Alien Invasion - Anyone have this?

[trancejeremy]

Elves, dwarves, and wizards are pretty dated too, but some people seem to still have lots of fun playing with those...

MJ-12 and Area 51 are staples of UFOlogy based invasion SF, and I don't think they're wrong for including them. But that said, I'd like some new stuff, too.

Well, I didn't mean "dated", so much as "fad-ish". Elves, dwarves, wizards are all apart of real world folklore and have been for 1000s of years. MJ-12 was popular for about, oh 2 years or so in the early 90s.

Roswell has gone from a fad to a parody.

Putting them in a supposedly serious product about aliens/UFOs is like D&D including the Smurfs and Chuck Norris.

 

[Stormborn]

Well, I didn't mean "dated", so much as "fad-ish". Elves, dwarves, wizards are all apart of real world folklore and have been for 1000s of years. MJ-12 was popular for about, oh 2 years or so in the early 90s.

Perhaps in popular perception, but rumors of MJ-12 and Co. have not only been around for some time before that but continue to be the fodder for UFOlogist specials on Cable TV. What one person may percieve as a "fad" due to a brief foray into the popular mind another may see as a neccesary staple for the genre.

How does the book deal with how these groups, or their succesors or competitors, may have changed in the last 10 yrs or so due to world events? How much does the book deal with the "secret history" of modern events? Or are these the subject of a forthcoming suplement?

 

[Urizen]

Trancejeremy: I'm sorry this book doesn't seem like something you would like. However, Michael Tresca did an outstanding job on it. It is a serious book and a very good one at that. I wish I were able to convince you of that.

Stormborn: Thank you for your questions. Alien Invasion can be considered a primer for starting a campaign dealing with extraterrestrials and government cover-ups involving them. We felt that it was a good idea to get the "basics" about aliens out there first in a core book before jumping into plotlines about these groups.

Not everyone is as well-informed about the subject matter in this book as people like yourself, or Trancejeremy or Psion. With that in mind, it was very important to ensure that the average gamer was provided with enough information about aliens and such to be able to begin a campaign using this book.

As far as bringing the organizations like MAj-12 into the future, we will be releasing supplements which build on the subject matter, establishing plotlines and adding new organizations (both military and private sector) who have their own agendas.

I likely won't do any commercial product directly relating to Sept-11 because I don't want to make money off those tragic events. I know it has been mentioned in another book which has recently been released (and I won't name), and I thought it was pretty tacky, but hey.. that's just my opinion.

I hope this helped.

 

[elforcelf]

Are these paper books or pdf's?

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Putting them in a supposedly serious product about aliens/UFOs is like D&D including the Smurfs and Chuck Norris.

*boggle*

I suppose including Nazis in a pulp type game would be the same, cause you know Nazis have been done to death. There was even a musical making fun of them.

Area 51 and MJ12 are 'canon' for this kind of thing. They provide the kind of grounding players need and help orient things. Without that, you'd not have a UFO game. You'd also have players having to question everything since they'd have no 'real world' prior knowledge they could bring into the game, which to my mind is crucial for a modern era campaign.

 

[Urizen]

Are these paper books or pdf's?

Alien Invasion is in PDF form right now, but I'm hoping to have POD version on sale through rpgnow.com by the end of october.

 

[elforcelf]

Thank you!

 

[The_Universe]

Alien Invasion is in PDF form right now, but I'm hoping to have POD version on sale through rpgnow.com by the end of october.

As soon as the POD version hits, let me know. This is exactly the kind of product I'm looking for. I'd have already purchased the .pdf, but 130+ pages is a little lengthy to flip through on the computer screen.

Perhaps in popular perception, but rumors of MJ-12 and Co. have not only been around for some time before that but continue to be the fodder for UFOlogist specials on Cable TV. What one person may percieve as a "fad" due to a brief foray into the popular mind another may see as a neccesary staple for the genre.

I just want to back up this sentiment. Any spin through the AM radio dial after 2am will reveal that these ideas are very much alive among those who live in the conspiratorial world (as would, I suspect, a quick look at the History or Discovery Channels in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday). To my mind, the book would have been utterly incomplete if it had chosen to ignore these basic conspiratorial building blocks.

 

[Vigilance]

Hmmm... a search for "MJ-12" on the Coast to Coast website delivers hits as recent as November 20th 2005, where a guest discussed arguments for and against the documents at a Chinese UFO-ology convention he had recently attended.

There were also two other hits from 2005 and one from 2004. There were more but my curiosity was satisfied that MJ-12 is not old news to the UFO conspiracy community.

Looks like it's not so fad-ish to me for those interested in UFO-ology.

Chuck

 

[Kesh]

What do you mean by "classic" ufo invasion? I honestly didn't realize the genre was so well-defined.

Not the original poster, but I'm guessing they meant stuff like The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds (1953 film version), This Island Earth, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Villiage of the Damned, etc. Typically, these involve the aliens just dropping in and trying to take over, with the government fighting back and innocent civilians caught in the crossfire.

Versus the modern take, such as X-Files, Men In Black, Signs, The 4400, The Thing (1982), V, etc. Where the government knows what's going on and is hiding it, or actively helping the aliens. And the aliens themselves are more subtle, hiding and biding their time to manipulate humanity until we either welcome them, or just get replaced all at once as the dominant species.