ALIEN RPG Building Better Worlds: First impressions

On Alien Day this year, I treated myself to the Building Better Worlds supplement for the ALIEN rpg.

Building Better Worlds is a 300-page supplement focusing on exploration and colonies in the world of the ALIEN rpg. It has the same look and feel as the rest of the ALIEN, so while it looks pretty, it’s annoyingly difficult to read and hard to use at the table. (At least this time, I didn’t encounter the terrible organisational issues that plague the cinematic scenarios. See here, here, here, and here.)

To get the most out of Building Better Worlds, you need to buy into ALIEN’s “Perfected” story arc that started with Chariots of the Gods, continued with Destroyer of Worlds and ramped up with Heart of Darkness.

And while it’s nice to see the background unfold as the supplements come out (although that’s not without issues, as I explain below), if you’re not invested in the Perfected storyline, this may not be for you. 

For me? I don’t know. It’s not that I don’t like the Perfected, but it veers further away from Alien and Aliens than I’m comfortable with. Maybe the upcoming film and TV series will change that. We’ll see.

There are a couple of things I don’t like – such as synthetics being affected by black goo and turning into abominations. I guess that’s extrapolating from David in Alien: Covenant (why would you make an android with hair that grows?), but I don’t have to like it. But as I’ve said before, everything after Alien is fanfic.

What is Building Better Worlds about?

Building Better Worlds does for explorers and colonists what the Colonial Marines Operations Manual did for colonial marines. In other words, it gives the GM enough detail (worlds, organisations, careers) to run a campaign set on the frontier. Seven adventures provide a campaign with an arc that feeds into the main ALIEN rpg storyline.

And the difference between explorers and colonists? Explorers are well-paid teams looking for new resources and lifeforms, while colonists are under-resourced settlers of exoplanets.

History of colonisation

Building Better Worlds starts with its version of history, from 2023 to 2188 (now).

It’s written from the players’ perspective rather than the GM’s, so is easy to share. And while you can work out when the movies take place, I wish they were referenced explicitly – especially if the novels or comics (which I haven’t read but potentially might like to) were referenced.

Anyway, I imagine that at some point, this will become known as “the ALIEN rpg universe,” as I expect the upcoming movies and TV series to contradict key parts of the timeline.

The main issue I have with the ALIEN rpg’s history is its archaeological nature. Bits of history are present in different supplements (books and adventures). But it can feel like the supplements assume you know all the history – otherwise, some bits don’t make sense. Worse, sometimes you need the later supplements to make sense of the adventures. For example, Heart of Darkness talks about “Perfected Space”, but we don’t learn about that until Building Better Worlds.

Lists and lists

Inevitably, a book like this has lists. There are lists of organisations (United Americas, Three Worlds Empire, the Union of Progressive Peoples, Weyland-Yutani, and so on), lists of gear and ships (suits, weapons, vehicles, spacecraft), lists of monsters (new aliens and old), and lists of systems and colonies (thumbnail sketches of a dozen or so colonies).

If you have previous books, there are familiar faces (monsters and equipment) here – particularly from Chariot of the Gods and Heart of Darkness. I would have liked to see more new monsters, but most are from earlier adventures. (There is a xenomorph “Empress,” the next stage after a Queen. There had to be a next stage, didn’t there?)

New careers

In addition to notes for using the core careers, Building Better Worlds introduces two new careers: Wildcatters and Entertainers.

Wildcatters are blue-collar prospectors, surveyors, constructors and so on. Entertainers are performers, croupiers, waiters and the like. Each comes with talents and signature items, like any other career. Personal agendas are treated slightly differently, as nobody becomes a colonist for no reason, and there is a table of additional agendas to choose from.

The Lost Worlds campaign

This is Building Better Worlds’ sandbox campaign – and it’s pretty good. The PCs are members of the United Nation’s Great Mother Mission, a small fleet of ships going to reestablish contact with the spinward colonies (lost for 75 years following massive solar ejections, gamma bursts and waves of radiation). 

While the Great Mother Mission might be a United Nations project, it is manned by members of various factions – who soon fall out. The PCs must navigate this tension while taking their ships and exploring some of the lost colonies. Along the way, they will discover what is really going on.

