https://www.alien-rpg.com/

Has someone tried this?

The artwork is great and the presentation intriguing. IIUC, it covers from Prometheus to Alien 3 (OK, not the best marketing...) with the game being set after Alien 3. I also like the possibility to choose your approach: "Campaign" (your characters may survive to see the next horror) or "Cinematic" (have an evening of fun with your friends while the characters are eaten/go crazy/both in a single session span).

Using special dice to simulate stress, BTW, is another interesting idea - at the very least something different from the usual SAN mechanism.

Thoughts?

[Edit: Talking of SAN, IIRC one of the "Blood Brothers" books contained an "Alien" inspired scenario - and it is actually not much difficult to whip together a CthulhuAlien adventure. But these books could still be interesting for the background infos alone.]

I have not, but I recall that the creators of Phoenix Command (or... um... maybe the Masterbook guys... Its been more than twenty goddamn years...) had a Aliens game back in the day.  Any connection between the two?

Quote from: Spike;1119293I have not, but I recall that the creators of Phoenix Command (or... um... maybe the Masterbook guys... Its been more than twenty goddamn years...) had a Aliens game back in the day.  Any connection between the two?

Leading Edge. So, Phoenix Command.

Quote from: Spike;1119293I have not, but I recall that the creators of Phoenix Command (or... um... maybe the Masterbook guys... Its been more than twenty goddamn years...) had a Aliens game back in the day.  Any connection between the two?

I remember Aliens RPG. It is really from way back (early '90s or so). It was not a good game. The problem was that there wasn't much background to build a game on.

This is a new group of developers. Given that this is an official, 20th Century Fox approved game, I hope that they were able to weave together a more expanded and coherent universe (the star map is intriguing...)

The "Alien" books recently published, BTW, are canon too, and give more material. They, basically, are good pulp sci-fi (with good pulpy endings for many characters). One of them, "River of Pain" tells the story of what happened on the LV426 colony between the discovery of the derelict ship by Newt's parents and the arrival of Ripley and the Marines in Aliens. Initially I thought that it was not a good idea, that keeping an aura of mystery was better. I read it, and I was wrong: it is well thought out, and it shows how unnaturally fast you can lose control of a situation involving Aliens.

Anyway, the price of this new game is steep, but it would seem that you get a lot of things for your money. I'm definitely interested.

I had a second-hand chat with a GURPS player who was trying it out and mostly complaining about the seeming lack of editing / development / playtesting - the sample characters seemed to have all rolled very unlikely high attributes and were using skills that shouldn't be allowed according to the rules, and lots of quibbles about other apparent mistakes and sloppy details. He said the one rule he found interesting was the "merit points", though we didn't get into that.

I also read another thread about Alien RPG on Reddit r/rpg where well, I'll post a link: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/ehhucw/i_was_excited_about_running_alien_rpg_but_i_feel/

Again it looks to me like the book wasn't very well edited or developed, so it looks like the rules are unclear and may play out like unplaytested rules usually do - weird results.

Part of the complaints on the thread however strike me as lack of GM experience/flexibility in how to deal with obvious issues with running an RPG set in the Alien universe - i.e. the players already know lots about those aliens, and his hilarious perspective which I would satirize as "I bought an Alien RPG, and it's about dealing with Aliens all the time, which I get bored of quickly and can't think of anything to do that interests me with it now". Others on the thread offer other ideas and suggestions about that.

Thanks for the link. I see that you can also get a PDF version of the game.

Anyway, I'm more worried about the rule-holes than the obvious "Anyone who has seen Alien knows what will happen". I was actually toying with the idea of launching an "Alien" adventure with a "banal" ancient ruins on a desolate planet theme - only to cut the players a the knees when the menace turns out to be some very ugly Lovecraftian entity (adapted for this system). After all, space is unforgiving, isn't it?

Food for thought. $139 is not a casual expense. Thanks again!

Not really sure I need an actual licensed game to run Alien. There's so many other universal systems that can handle everything about it, and expand on it.

Honestly, the best Horror one shot system out there is "Dread". The Jenga tower mechanic makes for an excellent fun increasingly stressful set of circumstances to recreate any cinematic horror one shot.

Quote from: Orphan81;1119308Not really sure I need an actual licensed game to run Alien. There's so many other universal systems that can handle everything about it, and expand on it.

Honestly, the best Horror one shot system out there is "Dread". The Jenga tower mechanic makes for an excellent fun increasingly stressful set of circumstances to recreate any cinematic horror one shot.

I really want to try Dread.

I've found Traveller to be awesome for playing in the Xenomorph universe. It makes it hard to rationalize buying a specific system to play - although it might be awesome. It's one I want to play before I buy.

Quote from: Kersus;1119317I've found Traveller to be awesome for playing in the Xenomorph universe.

