Let's Read the ALIEN RPG

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Now for some Lovecraftian stuff you might use for a game. Even just as something an NPC believes.

The comics have often explored what a victim experiences while sedated by a facehugger with it tying into the religious side of the franchise quite frequently. Here's an example where a victim sees glimpses of the species' past and future:

Alien future.jpg

This is an android's rantings as it dies about the purpose of the Alien race. The character is from an android separatist group convinced they know the "truth" about the Aliens.

Marvel Alien.jpg
 
For those wondering what's next.

There will be a final cinematic scenario in the 26 Draconis* series called "Heart of Darkness".

After that is an Explorers/Colonist campaign book called "Building Better Worlds" that gives tools for setting a campaign beyond the borders of human space. Apparently will have much more Engineer related material.

*This is the particular strain of the black goo used in all cinematic scenarios so far.
 
For those wondering what's next.

There will be a final cinematic scenario in the 26 Draconis* series called "Heart of Darkness".

After that is an Explorers/Colonist campaign book called "Building Better Worlds" that gives tools for setting a campaign beyond the borders of human space. Apparently will have much more Engineer related material.

*This is the particular strain of the black goo used in all cinematic scenarios so far.
So Heart of Darkness is more Colonial Marine stuff?
 
Another weird setting fact is how much subjective time Ripley experienced between Alien and her death in Alien 3. If you go by the DVDs and lines in the movie then from her point of view when she dies at the end of Alien 3 only roughly two months ago she was speaking to Ash, Captain Dallas and the others on the Nostromo.

Most of that time is spent as a dock worker at Gateway station above Earth that you see at the start of Aliens. Roughly speaking:

Alien infestation on the Nostromo: 1-2 days
Wakes up at Gateway and starts work there: Roughly 1.5-2 months
Time on LV-426 with marines: 1-2 days
Time on Fiorini-161 prison: 2-5 days

Just a bit funny I thought. spaceship nightmare, two month break, death colony, death prison.

tired.png
 
Alien infestation on the Nostromo: 1-2 days
Wakes up at Gateway and starts work there: Roughly 1.5-2 months
Time on LV-426 with marines: 1-2 days
Time on Fiorini-161 prison: 2-5 days
Isn't it longer than that because of transit time, though?
 
Would it use the small mouth or the big mouth to eat the baby?

Also, Worth1000 is still around? That takes me back.
From wikipedia "The service was shut down on 1 October 2013."
 
I got this in an email today:

Free League and Titan Books Announce Creative Partnership for the ALIEN Universe

Cohesive Narrative Across Novels and the RPG
Free League Publishing and Titan Books today announced a collaboration to publish a unified storyline set within the ALIEN Universe. For 2022 and into 2023, the editorial and writing teams will share assets and coordinate plotlines to form a cohesive narrative across three original novels and the multiple award-winning ALIEN RPG.

“The ALIEN RPG has established the ‘Frontier War,’ as remote human colonies come under assault by an unknown enemy, dropping a deadly pathogen that unleashes monsters on those worlds,” Titan Acquisitions Editor Steve Saffel said. “At the same time, in the wake of the Titan novel Alien: Into Charybdis, political tensions on Earth reach a boiling point.”

These dramatic events play out in the recently released ALIEN RPG: Colonial Marines Operations Manual by Free League and three upcoming trade paperback novels by Titan Books, each independent but all set against a dramatic galactic backdrop:
  • Alien: Colony War by David Barnett (April 2022)
  • Alien: Inferno's Fall by Phillipa Ballantine and Clara Carija (July 2022)
  • Alien: Enemy of My Enemy by Mary SanGiovanni (February 2023)
The results will set the stage for further developments within the ALIEN Universe, as depicted in the roleplaying game and original fiction.

Find out more and pre-order the first novel here.

To further establish the connection between the game and the novels, the ALIEN RPG lead setting writer Andrew E.C. Gaska will develop three unique RPG scenarios which will appear as bonus features in the books, one per novel. The first such scenario, Fallout, is included in the first novel available now for pre-order.
 