Structure

The structure of the campaign is that the PCs are sent on their ship to survey the abandoned colonies. There are six colonies to survey, which can be done in any order. Campaign clues scattered among the colonies unlock an exciting final level, er, campaign finale.

Home Sweet Home: The PCs face feuding families, a powerful sandstorm and space locusts.

To Go My Own Dark Way: Feral colonists, a failing terraformer, a crashed ship and the Children of the Two Divines. Suffers a little from events-happening-while-the-PCs-are-present syndrome (but not as bad as Mysteries of the Ancients, thankfully).

Leave All Else To The Gods: The PCs must start a colony on a paradise planet. But is it really paradise? (Go on, take a guess.)

The Devil Lives in Still Waters: A warlord, insurgents, and a mysterious pyramid.

Against a Sea of Troubles: The PC’s sister ship gets into trouble, and the PCs must go to the rescue.

Let Sleeping Gods Lie: The PCs explore a dead colony, with automatons mindlessly following their programming.

In the Shadow of Perfection: The final adventure is set inside a massive Engineer artefact and puts the fate of humanity in the PC’s hands!

During these adventures, the PCs will explore abandoned Engineer cities and juggernauts, new and old xenomorphs, and the Perfected.

Is it any good?

I’ve not played or run these, but they seem pretty good on a read-through. Most adventures seem straightforward to run, and I can imagine each taking no more than a session or two.

The finale, however, feels ambitious. It’s the climax of several plot strands coming together, and on a brief read-through, it feels like it will be challenging to run. However, it brings in characters from earlier adventures, so I suspect that it will be easier to run than it currently feels.

It’s difficult to judge the lethality of the adventures, but given that the PCs are playing members of the Great Mother Mission, replacement characters will be easy to create.

Will I run it? I don’t know. I’m not currently planning to, but I’m much more likely to run this than the missions in the Colonial Marines Operations Manual.

A few observations

Geography: It’s not clear where the expedition is when the mission arrives at the spinward colonies. The star map, while pretty, isn’t very useful – several star systems used in the campaign aren’t mentioned on it. (There are lots of unlabelled stars to pick, so it’s not a critical issue, but it seems to be a basic oversight.)

For all their 2D abstracted goofiness, Traveller’s subsector maps give a much clearer idea of geography and travel times. Speaking of travel times…

Travel: Travel times could be clearer. The colonies are about 30 parsecs from Earth and spread across an area about nine parsecs in diameter. The PC’s ship has an FTL rating of 10 (10 days per parsec), so they’re about 10 days away from each other (although taking three months to cross from one side to the other). But it’s not clear to me how long a journey needs to be before putting the crew in cryosleep. Maybe it’s a decision by the players based on how much they want to risk rolling on the core book’s NDD (neurological distortion disorder) table.

Maps: There are few player-facing maps. The book has lots of maps, but often they have features marked on them that only the GM knows about – making them hard to share with players. I don’t know why this is so hard for Free League to get right - a pdf of handouts would be so easy to do, yet be so helpful.

Pedant’s corner: One adventure has two lifeboats – but the lifeboats seem to be too big to fit in the space on the deck plans for their parent ship… 

Structure: I really like the overall structure of the campaign. A mission to explore an area of space, with six independent but thematically linked adventures leading to a campaign climax. Traveller’s disappointing Mysteries of the Ancients campaign (my review here) could have learned a lot from this. Building Better Worlds has a huge advantage over Mysteries by assuming the GM is running this as a standalone campaign with the players bought into the premise.

Building your own better world

Along with enhanced systems and planet tables (building on those in the core rules), Building Better Worlds’ appendix has a hidden gem – rules for a colony minigame. These let you track the growth of a colony as it struggles from its initial start to become a healthy, sustaining colony.

These rules let you choose policies (low taxes, collectivism), installations (AI upgrade, workshops), and projects (supply run, orbital mapping) to give a colony its own flavour. And if the PCS are colony leaders, they may even get to choose.

Overall

So overall, Building Better Worlds seems pretty solid. I prefer it to the Colonial Marines Operations Manual, but then exploring ancient alien ruins is much more my thing than a military game.

