Hello and welcome to the Weekly Scroll Podcast.
My name is Ryan. And this show is not sponsored
by Nazis. It's very we're not sponsored by
anyone, but especially not very true both.
Both statements are equally true.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or AI, but yes, yes, we're here.
As we say. I feel like every episode it's
been a couple since we've done a review, but we are here.
We are going to be wrapping up our mini mothership month.
We've already done a couple of APS.
We reviewed Mothership 1 E We also talked about Cosmos orbs
and our last space game of the day or the month is going to be
the alien RPG. That's right.
I like, I want to do like a tagline for the Alien RPG, but
it's just like, that's it. It's Alien like it's.
Alien. It's Alien.
I have I have the down Cam set up.
This is the Alien RPG book. Yeah, gorgeous book, interesting
game. We're going to go over.
It is from Free League, which is a Swedish publisher.
They're the people that do Merkborg and like every other
fucking IP under the sun. I used to be super into Free
League. I still enjoy them, I still
enjoy their stuff, but I'm I'm really, really over a lot of the
IP content I would say is. The IP farm getting to you.
Bro, bro, and I have a lot of them, but like after Blade
Runner I was like no please, I'm fucking done like.
That's exactly what I was like. I didn't back Blade Runner.
I was like, I'm not doing anymore, you know, You know,
IPS. I just can't, I just can't.
But Alien was one of their earlier ones actually gorgeous
cover. It shows a spaceman with a
xenomorph behind it. Love the tail, like circling it.
It's got this is a xenomorph. That's the spaceman.
And then I do love the pile of skulls.
It's it's standing on, which isn't it kind of looks like
rocks, but you look close with skulls.
It's a it's a gorgeous book. It's a thick boy.
This is a thick little book here clocking in, I think right
around the same as every other one.
This is roughly 400 pages. 392 pages.
Yeah. It's a big one.
It does use, Yeah, well, I mean, I, we've said this before and,
and I'll talk about it a little bit more.
The starter said book is only about 100 pages and
realistically you only need about 115 to to cover
everything. Everything else in the book is
lore, which is cool to a point, and we'll go over that a little
bit more. But this is the Alien RPG.
It came out I believe in 2019. It was in the 2020 innies
though, like for the award season or whatever.
So in in the 2020 innies it won the gold innie for best game in
2020, which I think is the only thing that beat Merkborg that
year because I think Mark Borg won like 3 gold innies two or
three, but it got silver and best game and I believe it was
to the Alien RPG that got gold. The Alien RPG Building Better
Worlds supplement in 2024 also won a gold innie for best
supplement and a silver one for best cartography.
So award-winning game for free league.
It does use the year 0 engine, which is free leaks like in
house engine, which they do every game with.
When we did Coriolis the great dark over on the AP side of the
channel, we used the year engine yeah and it was good.
I really liked it a lot. Yeah, I remember you saying you
enjoyed that one and and it was when I was kind of working on a
dice pool system and you were like, you should check it out
and I never did. Yeah, well, now we did.
Now we're going to look at years.
Ago. And this is one of the earlier
games, like I said, that did it. This was not one that went out
on Kickstarter. I kept trying to find the
Kickstarter and then realized it wasn't Kickstarter, They just
existed. So the game itself, the book is
gorgeous. Like I said, it's 400 pages, a
big fat chunk of its lore. Obviously, we're going to go
over that more in just a second. It is a very vibey book.
But I'm going to be straight up with you, and I'll say this
right at the top of the show. If you're going to get into this
game, honestly I would get the starter set and for those in
pockets land. I just revealed it.
Underneath the the book is the starter set.
I also do have the GM screen. Two good covers, Both of them
are very good. The cover of the starter set
really fucks hard. It's black and red and it's got
a very much just like a buzz cut Ripley with a with I believe
this would be a flamethrower in silhouette it with red behind,
but you can see I love the the xenomorph tail coming down
behind them or in front of them. I guess it's it's fucked so
hard. It's so good.
This cover's great like I said, I do have the GM screen freely
gloves to put out a bunch of stuff usually gym screens.
I am a little bit disappointed in this one though, because like
I love this panel which is like a xenomorph in in profile with
very much like light hitting the acid like coming off their
mouth. But all the rest of the panels
are just are blank. So the other panels are just
like Starfield. I wouldn't have minded like I
think this one may be like the inside of something, but like
it's it's very much very dark and not very fancy for a gym
screen. And then on the inside, it looks
very much like the game that we'll go over momentarily.
But it does have a lot of like really great panels on it.
I have a problem where I don't throw any part of the game away.
So like one of the things I hate most about games is when they
have that like that the piece inside the plastic on the back.
That's not same size to fit in anything else.
Please Gabe, stop doing that because I have to save it.
I have to save it. No, I do.
I have to. Other people don't starter set
real quick. Let's flip through this real
quick and then let's get in this game.
So again, the starter set's really great.
One thing that I said like I'm definitely firmly in the camp of
400 pages is too big for a book. And I know, and this is my dream
world because I don't financially it makes a lot more
sense to do 1 big book versus like 3 smaller books, right?
Doesn't mean I'm ever going to like it.
That book could have easily been split up into a player book, a
lore book, and AGM book, right? The primary book.
But going through the starter set, you get a deck of
initiative cards. You can tell I've never played
this because it's all still in the plastic.
You get two different sets of dice, the regular dice and the
stress dice. We'll go over those in the game,
but you get 2 fats that's a dice you get 246810 dice in each one.
There is the small game catalog that comes with everything,
which is the whole list, but massive, massive map that comes
with it. It is a huge map of the system.
I'm not even going to open it all but like it literally it's
it's like 8 panels basically. But then on the other side you
get maps of all the different chips and parts of the ship on
it. Really gorgeous, really nice
thick paper, beautifully done. And then in the rest of the
starter set you get a bunch of really cool stuff.
You get all of your pre gems, which is cool.
Yeah, the one side is all of the it's your talent, it's your
stats and everything like that. The other side is your full
character sheet, all filled out really nice.
You can definitely tell Coriolis borrows a lot from Alien too
when you look at the character sheet.
If you look at the Coriolis in the Great dark character sheet,
very similar. You also have the core book,
which you'll see if I compare the starter set core rule book
to the regular core rule book, it is slightly smaller by about
300 pages. Yeah, yeah, this.
And this is all you need. I think the only things missing
from the starter rule set, I think maybe like talents and
stuff, and then the other stuff that comes is an adventure, a
pretty beefy adventure if you like it.
This is 48 page adventure called Charity of the Gods.
And then you get a ton of tokens because the game, especially
when like hunting and seeking and stuff starts, there's a
whole mechanic for like when things are trying to find you.
So having tokens on the board is really great.
So I love that it comes with with the token sheet.
I'm never going to use them because I would never crack the
tokens out of a token sheet. But but yeah, so that is the
starter set and the regular core rule book and, and all the stuff
that comes with it. I do highly, highly, highly
recommend. Realistically, if you want to
get into Alien and you're not necessarily like obsessed with
the lore, I definitely recommend going with the starter set
instead of the book, But that's just me.
I'm going to be honest, I mostly read just the starter set and it
was enough information and yeah, I I thought it was.
I feel this is an incredibly serviceable RPG in my opinion.
Yeah, I really actually enjoy the Year 0 engine.
I think they do a good job and I think that they do enough to
make it different for each game so that it doesn't just feel
like repetitiveness. Like there's a lot like you're
not going to find the panic table in some room, right?
I mean, you could, I guess, but why?
But yeah, but why would you? They do do a good job of that
though, so I believe. OK, I'll save this for later.
Remind me that I Oh no, I'll just move this over here.
I have the prices and stuff already set up.
Oh cool. I was just pulling them up as
well actually. Nah, so let me rearrange my desk
a little bit. What is the Swedish?
Currency called it's KR. What is it?
Kroners. Kroner.
I it's KRONER. I'm almost positive and I say
kroner. But for any Swedes out there,
feel free to tell me that I'm a fucking idiot and then I'm
saying it wrong. You are more than welcome to.
And we'll continue to say it wrong by accident.
Yeah, I've said Kroner like I'm sure, but but I mean, it's
probably Kroner in the same way that like Merkborg is definitely
not Merkborg. You know what I mean?
It's like more border jail or something like that.
But anyway, so the Alien RPG, so so initial my initial thoughts
real quick. What, what?
What do you think about the Alien RPG?
I think this is fine. I don't hate this at all, nor do
I feel incredibly like positively, I don't, I don't
feel bad about it. You know, I don't feel I'm not
like really in love with this. I'm not dying to play it, but it
this is a good RPG that is definitely good for someone.
Yeah, like if someone was like, yo, I'm setting this up and
you're free, you'd be down to play.
Yeah, yeah, I definitely do that, absolutely.
But I'm not. I'm not taking this to my table
to run it. Gotcha.
Cool. Yeah, I mean, I love Alien the
movie. It is one of my favorite movie.
I also love Aliens the movie. It is one of my favorite movies.
And one thing that obviously is going to happen today is we're
going to compare this to Mothership, right?
Like that's an inevitability because when you're, if you're
an Alien fan and you want to play an RPG, these are the two
that you're going to do. You're going to do the Alien
RPG, which is the official IP, right?
Or you're going to do Mothership, which very much is
like the other quote UN quote space horror game kind of in the
genre. So we are going to and they are
very similar, at least in some aspects, like they both have
stress and panic. They both have panic tables.
I think that's where a lot of the comparison is going to come.
They. Both hit androids, yeah.
Yeah, they both have Marines whether they should or not.
So, so that that's that's going to happen.
But but getting into it right off the bat, again, the cover
absolutely slaps. I will say freely, one thing
that they do incredibly well is the art.
The art in every single book they do is stunning.
Whichever artist I I'm pretty sure it's, it's frequently the
same person. Their art is absolutely
stunning. This like digital artwork where
they have this kind of like, I don't know, like splatter over a
lot of it. It it is so good.
Lead artist on this one was Martin Grip.
Yes. So yeah, the designer.
Is. Christian Graneth, bro, don't
even, don't even pretend that we don't know how to say these
people's names. Yeah, but yeah.
Christian Graneth. Yeah, but Martin Grip's art is
insane, like in everything that they do.
It is, it is incredible. Scrolling right through the
cover, which you talked about already.
You have the stars of the Middle Havens.
Let me go to a quick two page view on this so you can at least
see that. Cool now.
Yeah, it's gorgeous. It's gorgeous.
And again, you get the in the starters that you get the
entire, you know, huge map that's literally like, I don't
know, it's like 4 feet wide. Like, it's really, really big.
That's going up on the wall. Yeah, but then all your maps you
need for the adventure on the other side.
But but yes, that would definitely be a wall map faux
show. Oh, this one's going to piss me
off. The cover is wider than the rest
of the game. Is it?
Oh man, that's going to make me mad, but it doesn't matter.
Who cares? I'll just shrink this down.
Hey question. I won't.
Do you have bookmarks in your copy?
Let me see, yes. What is wrong with the one I
have open? Do you have the starter set one?
No, I'm yeah, I'm looking at the core, but there's like 3
versions. I might have opened up the wrong
one. Let's.
See, yeah, so looking at the core, so, so real quick before
we did too much, like I said, there's the core work and then
there is the starter said book. So if we go down to you, yeah,
you figure that. So if we go down to the index
real quick, you'll see the differences between the core
book has 123, they're all numbered 456789101112, has 13
chapters in it. And then the starter set rule
book, which again, as I said, I highly recommend going to the
starter set. It only has five chapters in it.
So a a huge chunk of the game, I would say obviously more than
half the book is lore. And I do think that the only
things that the starter set doesn't have in the core part
that the other one has, that the core book itself has, is the
talents. And I don't think, yeah, I think
it's just the talents and maybe some parts of gear.
I believe you're correct. Yeah, so, but other than that,
they're basically the same book. They're pretty much photocopies
of the same book. So going through real quick, we
have space as hell, which is a chapter kind of just like, what
is this game kind of thing. There's Chapter 2 which is your
character, Chapter 3 which is skills which is more character
stuff, Chapter 4 which is talents which is more character
stuff, Combat and panic which is obviously the core of the game.
The gear 7 is a hard life amongst the stars.
So starting at 7 is when it starts to get into lore.
Starting at 8 it literally switches from player section to
like game master game mother section in the book.
So from chapter 8 to 13 is pretty much all GM stuff, which
starts on page 206. You have your job as the game
mother government as corporations systems and planets
alien species campaign play and then the adventure hopes last
day that takes you all the way out close to 400 pages.
This spread right here that we that is in here too also is
incredible. The space is hell.
I can't lie to you by your chances, but you have my
sympathies. It's a gorgeous spread.
It's basically it's basically two page spread of the cover of
the book. And yeah, it's absolutely
stunning going back to two page. So there is getting into this
right in the beginning through the first kind of intro chapter,
there is this running narrative in the background of the game of
the UUSCSS Miranda with Captain Charlize recording this like
story that's happening. I thought it was cool lore bits.
I'm not a fan. I'm kind of like, why is the
core of the beginning of this game literally just like
domestic abuse and alcoholism? Like I don't that's AI mean
maybe I don't know. It's a little edge lordy, I
guess. I don't mind the drinking and
this is a weird thing to say. Like I don't mind the drinking
That feels very kind of like alien of just like this world
sucks. I'm going to like do drugs and
alcohol, right, But like the fact that like it starts about
this like couple that they notice, like argues a lot, like
one of them, like beats the other one up and like the guy
just like like runs off so he doesn't like beat her back.
And then like basically the story is like they keep trying
to find him and then when they eventually found him, he's
fucking dead. And then the story continues to
devolve into like they're all dying.
They realize it's an alien and then they all none of them
fucking make it out. And it's cool the whole way
through. But I'm like, why does it start
with literally just like you could have done anything.
Why domestic abuse? I was drinking while reading
this and so like several of those passages I missed.
So I definitely actually missed that one.
Everything else afterwards and a little before.
And I mean, maybe it did read that and I just don't remember
it. Because here's a specific blah
blah blah blah blah. Note to self, no more husband
and wife teams on my crew. Nat and Reed are fighting again.
We'll we'll come back to it, but I'm going to scroll.
I did. I did absolutely read this.
Course we've got problem. Yeah, of course we've got
problems already. This time of the domestic kind.
Reed came aboard drunk and getting that punched him in the
face, may have even broken his nose.
I stepped in before it asked. Escalated like just like OK and
when you continue the story read like ran off and then Nat
thrashed the gallery and locked yourself in her corner.
So it's like it literally starts at this husband and wife, one
comes in drunk, gets beaten up for it, and then the other one
like demolishes the like their crew quarters.
And it's just like there's a million ways that you could have
like shit sucks and it's fucked up.
I don't necessarily think that like literally starting it out
with domestic abuse was like. Yeah, probably not necessary,
but but the other stuff in this in this section really great.
I do like the lore on the world. I was really interested in the
IT might be the next stage, which is territories of the
frontier. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, where it talks about like the different empires that kind
of run like Earth and space. And I was like a cool context,
you know? Yeah.
Well, let's get, let's get to that start from the beginning.
We'll get to that real quick and then you can tell me.
But so I will say, so layout wise, the the majority of the
book is laid out as this like black starry background.
And then there are these like, what do you call this like a
card? Would you feel it's like a like
a digital kind of card? Blurbs, little boxes, cards.
So every every kind of like section throughout the book is
like boxed in by these like cards with like kind of like
Spacey stuff, you know, like little things.
I will say layout wise it looks interesting, but there's parts
later in the book where the stick to itiveness of.
Making every section different with this cards inhibits the
layout where things are on the like weird pages because it
doesn't fit because they stick to this card format.
I think I noticed a couple sections like that that you were
that you're talking about right now.
I will say that I did really appreciate that there's so much
in this game and it is so long, but none of the pages are so
cramped that reading them is annoying.
Like it all feels like there's enough room for you to not have
to like, put on your reading glasses and get really fucking
close to decipher it. I agree.
And I do like that every every
kind of like it's not every paragraph, but kind of every
section is on its own little separate like card.
But again, there are times where there's too much on a card
because there's like space above and below.
There's a lot of margin in these cortical.
Cards several times of that. Where you're like this actually
I know goes up there, but it didn't fit so you switched it
with that one up there. Like at one point we get to
something and I'll talk about it when we get there.
It's you see something like 4 pages before you get to the
rules and I literally stopped like looked multiple pages front
back to be like where is this thing?
And then I eventually found out. So anyway, space is vast, dark,
and not your friend. Space isn't as empty as you
think either. The frontier is expanding.
Long story short, this is the alien role-playing game right?
What's the story, Mother? I do like as we go through,
there are a lot of quotes. There's a quote from Revelations
here and behold, a great dragon, etcetera, etcetera.
So the titular Alien and all of its iterations is the stuff of
nightmare, from Neomorph to Xenomorph.
There's a cool section here. Again, this is the intro to the
game, intro to the world. This is the Alien RPG page.
And then you get to the frontier life.
It says there's nothing in the desert and no man needs nothing.
David Prometheus. So this gives context to kind of
like where the game mostly takes place and it is on the frontier.
It's not at on Earth or like any specific, you know.
Mining Colony. David B Prometheus.
I said David Prometheus so it says David 8 from Prometheus so.
You said David B Prometheus like it's David.
B Prometheus. Yeah, Didn't you know the movie
was named after that one Android, the.
Titular character of the movie. Prometheus, right, David?
Prometheus, anyway. So no.
Yeah, the frontier begins on the leading edge of the outer Veil,
crosses through the outer rim of the known territories and
stretches on into deep space. So located between the core
systems and the outer rim, the outer Veil is a vast region, and
that's where a lot of that stuff happens, the outer rim beyond
the Outer Veil. There's some context here about
colonization and colonial Navy and all that kind of stuff.
A lot of the early lore when I first started reading and I'm
like, why do we need all this right in the beginning?
But then as I read, it was like, no, this is actually like,
amazing. I love it.
I. Actually thought this was really
good. It's, it's enough to get you
like kind of your feet wet in the lore of this world, but not
so much that you're like, Oh my God, when's the game start, you
know? It also gives you a lot of
context where like it, you know exactly within the Alien movies
it takes place too. So territories of the frontier.
You like that part? Did you want to touch on those
real quick? Yeah.
So there's basically 4:00-ish different powers that kind of
control all of space and time. That is like Earth and space.
So there's the the Three World Empire, which is consisting of
the former United Kingdom, Japan, and several other
developing countries. The Wayland Yutani Corporation
itself is a result of the formation of the Three World
Kingdom. There's the United Americas,
which is basically North, Central and South America all
banded together to become a superpower.
