Most important things when running an Alien or Alien inspired game?

Aliens are important

if you plan on killing or seriously handicapping the character then use an npc since you don't really want one player to be at a distinct disadvantage right off the bat (that said you could give each player multiple characters, gives you a bit more free reign to screw them over since they can still play). That said when you use npcs or multiple pcs per player you lose the all important feelings of violation and vulnerability I mentioned before.

ah yes, I'd forgotten about that

Alien or Aliens?
Because one is straight survival horror and the other is action horror.

Alien

I feel kind of sorry for Weyland Yutani, their initial acquisition plan was basically pre-programmed instructions to grab any aliens they found because they're damn interesting.

After that most of the dickheadery in the second film was courtesy of Carter Burke who apparently wanted to just sell the aliens on to the bioweapons industry, there's no evidence WY were even involved.

Alien 3 is where WY started to be portrayed as the overt baddies and the expanded universe seemed to just keep going with the secret WY xenoborg blacksites and shit, missing the point that Burke had just wanted to sell the fucking things.

Tell, don't show

Practical concerns: What to eat, what to drink, where to sleep/hide.

Emphasize that brute force and direct confrontation as extremely risky and foolhardy while clever thinking and use of environment is much safer.

You might want to check out some of the Unisystem-based AvP homebrews too.

Pretty much. In the first two films, WY actually had no idea about what the aliens were like at all.

In the first one, it's just 'if you see extra-terrestrial life then please grab it" The only bad thing was that the ship and Ash were programmed to prioritise getting aliens found over the human crew. BUT that might actually be justified, computers tend to be quite bad at dealing with unknowns as they can be infinitely bad. This tends to make computers either very reckless or overly cautious. At least with that level of prioritisation, the computers actually acted rather than just taking orders from the crew.

In the second film, they don't know what the aliens are like, they only find out once Ripley is found in cryo and as Burke points out; the colony has already been there for several years. The colony, as you rightly said, was put there by Burke who hoped to find whatever had caused the loss of the Nostromo.

+1

>he only bad thing was that the ship and Ash were programmed to prioritise getting aliens found over the human crew. BUT that might actually be justified

Particularly given the obvious comms lag involved in space travel in that universe, plus the fact that finding a new complex life form is realistically more important for the species as a whole than the survival of eight odd truckers.

If the computer hadn't prioritised the alien over the humans or if the humans hadn't been expendable then the conversation would have gone like:

>Hey, we found an alien but it's hissing at the crew, I think we'll have to kill it.

>What? Wait, fuck no don't kill the damn thing! Just put it in a box or-

>Oh hey sorry, yeah we killed that thing a few years ago, it spat at Mike the maintenance guy. Say hi to our folks for us and see you in 5 years!

In fact it wouldn't surprise me if 'crew expendable' wasn't the IRL reaction to finding aliens.

There should not be any area where the aliens can't get to. Otherwise, the players will barricade themselves in and their fear of the alien will diminish.

Every encounter with the alien should be a challenge. I'm not saying that the aliens should be invincible (like in Alien isolation) but it should never be that the players can just easy gun down tons of them as that will diminish their effectiveness.

In the big picture, it's as much cosmic horror as anything Lovecraft ever wrote, but for different reasons.

In the Alien universe the exploration of space is a dreary and depressing thing. There are no great civilizations of intelligent extraterrestrials to meet and talk to and learn from. There may have been, once. But in the great cycles of intergalactic colonization, we have come on to the scene during a lull. The empires have fallen. Whatever sentient life is out there is toiling away in obscurity, or has not yet evolved to our level. The ones that came before us are extinct.

Instead we find ruins, the detritus of intergalactic civilizations that once existed. What technology remains is incredibly dangerous, too advanced to be reverse engineered and more likely to destroy any foolish enough to tamper with it. But there are worse things out there. Slithering through these ruins we find nightmares, horrors that live only to eat and breed, and their breeding means the death of everything they meet. We are mice exploring a condemned house full of cats and poisoned traps.

If you're feeling generous, there might also be some barbarian species combing through the ruins alongside us, scavengers making up for their own cultural and technological regression by living off the corpses of the old empires. They are bloodthirsty and savage, with no interest in cultural communication, and little of import to say anyway. They sift through the ruins and hunt what they find there, for sport.

