Alright, first thing's first: I love Alien. It's probably my most-listened-to episode of the Film Reroll, and after my thirtieth time re-listening to Pitr talk about "this bonus situation" and Paulo execute the Tactical Hemingway, I decided to sit down and watch the movie for myself. And I spent the whole time fiddling on my phone and got nothing out of it, like a fucking idiot.
But then, I watched Aliens. And boy howdy, that one stuck. I'm not generally much of a sci-fi nut (not much for genre fiction in general, honestly), but Aliens spoke to me. A lot of that comes down to the character of Ripley: we see in the first movie that she is a take-no-shit badass, but the sequel also lets us see that she is capable of warmth, and vulnerability, and pain. Not to mix my Gender Content in with my RPG Content, but in Ellen Ripley I see the kind of woman I want to be. Aliens is also a great movie outside of Ripley: the script is really fun and punchy, if at times a little over-the-top ("We're on an express elevator to hell... going down!"), and while I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call it anti-capitalist, the franchise displays a level of anti-corporate skepticism that I find refreshing. All this to say: I've since rewatched both movies, adore them both, and consider them as a central part of my personal film canon.
(Nota bene: I have not seen Alien 3 because the fact that they kill off Newt and Hicks at the very beginning is enough for me to know that I would not like it. Jury's still out on Prometheus and the other new ones, though: I haven't seen them, but I might.)
Anyway, this isn't a film blog: what I'm trying to say is that when I found it that there was a new, officially-licensed, critically acclaimed Alien RPG, I was stoked as fuck. Not only that, but it was brought to us by the much-feted Free League/Fria Ligan, the minds behind a bunch of books that I haven't read but sure would like to. Speaking of which, if you want to buy me Tales from the Loop or Mörk Borg, by all means feel free. It's hard for me to justify the expense currently, because I bought both the core rulebook and the starter set for Alien.
So, what kind of an RPG are we looking at here? Well, it's a crunchy one, to an extent that kind of surprised me. In terms of at-the-table complexity, I'd put it on par with D&D 5e. While that's certainly not an unmanageable amount of rules to keep track of, it's very different from the games I usually read and review, which tend towards the story-game/narrative-before-mechanic side of the spectrum. And in fairness, this game has some really neat abstractions in its mechanics that easily could have been replaced with more literal rules. For example, it splits the difference between "theatre of the mind" and "grid-mandatory" combat by dividing the map into zones (a zone being about the size of a room, typically), and having range-based mechanics interact through zones rather than feet or inches. It also deals with time in a way I really liked: instead of durations of seconds, minutes, and hours, there are "turns" (for stealth movement), "rounds" (for combat), and "shifts" (for longer activities or rests).
The character creation in Alien is actually fairly straightforward: you pick a career (e.g. "Space Marine," "Company Agent," "Roughneck," "Kid"), you put points in stats and skills, and you're more or less good to go. I was a little disappointed that there just weren't more options and places for customization: the book only offers nine careers, each of which are rules-light enough that they definitely could have written more. That said, this game is simultaneously optimized for one-shot pre-made-scenario and long-term campaign play, and I understand the advantage of being able to grasp a new character sheet almost immediately when you're running a cinematic scenario. My only other note about character creation is this: probably don't play a Kid. This is a game that makes very clear that your character is almost certainly going to die a bloody, horrific, no-one-can-hear-you-scream death. Now, I don't know about you, but for me that has a very different vibe when the person getting their chest burst is, say, Harry Dean Stanton, than when it's a 12-year-old. So, I dunno, tread carefully, I guess? Or if you want to play as the kids from Stranger Things getting their shit absolutely kicked by an alien monstrosity, that's fine too. I'm not the game police.
The crunch really starts to come in once you're done with character creation. The resolution mechanic is based on counting sixes out of d6 pools, but every time you make a skill check you also have to roll additional "stress dice" to check if you start freaking the fuck out. It's a nice little mechanic: it seems kind of cumbersome, but also very well suited for doing this kind of simulationist horror. The basic resolution mechanic, is, of course, subject to modification by any number of factors from any number of tables scattered throughout the middle third of the book. I will say I don't love some of the formatting choices in this book (why are the careers and career abilities in separate chapters?), but it's nothing that couldn't be fixed in an hour by assembling a cheat-sheet. This is also the first game I've read in a long time (maybe ever?) that has a hit location chart for critical injuries built into the core rules. Besides that, there's really everything you'd expect for nitty-gritty gun-based space combat: rules for cover, rules for rate of fire, rules for what happens if you're low on food, water, or oxygen. There's also some pretty snazzy rules for ship-to-ship combat, which I find is a point where a lot of space-systems fall apart. And of course, there is the cost, weight, and stats for every weapon and item imaginable.
Bottom-line: I think this would be a hard game to play, but that's not the same as it being a bad game. It clearly expects a decent command of the rulebook from its players and a really thorough system mastery from its GM, but I think that can be very rewarding. If somebody made a PbtA Alien game, I think it could be equally effective: you can do the "oh, the carnage," the "man turning against man," and the "bleak unblinking nature of the cosmos" equally well with that kind of story-forward thematic system. But sometimes you want to know that you are constantly at risk of the xenomorph sticking its giant pointy tail through your fucking abdomen if it rolls just the right number. And it probably will roll that right number, because you're a puny human and it's the fucking xenomorph. Moving your little tokens around the map, turning on your motion detector to check for pings, and rolling to see how much oxygen you're losing every turn is just as thematic, just as fun, and just as valid as any other way to play an RPG. After all, there's a little grognard in all of us. My only real gripe with this game is that I wish there was more new stuff here: the book gives you exactly enough material to re-create the plot of any of the extant movies, but not much more than that. Luckily, I like the extant movies enough that that's not a deal-breaker. I really hope I can find some friends to play this game with.
Addendum: if you're thinking you might like to try Alien: The Roleplaying Game, I can whole-heartedly recommend the starter set. It's about the same price as the full rulebook, and for that price you get a condensed rulebook (which seems to have pretty much all the rules, they mostly just cut the worldbuilding/setting stuff), a starter adventure with pre-gen characters, a fucking massive star map (on really nice paper) with the battle maps for the starter adventure on the back, and a whole bunch of tokens for stealth and combat. Shit's pretty neat.
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