There's the Yeah, like they should the No white people would
never in America, would never let in the US.
They. Said should, but they actually
would, right? That would make.
Too. Much people think that Puerto
Ricans aren't U.S. citizens. Like, come on.
Dude, I've heard somebody say that.
I'm like, you're fucking stupid. So dumb.
The Union of Progressive Peoples, which is a like
socialist bloc, and then the Independent Core Systems, which
is like a loose conglomeration of like partially like privately
owned colonies, some of them being owned by corporations,
some not that kind of like banded together to represent
each other. And I just think it's like a
really great chunk of easy world building that you immediately
know there's like there's four distinct powers.
And those powers, if you dive into them, I think they are
fairly diverse within themselves.
But you can immediately understand that, OK, there's
like four major powers control where we're going.
I, I, I mean, I know a lot of this is lore directly from,
because like anyone that's watched the movies and stuff
like that needs to understand that the alien lore goes so much
deeper. There's a million comics,
there's a ton of novels, like a lot of this pull directly from
it, but it's really great. Yeah, like the UK and Japan and
big corporations is 1. The Americas is one basically
like all of the socialists cause like communists like Russia,
Vietnam, all the kind of stuff has one.
And then the independent core systems is basically like a
trade federation. Like it's big companies and
small companies, but they're all like just a loose, a loose
grouping of basically private businesses, big and small.
And I think that's a great mix of of, of narrative possibility
in there. That's really fantastic.
And I love the Alien franchise, but I don't know any of this
shit. Although a lot of it's kind of
like dropped in and hinted in some of the more popular pieces
of the franchise. So it's cool though as a fan to
read this and be like, oh cool, this is what's going on the
entire time. No, I have read a bunch of the
comics. I've read a bunch of the novels
and stuff. It is, it's interesting.
I mean, I love the union progressive peoples, but like,
that's just, that's just me. But but yeah, going from there,
basically you get a rundown of like where things are and what's
happening. So Dominion of the Stars,
basically corporate dominance as we are already seeing, you know,
with our, with our what? Do you mean?
South African oligarch American, apparently.
Oh, I thought. You were talking about the the
WWE millionaire owner that's in charge, it's going to be in
charge of education in the US. Fucking God this.
This is the darkest. That's all your schoolmates.
Honestly, the fact that we have this just because people didn't
want to vote for a woman will never anyway.
So corporate dominance, Long story short, corporations,
whether it like they actually do or not control everything
sometimes literally basically as nation states in and of
themselves a God at the ascent of space.
I So one thing I do like about this is this book does not try
to be super filtered right. Like one thing about 5 E is it's
very extraordinarily like putting in its language to be
extraordinarily precise and UN and has no personality.
Right. There's a lot of books are like
that. This book doesn't like there's
cursing in this book. There's definitely times where
it's like don't do that. That's fucking stupid.
It doesn't say fucking, but like don't do that.
That's dumb. And I do like that.
I do like this book has a little bit of a voice and I do really
like that about free League is like I said, I'm kind of over
the IP stuff, but everything I've read from free league,
which is like, I mean, which is the entire shelf is I have
everything Simmer ever did everything for Vince Lands ever
did Vason everything are like, I mean, I have a lot of free
league. I do enjoy their stuff.
It's really, really, really good overall and always very well
done. Yeah, but I think I go.
Back and forth on the IP thing, because I'm like the license IP
thing because I am kind of sick of it, but also if it's well
done, I'm a little less sick of it, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I mean, I also wish that the Lord of the Rings RPG wasn't
5E, but what do I know. There is one that isn't isn't
it? Isn't 1 ring?
Like is it all 5E? Oh right, 11 ring is not but the
one that freely has which is the order so.
They do, Freely is 1 ring too, isn't it?
Is it not? Slow I'm pretty sure because
what what freely, what freely has I know, but what freely has
been doing is putting out their own stuff and then started doing
5E version. So there's Simba Room and then
there's Ruins of Simba Room, which is a 5E version.
So I think 1 Ring is their setting and then there's a Lord
of the Rings RPG, whatever that's like a 5E version of like
the One Ring setting or. Whatever, you are correct.
Yeah, which is another thing that I'm not a like, I mean, I
know five years where the money is.
I fucking know that, right? But I was much happier with some
room when ruins of some room didn't exist, even though I have
it still in plastic in super limited edition.
Maybe eBay one day. Anyway, God at the Ascent of
space, basically, it says that a lot of people fall to religions
as slash cults because realistically they're the same
thing, but out in the middle of nowhere.
A lot of people get religious. This is rumor, control, story
spread faster than light. A lot of what's going on in the
world, in the universe, is dictated through media,
propaganda, things like that. And a lot of people, yeah, use
that for what they need. Here are the facts.
The year is 2183, a little more than three years since the
destruction of the Hadleys Hope Colony on LV426, the
disappearance of the USS Salaco, and the closing of the prison
and LED works on Fiorina 161. So for those that don't know,
that is Alien on LB426, that is Aliens on the USS Sulaco, and
that is Alien 3 on Fiorina 161 which I believe sets this
between Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection if I remember
quickly. Oh, I saw Alien Three one time.
Alien 3 is story wise I really enjoy it a lot.
It's the the CGI in it is so terrible.
It really did it, the movie itself with the service.
Swimming right, the aliens are swimming in in there in CGI is
that that one at one point the aliens are like under the amount
of water and they're. Oh, probably yes.
It's like a it's a prison colony on like an island.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And.
Maybe a bad take. I loved Alien Resurrection.
I thought it was really weird to be like we got her DNA from lava
like. But I really enjoyed Aliens and
Resurrection. Why not a writer?
I mean, come on. Yeah.
So your crew is expendable. The only publicly made
exposition of these events deals only with the aftermath of
Fiorina 161. There's a book that came out,
and apparently that book spread like waterfowl or wildfire
across frontier. And this time it's war.
To add fuel to the fire, conflict between rival sectors
of space have increased exponentially in the past five
years. While unconfirmed, many believe
that Hadley's Hope was a test site for one of Waylan Utani's
bio weapons and that an enemy state sent a warship to nuke it
from orbit. That so they think what happened
with the Slako and and Aliens, because Alien takes place like
50 years before Aliens because she's in like stasis longer than
any human being. She's in stasis, like 52 years
or something like that, yeah. Her daughter is like super old
when she gets out right? Yeah, she's she's dead.
Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
She's dead. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So so this is what happens after
Aliens and Ali in three. And so that's the world that
you're set up in. People on the frontier are aware
of those events, which is really cool.
Like you kind of think in the movie that it's a little bit
self-contained, but it's just like, no, obviously the news of
that shit's going to get out. So people are on edge because of
that and think that the corporations are like out to
kill them and and do bio shit. So there is a full 2 page spread
timeline which is absolutely fantastic.
That starts all the way back in 2023, so last year yeah and goes
piece by piece all the way to the current timeline set in
2180, which is the present days, which is the new anchor point
station is established. Tensions flare on the frontier
as factions accuse each other of foul play during the Hadley's
Hope incident. Robert Morse's space beast is
transmitted throughout the colonies and subsequently
banned. And mistrust escalates as rumors
of the deadly ailing life horns and company bio weapons spread
across the frontier again, I I love the fact that the fallout
of the movies is and how information about that spread is
the time that you take place like directly.
Addressed in here, yeah. It's so good.
I think that's so clever to to have that as the setting point.
This is what I mean by like a licensed IP, like in doing it.
Well, you know what I mean. Like this is such a clever way
to continue on with that story. Yeah, and and that's why like,
it's hard because I, again, I kept going all the way through
Blade Runner, but I don't remember the one that they did
after that. It might have been like The
Walking Dead or something, but I was just like, listen, that shit
sucks in season 1. Like, I don't need an idea of
it, you know what I mean? Yeah, but it was it was terrible
season 2 seconds. I will say the graphic novel
amazing. Anyway, tangenting like crazy.
We're 4 pages in and we're 42 minutes in the show and that's
on me. So careers on the frontiers, you
got Frontier colonists, which is fucking everybody, right?
Homesteaders, farmers, scientists, miners, doctors, all
the kind of shit, right? You have space truckers, which
obviously are truckers in space. You have Colonial Marines, which
are the United States Colonial Marine Corps represents the
finest fighting force ever assembled, technologically
advanced and supporting all the stuff, blah, blah, blah.
There is a part where it talks about like how it even came to
be. No, not this part.
Oh yeah, we'll keep going. More Moran and stuff here and
again, in the background of all of this stunning art, stunning,
absolutely insane art all the way through.
I'm not going to stop and talk about every piece, but like this
piece specifically on page 17 is clearly like the the ship from
the. Ship.
Yeah, the Prometheans kind of. Ship all right, 30 seconds and
then stop me. Prometheus could have been
insane and it's not. In and of itself I think it's a
good movie, but in the context of what it should have been,
it's not. If you can Google and find the
original screenplay, it's called Alien Engineers.
It was supposed to be a direct, a direct prequel to the first
Alien movie. Where If you've seen the movie
spoiler alerts at the end where they like get the engineer ship
to to drop back down that is supposed to be the ship they
find on LB 426. But they brought in the guy that
fucked up lost and made it all weird.
Rewrote it so they could have like covenant in like 3 movies
instead of just the one and made it not a direct prequel and said
it some other random world out there but the alien engineers.
I'll send it to you if you don't have it.
The alien engineers original script original screenplay is
fucking genius and God I wish Prometheus was that movie.
But in and of itself Prometheus is a good movie.
What it could have been was better anyway.
Company reps is another thing you can be.
Obviously you are representative of these giant massive
potentially like nation state companies.
And then there's a whole section here about role-playing in the
game. It talks about like what is
role-playing basically, which in in the context of like any IP
game from a company, this is not a bad page.
And it's very short. It's like it's like 3, it's like
5 lines. It's totally, it's fine.
It talked about the game Mother, which is the GMI do like that
the whole mother thing like I think it makes sense.
Funny, I at first I didn't like, I read it.
It was a game, Mother. I was like, oh, mother, the the
computer system. Computer control system.
Yeah, for yeah, everything. On top of that though, there's
so much like mother stuff there on aliens.
Like clearly it's very, there's a lot of like, like the alien is
a mother. She is a mother.
So the fact that she loses a child and then has a Newt and
everything is like part of the alien thing too.
So there's a lot of like mother stuff on top of the fact that
this system is called Mother too.
So game modes, this is where I will say, and this is where the
first I think comparison between Mothership will come into play.
The Alien RPG has two very specific game modes to play in.
One is cinematic play and one is campaign play.
And they are very different for like what you want to do.
So cinematic play is much more designed for very short,
potentially one shot games. It says cinematic scenario
emulates the dramatic arc of an alien film designed to be played
in a single session. This game mode emphasizes high
stakes and fast and brutal play. Conflict between players is
likely. You are not all expected to
survive. In fact, most of you won't.
And then there is the the one that comes with the starter set,
Charity of the Gods. I will say I love this that they
throw this. I don't know if you notice this.
Every time they mention something I'll read it
specifically it says one complete scenario.
Charity of the Gods is already available for separate purchase.
And then when it talks about dice, it says available for
separate purchase. I think the words available for
separate purchases in this book like 20 times, but this pre
generated scenario provides all the tools necessary.
So basically it is a very on rails cinematic experience with
specific arcs to play through and specific kind of like
emphasis for the way characters act and like their motivations
and stuff. And then the opposite of that
or, or in addition to that is called campaign play.
And they have the they both have these symbols.
The cinematic one kind of looks like the Instagram.
It very much looks like a camera.
It's like a circle inside of a circle, looks like a camera
lens. And then the campaign play one
is kind of like a four sided star with like triangles on the
corners. Campaign play is designed for
longer continuous play over potentially dozens of sessions.
And campaign play, the narrative of the game is to a higher
degree controlled by the GM as opposed to it being like an arc.
So it's more free form and allows for different stuff.
And one thing that I really like about it is the rules
specifically lend like are specific about being one or the
other. You know, I mean, like it's not
free form. There are cinematic play rules
and their campaign play rules, like 90% of it's the same.
But that 10% difference, the way that like, some character
motivations and stuff mechanically are different, to
me is very important. And I think that's one thing
that separates this game from Mothership, because I think I
talked about this with a bunch of Mothership people.
We've talked about it since we played Mothership twice
recently. A lot of Mothership feels like
it's built for campaign play. It's built for, like,
completely. Yeah, it's built for fuck me.
What is Luke Gearing's like? Insane awesome adventure.
Wolves upon the coast. No, no, no for mothership.
Oh for mothership Oh. Where's my brain?
Brain. It is the adventure for
mothership. Yep.
Why? Well, how were we both this
time? I don't know, like I was just
looking at my mother ship box set earlier, not today, but
we're doing great guys. If you're listening along with
us, you're really you're really great.
We love you. My my brain completely broke.
Oh, gradient descent. My fucking God.
Gradient descent, that's what we're, yeah.
It's like it's like 10. It's it's a longer thing.
So like in that game, like we've talked about this too, where the
stress in one shots is very rare, Like, and the difference
between like our first one shot and our second one shot is in
our first one shot was Josh. I think we all maxed out of
maybe like 3, maybe 4 stress. The only panic roll we rolled
was because Stella decided to. She wanted to roll it right with
Chris. Chris, how are you go back
Devil's Due and non of scoundrels over on Mother Ship
month right now. They started the game where if
you failed your this roll right off the bat.
No, you literally rolled AD 5 and because of the situation you
were in, that's how much stress you got.
So I started the game with five stress just because we started
in a stressful situation, which made a huge difference because
if we did get to 3 or 4 stress, we we were rolling for like
under 8 on panics, which is much different than rolling under
like 3 or 4. But in order to make stress
matter at all in the one shot, you pretty much have to start
with like 5 stress, which is again, it's not really built for
one shot, which realistically, I think a lot of people play one
shots, a lot of people. You can only get people together
to play one or two games, right? That there's probably some truth
to that and this this one probably is better for that.
Yeah, well, and I like I said, I like that mechanically there are
specific deviations. It's all it's fine.
It's all fine and dandy to to give explanation for your game.
But if you don't reinforce it with mechanical aspects of the
game, like a lot of people are just going to glaze over it.
Because I mean, look at how many people don't know what the fuck
the OSR is just, you know, know how many times it can be
explained because they glaze over the parts they don't want
to listen to pal anyway. So key themes, and this is
another part that I think is a very important page that I wish
mothership had. I know the Warden's Guide is
fantastic, but the key themes in this are there 3 really
important key themes are space horror, sci-fi action and sense
of wonder are the three keys. And I do love that it
specifically calls out both space horror and sci-fi action
as two separate themes versus and again, if you haven't listed
our Mothership review, I highly recommend going listen to that
just because but also so you understand the concept kind of
we're talking. I specifically said that I don't
think Mothership is a whore RPG. I think it's a sci-fi action or
sci-fi adventure framework more than anything, and I think the
same of this. I don't think this is really a
horror game either, but I think that it's more able to specify
being that because of the specificity in calling out the
themes and because of the two different styles of play
mechanically backed up anyway. Cruise devices, tools of the
game, character sheets, dice. There are specific dice.
There are the base dice and stressed dice.
I showed you those in the starter set parts.
Basically the sixes on one is the the good or bad one and the
ones on one is the the bad one, right?
Sixes on the base is good, ones on the stress is bad.
There are cards as well. There's a custom card deck
available available in the separate starter set.
These cards are used for two purposes.
Drawing initiative. So if you don't, I don't know,
The way a lot of Year Zero stuff works is you draw cards and the
cards give you the order for your like initiative and combat
and stuff like that. And if you decide to switch
with, like if your initiative changes, you just swap cards to
somebody and you just go in the order of the cards, which is
fine. It's a fine way of doing it.
Yeah, agreed. I have no strong feelings about
it one way. I mean, I have the cards so.
Yeah, I mean it's it works the same like you just if there's
five of you, you just draw from a deck and it even specifically
talks about if you don't have the the regular one when we get
to chapter 5, it does talk about like this is how to do it's just
a regular fucking deck of cards. I do There are no inline
hyperlinks in the PDF and this I know there are bookmarks, but I
don't even think the index is hyperlinked.
I know we adept like our thing and we jumped over it, but I
don't think there's any hyperlinks in the document on
the outside of the bookmarks. What is the role-playing game
The. Index.
Dope. What is the role-playing game?
You listen, this ain't your first time watching the show.
And if it is, I'm sorry, but we're not going over that
gorgeous piece here. Which realistically, I'm going
to be straight up is just the mirror of the mothership cover
but in grips art. Is this not the the mothership
dude? But like, his guts are inside
him? Wait a minute.
Yeah, I guess kind, I mean like I think if you put any.
Wait, no, like straight up here, Let me, let me let's OK, Boop,
boop, boop. Yeah, but that's anyone in like
a space suit with a little headlamp on it.
And I'm just saying, I'm not saying that that's what it's
supposed to be. I'm just saying like it's
interesting that it's very much a nice mirror image.
Gorgeous, gorgeous pizza. Anyway, So your character, this
is what I was talking about with specifically the differences
between cinematic play and campaign play.
So your your player character is your most important character
asset in cinematic play, such as hopes last day included in the
rule book. The player characters are
already provided for you. So in cinematic play you just
pick a pre generated character and they're usually more
characters available than the number of players.
So you just pick one right in camp campaign play, you do the
entire thing. And then before creating
characters, you decide on the framework of the game to decide
what kind of players. And this is another thing that I
like that I talked about specifically space trucker,
frontier colonists, colonial marines, like pick a framework.
So if you're going to do a space trucker adventure, do space
trucker stuff. If you're going to do a a marine
adventure, do marine stuff. If you're going to do a Cologne,
a colonist adventure, go, you know, colonize, don't colonize.
But like, you know what I'm saying?
Like, yeah, but it specifically calls out like, if you're going
to do Marine shit, just go do Marine shit.
Yeah. So how to create your
characters? Do you want to go through this?
You want me to just cruise through this?
Go ahead and just cruise. All right, so Cruise, Yeah, how
to create your characters. There is a one through 10 list
here. So #1 choose your career #2 You
spend points on your attributes. Bring up a dice for I'm gonna
have you make a character #3 spend points on your skills #4
choose your career talent #5 choose your name.
Number six, decide on your appearance #7 decide on your
personal agenda. That comes up in the difference
between cinematic and campaign play as well #8 choose your
buddy and rival #9 pick your gear and a signature item and
#10 you roll for cash. That Cash, Cash money.
So, so there are they, they run through the core concepts in
this section and then go through each of those things that you
don't hit going through. So there's a little bit of
redundancy here, but I don't mind it.
