A person in a space suit walking into an organic looking arch growing out of a metal floor. The cover reads Alien: The Roleplaying Game Building Better WorldsUsually, I try to be more timely with reviews here, but I kept running into interesting hurdles while working on my review for Building Better Worlds. I had heard rumors that Alien: Romulus would remove Prometheus and Alien: Covenant from the movie timeline going forward. Then, we received news that there would be a second edition of the Alien roleplaying game. At the very least, I wanted to wait until I could see Alien: Romulus before I finished this review. Since I didn’t have time to see it in theaters, that meant waiting for streaming.

In the meantime, Free League postponed the crowdfunding for the second edition of the Alien roleplaying game. Some of the confusion around the Alien franchise timeline was cleared up, as Alien: Romulus pulls elements from just about every movie in the franchise to date, and some of the confusion surrounding that assumption was cleared up, as Noah Hawley, the showrunner for the upcoming Alien: Earth television series said that he wouldn’t be pulling from Prometheus or Covenant’s storylines, but not necessarily that he was going to do anything that invalidated them. It’s even possible that the series isn’t meant to fit into the timeline of the movies. Now that I’ve finally seen Alien: Romulus, I can say that this is probably a really good time to look at an Alien product focused on colonial life in the setting.

Disclaimer

I received a review copy of Building Better Worlds by Free League. I have not had the opportunity to play or run any of the included material, but I have experience with various Year Zero System games.

 Alien: The Roleplaying Game – Building Better Worlds
Publisher Free League Lead
Writers Andrew E.C. Gaska, Dave Semark
Editor & Project Manager Tomas Härenstam
Illustrations Martin Grip, Eelco Sebring, Gustaf Ekelund
Graphic Design Christian Granath
Map Design Stefan Isberg, Christian Granath, Dave Semark, Clara Fei-Fei Čarija
Proofreading Brandon Bowling, Kosta Kostulas
Prepress Dan Algstrand
Brand Management Joe LeFavi/Genuine Entertainment
PR Manager Boel Bermann
Event Manager Anna Westerling
Streaming Doug Shute
Customer Support Daniel Lehto

This review is based on the PDF version of the book, which is 304 pages long. The breakdown of pages is as follows:

  • Far Spinward Colonies Maps: 4 pages (front and back endpapers)
  • Title Page and Credits Page: 2 pages
  • Table of Contents: 4 pages
  • Setting Information: 42 pages
  • Player-Facing Mechanics (Character Options, Gear, and Ships): 31 pages
  • Game Mother Game Facing Mechanics and Campaign Information: 62 pages
  • The Lost Worlds Campaign: 132 pages
  • Colony Building and Development Appendix: 16 pages
  • Index: 4 pages

Each chapter begins with a two-page image and chapter header with an in-setting quote. If you haven’t seen the layout of the Alien: The Roleplaying Game books, instead of standard headers with header titles, all of the text that would be under that header is included in a stylized box. Thus, each page has multiple blocks with a topic header and several paragraphs. 

This is one of those situations where I need to be careful what I wish for. Some RPG books have walls of text that can become easier to digest by being broken into smaller topics. The boxes go in the opposite direction. It almost feels like the issues are isolated and don’t flow into the following box on the page, even if they are subcategories of the same overall information. 

Modiphius had a similar stylization in the first edition of Star Trek Adventures, and the second edition scaled back on some of that stylization. I’d love to see the second edition of Alien: The Roleplaying Game do something similar. I like thematic layouts, but they can go far enough to become distracting.

Outside of readability, the book looks very nice. I like how the tables and special topics appear as green characters on a black field, similar to the appearance of the MU/TH/UR computer displays in the movie.

A cargo ship flying through a debris field above a planet.What are We Looking At?

When Alien: The Roleplaying Game was first released, one part of the product line was the boxed cinematic adventures, which use pre-generated characters with built-in agendas, loyalties, and plot twists. However, to facilitate campaign play, Free League planned to release books to support different kinds of campaigns. The core rules isolate three campaign concepts: Space Marines, Colonists, and Space Truckers. 

One of the game’s first releases was the Colonial Marines Operations Manual, which included information about locations, organizations, and events in the Alien setting, with a focus on conflicts, wars, and flashpoints. It also included an extended campaign where your space marines encountered various military engagements while finding escalating evidence of dangerous experiments, which they could string together to find the source of this research and shut it down.