I like this game, but the more established lore the setting gets the less keen I am in following any of it. I'm pretty happy with just the three movies.

Corporations.
Space.
Monsters.

That's really all I want.
 
Ho! Ho!

Because you've all been very good this year I'll pop by for a few days to post hopefully useful info. Mainly on Alien and some other stuff!

So to start with a brief overview of ALIEN scenarios that have come out. These are based on running each 3-4 times with separate groups, although not at cons.

There is the scenario at the back of the Core book:
Hope’s Last Day

Two scenarios at the back of tie-in novels:
Fallout from “Colony War”
EVAC From “Inferno’s Fall”

The 26 Draconis storyline consisting of:
Chariot of the Gods
Destroyer of Worlds
Heart of Darkness

The first three are "single act" scenarios, which roughly speaking means they're say a 1-2 session job.
The 26 Draconis scenarios are more 5-6 session each.

I'll post up some thoughts on each and material I found useful.

"Heart of Darkness" involves a major shift in the Alien setting, so the post about it will be spoiler heavy.

Regarding the novels "Colony War" is quite poor. Very 90s DOOM novel:
"The sergeant loaded his shotgun for the second time agressively. 'Fuck you' he shouted aggressively at the Xenomorph horde"

Inferno's fall is a good bit better, both in terms of writing and setting. It's still an Alien novel, so not likely to be of interest unless you're familiar with the setting. I'll say a bit more about it when I get to its scenario.

Watch Fassbender play with his flute while you wait.

 
Ho! Ho!

Because you've all been very good this year I'll pop by for a few days to post hopefully useful info. Mainly on Alien and some other stuff!

So to start with a brief overview of ALIEN scenarios that have come out. These are based on running each 3-4 times with separate groups, although not at cons.

There is the scenario at the back of the Core book:
Hope’s Last Day

Two scenarios at the back of tie-in novels:
Fallout from “Colony War”
EVAC From “Inferno’s Fall”

The 26 Draconis storyline consisting of:
Chariot of the Gods
Destroyer of Worlds
Heart of Darkness

The first three are "single act" scenarios, which roughly speaking means they're say a 1-2 session job.
The 26 Draconis scenarios are more 5-6 session each.

I'll post up some thoughts on each and material I found useful.

"Heart of Darkness" involves a major shift in the Alien setting, so the post about it will be spoiler heavy.

Regarding the novels "Colony War" is quite poor. Very 90s DOOM novel:
"The sergeant loaded his shotgun for the second time agressively. 'Fuck you' he shouted aggressively at the Xenomorph horde"

Inferno's fall is a good bit better, both in terms of writing and setting. It's still an Alien novel, so not likely to be of interest unless you're familiar with the setting. I'll say a bit more about it when I get to its scenario.

Watch Fassbender play with his flute while you wait.


Good to see you!
 
Okay so first the 26 Draconis storyline. Covers of the module here:

Alien-Chariot-of-the-gods-600x775.jpg

2_165680_e.jpg

Alien-RPG-Heart-of-Darkness-Packshot-2D.jpg

The 26 Draconis of their title is a strain of the Engineer's Black Goo.

Specifically a group of scientists landed on an Engineer world, got Neomorphs (the creatures from Covenant) implanted in them and altered the Black Goo so it could function as a vaccine/inoculation against Neomorph implantation. The inoculation works but has side effects.

The modules each shadow a specific film.

Chariot of the Gods reflects the first film. You're the crew of the same class of ship as the Nostromo and come upon another vessel full of horrors.
Destroyer of Gods involves a pile of marines coming to a planet and facing high octane xeno action.
Heart of Darkness takes place on an isolated factory prison in orbit around a black hole. So clearly the third film.

Just to say in the posts ahead, I'll put the major revelations behind spoilers but if you plan on playing you might not want to know anything. So just keep that in mind. Anything I'll have out of spoilers will be something the PCs learn initially or very early.
 
