Aliens or not

[C. Baize]

I dunno.. my players have been having some fun in our D20 Future campaign fighting Predators, Klendathu Arachnids, and Zerg...
But, that's not all they get...
They also get aliens from a video game from the '80s that they never played (but I played the hell out of it).
Kilrathi...
Klingons...
It's all source material, and if you use it as such, instead of RPing the video game... it can be a lot of fun.
For instance... they were hired by Star Law to go blow up a derelict warship that they didn't want falling into any enemy hands...
Star Law had only recently gotten the distress signal from this ship that they had lost all contact with a couple decades before.
What nobody knew was that the warship was originally transporting some new bugs they had found (Zerg), when it found itself on the outer edge of a Klendathu Arachnid migration / colonization.
There was a 25 year battle going on in that ship between Klendathu Arachnids, and Zerg... The PCs found themselves in the middle of it in cramped quarters, trying to set charges with which to blow the ship up and get the hell out.
It was a good little fight they found themselves in the middle of. And they seemed to enjoy it, immensely...
Especially when they got trapped in the mess hall, and barricaded themselves with tables and chairs to give themselves some cover.
It was a cool session.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Personally, I enjoy playing in campaigns based off one (or at most two) other sources: a single Final Fantasy game, perhaps, or the Alien movies. When mix-n'-matching comes into play (and that includes mixing another source with D&D/d20 conventions), it usually ends up silly, at least in my experience.

As for aliens:

I like to see lots of non-intelligent aliens for every human+-level intelligence. That seems like a much more probable setup than, say, Star Wars' hundreds of sentient species and a handful of beasts of burden.

My preference is for aliens that are close enough to humans to appear understandable, but different enough (physiologically and psychologically) to be truly alien. Intelligent, roughly humanoid? Sure. As different in their motives and behaviors as the aliens of Aliens? That, too.