So when it comes to the Alien franchise I will admit I lean more to the horror side of things. That means when I revisit the franchise, and I’m not marathoning them in order, my go-to’s are the original and Alien 3 (assembly cut). Yet, oddly even though the action-packed Aliens is my outlier in the franchise (we do not talk about Alien Resurrection), I couldn’t help, but be excited when Free League Publishing announced their Colonial Marines Operations Manual for the Alien RPG.

But let’s be honest if you’ve seen Aliens in the last nearly 40 years years you’ve quoted a line like “That’s it, man! Game over, man! Game over!” Sure, there was a Marines stat-block in the Core rule book, but this promised Colonial Marines, and nothing, but and look here WE GOT ‘EM.

The book is split into multiple sections. We get a section for players and a section for GM’s. Even if you’re not planning to run the game, Hell even if you’re just an uber-Aliens fan-person and just dig the background of the series this part of the book might be worth picking up, as it gives extensive background of the Colonial Marines from different perspectives. It discusses conflicts they fought in religious beliefs, and more.

We then get a section on weapons and vehicles for the Colonial Marines. If you have the Core Rulebook (and you will need it to run the campaign contained here), the weapons for the most part are pretty similar, but there are exceptions, and some of these are pretty awesome, and could potentially be pretty helpful in running your Alien game in general.

After this the book breaks off into GM material, and we get about 250 pages on how to run a Marine focused campaign. This includes elements like the type of ship these marines might serve on, and the weaponry they’ll have default access to. The book also suggest mission types if you’re the type of GM that plans on writing their own material stuff like this will definitely help. One note, I will make here is if you are planning to use the book and it’s campaign contents as a jumping off point that it does spoil the prior campaign Destroyer of Worlds, so you might want to run your players through that, before going into the campaign here. There is also background of the underlying conflict between the United Americas and the UPP over the Alpha Bootis system which is fascinating and makes great play fodder.

We then get into the main campaign which is compromised of 7 individual adventures. This campaign is fairly epic, and should players a reasonable amount of sessions to get through, but it’s full of twist and turns, so get ready to have some fun with it. Of course, each adventure can easily be played stand alone if you’re so inclined, but reading this as one great adventure seems like too much of a great thing.

As per usual Free League has gone a great job with layout and graphics. I don’t think I have a Free League book on my shelf that I don’t get tempted to pick up and peruse from time to time just for the awesome art and the Colonial Marines Operation Manual is no exception, it keeps perfectly in line with the artwork style of the Alien RPG, and looks great on the shelf with the rest. The Alien RPG is probably the best new RPG’s to hit shelves in recent years, and with the recent announcement of Blade Runner (one of my top 10 films of all time) Free League have me excited to see what they’ll do with that as well. As for now the CMOM is another exciting piece of Alien RPG material that is a required own for players and GM’s of the game, and comes highly recommended.