Review - Alien RPG

An RPG which captures the feel of the Alien/Aliens films beautifully.

Last Saturday I played Alien by Free League Publishing with my friend Guy Sargeant. It was a one-shot game for me to get experience at running the game for real prior to running the scenario at a convention. Guy ran all five characters.

The Basics

There are nine basic career archetypes you can choose from, each of which clearly represents a kind of character you will remember from the movie: Colonial Marine, Colonial Marshall, Company Rep, Kid, Medic, Officer, Pilot, Roughneck, or Scientist. Each of them comes with key skills, a choice of talents, gear, personal agendas and sentimental item.

Your character has four attributes (Strength, Agility, Wits, Empathy) and each of those has three skills associated with them. You have a certain number of points to put into the attributes, and a certain number to put into skills.

In order to attempt something challenging you roll a handful of d6’s - one for each attribute point, one for each skill point, and perhaps one or two for equipment. You are looking for sixes. One six is a success, every additional six after the first gives you a stunt. There are lists of stunts for the different skills as well as for combat. You also roll as many dice as you have stress. 6’s on the stress dice are just as good, because you benefit from the adrenaline of the stress. However, any 1’s on the stress dice mean that you have to check on the panic table, and that’s where things can get very hairy...

There are lots of ways you can get stress. Seeing shocking and horrific things. Firing an automatic weapon burst. People near you panicking. You can even up your stress yourself by pushing yourself, which allows you to re-roll any of your dice (as long as you’ve not had a panic check). Stress can rack up pretty quick though, and you might need to find a safe place to rest up and gather your wits. Perhaps enjoy a little banter with your mates.

Injury reduces your health, and when health reaches zero you are ‘broken’ and also roll on the ‘critical damage’ table - everything from broken nose and sprained ankle up to severed leg, disembowelled, or pierced skull. Fun for all the family.

Because it is a horror game, scarcity is another dial that can be turned to put up the pressure. Food, water, air, power can all be neatly tracked and cause you injury and stress if they run out.

Playing the Game

The rules have the funny conceit of the game being run by the ‘Game Mother’, because the ship computer in the original film was called ‘Mother’. It is worth getting together crib-lists of things which you will need to refer to frequently because some of the rules are scattered through the rules a bit, including some important ones (which I’ll mention later).

I ran the game with a map and ‘theatre of the mind’ for combat because that seemed a reasonable choice, and the combat rules don’t seem geared for delicate measurement. Ranges are engaged, short, long etc, where engaged is in hand to hand combat, short is basically in the same room, long is down a corridor from you and so on.

As I ran the game there were a few moments of stress racking up here and there as they came across bodies or similar weirdness. However, when they got into the armoury by hammering on the lock with a big wrench, that woke up a nearby alien and believe me, stress winds up quickly when fighting off the titular threat!

Initiative uses cards (and aliens get dealt two cards, so they get to go twice). The PCs can choose to swap cards between them, to agree the order they go in which gives some nice flexibility. Also there is a combat stunt which allows you to swap your initiative with that of your foe which gives an extra dynamic to the game.

I quite like that each of the xenomorphs has you roll a dice to decide what it basically does that round - from stare menacingly to piecing a skull with it’s jaws and a number of options in between. There are distinct charts for each of the lifecycle stages.

When the xenomorph fight kicked off it wasn’t long before characters were screaming, fleeing etc - all of which ratcheted up everyone else’s stress. The android character does have an advantage in that they don’t suffer from stress, but the disadvantage they they can’t push themselves either. It helps make the androids quite interesting to play.

It’s important for the players to recognise that they need to seek downtime in safe places in order to recover stress. If they don’t do that, then their tenure during the game is like to be pretty short once things really start going pear shaped.

Why I like this game

First of all the stress mechanic. Hopefully everyone who sits down to play this game is already bought in to the idea that their character agency may be taken out of their hands by the sheer horror of the situation. I love the way that stress creeps up, helps you pull off incredible things, but panic trips you (and other people up). All together it really pulls in the atmosphere of the films.

