Perfect Organism: the premiere

As mentioned in this post, I ran Perfect Organism, my ALIEN cinematic scenario, for the first time at Furnace in October. (And here are my design notes for Perfect Organism. And the game files.)

I had three players (one dropped out just before we started, but that was fine, as three is a good number for me). We took about three hours to play through the scenario, which was just the right length for the slot. With more players, I suspect it would have taken a little longer.

While I had a few preflight nerves, they vanished as soon as we started playing, and the players leaned into their agendas and the conflicts.

Extra prep needed

While preparing Perfect Organism, I realised I had forgotten to include agendas for Acts 2 and 3, so I created those.

I also realised that I might need some backup PCs. In the original scenario, the NPCs are mere shells—I hadn’t created full stats for them (having played a fair bit of ALIEN, I don’t believe full NPC stats are needed). However, that would be different for replacement PCs, so I picked five NPCs and fleshed them out.

I also created a key rules summary (basic tasks, stress, panic, combat) as I know I don’t find the ALIEN ruleset easy to remember.

I’ve added the backup PCs and amended files to the website.

Open secrets

Perfect Organism requires the players to separate what they know from what their characters know. This works two ways:

• The scenario takes place shortly after Alien and Aliens, but not everything that happens in those movies is known by the characters.
• The way I’ve set up the characters’ secret backgrounds means that the game could lead to note-passing and private conferences. I didn’t want that, so we agreed to play everything up front.

The players were happy to play this way—I think playing with all the secrets hidden wouldn’t have been as much fun.

Acts 1, 2 and 3

So how did it play? Within the first five minutes, the ICC lawyer started accusing the Weyland-Yutani executive of negligence and conspiracy while the USCMC major in charge of everything tried to calm everyone down.

I played all the NPCs passively – they mostly reacted to what was happening. As I had anticipated that I might run this with fewer than five players, I had prepared events in each Act for what their characters would do.

So it played really well. I’m not going into details (to avoid spoilers), but some key moments were:

• The PCs took their ship, the Coyote, down to the surface of LV-426. I hadn’t expected that, but in hindsight, it seems obvious.
• At one point, a facehugger attacked one player. It was an instant-smothering, with no chance to avoid—except the player used the Personal Safety talent to put an NPC in the line of fire instead. Nasty.
• I had one full-grown xenomorph attack the group. They killed it as it played with one of the NPCs—but then that NPC died from acid burns.
• The PCs blew up Kathar Station, which was cinematic, but I hadn’t expected it.
• We had a nice, downbeat ending. The PCs all survived, but most of the NPCs had died by xenomorph or explosion or had been abandoned by the PCs.

Overall I was happy with how the game ran. The players seemed to enjoy it and suggested they might run the scenario themselves.

Post-game amendments

I made a few amendments to the game after Furnace, but they were typos and clarifications rather than radical changes.

One of the other GMs at Furnace used standees for characters and NPCs, and I thought that was a good idea, so I’ve created table tents for all the characters. I took faces from Stefan Isburg’s wonderful ALIEN Character Compendium (no link, but you can find it on the ALIEN RPG Discord server) and created male and female table tents for each PC and single-gender tents for the NPCs (and some for the xenomorphs).

I’m now looking forward to the next time to run it – maybe at GoPlayLeeds or Airecon. Or both.