In campaign mode, you need to have more to do than running from and surviving xenomorphs. In the Operations Manual, what happens between running into the xenomorph-based military experiments is an escalating conflict that they fight in, presenting a different kind of horror, the horror of war. These adventures don’t focus on glorious battles but on ugly engagements where players fight to survive.

We haven’t seen the Space Trucker-themed sourcebook yet and probably won’t until after the new edition of the game, but Building Better Worlds is the Colonist campaign book. Just as the Operations Manual presented the horrors of war as the baseline of the Space Marine campaign, Building Better Worlds seeks to introduce survival horror into the campaign. Characters will try to survive hostile environments, keep terraforming equipment working, and deal with threats that corporations or nations have promised to alleviate when those organizations fail to support people isolated in cold, uncaring space.

In Space, No One Can Hear Your Setting Information

The core rulebook and the Colonial Marines Operations Manual include setting information, but the core book touches on significant events, and the Operations Manual focuses on military flashpoints. This book presents the setting from the viewpoint of humanity’s colonization of space. That means that while wars may be important, much of this information looks at the expansion of various nations and corporations as they reach further from Earth.

The Frontier War is a conflict that breaks apart formerly allied nations within the UN. It creates an interesting dynamic, as colonies may not find out who “owns” what stretch of space, and colonists traveling in hypersleep may find a whole different chain of command when they wake up. 

The significant organizations we have in the setting are:

  • Central Confederation of Africa (CCA)
  • United Nations Interstellar Settlement Corps (UNISC)
  • Throop Rescue and Recovery (TR&R)
  • United Americas (UA)
  • Colonial Marshal Bureau (CMB)
  • United States Colonial Marine Corps (USCMC)
  • United American Colonial Guard (USCG)
  • United American Outer Rim Defense Fleet (UAORDF)
  • The Union of Progressive Peoples (UPP)
  • Progressive Peoples Cosmos Exploration (CEC)
  • The Three World Empire (3WE)
  • Royal Expeditionary Group (REG)
  • Sir Peter Weyland’s Explorers Academy (SPWEA)
  • ICSC Investment Group (ICSCIG)
  • The Geholgod Institutete (GI)
  • Weyland-Yutani Corporation (W-Y)
  • Seegson Corporation (SC)
  • Hyperdyne Corporations (HC)
  • Omni-Tech Resources (OTR)
  • Gemini Exoplanet Solutions (GES)
  • Kelland Mining Company and Consortium (KMCC)
  • New Albion Protectorate (NAPRO)

The book has much information on these organizations’ backbiting, warfare, and alliances. There may be more information that you can incorporate into a campaign, but as we’ll see later, I appreciate how the presented campaign uses this information. Some of the highlights include Weyland-Yutani taking control of exploration for many nations after the UNISC lost contact with several colonies and the war breaking out between several nations coordinated by the UNISC, making any UNISC operations highly strained.

This also means that Wayland-Yutani is subcontracting from various unaffiliated nations in many cases, and the colonies are more Wayland-Yutani than any nation they are subcontracting from. However, there is enough information that if you don’t want everything to fall back on “Wayland-Yutani sucks,” you can find other nations and corporations to fill your uncaring organization quota for your campaign. 

There is also an overview of various regions of the galaxy and the settlements found in those regions. These regions include the Outer Rim Territories (you have to have one of these), the Frontier, and the Far Spinward Colonies. Each of the settlements has the following entries:

  • Location
  • Affiliation
  • Classification
  • Climate
  • Mean Temperature
  • Terrain
  • Colonies
  • Population
  • Key Resources

Most of these settlements have a paragraph or two that gives an overview and sometimes a plot hook for using the settlement, like the mysterious disappearance of the settlers, a flashpoint in the Frontier War, or a dramatic shift in climate. 

The chapter entitled Redacted from the Weyland-Yutani Extrasolar Species Catalog includes several creatures that exist across the galaxy, beyond humans, the Engineers, and Xenomorphs. These include Abominations, creatures mutated by the Engineers’ black goo, The Perfected, an intelligent species also created by the Engineers (picture humans with the techno-organic look of the xenomorphs merged with their skin), proto-xenomorphs, and full xenomorphs. There are also creatures like the Harvesters, giant tardigrade-like creatures used to facilitate mining.