Again, especially for a, a book that might be people's first
role-playing game as any IP could be.
I don't mind it in here. But so career, basically you,
you pick one. They're described on pages 38 to
55, not hyperlinked. But one thing I do like the
entire way through is there's an example and they literally build
an entire character with you as you read through it while you're
building a character, which I think is in, which is great.
We always talk about good examples of play as you go
through mechanics in games, you know, and I and I always really
enjoy those, especially when they're done well.
And this is a great idea that I don't know if I've seen before.
Like that there's been a couple, there's been a couple that have
done OK that, but I think this one does it extremely well and
concise and I can't think of any specific that done it.
I think there might have been like a even like a spin for
Campbell, one that did it did remember when we did like the
maybe Slayers? Maybe.
But I think you're it's very rare.
I think maybe in like the 180 games we've done, it's been like
maybe one or two. That's a lot of games.
Holy shit I've read so many tabletop games.
Crazy, crazy. So attributes.
Your character has four attributes.
They are Strength, Agility, Wits, and Empathy, none of which
are combat, and they scale. Each is rated from 1:00 to 5:00.
Your attributes are used when you roll dice to perform actions
and also determine how much damage you can withstand before
becoming broken. Read about that in Chapter 5.
Your starting attributes. So when you create your player
character for campaign play, you distribute a total of 14 points
across your attributes, and with no less than two, and then no
more than forward any attribute. But androids are different.
Synthetic characters get plus three bonus to two.
They get differences and we'll go over that.
But there's also androids are whole different fucking life
forms in this. And I do really like that.
I like it a lot. Skills.
So skills are the knowledge and abilities you have.
They are important as they determine, along with your
attributes, how effectively you can perform actions.
There are 12 skills in the game and they are described in detail
in Chapter 3. We'll get to them and they also
go from zero to five. And again throughout this
there's more examples. So as a Roughneck, and that's
key attribute is strength. We give her Strength 5, you
know, Agility 3 and it's Wits 2, Empathy 4 and then example as a
roughneck and that's key. Skills are heavy machinery,
stamina in close combat we give her skills and blah blah blah
blah. So like it literally example by
example, section by section builds a character out for you
which is really great. It it does talk about no skill
level, so you can always roll for skill even if you don't have
any. It just could suck for you.
And then your starting skill levels.
When you create your character, you distribute a total of 10
points amongst your skills and you can assign up to three
points each of the skills listed for your career.
So it's always better to put the points into your career and
specifically your starting skills.
But you get 10 total. Talents are tricks, moves, or
minor abilities that you can get.
Everyone gets a starting talent and then there's a whole section
here on playing an Android and why it's different.
It says rules wise androids work a little differently than
humans. Androids get plus three bonus to
two attributes of their choice after the 14 attribute points
have been assigned. So you literally get like plus
3. You get 6 extra points for being
an Android you but you can't push skill rolls.
We get to that. You don't suffer stress and thus
don't have a stress level, and then you don't get a signature
item. You never make panic rolls.
But androids suffer damage differently as well, and that's
later. I like that androids like
because. No, I would go ahead, say what
you say. Oh, in Alien, the first time you
realize dude's an Android, you're just like, what the fuck?
And then like, especially in like Aliens, they're they're
literally, I mean, they're not human.
I was gonna say they're a whole different breed.
They obviously are, but like this game makes it, they really
feel really different. I do enjoy this like I love
again, we're comparing, I'm like, compared to mothership.
Like I love androids and mothership and they do get some
bonuses, but they pretty much work like people, you know, they
almost can't panic because of how high their panic score gets,
but they still could. And I'd like that.
This takes a whole different approach on it.
I agree. Yeah.
I, I, I Android feels different in the same way that Marine
feels different from scientists. You know what I mean?
Like it doesn't in this game, everyone is kind of roughly the
same. Then it's like, no, here's all
these different ways where androids are a whole different
fucking thing. So I, I dig that there's stress
and health. Everyone gets the stress level,
we'll get to that. And then you also have health.
So health points are equal to your strength score.
Talents can modify that. And then suffering damage.
When you suffer damage, your health score is reduced.
This is explained further in Chapter 4.
If it drops to zero, you're broken and you take a critical
injury, your personal stuff, your name, your appearance, all
those kind of things. So personal agenda, there is a
specific rule here that's a different between cinematic and
campaign play. Again, I love the mechanical
differences that they make the two different ways feel, and
this is one of them. So in cinematic agendas, the
play, the PCs agendas are predetermined by the scenario.
At the beginning of each of the three acts of the scenario, the
GM gives each PCA handout with a new agenda for the ACT.
The agendas are hidden, you don't show them to other
players. And at the end of each act, the
GM evaluates the actions and if you took specific actions to
further your agenda, you're awarded with story points and
then you can use that. So like, you literally don't
even know your character's agenda.
The GM hands it to you at the beginning of an act, you act
that out, and then when it comes to the next act, you get a whole
new agenda to do which. I think is really, I love that.
I really do think it's like a like from I haven't played this
obviously, but from reading it, it does like I'd like
mechanically how that works for like a one shot.
And also it that seems very fun from like a like one shot role
play perspective because you're not going to you're not trying
to build this character long term.
And so you get to just like, act out these scenes like an alien
movie from almost a script, but not quite a script.
Yeah, yeah, to remind me that I have a point about that, but I'm
going to need the campaign first.
So campaign agendas. In campaign play, you can pick
one of the suggested personal agendas or you can come up with
your own. At the end of each game session,
you discuss the agendas of all PCs together.
If you have taken some concrete action to further that, you gain
experience points. So one thing I love about these
two things and real quick tangent on why I'm not going to
say what I was going to say. Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, go for it. Genres are different and like if
someone who only listens to jazz gets handed a metal album and
goes man, this is really shitty jazz, I hate it.
Like that pisses me the fuck off because it's like you're not
even, it's not even the thing that you like.
So to to just be like I didn't get the thing that I liked so
I'm just going to talk. It's it's such a weird thing
than teach RPG space that people think that all teach RPGs are
like 1 monolithic thing and then if one is different than the way
that they like to play it, it's wrong versus not understanding
that genres are very different things like like story games are
very different than OSR. So someone who only likes OSR
reading a a a story game and going oh, but this doesn't have
this and this doesn't have that. And why is all this like other
stuff? Like it's just like because it's
not the same fucking game. You're allowed to dislike it and
say like I'm not a fan of that genre, but to bash is like
specific games because it's not the game that you like to play
without understanding that it's just a different genre.
It's so fucking acid on it drives me insane.
I love the difference between cinematic and can't playing play
here, but I can I can in my mind see someone being like the
cinematic could play isn't real immersive gameplay like I can
like there shouldn't be like arcs given to me storytelling,
blah blah blah. Like fuck off.
Like I think there are a lot of people that want to play
something that lends a little bit more towards like Fiasco
than fucking OSE, you know what I mean?
And that is fine for different experiences.
And that's someone who like frankly, I I very much play and
kind of lean towards the more like that kind of OSEOSR space
For me, if I sat down and someone want to run this game
and do the cinematic version, I would be stoked on having a
different experience of the game and having to like play out a
character in a way that maybe I wouldn't normally, you know?
Because there's a difference. I mean, there's a ton of people
out there that love just having a framework and the whole
concept of like, the referee is just an arbiter.
We tell the story. That's my preferred style of
play. I love the emerging gameplay.
And I don't like storytelling GM stuff, right?
But when I'm going to play a story game, I'm I'm, it's a
different again. It's like listening to a
completely different version of genre.
Like I listen to fucking Raging Machine on the way into work and
Tupac on the way home. Like it's music, but it's 2
completely different experiences for two completely different
reasons, you know what I mean? So like if I just want to have
like a one shot play, right, It's yeah, have a different play
experience and a different style of play.
The cinematic agendas to me seem so much fucking fun.
Yeah, but also you listen. These points are a great reason
to have like a session zero and the set expectations and talk to
your players about what they want to do.
Because frankly, like, if it's outside, you and I have the
ability to buy into something that's outside of our preferred
genre because we enjoy the hobby.
But some people don't want to leave their perverted genre
ever. It's fine.
Yeah, I mean, there's a definitely a big difference
between people that like TTRPGS and people that like a specific
genre of TTRPG, you know what I mean?
And then 5 E So buddies and rivals, Alien role-playing game.
So basically you pick a buddy, you pick a rival.
I like it. It's interesting, it's cool.
Yeah, you can you can feed into that as much as little as you
want and that's whatever player versus player.
There's a whole section here about PvP stuff.
So in cinematic play, basically it it's it happens like
specifically the the cinematic agendas force players into PvP
style situations, right. In campaign play, it's not very
often that that happens. So that I think is very much a
session zero thing to have versus more of the cinematic
one, which like going to that, you know, it's going to happen
in the campaign play. Like you could specifically say
like, let's just not do that shit.
Your gear is important of starting gear, signature gear.
And then there's vehicles and spaceships.
Honestly, my God, we're going to skip the vehicles and
spaceships. It's neat when I fucking talk
about it. Encumbrance is very much like
the, the, the, the, the year 0 engine is very much a dice pool
with a little bit of OSR stuff thrown in.
And like the whole encumbrance system is that heavy and light
items, you know, count for two, count for one.
Tiny items count for nothing. If you're over encumbered like
you, you make mobility scores at disadvantage and stuff like
that. Like, I like it, it works, it's
serviceable, That's fine. Consumables are on a supply
track. You track each of the four
consumables because there are four.
There is air, food, water, and electric power.
There are specific tracks marked as consumables, some of which
are group consumables and some of which come under encumbrance
rules such as like water and food because you have to carry
it. Fun, interesting.
Again, we had to do that in Coriolis with some of the
radiation stuff and things like that.
It was fun, it was interesting, it was neat.
It's clean and a very like well done clean way mechanically.
It's there's a whole page here specifically on food and water
and like the supply and how much they count for and things like
that. Basically this is and when to
make supply rolls like like air every turn you have to make a
check for air. After every students activity
like a combat roll or a mobility roll, you have to check for air,
water once per day, food once per day and power situationally
and then developing your character experience points.
This is one thing that year 0 engine always does.
Also they also do it in Dragon Band, which if not Year Zero
kind of is a little bit, but experience basically at the end
of the game very much like that. The space does the same thing.
You just ask a series of questions.
There's 12345678, there's 10 questions and every question you
say yes to you get an experience point.
And once you have, once you get, you can use those experience
points to level up your character, right?
And I like that. I like that better than just
being like, I killed 10 things so I got 10 XP points, whatever.
No, it's like the the questions are, did you participate in the
game session? If you were there, you'd get a
point, which the the unwritten part is if you don't, if you
don't show up for a session, you didn't get that experience
point. Like show up to the game.
Did you risk or sacrifice something?
Did you risk your life for your buddy?
Did you challenge your stand up to your rival?
Did you make a panic role? Did you overcome a dangerous
event? Those are the kind of things
it's very much like RP narrative based things to gain experience,
which I enjoy because it is a role-playing game.
Yes, I think this is a great way to reinforce what this game is
about and how this game works. Yeah, yeah.
And and again, this is very much of the year zero thing across
the board. This is how they all work,
spending XP. So this is how you can use the
points that you get. So skills to increase a skill
level by one step cost 5 XP. Learning a new new skill at
skill level 1 cost 5 XP to do this however blah blah blah blah
blah blah you have a teacher and shit talents.
Learning a talent always cost 5 XP.
It also requires a day of practice and a successful wits
role. You can make one attempt per
day. So you have to get 5 XP to bump
up a skill, 5 XP to to get a new talent, things like that.
And then changing your buddy and rival, you can do whatever the
fuck you want, whatever more gorgeous art.
Although, I mean, one thing that is is that we're not going to be
missing is is art throughout this entire book.
So you're going to build a character real quick and you're
going to pick one of the characters that we'll go
through. So you can go with Colonial
Marine, you can go with Colonial Marshall.
We didn't talk about that a bunch, but basically it's like
the the Colonial Marine police basically.
Yeah, you're, you're like in the Wild West.
You're like a Marshall, you know, it's a Yeah, you're
exactly right. It's colonial police almost, you
know, Yeah. So Marine Marshall, company
agent, Kid, medic. I love that they had kid in
this. I mean, it's like perfect.
Like, you know, alien. It's Alien, yeah.
Officer, A pilot. I mean, there's a ton of classes
here. Roughneck scientist and that's
it. So who, who, who are you going
with? Oh, real quick, big shout out,
because we're looking at this in pages, but in spreads.
This is a piece of art and everything about that character
in a single spread and shout out for that.
I fucking love that. It's very.
Convenient, yeah, let me let me kick the spreads real quick for
the chat and also that XP page. Gorgeous.
Yeah, yeah, you're right. As as I do enjoy that They did
do it and in the book too. It's built and spreads like this
with the art. Who who else did 1 like this
very similar. They had like art piece doom art
piece doom. I can't remember.
We liked it. I don't remember.
Honestly, I remember. Us having the conversation.
Yeah, but yeah, you're right, The two page spreads with the
art and the piece are fantastic. So who who we who we, who we
going to go with? Let's do one that I wouldn't
ever do because I like that sometimes.
Company agent. Interesting.
OK, so let me go back to the. Corporate guy.
I wear a suit. I don't have this beard, you
know. Yeah, I was going to say that
beard. You've been you've been kicking
it. It's.
Winter agent, my winter beard. Maybe I should.
No, not my God. So, company agent, you're
hungry. Space is full of opportunity and
you've been assigned to the frontier to find the next big
thing. From insider information to new
mineral deposits blah blah blah blah blah.
You're the company man, you know obviously.
So your key attributes is wit, right?
Your key skills are comptech, observation, manipulation.
Your career talents are cunning, personal safety and taking
control, personal agenda. So you choose one of these
three. So you are greedy for power and
never miss an opportunity to get ahead?
Or the company is holding back information from you.
What and why? Or you are a nice guy but the
company is blackmailing you to do The Dirty work.
Get even. Which of those three would yours
be? Definitely the second one.
The company is holding back information from you.
What and why? Nice, nice.
So you're you're you're the inside man trying to trying to
figure it out I. Like that I worked for the
company for a few years. But things aren't just smelling
right, you know? Yeah, got that stank on it.
So appearance wise, there's a bunch listed here that are like
icy glare, disarming Spile, an expensive Rolex.
You're tanned, which I guess would be weird.
Yeah. Emotionless stare like what?
What, what? What is?
What is some appearance? What do you look like?
Oh, you know what? I think I'm going with two of
them. I'll do expensive.
No, not for what I'm playing, actually.
Let's do icy glare and monogram silk tie.
Dope, dope. What's that?
Well, what's what's? Well, I so let's just scroll up
and say typical names or what kind of name would you go with?
Let's pick one of the typical names and we'll do Mercedes
prints. Mercedes prints nice.
OK. So it's got like an MP?
Bougie name? Yeah.
I do think it's like kind of like a masculine name, 2 minute
names, but it does make a difference.
Like who? I I kind of got that as well,
but I'm I'm fine with breaking them old or you know, my my
character is what's sad. For no reason whatsoever, I
randomly found this thing of this person in Germany's talking
about how Americans don't say things correctly like Mercedes
or Volkswagen or like anything like that.
But, and I don't remember how they said it, but we definitely
say it wrong. I don't.
Care. Yeah, signature item.
Choose one of the following or come up with your own.
So this has letter of corporate authorization divorce papers.
Great. It's one of the it's one of my
favorite things in the China gang.
I'm just like, why, bro? Like, but of course, you know
what I mean. And then employee of the year
award or whatever I'm. I I think I'm going to stick
with what's on the list and do letter of corporate
authorization. Dope.
OK, The, the, the the worst one on the list, but that's a good
one narratively. Narratively.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe. Yeah.
But are you? That was good.
You're sniffing around. I meant maybe as man because I
took the feminine name. And yeah, yeah.
Maybe my character is Sam. Yeah, yeah, I can be whatever I
want. You can be whatever you want
even not in space gear. Choose two of the starting items
below and you also get 2D62 D 6 * 100 cash.
So leather briefcase or Chrome briefcase, gold plated pen or
Rolex watch data transmitter card with corporate clearance
level or M4A3 service pistol and D6 doses never sleep or D6 doses
nap relieve. I'm going to do the data
transmitter card with corporate clearance level.
Which makes sense with the corporate authorization.
Yeah, and then I probably would do D6 doses of never sleep.
Yeah, of course, because you're the, you're the, you're the
company. How do you didn't get to the top
for no fucking reason, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I got to, got to take down.
So I have to get. I have to figure out what's
happening as quickly as possible before the company discovers I'm
trying to figure out what's going on and gets rid of me.
It's of course, I mean, this is the thriller movie, you know,
after all, I always enjoy when we.
Build characters especially in games like this where you can
really internalize lore and like you get these items that you can
really like will lend to your internalized lore.
Well, even if you look at your again, like your key, your key
skills include contact, observation and manipulation,
and your talents are cutting personal safety and taking
control. So you definitely built a guy, a
person who I I just think it's it's it's very much that like
you were like the man, but something made it like picking
your head where you just went. No, Oh God, what is that?
This is not the style of the movie, but like kind of the way
it it changes in your head. What is the name of that movie
with Christian Bale with like the gun, like gun Foo before
Keanu Reeves did gun Foo. It was like.
Equilibrium. Equilibrium is it's so insanely
that so many people haven't seen it because they didn't do the US
release, because they did it did so well overseas.
They don't want to risk losing money in America, so they didn't
release it. It is such an insanely good
movie. It's very much like a like a
Fahrenheit 451 kind of thing where people like don't feel
feelings and then he starts to feel feelings, but he was
originally like the guy that kills the people that feels
feelings. It's such an amazing movie.
I love it so much. I need to see it.
You're not the first person even I think recently be like, you've
seen that like, yeah, it's. Excellent.
Yeah, it is an excellent movie. See chat test.
It's an excellent movie for those watching.
Don't forget we stream live on Twitch every Friday morning at
10:00 of ish, not some Friday mornings at roughly 10 to 10:30.
Beautiful page here. So skills.
There's a quote here from Ripley.
Hey, I feel kind of like a fifth wheel here.
Blah blah blah, drive the loader.
So there are 12 skills in the game and they are as listed.
Heavy Machinery which is strength skill, Stamina which is
strength, close combat which is strength, Mobility, Range Combat
and Piloting which are all agility.
Observation, Comtech and Survival, which are all Wits,
and Command, Manipulation and Medical Aid, which are all
empathy skills and your primary skill is wit it.
Was. Your primary attribute, yeah.
Comtech observation or. And manipulation.
