Alien RPG: Building Better Worlds blows the door open on canon and play possibilities | RPG Review
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Thank you Dave for a lovely and insightful review. As the lead writer responsible the for new PCs, campaign play, the colony rules, the campaign itself and much of the art direction, I am blown away by your comments! Your suggestions for improvement are great as well, and I'll take them on board in future projects. Thank you, and I hope everyone enjoys playing it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
@@davidsemark2288 Amazing work on this book. Thanks for watching my review!
3:10 Regarding the “major careers,” the core rulebook specifies three types of campaigns: space truckers, marines, and colonists. The first expansion covered marines and this one covers colonists. The next expansion should then cover space truckers.
I really hope they add a corpo campaign. However I guess you could potentially use the other 3 to craft one.
@@Bearwiffa228 I could see that as a full on expansion.
I could also see more of a crossover book setup with the Blade Runner stuff being workable, perhaps also getting Predator for the AvP stuff, which could add some of the more oddball character options for people wanting to go with the yautcha trained individuals or similar things.
@AzraelThanatos @Bearwiffa228 Space Truckers work for the corporations, so they might be folded into that
@@AzraelThanatosplease god don’t add predator or blade runner to this amazing universe
@@neurohack9038Alien Vs Predator is one of the major things that I used to love with both the comics and games, I'd spent a long while converting the D20 Modern fan supplements for Alien and Predator to work with SpyCraft and had a rather long campaign run with it. I keep wanting to play more with it and an official game is something I really want
As to the point about "reprinting" monsters/content from the Cinematic Scenarios. I actually prefer this.
1) Not everyone is going to get the Cinematic Scenarios. While these are some of the best written and easy to run adventures I have seen in any system ever, some people will not want to play, "See who is going to be the Final Girl" and just go straight to campaign mode. This way they get access to the things in the Cinematic Scenario books without, you know, piracy.
2) Even as someone who owns it all in print, I appreciate not having to lug the Cinematic Boxes to games when I am running in Campaign mode just to have access to the critters.
3) If I am running from home, the ability to have one book open to critter and the other book open to the content I need is also useful.
I also dislike the old, "See Issue Blah Blah of Blah Blah!" that comics do. If you can't contain enough context for your story in one book, you're doing it wrong. I'm here to relax with entertainment with TTRPGs or Comics. Not cross reference materials for a thesis. 🙂
Very perceptive points. I love the way you appreciate the superficially off-brand content of this expansion for its very complementary narrative value. Well played. The art appreciation and critique resonates as well. TY for sharing your discoveries and insights.
Thanks for your appreciation!
14:43 The reference to a West Marches colony is about our playtest of the colony rules (but not the campaign, no spoilers to worry about). Co-host (and co-lead author of the book) Dave Semark developed the colony rules while running a West Marches style campaign which you can find in a playlist on our channel. There were no specific mechanics around the West Marches style of play, other than booking the players in idvance and writing the adventure around who will be present. It was fun to play (I was the wily Inspector Xiu, always managing to get one over on the corpos) and I hear fun to watch. We will rip it into podcast form soon.
Probably one of my favorite RPG books ever! A great source of inspiration for designing your own space setting. I am also running a home brew Building Better World campaign. The plot is a signal is being projected from an unchartered star sector and its up to the players to locate and signal as well as build a thriving colony around it and build a science center to study the signal's origin.
paused at 1:45 - that summary was great! thank you- going to keep watching, but dang that was quick and helpful
I have no time for a full Aliens campaign, I have no shelf space in my house, but boy do I want to buy all these books! They look amazing.
Exactly.
It's been my experience with this game is that the campaigns plot points the way they are layed out (mandatory and optional) function perfectly as story hooks for other one shots assuming you can reskin them to your liking.
A host on an RPG podcast I was listening to made the point that collecting RPGs and playing RPGs are two totally different, or at least barely-related-at-all hobbies, lol. And you can almost always get or build more shelves...
I've been collecting this one for awhile, and only played the intro one-shot so far, but the books are full of great ideas and I really like the whole game design and aesthetic. I might not play it much right away, but I definitely will play it more at some point - just like the better Alien movies, these books are pretty timeless.
I have a bookshelf FULL of RPG books I’ll never get to play. I still enjoy reading and imagining scenarios though.
I'm seeing some "mega dungeon" tools here. In the case of a "west marches" theme you can create scenarios where you play various characters (miners, corporate spies, marines, smugglers, etc). The characters that survive become NPCs and should you play other scenarios you can use the NPCs as replacement characters for a player death.
By the end of your colony run... You'll have a roster of character sheets with their own back story's that each group has seen or played themselves at some point. A great build up for an alien outbreak or colony being attacked.
Wow, I love it.
