Mail Room: Alien

Oh wow, seriously impressed by this one. The presentation of this one is sort of like one of those "movie companion" books, like those official guide to the movie sort of coffee table books for fans. There are pages full of art with one lonely box of rules in an offset center box, floating in the space of nothingness.

Beautiful.

And they took out Alien: Resurrection from the timeline, and included Prometheus and Covenant. Well, that over the shoulder basketball shot in Resurrection is still in my timeline, thank you. There is no retconning pure awesome.

Not Your Typical Alien?

The book gives you license to change the alien, the monster, the abilities, and the threat. I suppose including Prometheus in the timeline is a good thing, since once that black goo DNA stuff gets loose and melds with any lifeform - you have no idea what it is going to do. I wouldn't go so far as to make it like The Thing, but if that goo gets on a dog, or a tiger, a cockroach, a centipede, a jellyfish, or a strange gel worm...who knows what it could mutate into? Even among the alien xenos themselves you could have a similar variance in abilities and powers, and the book says keep the players guessing.

What we saw in the movies could be only ONE of the life forms. Hollywood's infatuation with that one monster could be blinding us to the real horrors which lie in the dark void of the universe. Corporate profits over everything else? Sounds like Alien to me.

So the door is opened to all sorts of space horrors.

I feel this is a good thing, because you don't want the knowledge of the movies to define the game and to limit it in player's heads. If tonight's monster is a giant bone-and-flesh blob of bio-goo that melds and absorbs with any crewmember it eats, that is the monster. If it is a space cucumber that bores into people's heads and uses mind control on others, that is the monster.

Another thought, with a movie like The Thing, that DNA is very rapidly acting and it insta-transforms into a final form. I do not feel this is "good Alien form." In the Alien universe, the black goo sets into motion a series of evolutionary changes - and this is true for most of the movies - where something goes from one form into another in a series of staged evolutionary steps. Sometimes the form changes. Maybe it creates a cocoon. Maybe it turns into a larvae for a stage. Maybe it burrows into a host on one stage and pops out in another.

That series of horrifying, staged, unpredictable biological evolutionary steps I would keep as a centerpiece of the game. Any monster I build would share this trait, and I could probably dig through a book about insects and how they lay eggs, create cocoons, create hives, build nests and traps, parasite other insects and lifeforms, and turn into different forms through their lifespans for a bunch of great ideas.

You want players to feel their characters are like test subjects in a petri dish, with the next evolutionary step being more horrifying than the next, and the game green lights this.

Excellent.

Looking Forward to This

More when I dive in, and this already has a highest recommendation from me just from what I have heard and seen as I cracked the book open. And it is a high quality stitched book with very high production values. I am really happy with this one.

The only thing I wonder about is if the people playing this game will limit themselves to what they saw in the movies. I feel there is so much more here to explore if you pull in the horrible evolution of Prometheus, and realize the movies are not telling the whole story.

They are made by the corporations.