Secondly the agendas. If you are running a cinematic style one-shot, the varied agendas introduces some really fruitful inter-character tension to the game. The game rules reward you for playing up to your agenda, but most of the time it is just plain fun. The agendas do mean that you can see some PvP conflict, and the rules in place seem to handle that pretty well.

Thirdly, it is easy to tweak things to your liking. Personally, although I think Aliens is an incredible film and one of the best sequels I’ve ever seen all-round, I don’t like the queen alien they introduced. Making them like hive-insects in that respect made them at the same time less alien and less terrifying. The original film novelisation made it clear that the alien could capture people, cocoon them and start a process that turns them into the eggs. Thus if even one of them got onto a planet, it could spread and grow like a pandemic. That seems much more terrifying to me. So guess what - in my games of Alien, that’s going to be the way things work!

Fourthly, the character careers have bags of flavour. So much so that I could see the rules being used for a plain old gritty sci-fi game which didn’t actually have to involve the xenomorph at all! You could use these rules and have an enjoyable and gritty game of blue-collar space workers.

Where can you find the game

Probably easiest to visit https://freeleaguepublishing.com/games/alien/

Would you like to see a story?

I ran the introductory scenario which is included in the back of the rulebook called “Hope’s Last Day”. It’s set in Hadley’s Hope in the colony after the main alien incursion, but before the colonial marines arrive with Ripley.

I decided to add a little bit of variety to the stock characters, so I separated their agendas out, and gave the agendas randomly (and secretly) to the player characters. Even I didn’t know who had which agenda, and it was great to see them gradually get revealed during play.

Note - I made ‘android’ into an agenda. The person who got that agenda was told that they couldn’t push themselves, and they could pretend to be stressed but didn’t have to reveal that they were an android until either they were wounded (white fluid rather than blood) or there was a situation where they exposed their greater than normal android abilities - permanently boosting two attributes by +3 - or didn’t suffer from stress or panic.

Characters:

McWhirr: Officer, Union Organiser. Secret agenda - she is an android that will sacrifice itself to save people.

Hirsch: ex-Marine, Janitor. Secret agenda - a religious fanatic who thinks these are demons he must destroy.

Singleton: Pilot, Tractor-driver, Secret agenda - take revenge on the corporates who are responsible for what has befallen your friends and family at Hadley’s Hope.

Sigg: Scientist, Lab Technician. Secret agenda - an agent for Weyland Yutani, make sure no information leaks out, kill people if necessary.

Holroyd: Roughneck, Mechanic. Secret Agenda - get a sample of the alien life-form off planet.

Act 1

They enter the base and hear an intercom alert, warning everyone to make their way down to the basement storeroom for a final stand. They decide to go down that way to investigate, creeped out by the steam and flickering emergency lighting. They nearly get to the location of the final stand of the colonists but get cold feet and decide not to proceed further down that route. The scenes of fighting worry them enough that they decide their first order of business is to make their way up to the armoury in the command centre.

They make their way up to the second floor, and creep through the corporate office on the way to the command centre. They see the corporate agent Reynolds sitting in a chair with her back to them. Investigating further she is dead (horribly so) and her keycard has been partially melted by some kind of acid. Her communicator is blinking, and they find messages on it from her scientist, Kominsky, who is apparently locked in the med lab.

The way there is through the command centre. Sigg runs a bypass but has to push herself to do it and picks up some more stress. The armoury door is locked and she fails to bypass the security on this, pushes herself and gets a mild panic attack, but nothing too bad. Hirsch decides to batter the lock off the door and picks up a heavy wrench. The noise reverberates around the room, but he gets it open. Silently a shape unfolds from the machinery behind them. They hand out the shotgun and magnum when the alien behind them strikes. Hirsch hides behind a cabinet when it looks at him, Singleton takes a shot at it, and it turns and jaws piston out and through Singleton’s skull, killing her instantly. The others unload with their magnum, shotgun and bolt gun, and acid is sprayed liberally over Singleton’s body as the alien goes down. Sigg deduces some pretty horrible things about this alien and they decide to keep a bit quieter as they move to the medlab.

