It’s time to let Alien die
Just like the film franchise, the Alien RPG is an unmissable thrill ride which inevitably drifts into diminishing returns. While I recommend playing it to everyone, it’s honestly a bit of a beast to GM with limited potential for fresh stories. Personally, I am done.
It’s not hard to see why the Alien RPG has been so successful for Free League. Unlike most licenced games, it does what it says on the box very, very well. It’s perfect for spending a few evenings creeping through your own movie. There’s an appropriately high body count. Year Zero’s an easy, fun system and while not the first RPG to feature a stress mechanic, the pinballing shitfuckery of its panic rolls consistently creates the kind of scream-or-laugh-out-loud moments players remember forever.
Please... kill me!
Lore master Andrew Gaska rightly leans into the setting of the early films, including William Gibson’s criminally rejected script for the threequel. Sincerely, these scenarios are some of the best stories told in this universe since 1986, but they can be a Queen-sized bitch to GM.
Most obviously, the admittedly gorgeous core book is the hardcopy embodiment of the vast empty spaces between the stars. Flip through it often enough, you’ll wish for your own hypersleep pod. It could be half as thick and twice as organised. Even if you do find what you’re looking for, the rules are often maddeningly vague. And is just one-and-a-half pages really everything there is to know about synthetics?
Worse, after playing enough Alien RPG, even the chaos of those panic rolls gets repetitive, or produces too many conditions and penalties to keep track of, and the whole thing becomes a slog.
The game absolutely sings in ‘cinematic mode’, replicating the bottled terror of the best movies over one or two sessions. The enclosed short Hope's Last Day scenario is a cracker. But, as you've probably read elsewhere, campaign mode is a grind.
There's another point to make about these published cinematics. As great as Gaska's writing is, I found them to be quite bloated. Even as an experienced GM, Chariot of the Gods is a lot of work, with a multitude of NPCs, competing agendas, writing that’s more like a script than a guide, and way too much material for one or even two sessions, including a late twist I suspect many GMs jettison for time. Production on the maps and cards is great, but they often detract from the drama at the table as you try to read the symbols or pick over minor errors.
Similarly, I joined a group that took five sessions to play through the Heart of Darkness cinematic, punctuated by shifting character agenda cards that felt very arbitrary (my advice is to do without the agenda cards, or only use the first as an opener and let the players do whatever they want).
I did make a stab at my own campaign, using the Novgorod Station and random tables from the core book to generate destinations for my space truckers, but it was bereft of an overarching plot. Was there more to life than indentured servitude to Weyland Yutani? Would my story be worth the players' investment, given the near-inevitable end of being impregnated by a penis crab? The succession of middling-at-best movie sequels shows just how hard it is to write a fresh take on the xenomorph, so why should my home brew campaign be any better?
Interestingly, players can cope with the cognitive dissonance of pretending not to know there’s probably definitely a penis crab around the corner, but this gets harder the longer it drags on. A property like Alien comes with a clear set of expectations and this breaks the immersion provided by the best RPGs, where anything could happen at any time. It’s true that you could choose not to include a penis crab in the game, but then is it even Alien anymore? And if you’re not including a penis crab, why are you even playing Alien?
I enjoyed some of the Colonial Marines campaign and have read positive reviews for Building Better Worlds, but I’ve been unable to summon any more enthusiasm, given the many other games queuing for my limited playtime.
At the time of writing, I won’t be backing the Alien RPG Second Edition Kickstarter. Ironically, while the rules do need a polish and a new writer is coming aboard (with impressive RPG credentials this time), I'm just not interested anymore. It feels too much like Disney cashing in on the release of Alien Romulus. Plus the addition of miniatures pushes the game into tactical bughunting rather than storytelling. Which is fine, if you like that sort of thing.
Between Mothership and Death in Space, there's an embarrassment of sci fi horror rpg riches these days. I'd much rather set a fresh course in a new storytelling universes, free of expectations, instead of endlessly retreading a near-50-year-old franchise. Again, this is not unlike deciding whether or not to even bother watching any new Alien films or the TV series. They’re probably also going to be… fine, but I just wish we had something new instead.