Oh, manipulation, right? Yeah, so role-playing is
intimate. Yeah, role-playing is intimate
conversation. The GM sets the scene, blah
blah, blah, and says yeah, wait a minute, I love this.
So the Jim sets the scene, you scarbage.
When I do, she tells you how the PCs react, you respond and so on
back and forth. The story grows one step at a
time and everyone is happily ever after.
Yeah, just getting that last part.
Not on the frontier, you don't. That's I'm talking.
I love there some personality written into it.
I think they did a really good job writing this.
Sooner or later. The shit, just like Prisoner
Murphy hits the fan. Things come to a head and a
point of no return is reached. And like that's like you said,
like I'm kind of annoyed by the IPS, but then when I read the
books, I'm like, but you do such a good job.
Like you do such a good job. You're not as angry about when
you're like, this is, this is great.
It's not like. No, everything I've played,
everything I've played from freely is fantastic.
Like I wasn't the biggest fan of Dragon Bane just because of the
style is different than my style, but as an RPG it's it's
for people that are are used to five and want to play something
better. Dragon Bane is actually better
better than shadow dark too, but it just wasn't my game.
So rolling dice. Oh my God.
Wait a minute. You mean just never mind?
There are 12 total skills. Like we said, there are 4
attributes, Strength, agility, wits, and empathy.
They go from zero to five. I don't.
Do you want to sit down and actually like, plan out where
your numbers and stuff go or are you good with where you're at
with that? No.
We we have a rough idea. We we all if you're listening
along, you kind of understand the type of character I'm
playing and also I would really like reinforce a lot of like the
key skills and I would probably also just anything extra.
I would invest in other things that really push this whole,
like the internal company SPY kind of narrative.
Yeah. Absolutely.
So rolls without skills. So as mentioned in chapter 1,
there's two types of 6 headed dice.
There are the base dice and the stress dice.
We'll get to both of those, but normally 6 headed extra fine.
Again, on the base dice 6 is a good.
On the stress dice ones are bad, like like worse than normal.
So rolls without skills. If you don't have the skill
required for the action and you want to perform it, you can roll
it in a way. Simply roll a number of base
dice equal to your attribute as well as any stress dice.
Because basically look at it so mean success when you use a
skill. First, first describe what your
character does or says. OK, every fucking teacher, every
player out there, first describe what you want to do or say what
you want to say. And then the GM will say if you
need to roll dice, bro, you walk into a room, there's a box in
there, roll the perception, roll the perception check to see if
you see a box like anyway, OK, so do all of that and then add
your skill level to your score and the attribute connected to
the skill. Grab that many base dice.
If you have stress dice, add these to the dice pool as well,
which I love. So basically let's say that your
your wits is 4 and your manipulation is I think that's a
wits is, is 3, right? You would roll. 10IN dice.
Whatever fucking it doesn't matter Comtech, right?
So if you have like a widths of four and a Comtech of three, you
you roll 70 sixes, OK. And if you have any stress,
let's say you have two stress, you also roll 2 stress dice.
So you roll 90 sixes trying to get a trying to trying to
succeed, right? So you add your stress to your
roles. So it could actually so they
said. Then just roll the dice
together. If your action action to
succeed, you must roll at least 1-6.
If not, your action fails. If you roll more than 1/6, you
can perform stunts. I will say this, you will be
surprised. There's a big difference between
dice pool games that go success on 456 and success on only 6.
If you go watch our AP. If you go watch our AP of
Coriolis the Great Dark, I failed so many times rolling
like I think up to like 11 D sixes fail fail.
Like it's insane. Like mathematically it didn't
make sense. But like I I failed a lot of
891011 D 6 rolls because it you specifically have to get a six
which is crazy. When we played my first version
of Adip's My Sorcerer's in Space game, it's it was passing only 6
at that point. And I mean they would roll like
a ton of dice and it just, it's insane how much you can miss.
And there's a amazing and beautiful table I think on the
next page that is a chance of success table.
Yeah. That we'll we'll get to when we
get there, but. Yeah, we'll get to it.
But it's it's it's crazy. Yeah, it's great.
And like I said, I mean, we like, I think Cosmosaurus is
456, right? Like a lot of Spencer Campbell
stuff is 456, like the loom system is 456.
A lot of dice pools do like a mixed success 456 kind of thing,
or like 4-5 is like a partial success and six is like a full
success. Having the only way you succeed
only be sixes is fucking crazy. Anyway, so the alien symbol on
the stressed ice, the one is replaced by the alien symbol.
If you roll one or more you risk panicking.
So basically as we said, if you have 4 based ice and you and
then a skill that had a three, so you have 7 and say you have
two stress, that's nine. You roll 96.
You have to get a six on any of those nine dice, including the
stressed ice, in order to succeed.
But if specifically if the stress dice come up as a one,
you potentially panic. So stress both helps and
potentially makes that suck for you.
I, I like it. I think it's a really
interesting dice pool mechanic. Me too and I.
Love dice pools and I like the, I like talking about the math of
them just because I've, I've looked into it now so much.
I'm just like, you guys don't understand, Like you can roll a
fucking handful of dice and that's not nearly enough, you
know? Yeah.
Then what they do with the extra successes is really good too.
Again, again, Coriolis basically took all of this.
Yeah, the stunts are so good. So we get a very good so so so
gear. Gear can give you extra based
ice to roll, but not always. So there's a specificity of the
gear where sometimes it will give you a base dice or an
effect or something like that. And I like that they use gear in
a very kind of amorphous wave with multiple canics, one of
which could just be more dice, right?
The art of failure. If you don't roll any sixes,
something goes wrong. For some reason, you fail to
achieve your goal. Feel free to elaborate on why,
but I do like this part. It says failure must not stop
the story completely. Even when you fail, there must
be a way forward, perhaps at the cost of time, risk, or dollars,
but still away. The GM is the final say on the
consequences of failure. The one last chance you have is
pushing the role, which is which is 1.
So we'll get to pushing the role in a second.
So chance of success table talk about that.
So a couple of notes, things I was thinking while you were
speaking, a couple things. I love the the art of failure
part because it's that very much nothing never happens, which is
good. Nothing should never happen.
If they fail, there still should be always number what game you
are playing. There should be a path forward.
My second note is I don't like when games have like proprietary
dice and that have symbols on them and they reference the
symbols within the game all the way through.
I understand, like you probably will get them and all of us
understand that now the the plus symbol is a six and the good
dice and the face hugger symbol is one on the bad dice.
It's just like a minor annoyance that I have.
Like I like to plan for things that people will, you know,
people will have, you know, people will have dice.
Doesn't really matter. It's a minor gripe.
I get it, but that's my minor gripe.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's valid. I do think they did a good job
of like explaining above, like which is which, but you're
right. Like if you notice when I read
it, I just had six because I was just like, fuck it.
Like I'm not talking with and. If I get those dice and I have
them, I know that the. The one symbol is the good.
One, yes, is the digit that's missing, yeah.
But no, I mean that's completely valid.
I think my counterpoint, because you brought this up a little bit
before stream, was I also don't mind when a game wants you to
experience the game specifically, but in the rules
text itself. Yeah, I I would not mind if
every time that symbol was there in parenthesis that said 6 next
to it every time in the entire time.
I wouldn't mind that at all. It's a very minor gripe and it
doesn't affect my way I feel about this game at all.
It's incredibly minor. If you were listening to this,
I'm just being implicated. Bull fuck.
Pedantic is part of our personality.
So chance of success. This is a table that shows the
chance of a of a single die rolling A6 based on the number
of die you have in your pool that you're throwing.
I just think it's a convenient thing to have and I think a lot
of people have a really good understanding of like what AD 20
success looks like and like how it's a 20 sided diet.
Every, it's 5% each, each one, each number is 5% chance, right?
But when you get dice pools, it becomes a lot murkier.
Murkier. Like even I'm like, I pull up a
thing that I have that runs the probability for me to pull it
from. So I'd like that this adds
context to what it looks like. It's OK, if you've one die,
there's a 17% chance of you succeeding unless you push it,
and then even pushing it that's 29%.
I I think there's very few instances in this game where
you'll only have one die. But I just like the context this
gives a player. It's like oh shit like even 4
dice is like a 50% chance essentially unless I push it. 10
dice is only an 84% chance of success.
That means with 10D6 you have a 16.
You have a 16% chance of failure, which is crazy like and
but pushing it. Obviously the math works out
where you have a 90% plus chance of pushing with seven dice.
That's insane to me. The the, the dice numbers here.
I like dice pools. I don't always love when they
get to like really the massive sizes of dice pools, which is
why I think I generally prefer games where it's not just a pass
on 6, because the moment you say it's a pass on five or six, the
math gets more forgiving, although still not incredibly
forgiving. But you can make a dice pools a
little bit smaller without. Well, so so 10 is 10 is for the
most part the Max, right? Because.
But the odds of getting to 10, but the odds of getting to 10 is
very small, right? Remember when you start the
game, in order to have a 10, you have to Max out one of your
attributes and Max out a skill, right?
But you start with like generally like your Max will
probably be about 3 in an attribute and maybe like 3 in
the scale. So your dice pulls are roughly
when you start going to be about like 6 and then maybe with some
gear it'll be about 7. But realistically 66.
Especially the dice that they have, which are a little bit
smaller. I don't mind being like fucking,
I'm rolling 10D6. I mean, I like that's when
obviously we did it digitally, but like, you know, you would
have to have your own. One thing that I do like about
the proprietary dice, when you're rolling 10D sixes, you
don't even have to try to look at numbers, you just for symbols
that. Is so true.
That is a big upside of having their dice for.
This game, but I do I do I think it's a really interesting number
set because like you said, it's it's very different than like
2D6, which is my favorite or or two of anything because there's
a specific curve that you're going to run into every time.
Obviously D20 is 5% chance. D100 obviously is whatever it
is, right? Like if you need to roll under
50, you have 50%. Like, you know what I mean?
Like, it's obviously the easiest one.
The dice pool math is so fucking interesting.
And the pushed math makes it even more so.
But yeah. So how do you push A roll?
So pushing your roll, I'm sorry, there's a whole block here for
describe your action. You create a story together.
In the Alien RPG, a dice roll is a dramatic high point.
First you describe what you were trying to to achieve so that
everyone knows what is at stake. Then you roll your dice,
interpret the result. Describe what happens.
Describe what you do, what you say, everything like that.
I like that. Numerous times in the game it
says listen, describe, describe your action, describe this thing
like don't just roll dice first, do a thing.
So I like that it reinforces that over and over and over
again. People are still going to ignore
it. Pushing your role if you are
desperate to succeed. If you are desperate to succeed
with the dice, you can choose to push the roll.
This means that you grab all the dice that didn't show 6 and roll
them again and you get a new chance to roll A6.
Usually you would only push if you failed, but sometimes even
if you succeed, you could push so that you can get more right.
Pushing A roll is not without risk.
It increases your stress level so you can only push your role
once. If you don't succeed on your
second try, you just have to deal with the consequences so
you can roll. If you fail, you can push and
then you're fucked. Like that's all it is.
I really like pushing the role. I think it's, I think it's just
fun, you know, like you grab all the ones that didn't pass, you
get to roll a big group of them again.
I don't know, I just I think action wise in real life is just
a fun thing to do. Yeah, so, so don't, I mean we're
always looking to chat and we're always like type in a chat, but
we don't always talk to chat because like we do put this on
YouTube and stuff. But someone just asked, isn't
this consequences from PBTA? My God, if that's not a kid in
Worms that I would love to open for an hour.
But Long story short, PBTA realistically, to me, despite
what the Bakers claim, what Pbta is, which originally was just
supposed to be a name that they published up under Pbta is
really defined by the narrative tools that the game itself uses,
right? Like the, the pick lists and,
and, and things like that, like the playbooks and the moves and
the pick lists and, and whatnot. So the game and the rules
themselves are very built around these narrative mechanics,
right? Like if you do this, if you roll
this, you have these two options.
If you roll this, you have these two options.
Roll this, you have these two options.
The game is very much designed to be run through these kind of
choke points of narrative choices, right?
Those choice points don't exist here.
The the possibility of like consequence and stuff like that
exists in all TPG, right? That is just consequence isn't
is a is a is is the result of choice right?
Is there's a consequence that comes across it.
But in PBJ specifically, PBJ is built to mechanize the narrative
elements of storytelling so that it is much more so.
So it's more mechanical, like it specifically has the narrative
mechanics built into versus this, which it doesn't have
those. It has the framework in order
for you to come up with your own consequences, but you're not
driven specifically into the mechanical narrative framework
that PBTA is built on, which is the part of PBTA I don't like.
I like more free form, but I completely understand why people
like that. And I think Pbta people would
definitely prefer the cinematic version of this game because of
the kind of mechanical. Grant And it wasn't over the top
at all. I'm really proud of you for
that. Someone made your PBTA and you
didn't go all the way off script.
I'm really proud of you. Hey Lyson, great, good for me.
The only thing that really bugs me is just because something is
2D6 makes success doesn't mean it's PBTA.
That's not that doesn't define PBTA because if it does then why
is no dice, no masters PBTA? You know what I mean?
Like it is the is a mechanical narrative framework that really
defines PBTA moves, playbooks, things like that.
I think anyway, so yeah, everything's a move.
Listen, I'm going to scroll the next page.
I'm going to use the scrolling move.
So stress level. So pushing yourself builds
tension to a point where you risk going into a wild panic or
a stress level. When you push A roll, your
stress level increases by 1. Mark that down in a character
sheet before you re roll your dice because notice this is
before you re roll your dice because you always add your
stress. So if you have an increased
stress level, guess where you get to add more stress?
When making secure rolls, including the immediate reroll
when pushing, add a number of stress dice to your dice pool
equal to your current stress level.
What's interesting is when you push A roll, you both increase
your chance of success and increase your chance of terrible
failure, which I love. That's The thing is the year 0
engine is fucking good. Like it is really good.
Like they do a really good job of and incorporating it into the
system that they want. Like the stress and panic in
Alien RPG using like the way that they do the year 0 engine,
they do a really fucking good job.
You know, the the more I always say this like I read, we read
these games separately and then we go through them together
again, like in the show, and I always gain like a better
understanding for a lot of these, maybe not all of them.
Some of them I like show into that.
I study it like it's a religious text.
I still think for this game and like for Coriolis, like man, I'd
make it 5-6. I mean, maybe I'm just not
hardcore as everyone else, but I don't think it's.
Necessarily about being hardcore, I think the problem,
the only issue with that is how much you would change the math.
You know what I mean? Like.
Yeah. Because like, if that's the if,
if that were the case, like you would really want to drop your
skills down, but then the math would still be the same.
Because if you go, OK, now you Max out at 3:00.
But if you're saying 5-6 basically like I mean it's the
Alien RPG in yeah I I could see doing 5-6 in campaign play and
leaving it as 6 for cinematic play.
That I think that's maybe the way I I wouldn't necessarily
start playing this game and immediately make the adjustment.
It's just kind of reading chat as we've been going and also
thinking about my own experience with dice games.
I have a single point pass. I'm like fuck, it is brutal
sometimes. It is but but actually, you know
what? I know I said that you Max out
at 10. That's not true because if you
have a Max attribute, Max skill, and then you have like five
points of stress and you have a piece of gear, you can be
rolling 16D6. But I hear what you're saying.
When I, when we played Coriolis, I know we failed a lot, but I
didn't feel like it was so brutal.
That wasn't fun. OK.
You weren't frustrated by it. I was pissed off that I kept
failing, but it felt it fit. It fit, you know what I mean?
Like I, I, I, we succeeded enough at the things we needed
to succeed at and things like that.
Like I wasn't at the end of the game, I wasn't mad at how bad I
was rolling. It was more of just like
everyone being like, oh man, look at you rolled like a bunch
of bats and stuff. Like we saw it fun, you know
what I mean? Like it wasn't unfun and it
didn't feel so brutal because a lot of it was for like
exploration and things like that.
It wasn't, it wasn't so bad that it was bad, but if you wanted a
game to just to, to be more successful, to be a little bit
more heroic, I can imagine like Symbroom or something like that,
to to be like that. I don't think it would break the
game. I do think it would be a very
different play experience If you did change it to five and six.
You're probably right. So panic pushing dice rolls is a
little like playing blackjack. It increases your chance of
success, but if you push too hard, you can suffer
consequences. When you're all stressed dice
and scroll and have one or more alien symbols or A1, you cannot
push the roll. Instead, you must immediately
make a panic roll. See page 104.
We're going to talk about the panic table a lot.
A panic roll can cause your skill roll to fail no matter how
many. So you could roll, you could
roll ten. You can roll 9 based ice and one
stressed ice. So you roll 10D6 and if you roll
9 sixes and one one on the stressed ice, you fail.
Most likely in almost opposition to what I was just saying.
I'm actually super into that. So it'll be like an Alien game,
like just full blown panicking and freaking out and everything
going wrong. Like that's that's perfect for
this. And I like the way I I on.
We'll get to the panic table. I have thought so.
Ammo if your action is firing a weapon with a limited magazine.
Thank God they say magazine did the star thing because honestly
I love the horse hair. See and I love Warhammer.
But if one more you fuckers calls it a clip and not a
magazine, I'm going to freak the fuck out.
Rolling one or more alien means that you empty the magazine in
addition to making a panic roll. I love that that like you
failed. So even though you're trying to
like 1, you just go like freak out.
I love it. It's so good.
There's a whole huge example here about stress and taking
stress and stuff. It's really good.
Honestly the examples of this entire book, fantastic.
It does talk about the story points here.
In a cinematic scenario, which is like the the one shot
version, you can spend a story point to get one automatic 6 on
a dice roll. You can spend the story point
after a failed roll or even after a successful rolls add an
extra D6, an extra like success. You gain a story points by
following a personal agenda. So like because it's a cinematic
game and you're handed your agendas, playing into the
narrative in the RP gives you story points, which allows you
to succeed at roles which could give you more story points.
Great system. Again, I love the mechanical
emphasis they put on the differences between cinematic
and campaign play. So NPC isn't pushing NPCS?
Can't you only have one chance? We talked about that you can't
push more than one group roles. When you face a challenge
together with other PCs, don't roll dice separately and say you
choose the one person among you most suited to take up the
challenge and the others can help if it's relevant to the
situation. If the role fails, it counts the
failure for everybody and modifying the role so external
factors can come into play. This gives you fewer or more
base ties. It's called modification.
Modification plus one means you roll an extra 1 + 2 means 2 -, 1
means -1 -, 2 means -2. So fear modifications can apply
to the same role. Simply add them together.