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Chariot of the Gods:

So in this module you are the crew of the USCSS Montero on a mission to transport fuel to Sutter's World, a very remote colony. Weyland-Yutani has contracted your ship for the job rather than safer and larger haulers since the destination is so remote and the colony so new it isn't part of established trade routes. The fuel is for the colony's fusion plant to keep the lights on.

You wake from hypersleep because the ship's computer has detected a signal mid-route only to find the signal is coming from the Chronus. The Chronus is a ship famous in-setting for being a long lost scientific expedition that went outside settled human space on an archeological expedition.

As a player the module is quite similar to Traveller's "The Annic Nova" at first. Exploring a seemingly abandoned relic of a ship and slowly trying to piece together what happened. If you like Call of Cthulhu scenarios where you explore a detailed mansion with a bit of history you'll probably enjoy it. Of all the 26 Draconis scenarios it assumes the least familiarity with the setting and can easily be played by people with the standard cultural osmosis knowledge of the films. You'd probably get a bit more out of it if you watched Prometheus and Covenant though.

So GM stuff.

So first I'll say there is a feature of this that it shares with the sequel "Destroyer of Worlds" that GMs should be aware of. It starts as a slow burn but a set of events can occur one-third or halfway through that turns it into a slaughter fest.

Initially you explore the ship and see slice of life stuff across the ship and evidence of some kind of accident and outbreak. Eventually the PCs will meet roaming abominations (see below) which can be avoided pretty easily.
However when you find the Chronus crew's hypersleep pods and wake them up a Neomorph bursts out of one of them and the rest of the crew starts mutating. At that point you have several monsters more powerful than the PCs roaming a very confined space.

The whole twist is that the 26 Draconis inoculation does prevent alien-like creatures from gestating in you, but in most cases it also triggers a transformation into abominations like Fifield from Prometheus:

Screenshot 2022-12-10 at 11-07-12 ALIEN_Starter_Set_Chariot_of_the_Gods.jpg

The backstory is that the crew landed on a large asteroid called LV-1113 in the 26 Draconis system. It contained an Engineer stellar forming (i.e. machinery that can create stars or alter the life path of an existing one) and genetics facility, but the Engineer biotech had long ago run wild and quickly infected the crew with Neomorph embryos. The crew developed the inoculation, found it was mutating some of them and shortly after there was a mutiny. The mutinous crew was left behind on LV-1113 and the surviving crew quickly hit jump and have since been adrift.

If left long enough, about a day, the abominations evolve into the Belugu-head that was cut from Prometheus:

Shwa_babyhead.jpg

In original drafts Fifield survived long enough to complete his transformation into this. The Belugu head is more than strong enough to cause a TPK for the PCs here and the module can reach a stage where there are three or more of them.

The final act of the scenario has a pirate ship arrive and attempt to seize the Chronus for itself. Like most people who've run this scenario I rarely use the Pirates. They can be helpful if there are too many creatures as them breaching the Chronus can reduce the pressure on the PCs. However in most runs I find they don't add much to the module which up to that point is focused on body horror and the mystery of the ship, so gunning down pirates distracts from the core experience.

If you plan on running the later modules it's worth bringing attention to the fact that the Chronus crew ejected a whole section of the ship and abandoned the rest of the crew on LV-1113, since that point comes up in Heart of Darkness.
Technically speaking this module only mentions that the facility was storing black goo and it's in Heart of Darkness that the GM learns it was also for stellar forming. I include it here because when the PCs speak to the Chronus crew they would know this or at least have seen Engineer sculptures with stellar imagery and advanced machinery not seen at any other Engineer site, so I think it's useful for their dialogue.
I think it's reasonable that some of the Chronus crew would conjecture that the whole place was a Engineer "life creation" site, since it could create stars and plant the seeds for life on its worlds, so one can include that for a bit of wonder/dread.
 