Oh, you'll just love Hostile.

I picked the core book up with the screen last week.  It's a very nice looking book, but most Free League books are.

The rules are roughly 70% their house system.  It's a little on the simplified side but it works well and overall is pretty good.  I haven't played this version, but I have played a few of their other games that use the system (Mutant Year Zero, Tales From the Loop, Coriolis) and they are perfectly fine.  It in no way really enables heroic-level characters, but allows normal people to have heroic moments.

You get a pool of d6s and 6s are successes.  Extra 6s can usually be spent for bonus effects like completing the task faster, using less materials, upgrading the quality, etc.  You can push a roll, reroll any non-1s, to try and get a better result, but then the 1s (which were just 1s before) usually turn into a negative effect like damage or gear durability loss or something.

The whole stress mechanic introduced here seems neat.  You basically get bonus d6s to do things and there are special rules for what happens when the stress dice come up 1.  So while you are on edge you are more focused but have a higher chance to mess up.  Panic results range from nervous twitches and trembling to running for cover, screaming or going catatonic.  It's a roll and the more stress you have the more likely the worse outcomes are.  Each character has different ways to relieve stress.

Character types fit into 3 broad categories.  Basically you can choose from Colonial Marines, Space Truckers or Frontier Colonists.  I think you could mix these a little bit, but it seems set up to make 1 of those 3 types the main focus of the game.

I will say, the buy in could be expensive if you go all in: Book, dice, cards, markers, etc.  Based on past experience with their stuff, the extras are nice but not anywhere near needed.  We played Mutant Year Zero with all the bells and whistles and never really felt like we would be losing anything without them.

If you are looking for a less expensive alternative I would suggest checking out Mothership.  The core book is PWYW.

Amazing Engine had that Bug Hunt pack in mini setting. Pretty much Aliens with the serial numbers filed off. Which is ok as Aliens is It with the seriel numbers filed off. :rolleyes:

Quote from: Skarg;1119299I had a second-hand chat with a GURPS player who was trying it out and mostly complaining about the seeming lack of editing / development / playtesting - the sample characters seemed to have all rolled very unlikely high attributes and were using skills that shouldn't be allowed according to the rules, and lots of quibbles about other apparent mistakes and sloppy details. He said the one rule he found interesting was the "merit points", though we didn't get into that.

A lot of that sounds off to me.  Characters don't roll for attributes.  You get 14 points to spend on them.  There are only 12 skills in the game and you can still attempt any skill even if you don't have points in it.  There are no "merit points" that I know of but there is something called Story Points.  They are in the cinematic play, but not campaign play, rules.  Basically, if you are following your personal agenda you can get story points, max 3.  These can be spent after rolling, to give yourself a single success.

Quote from: Reckall;1119295I remember Aliens RPG. It is really from way back (early '90s or so). It was not a good game. The problem was that there wasn't much background to build a game on.

I'm a huge fan of the Aliens: This Time It's War board/skirmish game from Leading Edge, which I've heard is a simplified version of the Phoenix Command rules:  http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1770/aliens and https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/408816  I've not played PC, however, so I really don't know how well it aligns.  Has anyone played both?

Quote from: Reckall;1119295The "Alien" books recently published, BTW, are canon too, and give more material. They, basically, are good pulp sci-fi (with good pulpy endings for many characters). One of them, "River of Pain" tells the story of what happened on the LV426 colony between the discovery of the derelict ship by Newt's parents and the arrival of Ripley and the Marines in Aliens. Initially I thought that it was not a good idea, that keeping an aura of mystery was better. I read it, and I was wrong: it is well thought out, and it shows how unnaturally fast you can lose control of a situation involving Aliens.

The old Aliens Technical Manual had a fair amount of additional background/lore for the setting, and made some of the connections between Aliens and Bladerunner clearer/more explicit, as well as some of hte background leading to the initial exploration of LV426.  I'll have to keep an eye out for the River of Pain.  I did read Alan Dean Foster's two novelizations of Aliens and Aliens, and he adds some intriguing background about dreams/dreaming to Ripley which is something I've not seen exploited in the LE game at all, or in the subsequent films.  It always stood out as an interesting flavoring of the mystical in what is otherwise a pretty hard-SF universe.

Allan.

Quote from: rgalex;1119329The whole stress mechanic introduced here seems neat.  You basically get bonus d6s to do things and there are special rules for what happens when the stress dice come up 1.  So while you are on edge you are more focused but have a higher chance to mess up.  Panic results range from nervous twitches and trembling to running for cover, screaming or going catatonic.  It's a roll and the more stress you have the more likely the worse outcomes are.  Each character has different ways to relieve stress.