So you can get plus twos and minus ones and all sorts of
stuff. Basically there's there's
situations that you're in and things that can be happening
that modify the role. So gear can help, the difficulty
of the action could hurt, help from others can help.
So it's not just flat, there is more to the the the situation
and I like that a lot of it is narrative being brought into it.
So there is a difficult table here.
Basically, if something is a trivial action +3, just don't
even fucking roll if it's trivial like.
It's interesting because maybe 2 pages back we kind of skipped
over, but there is a little blurb.
It says don't roll too often. Yeah.
And then almost immediately, like when you get to difficulty,
it's like, oh, for a trivial task like, then they but it's a
+ 3. It's like, well, don't roll too
often if it's. If it's a trivial task, why
would they roll? I'm glad you brought that up
because there is some wording in here that I hate that I hate a
lot. Don't roll too often.
Dice rolls are dramatic moments. Pushing increases stress and can
trigger panic. Rolling dice too often can cause
the stress mechanic to spiral out of control too quickly, but
that might never roll dice unless it's absolutely
necessary. I fucking hate that wording.
I hate anytime something is like never or all or things like
that, because again, this is one thing that I didn't like about
mothership is like never roll dice, never rolled.
The stress in the panic is part of the core of the game.
Honestly, it it should say like don't make players roll too
much, but like engaging with the stress mechanic is part of the
fun of the game. So saying that basically don't
ever. My problem with never is people
that are less experienced in TRBDS might be like, well, then
I'm just not, you know, I'm not like they don't understand the
nuance of that. So I would prefer.
Absolute. Yeah, I like, I think it should
be like, you know, avoid rolling in unless you unless you really
have to, knowing that it could, you know, spiral the stress out
of control. I don't like this is never.
I think Mothership does the same thing where it says like never
fight right after the combat page.
So there's a difficulty table here it goes -3 up to plus 3.
Whatever help from others. When someone helps you, you get
a + 1 modification and the most you can get from help is +3
oppose roles. They do exist.
Sometimes rolling AD 6 isn't enough to succeed with your
skill roll. In some cases you have to beat
your foe in an opposed check. So basically you have to
actually beat them. Tie goes to the bad guy because
every success your opponent rolls deletes one of your
successes. So at the end of the day, you
could be tied at no successes, which means like no, what's up?
So for PvP. Yes.
Would you say it would be opposed rolls?
It would depend on the situation.
I mean yeah, I like if me and you were fighting, I would say
opposed rolls. If me and you are both like
racing down somewhere, I would say both.
Like you know what I mean, Roll both.
Each of you roll your own separate skill checks and
whoever has the most, you know what I mean?
But at the end of the day, it's based.
It's the same thing. Like what's the difference
between 2 pose rolls and us doing like one each?
And whoever has the most success is still gets success, right?
But yes, if I was doing PVPI would 1,000,000% say oppose
rolls. But the specific things that
they show here are things like it says the polls rules are
common when you use things like manipulate or mobility to sneak
and things like that. And it says the GMA also used to
polls rules when she determines it's appropriate, like rolling
stamina versus stamina for like an arm wrestling contest.
So I would say that if we were actually fighting, I would still
do oppose rolls, but I think it would depend on the situation.
Like if I have my gun out and you are dodging, I would do like
like a range shot and have you do a like a mobility check to
dodge behind something. And if my shot, if my range
attack has more successes than your dodge, I hit you, you know,
I mean, that's how I would run it.
So I would absolutely. Run in that situation.
If say that I'm shooting and you're dodging and it goes to 0,
I mean nothing, never not happens.
I would probably say it doesn't hit you.
But then I would give the person who I might say that like you
don't come up from your role like super well or something
like that, or the other person because you dodge has a chance
to move first. You know what I mean?
Like I would give like kind of an equal because obviously like
what you what the defender wants is the offender not to offend,
right. So I would really.
In that situation. Absolutely.
It mentions PvP earlier and it doesn't really go in on anymore
and I thought there was some more expansion in the opposed
rules, but I there's really there is.
I think there's some PvP maybe later, but I'm not sure we'll
have to look at it so now we get into a breakdown of the entire
skills list, which is a weird spot to have it because we
talked about skills forever ago He.
Did can't talk. About it, but it's really long,
so I it's it's weird. So here's a close combat, which
is one of the biggest cards here.
But for every skill we'll we'll specifically talk about this.
There is so it says the word of alien is a brutal place.
Sometimes you have choices, sometimes you don't blah blah.
So there's a list here says on a failure, it gives examples you
stumble and miss. Now it's your opponent's turn on
success, you hit and afflict damage equal to your weapons
damage rating. And then there are stunts.
So I don't know if we missed stunts or we're going to run
into it in a second, but basically every time that you if
you get a six, you succeed. If you get an additional 6, you
can spin it on stunts and there are stunts listed mention about
I don't think we hit the stunt rule yet.
It might be after this. So there are stunts specific to
the skill right? So for example, for every extra
6, choose one of these stunts. So in close combat you inflict
one more point of damage. You can choose the stunt
multiple times if you roll more, if you roll several extra.
So if you roll 5, you can do four extra points of damage on
top of your success. Another one is you outmaneuver
your enemy and can trade initiative scores.
You knock or pull a weapon or other object from your opponent.
You choose which your opponent is knocked to the ground.
So there is there really realistically is a little bit of
that Pbta narrative tools. I definitely feel it more within
these, you know? Yeah, it for stunts.
So it's it's a kind of a weird mix of of of those kind of
narrative bits. But I do like these there's a
much bigger list, but I also do like that there's definitely
this I I like if someone was like, but could I also do this
instead if it fits into the the rest of the stunts, like some
type of close combat thing? This not on this.
I would absolutely let them do it right.
There's weapons in close combat. You can use your weapon as a
club and then blocking when I'm attack you in close combat, you
can try to block. So there are those things listed
for every skill. There are failures, success and
stunts for all 12 talked about a group, self, role, whatever.
I really like some of the failures, like Piloting's
failure. It's just like, you come in too
hot, you crash and burn. And I just think that's like,
that's a very hilariously dramatic and like deadly
failure. Yeah, it's really good.
Like empathy, our manipulation. Your adversary won't listen and
won't do what you want. They might start to dislike you
or even attack you. Yeah.
So they're really good. There's a whole section here
about like negotiating position, as in like your chances of
manipulation are affected by your negotiating position, which
is determined by the GM. Each of the following factors
gives you plus one to your role. You have more people on your
side. What you ask for doesn't cost
your opponent anything. Your opponent has suffered
damage. There's that's very, that's a
very Blades table thing if I've ever seen it.
I do like that they pull in the parts of the games that I'm not
a huge fan of. The parts that I do like.
Yeah, that's very fair. Yeah.
I really like like how the skill system works in this.
You also don't like necessarily have like you have like a few
skills, but there's not you won't have so many starting off.
That's kind of daunting learning how each of them work.
I feel like by the time you obtain new skills, you'll have
several of these like, you know, kind of down.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I completely agree.
Yeah, because you only start with like 3 and let's move on.
Yeah. So there are talent, right?
There's there's talent for each character, which are basically
like little bonuses you can do. So Colonial Marine, Colonial
Marshall, company agent. So let's specifically go over
the company agent talents because that's what you had.
So your options are cunning, personal safety and take
control. Which would you pick?
And then read that and what we'll talk about.
OK, so. I'm immediately probably going
to go with Cunning. If the company has taught you
anything, it's to always be on the lookout for anything that
can give you an edge. You can push any skill role
based on wits twice, not just once like other characters.
Each push increases your stress by 1.
I like that stuff. Like I think it really lends to
the characters like just kind of paranoid, like really pushing
the line of maybe getting killed by the company or falling to
their own paranoia. Yeah, yeah.
Oh, that's a bro. We should, we should, we should
do Paranoia. That's a that's a cool game.
So yeah. So talents are cool.
There's also a huge list of general talents because again,
you can with five XP, you can learn a new talent.
So there's bodyguard, calm breather, counselor, Ava,
specialist, fast reflexes, healer, hidden stash.
Any of these jump out to you. Just I like coup de See page 99
without rolling for Empathy. Also, your stress levels
decrease decrease by one step each time you cause an enemy to
be broken. Yeah, that's terrible.
Yeah, cuz so that is a rule Later you can coup de So you
literally have to roll an you have to fail an empathy check.
God I have so many murder hobo groups in my past that really
could have used some sort of rule like that.
Yeah, you have to fail an empathy check in order to coup
de Grasse somebody, but I love yeah, so I love this one.
This literally like, Nope, you don't have to do that, bro.
There's a whole another page. PAC mule, quick draw, second
win, weapon specialist. I mean, there's a lot of really
cool talents. And one thing that I really like
about these, one thing that specifically that I didn't like
about Dragon Bane because it does use kind of a similar kind
of like skills list, but there's like 20 of them.
But then a big chunk of the game is built on these not talents.
I can't remember what they're called, like heroic, heroic
abilities or whatever. And like you have to you have to
do the thing. But like they're shit like
grappling and stuff like that was in there are like 2 handed
weapon fighting and I'm like, I hate one of the things that I
dislike most about 5 E is the what's it called?
It's not They're not stunts. What are they called in 5 E
feet? Because there's shit in there
that should just be the regular game, you know?
I mean, like grappling shouldn't be hidden behind a feet wall.
Like it should just be a regular thing.
So one thing that I like about and Dragon Band kind of has a
bunch of those where it's just like, why isn't this just a
regular part of the game? One thing that I do like about a
lot of these is that they don't feel like a regular part of the
game. Like a lot of them are bonuses
above and beyond you. Do things that mechanically you
could not do otherwise. Right, but that don't that don't
feel like you. Should be able to do it right?
Like like light Eater, when making a supply roll for food,
you get to roll 2 dice fewer for your supply level to a minimum
of one die because you eat like like that doesn't like that's
not something missing from the game, right?
So I really like the way that they did the general talents and
all the talents specifically because it doesn't feel like
they they took something out of the game and, and and locked it
behind a talent wall. It feels like they just have
bonuses, which is, which is interesting.
I feel like 1:45 is a really low number.
It's like going down anyway, combat in panic.
So here's the thing. We're on page 81 of a 400 page
book, but we're not going over half the book because of the
chunk of its law. We're actually almost done.
Fight or flight? That's a big question now, isn't
it? You may feel invincible tucked
away behind your cozy character sheet, but your PC is out there
on the line, and they are damn well mortal.
Remember back in Chapter 2 when we told you not to get your
character killed? Consider this your second
morning. Often it's better just to run
away and fight another day, assuming you're fast enough.
Etcetera, etcetera. Sometimes you have no choice.
Sometimes the alien thing you thought was right behind you was
already waiting for you in that dark corner you thought was
safe. Love that.
So this is basically the combat chapter.
Love it. It's really good time and space
maps and zones. Coriolis does the same thing.
And I do think this is really interesting.
So the map is split up into zones.
It's large areas of the map are specific into zones.
And you can play without maps because you can just be like if
you're, you're, you're all in run zone 2, you're all in zone 4
or whatever, the map is decided into zones, each one, let's say
25 meters ish. It could be smaller if it's in
cramped environment, things like that.
But within those zones there are still distances.
So you can be in a zone and then in a range, right?
So you can be in zone 2 with an alien and that alien could then
be either be engaged with you, which is right up on you, a
short distance with just a few meters away, medium distance,
which is up to 25 meters away, which means they're in an
adjacent zone, long distance, which means 100 meters away,
which is 4 zones away or extreme distance.
So it's the kilometer away. So if you are in, so if you're
in the zone with somebody, you're either engaged or in
short distance, which means they're either in the zone with
you or right the fuck up on top of you and anything beyond that,
you start to go into a decent zones.
I like that. I think it's interesting.
It could. You could just get rid of medium
distance and just say like a zone away, but it's fine.
That's kind of, I was like, that's kind of where I'm at.
I think my favorite version of of zone combat is.
Yeah, the Electric Archive. Thank you, that's exactly what
it is, The Electric Archive. Emile Boven does a fantastic job
of that. Yeah, it kind of cuts out that
that weird little extra bit you were just talking about.
Oh, someone just mentioned right Tom.
We should right Tom sometime too.
I have not read it so. It's good.
We did read Red Giant, which is very heavily influenced by right
Tom. Oh yeah.
Man, we should play Red Giant. Sound good?
So borders in line of sight. The borders between two adjacent
zones can be open or blocked. It's a door.
It's not a door. Right.
Measuring time, who cares around is five to 10 seconds and that's
usually for combat. A turn is five to 10 minutes and
that's for stealth, frequently primarily used for stealth and
then shift is five to 10 hours, frequently used for recovery.
So it's G Ms. job to track that. So zone features, it can change
if it's cluttered, if it's dark, if it's cramped, there can be a
justification or switches to mobility roles and things like
that based on the zone. If it's super cluttered, you
might roll out You must roll mobility to move through the
zones, right? Fantastic page here.
I love this piece of art. It's absolutely stunning.
So stealth mode is such a cool thing.
And they're literally, I don't know if, OK, if you listened to
our Mothership review, you'll hear me rant about how I think
it's a huge misstep to not only not have stealth mechanically in
Mothership, but to not even mention that it's not there.
I, I think that's a misstep. Stealth is a huge part of
horror, right? And to just assume that the
players and the GM will all be able to work together solely
narratively through a conversation to do that with no
mechanical backup whatsoever, I think is not a good choice.
I think that's the most I think it's the best way I could say
that Mothership doesn't have stealth and it should.
You missed that little right there, but anyway, so I didn't.
I didn't need to hear it. I knew.
I know every word you just said so.
So stealth mode is so fucking cool in this game, and we're
going to go over that real quick.
And it's one of the reasons we have the tokens, right?
So much of the throw happens before the enemy shows itself
and bullets start flying. And a key part of that
experience is exploring unknown locations where enemies lurk in
the darkness. A key part of the game, it is
stealth. Crazy, right?
This is represented through stealth mode, which is played
out in turns, which is like 5 to 10 minutes, right?
In one turn, you can move two zones on the map and explore
them, scanning for enemies and getting a superficial
description of these two zones. If you want to examine something
in the zone more closely, such as accessing a data terminal,
you need to stay one entire turn in a single zone.
So it goes through enemy detection, movement, and motion
trackers in the stealth mode. So we'll go over this pretty
pretty pretty thoroughly. So in stealth mode, enemy
movement is handled secretly by the GM.
This is carried out each turn after your PCs of mood.
NPCS must comply with the same rules of movement as PCs.
To handle NPC movement, we recommend that GM has a second
copy of the Conflict map hidden from view, and on this map, the
GM places tokens. It represents where things are.
If your GM doesn't have access to the screen, you can simply
track blah blah blah. Active and passive enemies.
So enemies can be active or passive as dictated by the
scenario. Active enemies are aware of you
and actively stalking you. Passive enemies are not aware of
your presence and can be ambushed by you.
Detection In stealth mode, you will automatically detect
passive enemies in the same zone or in line of sight.
If you make no attempt to move quietly, passive enemies will
automatically be detected by you as detect you as well.
You draw initiative right? If you want to sneak past
passive enemies undetected or make a sneak attack, roll for
mobility against your observation.
To oppose roll, you get a modification based on the
distance. Active enemies nearby nearby may
try to sneak up on you for a sneak attack.
If so, the gene informs you that a threat is moving in on you and
then rolls mobility for the enemy against your observation,
which is awesome. I love that the way that you get
around bad guys is the way bad guys can get to you.
It's, it's very Alien Isolation, you know?
Yeah, dude, I think, dude, this is an Alien Isolation mode.
And honestly, like, there's a bunch of scary games out there,
right? And obviously like jump whore
and like religion, like all that shit's scary.
Alien Isolation had me have probably had my height rate
higher than any game I've ever played.
Yeah, yeah, it's like that's what I'm saying with like not
having some type of like self mechanics and stuff like that,
like that. The the dragging yourself into
that locker as a thing like walks by, like my heart rate was
like 200. Yeah, I will say that's a very
valid, I know you went over this.
It's a very valid Chris. It's a mother ship because you
you miss out on this like this very tense, like, hey, the
enemy's moving in on you right now and you're like, oh, fuck.
Like you don't necessarily know where they're moving in on you
because they're also like the active enemies are like they're
also kind of sneaking up on you. It's I could just imagine the
tension that builds in those moments.
You know, and like, and obviously like part of why, you
know, Shawn decided not to put that mothership because he was
like, I want that to just be a conversation.
This is again, the, the part of mothership that I don't think I
said on the previous review. It is this weird mix of a very
much like an OSR ethos to the principles of play with a very
much not OSR system. And there's.
A disconnect and like a friction because of that, because it's
like, I want the coolest part to be all narrative.
And it's like, yes, but not everyone is as far into TTRBGS
as that. Not everyone.
And like, as soon as you can like give a little bit of a
mechanic to it, everyone can be on the same page.
I agree. I, I think that that's a, that's
another discussion, discussion about like scaffolding more or
less, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I don't like a ton of it, but for something that's such an
intrinsic, like part of the game, part of horror, part of
this genre, you kind of have a little bit of it, in my opinion.
And I think this does it. I love the way this does it.
So you cannot spot active enemies that choose to remain
hidden and don't attack you unless you have detected them
with a motion tracker. So yeah, the the enemy movement
detection, I think it's really well done.
I think it's really concise. I think it's incredibly clever.
I can honestly already feel my heart racing like making these
moves, you know what I mean? Yeah, speaking to conciseness, I
have to say, and I, and we've probably already said it, the
the rules in this game, it's really easy to just take a bite
into and understand. And, and I am the one who often
complaints about big chunky walls of text and rules and but
this game does not do that. Yeah, I do think the I again, I
think layout wise having each kind of like section be on its
own little card really like separates it in your mind.
It's one reason I read, that's one reason I read things in
pages, not spreads because I don't like, it's just too much.
I like to narrow it down and even in PDF where I can even
look at part of the page at a time is better for me.
So I do think layout wise, but again, we will come across some
stuff here shortly where it kind of fall there.
You'll see the downside of this a little bit.
So motion trackers exist. It's a useful piece of
equipment, the the M314 unit. The tracker will automatically
detect the presence of any large moving objects within long
range, which is up to four zones away indoors and extreme range
outdoors, and you know which zone they are in.
We're making that you mark the ping of movement from motion
tracker, not that the motion tracker will only detect moving
objects and detecting an enemy, but the motion tracker doesn't
mean you have spotted it because don't forget in that scene where
there's a million of them all on top of them and they don't see
them. There's a reason for it, but
there is stealth, mobility, like modifiers, stuff like that.
Actions and initiative. Getting this draw, The
initiative we already talked about, it's cards.