However, the ALIEN rpg seems to be moving even further away from the original movies and doing its own thing – concentrating mostly on the black goo and leading to the Perfected. This is probably exactly what the line needs if it is to continue to grow, but I’m not sure I need to be part of it. 

So am I finished with the ALIEN rpg?

I don’t know. ALIEN supplements come out so infrequently that it’s not hard (or expensive) to keep up with them. The question will be whether I can be bothered, and I think the answer to that will come down to two things:

• Whether the next supplement (a cinematic adventure) appeals.
• Whether I run/play more ALIEN – currently, it’s not on the horizon, but that may change.

But never say never.

Quintin Smith’s rule of three on the Bastionland podcast

I’ve just listened to Quintin Smith (Quinns) on Chris McDowell’s Bastionland podcast. The idea of the podcast is that guests bring three games to discuss. Quinns brought Torchbearer, Sidereal Confluence, and Jubensha.

(Quinns is a games journalist who used to review boardgames on Shut Up And Sit Down and now reviews tabletop RPGs on Quinns Quest.)

While the podcast is great, four things specifically caught my attention.

#1 Sidereal Confluence

This sounds just up my street. Sidereal Confluence is an economic trading board game with simultaneous play, asymmetric powers, and negotiation that copes with up to nine players. Sounds awesome!

It also sounds like a great base for the trading rules in a freeform…

Having read more about Sidereal Confluence on boardgamegeek, the designer is writing an RPG around the setting. (His design notes tell the story of the game, while this thread goes into the underlying logic of the different aliens.)

Anyway, Sidereal Confluence is now on my wish list, although I don’t know when I’ll get to play it because it’s a four player game and I don’t think it will appeal to Mrs H.

The point Quinns was making by referring to a board game in an RPG podcast was, why don’t we see more unbalanced PCs in RPGs? The current trend is for balanced PCs, but why not experiment with making them unbalanced – or at least so they play very differently?

I’m not sure I have a strong view, but it’s an interesting point, and I can imagine Most Trusted Advisors would work with asymmetric powers.

#2 Jubensha

Their discussion around Jubensha clarified (I think) some of the differences between Jubensha and freeforms. Because Jubensha is designed for six players, the game is more focused on those players’ emotional journey. (There are lots of larps that do this (especially Nordic larps), but Jubensha sounds more mechanical than most larps.)

For me, however, I love the buzz that I get from a large multi-player freeform. At Peaky, we typically write games for 8-10 players, and often, that seems too small for me.

#3 What can other games learn from having a GM at the table?

Quinns and McDowell also discussed games where one person has a facilitating (ie a GM) role. TTRPGs are almost unique in that regard: it’s not something you often see in boardgames or traditional murder mystery games, and they reflected that maybe Western-style murder mystery games could learn something.

Of course, I was shouting at the podcast because that’s what we do at Freeform Games. We call our GMs “hosts.”

(I wasn’t shouting very loudly, though, because if we’d been better at spreading the word then maybe things would be different.)

#4 Why don’t we see more pre-generated PCs?

Finally, Quinns pointed out that the advantage of giving players pregens (which happens in Jubensha – and freeforms) is that it lets the designer link the characters together to create tension and drama.

And why don’t RPGs do more of that?

I think the answer is:

• Historical, as in it’s not how D&D did it back in 1974. And that’s now become cultural – ie, players creating their own characters is now how rpgs work.
• Most players like the ownership that comes from creating their own character. Only weirdos like me would rather be given a character.
• Pregenerated PCs are great for one-shots and may not be suited for endless campaigns.

That’s not to say that inter-character linkage isn’t happening.

Many PbtA games have questions linking characters on their playsheets, and the pregens in ALIEN’s cinematic scenarios are designed to drive the adventure in interesting directions. (I’m sure there are others.)

Then there’s Lady Blackbird, which feels like an almost-perfect blend of situation, character and rules. (McDowell and Quinns touch briefly on Lady Blackbird – I wrote about it here.)

 And as I’ve said before (and hinted at here), getting your pregens right for a convention game is half the battle. I find that when players are riffing off each other’s characters and the characters are tied into the scenario, my life as a GM is so much easier.

Quintin Smith’s rule of three

So anyway, give the podcast a listen. It’s worth it.