Colonists walking down from a ramp on a ship. There is a helmeted person in the lead, then someone carrying a rifle. On the other side is a child with a dog, and further up the ramp is another person carrying equipment. There are two other figures at the top of the ramp.Life on the Frontier

There are notes on modifying the careers presented in the core rulebook for a colonial career. This includes swapping out key talents and equipment and explaining what that career does in a colonial campaign. For example, Colonial Marines in a colonist campaign aren’t going to be part of a larger unit; they’ll likely be stationed as some of the few defenders of the colony. 

There are also two new careers: the Wildcatter, professional miners and prospectors, and the Entertainer, who tries to brighten colonists’ lives with your professional skills. These are structured like the professions from the core rulebook, presenting the following:

  • Key Attribute
  • Key Skills
  • Career Talents
  • Personal Agenda
  • Signature Item
  • Appearance
  • Gear
  • Typical Names

There is a list of new personal agendas keyed to colonial campaigns and suggested ones for the Wildcatter and Entertainer careers. 

The book expands on the weapons available, including pistols and rifles manufactured by some colonist-focused corporations and tools that can be used as weapons, like mining lasers and flame throwers. There is also an expanded section on outfits, armor, survival gear, and exploration tools. The key to most of these is to highlight that colonists aren’t likely to have higher-powered military weapons or armor, but there will also be gear that can be repurposed to destructive effect.

This section details off-road vehicles, trucks, tractors, small aerial vehicles, shuttles, dropships, and exploration pods. It also includes additional FTL ships, mainly exploratory and colony ships. I can easily see why smaller vehicles need stats showing how much damage they can take, how maneuverable they are, etc., but I’m still at a loss for why the larger FTL ships have combat-oriented stats. Capital ship combat seems to be the least “Alien” thing to spend time on in a campaign, and there is a place in the example campaign where they could use these rules, but they (wisely, in my opinion) don’t focus on the ship to ship combat in that part of the campaign.

The Mechanics of Survival

The campaign section of the book presents the Game Mother with example missions and scenarios for colonists and discusses campaign themes such as Explorer Campaigns and Colony Campaigns. Colony campaigns try to build up and establish one location, while Explorer campaigns survey different worlds, set up preliminary equipment and then move on to other worlds. 

Various charts handle unexpected or variable events, like what happens when a Wildcatter goes prospecting or what happens when a compression suit has a breach. I’m happy to report that many of these events interact with the Stress and Stress Dice mechanics. You don’t just gain stress from xenomorphs jumping out at you, but when survival gear breaks, you wonder if you’re going to suffocate due to a lack of oxygen.

The Appendix includes expansions to the core rulebook’s random star system generation tables. Several charts show what a starting colony looks like in the game. This includes who sponsors the colony (and who you have to keep happy), what the colony was set up to achieve, and the policies, installments, and projects that modify the stats of your colony, which you measure to see how well your settlement survives if it prospers, and what complications come up.

For this style of colonial play, there is a cycle to follow:

  • Phase 1–Colony Incidents
  • Phase 2–The Command Team Does Its Job
  • Phase 3–Grow or Decline
  • Phase 4–Colony Initiatives

The suggested pacing for this style of campaign is for the PCs to engage in one or two more traditional adventures before advancing to the next colony cycle. While the cycle generates events that the PCs will have to deal with, the GM is going to have to do the heavy lifting to make sure those one or two adventures between cycles have horror themes because, without that, the colony cycle may appeal to people that want more of a “hard work and a little bit of survival” campaign, and less of a “space doesn’t want us out here, and it’s trying to kill us” style horror.

A person in an environment suit walking along a metal walkway, toward two xenomorphs with bioluminescent heads. The Lost Worlds Campaign

This is the strongest part of the book. This section answers everyone who asks, “What does a campaign even look like in an Alien RPG?” While the Operations Manual also included a multi-part campaign, and I don’t think that one was bad, this feels much more like what I envision for an Alien campaign. While colonial marines may not be prepared to face mutated monstres and xenomorphs, they are trained for violence, and they expect someone or something to try to kill them. Colonists and explorers aren’t expected to do anything other than survive the environments they explore and try to tame.

The PCs are part of an expedition sent by the UNISC to reconnect to lost colonies, offer help, and reintegrate them into broader society. The expedition has members of multiple polities on board, eventually becoming a problem as word of the Frontier War reaches the expedition. You also have a nice built-in explanation for new PCs if any of your players have a character that meets their demise since the expedition has tons of colonists in hypersleep, waiting to be tapped to take over for a deceased specialist.

