Alien RPG

Alien and Aliens are two of my favorite movies of all time. IMO, they’re the only two good movies in the series, and they’re nothing like each other. One is a slow, suspenseful horror film, and the other is an exciting action movie. They both feature beautifully disturbing creature designs, and a strong female lead. I love how the future is depicted as being low tech and dirty, as opposed to the immaculately clean Star Trek, where technology is basically magic.

It’s not easy to make an RPG system that works equally well for both movies. If I’d been in charge, I might have focused on one or the other. But the Alien RPG (2019, Free League Publishing) makes a pretty solid attempt. I’d say the system works better on the suspense side than the action side, but so far I haven’t played it enough to really judge.

In the Alien RPG, there’s two types of games: Campaign play and Cinematic play. If you’re only planning to run one-shots, then you don’t really need the core rulebook, and can get by on the Cinematic Starter Kit instead. Either style of play can be used for action or suspense themed games, but in my mind, the one-shot Cinematic games work better for horror, and the Campaign works better for those who want a marine-filled action fest. But YMMV.

Alien RPG is a dice pool game that uses special d6’s. Regular d6’s work, but you’ll want a bunch of them, and you’ll want them in two different colors. The first set of dice is the “Base Dice”, which you use for skill checks. They are normal d6’s except there’s a special symbol on the 6. When you need to perform a skill check (which includes attack rolls), you roll a number of Base Dice based equal to your skill level plus the governing stat. If you get even one six, you succeed. Additional sixes let you perform “Stunts”, which are extra effects.

Then there’s Stress Dice. A big part of the Alien RPG, and one of the elements that really helps it nail the feel of the movies, is keeping track of your character’s stress. Your characters can gain stress several ways, from taking damage to seeing a xenomorph for the first time. When you roll a skill check, you take a number of Stress Dice equal to your current stress level, and add them to your dice pool. These dice have the same special symbol on the 6 as the Base Dice, but they also have a facehugger symbol on the 1.

So Stress Dice can actually help you, in that they give you more chances to roll 6’s. Just like how being under pressure in real life can sometimes make you more competent. But if any of your stress dice come up as 1’s, you have to make a panic roll. This roll might result in your character fleeing, dropping an important item, or even attacking a fellow teammate.

 

For example, Bob has an Agility score of 4, a Range Combat score of 2, and his gun has a bonus of 1. His stress level is currently three. He wants to shoot at a xenomorph which is currently sticking its head in the door. Bob yells, “Eat this!”, then rolls 7 base dice and 3 stress dice. Among the 10 dice, he ends up getting three success symbols and one facehugger symbol.

 

Only one success is needed to hit the alien. The other two success dice can be used to perform stunts. Some of the stunts won’t apply in this situation, such as knocking the weapon out of your opponent’s hand. But one of them allows you to push your opponent backwards, so Bob uses this one to knock the xenomorph back through the open door it was standing in. For the other stunt, he just chooses to have it do one extra point of damage.

 

But since he also got a facehugger symbol, Bob has to make a Panic roll. He rolls a d6 and gets a 4. His current stress level is 3, so he adds that and gets 7. Looking at the Panic roll chart, 7 is “Nervous Twitch”, which causes Bob and his nearby companions to each gain 1 stress die. That could have been a lot worse. 

 

There’s a little more to it than that (the opponent may have an armor rating that lowers the damage it takes, their wounds might spray acid when hit, Bob’s distance from the opponent might change the number of base dice, Bob could use his Fast Action to aim for 2 additional dice, the weight of all these dice might collapse the table you’re playing on, etc etc etc), but those are the basics.

Personally, d6 games are usually a turn off for me. I’m a huge fan of 20-sided dice. But I have to admit that I associate unusual-shaped dice with fantasy, so Alien RPG’s d6’s do help set the futuristic mood here. Also, I’ve never really been in love with dice pool games in general. Honestly, the most recent Star Wars RPG (2012, Fantasy Flight Games) is almost incomprehensible to me. But I think Alien RPG pulls it off well.