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Destroyer of Worlds:

The "bad ass marines" scenario. So in this you are bunch of Marines called into a colony of the United Americas to capture a group of elite black ops marines who might be defecting to the UPP (Union of Progressive Peoples) with top secret information. The nature of that information is not revealed to your PCs.

The setting is quite cool. Ariarcus is a winter climate oil mining moon in orbit above the major storm of a Gas Giant. Few ships land, but instead pick up oil from a space station tethered to the moon by a space elevator. The moon was until recently owned by its citizens (very rare in the setting), but has recently been taken over by the United Americas as a staging post for their war against the UPP. You start off in the United Americas base Fort Nebraska which sits in the center of the colony.

Screenshot 2022-12-10 at 14-10-19 ALIEN_Destroyer_of_Worlds_Book.pdf.png
Screenshot 2022-12-10 at 14-10-47 ALIEN_Destroyer_of_Worlds_Book.pdf.png
elev.jpg

A preview of the map here:
Screenshot 2022-12-10 at 14-12-46 ALIEN_Destroyer_of_Worlds_Map.pdf.png

The module kicks off with you investigating the bar, factory, hospital, police station, local rebels, etc in search of the rogue marines. Some odd NPCs to meet along the way, e.g. a freed pleasure synthetic runs the local bar and tension from the citizens as they are split on remaining with the United Americas or joining the UPP.

There's also some cool PCs to play as. The Brazilian leader of your platoon, a survivor of a previous Xeno attack on a space station, a totally passive Bishop android, a tank bred soldier, etc. Each one has a pretty cool internal motivation (I won't mention in the spoiler since they're meant to be hidden from others).

Since the box art shows a massive alien ripping through the colony and you're all marines, I'm not spoiling much by saying this isn't pure investigation. So expect fairly extensive action as the module progresses.

Staffan Guldevall over on the ALIEN RPG facebook page made this wonderful intro to it:


The module has a four part structure. In the actual book itself this is given as three acts, but for me these are the actual breaks:
  1. Initial investigation looking for the rogue marines
  2. UPP arrives and invades the colony
  3. Engineer ship arrives and black goo bombs the colony. UPP and UA citizens turned into monsters
  4. Retreat into Fort Nebraska where UA military is hiding a full alien colony, culminating with a fight or flight with the queen.
So similar to the previous module this starts as a slightly Noir slow burn investigation and then becomes a literal all out war. Once the UPP arrives there's not as much scope to continue the investigation and when the Engineer bomber arrives it becomes irrelevant. So I would stay in stage one as long as possible so the players actually get a feel of a colony in the Alien world and features of everyday life there.

There is some trade-off here as most locations have pretty cool details about how they change in the later acts. Overall though the rush/pressure of the later acts will override this. I found the hospital benefits most from a later act visit, since the UPP don't seize it and its far enough from the Black Goo bombs, so it can be appreciated.

Once the Engineer bomber arrives the whole colony becomes filled with ravenous mutants, the only safe place being Fort Nebraska which is full of Aliens. So there is no let up at all until the end.

Screenshot 2022-12-10 at 14-44-59 ALIEN_Destroyer_of_Worlds_Book.jpg

The second section where the UPP takes over the colony is probably the most unusual, since you're in a "real" war scenario. No Aliens or that. Actual trench warfare, trying to take on the overwhelming UPP forces with gorilla tactics. I've read of a few groups just cutting out this section. So maybe worth thinking about if you want to include it.

Regarding the backstory:
Fort Nebraska is a research facility for attempting to weaponise the Alien. This includes samples of 26 Draconis to prevent Alien embryo development. The four marines the PCs are hunting were impregnated and inoculated. It worked on one of them, the other two are going to be chestburstered, but for the final one the black goo started bonding her DNA with the Alien, so she's literally becoming a hybrid. When the UPP arrive the attempts to export the alien hive off world get fucked up and the xenos spread into Fort Nebraska.

As a GM you need to know the setting better to run this one, as reasons for joining the UPP are a large part of the civilian mindset and many of the rogue marines joined these UPP aligned rebel citizens. In general I found the woman becoming a xeno is the best monster to introduce first (the module itself says this).