Character types fit into 3 broad categories.  Basically you can choose from Colonial Marines, Space Truckers or Frontier Colonists.  I think you could mix these a little bit, but it seems set up to make 1 of those 3 types the main focus of the game.

I like this. Thanks for the description.

Quote from: Reckall;1119285IIUC, it covers from Prometheus to Alien 3 (OK, not the best marketing...) with the game being set after Alien 3.

I don't like the movies other than Alien and Aliens. The sequels were just plain bad. The prequels were also bad, and they ruin the continuity.

The engineers as the History Channel's ancient aliens is just plain stupid. Even aside from the terrible writing in those movies making absolutely everyone like idiots, the idea itself doesn't belong in the franchise. Not only does it defy real science so much that I cannot suspend my disbelief like I did for the aliens, but it just raises more questions than answers and generally causes the logic and world building of the franchise to fall apart.

I vastly preferred the Dark Horse EU. It had plenty of silly or stupid stories, sure, but those are easy to ignore. If you want an RPG relevant explanation, then there was an Aliens: Fuzion game a while back.

Below are some ramblings that came to me while contemplating this topic:

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My thoughts on the biomechanoids:
The engineers were interesting back when they were these mysterious giger aliens. There is tons of speculation on Youtube and Reddit about them maybe even being part of the same biomechanical ecosystem as the xenomorphs. There was speculation that the xenomorphs themselves were intelligent beings (O'Bannon's notes even stated they were intelligent, and the one on the Nostromo was a feral child), even capable of building ships. There was so much room for fascinating mystery and horror in the right hands.

If I ever wanted to explore the xenomorphs in a campaign, then I would probably use some premise like the following:

The aliens are an intelligent species, but are utterly alien to humanity. They have a reproduction-centered religion, owing to their bizarre and convoluted manner of reproduction. The phallus-headed monster is merely one of the many horrifying forms these creatures may take. Those encountered by the Nostromo and Hadley's Hope appeared unintelligent because they were essentially feral children, behaving on basic instinct with no adults to pen and train them.

The space jockey is this weird alien being. The creature we see isn't a humanoid elephant with a trunk, or an albino giant man in a suit. No, it's a biomechanical humanoid alien with a biomechanical suit attached to its body. The pilot had no legs because it was either grown out of the pilot's chair, removed them when it was assigned to pilot, or never had any before it was a pilot. The intention is to be mysterious and made viewers wonder why it looks the way it does. Here are some picture references:
https://www.deviantart.com/action-figure-opera/art/js1-307650559
https://www.deviantart.com/action-figure-opera/art/js2-307650635
https://www.deviantart.com/action-figure-opera/art/js3-307650719

Anyway, The space jockey isn't a separate race, but part of the same biomechanical ecosystem. The pilot, the ship, and the aliens are all part of a single biomechanical super-organism. In Giger's concept art, the side of the hold is lined with devices resembling a cross between uteri and conveyor belts. These are seemingly the source of the eggs and would explain why they are neatly lined along the floor and covered in a glowing blue mist that seems to serve an intended purpose (stasis? communication? both?).

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What happened to the Derelict?
However, that biomechanoid explanation raises the question of why the derelict on Acheron was broadcasting a warning to keep others away and why the pilot had been killed by a chestburster. I think the biomechanoids had been fighting a war, perhaps a civil war. Or experience really, really bad luck. The backstory of the derelict changes dramatically depending on which source and speculation you read. What follows is the version of events I'd use for my campaign setting where the biomechanoids are freakish alien entities intended to unnerve players.

First I'll provide a brief summary of what went down on the derelict. The ship was fought over by the crew and enemy pathogens, in whatever forms they took. The enemy entered the ship, passed between the cargo and bridge sections (impossible to distinguish point A from point B in the timeline), infected the cargo, infected/killed the pilot, infected/attacked/killed the pilot/crew/security, enemies got killed by crew/security, any surviving enemies crawled away and died, any surviving crew/pilot grounded the ship and activated the warning beacon, then everyone remaining died.

Below is a bunch of speculation on the exact ordering and nature of these events:

The pilot had been parasitized by an alien, which had apparently burst out from under the floor separating the bridge from the egg hold. The hole is quite large and the distance between the eggs and the bridge is quite large, so it doesn't make sense that a regular facehugger did this; what did had to be much bigger. The lack of damage visible elsewhere on the bridge and in the hold suggests that it came up through the floor rather than down through the floor, but that's no guarantee. (More on this later.) We can only speculate why this happened: perhaps one of the organisms in the hold malfunctioned or was infected by an enemy pathogen, or perhaps an enemy combatant or spy had stowed away in the hold and waited to attack. It is impossible to determine the conditions that led to the ship landing in the first place: was it attacked while it was grounded? did it perform an emergency landing? We can assume that the pilot was unable or unwilling to crash and burn in order to destroy the cargo.