Edwin draws 1. You can move them around, it's
fine. Changing.
You can right? Slow and fast actions.
When it's your turn acting around, you can perform one slow
action and one fast action or two fast actions.
I like it. Reminds me of of Warhammer a
little bit. I know we didn't, actually,
Yeah. I think my issue with this right
off the bat, I think I'm, I'm better about it now was there's
the delineation between what is a slow action and a fast action
because fast action you don't roll for except sometimes you do
roll for it, right? So it, it just, I don't know,
like, I guess it makes sense because you don't, you don't let
them shoot twice. They can't throw weapons twice.
I I guess I understand why it's broken up, but it's.
Again, I mean, it's the same way.
I mean we, we thoroughly went over Warhammer 2E and that's the
difference between a half action and a full action, you know what
I mean? Like like like aiming.
Aiming doesn't require a role, but you can aim and fire AS2
half actions in Warhammer. So like having that as like 2
fast actions is a similar thing, you know what I mean?
So it says a slow action usually consists of rolling.
A fast action is quicker and doesn't always require rolling,
though it might. And there's a list, right?
So describe your actions. This is like the 10th time it
said it, and honestly I wish it said it 10 times more.
Describe when it's your turn to act.
Simply state which two actions you wish to perform.
Describe how you go about it and then roll the dice.
So slow actions and fast actions going through the list here,
right? So things that you're almost
always going to roll for crawling, close combat, attack,
shooting your firearm, throwing your weapon, stopping, panic,
first aid, things like that. Fast actions, running, getting
up, drawing a weapon, blocking an attack, picking up an item,
aiming, grabbing the wheel, driving.
So again, fast actions that require checks, blocking an
attack is a skill close combat skill, shoving, grapple attacks,
close combat skills, retreat is mobility piloting, things like
that. But if you look at the slow
actions, almost all of those require.
But like crawl doesn't require reloading doesn't require using
a signature item doesn't require but like shooting a firearm
burst a Full Auto. So I do think there is like a
decent difference, but I do like how there's also prerequisites
to the actions too, right. So like, you know, if you want
to retreat you that Amy has to be an engage range.
You know what I mean? Like if you want to see cover,
you have to be in the same zone where cover exists, you know,
things like that. So I don't mind it.
I think they are split up pretty well.
And honestly, I don't I will say I kind of don't like the fact
that it's called slow and fast actions.
I do wish it was more like half and full actions.
Maybe that's my my bigger problem with it because yes,
full and half slow. Slow makes me feel like it's
going to move me down an initiative.
That's a very old school gamer thing of me.
Hey, I'm not crazy that, well, maybe.
Isn't there an Overwatch action? I believe it's normal.
I think that's a specific marine action as part of I think that's
a specific marine thing. If I remember correctly, I'm
pretty sure I know what you're talking about.
And I do think that's a specific marine thing.
But like, for example, like driving is a fast action, but
like crawling is a slow action. So there's like, again, I wish
it was more, I wish it was more like half action and full action
as opposed to fast and slow. Because to me, fast action, I
get like aiming, right? I get like getting up.
That makes sense, right? Versus like, you know but but
why is throwing a weapon a slow action but blocking attack is a
fast? Action.
You know what? I mean, yeah, so again, I wish
it was more like a like instead of fast and slow.
Wish it was more like half and full.
But regardless, I do, I do like the way that they work.
I think there's a good mix between the two because you can
do 2 fast action so you can aim. Well I guess you can't aim and
fire in the same turn. No, I can't you.
No, you can't aim and fire in the same turn.
You can do a slow action in the fast action there, right?
Oh, yes, you can. You can slow and fast or too
fast, yeah, which again is weird to me, like a slow and fast or
too fast. Isn't I?
That's, that was my thing too. It's like that's just two
actions. Like if I said to you, like, you
can do an action, right, You cannot attack twice in the round
no matter what. Like is, doesn't that clear up a
lot of the same space, more or less?
I don't know, Maybe not. Maybe oversimplifying something
about this is like, no, yeah, so egregious that I hate it.
But something about this in my head, I'm just like, this is not
as delineated as I would want it to be.
Yes, because because if you can do a slow and a fast and then
you can do 2 fasts feel like too fast.
Like if you called, let let's say that slow is a full action
and fast is 1/2 action. It's basically you can do a full
action and a half action or two half actions.
You're missing half an action's worth of stuff, right, Which I
guess is why it's slow and fast because like they specifically
make it where like you can't do too slow action, so you can't
fire twice, right? Like you can't throw 2 weapons,
you can't reload twice. That must be what it is.
I don't. I think it's really just the
term slow and fast action is really throwing me a little bit.
Yeah, there's something about this.
It might be that that isn't as smooth in my smooth brain as I
would like it to. Be yeah, it's kind of sliding
right off the smooth brain, yes. My satiny.
My Satiny. I remember when I read it the
first time too, I was just like wait a minute, what is the slow
and fast time? So much more than too fast.
But I think it's because of the way they split it up.
They specifically make it where like, you can technically run
twice, but you can't like, yeah, you can't shoot twice, you can't
give orders twice. Like that's kind of what it
feels like more. It almost feels like a heavy
action and you know what I mean? Like something that like has
more more substance to it versus slow, you know?
There's something there, there's something quite articulate.
Yeah. One thing that it does though is
like it says mark your actions. And I do like this as there are
reactive actions such as blocking.
Oh, and Overwatch fire, break, Overwatch fire break the
initiative order. It can be hard to keep keep
track of how many actions combatant has performed in the
round. One of the tips they say is like
you have the initiative cards and basically it says like if
you've done like like half an action right, turn it to the
left. And if you've done, if you've
done half your actions for the turn, turn it to the left.
If you did all, yeah, turn it to the right so that you can know,
hey, I still have 1/2 action left for a reaction later, which
I think also makes it a little bit easier up top right.
So you can do your slow action on your turn and say, hey, I'm
saving this fast action for later when I need to do a block
or I need to do a, a retreat or something like that.
Like you can save some things for later because if you do all
your actions and then something comes around to you again,
you're shit out of luck. Dragon Bane worked a similar way
where we would like you would have to save like part of your
action to be like, if you want to block some shit later, like
you have to have a block ready to go.
It's not just like it's not like 5 U where you have a reaction
kind of in your action economy, just kind of amorphously
floating there like, you know, like a like a quantum reaction.
Specifically if you've used all your half actions, you don't
have a reaction later. So there's definitely like a a a
choice in if you want to use your whole thing or not.
Yeah, I think in that context, it's a little bit more, it's a
little more smooth in my understanding.
I just, there's something about it that's just not.
Yeah, whatever. It's not the least serviceable
action economy I've ever read. So this is like everything I've
complained about in this game. My complaints are so, so
miniscule in mind. They're really not that big of a
deal. There is some friction in the
way that like, like I'm, I'm, I think we both are like that is
being communicated to us so that we're we're understanding it.
We get it. We would play it just fine.
But somewhere in there there's a little bit of friction that
isn't quite setting. So movement, you can do it
right. Ambushes and stink attacks, you
can do it right. close combat, you can do it right.
So this is where we get to things like resolution,
blocking, shoving, grappling, retreating.
These are things that are so for example, like blocking, if you
are attacking close combat, you can choose the block attack to
avoid being hit. Blocking is a fast action.
You roll close combat, but you have to have half action for it
and it is a reactive action. It's a reaction that breaks a
normal initiative order. So you have to have an action
ready for it. This is a reactive action.
Active action. Yeah, Range.
The great term for that is. What's that reaction?
Yeah, yeah. Range combat is the thing.
You get more or less modifications based on the range
that you're in. Something's right on you.
Or like really far away aim shots modify things.
Extreme range, dim light, darkness.
All modifiers right? Full Auto fire weapons listed as
fully automatic and fire long bursts of Full Auto fire.
It counts as normal range attack, but you get modifiers to
the role. Your stress level immediately
increases by one if you fire in Full Auto Love that.
Add the stress to your role for the Full Auto burst.
Like you add the stress and then you fire your Full Auto.
You can distribute any additional successes you roll
beyond the 1st to secondary targets within short range.
Cover is a thing. Ammo is a thing.
So most firearms in the world of aliens have large enough
magazines you don't need to worry about it.
However, when tension rises, you risk wasting ammo.
Oh you son of a bitch, what? However, when the tension rises,
you risk wasting ammo and emptying your clip at the worst
possible time. Whenever God.
OK, so I'm not even a huge gun guy, but I did grow up on a gun
range. Like a magazine is when you have
the things loaded and you stick it in and it feeds stuff out of
the magazine. A clip is the thing that you
actually like. A lot of times it's from like
older guns you would have like 3 or 4 in like literally a clip
and you're like knock it down into the gun itself and it feeds
out and then like into whatever. So whenever you fire a weapon
and roll one or more stress on your stress dice, you have
emptied your magazine after the attack and need to reload.
They're not they're not the same.
You can't, they're not interchangeable reloading the
selection. So basically you can fire all
fucking day until you roll A1 and then you need to reload.
I like that. I like, you know, especially if
you're like a space marine with a giant fucking gun, right, like
I don't mind not caring about ammo until you need to care
about ammo mechanically, right, But I do also think that like if
you just have like a little revolver and it's you're only
going on the entire ship, making each round be something you
track more. So you know what I mean?
Oh, I love the androids and ammo part here real quick.
I read it real quick. I don't know why I didn't read
it out loud. Basically, androids don't have
stress levels, right. So like, like they don't like,
run out of ammo and stuff like that.
So the As for NPCS, they, this is intentional to simulate the
controlled nature of synthetics. So basically they'll know and
they'll just reload, you know what I mean?
And they're very PCs run out. Yeah.
And NPCS run out when the GM feels like, when it's
dramatically appropriate. Overwatch, this is what you were
talking about as a Did you want to go over this one?
Yeah, sure. So Overwatch as a fast action,
you can essentially assume the Overwatch position and basically
you are aiming in a certain direction as long as you are not
engaged with an enemy currently. Between the time you assume the
Overwatch position and your time to act in the next round, you
can fire your weapon against a target in the chosen direction.
You can fire whenever you want in the turn order.
Once again, this breaks initiative, the initiative
chain, and your shot is resolved before all other actions, even
if they are already declared. There's a good example here, but
basically it's it's Overwatch in the way that we fairly
understand from video games. I do like this rule.
You take a fast action, you basically you're basically
holding an action for later and just aiming in a direction.
Yeah, I like it. It's good.
It's interesting that they move it so far down from the other
stuff, but I guess it is kind of in like they're going through
the actions right now and stuff like.
That so we're going out like a combat and gun area.
And also by the way, you can lose Overwatch by engaging in
close combat or suffering damage.
It just kind of knocks you out of position.
Yeah, damage, starting health, but not injured.
Your total health score is equal to your strength score.
Armor. To protect yourself from harm,
you can so you can wear armor. The effectiveness of a piece of
armor is represented by its armor rating.
You can only wear one suit of armor at a time.
When you take damage from an attack, roll a number of based
ice equal to your armor rating. Each success you roll lowers the
damage inflicted. I would say if there was one
rule that I would delete from this game instantaneously, it's
this. Oh, really?
Why, why, why? My armor exists on my body,
right? Someone like, why am I rolling?
Like I, I, I, I don't mind dice rolls and stuff like that.
I think that, like, I don't think it slows combat a ton.
I think that they do a really good job, but like every time I
get hit I'm rolling an armor roll to see if my armor protects
me. That's very fair.
I feel like that's, Yeah, I get what you're saying.
It doesn't make sense. What was there?
And sorry real quick, we already talked about how you fail even
with like 10 dice. Armor is not like A10 or A-15 or
A20, right? So like your armor only works if
you roll an armor roll and then get a six.
Honestly I think it should be almost a reverse.
Like it soaks everything except for once.
Like basically your armor never works.
Yeah, that makes yeah, I get what you're saying.
I was thinking of how I would change this rule and I was
thinking what was the armor rule for 17th century mentalist?
Oh yeah, like you're talking. Value, which was an amount of
dice, and basically you spent the dice because it would still
fit into like a dice. Yeah, which is obviously trying
to fit armor into like, still being part of a dice pool game.
Yes, so basically if I remember correctly it was 17th century
minimalist say that your armor rating was 6 right?
If you were going to take like 3 damage, you can instead just
take 3 dice out of the pool and move it down right?
And then between like the next time you do downtime, you can
roll those dice and successes on those dice give you armor points
back and failures don't until you until you run out of It's so
fun until you run out of all of your armor points and then your
armor's just broken. That honestly would be such a
better, more fitting thing here because realistically it's like
every time I get hit, I have to. I'm also then also rolling more
and again, we talked about missing like like I said, or the
opposite, like I said, is just roll your armor dice, you soak
that as many damages that aren't won.
Do you know what I mean? Because like, why is my armor
not working so much? Like why am I fucking wearing
the shit if I, if I have to roll and then get a six just to
protect myself? Because again, if your, if your
armor score is like 4, what is the odds?
Well, we, we looked at it. It's like it's like 20% chance
that maybe you'll get one and then and then you only reduce it
by 1. Oh yeah.
Do you think that that is to lend?
I mean, I think obviously to lend to this being like a
incredibly like lethal actual horror game.
I think it's definitely a lethality thing too.
But like the other thing too is like the damage that you do is
based on like the weapon damage, which I don't think is like
it's, it's a set number damage like the gun does like for
damage or something like that, right?
Like, so yeah, I, I don't know, I, I, I think it's a little bit
clumsy and basically 9 times out of 10 years armor is just not
doing shit for you. So.
We can all agree that my idea for the hack is obviously the
best. Yes, you use 70s minimalist
armor here for sure. Recovery.
Check out 17th century Mammalis if you've.
Known. Oh such an insane game.
We did a review on it on channel on episode.
I don't fucking know. This is another part where it's
like kind of weird, right? So damage and then armor and
then broken at the top, but then recovery is after broken, but
it's farther down. You know what I mean?
Like this is where it starts to kind of break a little bit.
All right, So broken is in the top.
If you drop to zero health, you are broken in effect, taken out
of the action immediately roll for a critical injury.
If you're not dead, you can crawl and mumble through the
pain. You can't perform any other
actions and you can't roll for any skills.
So literally it mechanically it says just crawl and mumble.
You're in so much pain, you don't know what's going on.
Perfect. You can't go below 0, but each
further attack that causes damage gives you another
critical injury. So we'll get the critical
injuries in a second recovery. When you're no longer broken,
you recover one point of lost health per turn, which is like 5
to 10 minutes of rest. Critical injuries can still
affect you after your health is restored.
And then getting back up, something can give you first
aid, or eventually you can just get up on your own.
The coup de grace we talked about this, You have to fail an
empathy role in order to do that.
And whether or not you succeed at killing your target, you
increase your stress level by one, because killing in cold
blood is not that easy unless you have the merciless talent,
and then you don't take any stress and do whatever the fuck
you want. Critical injuries as long as you
still have health left. Damage points represent fatigue,
bruises or smaller cuts. Painful to be sure, but possible
to overcome. Critical injuries represent much
more dangerous form of injury. They're more like lingering
injuries, right? Health, you can get back
lingering injuries. Critical injuries.
You have to like, heal, right? Death.
If you suffer a critical injury listed as fatal, you must make a
death roll. Make a death roll using stamina
and you cannot push it and you are not allowed to roll any
stretch dice if you're if you fail, you die.
Perfect. Love it.
I'm. Very, very OK with how like the
broken and to death and critical injury system works in this
Yeah, table next. Yeah, you can get broken and
then it says instant kill. Note that there are four
critical injuries, 6663 through 66 that just kill you, right?
So there is a D66 critical injury table here starting at
11. You just get winded all the way
down to the the four that they said. 63 is disemboweled, you
die instantly, 64 is crushed, crushed skull.
Your story ends here. 65 is pierced head, you die
immediately and 66 is impaled heart.
Your heart beats for the last time.
So yeah, it wrote me a critical injury.
I rolled A31. I got a broken nose.
It's not fatal. There is no time limit.
You have a manipulation and observation are -1 and it takes
D6 days to heal. So it's a it's going to take
five days to heal. Oh, and you're a manipulator guy
too. I know this is terrible.
I. Can see you coming in with like
the Band-Aid across your nose, the black eye.
You know what? I.
Mean like this because my dad was kind of stopped up to the
blood. So good.
Broken arms, ruptured intestines, busted kidneys,
concussions, knocked out teeth. So good.
Love the injury table? I just rolled the 63 my second
time. Just for the record.
The second time I died. I love it.
You die, you got disemboweled. I think this is great.
I think this adds to both the sci-fi action and horror
elements because these are horrifying.
A lot of them are just fucking terrifying.
Ruptured intestines. You get disease with virulence.
It's great. Permanent.
So this is one of the things I'm talking about permanent mental
trauma. I like disable.
You do or you don't. I don't.
I don't mind it. What I don't like is that we are
on page 101 and the rules for permanent mental trauma are on
page one O 4, 3 pages later. And this is one of the things
I'm talking about where I'm just like the layout makes it like,
why is this so far back? I don't get it.
So permanent mental trauma, Let's talk about them and then
we'll ask why you don't like them.
So you can get a phobia, you can get alcoholism, you can get
nightmares, you can get depression, you can have drug
use or you can have amnesia. Why don't you like it?
Listen, I I'm not trying to be that guy, but I'm going to be.
I don't like gamifying mental illness.
Like I genuinely, I do not like it.
I I'm not. So it's not so offensive to me
that I would like flip the table and walk out on this.
Like I would engage with this. I just don't really ever love
when the game does it and almost no game does it well.
A game that does do something in instead and does it well is.
Live in a horror. Not living the horror, which is
just like it makes your character more strange, more
odd, and it gives them a little narrative tidbit.
So I do want to go back. Like how you knew where I was
going? Oh yeah, yeah, twice this
episode. I do want to go back to the
mothership table and do and and talk about how they do have
extremely similar conditions, like nightmares, which is the
exact same thing. The loss of confidence,
deflated, being haunted, spiraling.
Like they have a lot of these similar conditions.
I mean, not the same degree to like alcoholism and like
depression, drug issues. Depression and.
Here's the thing, I don't mind this.
Right. This to me is very much a
session zero thing, right? For those that don't mind this,
because at the end of the day, yes, mental illness is very
serious thing in this kind of setting, in a setting of like
horror and and trauma and and things like that, like
everything's awful. The world's awful.
Not only is your life terrible, now aliens are trying to eat you
and stuff like that. I think these are fitting and I
think they because it's alien RPG and these things exist
within the universe of the game that they're making.
Like I don't, I don't mind these.