The final confrontation with the hive will probably kill everybody, so you'll need the NPC cards once you run out of PCs. This is because you face a Charger and Queen sequentially, two of the three most powerful Alien forms in the game thus far, in addition to several Warriors who each could kill a marine. It's also easily possible for the PCs to all die as part of winning. One method to kill the hive is to overload the colonies fusion reactor and basically blow up the moon, or collapse the space elevator back onto the surface. The queen is in the elevator, functioning as a final "fuck you" to the PCs when they think they're safe.

PCs have very gameable backgrounds. Silva the captain was part of the same black ops unit as the rogue marines. Hammer the tank bred marine is obssesed with proving himself the ultimate bad ass in a hand to hand confrontation with a Xeno. Iona is a sellout coward. The synth character Charlie is being mind controlled against his will by a Weyland-Yutani synthetic eager to secure the Alien. The player will alternate between being the WY synth and Charlie.
 
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Ho! Ho!

Because you've all been very good this year I'll pop by for a few days to post hopefully useful info. Mainly on Alien and some other stuff!

So to start with a brief overview of ALIEN scenarios that have come out. These are based on running each 3-4 times with separate groups, although not at cons.

There is the scenario at the back of the Core book:
Hope’s Last Day

Two scenarios at the back of tie-in novels:
Fallout from “Colony War”
EVAC From “Inferno’s Fall”

The 26 Draconis storyline consisting of:
Chariot of the Gods
Destroyer of Worlds
Heart of Darkness

The first three are "single act" scenarios, which roughly speaking means they're say a 1-2 session job.
The 26 Draconis scenarios are more 5-6 session each.

I'll post up some thoughts on each and material I found useful.

"Heart of Darkness" involves a major shift in the Alien setting, so the post about it will be spoiler heavy.

Regarding the novels "Colony War" is quite poor. Very 90s DOOM novel:
"The sergeant loaded his shotgun for the second time agressively. 'Fuck you' he shouted aggressively at the Xenomorph horde"

Inferno's fall is a good bit better, both in terms of writing and setting. It's still an Alien novel, so not likely to be of interest unless you're familiar with the setting. I'll say a bit more about it when I get to its scenario.

Watch Fassbender play with his flute while you wait.


Séadna Séadna is back!
2711F07F-AE32-474B-B697-5AB85CE2188A.jpeg9A48B4F3-05B9-42D8-A809-538DE9C5891B.jpeg024B5685-5F8A-49C0-9315-3A1C8C737003.jpeg
 
So coming to the final one Heart of Darkness which is a bit of a "game changer" for the setting, I'll just say a little about the Black Goo, the various Xeno species and life in the cosmos.

A major conceit of the setting is that all worlds in the setting with natural life are only at the microbial stage or are dominated by insects. Any world with higher life always has an Engineer facility on it or some history of Engineer settlement. This is the case for both the only known world with sentient life, Arcturus or garden worlds with Cretaceous Earth like life such as the UPP world Shānmén.

So most here will know the Black Goo as the mutagen from Prometheus and Covenant. Within hours of infection it turns the infected into a ravening monster with features reminiscent of the famous Xenomorph.
The black goo is in essence a retrovirus with a complex enough structure to perform computations as it undergoes chemical reactions with the host's DNA. So a sort of mutagenic AI.

The Alien queen secretes a form of the black goo naturally called Royal Jelly which is used to make other queens or Praetorians. The RPG doesn't definitely come down on one side, but the default/most hinted implication is that the Engineers found the Xenos and retro-engineered the Black Goo from them. In several places it references the "Deacon" myth of the Engineers being a dying race who'd advanced to the limits of science, become sterile, where upon one of them underwent a spiritual journey that "ripped the heavens" and met the "Star Beast" was impregnated and from his "child" the Engineers found a method of procreation through sacrifice.

The Black Goo goes into a more advanced form when dowsed with intense radiation, like that from a Black Hole. More below in the Heart of Darkness post.

