Alien RPG

Did anyone check out the fairly recent Alien RPG? Just curious about your thoughts/experiences...

I have. The game actually looks to be quite good. Literally and figuratively. The art is incredible. I haven't had a chance to play yet, but it is overall a solid game, at least from reading it. Not a tactical game, but more story driven.

I think the one big knock against it, at least in my opinion is that the game looks to be limited in terms of game play. There are rules for campaigns, but I don't know that it would be fun to stretch Alien out over weeks, months, years of gameplay. That's just my opinion. The rules for short games look solid, and the whole looks like it was designed to be brutal, and brutal in the sense that, if your character is alive at the end of the game then pat yourself on the back-just like in the movies.

I'm sure ther people have different opinions

Our IRL group started the "cinematic" adventure path of Chariot of the Gods, only got through one session of it before one of our regular players (who's a nurse) lost all their free time to the virus, and we put it on hold...

But that one session was... I'll call it; good. It wasn't as great as we all wanted it to be, I think. We were all super into the setting and premise, really embracing the tension and horror. And it may have just been because it was a completely new system to us, but the mechanics kind of fell flat. For better or worse they weren't used that much (in a four hour session we rolled maybe 3 or 4 times each, I was maybe even like 2), and we're all long time gamers that like a mix of roleplay and roll-play. The dice weren't as punishing as I wanted them to be, and as I think they should have been based on how the system reads.

But we had a lot of fun, it was just mostly cuz we were all majorly bought-in.

We all want to play it more and keep learning about it. I really am not passing a final judgement on it yet. The system sounds good on paper, I think we just need more time with it.

For reference, the basic dude system (the Year Zero Engine) has a free srd out there if you want to give it a kind of preview.

Thanks. I've been more and more into tense...horror settings lately and thought I'd ask. It's difficult to even clearly articulate what I'm looking for or trying to accomplish/experience as a player and casual GM. Alien just looked like it might provide a bit of that experience. I certainly enjoy the lore around the universe and the original is indeed creepy... I'm also one of the weird ones that thought Alien 3 was pretty good in the sense that it creeped me out similarly to the first Alien movie. :)

But, thanks for the thoughts on the system.

I'll check out the srd for the Year Zero Engine as well. I'm mostly into Savage Worlds as a system these days...hmmmm...I bet it would work pretty awesome for a big action Aliens..colonial marines type game. :)

It's the base system for A LOT of very well reviewed, but not widely played, games...

Mutant: Year Zero, of course, Tales from the Loop, Forbidden Lands, Coriolis, and of course Alien.

Fria Ligan (the developer of the system) just recently acquired rights to the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit/Middle-earth IP so we may soon be seeing something in that flavor too...

I can't recommend Delta Green enough as a "tense horror setting".

Delta Green is neither Fria Ligan nor Year Zero, but yea, agreed. If we're turning this into a riff on horror games, Pelgrane/Gumshoe has a pretty good "lite" take on the Cthulhu line in DG.

I was just put on to this setting literally three days ago. It certainly looks promising... almost X-Files, but dare I say creepier? I love the idea of tieing several mythos and paranormal things together around the Lovecraftian cosmic horror fiction...non-fiction. ;) haha

Personally, I find "Greys"...the aliens...superbly creepy. The movies Fire in the Sky, The Fourth Kind, Dark Skies all creeped the &*#$ out of me... I find abductions intriguing and extremely creepy. I've also read "The Most Dangerous Book in the World" which ties Greys to Demons...Aliester Crowley, etc...

Delta Green is what I'm currently reading through. Both the Agent and Handler's books.

If you have any q's about DG, hit me up. I don't think it's too bold to say that I'm the most enthusiastic player and closest thing to an "authority" on the game that GP has amongst its ranks. I can't say enough good things about it, I absolutely love it.

@emsquared, I've never played FoDG but the rulebook looks awesome. I have mixed feelings about GUMSHOE in general, but I know it works a lot for some people, so yes, that is an option.

If nawashi is already digging into the Arc Dream-published stuff, though, I'd strongly recommend sticking with that instead of switching to GUMSHOE. The Delta Green rules are really really nice - a huge step forward for the CoC/BRP ruleset, and absolutely punishing towards PCs (way moreso than standard CoC).

(This OBVIOUSLY represents my OPINION. Plenty of people love GUMSHOE. But I think Dennis Detwiller is a more exciting game designer than Hite or Laws, if not as prolific.)

Your post confused me Santouche so I had to google...

Realized I have always thought that Delta Green and Fall of Delta Green were the same thing (that ppl just called FoDG, DG for short)... Interesting, so what's the main difference(s) between DG-DG and "basic" BRP?

It's still a percentile based system. If you've ever played any edition of CoC, you'd be able to pick up and play the new edition of DG without reading *most* of the rulebook. However, they've streamlined the skill set a bit (it's still pretty big, but they've done things like combing "Climb" and "Jump" into an "Athletics" skill, "Spot Hidden" and "Listen" into an "Alertness" skill, etc); character creation; the SAN system, and the system for temporary insanity and mental disorders; and the combat/damage system, which is still not the greatest combat system in the world, but works way better for the horror genre than the CoC rules. Fights are shorter and way more lethal.

They've also introduced a couple new, key features: "sources of sanity", borrowing the concept from Unknown Armies, which leads to way more SAN loss as it's no longer limited to just supernatural exposure; and "Bonds", representing the people that are important to your character, which are assigned a score that diminishes as your PC is increasingly corrupted by the unnatural.

DG started off as a single CoC Now scenario ("Convergence"), which then became a splatbook for CoC, which then became a handful of splatbooks for CoC. Then, about 3 years ago, the folks who used to be Pagan Publishing kickstarted the new edition and released it as the flagship product for Arc Dream Publishing. After that was done, I believe Ken Hite approached Arc Dream about wanting to do a DG sourcebook for the Vietnam War era using GUMSHOE rules. Thus, The Fall of Delta Green was born.

Anyone going to do the ALIEN thing?

Horror is a difficult thing to sustain over years of a character's life in ALIEN. Either the Xenomorphs eat you, or you survive (which diminishes the threat of the Xenomorphs). ALIEN is about the ALIEN, and once you pop that bubble, it's kind of a shoddy universe in many respects (although I didn't think PROMETHEUS was that bad).

So, yes, in general, the short Cinematic games are a lot tighter and better at making bad stuff happen.

The longer games require a more complex framework to sustain. There are random tables for all 3 campaign types (Space Truckers, Colonial Marines, and Colonists), but those are only about half the picture if you want a sustainable thing. I'm not sure I'm ready to RUN another ALIEN game right now, but I can eventually put one together.