SciFi Horror Tabletop RPGs For Fans Of The Alien Franchise
Sci-Fi Horror Tabletop RPGs For Fans Of The Alien Franchise
Contents
A selection of science fiction tabletop RPGs with rules and themes perfect for telling stories in the lonely horror style of the Alien franchise.
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The Alien film franchise, an influential saga of sci-fi horror that popularized tropes such as blue-collar astronauts, duplicitous synthetics, and parasitic aliens, has been adapted into graphic novels, video games, and most recently, a tabletop RPG created by Free League Publishing. Alien: The Roleplaying Game is just one of several sci-horror RPGs for sale both online and in print – games themed around the merciless solitude of deep space, the disturbing nature of alien organisms, and the dehumanizing aspects of corporate culture.
The original Alien movie, directed by Ripley Scott, written by Dan O’Bannon, and released in 1979, took inspiration from several sources – earlier sci-fi movies like John Carpenter’s Dark Star, science fiction novels such as A.E. Van Vogt’s The Voyage Of The Space Beagle, the real-life parasitism of creatures like Digger Wasps, etc. One other possible inspiration for Alien may be the midpoint of Dracula, where the crew of the sailing ship Demeter, unknowingly transporting Dracula in their cargo hold, are picked off one by one during their sea voyage – evidence that the “monster-on-a-ship” horror trope is older than many people think.
Each of the tabletop RPG systems listed below, besides mirroring the used future and bio-mechanical monster aesthetics of Alien, also have settings that ring true to the motto of the Alien series – “In space, no one can hear you scream.” This refers to the dangerous, pitiless nature of outer space, but also expresses the horror of dying alone at the hands of a hungry alien or being forsaken by a soulless corporation who treats their employees as expendable.
Alien: The Roleplaying Game
Alien: The Roleplaying Game was designed by Free League Publishing, and uses a modified version of the D6 die pool system seen in RPGs of theirs such as Tales From The Loop or Forsaken Lands. The game is set after the events of Alien 3, where the destruction of multiple ships and colonies at the hands of Xenomorph outbreaks has let to rising tensions between the United Americas (the polity the Colonial Marines from Aliens hailed from) and the Weyland-Yutani Corporation that keeps trying to monetize the Xenomoprh life-forms. Alien: The Roleplaying Game can be used to run cinematic one-shot sessions or extended campaigns where player characters navigate the harsh environments of both space and their blue-collar jobs while encountering Xenomorph infestations and “Space Jockey” ruins at dramatic intervals.
Those Dark Places
Those Dark Places, an Osprey Publishing RPG that describes itself as an “Industrial Science Fiction” Roleplaying Games, leans heavily into the “Space Trucker” aesthetic of the first four Alien movies, painting pictures of a far-future outer space frontier filled with dingy, unsafe space stations and ships. Game sessions of Those Dark Places, ranging from narratives about Alien-style encounters with extraterrestrial horrors to plots about surviving the harshness of the cosmos, are centered around the mechanics of Pressure and Stress, which crew-member PCs accumulate over the course of play (unless they’re synthetic androids).
Shadows Over Sol
Shadows Over Sol, a sci-fi-RPG published by Tab Creations, blends the “horror and corporate politics” themes of Alien with the scientifically accurate world-building of movies like The Martian or shows like The Expanse. The setting described in the of Shadows Over Sol core book is a solar system colonized by corporate interests and net-based sub-cultures, fleshed out with details about realistic future technology, factions, colonies, and real-life landmarks in the solar system. Player characters are generally trouble-shooters for hire trying to complete assignments across the solar system, running afoul of engineered bio-weapons, alien life-forms, and slumbering cosmic horrors in the process.
Mothership
Mothership, a Sci-fi Horror RPG, explores many of the same themes as Alien: The Roleplaying Game, albeit with an “Old-School Revival” sort of sensibility. Character Sheets in this system contain a fluid flowchart structure that makes it easy for players to quickly create new characters when their current ones perish at the hands of space hazards/alien terrors. The rules GMs can use to run a session of Mothership are similarly accessible, with descriptions of how to run different scenes confined to individual page spreads.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/alien-sci-fi-horror-tabletop-rpgs-dark-places/
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