As you may have noticed from one of my recent additions to one of my older posts, I've been spending some quality time in the ALIEN RPG from Free League.
The ALIEN RPG is a new, fully-licensed RPG that does a fantastic job of mining all of the various background lore, official and unofficial (aka canon and extended) and weaving a unified setting out of all of the disparate parts.
The core of the game is based on the "Year Zero Engine" used in other Free League games, and its a pretty abstract / lite type of engine which could have turned out pretty boring for ALIEN ... except for a particular focus on a system for stress and panic (think Sanity checks from Cthulhu games) and a system for dealing with limited consumables without turning the player into total equipment accountants.
So, the base of the game is set in 2183 AD, after the events of Alien^3 (the one with the prisoners that came after the fan favorite with the Marines).
Elements of the 4th movie are present - as well as deep mining the games, comics, novels, draft scripts and everything else related to the Alien franchise.
This is a great contrast to the first ALIEN Adventure Game RPG by Leading Edge Games in the early 1990s - which only had ALIEN and ALIENS to draw from, and was primarily a US Colonial Marines campaign.
Free League has provided some great support for the game so far.
The product line started with the "Cinematic Starter Kit" with a cut-down rulebook introduction to the game and setting, as well as the Chariots of the Gods cinematic adventure.
Next came the core rulebook which contains the Hope's Last Day cinematic adventure of the fall and destruction of the Hadley's Hope colony on LV-426 / Acheron / Calampos in the Zeta 2 Reticuli.
There is also an adventure called Destroyer of Worlds dealing with the Fort Nebraska base and colony in the Kruger 60 system.
Pre-order PDFs are out now for the Colonial Marines Operations Manual which covers playing as a Colonial Marine Strike Team and has sandbox mission generation as well as a 10-mission story arc campaign.
The story in Colonial Marines missions follows the events of Destroyer of Worlds which obliquely reference events in Chariots of the Gods.
There are additional resources for download from their site, as well as additional resources you can buy like dice sets, setting maps, map tokens and other player aids.
And that leads me into some of what I really like about this game:
The production values are lavish.
The artwork is consistently good throughout headed by Martin Grip.
And the writing is headed by a science-fiction novelist Andrew E.C. Gaska, backed up by additional writing by respectable independent RPG writers like Paul Elliott of Zozer Games.
As noted elsewhere in these forums - the star map is based on realistic starmap data, with some concessions to some of the "lore" that breaks parts of the map realism.
But, as an admitted superfan of the movie ALIEN - I find one of the most enjoyable parts of this game to be finding and recognizing the all of the hidden easter egg references and sources ladelled liberally all through the design.
The game is designed to run in two modes: cinematic mode is based around (cough expendable cough) pre-generated characters with agendas and plot hooks pre-designed to be taken advantage of in the adventure.
Additionally there is a "campaign" mode where you create and grow characters much like traditional RPGing.
And that hits the hard part of the ALIEN RPG... the xenomorph is a bit of a one-hit wonder as a threat - all the players know what is coming.
"Oh there's an egg its an alien. Oh there's a robot, he's evil. Oh the company is doing something shady" - non-surprising trope-a-rific.
This makes it a bit tough to use the xenomorph well in a long-running campaign... that's what makes cinematic mode useful.
Need a quick-fix of alien encounter that doesn't wipeout your main players - run a cinematic.
Then the characters are like clones in Paranoia, and just as expendable.
So what else can you do in the ALIEN universe besides avoid being killed by a xenomorph?
That's where both the Leading Edge Games and Free League RPGs stand out well - they each mined a LOT of material to provide a lot of hooks and inspiration for other missions in the setting besides just prying facehuggers off friends.
In the Leading Edge Games ALIENS Adventure Game, Leading Edge repurposed their Living Steel background, particularly the Corporate Wars era of the timeline which was a fantastic fit with the ALIEN and ALIENS movie universe... even if it had been started years before ALIENS was even a thing.
To their credit, Free League brought a lot of the Leading Edge Games setting elements (much of the Chapter 3 setting from that book) such as planets, bits of the lore about them, and even the Harvesters of Tartarus alien lifeform forward into the new game.
I mentioned Paul Elliott from Zozer Games before as one of the contributing writers to the Free League ALIEN RPG line and I personally think it was a brilliant move.
I've been a customer / fan (and even a partial inspiration for) Paul's independent game HOSTILE for the Cepheus Engine (a 2d6 engine built from the open-game Traveller RPG from Mongoose Publishing)
In HOSTILE, Paul solved the main problem with any game containing the xenomorph ... what else can it be about?
Free League apparently learned from that and mined all of the canon and non-canon "lore" of the ALIEN franchise and tried, successfully in my view, to use that as opportunities to make the ALIEN RPG campaigns about something more than just killing people in horrible ways.
So, overall, I've been on the preorder for each product in the ALIEN RPG line and I've not been disappointed with any of it.
The only downsides I've found so far - to fit the franchise lore, putting some of the "canon" colonies and their locations into the near star map introduced some broken star map data - but I see that as what it is - trying to fit obviously unfittable franchise into place.
The other downside is that the official adventure material is a case of having to give the majority fans what they want - many of the adventures are basically built around the evil corp trying to harvest xenomorphs type trope... luckily these are cinematic adventures which can give you movie-type adventure without messing with your long-term campaign characters.