Anyway, the pilot was infected and the alien organism tried to kill the rest of crew (if any) before being killed itself. Whoever survived, whether that be the pilot before bursting or another crew member, activated the warning beacon that was detected by Weyland-Yutani. (BTW, The Nostromo didn't arrive by chance, they were sent on a slight detour by Ash when he replaced their previous science officer during a pit stop; as explained in the novel and IIRC a deleted scene.) The warning was intended to alert other members of their civilization about the containment breach (since Weyland-Yutani had already translated it and assumed there was an alien bioweapon aboard, so we can assume that much info was in the warning) so that they could either avoid the derelict or know to prepare for biohazard containment in advance (which Weyland-Yutani didn't do, probably because the pilot assumed whoever heard already knew what it was and knew how to prepare; not, as the prequels suggest, because they're idiots obeying a malfunctioning robot). (Btw, while the prequels are horrible it stands to reason that the jockeys would be able to invent the black goo given everything else the biomechanoid tech does. I've even seen speculation that facehuggers expel the black goo directly. Those mysterious properties can gloss the holes in my current explanation, too.)

An alien left the ship after it crashed, was ultimately calcified/fossilized/mummified and fused into one of the surrounding rocks, as implied by the Alien script that describes an alien fossil visible in a nearby rock as the Nostromo crew investigates the derelict. This shot was never filmed, tho I imagine it would have looked a lot like Giger's painting "Necronom IV (1976)". A possible inside reference to this cut shot occurs in the video game Dark Seed II, when the protagonist sees and comments on a fossil in a nearby rock that was copied from that painting.

I'll note that this situation had at least two alien organisms: the facehugger (although it clearly wasn't the tiny kind we're used to; and giant facehuggers show up in the EU too) and the jockey-burster. Although there may not have been these clear facehugger/burster distinctions. The black goo works in mysterious ways and could have infected the pilot through another vector. (BTW, the novelization of Aliens describes the Jordans discovering multiple dead aliens in the ship's corridors that had been killed by the jockey crew/security protocols. One of these corpses is suggested to be a queen due to its head crest. It isn't explained whether the queen laid the eggs in the hold or they already existed and the queen presumably hatched from one.)

Anyway, the facehugger implanted the pilot, detached, and died. It may have attacked/killed the crew/security before infecting the pilot or between detaching and dying. In any case, it died and we have no idea where the body went; it may have been the same alien as the one entombed in the rocks next to the ship. (I saw speculation that the jockey's "trunk" was the calcified/fossilized/mummified remains of the facehugger, but Giger's art clearly indicates that's a biomechanical air hose rather than a trunk or facehugger.) The jockey-burster killed or fatally injured the pilot and left the ship where it died and got calcified/fossilized/mummified. Between bursting and dying, the burster may have attacked/killed the crew; it may have been grievously injured in the process, explaining why died right next to the ship.

There is a possibility that there was a second burster who went down into the hold and created that hole in the floor. The only reason it would need to go down through the floor into the cargo hold would be to lay all those eggs, an outcome I've already dismissed because the ships was obviously designed to carry those eggs already. The only alternative that fits with my explanation is that it went down in order to contaminate the hold with an enemy pathogen. In this case, the facehugger may have entered the bridge from another entrance or infected the pilot before it fused to the chair.

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Adventures on the Derelict?
All that's pretty much what I thought up just now. It's irrelevant unless you plan to investigate the derelict and that's entirely valid as an adventure.

Speaking of... I remember playing an Alien-themed CYOA game made in html on an ancient angelfire site which had you visiting LV426 and given the choice to investigate the Nostromo or the Derelict. I don't recall if you could also visit Hadley's Hope, sorry. Anyway, every single path ended with you dying in some gruesome fashion. Most of these were you being cornered and killed by an alien (or grabbed by a facehugger) that the author had put there without explanation. IIRC, at one point you were given the option to knowingly re-activate the Nostromo's halted self-destruct counter and you would die before escaping as punishment for your stupidity. In one path (I remember only because it was so darn weird), you could open the derelict's computer and awaken the ship. This releases an intelligent alien queen from stasis, who inexplicably looks like one of the attractive biomechanical women from Giger's art (and this was at least a decade before the fanart of alien queens with Shaw's face), who take over the ship. Some aliens would pop out and, rather than killing the PC, cocoon and convert 'm into a biomechanoid. Then the alien queen would travel to the biomechanoid planet "Heavy Metal" (yes, it was literally called that!) where she would activate another ship, which was inexplicably a replica of V'ger from Star Trek. This gigantic ship would visit Earth, taking the coordinates from the PC's mind, where the giant ship would engulf the planet in its enormous hangar bay and convert everyone there into biomechanoids too.

I have no idea what was that author was taking, but I want some!