Using AI to write freeform larps at Peaky

At Peaky 2024, I experimented with using AI (mostly ChatGPT) to help write freeforms.

How did that go?

Before Peaky

Ideas are usually discussed on the mailing list in the run-up to Peaky, and I said I wanted to experiment with using ChatGPT during the writing process.

This provoked the inevitable discussion about AI ethics and copyright, which I didn’t really want to get into, but clearly, there’s plenty of concern about using AI.

I explained I wanted to use it for brainstorming and ideas rather than actually generating text, which seemed to ease some concerns.

Steampunk name generator

On Friday night, when we were generating ideas, I didn’t get my laptop out and didn’t think about AI at all. But on Saturday morning, I wanted to start naming our characters. Being lazy, I headed over to the Steampunk name generator over on fantasynamegenerators.com.

While many were splendid, our characters were gender-neutral, so I decided to give ChatGPT a spin and in moments, it gave me several gender-neutral names suitable for our steampunk game.

• Emberlyn Steele
• Asher Grey
• Rowan Brass
• Quinn Gearhart
• Phoenix Thorne
• Skylar Steamwood
• Marlowe Copper
• Sawyer Ironwood
• Ellis Wilde
• Avery Clockwell

We found the surnames a bit cliched, but we used several of the first names. (Yes, we could have come up with those ourselves, but using ChatGPT saved time.)

I also asked for some Martian names and picked one.

Patriarch/matriarch fail

And then I forgot about using ChatGPT, until I was searching for a gender-neutral word for matriarch/patriarch.

I asked ChatGPT, but it was hopeless – I don’t know what it was thinking. (“Dominion Guardian” for patriarch and “Ascendent Sentinel” for matriarch!)

So I just went for “head of the family.”

And that was it for ChatGPT at Peaky, but it wasn’t quite the end of my AI experiment.

Dinosaurs for the win

Our game is set on Mars and has dinosaurs in it. We call them “marisaurs.”

Just as we were finishing writing, I asked Artflow for a picture of a “dinosaur on Mars”. And then I forgot about it.

When I came home, I remembered that I’d asked for the picture and sure enough, it gave me a picture of a dinosaur on Mars. You can tell it's a Marisaur because it has three legs! (I don't know if that's because AI art is crap, or it knows that Mars = tripods. I have my suspicions, though.)

After Peaky: content warnings

I was working through some of the comments from the players at Peaky, and one piece of feedback was that we ought to have some content warnings.

My first reaction was, “Really?” as we had deliberately made everyone equal, but the players pointed out that Steampunk could have colonialism themes. (I have blind spots on things like this; because I don’t find content warnings useful, I forget that some people do.)

So as I have blindspots, I thought I’d ask ChatGPT. Sure enough, it gave me ten:

• Violence and Combat: Expect intense combat scenes, potential gore, and steampunk weaponry.
• Colonialism and Cultural Sensitivity: Steampunk settings can unintentionally echo colonial themes; be cautious with depictions of Mars and its inhabitants to avoid harmful stereotypes or implications.
• Substance Use: If the game includes elements like steampunk-era drugs, alcohol, or smoking, this should be noted.
• Slavery and Oppression: Address the historical context of industrialization; avoid glorifying or minimizing systemic oppression.
• Classism and Discrimination: Consider how class structures and discrimination are portrayed in the game.
• Body Horror and Modification: Some steampunk settings might feature cybernetic modifications or body horror elements.
• Death and Loss: The storyline might include characters dying or mourning the loss of others.
• Language and Profanity: Highlight if there's strong language or profanity.
• Sexual Content and Themes: If there are sexual themes, innuendos, or explicit scenes, players should be aware.
• Mental Health and Trauma: Be mindful of depicting mental health issues or trauma, ensuring sensitivity and avoiding stereotypes.

Ten is a suspiciously round number (I didn’t ask for ten), and as the last four aren’t unique to steampunk (and aren’t appropriate for our game anyway), I think ChatGPT may have padded the list out. But it’s a good summary and contains points I wouldn’t have thought of (such as body horror for the cybernetic modifications).

I’ve summarised this as: Content warning: This is not a serious game. Victorian tropes of sexism, colonialism, class-ism, discrimination, slavery, and oppression have no place in The Canals of Mars. Everyone is equal on Mars (although some characters may think they are more powerful than others). (Again, that’s a first draft. The other writers have yet to amend it.)