All the various "morphs" at this point can be confusing, so basically:

Xenomorph XX121: the classical Xeno of the movie

Neomorphs:
Guys from Covenant.

ARPGNeomorph.jpg
Colin-shulver-final-neo-2-152.jpg

The end result of the black goo mutating a worlds fungal and insect population. Infects hosts via spores.

Xenomorph XX033/Deacons/Protomorphs: The things that burst out of the Engineer in Covenant and anything involved in their life cycle. End result of a genetically stable black goo infestation.

TrilobiteImpregnatesEngineer.jpg
Deacon_prometheusmovie_still.jpg
Screenshot 2022-12-10 at 15-42-09 ALIEN_Heart_of_Darkness_Book.pdf.png
Screenshot 2022-12-10 at 15-41-58 ALIEN_Heart_of_Darkness_Book.pdf.png

As a black goo infestation evolves and if it has enough energy it becomes stable and begins to terraform worlds and even machines and space stations into a ProtoHive. The Protomorphs are then the Hive's immune system.
 
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Destroyer of Worlds:

The "bad ass marines" scenario. So in this you are bunch of Marines called into a colony of the United Americas to capture a group of elite black ops marines who might be defecting to the UPP (Union of Progressive Peoples) with top secret information. The nature of that information is not revealed to your PCs.

The setting is quite cool. Ariarcus is a winter climate oil mining moon in orbit above the major storm of a Gas Giant. Few ships land, but instead pick up oil from a space station tethered to the moon by a space elevator. The moon was until recently owned by its citizens (very rare in the setting), but has recently been taken over by the United Americas as a staging post for their war against the UPP. You start off in the United Americas base Fort Nebraska which sits in the center of the colony.

View attachment 52782
View attachment 52781
View attachment 52785

A preview of the map here:

The module kicks off with you investigating the bar, factory, hospital, police station, local rebels, etc in search of the rogue marines. Some odd NPCs to meet along the way, e.g. a freed pleasure synthetic runs the local bar and tension from the citizens as they are split on remaining with the United Americas or joining the UPP.

There's also some cool PCs to play as. The Brazilian leader of your platoon, a survivor of a previous Xeno attack on a space station, a totally passive Bishop android, a tank bred soldier, etc. Each one has a pretty cool internal motivation (I won't mention in the spoiler since they're meant to be hidden from others).

Since the box art shows a massive alien ripping through the colony and you're all marines, I'm not spoiling much by saying this isn't pure investigation. So expect fairly extensive action as the module progresses.

Staffan Guldevall over on the ALIEN RPG facebook page made this wonderful intro to it:


The module has a four part structure. In the actual book itself this is given as three acts, but for me these are the actual breaks:
  1. Initial investigation looking for the rogue marines
  2. UPP arrives and invades the colony
  3. Engineer ship arrives and black goo bombs the colony. UPP and UA citizens turned into monsters
  4. Retreat into Fort Nebraska where UA military is hiding a full alien colony, culminating with a fight or flight with the queen.
So similar to the previous module this starts as a slightly Noir slow burn investigation and then becomes a literal all out war. Once the UPP arrives there's not as much scope to continue the investigation and when the Engineer bomber arrives it becomes irrelevant. So I would stay in stage one as long as possible so the players actually get a feel of a colony in the Alien world and features of everyday life there.

There is some trade-off here as most locations have pretty cool details about how they change in the later acts. Overall though the rush/pressure of the later acts will override this. I found the hospital benefits most from a later act visit, since the UPP don't seize it and its far enough from the Black Goo bombs, so it can be appreciated.

Once the Engineer bomber arrives the whole colony becomes filled with ravenous mutants, the only safe place being Fort Nebraska which is full of Aliens. So there is no let up at all until the end.

View attachment 52786

The second section where the UPP takes over the colony is probably the most unusual, since you're in a "real" war scenario. No Aliens or that. Actual trench warfare, trying to take on the overwhelming UPP forces with gorilla tactics. I've read of a few groups just cutting out this section. So maybe worth thinking about if you want to include it.

