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.
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