Unfinished business

So there we go.

ChatGPT made a few things quicker and simpler, but it’s certainly not a paradigm change. At least, not for 2024.

Peaky 2024

I spent the sunniest weekend in April in a small-ish room hunched over a laptop writing a freeform. Yes, I was at Peaky 2024. How did it go?

TL;DR I wrote one freeform, played in two. Played lots of boardgames. Talked bollocks with friends for hours. Slept badly. Would do it again in a heartbeat.

Friday

For the first time ever, I didn’t drive to Peaky. A car was coming down from Scotland, and I was kindly picked up. So I packed lighter than I normally do, but I didn’t have to drive, which was lovely.

We arrived shortly before 4 pm, found our rooms and said hello. Peaky started properly with its AGM, followed by dinner and the pitch meeting.

Pitch meeting

We had 32(ish) writers at Peaky 2024, and the purpose of the pitch meeting is to form them into six groups of roughly equal size (so 4-6 writers in each group) who all want to write the same thing.

It’s somewhat chaotic. The first part consists of pitching ideas for games – we typically end up with about 20 ideas. Then we vote to remove the less popular ideas, and this continues until we finally have our writing groups.

This is all done with flipcharts. It’s loud and chaotic and can be awful.

Ideally, we ensure the writing groups have at least one experienced writer. We’ve missed that before.

I’d love to find a better way, but we’ve tried forming groups in advance (which can be cliquey). Part of me would like to do it randomly or with team captains picking writers (like at school), but there are issues with those as well. Maybe there’s an app we can use?

Anyway, I pitched a “time loop game,” which was popular, but I wanted to help Suey write a freeform taster session that could be played in a 60-minute SF convention slot. Our group was me, Suey, Tym and Alli.

The Canals of Mars

I’d already been talking about this with Suey. I had a similar idea a few years ago using pirates as a setting (when Pirates of the Caribbean was all the rage), but we decided on a Martian steampunk setting.

The rest of Friday was spent deciding what we wanted to include in our game. We were writing something for newcomers to experience a freeform in under an hour, so we wanted lots of interaction and goals and abilities and so forth – but without overwhelming new players with text!

We kicked ideas around and came up with an election (for the “Grand Architrave”) as the spine for our game, the framework around which we would hang other things.

We also decided to write for eight players. I reckon it’s easily expandable, and we could have many more than eight, but we decided to keep things simple and start with eight.

Saturday

I had a terrible night’s sleep. Peaky does that. Too late, the wrong food and drink. Just meh.

At this point in the game writing process, I like to have the setting and background settled. So I started to write the setting:

It is 1888. In the forty years since the first colonists arrived on Mars, Nu London has grown into a bustling metropolis, rich from the profits of mining lift crystals, the precious jewels that power the solar transports that sail the etheric void.

But all is not well. Nu London desperately needs investment, mining accidents are imperilling lift crystal mine production, Olympus Mons is grumbling, the canals are blocked with red weed, and the marisaurs (Martian dinosaurs) seem to be dying out.

(This was expanded later, but it didn’t change much.)

IT glitches

The wifi was really random, this year. I had the best connection I think I’ve ever had, while others in the same room couldn’t connect at all.

We decided to write in Google Docs, which only two of us had access to. The others had to resort to swapping files back and forth via a thumb drive like it was 2010 again.

Characters

After breakfast, when the writing team reconvened, we agreed this text and then decided on our eight characters:

• Addison Fotherington-Porter: An artificer of marvellous inventions.
• Valentine Fotherington-Porter: A writer of popular romantic fiction and candidate for Grand Architrave.
• Phoenix Belcher: A popular philanthropist and candidate for Grand Architrave.
• Blake Belcher: A director of cinematic productions.
• Captain Amos Gridley: Explorer, inventor and captain of a steam-powered sea-dirigible.
• Emberlyn Cogsmith: Wealthy investor and philanthropist.
• Seren:  A Martian mystic and candidate for Grand Architrave.
• Valen: Wealthy Martian investor.

