I will admit being a little behind, but I just heard about 2 months ago about Free League Publishing’s recent Alien RPG, and as soon as I heard about it I knew I had to get my hands on it. The thing about Alien is, as good as the movies (some of them) are. The world of the films has so much depth from just a few hours of filmed material (I know there are comics and novels, but I haven’t read a lot of them), so the excitement of being to run a campaign in that universe was too exciting to pass up.

Even though Alien came out in 1978, this is the first official Tabletop Roleplaying game set in this universe, that is simply mind-blowing considering most of the epic sci-fi franchises have had them by now. The film takes place after Alien 3, but avoids Alien Resurrection (ha). Covenant and Prometheus do fit into this universe, as does Alien Isolation.

This is a game by Free League who is known most highly for their Tales from the Loop from 2017. Likes Tales from the Loop, Alien is built upon the “Year Zero Engine” that Free League has become most known for. As a short aside this is the use of a pool of six-sided dice that are rolled based on your characters skills. Any 6 is a success, and multiple 6’s allow for extra things called stunts.

You will get your dice pool based on your attributes and skills.

If you have a strength of 4 and a heavy machinery of 3, and need to do something that involves machinery you’d roll 7 dice. That being said this is all balanced out by something called a stress mechanic. You most roll a number of dice equal to the amount of your stress level. This might offer you greater success, the logic here is that stress might help you succeed, however it might also lead to a panic attack.

One of the most exciting aspects of the rules laid out in the core rulebook is the 2 versions of play. There is “Cinematic Play” and “Campaign Play”. Cinematic play is set up like the 3 act structure of a film, and is meant to be more excited, but also allows for your characters to be more squishy as they aren’t exactly meant to survive in the long-term, also you are more likely to run into the titular Xenomorph in this version if that’s what you’re looking for. Campaign play is exactly how it sounds, it is meant for Game Masters (Game Mothers), who want to run a game in the Alien universe for the long term.

One of the most exciting parts of the whole book for me, is the in-depth portions of the creatures and locations of The Alien universe. There is a 4 full pages on the Engineers (no specs given, so it looks like no fights are happening). Even separate from a book that gives rules for a game, this is basically “Everything I wanted to know about the Alien Universe and was Afraid to Ask”. In the back of the book is Hope’s Last Day, a demo scenario that reads quite well. Due to the pandemic I haven’t had a chance to play it (or Destroyer of Worlds, more on that next). Also, like other Free League publications this book has simply fantastic graphic design and layout. Every page, every design choice is just excellent. There are moments in the last 2 weeks, where I wasn’t in the mood to read, but simply passively looked through this one.

DESTROYER OF WORLDS

OK, this is where it gets exciting for me. I just started running Tabletop RPG’s again 2 years ago after a decades along extended break. As such I haven’t had much time to begin writing my own stuff, and have relied heavily on pre-written modules, so getting the first fully realized Alien RPG module in the mail was quite exciting. I know the starter set came with one called “Chariot of the Gods”, I haven’t gotten to play or read that one (and technically again I haven’t played this one). But as soon as I started going through this I couldn’t help but get excited.

Destroyer of Worlds is meant for the “Cinematic Play” style of the Alien RPG. The long form RPG player in me is slightly disappointed in that facet, but then again right in front of me I have an adventure module where my party will play a group of Colonial Marines, in an adventure that reads one part Aliens, and one part weird ass folk horror thing where a group of Colonial Marines land on a colony to find another group of AWOL marines who have stolen intelligence. Thing is this group might be protected by a group of sinister locals, there is an invasion on the way, and of course ALIENS.

This scenario does comes with pre-generated characters, but one could easily design their own to go along for the ride if they were so-inclined, but as the implication is hardcore cinematic play it seems like it would be easier and more natural and less deadly for your campaign characters to just use the ones included. If these characters die (they will) you will just take over random NPCs to finish the adventure.

The adventure itself is 88 pages, and is 3 acts long, and it reads like an action packed version of Aliens. It expands on the universe successfully, and is equally creepy, violent, and exciting. There are lots of hand outs for the players to interact, large maps of the colony that make this a very graphic intensive adventure. There are also cards that give characters new secret motivations midway through the module. Which again is a high point here.

I am definitely going to run this for a group of friends around my physical table once this is over, rather than over Zoom like I’ve been doing over the last few months. It just feels like their is too much gorgeous physical and well-designed material, and even if I wanted to display it via PDF on screen it would be more fun at a real table.

If there is one thing I’d like to see from the Alien RPG soon it’s a long form scenario that would take a while to run. Their own Masks of Nyarlathotep so to speak, because I would like to run some characters through this world with the expectation that they might survive even for a little while.