This campaign most resembles the Explorer campaign model mentioned elsewhere in the book. The PCs will be sent to various worlds to assess them, make contact with lost colonies, potentially help repair and replace damaged equipment, and resolve any local problems at the colony in question. After each mission, the PCs must present the colony’s potential and world, describing how worthwhile it is to spend resources on that lost colony.

Six different expeditions can be approached in any order. Six clues to the Metapuzzle, the campaign’s background story, are slowly coming into focus. In addition to the six expeditions and the six clues for the Metapuzzle, campaign events trigger after the PCs take certain actions or after a set number of expeditions.

So, what is going on in the background? An intelligent species, The Perfected, have founded a religion among some of the human colonists in this area, and they have introduced a new strain of the black goo to modify these cultists. The Perfected version of the substance can even mutate the synthetic bodies of androids. The Perfected want to prove to their creators, the Engineers, that they are worthy, and to do this, they want to spread their version of the pathogen and seed their modified versions of the xenomorphs to the wider galaxy. Not literally, because they haven’t seen any Engineers for centuries, but the Engineers considered them a mistake. 

No one in this region has the coordinates to travel back to the core settlements of the galaxy. The Perfected need a means to find that region of space. The Perfected are attempting to fake out the UNISC expedition, trying to make it look like they’ll use one means of leaving this region of the galaxy to secure another way to do so.

That means the PCs will encounter modified xenomorphs, weird mutated cultists, and strange humanoids with a chip on their shoulder, in addition to the warlords, cannibals, overenthusiastic automatons, and petty criminals who live on the various colonies with which they are reestablishing contact. They may also run into bioluminescent xenomorphs and possibly even a Xenomorph Empress. 

I like this campaign’s structure and the Metapuzzle it uses, but I wish some points were executed better. I don’t like the narrative of one expedition, that people who are under duress turn into barely human cannibals. The expedition involving Warlord Zhāngjié suddenly starts to use the word honor left and right since the people in power are Chinese, and some of the presentation feels like caricature. 

While I like that actual climax, as it’s presented, running it in three parts, it feels like it needs to cut to the scariest, most dangerous parts of the resolution. The climax involves a confrontation at a space station seeded with mutated xenomorphs, with various factions in open combat. At the same time, the cultists and the Perfected pull everyone’s strings. While on the space station, there are also xenomorphs with the “capture” ability, meaning they’ll cart off captured people to be cocooned into one of the queen’s hives. PCS may end up facehuggered or infected with the modified pathogen, and the best resolution may be to perform a major sacrifice play to save the wider galaxy. 

It’s an Alien RPG campaign, so players should be prepared for a horrible death. However, given the way the ending may require a Kobayashi Maru no-win situation, you may still need to be careful about your expectations. When you get close to the end of the campaign, you may want to reinforce that it’s unlikely to get the best possible ending they can imagine. 

I Think if We Are Kind, It Will Be A Kind World
This book is the answer to your question about what an Alien RPG campaign would look like

As I mentioned above, this book is the answer to your question about what an Alien RPG campaign would look like. Focusing on the colonial and exploratory narratives leans into franchise elements that have been highlighted many times, including in Alien: Romulus. The campaign presented does a great job of taking some of the more comprehensive setting material presented in the front of the book and making it relevant to the campaign.

I Don’t Dream at All

Some of the essential points in The Lost Worlds campaign, things that need to happen to make everything make sense, aren’t called out or bullet-pointed in a way that makes them stand out. While the campaign uses the setting information well, it does feel like it could be more concise. Some of The Lost Worlds campaign expeditions lean on negative stereotypes and assumptions. The climax itself is satisfying, but everything in the adventure leading to that climax feels like it gets a little bloated. 

Qualified Recommendation–A product with lots of positive aspects, but buyers may want to understand the context of the product and what it contains before moving it ahead of other purchases.

Some tables will get everything they want from the cinematic offerings for Alien: The Roleplaying Game. Two or three nights of quality entertainment per cinematic adventure is a good return on investment. But if you explore what Alien can be as a campaign, this is the stronger option that makes the most of the franchise’s wider setting and themes. But it may take a little work to get everything out of it that it can provide to hit all the right notes.