There's An Official ALIEN RPG Coming!

Free League has sent out a press release announcing that they will be publishing an official Alien roleplaying game, set shortly after the events of Aliens.

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There's a trailer over on Vimeo, and more information on their website.

More info if/when I hear it, but in the meantime here's that press release!

LOS ANGELES, CA (April 26, 2019) – Forty years ago, Alien shocked and inspired the world with a horrific sci-fi universe that forever changed the genre. In celebration of its 40th anniversary, Free League Publishing has announced today that fans can soon explore that iconic universe for themselves with an official line of tabletop role-playing games.

The long-term licensing partnership with 20th Century Fox Consumer Products will kick off in late 2019, launching an ongoing tabletop RPG series drawing upon four decades of world-building within this beloved universe. Free League is renowned for its own world-building in science fiction, with their best-selling sci-fi RPG Tales from the Loop sweeping the 2017 ENnie Awards for Best Setting, Best Writing, Best Art, Best Game, and Product of the Year. Tomas Härenstam, Free League co-founder and game director of their sci-fi RPGs Tales from the Loop and Mutant: Year Zero, will oversee game design, with original artwork from esteemed artists Martin Grip, John Mullaney and Axel Torvenius.

Taking place shortly after the events of Aliens, the first RPG will propel players into the vast possibilities of the Outer Rim Frontier. From the pioneering colonists and scientists to the ever-present Company reps and Colonial Marines, the game promises a diverse range of characters and gameplay experiences far beyond the staple cat-and-mouse suspense and survival horror of the franchise.

“The Alien saga isn’t about superheroes with superior firepower,” says game director Härenstam. “It’s about placing ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and testing the endurance of the human spirit against inhuman atrocities and impossible odds. Such a harsh yet hopeful universe has captured our imagination for 40 years with good reason, and we’re excited to explore new stories and perspectives as players must face their demons (in a true and metaphoric sense) and brave the horrors of the unknown.”

To best capture the Alien experience, the RPG will provide more than the framework for continuous, open-world campaigns. Beyond the sandbox campaign game mode, Free League is also designing a “Cinematic” mode, with pre-generated scenarios that players must complete within a single session. Emulating the dramatic arc of an Alien film, these survival challenges promise escalating stakes and fast (often brutal) gameplay where most players aren’t expected to last the night. Their first cinematic scenario, Chariot of the Gods written by sci-fi novelist Andrew E.C. Gaska (Death of the Planet of the Apes), is included in the core manual. More cinematic modules and game expansions are already in production, with direct tie-ins to Fox’s future plans for the franchise slated for 2020 and beyond.

The Fox-Free League licensing deal was brokered by Joe LeFavi of Genuine Entertainment, who will manage the license on behalf of Free League and serve as an editor on the game series. Alien is the latest in a slew of high-profile tabletop deals by LeFavi, including the master tabletop gaming license for Dune, the tabletop RPG series for Altered Carbon, and multiple brand extensions of World of Darkness.

For more news and previews on the Alien RPG series, visit alien-rpg.com.

 

[ParanoydStyle]

I feel torn about this. On the one hand, Aliens/Predator* is my favorite franchise* and primary fandom. The way most geeks feel about Star Wars or Star Trek or whatever I have always felt about Aliens. It is my main geek jam. So much so that one of the first RPGs I ever made as a kid was an AvP RPG. I've returned to the idea many times over the years.The Singularity System actually started out as as an Aliens fan RPG called Bug Hunt before it got rebuilt into a setting neutral, more Traveller-like product. I think some of the fluff that I'd scanned from the Colonial Marines Technical Manual actually made it into the text as copypasta. Hell, as recently as 2017 I posted the entire xenomorph life cycle, the Colonial Marines arsenal, and stats for a playable yaujta (Predator) and their gear and rules for their culture of honor. So an Alien RPG is clearly something I've always felt needed to exist, so much so that I've tried over and over to DIY it over the years.

So, yeah, torn. I'm glad that my favorite thing is getting an RPG. I'm sad that I'm not one of the folks making it. I really hope they do an awesome job with it. (I still remember I was in middle school or high school, very new to GMing, we were playing the d20 Star Wars. I had everyone make characters, establish their roles on the ship. I told them that we were doing something "not set in the Star Wars universe" but I did NOT tell them we were doing Aliens. So when I got to do my John Hurt impression as a chestburster exited an NPC (whose name has long since been forgotten) I really went all out twitching and coughing and wretching and clutching my chest and choking and spasming before transitioning from that into narrating what looked like nothing so much as a a blood-slick penis with teeth exploding out of his chest. It scared the living out of my players (and not just, I hope, because they thought I was having an IRL medical emergency).

* The Aliens vs. Predator films are awful. The extended universe (graphic) novels that preceded them were excellent.

Step 1. Identify and Destroy any Android you can find.

I realize there's only around a 1 in 4 chance of this happening, but that's still a 25% chance you just killed Bishop, and therefore, very likely doomed yourselves. (Annalee Call was also a 'good' synthetic, but much less instrumental to the survivors surviving than Bishop.

Not being completely familiar with whatever extended universe exists for the Aliens franchise, it looks to be xenomorphs (in one form or another), predators, and... pretty much that's it.

I can't recommend the Earth War (Earth War/Earth Hive, Nightmare Asylum, the Female War) series of graphic novels/novels strongly enough. They were written between Aliens and Alien 3 so the characters of Hicks and Newt were central to the plot: when Alien 3 killed those characters off they got retconned into "new" characters with new names, Wilks and Billie. Anyway besides that I love that trilogy, the big reveal at the end of the first book is that the Pilots* (remember that gigantic dead elephant-man looking mother in the original derelict in Alien) are terraforming Earth so we've got more going on than fight aliens or fight predators or both. Also, keep in mind that killing your fellow humans is definitely going to be a major thing if this game is true to the franchise. I don't know about you but I would very much like to put some bullets through those heartless corporate bastards at Weyland-Yutani, and their combat synthetics.

*Although I don't know to what extent the Prometheus cycle of movies has retconned the Pilots/Navigators: they might be completely unrecognizable or even non-existent.

 

[polyhedral man]

If this is kickstarted i would advise checking the comments section on their forbidden lands Kickstarter page before pledging. I was just told that the limited edition that i pledged for over a year ago is "out of stock" and offered me a refund instead... from looking at the comments section it doesn't seem to be the only case that was mismanaged. So i'd urge people to do their research before pledging on their projects.

 

[KFC]

It won't be KS-ed.