Killed in the medbay trying to locate a keycard for the shuttle. Heroically body tackling a xenomorph into the roaring engine of the shuttle prepping for planetary take off. Onboard the shuttle as it loses control without a pilot and crashes into a mountain. Unceremoniously kicked off the closing ramp by ex-colleagues as the shuttle approaches the upper-atmosphere. In orbit and stabbed in the back by the only other survivor to escape the alien horrors. Finally getting ready for cryosleep, to be fatally embraced by those alien horrors. All of these events have happened in the Alien universe; they have all happened to the same group of more-plucked-than-plucky colonists while trying to flee that same infamous, cursed moon from Alien and Aliens: LV-426.
For Alien Day this year, I have spent the past couple of weeks preparing to run a session of the tabletop roleplaying game Alien RPG: Evolved Edition, a revised edition of Alien: RPG (2019) published by Free League, which released in November of last year. With a slight hint of “Am I a synth?” paranoia, a corpo associate of mine confided that I looked exactly like someone who would have done this sort of thing before, but at the age of 44 – in real or implanted years – this is my first foray into being a GM (Game Master or Game Mother) for a TTRPG. Like a xenomorph in a high school swimming pool circa. 2004, I have very much gone in at the deep end.
Designed as a three-act cinematic prequel story to Aliens, ‘Hope’s Last Day’ is from the all-in-one, shake-and-bake Starter Set, and this is where, with an extra GM screen in hand, I have chosen to seal the hatches, plant my sentry guns, and make my stand. In having learnt absolutely nothing from Lieutenant Gorman and his 38 simulated drops, I was quite easily pulled down the black rubber-and-mucus-lined ‘rabbit’ hole of seeing how play-throughs of this one-shot scenario (designed for single-session play) panned out for other groups. Not well, if the metric by which we measure success is to please our Weyland-Yutani benefactors with saved samples to study, to save the universe from encroaching alien infestation, or to simply save ourselves and survive. The subjects that sign up for Alien: RPG have different priorities. All other considerations secondary.
Watching videos and reading about those other play-throughs, I felt as though I was accessing the data logs of a crew that had disappeared before I even arrived, comparable to Prometheus where a holographic parade of Engineers discovers the grisly consequences of “goo-around and find out.” Their inevitable demise, a familiar haunting story in the same shared space, separated only by time, motivation, unlucky rolls of the dice, and the soft murmur of “I would have definitely handled that differently.” Thanks to Alien: RPG, now you can!
In fact, it was in watching one such video where I first had the series of muzzle-flash shaped light-bulb moments that not only could I run a TTRPG, but Alien: RPG was the one that I had to start with. The YouTube channel Oxventure, which specialises in off-beat and distinctly British playthroughs of D&D, ran ‘Hope’s Last Day’. In the role of GM was Mike Channell, who has played engaging characters for years, but is not exactly known for ever being serious, aware of the rules, or being a GM. With Mike’s loose space jockeying on the reins, and leaning hard into the tropes of the cinematic universe, with something of a space-cockney spin, a protruding Giger-esque backbone was formed for 3+ hours, giving everyone around the table the (Class 2) license to have a blast. Sometimes literally. That’s when my eyes rolled into the back of my head, synth-style, and I suddenly had access to hidden truths that whispered for me to have a go myself. After all, idle hands are the devil’s workshop.
“Perfectly safe, I assure you … Take a look. It’s something to see.”
In TTRPGs, metagaming can occur when a player makes their character act in a way that is informed by knowledge that would ordinarily be beyond the reasonable experiences of their character. This tends to be frowned upon. Using the precise spell to inflict damage on an enemy’s weak points, without those weak points ever being made known in the story, for example, may take players out of the game being collectively experienced. In gaming the nuts and bolts, it cheats the story of hard-earnt impact. But over in Alien: RPG, the metagame is arguably woven more deeply into the narrative actions of the story itself. Would a character stick their head over a leathery, moist space egg if the player already knew about facehuggers from having watched Alien? Would the other players around the table then encourage their characters to try and laser the creature off, knowing what they do about acid-blood? If an NPC (non-playable character) popped up to say, “Ignore that dead facehugger on the floor by my feet, I’m perfectly fine!” by what horizons of expectations or rules of engagement are the players and their characters supposed to act?