"Standard jazz hands xenomorph" LoL
Awesome content as always Dave. Great to have good videos about good books!
Thank you kindly, Jonathan!
I hated what happened with the lore in Prometheus and Covenant but I have to say, this team is doing a great job at salvaging it and turning it towards a more interesting direction. While I personaly would like more mystery and focus on the Xenomorphs themselves as the origin of danger, if Alien has to have an elaborate backstory with the Engineers and other nonsense I think this seems to be it, as good as it gets.
Agreed. And with the play options being expanded so widely, a GM can use whichever alien threats they want.
Really appreciate this review! My first Homebrew Alien campaign riffed on Alien Covenant and this feels like an excellent toolset for that or a follow up game. Glad to hear more lore on Engineers, too. Thanks!
For the campaign modules, in the core book they state 3 ideas for campaigns, marines, colonist, and space truckers. Presumably the next will be about space shipping and more odd jobs
Looking at running Coriolis, this, or Traveller again. This new book makes it tempting to go Alien. Though Coriolis is a close too.
Awesome breakdown. I preordered the book and got my physical copy little while back. I've just NOT had time to really dive into it and this helped a lot. Thanks!
As usual, astounding review!
Setting the bars higher with each video!
Thanks!
This is exactly what I was hoping for in this book.. a broadening of the scope of the Alien RPG. Thanks for great review, Dave.
Glad I could help!
The guys from Zozer Games were asked to help with the Alien RPG since well they honestly have the best version of that sort of universe called Hostile.
I got my PDF copy a few days ago (physical copy inbound soon). I was mostly impressed with it, but I 100% agree with you that copy-pasted xenomorphs felt very cheap to me; the authors and artists are clearly very creative - give us more non-xenomorph aliens and more art for them please! Now the seven part campaign at the end is quite epic, it's also far less linear than the campaign in Colonial Marines book, but the way it was laid out didn't quite work for me - I found the layout and the amount of text to be quite confusing personally. That said, the actual plot, locations, NPCs, factions, encounters, etc., in the campaign were really interesting. I am looking forward to doing a science exploration game using the campaign provided - at least the first three or four adventures.
Lot of this background lore is inherited from the old Leading Edge Games rpg and Colonial Marines Technical Manual. And probably Alan Dean Foster's novelization of Alien (been a very long time since I read it).
I am very very much looking forward to getting my hands on this. I'm in Canada and I've been refreshing my LFGS new book pages every day, lol.
Great review! Thanks.
Thank you so much for everything you do! 😀
3:14 gaska said there’s a Seegson Synthetics book in the works! So maybe this will also feature jobs associated with that and working joes!
Oh I love that.
Pretty sure it’s going to follow the same trajectory of one boxed campaign and a sourcebook to accompany. Hopefully we see it announced this year.
Great review of what looks like a very good expansion.
They brought in the ark mechanics from Mutant Year Zero! 😲
I wouldn’t exactly call the Three-World Empire a hostile entity similar to the UPP, considering that for example Kane from the original movie is from the 3WE.
Great review Dave, as usual. I feel that pictures of gear is a must in any ttrpg and not doing so is a bad idea. I'd rather they leave out a few landscape/planet etc pictures in order to make sure the equipment pictures are included instead.
It’s funny. You cant please everyone because I love the landscapes more than gear. Nightmare being a designer I guess. 😉
The copy pasted creature stats is actually a feature not a flaw, when this game launched, FL stated that the starter set rules would be sufficient to play other books and modules, including this sourcebook.
Great review o7
Might be wrong here, but the "Perfected" Xenos, I think they're also in the Alien/Marvel comics, though I don't know where the story leads.
And about the Engineers, the prequel-movies, it was hinted they could be retconned, as the new theatrical movie & tv-show, also prequels, seem to do their own thing.
great video, my mind is racing
Instead of straight copy-pasting creatures, it would have been nice if they had even just offered tweaked versions of existing creatures. This setting is all about creatures being slightly altered by designers, or black goo, or simply evolving unique traits on their own in new environments. This would also provide something to surprise experienced players, which is always fun. It would probably only require minimal tweaks to the existing art, or potentially no tweaking at all depending on the nature of the changes.
Not having illustrations for vehicles is also rough - at least the online Alien community is pretty amazing at developing resources for the gaps left by Free League.
Random TH-cam question - i stopped at the spoilers section, but wondered if that screws up your algorithm interaction. Beyond things like a comment and a like, is there a point i can skip ahead to so the algorithm doesn't think this is a video that watchers abandon?
Thanks for being so thoughtful about it, but don’t sweat it. I don’t really abate the spoilers for the rest of the videos, unfortunately.
Danke!