This is a very deadly RPG. Player characters typically only have around 4 hit points, while xenomorphs have about twice as many. You are not meant to survive melee encounters with an alien. This is a “run and hide” RPG, not a “kill everything that moves” game. That is, unless your party is a group of well-armed space marines, but even then you’re going to want to engage the enemy on your terms. In any event, if you find yourself face-to-face with a xeno and you’re armed with a wrench… just run.

Death is interesting. Getting to zero hit points doesn’t kill you, it just requires you to roll on a critical injury table. Some of these injuries are fatal, some will put your character out of action for a few days, and some just leave you with battle scars.

Combat uses cards to determine initiative. On your turn, you get a slow action and a fast action (or two fast actions). Distance is kind of vague, so combat grids aren’t really necessary. For the most part you just need to track is which characters are currently in which room.

I tend to dislike encumbrance rules in RPGs. It’s not that I think PCs should be able to carry thousands of pounds of loot, it’s just that most of the time tracking weight is more tedious than fun. But Alien RPG’s encumbrance system is intuitive and easy. It’s based more on an object’s size than weight. You can carry a number of “regular-sized” objects equal to double your strength score. Larger objects count as multiple objects, and smaller objects count has half an object. “Tiny” objects (pen, ID card) can fit in your pockets and don’t need to be tracked. It’s a little thing, but it’s touches like this that win me over.

Reading through it, my first impression was that it looks like a "rules light" system. It’s really not, though. Sure, there are a lot of rules that won't come into play in every campaign, like the ones involving starvation, freezing, air supply, and so on. You put all of those aside, and it seems like you're playing with about two page's worth of rules. But when you actually start to play it, it does feel crunchier than it initially reads.

Aesthetically speaking, the books are beautiful. The designers are totally committed to the theme. The pages have a black background, with most information in green “pop up” windows, like you’re using one of the computer terminals in the Alien universe. It’s full of timelines and space maps, with nice artwork and quotes from the movies. The book looks great on my shelf, and I’m proud to own it.

But from a practical standpoint, the books are a little difficult to use. To preserve the aesthetic, they wasted a lot of pages. An entire page might contain a single paragraph, floating in the middle of a star field. Rules that ought to be on the same page are sometimes found 30 pages apart. At times I found the DM screen more useful than the rulebook, because it puts the most-used charts and rules in one spot.

Even the “Cinematic Starter Kit”, which includes an abridged version of the rules, feels disorganized. It basically copies the most important pages right out of the core rulebook, aesthetic and all, rather than reorganize the rules in a more intuitive way. Look, I love how beautifully these books are presented, but I wish it included a quick reference book. If condensed efficiently, it would be a lot easier to find the rules you need when you need them.

Even the bestiary section is presented in a confusing way, with a creature’s stats in one chart, but with special rules several pages away. During one fight, I kept having to flip back and forth between a xenomorph’s attacks, and what happens when they die. Unless you make your own monster cards, you’re going to be flipping back and forth a lot.

Bottom line? Well, there is no bottom line, because I haven’t played it enough to really judge it yet. So far I’ve only run a single session for one player, and we hand-waved a few rules because we were still getting used to the basics. But the feel of the movies is there. It would have been very easy for them to just churn out a quick Traveller clone, but you can tell this RPG was a labor of love. This is a game for Alien fans, by Alien fans.

If you’re torn on whether to buy the core rulebook or the Cinematic Starter Kit, I’d go with the starter kit. You get an abridged rulebook, some dice, cards, and more. And it’s usually cheaper than the rulebook. But if you end up liking the game, the core rulebook adds character creation, vehicle rules, a larger bestiary, and a ton of lore about the Alien universe. If you don’t care about having the physical book, you can buy the core rulebook a little cheaper digitally from DriveThruRPG.

By the way, the module I ran was a short Cinematic one-shot I put together, loosely based on the Commodore 64 game, “Project Firestart”. It’s not finished, but here are my notes for the module if you're curious.