Monsters endure because they are both compelling and horrific – they push us away with (often metaphorically loaded) violence then pull us back in with the promise of more to come. It’s one of the reasons why we engage with Alien media with their largely predicable ebb-and-flow of metal-fanged horror; it’s the same reason why I asked my upcoming group of players to watch Aliens: enjoy the hateful monster, learn the ever-shifting boundaries of what an alien monster can be, and, once you’ve seen a hundred different ways to die at their claws, jaws, and bodily fluids, step right up into the Alien meat-grinder and be the hundred and first – but maybe, just maybe, take some star beasts and dragons out with you in as badass a way as you can conjure to imagine. Why yes, there’s a series of nitrogen tanks on the wall, and you have a Seismic Survey Charge? Mother says: Roll those dice.
There’s always an element of metagaming when playing with franchises or any heavily genre-based narrative, but first and foremost, players in the Alien: RPG are encouraged to use that knowledge to tell a communal story. Would you position your head over a flowering ovomorph? Perhaps not, especially if its early in the game session. But would you ask an innocent NPC to possibly take a little cheeky peak while they’re over there? Just to see what’s going on? Maybe. Congratulations, now you’re thinking the Weyland-Yutani way.
That being said, one of my prospective group did go ahead and read the full scenario outline for what they thought was the game session we are going to play. Thankfully, they read the wrong one; with all the wisdom of Gorman, all he knows is that there’s still no contact with the colony and a xenomorph may be involved. Just as metagaming with a franchise encourages a liberal foregrounding of the shared rules that govern its world, you still wouldn’t want your character to be pulled into a vent for #roll dice# hours because as a player you prioritised imagined personal gain over the integrity of the group. Game over, man.
“We’re all gonna’ die […] Only question is how you check out.”
Like the movies, Alien: RPG doesn’t really present scenarios for players to win, they’re mainly gently-authored sandboxes for them to survive in as long as they can. Two types of game modes are offered to players: Campaign Play, which is designed for continuous play with the same cast of characters over multiple sessions; and Cinematic Play, designed to replicate the narrative arc of the films. With bodily excretions, ‘Hope’s Last Day’ is fixed square to the wall by this second category, with the first not really making much sense to me unless you actively want to avoid high-stakes conflict and just go on a bug hunt, or bring up ever-evolving synths on Earth; perhaps the idea has got legs (or eyeball tentacles) after all.
Seasoned D&D players might be expecting a campaign mode, yet I can’t shake the idea that Alien: RPG is at its best when players are encouraged to eventually extinguish the lives of their characters, diving backwards into molten metal like a goddamned hero. But before they can get to that, they first have to stoke the fires of the metaphorical refinery, by which I mean players must engage with the Stress and Panic rolls, and the immediate, terrible consequences. The game throws these at their characters in a rate fast enough to eventually nuke ‘em from orbit just from the cumulative weight of rolled dice alone. ‘Unnerving encounters’ introduce stress dice. Stress dice introduces a greater chance of success (because you’re more focused now than when you only had bonus shares to gripe about); they also introduce the possibility of a mildly debilitating Stress Response, such as being Jumpy or having the Shakes. All of the Alien world is an ‘unnerving encounter,’ so good luck there. ‘Truly horrifying events’ triggers a Panic roll – modified by your Stress level – and can range from being Spooked to a full-on Catatonic state, by way of all sorts of actions that would be disastrous for your party… if they allow you to carry on screaming unimpeded. Which they won’t, because in Cinematic play everyone also has a Personal Agenda that over the course of the three-act structure not only invites conflict, it puts the gun in your hand and firmly asks you to blow the window, sucking everyone out of a pressurised container faster than you can say “extruded Play-Doh.”
As I look forward to running Alien: RPG on Alien Day, I’ve poured over books, video games, comics, and movies. These have all been largely solitary exercises (apart from inviting my wife to watch every Alien film, forever giving her nightmares about the survivability of our cat should it find itself in space. Spoiler: Kipo would be fine, we would not.), but the thought of having that shared communal story with myself as a GM is not only something new to me, it’s exciting to think that this will be the birth of a new Alien story for all of us in that group. We will sit around the table, eating and laughing while a drinking bird nods knowingly in the middle, then one of us will start a chain of events that none us will fully know the outcome of. We might metagame, we might lose, we’ll definitely make mistakes, but I can’t wait to get back to LV-426 for another glorious day of the gore.