Thank YOU! 🙏
Have you ever thought about reviewing Neon City Overdrive, Hard City, or Tomorrow City from Nathan Russell? I would love to know your opinion on those.
Do you have them or is it for a purchase? I haven’t heard of those. Google beckons…
I don't quite understand if a SEV Campaign is part of this or will that be part of the third book with the space trucking?
I need to buy more Free League books
I don't. I need to buy more shelves, THEN more Free League books!
It's nice direction especially as Alien is one of the better(best?) iteration of Y0E in my eyes. And indeed expecting alien monster in each game could get boring very fast. But I have a one "problem" with that... "Alien RPG" is starting to shape as good(and especially not so complicated) alternative to Traveller - so something I would call: "next gen hard sci-fi" RPG and it have very good rules for ships, combat and overall is very good... but that means one thing: the alien brand soon can be a burden for the system, rather than a boon/nice future - as people will miss a great system for hard sci-fi -> thinking it is mainly meant for standing against alien monster and not general system at all. At thats a pity. Plus I would by more of supplements for this systems if the color pallete wouldn't be so dark - I don't like it being so black most of the time, quite depressing I must say. And what I like about space is the thrill of exploration and visiting new worlds, not being always in dark, small places.
And this expansion was a nice opportunity to change the color palette for something brighter...
Besides all of this my "dream/wish RPG system" right now would be something like Science Fantasy a la Shadowrun but with space exploration dane by Free Ligue guys! In fact I'm working on something like that, but would prefer to have something ready for them.
Besides 2: currently I'm most excited for Ad Astra expansion for Mutant - I wonder how similar it will be to this one, and how "explore" it will be! And if they will add some cyberpunk elements(aggumentation?) . I really hope you will review this book!
Ok, going to see the rest of the video now! Thx fort great content! Your books analysis safe me enormous amounts of time! (maybe it's time to support you withy money too... hmmm:) :D
BTW 3: Writing this I just got e-mail that Ad Astra is released ! Lol... :)
I'm buying it for the lore and the story.
100%
A: I haven't even played the base yet
2: I haven't had the income to afford any of the expansions
😀 : I would love to dive full on into this, however.
pretty sure the next book might actually introduce what OSR D&D would call domain play where they introduce the colony/corp sim. Or maybe some kind of faction war emulator.
I hope they do that with the third expansion.
We're all hoping for fleshed out corps and a sourcebook for space truckers. It's likely both will happen, but Free League are juggling a lot of games now :)
If money is an issue, the three cinematic scenarios are the cheapest path to still have fun with for a long time. If you want your own campaign with custom characters, PDFs are probably going to be cheaper. I'm fortunately up to date, so buying Building Better Worlds was just this month's fun expense. Then other products came back in stock, and it got a bit out of hand and over budget…
I've seen the harvesters in an older version of the Alien RPG, which I think was made by West End Games. Not 100% sure. I pictured them as looking like giant tardigrades, but that was just a guess since there was no picture in the old book.
Oh that’s interesting. I hadn’t seen them before.
Not West End Games I think, Leading Edge
@@matthewtyler-jones8317 They were included in the core book, but BBW takes them and expands the rules to allow a PC to use them to 'harvest' rock and aid with mining operations. Naturally, they are tough to handle and a problem if they get out of control...
@matthewtyler-jones8317 Ah, that sounds right. I'd forgotten about Leading Edge.
I have alien RPG - not played yet. My ‘worry’ is that Alien RPG can run the risk of everything being about the Aliens. No surprises and all that. Does this book expand the world to be a wide open Alien based universe in which the things that go bump in the night might not actually… you know… be Aliens?
A dark sci-if universe with the potential of an Alien encounter one day would be good by me.
The missing Fullfremen illustration bothers me more than it should.
WARNING! SPOILERS!
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While the book and the campaign are great and a lot of thought went into fleshing out the Alien universe I can't help but to feel disappointed by the direction the lore is taking. The Alien universe used to be one of existential, lovecraftian horror and dread: A deeply capitalist humanity sends expandable humans into a deadly and uncaring galaxy to plunder its riches just to find ancient, horrible and incomprehensible terrors that hunt and kill us. And we don't know why. Everything is a mystery. And the more we uncover the worse and more incomprehensible it gets (cut the creature = release acid). It makes you question our place in the universe as a species but also on an individual level. The fear of the unknown dialed up to 11. Because there's no instruction manuals, no explanations and no narrative - THERE IS NO DEEPER LORE! Which made everything even more unsettling. Not just the creature was Alien - everything was! Sure, every movie added their own ideas to the Xenomorph, but we were purposely left in the dark about its origins and function.