Act 2

Into the medlab they find Kominsky locked into the quarantine room, alongside another body which has a facehugger attached. McWhirr decides that they are not letting Kominsky out until they are sure that things are safe. The decide to have a break to reduce some stress. Hirsch provides some welcome banter which helps them recover a little more quickly. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. They probably should have started moving but they decided to rest a little more - and it turned out to be a mistake. A facehugger scuttled into the room, causing them all to jump up in panic. Someone shoots at it and misses, so it lashes out with its tail and injures Siggs who panics and runs for it, down a corridor towards the upper casino level.

Holroyd attempts to pin it under an empty stasis flask, and is injured by a splash of acid blood before he got it sealed in the box. Secretly pleased, he was now planning how he might get this box off the planet.

Meanwhile Sigg had reached the casino, tugged a door open and was buried under a pile of bodies that tumbled on top of her. She screamed and burrowed her way out, then screamed again as she realised that one of the bodies was still conscious. “help me” the person whispered, and Sigg dragged them out and back into the medic bay. Her name is Maria, and she is in a bad way.

They decide that it is time to get Kominsky out of isolation. She is clearly suffering from PTSD or something similar, and is barely able to string words together with them. But she does have a precious security card key on a lanyard round her neck - their ticket out of here!

They are planning their route out of here when Maria screams and arches her back. Everyone clusters round her, looking for the medical equipment, and is startled when blood fountains out of her chest and a vicious chestburster tears out, hissing at them. Everyone makes a panic roll and Siggs and Kominsky literally flee as fast as they can, running out through the command centre.

McWhirr shoots at the horrible little thing and it returns the favour by slashing at her legs with its razor sharp metallic teeth. It wounds McWhirr badly. So badly that McWhirr starts leaking milky fluid and her leg servos give way, crashing to the ground!

Finding out that McWhirr was an android stresses people out, and a couple of others panic and drop what they were holding. Holroyd cowers, but Hirsch keeps his head and blasts the thing with his shotgun, killing it but spraying McWhirr with some more globs of acid which finish off her legs.

Act 3

Cut to Kominsky and Siggs, running in the direction of the shuttle landing pad. They pause for breath at the airlock, and Siggs readies a syringe to take out Kominsky as her personal agenda is that nobody gets out with information that would embarrass her bosses at Weland Yutani.

Just before she strikes, something else happens to Kominsky who screams and clutches her chest in pain. Siggs twigs what is going on and changes her plans, reaching out to grab the lanyard with the security pass from around her neck (we ran this as a grapple with +1 stunt in order to succeed). Success! She grabs the lanyard just as Kominsky falls to the floor in a shower of blood. A screeching chest burster emerges and sizing up the situation decides to deal with this human. It leaps at Siggs and tears at her neck, rupturing her jugular. It then flees as Siggs vainly attempts to staunch the flow of blood until help arrives.

Back in the medical bay there is a tense stand-off between Holroyd who wants to get away with the facehugger in a box and Hirsch who is determined to kill it. Weapons are drawn, Orders given, but Holroyd tries to run for it. Hirsch shoots him with the shotgun, destroying his foot, before taking out the creature in the box. McWhirr and Hirsch have long hated each other, and McWhirr is an android, but there is something in Hirsch that yearns for redemption. He hauls up McWhirr to his back where she clings, and tells her that they were both getting out of here.

Leaving the dying Holroyd on the floor of the medical centre, they follow the route towards the shuttle bay - and come across the dead Kominsky and Siggs. Siggs hadn’t been able to hold out long enough. They retrieve the security pass still gripped in Sigg's dead fingers, then proceed onwards.

Making their way across the tarmac, they attempted to move stealthily to avoid attracting alien attention - they succeed but at a cost... Hirsch panics and drops something - he drops McWhirr! McWhirr tells him to keep going and draws her magnum, determined to hold off the aliens to give him a chance.

Hirsch runs a bypass to disengage the security which is a close thing but he avoids further panic. Sitting in the pilot seat and powering up the engines he is unfamiliar with causes him to panic and he starts screaming; pulling back on the controls the shuttle launches up into the sky, Hirsch screaming as it does. Terror or relief, we don’t really know. As he calms down, he sets the controls for home, and wearily climbs into a sleep pod for the long journey. Nobody will ever believe him, but he has demons he must seek out and slay.

~ end ~

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