The ALIEN RPG is a new, fully-licensed RPG that does a fantastic job of mining all of the various background lore, official and unofficial (aka canon and extended) and weaving a unified setting out of all of the disparate parts.
The core of the game is based on the "Year Zero Engine" used in other Free League games, and its a pretty abstract / lite type of engine which could have turned out pretty boring for ALIEN ... except for a particular focus on a system for stress and panic (think Sanity checks from Cthulhu games) and a system for dealing with limited consumables without turning the player into total equipment accountants.
So, the base of the game is set in 2183 AD, after the events of Alien^3 (the one with the prisoners that came after the fan favorite with the Marines).
Elements of the 4th movie are present - as well as deep mining the games, comics, novels, draft scripts and everything else related to the Alien franchise.
This is a great contrast to the first ALIEN Adventure Game RPG by Leading Edge Games in the early 1990s - which only had ALIEN and ALIENS to draw from, and was primarily a US Colonial Marines campaign.
Free League has provided some great support for the game so far.
The product line started with the "Cinematic Starter Kit" with a cut-down rulebook introduction to the game and setting, as well as the Chariots of the Gods cinematic adventure.
Next came the core rulebook which contains the Hope's Last Day cinematic adventure of the fall and destruction of the Hadley's Hope colony on LV-426 / Acheron / Calampos in the Zeta 2 Reticuli.
There is also an adventure called Destroyer of Worlds dealing with the Fort Nebraska base and colony in the Kruger 60 system.
Pre-order PDFs are out now for the Colonial Marines Operations Manual which covers playing as a Colonial Marine Strike Team and has sandbox mission generation as well as a 10-mission story arc campaign.
The story in Colonial Marines missions follows the events of Destroyer of Worlds which obliquely reference events in Chariots of the Gods.
There are additional resources for download from their site, as well as additional resources you can buy like dice sets, setting maps, map tokens and other player aids.
And that leads me into some of what I really like about this game:
The production values are lavish.
The artwork is consistently good throughout headed by Martin Grip.
And the writing is headed by a science-fiction novelist Andrew E.C. Gaska, backed up by additional writing by respectable independent RPG writers like Paul Elliott of Zozer Games.
As noted elsewhere in these forums - the star map is based on realistic starmap data, with some concessions to some of the "lore" that breaks parts of the map realism.
But, as an admitted superfan of the movie ALIEN - I find one of the most enjoyable parts of this game to be finding and recognizing the all of the hidden easter egg references and sources ladelled liberally all through the design.
The game is designed to run in two modes: cinematic mode is based around (cough expendable cough) pre-generated characters with agendas and plot hooks pre-designed to be taken advantage of in the adventure.
Additionally there is a "campaign" mode where you create and grow characters much like traditional RPGing.
And that hits the hard part of the ALIEN RPG... the xenomorph is a bit of a one-hit wonder as a threat - all the players know what is coming.
"Oh there's an egg its an alien. Oh there's a robot, he's evil. Oh the company is doing something shady" - non-surprising trope-a-rific.
This makes it a bit tough to use the xenomorph well in a long-running campaign... that's what makes cinematic mode useful.
Need a quick-fix of alien encounter that doesn't wipeout your main players - run a cinematic.
Then the characters are like clones in Paranoia, and just as expendable.
So what else can you do in the ALIEN universe besides avoid being killed by a xenomorph?
That's where both the Leading Edge Games and Free League RPGs stand out well - they each mined a LOT of material to provide a lot of hooks and inspiration for other missions in the setting besides just prying facehuggers off friends.
In the Leading Edge Games ALIENS Adventure Game, Leading Edge repurposed their Living Steel background, particularly the Corporate Wars era of the timeline which was a fantastic fit with the ALIEN and ALIENS movie universe... even if it had been started years before ALIENS was even a thing.
To their credit, Free League brought a lot of the Leading Edge Games setting elements (much of the Chapter 3 setting from that book) such as planets, bits of the lore about them, and even the Harvesters of Tartarus alien lifeform forward into the new game.
I mentioned Paul Elliott from Zozer Games before as one of the contributing writers to the Free League ALIEN RPG line and I personally think it was a brilliant move.
I've been a customer / fan (and even a partial inspiration for) Paul's independent game HOSTILE for the Cepheus Engine (a 2d6 engine built from the open-game Traveller RPG from Mongoose Publishing)
In HOSTILE, Paul solved the main problem with any game containing the xenomorph ... what else can it be about?
Free League apparently learned from that and mined all of the canon and non-canon "lore" of the ALIEN franchise and tried, successfully in my view, to use that as opportunities to make the ALIEN RPG campaigns about something more than just killing people in horrible ways.
So, overall, I've been on the preorder for each product in the ALIEN RPG line and I've not been disappointed with any of it.
The only downsides I've found so far - to fit the franchise lore, putting some of the "canon" colonies and their locations into the near star map introduced some broken star map data - but I see that as what it is - trying to fit obviously unfittable franchise into place.
The other downside is that the official adventure material is a case of having to give the majority fans what they want - many of the adventures are basically built around the evil corp trying to harvest xenomorphs type trope... luckily these are cinematic adventures which can give you movie-type adventure without messing with your long-term campaign characters.
