I had a couple of days to prepare to run a game for some 20 hours for 3 or 4 people, and I chose to run Destroyer of worlds from Free League for their Alien system.
This is something as unusual on this blog as a review of something I’ve actually gamemastered, so I’ll just get to it under some very distinct headings.
Cinematic scenarios
Cinematic scenarios for Alien: the roleplaying game are essentially one-shots, with premade characters, played out over three acts, in different settings, but seems to so far, in the two that I’ve read, that there is a meta plot as well.
Panic reading phase
My prepping involves a lot of unstructured panic and some very focused hours of reading, which has led to me appreciating books that are laid out in a straight forward way, with the adventure in one place and the fluff in another part of the book.
Structurally, Destroyer of worlds worked well for panic reading. I got what the story was about in the first pages, then I got the NPC:s and locations, and how they differed in the different acts.
It was a decently quick read, I could quite easily memorize the big picture, and it was clear where I needed to go to look things up.
The last part of the book was all xenomorphs, their evolutions, and their tables, which I just skimmed, but more on that later.
Since I know the year zero engine (and with it being as simple as it is, I might have been able to learn it as well) it felt like something I might actually have the time to prepare with just a few days to spare.
Actually running the scenario
Have I said that I love pregens? I love it so much. My players are all old, and beeing handed a paper with stats, quirks, motivations and weapons just make things oh so smooth.
The scenario has seven pregens, with one of them being an android. These characters all have one agenda card for each act, with predetermined goals and some feelings when stuff gets more and more FUBAR.
It is also implied that characters will die off, so not having seven players for the scenario is a good idea. We played this scenario with three players, and the rest of the crew being apathetic NPCs. It soon became apparent that this was great.
This being alien and all, a whole bunch of characters died, and the players could just pick up another pregen, jump out of the APC and continue shooting.
The scenario starts off with a long rant by a higher ranking marine corps officer, which had my players being all gong ho and yes sir and getting in the spirit of grunts straight away.
At the start of the act they also got their personal agendas which range from an itchy butt to being some sort of double crossing secret agent. The range between the act specific missions outlined on these cards, which also gives rewards, could be lessened.
All in all though, the personal agendas worked well except perhaps for the android, and gave everyone help in finding their character’s drives. Some might argue that it isn’t needed if you’re good, but we can’t all be improv actors on youtube.
The scenario felt tense, stressful and dangerous. Until the finale. More spoilers I guess, but also not that many surprises ahead.
The finale had a ton of aliens, a queen, eggs, fire, flames, bullets, blood, acid and confused screaming. But instead of being a tense moment, I game mastered it kinda stupidly and followed the alien attack tables, which resulted in a lot of xenomorphs not doing a lot. Which is one charm with random attack tables, but logic goes over randomness, and the story supersedes both. So my recommendation to gamemothers out there is to just go all out in the final fight and have the xenos let loos with all their might.
Final verdict
It was fun, it was easy to run. The handouts were great, and everyone enjoyed themselves. 10/10 in that regard. I’d recommend it for people that like marine corps stuff. I’m more of an Alien guy than Aliens though, so I preferred the gameplay in chariot of the gods, the starter cinematic scenario.
Quality-wise, the book could have been better, after about 10 hours the glue failed and it almost fell out of the cover. The character sheets could have been a bit sturdier and easier to write on as well. Laminating those seems like a great idea though, with how stress bounces up and down.
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