With our characters in place, we wrote each character’s introductory paragraph. This is the first paragraph that the player reads and provides a broad overview. The rest of the character sheet then flows from that.

At least, that’s how I do it, and it takes me no more than 15-20 minutes to do this. 

However, I quickly found that other writers did things differently. One wrote in bullet points; others went into detail. (We made them more consistent later on.)

Plots

With the characters defined, we each picked a “plot” to write. I picked the election plot while others wrote about inventions, great works, and investments.

My plot document included brief rules for how the election worked, a timetable for hustings and the voting deadline, and a little bit of character background and goals. I also included a page of voting slips.

With that done, I put the text into the character sheets and the setting documents. (And for those that didn’t have access to Google Docs, I did the same for their plots.)

And that was it for plots. Given the players were only playing for 40 minutes, we estimated that most players wouldn’t have time for more than one plot.

Review and edit

With all the text added to the characters, we printed everything for review. Everyone made notes on the character sheets, which we then incorporated. (At the same time, I polished and buffed to remove the differences – so where one character was written in bullet points, I fleshed it out into full sentences and paragraphs.)

We then did the same again until we were happy with everything, at which point we printed it all out and called it quits.

With only eight characters, we finished quickly (before 6 pm). We could have written more characters (and I would have been happy to), but we agreed to limit it to eight. So we played boardgames instead.

Sunday

And on Sunday we played the games. Graham managed the Sunday running schedule, and this is how it went for me.

Starship Theseus

Starship Theseus is a 10-player game written by Adam Hayes, Nyx Hollindrake, Michael Jones and Christi S.

I played part of the crew of a colony ship. We spent most of the voyage in cryosleep, and the ship would wake us occasionally when it needed the command crew to deal with something it couldn’t manage. I played the security officer. As the game progressed, we discovered things about ourselves and the world we thought we knew.

I had a lot of fun with this game, although it finished somewhat abruptly because we ran out of time. It deserves a longer slot.

(Meanwhile, in another room, Elevenses had its premiere. Elevenses was written by Kirstine Heald, Malk Williams, Julie Winnard, Ewan Munro and Michelle Minett. When Dundee Bakewell does not return from travelling after a year and a day and is declared dead, the villagers gather over tea and cakes to divvy up their possessions. For 11 players.)

The Canals of Mars

Our game. Suey ran it while I kept track of time. The game went well – certainly no serious problems, and the players seemed to think it worked well as a freeform taster. 

We kept it to 60 minutes (including setup and debrief), which gave us an extra hour to relax while we waited for the other game to finish.

(That other game was Full Circle by Nickey Barnard, Nick Curd, Philippa Dall, Tony Mitton and Mike Snowden. For 12 players and inspired by Logan’s Run and Rollerball.)

Love Letter: The Silver Rush

Set in the American Old West, Love Letter: The Silver Rush is a 12-player game played over three scenes. The scenes are split by gaps where one half of the game goes prospecting while everyone else stays at home. During those gaps, the players write letters to each other. Events happen, and it’s an angsty game of romance and feelings.

(It’s also the third Love Letter game – the first was set during the Great War and the second during the Crusades. I was part of the Crusades writing team some years ago, but I can remember nothing about it now.)

I won’t say who I played (because of spoilers). I enjoyed Love Letter: The Silver Rush, but I’m not sure how I feel about it being longer. Two hours was about right for me – playing it for longer doesn’t appeal (although I know the games are very popular).

Love Letter: The Silver Rush was written by Ben Cole, Natalie Curd, Clare Gardner, Heidi Kaye, Elyssia McCormick, and Richard Perry. 

(And running simultaneously was Hotel Requiem, a 7-player game written by Malcolm Campbell, Emory Cunnington, Bethan Griffiths, Peter Jones and Elynor Kamil. You can check out, but can you ever leave?)

And then it was all over and I spent Sunday evening chatting and playing board games.

Overall

Peaky is lovely. I always have a great time seeing friends, writing and playing games. I wish I slept better, but it doesn’t take me long to catch up.

And I’m looking forward to Peaky 2025.

About Peaky: To learn more about Peaky, see the website (actually a wiki). If you’re interested in attending Peaky, bookings will open sometime around December. Keep an eye on the ukfreeforms mailing list or Facebook group.