Regarding the backstory:
Fort Nebraska is a research facility for attempting to weaponise the Alien. This includes samples of 26 Draconis to prevent Alien embryo development. The four marines the PCs are hunting were impregnated and inoculated. It worked on one of them, the other two are going to be chestburstered, but for the final one the black goo started bonding her DNA with the Alien, so she's literally becoming a hybrid. When the UPP arrive the attempts to export the alien hive off world get fucked up and the xenos spread into Fort Nebraska.

As a GM you need to know the setting better to run this one, as reasons for joining the UPP are a large part of the civilian mindset and many of the rogue marines joined these UPP aligned rebel citizens. In general I found the woman becoming a xeno is the best monster to introduce first (the module itself says this).

The final confrontation with the hive will probably kill everybody, so you'll need the NPC cards once you run out of PCs. This is because you face a Charger and Queen sequentially, two of the three most powerful Alien forms in the game thus far, in addition to several Warriors who each could kill a marine. It's also easily possible for the PCs to all die as part of winning. One method to kill the hive is to overload the colonies fusion reactor and basically blow up the moon, or collapse the space elevator back onto the surface. The queen is in the elevator, functioning as a final "fuck you" to the PCs when they think they're safe.

PCs have very gameable backgrounds. Silva the captain was part of the same black ops unit as the rogue marines. Hammer the tank bred marine is obssesed with proving himself the ultimate bad ass in a hand to hand confrontation with a Xeno. Iona is a sellout coward. The synth character Charlie is being mind controlled against his will by a Weyland-Yutani synthetic eager to secure the Alien. The player will alternate between being the WY synth and Charlie.

So does the module explain why the Engineer bomber shows up and mutated everyone?
 
So does the module explain why the Engineer bomber shows up and mutated everyone?
No. You know a few other systems have been bombed like this, but the RPG doesn't go into what's going on.
From recent novels you know it's not actually the Engineers doing this, but human-made synthetics. Though it's not been said why they are doing it. The RPG avoids most of the details since it doesn't want GM's to have to read the novels. It just says: Big ship shows up, can't be seen through clouds, drops bombs and leaves in under five seconds.
 
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I ran all three of these scenarios and enjoyed them all. Chariot of Darkness was my favourite. It had great structure and an unusual premise. It felt like several scenarios in one and they all rocked.

Heart of Darkness was my least favourite as I found that it was relatively unwieldy in the information presented and difficult not to have the players just dive straight into some kind of suicidal action to tank it pretty hard.
 
Heart of Darkness:

So let me say up front I fucking love this module, Gaska = God, etc. However my players really bought into it and I remember every detail easily because the themes were seared into my brain, "objectively" it's not well organised and contains a ton of setting information.

156110.jpeg

Heart of Darkness takes place on a maximum security space station prison, the Erebos, in orbit around a black hole in the 26 Draconis system. The prisoners operate a factory facility that trawls the plasma stream around the black hole. The plasma is funneled into a charging station where it refills gigantic "batteries" that can power colonies for years. These batteries are then shipped off to various worlds.

The PCs play scientists called in to investigate when a series of intelligent seeming transmissions are detected from the hole's accretion disk, originating from a swarm of lights orbiting some kind of object. The station was ordered to recover the object and you go to learn more. The PCs are part of the multinational Gehelgod institute, a think tank composed of the worlds best physicists, geneticists, etc.

The black hole is a total anomaly as when the Chronus investigated this system decades ago it was a trinary with no star on the path to becoming a black hole. In addition you know the Erebos was originally staffed by Weyland-Yutani personnel, until most of them were murdered by the former station manager who is now the leader of the prisoners.

Staff on board and prisoners claim the Black Hole "crushes souls" and it seems to have an unusual "pulse" that slowly erodes people's memories. The PCs arrive with a small supply of stims to delay these mental effects.

