A L I E N

Happy Alien Day, American friends. Here we celebrate on the 42nd of June.

Fria Ligan celebrates by announcing a Starter Set and a new big adventure for their A L I E N RPG. The Starter Set will contain a condensed rulebook which is still over a hundred pages. That seems like it could be pretty easy to condense, as the normal rulebook is laid out like an artbook with a game system in the captions. Most of the art is great, some a bit too obviously photoreferenced for me.

Gehenna Gaming will be interviewing one of the designers tonight at 9.30 UK time.

Need more art? The unmade game Aliens Crucible provides some.

It still packs a fair amount into its four hundred pages. It notably contains two supported playstyles, the standard Campaign where space marines and truckers get into various kinds of trouble and the one-shot-based Cinematic where PC agendas are built to clash and Stress to ramp up harder so that not everybody should survive.

It also takes advantage of the breadth of the licence (excepting the Predator and other crossovers) including those prequels and teasers for Alien Resurrection as it’s set circa ALIEN³, but also features concepts from the other unmade Alien 3 scripts like the Union of Progressive Peoples from the William Gibson version and the wooden hermitage planet from Vincent Ward’s, and more like the Church of Immaculate Incubation from the first Dark Horse Aliens comics and even the Harvesters from the Leading Edge Aliens RPG. This means you have a lot to draw from, including ideas from several incompatible alternate continuities.

The system itself is pretty minimal and straightforward, with four stats rated to five, a small number of skills and talents, and more space given to suggested emotional connections and visual tics playbook-style for the careers. It all runs on D6, and includes 6D6 random tables (like TOON!) for things like critical hits. Stress runs similarly to Hunger Dice in Vampire: The Masquerade Fifth Edition, replacing regular dice as it rises, while it has some advantages as well as the increasing risk of panic.

What could you do with the setting? Possibly a lot.

I’ve played Alien-related games before and often died - I once got to play Hudson in a runthrough of Aliens, and didn’t die because the session ran long - as well as borrowing from it rather heavily for The Stars On Fire, with the UPP being one of the things I swiped. Other “space sucks” settings like Traveller 2300 and The Expanse also focus on humanity going out into the stars and still keeping nation-states and fighting over resources while also prodding at dangerous first contact and the like.

I could certainly run a campaign like that again, and with the Stress and other systems this might be a good choice.

Oh, and one last ALIEN gaming connection for you... the Alien Anthology short film Harvest features a Xenomorph played by L.A. By Night’s Alex Ward.