Last week I ran the Alien RPG from Free League for the first time. I used the introductory scenario Hope's Last Day from the core rulebook. Part of the incentive for doing so was to fill a single evening refereeing slot at short notice, but also because I'm working on a scenario in the Space 1999 universe using the Alien rules.
Below are my observations of the system having run a single game with it. I won't be going into massive detail on the adventure as published, so there will be no spoiler alerts to worry about here.
What's to like about Alien
My understanding is the game runs off the Free League 'house system' which is also used in Mutant Year Zero, which I have played previously, although not extensively. It uses dice pools which are somewhat reminiscent of Vampire. I played with a group that generally plays Dungeons and Dragons, and are used to getting a result from 1d20, so dice pools were a little unfamiliar to them.
The great thing about the system is the use of Stress Dice, which are added as PCs become more stressed in the course of the adventure. These can bring you additional successes, but can also prompt panic rolls if your character rolls 1s from this pool. It does mean you need two distinct pools of d6s in different colours, which can be a problem if players don't have these.
In my view this works better than the Sanity mechanic in classic Call of Cthulhu, although the latter is more designed to depict the gradual erosion of sanity over time, potentially even weeks or months, while the Alien stress system works better for a scenario that takes place in a matter of hours. A 15 minute rest, and Alien PCs can start to reduce their Stress, not so Cthulhu investigators.
The Alien system does lead to a lot of panic rolls, although even with 1-5 Stress dice, the chances of characters completely losing it seemed small. Towards the end of the game, as we were running out of time, I ducked a couple of possible checks in the interests of finishing the adventure before we were ejected from the pub! I would estimate that 50% of the rolls ended up being panic checks.
The rest of the system is pretty straightforward. Combat is less granular than D&D, and the overall system is less crunchy than Call of Cthulhu - e.g. only 12 skills and four traits to worry about. There is more crunch when it comes to the aliens / xenomorphs themselves, of course.
What's not to like about Alien
GMs need to work hard here to reduce the number of dice rolls, as I can see they will slow the game down, especially at dramatic junctures. The designers have tried to cut down on this by simply adding dice from supporting characters to the total pool - e.g. three players search a room, but only one Observation roll is made, with +2D for the extra pairs of eyes.
The aliens themselves attack using a pre-defined combat table which the GM rolls against to see what sort of attack / reaction they use. This is fine when the party is facing a couple of opponents, but I can see it becoming complex / messy if there are many. Human opposition does not use this format. I feel that somehow this could have been avoided in the design. Also, it can lead to aliens doing things which are not in their best interests at certain critical junctures.
A GM creating new monsters / aliens will need to pay attention to this format, but somehow it seems unnecessarily fiddly, and again something the referee needs to pause to consult in the middle of a high stakes combat.
My big reservation with the game is the fact that many players and fans of the movies are forced to at least initially ditch their knowledge of the xenomorphs and pretend to play people who are ignorant of the threat. Luckily for me, I had two players who had not seen the films, and the player with the most knowledge of the milieu was playing a character who had already seen a copy of Ripley's Nostromo report.
Overall impressions of Alien
The big question with the Alien RPG for me is whether is can be used to run other, generic sci fi horror survival adventures. As mentioned at the start of this post, I'm working on a Space 1999 adventure, and would like to write some of my own sci fi horror scenarios, either inside or beyond the Alien universe, but which don't include the xenomorphs.
In many respects I think it could work well. I will try to get my Space 1999 game off the ground using this and may well return to Alien for other adventures. But I think I may veer off using the Geiger xenomorphs and look at other horrific creations, as this at least conjures up a sense of the unknown.
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