Alien RPG: Building Better Worlds blows the door open on canon and play possibilities | RPG Review

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.

Great review! Thanks.

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.

I'm buying it for the lore and the story.

Thank you so much for everything you do! 😀

Comment for the algo to spread Alien franchise propaganda. xD

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 🙂

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 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.

As usual, astounding review!
Setting the bars higher with each video!

Please enjoy a coffee or domestic beer on me.🍺☕

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.

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?

Danke!

This is just a genuine honest question but; Do you think we'll ever get an expansion that will include Predator?

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.

Awesome content as always Dave. Great to have good videos about good books!