I do think the horror and the way that they do that is better.
I think these are realistic ish for what they're trying to
accomplish. This is.
Definitely not the most egregious example of what we're
talking about, you know? No, Yeah, but I mean like
alcoholism, you must drink alcohol every shift or your
stress level increases by 1. You cannot relieve stress
without drinking alcohol. This is really dip up in the air
depending on how people feel about these kind of mechanics,
Right. Like yes, I would play with
these. I can absolutely see why people
wouldn't. And if I ran this, I would
absolutely make this like one of the tops of my list for my
Section 0 to see what people are OK with and what they're not.
And if people were not OK with this, I would just delete it
from the game. If I played this game and
someone else was running this, I would, unless someone else also
had like a big problem with I, I would probably let this slide
and just not even worry about if I ran this, I'd rewrite this
table. So I mean, there's six things on
this table. Would take me 15 minutes to
rewrite it. Yeah, very true, very true.
Again, things like this are are very dependent on how you feel
about things. But I do think it's interesting
that there really is no discussion of like safety to
like there is a little bit in the beginnings and like it's,
it's a rough game, whatever. But it's interesting that
there's no real discussion of like safety tools and stuff like
that of more than the. Scene thing though, you know
what I mean? It really is.
But I mean, like, I mean, yeah,
you're in. But anyway.
So we'll get back to why the fuck you even do that later in
three pages. Healing.
Table right here. You'll figure out what it is
later on. Yeah, yeah, healing you can
great picture of space Marine very much got that fucking gun.
I can't remember what it's called from the movie with like
the, you know, the attached to the battle armor and we go, we
go, we go stress and panic. We're going to get to actual
stress and panic. And then I think we're, we're
pretty wrapped under stuff. So stress level, the mounting
tension in your character is measured by their stress level.
It usually starts at 0 and increases.
So here are things that could increase it.
You push a skill roll. You fire a burst of Full Auto.
You suffer one or more points of damage.
You go without food, sleeper water.
You perform a coup de A person nearby is revealed to be an
Android. I love that that increases the
stress. You encounter certain creatures
or locations. Whenever you make a scale roll,
you must add a number of stress sites equal to your current
scale. We talked about that.
So panic roll. As long as you keep your stress
in check, you can use it to your advantage.
But if the tension grows, continue to panic.
You need to make a panic roll win.
You roll one or more ones. Little aliens on the stress
dice, you roll the panic roll. I like that it's not.
Like if you if you if you gain stress by rolling that boom,
roll panic too. You know what I mean?
I like that. I feel like you're going to roll
for panic a lot more in this game than Mothership.
Absolutely. And it's not, and it's not fully
dependent on when the GM decides that you're going to, you know
what I mean? You witness a friendly character
suffering from a certain panic effect.
You're pinned down by a ranged attack.
I love that one. You suffer critical injury,
You're attacked by a strange alien creature.
It's really horrifying. Vinegars so resolution you roll
AD 6 at your current stress level and check the table to the
right. This is a quick reminder, kids
don't give directions for tables.
Just give the names of tables because people like I'm reading
this in pages not spreads so it's not to the right for me.
It's down, so don't give. 4. .1 or let's just, let's just call
it all the panic roll table because that's what we're saying
like just give, you know, don't, don't do that.
So more panic. If you're suffering from panic
effect 7 plus on the panic roll and are forced to make another
panic roll, the new panic effect replaces the previous one.
Overkill The Overkill talent lets you replace the effect of a
panic roll result of 11 or higher with the overkill effect,
if you have any. If you have enemies insight
triggering overkill, blah blah blah blah blah.
So stopping panic, Yeah, some effects on the panic table are
immediate and last one round. Others remain in effect until
something happens, like another character comes to your aid.
You are broken. One turn passes, so panic is not
it. It changes, relieving stress.
For every full turn spent resting in a safe place, your
stress level is reduced by 1. You cannot make any skill roles
while resting, etcetera. Once per act in cinematic play
and once per game session and campaign play.
You can interact with your signature item in some way to
reduce your stress level. Some conditions such as starving
or freezing block that ability. OK.
Permanent mental trauma. If you have rolled a result of
13 or higher on a panic roll during a game session, you must
make an empathy roll. After the session roll for the
attribute only, not using, not using any skill.
If the role succeeds, you develop a permanent mental
trauma of some kind. Roll AD 6 and control the table
on page one O 1 again. That makes it like it's
literally an out of game role. Like it's after session stuff
like that. You could just not do that.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's.
Nothing out to just. I could not do it at all all
right. So getting 2 tables dude.
Bro I how do you feel about this panic curl table versus mother
ships? I really like this one.
I love 12. Just scream.
You should literally just fucking scream the top of your
lungs and you lose your you lose your next round.
Yeah, I personally think that this is a far superior panic
table. Let me explain why.
I don't think we talked about this enough in another ship 1,
so I'm going to go back to another ship table, for example.
So nightmares is a completely separate thing from panicking,
right? Like that is a mental trauma
that you can get later in in Alien, right?
In this nightmares is #7 nightmares gain a new condition.
Sleep is difficult. How is that?
Panic. How is that panic?
It's not like. It's not right.
Loss of confidence. How is that panicking?
Like almost all of the condition ones are not panicking.
They really could have reduced some other ship table down to
just AD 10 which would get rid of the D20 in the game and just
make one of them be you gain you overcome your panic and gain a
condition. Roll AD 10 or AD 5 on the
condition list. You know what I mean?
Like it could have just been like a nested list for
conditions. Why?
I don't understand. It's called a panic table.
It's called the panic. Why are some of them not
panicking? Like I, I just want to be like,
wait a minute, I got nightmares. So how am I panicking right now?
Right? But you're worried.
About alien dreams are going to be.
Right when you go to the Alien RPG, every single one of these
is panicking, right? Keep it together is one through
6, A nervous twitch. Trembling, dropping an item,
freezing, seeking cover, screaming, fleeing, going
berserk, going catatonic. These are all immediate panic
responses that happen at that time time, right?
Like it's not some amorphous time later where suddenly your
sleep is not good, right? I can see what they're doing
with the panic table, but it I don't understand what's called a
panic table when like 8 of the results are like not actually
panicking. Yeah.
Will I rename that table the Bad Things table?
The bad things, right? But this panic table, actually,
again, all of these are actively so like trembling, you start to
tremble uncontrollably. All skill roles using agility
suffer -2 dropping item. Whether by stress, confusion, or
the realization that you're going to die anyway, you drop a
weapon or other important item, Right.
I'm seeking cover. You must use your next action to
move away from the danger and find the safe spot.
Like screaming. Yeah, you just scream your lungs
out for around each of these, again, very specifically at that
moment. Panic effects, which for a panic
table makes sense to me anyway. Other hazards, there's
conditions are starving, dehydrated, exhausted.
All these suck for you and you got to roll and things are bad.
There's vacuum decompression, there's freezing, there's
falling, there's explosions, there's fire.
All the ways for you to take damage, diseases, radiation.
I do like the radiation. You actually get rads and those
rats can affect you and you you can like roll to get permanent
radiation and stuff like that. It's really neat.
Table that's on page 110. You should read those Drowning
sucks, suffocating sucks, synthetics.
There's a whole different page here that is a completely
separate critical injury table just for androids.
So or like synthetic things. So like a ruptured fluid pump, a
severe chassis breach, destroyed arm servos.
You know, it's completely different.
I love this one. It says electric, electric
sheep, which obviously is very much like a bill.
OK, Dick thing. It is illegal to program an
Android for violence, but of course there are mods that let
you do that. Xenomorphs.
There's a section here about talking about Xenomorphs.
So multiple action signature attacks, the health of one, the
armor rating of one, the special abilities.
We're not going to talk about this now because there's
literally an entire chapter on xenomorphs that we're also not
going to talk about, but it's there section of your vehicle.
Get there for a game that's about Xenon Plus.
There's a whole thing here on vehicle combat.
We're not going to talk about it, but it's neat.
Vehicles themselves have attributes.
There's like specific damage types, components, aerial
vehicles, repairing them, all that kind of good stuff.
OK, Gear is when it comes back in.
So weapons and armor, weapon features.
A weapon can have a bonus which indicates in a modification at
the base damage, how many points of damage that you use to attack
it. If you roll extra D sixes you
can do extra damage, a range, a weight, a cost, and a special
ability. Like if it's armor piercing.
I think someone to chat mentioned armor piercing so I'm
going over some of these. One of the only things that
bombs me out is they have so many pictures of the guns in
here but not all of them. I'm like, you're already at 392
pages, just give me pictures of all.
The guns plot a few more in there we're.
Not. Pressed for length at this
point. Right, but there's a whole
section here on pistols whole section here on rifles like
stopping for one. So what's interesting is like it
gives you a paragraph for each one, but then it also gives you
a card and the card shows you a picture and then also gives you
the bonus. So for example, the the armat
M41A pulse rifle bonus plus one damage 2.
That's the other thing too with like the armor roll, right, is
most of the damage in this game is like one or two.
So like if you have an armor rating of 6, you would never get
hurt, right? So I guess basically your armor,
if you even get one success on our armor roll, you you can get
rid of our like half most damage, right?
So it's not terrible. But yeah but I mean Mothership
is literally clunky. Though.
A tiny bit, but like mothership is literally take no damage
until your armor breaks and then you take all damage.
You know what I mean? I do yeah.
So bonus one damage 2 range long wait, one cost 1200 comment
armor piercing Full Auto grenade launcher.
That's a good one. But again, like the art on these
is really, really neat. It's nice to see all of the of
the art pieces for them. And that's why I'm bummed that
like they do like 3/4 of the art, but not all the art.
I'm like, just do all of them at that point, you know, heavy
weapons are listed here. Oh, the M56A2 smart gun.
This is the one that what's your face carries?
That's the the baddest one that everyone knows from alien close
combat weapons. So it talks about mechanical
cutting torch stun batons, suits of armor to protect yourself.
So so let's look at some of the armor ratings.
So like the M3 personal personnel armor is an armor
rating 6. So like you roll 66 to try to
reduce damage. Makes sense.
But so standard issue marine armor is a is AD 6.
That's basically the what's it called suit from mothership
Waylon Jutani, a ape suit armor rating 3 bonus to survivor
roles, air supply 4. So it gives you a lot of a lot
of different stuff here. Obviously there's the cargo
loader image here. I have the kind of the power.
Is it the power loader in this one?
Yeah, just fight aliens in the Big Mac suit.
Yep, other equipment you got computer mainframes, a bunch of
them and they cost a lot data storage.
This is when we start to get to be like damn, there's a shit
load in this fucking game and like I don't mind that they're
so fucking much because if I was running a campaign, it'd be nice
to have all of this, but man, I read all of it and I would not
read it again. I.
Didn't read all of it and I because I scanned most of them
like I'm not reading all this. Yeah, no, that's why I said like
honestly, everything you need to play the game is in the starter
handbook. The only thing missing, I think
it's like I said, it looks like talent.
Yeah. We did, yeah.
Yeah, we did. Yeah.
But it's because you don't need them as much in cinematic play.
And the starter set is really designed to run that charity
guide, cinematic game. Vision devices, tools, medical
supplies. Like I'm not.
Listen. Strobe alert for those watching
real quick. Right now I'm scrolling real
quick through this vehicles. Love vehicle art so.
No, fuck this. You know what?
That's what bookmarks are for. Gear.
Yeah. Vehicles is the last one.
A hard life among the stars. So now we're getting into lower
and things like that that we're just gonna go through.
So it literally talked about faster than travel Hypersleep.
There's so the next whole bunch is GM stuff, lore stuff and a
bunch of like random mechanical stuff thrown in with the lore,
right. So like there is hypersleep and
then the neurological distortion disorder effects from too much
hypersleep random table. You know what I mean?
So like, that's what I'm talking about.
There's a ton of just lore, the core systems, the outer veil,
the outer rim. And then randomly you'll get
something for yeah, like hypersleep sickness, how
spaceships work, you know, things like that.
So this is a whole section that's really focused on a ton
of lore, living expenses, money, it's living the life on the
frontier is this entire section. That is what chapter was that?
I don't know, like 7 or something like that.
We're going to jump through all of that.
There's a whole section here on space combat, crew positions,
distances and zones, approach velocities, detection,
initiative, and turns for space combat.
We're not going to go over that. One of the best things that
Mothership 1E did was take that out of the game and put it in
its own book. I did like.
That yeah, but it's here. And again, I'm I will forever be
a proponent of. I would rather have many small
books than one giant one. But I understand money is a
thing and it costs more. All right, next chapter is your
job as the game mother. That's it, man Game over, man,
game over. Had to have that in here.
So it talks about game principles.
It's it's a good it's just a good GM section.
It's not as good as the Wardens operation manual, but it's good.
So riff from the movies, limit their resources, stay in the
shadows, increase the pressure, let them breathe, fuel their
agendas, bring horrible death and reveal the universe.
Those are the principles. It goes over the themes and it
specifically really talks about space horror as the theme goes
deeper into like space as hell and the killing greed of it.
Sci-fi action as the own thing since wonder things from the
beginning really spread out more and I really like again, they
separate the sapphire accident space or as as separate themes
in here. The retrofuturism bit too.
Honestly, I love retrofuturism so much.
It's like we're we're we're fling through space on
hyperspace, but it's on like a like a shitty foot thick like
DOS monitor. You know what I mean?
That like. Type all these big keys, it's
like black and greens, black screen and green text, Yeah.
I I love that because realistically, yeah, you think
we're going to get to the future Before we had touch screens like
stress and horror. There's all section here, but
like fearing the unknown, losing control, making having given
them horrible choices and different stages.
The fear, I actually really love this part.
The stage of the fear, like the dread, the tear and the horror.
Dread is a sense of something bad is about to happen, but no
one is really sure what or why Terror is.
You feel terror when you know something bad will happen any
moment now. It's no longer a question.
It's more like wind. And then horror is the ultimate
form of fears. Horror.
Horror is the moment when the danger reveals itself.
It is the moment of the climax. I love those 3 arcs.
Yeah, there it's, yeah, it's great.
Relieving stress, splitting the team.
Again, these are all GM tools creating NPCS.
There's a whole, there's literally a whole section here
about cinematic play and the best ways to run that,
structuring your cinematic scenarios, act one, act two, act
three with your events and things like that.
And then again, a whole other section here for the campaign
plays. It does have a section here
about Sassoon Zeros. It doesn't really talk about
like safety tools a ton. It's more of just like how did
you meet? What did you do?
What are you like? What is your group of thing?
And it talks about like how to 0 in on like a campaign focus and
the goals of rewards of a campaign.
And then it gives a whole section here on xenomorphs and
campaign play and then a reading list of more alien stuff to do
that aren't the movies to give you more context, which is
really great. And I don't need to give you a
list that gives you like a like a little blurb on like why,
which is really, really cool. And now there's a whole section
here on the governments and the corporations that we are not
going to go over big business, big government, big lies, right.
Good. We're.
In this book, you know we're skimming.
Great, did you read this section?
I read parts of this section, I more read the shit.
What's the name of that chapter? We just skipped over the hard
life among the Stars section. But there's regardless, there's
a lot of great lore that's very digestible in this, and it's not
so esoteric or out there that you're like, OK.
Yeah, no, I this is actually one of my favorite chapters.
Like the hard life among the stars is really like the the
nitty gritty mechanical things. It's like how much it costs to
live in stuff. Yeah, but this goes deep into
the history of all of the countries and stuff.
So like the three world empire, the history, the organization,
the leaders, the relations, the current activities.
It does that for the United Americas.
It does that for the the UPP, the union of progressive
peoples, and it also does that for the obviously all of them,
the independent core systems colonies.
So you get the history, you get like what they're doing now who
they don't like really a shit load of fantastic campaign
tools. Less important for cinematic
play because it all of the stuff is kind of more spoon fed to
you. But for campaign stuff, I love
the depth of the lore and also being a fan of this universe.
I learned stuff from this game that I did not know about the
the world and things like that. So you get the history of Waylon
Dutani, the history of a lot of corporations and things like
that. There's a whole section here on
systems and planets that I'm not going to go into, but it
literally breaks down like the entire fucking core system.
Like the it's crazy how in depth it goes into like the universe
as like a a series of planets and stuff and breaking down each
sector and what's there and like what's on the frontier and stuff
like that. For like for a campaign toolkit,
this chapter is absolutely incredible.
And on top of that, it does have a ton of really fantastic like
narrative places. Like this is literally like a
whole page and a half of just like narrative story fit into
here. It's really good.
Again, I wish honestly it was just a separate book, but it's
good. And the art throughout this is
really good too. Like look at this, look at this
alien page from the like from the front looking at page. 282.
Oh my God such an insane piece of art.
So this is the whole section literally just on xenorfs
talking about the aliens of the species engineers, like their
architecture, xenomorphs. And this gives you a lot of
mechanical stuff and it it basically this is a xenomorph
bestiary. It literally talks about like,
it also talks about like like the stages of how xenomorphs can
be like neomorphic egg sacs and neomorphic moats and stuff.
It gives you all of the lore about the aliens and all of the
stats. You can run them.
It's incredible. It's an incredible, incredible
section if you're a fan of the Alien franchise.
An awesome chess Buster scene. I love how they like allude to
Ripley so many times, but just give her like a slightly
different haircut and stuff like that.
I am sad though, that they don't give pictures of all the aliens.
I'm like, bro, like we're talking about like Praetorian
Aliens and shit like that. And like, and you're not going
to give me like a picture of Praetorian.
Come on, other extrasolar species, just like again, more
cool lore and stats for extended alien bestiary.
A whole chapter on campaign play.
It touched a little bit about earlier in the game mother
section, but this is an entire section on building out the
campaign framework specific to the different types, right?
Specific to space truckers, specific to Colonial Marines,
and specific to the frontier colonists.
So creating your own star system.
Again, this is the campaign tool kit section of the entire thing.
Job generators. I mean, there is so much in this
book, it's insane. And it's all well formatted.
It's all got gorgeous art. Yeah.
Whole section on NPC's, a
bestiary for them and how to build them like salvage experts,
pilots. And then we get to, I believe
this is the adventure, the Nova, the Nova God Station.
No. Is this?
Yeah, it must be. Yeah, it is.
It's the last days of Hadley's hope.
Yeah, Hope's last day. Yep.
So, and that's the adventure. And we don't read adventures on
the show character sheets. Index back of the book.
I also know that the, the, the, the table constants, the front,
not hyperlinked. Index not hyperlinked.
That sucks for PDF users. And then more map stuff in the
back. And that's the entire book.
Boom, boom, 20th Century Fox free league.