Now this new book explicitly tells us what's going on and I couldn't be more disappointed:
Humanity stumbles upon an aeons-old interstellar war fought with genetically engineered bio-weapons between two ancient factions - the Engineers and the Perfected - who we are closely related to because the Engineers created all life in the galaxy. Both are obsessed with the Xenomorph. They see us as cattle to use for creating the perfect organism. Sucks to be us but hey, war is something we understand and can comprehend. Everything makes sense now.
Did the Alien universe just become less... alien?
I wonder why the designers and especially Andrew Gaska did that and came up with such a disenchanting explanation for everything: Why not keep it in the dark? Why humanize it? Why lessen the horror that is the Alien universe? I guess it's mostly a GM-problem (and maybe just for me) because keeping the truth from the players is easy. But the book is out there for everyone to read. It's official lore now.
I feel like the incomprehensible got lost between all the body horror, suspense and jump scares. The rest of the book is awesome though.
It happens to any successful franchise. The other worst offender in this department is Star Wars. The original trilogy contained so much mystery and implied history. But then the worst happened.
My advice is to break free of the canon at your table. Explain away the engineers and all that stuff as a Weyland-Yutani psyop or PR stunt to boost their share prices, and in fact they know nothing about the origins of the xenos or any other life they’ve encountered.
Well a lot of this is from Prometheus and Covenant movies, so they are working with what they were given. I know my players WANT answers, in any long campaign they will be trying to find those answers. If I were to say, "no back lore, just a big mystery that you can never solve", they would be bugged by that. However, if I don't like the lore given in a book, I am always free to make up my own.
If you want to play the game with big, unsolvable mysteries, no reason you can't.
Warm regards, Rick.
Sorry that this question doesn't have to do with this game. I just wanted to know if there are any good ttrpgs themed around Robinhood out there?
Hm, I actually don't know of any, but one should be created around the amazing Robin of Sherwood TV series created by Richard Carpenter and shot in England (& likely also Wales?) in the mid-80s. It's probably my favourite tv show ever, although my family doesn't feel the same way, lol.
There is a GURPS Robinhood expansion, (which might be available as a *.pdf), which was pretty good.
Warm regards, Rick.
This is just a genuine honest question but; Do you think we'll ever get an expansion that will include Predator?
Probably not but maybe. That would mean Free League would need to buy the Predator IP to include them in the ALIEN game.
Not very likely unless there was directive from either FOX or there was such a demand for it. EC Gaska has said he prefers keeping the Predator franchise separate and the current direction from FOX/Disney is that Predator and Alien are their own separate franchises while any crossover is in a universe/franchise of it's own, the AVP brand. So there'd have to be a shift in the higher ups for it to happen. Personally, I just want more weird space horror beyond xenomorphs, like the Perfected.
I don't think it's likely because the designers seem to be in that weird cult that doesn't think AvP "counts" for some reason. Of course, it's financially one of the most powerful forces in the franchise, so if there's some sort of mandate or the staff changes to include more reasonable people then it's definitely possible. Personally I think it's a major hole in the world building of the game, like they just completely forgot to account for almost half of the main series (Resurrection isn't part of the setting either because the game is focused on the late 22nd and early 23rd century) and it's something most players are going to want to homebrew in the game anwyas, so not putting out a book on it just seems like burning money to me.
But who knows, it's a definite possibility even if it doesn't seem probable at the moment.
No, there are actually two IPs that Free League would have to licence to include Predators: Predator, and Alien Vs Predator which is a separate license
It stand alone?
No, you need the core rule book.
@@DaveThaumavore ok I want to play kids on bike but I don’t no what book I will buy ,what is core
@@keetalk7899 "Core" is the book that contains all of the rules of the roleplaying game. Here is where you can buy the PDF of the Alien RPG core rules: bit.ly/AlienCoreRPG
Comment for the algo to spread Alien franchise propaganda. xD
Please enjoy a coffee or domestic beer on me.🍺☕
Wow, thank you!!😁
Ever one of their books are a wast of money. You could take all of the text of the books and put it in a 20 page book
To me, this was a disappointment. The lack of rules for a colony is what did it. It's only about ~20 pages for running a colony, and hardly any context for it. Like Forbidden Lands, you have a place and context to base building... but there's nothing and no grand purpose behind what should be a core concept in an ALIEN campaign about space colonists.
The rest of it? Lore and the pre-canned campaign (for space explorers, not space colonists)... is either not very useful or completely useless.
It really could've been a pamphlet, stable-bound softcover if we look at a space colonist campaign. And we pay a premium hardcover price for it. Kind of conscionable in 2023/2024.
Zozer Games has a book called Colony Builder. It was created for more in depth creation with his Hostile setting/game. He worked on the Alien RPG since his game Hostile is honestly the best version of it out there. Inspired by the old sci fi movies of the 80s and early 90s. I ended up picking that over this Alien RPG more options as well.