Either way, mankind's hopes and dreams about the wonders of space swiftly become a dark joke, made all the more humorous by man's inhumanity to man that has bred and fostered on Earth over the centuries. For the hapless civilians and soldiers sent out into the spaceways, they each unknowingly drift between depths of unknown terror and the crushing soulless will of their corporate masters. One drives them into the arms of the other.

Make sure the monster(s) can easy overwhelm your pcs in head to head confrontation, forcing them to think of alternative strategies to deal with the problem

Keep your options open. You've got a lot of room for conflict beyond just the threat of the xenomorphs themselves. Rebellious colonists, rogue android communities, Blade Runner esque people paid to HUNT those androids, The Company's paramilitary forces, USCM units being manipulated by The Company, mercenaries, pirates, hostile salvage teams, other hints of ruined extraterrestrial ships or tech, The Company's few remaining corporate rivals, etc etc.

The threat of the aliens will be more profound if they show up mixed in with other factors like these.

Don't stick your dick in a face hugger

Focus on themes of the unknown, body horror, bizarre sexual symbolism, being at the mercy of forces beyond your control or comprehension, and human greed

underrated advice

>In fact it wouldn't surprise me if 'crew expendable' wasn't the IRL reaction to finding aliens.
It would shock me if that wasn't the case. Human lives aren't really all that valuable in the grand scheme of things.

Thats because anything after Aliens is fucking terrible

There weren't any movies after Aliens, user. Alien 3 and Resurrection were just mass-hysteria fever dreams caused by chemicals in the water.

>Alien 3 and Resurrection were just mass-hysteria fever dreams caused by chemicals in the water.
So what was Prometheus?

Alien 3 is better than Aliens.

>I feel kind of sorry for Weyland Yutani

>Crew expendable

Fuck Weyland-Yutani.

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>I don't agree so it must be bait
user, quit it.

>Most important things when running an Alien or Alien inspired game?

Aliens.

Oh but didn't you hear, they're finally making a third one.

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I would suggest something Ive been batting around in my head. Ok so you nees to establish that death can come at any time to the PCs. The beat way to do this is to kill a PC early on. This of course sucks for whoever gets offed first, but lettinf them reroll is cheap because it robs the entire point of survival gaming. So what you do is this. Each player rolls up a character. If you have 5 players you tell them to work together to create 2 npcs to fill out the crew, and then you make 1 because 8 is a nice number of people to crew a ship. Now when you kill the first PC early on to put the fear of death in them, you allow the player to choose one of their 2 npcs. This leaves one more as a spare and is how I would run the game. ALTERNATIVELY, as soon as you can after the player chooses thwir replacement you kill or remove the other npc they made. This way the player feels like even though they died they at least had some agency in their choice of replacement, but now everyone knows there are no more lives.

So... shit tier idea or no?

>So what was Prometheus?

A testament to our sins.

Don't make it about Alien(s) off the bat.

I would very much enjoy if you elaborated upon this, as Aliens is my favorite movie of all time, and I enjoy opportunities to discuss it and the rest of the franchise.

Please, user, continue.

Alien 3 definitely falls apart too quick, it seems we don't get enough time with some of the characters before they die. But it has better characters, better drama, and nicely ends the series. If it hadn't been mangled by suits, it would be a masterpiece like the first.

2 ("s?") has its high points, like the stunning sets and costumes, but the characters are so fucking dumb and it degrades the series by making it a dumb action movie.

Have them find a pool of saliva, if they look up theres a ventilation shaft. If they dont gtfo then they encounter the alien. Like the pc game.

Be sure to drop the alien on them at some point where they think they are safe.

Look we get it you like bald ripley, we all do, but still stahp it.

In grim darkness of the distant future, there is only corporate bureaucracy.

Hey, there's always some hope. You might get a good bonus, after all, if you serve The Company well. Gotta keep your eye on that bonus situation.

Prometheus was only barely bad in my opinion. It had a lot of cool ideas, and a few good moments. The characters behaving like the real aliens was the problem, and I get the feeling a lot was hacked off in editing. The actual conversation with the Engineer being the most egregious.

The Assembly Cut of Alien 3 is great stuff.

That reminds me, Derelict is really good, it's a black and white edit of Alien and Prometheus into one film with parallel narratives: vimeo.com/130948318

Bummer that it's not on vimeo any more.

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