There are few movie universes I find more engaging than the Alien universe. The combination of working class aesthetics, evil corporations, and intriguing alien lore has always commanded my attention. While there have been video games throughout the years that have allowed you to step into the Alien universe, the tabletop RPG from Free League Publishing gives you the tools to play around in that world with complete freedom.
Contained in the core rulebook is a wealth of information about the systems, planets, governments, and corporations of the Alien universe. Even though this does take away a bit from the mysterious and economical worldbuilding the movies so deftly employ, it’s never too much and gives you plenty of room to create within the established world. In a clever twist, the events of the film are regarded as rumors and unconfirmed hearsay, allowing your characters to be unaware of the concrete existence of xenomorphs. The book also includes tables allowing you to roll dice to quickly create new systems and planets for the players to explore, giving you infinite possibilities to tell your own story.
The game is built for two different types of play. The first is Campaign, which is closer to what you think when you imagine a Dungeons and Dragons-like tabletop RPG. Players create a group of characters and play out their story over several sessions, with the story evolving as you progress. The manual provides a few different frameworks for your party (Space Trucker, Colonial Marines, and Frontier Colonists), giving you plenty of prewritten plot hooks for each. Being able to quickly roll some dice to figure out a job to send your Space Truckers on is something that’s helpful for any Game Master, and the Alien RPG definitely has those tools in spades.
While the idea of taking a crew on a long tour of the Alien universe is a fun one, to me the Alien movies shine because they are small, compact tales that allow for large amounts of tension. During a campaign, the Alien will lose its mystique if you run into it all the time, creating the need for lots of other types of threats to interact with (which the book does provide, to its credit). If the idea of an extended campaign doesn’t appeal to you, there’s still something for you in this book: Cinematic Play.
Cinematic Play is specifically meant to be played as a one-off adventure, capturing the highly lethal nature of the films. Players are provided with pre-made character sheets that are slotted into certain roles and have hidden agendas. These agendas are often designed to put players into conflict with one another. Like in the films, players could secretly be corporate androids who are meant to capture the xenomorph at the expense of the crew, allowing for drama to come from more than just confrontations with aliens. Cinematic Play is where the game really shines, giving you an opportunity to focus on the pure horror of the situation and kill off players more readily than you would in a long-form campaign.
None of this would mean anything if there weren’t good mechanics to back it up, and luckily the Alien RPG is finely tuned in this area. The game modifies the basic dice resolution mechanics from Free League’s other games like Mutant Year Zero and Tales from the Loop by adding an important stress mechanic that melds fiction and play perfectly. When a player has to overcome a challenge, they roll a pool of six-sided dice based on their skill rating in whatever they are doing. If any of the dice come up with a six, the roll succeeds. Any additional sixes allow you to enhance the action in unique and interesting ways.
For example, if I was trying to quickly hotwire the control panel of a door to slam it shut to stop a xenomorph from getting to my crew, I would roll a Heavy Machinery check of five dice. I roll two sixes, so I succeed and can use that extra six to break the panel permanently so it can’t be opened again by another player or NPC.
The twist on this system is that once players start accumulating stress, they also must roll a stress die. These are dice that can count as successes, but if you roll a one on a stress die, you must make a panic roll. The result of the panic roll can cause your character to act irrationally, having effects ranging from negatives to future rolls to forcing you to attack the nearest person or creature, friendly or not. Stress comes from either pushing yourself to re-roll a failed roll or from fictional situations like someone betraying the group, so it builds up slowly over time, inching you closer to that devastating panic roll. It’s a wonderful system that really ramps up the horror theme, tying dice rolls into the characters’ mental state perfectly.
Not every character is a fighter in the world of Alien, and the book provides players with plenty of choices for character classes. There are rules for combat, but oftentimes situations can be overcome with other problem-solving skills, making the scientist just as useful as the marine at getting you out of a jam.
Alien also has some fairly detailed rules for ship to ship combat and faster than light travel. I can see them coming into use during Campaign Play in order to give players a bit more variety, but these types of scenarios aren’t exactly what I come to the Alien franchise for. That being said, the ship combat rules do seem like a robust set of mechanics that allow all players to be involved, no matter what their class or role on the ship, so they are a strong addition to the already expansive ruleset.
If you’re new to tabletop gaming, the Alien RPG would make for a great place to jump in, especially in the fast and tense Cinematic mode of play. While some of the rules do get a bit heavy on the number crunching, the basic moment-to-moment mechanics are easy to follow and smoothly translate dice rolls into fiction in a satisfying fashion. The core book comes with one Cinematic scenario, and others are available in supplemental books from Free League. Whether you want to follow one of those or write your own, the universe of Alien is brimming with storytelling opportunities for players and game masters to take full advantage of.