The PC's have the usual set of personal motives and a few provide very good role playing opportunities. Unfortunately I can't say more beyond this as virtually everything here is a spoiler, since this module closes out plot points in Covenant, Prometheus and was seemingly approved by Disney.

So what is going on?
The object is the ejected part of the Chronus from the first module, the "lights" are self-organising motes of the black goo charged by the black hole and the black hole is unnatural having formed when the Chronus crew triggered the Engineer stellar forming facility.

With the Black Goo powered up it can convert machines and even space stations like the Erebos into living creatures. Over the course of the module the Erebos itself comes alive as a gigantic bio-mechanical beast with the PCs exploring its innards and fighting off its immune system in the form of Protomorphs.

However the big shock is what the new goo does to humans. It evolves us into Giger-esque gods called the Fulfremmen (Anglo-Saxon for 'The Perfected'). A scientist on the Erebos translated Engineer glyphs as saying it was fear of these perfected that led the Engineers to mark Earth for extermination as seen in Prometheus:

Screenshot 2022-12-10 at 16-51-57 ALIEN_Heart_of_Darkness_Book.jpg

The goal of the Perfected in this scenario is to get the PCs to find a purer form of the black goo to complete their mutation into gods and then use the ship they arrived on to leave the system, spread throughout the cosmos by infecting human colonies and ultimately get revenge on the Engineers. If you look at the design it looks like Giger's goddesses:
a41252f13c67a8ece5b34480fe1733f0.jpg

and what Shaw was evolving into in Covenant:

covenantshaw1.jpg

The previous station manager, Wicks, actually went mad from going to close to the Black Hole which told her to destroy the Erebos, for reasons she can't articulate but fully believes in. She attempted to do this by setting fire to the station and getting others to evacuate, but was stopped by the current warden who put out the fires by venting the atmosphere, killing the rest of the staff and pinning it on her. She lives to get revenge on him and plunge the station into the black hole as the "voice of the black hole" demands.

So the Fulfremmen are the major antagonist here. Their attack table is full-on Giger including attacks with sexual overtones:
Screenshot 2022-12-10 at 17-00-54 ALIEN_Heart_of_Darkness_Book.pdf.png
They are far more intelligent than humans, have perfect balance and grace and are psionic. Infection by the Black Goo will slowly convert the PCs into Fulfremmen.

The prison population is quite an interesting bunch as they are led by the former station master Wicks
Screenshot 2022-12-10 at 17-23-39 ALIEN_Heart_of_Darkness_Book.pdf.png
and spiced up by a former Yakuza hacker and a tough guy prisoner who supports Wicks since he just wants to see her get revenge. This can really be mined for the same tension you see in Alien 3 where you have to rely on ultra-violent criminals to survive.

The PCs face fairly tough odds here, as the station comes alive, sends more and more monsters after them and they slowly have their minds crushed by the signal from the black hole. There's no "nice" ending here. They PCs either end up aiding the Fulfremen, die trying to stop them, or mutate into them. The Erebos is also quite dangerous to explore before any of this alien stuff kicks off because a lot of the station is irradiated or exposed to vacuum.

It can be quite exposition heavy, includes notes from the station scientist as he unravelled the Engineer hieroglyphs and the details of the Fulfremmen before mutating.

There is an additional plot point of the station spying on the UPP and storing their comms. Two of the PCs are UPP operatives there to recover the info and leave on a UPP ship. For many others I've read this overloaded the module, but for me it helped the claustrophobic and paranoid atmosphere.

The stand out PCs for me are the insane scientist who just wants to do amoral experiments with the black goo and the team's security guard who is sort of secretly a xeno cultist and begins to worship the Fulfremmen.

This module is pretty heavy on Alien lore, requires real buy-in to the setting as playing it casually will ruin the atmosphere and I found it works best when working with the semi-sexual horror of the Fulfremmen, which not all groups will like. However after running one player said the session was the scariest gaming session he ever had, so I think there's real gold here when it works.
 
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