That's the game. So for a 400 page book, I think
we had fun with that one. I.
Think, yeah, of all of the longer books that we've done,
that might be more one of the more fun ones we've gone
through. Yeah.
You know, it was a longer episode but didn't feel like
gruellingly long like going through.
I, I think part of that really lends to the fact that, like, it
reminds me a little bit, and I've said this about a couple of
games, reminds me a little bit of Flayo from Kobayashi.
Oh, Kobayashi's got a new game on Kickstarter.
I don't know if you saw that. I did not see that.
Go check it. I can't remember what it's
called, but I, I, I anything Kobayashi does, I'll I'll back
sight unseen. If you look it up, I will tell
the stream. Go fucking back back that.
Oh, so we're going to review anyway.
So what I was saying is Flayo is a game that has a lot of rules,
but each individual kind of rule is is well written, concise and
doesn't isn't dense. So there's a lot to it, but each
one doesn't feel that. And I felt that way about alien.
Like I feel like there was a lot of rules but none of the rules
individually felt like a lot. Yeah.
So Alien RPG, we are going to go
to the review scores. For those that don't watch the
show, we do quantify, yes. Assassins, demons, and dying
gods. Yes, go back there on
Kickstarter. Kobayashi did a bunch of stuff,
but standouts are Flayo Black Sword Hack.
Black Sword Hack is one of the best games out there right now.
And yeah, so go go, go back that we quantify our terrible
opinions with numbers. We give a total of up to 10
points across five different metrics for a Max of 50 points.
No one will ever get A50, so and we break them into those five
metrics which are art and layout, which is the visuals of
the book. So the art that's in the book
and the visual layout of the book, usability, which is more
of like the layout in it's usability.
If it has things like hyperlinks, bookmarks, physical
bookmarks, if, if chapters in the right order, in our opinion,
things like that. Rule set is the actual core rule
set of the game. If it's, if we like it, if it's
adapted, how well is adapted, things like that.
Originality is exactly that on any aspect.
It could be the rules, it could be the C, the, the, the setting
could be anything. And then the value is bang for
your buck, not just how much it cost, but how much is out there
for you. Third party licenses, extra
adventure. How much game do you get for
your money? So starting with art and layout,
what are your thoughts? Oh, I think this is good.
You know, I, I the art, I mean, obviously the arts.
Amazing all the way through. Very vibey, very, very well
done. And I like the way the layout's
broken up by those boxes. Yeah, I think it's good.
What do you think? I think it's fantastic.
I mean, there's a million fucking pieces of insanely
stunning, gorgeous art throughout the entire book.
I do. And like you said, I do like the
cards visually. I think they're super helpful.
That's definitely going to be a usability thing.
But like, it feels like Alien. I love the green text written in
like the very typewriter font. Like even in like when you get
to the frontier section, it suddenly stops being space and
it's like the blue sky and stuff like that.
Like art, art wise and layout wise.
I mean, we, we just said it. We, we, we cruise through the
1st like 140 pages before we started scrolling and it did not
feel that way. And I think part of that really
lends stuff to the way that it, it visually looks and, and was
visually digestible. Again, part of that is
usability, but I think. Top to bottom.
Yeah, I think top to bottom art and layout wise like it.
It would be hard to stuff more art into this book, but it never
felt overwhelming. And I do love how they would
incorporate art onto pages into the art and have whole pages
that were just like just textless, beautiful, gorgeous
spreads and stuff like that. So I mean, this is pretty
pretty. I think I think the art is
better than the layout. I think the light is serviceable
and vibe, but I don't think it's like the greatest layout I've
ever seen. So what?
Number are you thinking? I'm thinking like an 8 because
like I think art art wise. The art's insane.
I'm thinking like an 8 too. The art really carries it,
probably more than the layout, like you said.
Yeah, but the layout's still not bad.
No layout layout's good, but I yeah, I think the art is is
definitely superior to the layout in this boom, all right,
usability. So as we said, this is like
things that make the game more usable, right?
Like like hyperlinks, right, like PDF accessibility, like
bookmarks in the actual book. Let's see, let's see, let's see.
Oh, there's one. Yep, we got one.
We got them so so as far as digital tools, fucking none
right. Like it has bookmarks in the PDF
and that's literally it. I would be shocked if this was
also like remediated for screen readers.
The fact that the index and the table of contents, neither of
which are hyperlinked in APDF. I mean the only this is not
going to change the score at all.
But I will say this game did come out in like 2019.
Well, there are in fact digital tools.
There's there's a good amount actually, if you go to
gamehyphenmother.com. What is game hyphen mother?
It is alien RPG tools to make your game more awesome.
There's the Android. There's an Android app.
Actually, I don't have an Android phone.
Oh, that's not true. I do have an Android phone, it's
just not my main phone. Bro, I mean, this changes a lot
of stuff when we get to yeah, I I I'm literally on the fucking
free league page and I don't see this character generators,
Android app, a whole section of GM tools.
There's a whole section of downloads, which is like form
fillable character sheets, map icons, roll 20 VTT icons.
I assume this is not from free league.
Yeah, this must be a free league thing.
Which about FAQ. Hello, I'm Tom, and I love
Alien. When the Alien RPG game was
first announced, I was super excited.
Yeah. I mean what I mean, does it
count if some somebody realized that we needed all of this and
the game did not put it out? If it exists for the game and is
usable immediately for anybody, I believe it counts.
You know, like we'll count like for value.
We'll talk about like third party stuff that's been made and
that will account for value for. Us right, So I think this goes
to maybe value, but like I don't see how someone's like third
party stuff and like changes the usability of the book we just
read. OK, that's valid.
Yeah. So usability wise, I mean,
realistically, I think that the, we did talk about like there's
numerous parts in the layout where things are like, like for
specifically example, the, the trauma, the mental trauma table
is 3 pages before you ever know what mental trauma is.
And, and here's the problem is people like, oh, like, like when
you read the book, like you can always come back to and it
references a, a previous page. When you, the first time you
read through a book is very important because the first
impressions are important. Like if you read through a book
and reading through the book is obnoxious to do, why would you
come back to that? It's probably not the only RPG
you read, right? So it's important for that first
impression. So I think the things are out of
order. I think the only thing it has to
do is, is that I think layout wise though, it is incredibly
easy to read, which gives a lot of points.
We literally just talked about how it never felt overwhelming
because of the way that they put it together.
So it's a hard mix for me of I mean God damn if it just had
some, some fucking hyperlinks like this would be good.
Some navigation tools I think would boost this a little bit.
It's just like for me, like you have the book, I'm going through
the PDF, there are bookmarks, the chapters, which I do
appreciate, and there are good. Yeah, I think I don't know.
I don't feel terrible about this.
I don't. Feel terrible, I think.
I think all of the digital, I think the lack of digital tools
really brings it down. But I think as far as actual
reading of the book itself, I think that brings it back up.
I'm probably between like a six and seven for this.
I'm probably between 6:00 and 7:00 as well.
I. You call this hard?
I think. I think A7.
OK, good, because things are things.
Are for the most part exactly where I think they would be.
There's only a couple things that are kind of outliers, but.
Yeah, yeah, I'd already had the seven before you inserted, so
I'm glad that we're almost 99% on the same page rule set.
So this is the Alien adapted version of the Year 0 engine.
I don't know how deep they were in Year 0 when Alien came out
compared to some of the other games.
So this again, I did. We did play Coriolis on the
Great Dark and a lot odd. I mean it does.
What's interesting about it is it clearly was the same system,
but this like it's not just reskinned for something, it's
broken down to the core and then rebuilt specific to the things.
Because Coriolis, even though it's a space game, feels like it
played very different to Alien even though so much of it was
the same. So I do like that Year 0 doesn't
just reskin, but rebuilds from the same foundation.
Yeah, and I've and I've encountered user numerous times.
And you as someone who hasn't, what do you think?
I mean, I think from what I understand about the other year
Zero games and the way the rules work for this, I think it's
plays a really good alien game. You know, like I like how stress
works. I like the dice pool system.
It might be fairly brutal but like I think that's also like.
That's the thing I would be more comfortable making a big ruling
on after playing it for several sessions.
I do, I do like this. I like how the panic works.
It all fits together fairly neatly too.
It feels like 1 cohesive system for this.
I yeah. And like I said, what's
interesting is you're going to read another Year Zero game and
be like, oh, like all the dice pool stuff is the same.
Like they there's push rolls and other stuff too, but it feels
because you're doing it for kind of a different reason and stuff
like that. Like it again, it's so
interesting the way that again, they don't reskin, they break
down the foundations and rebuild for every game and they do a
really fucking good job of it, but not worrying about other
systems. How do you feel about this
system? What do you think?
I like this system. I think it's it works really
well and there's, you know, the only things I would change about
this are just up to my personal preferences and not necessarily
like an actual inherent issue with the way the system works.
I think it all works well and after learning how the system
works baseline, everything kind of adds on to it in a way that
seems logical. Yeah, it's good.
I think you should probably make a rule on this because you've
had more experience with this rule set overall and then the
other version of it. OK, well I have a number in my
head. I'm I'm between like a, I'm
between like A7 and an 8. What are you thinking?
I really like this game. Do I think it's an 8?
Here's the thing. Here's the reason I think it
might get an 8 instead of A7. And we've talked about this
before. There are games that are like
really genius or in their simplicity, and there are games
that are crunchy and unnecessarily explained to the
point of being just like, I want to put a blade through myself in
the dark, you know what I mean? But I think this game has a lot
of depth to it without feeling overwhelming.
And like you said, every time you run into something new, IT
feels like it's just. It's just adding adding more
depth, not adding more complication.
No, I can I completely agree. Yeah, there's a lot going on
here. But it's not necessarily that's
complicated. It's it's that's a good depth to
it. Yeah.
So yeah, maybe an 8. OK, I'll go with it.
Originality. So it's an IP game and it's an
in house engine. So I don't I don't know how much
originality we can give something that's literally built
to be something else and you know what I mean?
And on top of that again uses it's an in house engine which is
just like the same thing that they use for like 6 other games.
I'm sad that your blur keeps cutting off the ears.
I know that's why I didn't wear this earlier.
So I don't, I mean I don't, I don't even know where to begin
with originality in this because like.
It's just a hit here because it's actually maybe like the
least original thing. I mean, that's how all, that's
how all IP games are realistically.
It's just like how I mean, I'm even trying to think of you got
bones on in the background because a blur.
Keeps playing in the background. We're going to get DMCA D by
Bones coming in and being like, you can't show my fiance is
watching Bones right now. So that's what's going on.
But yeah, it's hard. I mean, I'm trying to think of a
way where we can get some originality in this because like
Panic, there's not like it's a good rule system that fits
really well to play this game and the way that it's meant to
be played. But this is just a a one of the
metrics that just like is counter intuitive to this kind
of game. I mean, I like what do you even
give something like this? Like a like A5 just.
Because like 5. I'm feeling like a 5 on this.
It's good. It's not that's bad, it's just
not, you know, Hey, I wish my ears weren't blurred, bro.
Guys are missing out. You got to you got to just put
something behind you, like just get like a little screen, you
know what I mean? Yeah or like, yeah, just have
the chair high enough in the back put like a hoodie on so
it's like against the back of the ears.
Anyway, again, so those in podcast land that don't know
what the fuck we're talking about, Hunter put on a goblin
like ski mask, like yeah, balaclava that has goblin ears
and his his zoom blur is blurring out the ears.
So gosh, yeah. I mean, I don't know what we
would give a sense of fire for this.
Again, I'm trying to think of a way where we could say this is
like an original game, but I think like every IP game we run
into is gonna have like, I mean, I think 5 is being generous for
a game that like has no originality.
Right, yeah, value. So real quick, someone someone
again, we're talking to chat more than we usually do, but
someone just said it depends on how you define originality,
which, yeah, like 180 episodes in, we're still trying to figure
out how to redefine it, but it's like, yeah, it's it's an IP,
It's an in house engine. How many games feel like alien?
The reason we're doing this game is because it's mothership
month. So mothership, like any space
game out there. Death in space.
Like, I mean, all of these realistically, like take out the
Xenomorph and it's just a space action game.
So how many space action games out there?
Traveler death in space, God, let me just look at Star
Frontiers. I mean Warhammer 40K, you can
play sci-fi action in a million different things.
So it really comes down to it. It's just the IP Ness of it.
So I do agree and I think for us, I think we're being very
generous by giving it a 5, but it would be very mean to give
like a zero just because it is an IP game, because it does the
IP well. That's the other problem is it
does it well value wise. OK, so dollars for Donuts right
now. So if you're going to buy the
game, buy it on Black Friday and if you're listening to this,
it's too late for you. But normally the core rule book
is $54.21, which is for four. 100 pages of a ton of art.
I don't. That's not, that's not too much,
you know. The starter set is $51.
Oh, that's too much. For the starter set, I.
That's, that's everything. That's the dice and everything
too, right? $54.50 one dollars yes this is
the better buy in my opinion. I agree that's the better buy.
Yeah, honestly I would get this and then just get the PDF of
this so you can have all the lore yeah and just and just go
with that. But the starter set has all the
core rules for, for running the game plus, yeah, the dice, the
cars, the maps, the, the characters, the adventure.
So, but you do have that. You do have the core rule book,
which is $54. There are numerous expansions,
of which I have all of them. There is Building Better Worlds,
which one in Indian 20 and 24, there's The Story of Worlds.
There's Heart of Darkness, all of which are expansions or
adventures. There's the Colonial Marines
Operations Manual, which is a whole nother expansion onto
itself. And then on top of that you can
get Vt, you can get the foundry Vt modules for all of these.
So the core foundry book normally module is normally $26.
Right now for Black Friday it is $13.
I think I have it already and if not I actually might buy this
just in case for the future. The entire starter set foundry
modules only $26 and from there they're usually like 20 ish
dollars for the foundry modules. You can also get the GM screen
which is $26. The dice which are $20 a pop.
So it's a little expensive, but I mean it is.
I will say Freely does incredibly like quality stuff.
And don't forget, I don't know if there is AUS distributor
which I think might be Modifius, but if not, you are paying for
shipping from Sweden. Well, let's fucking see.
Add to cart. Proceed.
To check out. Yeah, proceed to check out God.
I switched to Kroner's Inter shipping address estimated
shipping. Stay alive.
Yeah, I'm going to do that. Estimated shipping is $12.00.
Not bad. Oh, that's not terrible.
No, I so for cost of the game for 400, it's it's it's a tiny
bit expensive, but it's a big it's 8 and half by 11400 big
book 50 bucks. I mean, that's basically the
cost of of it's bad to see the worm, you know what I mean?
And that one had foiling on it. But I think so it's a little
expensive with the core stuff, but it has so much content it
has you can get it all. It's just PDFs.
You can get all the foundry modules.
So I think depth of product line huge, like ton of stuff out
there. The book itself, half, half of
it is campaign tools. So you could run the game
forever just based on what's in there.
You can run 50 campaigns at a time if you.
Want how much are the expansions?
They're you. Fuck I literally just closed it.
Let me reopen close tab. I always forget to do the
control shift T Black Friday deal.
Man. I'm telling you if you want
stuff I would go get right now. If you want this, go buy it
right now. He's listening to.
No only though, like a couple of people that are in chat with
the. Actions are fairly expensive.
I beat you to it. Building better worlds comes out
to about 4386 USD. Let's see, Destroy of Worlds is
about the same. Building is Better Worlds, Yeah,
is a big book. It's a hardcover book that's 300
pages long. This is such a balancing act
between like bang for buck and also the amount of bucks
overall. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's a
lot of it comes down to like I said, like we're talking about
the the depth of the product line versus how much it cost
initially. So I think it kind of washes a
little bit. If you if you like Alien, you
like the game, there's going to be a ton of stuff for you to
play forever. I do think that the third party
digital tools are really fantastic.
It's kind of bummed that Freely doesn't offer those like.
Weird that they don't. But it's also amazing that
someone was just like, I love the game so much, I'm going to
give you everything you fucking need.
So that's cool. I honestly don't think that we
can count that into because like for example, third party master
stuff is on the master website. So like they incorporate it into
the the experience. Right, I'm saying A7.
Yeah, I think 7 is good and I think that's generous, honestly,
I think it's that. Might be a little too generous.
It might be a six. Honestly, You make the call.
I'm going to say 7 because I think that it balances out the
shitty originality score, which I do think it deserves a little
bit of points for doing the IP well in that 8 + 7 + 8 + 5 +
735. That's pretty good.
Yeah, it's pretty good. Yeah.
Because realistically at the end of the day, originality, if we
even give that A7, we're talking about like a 37, which puts it
in like the kind of like upper 3rd of of games we've gone over.
I think that feels good for like an IP in house system done
really, really well with gorgeous, amazing art.
It's about where I expect like all the free leagues to go,
except for maybe Symbro, but that's just because Symbro
speaks to my heart. This is the Alien role-playing
game. Thank you so much for listening.
Appreciate it. I know this is a little bit of a
longer episode, so for those that are out there listening, we
always appreciate all of our listeners across podcast and
YouTube. It is Mothership Month for those
listening. It runs through until the 12th
of December I believe. So definitely go check out the
APS. Go back the games that we played
those APS for Devil's due non of scoundrels and gosh, what was
the one from Silver Arm interloper?
So you can get all those adventures and and that has been
our mothership month for for the month, because that is the end.
Do we want to tell people where we're going to be next?
Week. Oh yeah, let's tell people where
we're going to be next week. Hey, so we're going to go to
PAXU next week. Friend of the show, probably the
person who has influenced me, one of probably the second most
in teach RBG. First there's a victory.
Adam Vas world champ gameco. Friend of the show, friend of
ours. We've said from day one that we
are an Adam Vas stand podcast asked us to run the They're not
going to be available to be at PAX so they asked us to run
their booth for them because they said there's probably no
one in the world that knows their games as much as we do.
Which I completely agree since I have all of them.
And I have almost all of them. Yeah, so you can find us next
week at PAX U running the World Champ Gameco booth.
We will also be part of the corpse run for Merkborg.
So if you are a fan of Merkborg and you're going to do the more
the corpse run at PAX U, you will need to get our signatures
also come by all of Adam's cool stuff.
And yeah, that's it. That's where we'll be.
Thank you so much for listening Hunter.
Beautiful as always. I think we talked about this.
Me and Hunter don't live close to each other so us both going
to party will be the. First person in like 7 years.
I think it's probably been like 7 years, like five to seven
years. So it'll be the first time we
get to see each other in person in quite a long time.
So I'm very excited for that. Good mothership month, buddy.
We will see everybody later. Have a wonderful day.
Bye. Bye.