Space 1999 RPG: Disaster strikes at Moonbase Alpha

We finished off my two-part Space 1999 adventure using the Alien RPG rules last week, which we were giving a road test. Player feedback seems to have been broadly positive about the system although I have a few observations which I will include at the end of this post.

By way of reminder, we had four player characters, who are investigating the murder of a geologist on the moon and were installed at Moonbase Alpha. You can read about the first part of the investigation here.

The team had gone to bed peacefully enough but were awoken by alarm klaxons at around 0400 Earth time. The ubiquitous red emergency lights were on and moonbase personnel were running to their assigned emergency stations. Arriving in the command station, the PCs found Commander Koenig and operations director Paul Morrow missing, and Professor Victor Bergman seemingly running things. Bergman told them he had detected very high radiation spikes in the vicinity of the base, which had now seemingly disappeared.

Bergman revealed that he had been monitoring radiation bursts on the moon for some weeks now and confirmed that he had detected some in the vicinity of the area where the geologist Stevens had been killed. He also told the team - privately - that he had heard rumours that the British had successfully set up a moonbase in the 1920s, but that knowledge of its presence had been suppressed for some reason.

Koenig arrived to take charge shortly afterwards and the party went looking for the missing Morrow. They found his body bloodily eviscerated in his quarters. Although there was gore everywhere, there was no sign of any footprints. [Yes, a major character from the series had been murdered, but this was a one-shot and I was not going with Space 1999 canon].

The PCs summoned a medical team to investigate further, but it was pretty obvious that Morrow had met a similar end to Dr Stevens a few days previously. Further checking found that Sandra Benes had disappeared along with one of the Eagles. Koenig seemed strangely unbothered by this news, although Bergman and his command team tried to track down the missing Eagle.

The party decided to take another Eagle with an excavation module and fly to the geological survey site that Jones and Stevens had been working on. Several hours of digging ensued and they eventually uncovered a tunnel that led to an organic looking door in the side of the rock. Entering it they found themselves in a mysterious, glowing chamber with a large bubbling pool in its centre, full of alien-looking organisms. Further passages led off from the chamber. IIRC one of the PCs failed a Panic check and fled. The others filmed the room with their recorders, took some samples, and departed.

On returning to the Eagle, the group were contacted by Prof Bergman, who told them that a small commercial mining operation on the moon had reported breaking through into a large cavern, and that Koenig had taken an Eagle and was en route. 

The team flew back to Moonbase Alpha to pick up a security team before heading on to the mining installation. Before leaving they gave the order to evacuate the base, with Bergman to supervise. With Morrow dead and Koenig missing, the command team seemed somewhat at a loss. 

The party landed their Eagle next to the mine and found Koenig's Eagle already there. Entering the ground floor of the installation, they found nobody around.

Evacuation of Moonbase Alpha

The group descended into the mine with their security team and found the bodies of two dead miners. At this point they chose to split up, with Major Harnst heading back up to the ship, while Wren and Weymouth went looking for explosives, taking three of the security team with them. The rest of the team stayed down in the tunnels with Dr Hart.

After that things moved fairly rapidly. In the mining tunnels, Hart heard some distant explosions while he searched for the missing miners and Koenig. He and the security team were suddenly confronted by a mass of expanding gelatinous matter which filled the tunnel. They fled but sadly Athletics rolls were failed and Hart and his team were consumed (some personnel paused to use their weapons on the matter, but without success).

Up above, Harnst headed out in her space suit to her Eagle, but found another transporter had landed. Ignoring it, she proceeded to her original Eagle. Weymouth and Wren then appeared with the remainder of the security team and moved towards the missing Eagle. Boarding it, they were confronted with Benes, whose eyes seemed to be glowing. The group fled although one security officer stayed to confront Benes and they heard him scream in pain on their intercoms as they ran back across the lunar surface to the other Eagle, which was now lifting off.

At this point Weymouth saw dozens of glowing objects approaching the mine through the sky. They looked like odd, glowing crab-like monstrosities with pincers. Wren cracked and fled back to the mine (failed Panic roll) but Weymouth managed to use his Command to stop her going into the mine. At that point a massive orange blob burst through the entrance and continued to expand. The walls collapsed and the catatonic Wren was devoured as well.

Weymouth led the survivors onto Koenig's Eagle because Harnst had already taken off. Harnst's Eagle was attacked by over a dozen of the aliens, who started to tear their way into the ship. Harnst tried some evasive maneuvers but as she did so, failed her Panic roll, froze and crashed into the surface of the moon with a spectacular Gerry Anderson explosion. This left Weymouth to fly the final Eagle out, by which time the rest of the aliens were focused on the giant glowing blob, seemingly using lasers to try to drive it back into the mine, or what was left of it. Weymouth was not sticking around the see what happened next and pointed his Eagle at Earth.

Notes on running Alien

Alien is a decent little system that I wanted to test out to see how it managed survival horror scenarios. It has been speculated you could run Cthulhu adventures with these rules. I liked the way Stress and Panic interacted, with higher levels of Stress opening up the characters to eventual Panic.

Panic can be ferocious in Alien - two characters died because of failed Panic rolls at critical situations towards the end of the mission. As Stress builds up, so the risk of Panic sets in. The party managed to reduce Stress while travelling - e.g. in Eagles or even while resting in the monorail inside Alpha between locations. But once alien contact was made things went downhill pretty fast.

I was not religious about stunts in the game. These happen when a player rolls multiple successes on a skill check. Instead I gave them a higher degree of success based on what they were trying to do. 

I allowed the players to use NPC security teams as back up, which given the situation and the authority that had been vested in them, they were entitled to do. Alien does not do well with groups of NPCs running around in support of the characters. The GM needs to wing it a little in terms of determining the responses of NPC allies. The rules do say you don't need to worry too much about Panic or re-rolls for NPCs - after all, the story is meant to be about the PCs. 

By the time we got into a real combat, the genie was literally out of the bottle and there was little the party's firearms or indeed their security allies could do about it. So I don't feel like I got much of a chance to try out the combat rules.

I hope to be a player in an Alien game soon, which might provide some more perspective!