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kasia jazmina

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Stand My Ground by Olya Bossak

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junji ito

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Portrait From Vertical Dentomancer

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By rbnks

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Take caution. Many dreams turn into nightmares

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by F3LC4T (exellero)

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evangeline gallagher

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they’re waiting 🔥 HELLPIERCERS

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Hot damn, what a fantastic book. This is Colonial Marines Operations Manual (2021) for Free League’s Alien RPG. Prior to this, published Alien adventures were designed for the cinematic side of the game — pre-generated characters, secret agendas, fairly linear plots — but this is the first in a series of open world campaign supplements (the plan, I believe, is release a book like this for every primary occupation in the core rulebook).

The player portion of the book is everything you wanted to know about the Colonial Marines for play. There’s stuff on unit structure, specialized roles (with slight mechanical tweaks), heaps of equipment. There’s a good deal of lore and rumors, too, which is an appetizer for the GM section, containing as it does a truckload of lore, details on swaths of the galaxy, the lowdown on the war that just broke out (between the United Americas and the Union of Progressive Peoples) and secrets galore. This section lays out the an open ended military-focused campaign, complete with a ship that serves as home base, NPCs and framing for particular sorts of missions. The final section supplement the open campaign with seven connected scenarios that build off the events of the seemingly unconnected cinematic scenarios and pushes the overall Alien RPG meta forward with some potentially big paradigm shifts.

The thing about this book, and the Alien line in general, that bowls me over is the lore. There is a lot of BAD material in the Alien franchise (Prometheus? Prometheus.). There is also some great stuff that is obscure (lots of comic book stories) or was unproduced (like Gibson’s Alien 3 script). Somehow Andrew Gaska has pulled those thread of varying quality into a tapestry that works as a compelling universe for roleplay. Initially, with the cinematic scenarios, there were big guardrails. Colonial Marines lowers them substantially and beyond them I can see the expanse of thrilling galaxy. More please.

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ouohouhhh...... ghost bride

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This is Death in Space (2021), an RPG about blue collar life (which is often miserable) in space (which is always hostile). In this, it is a cousin of Mothership, Alien, Those Dark Places and all the various other incarnations of industrial, deep space science fiction. Both the regular and the deluxe versions of the book make a good first impression, with a lovely design sense and very nice illustrations. I see a lot of folks shorthand the graphic design (and the play, honestly) as Mork Borg in space. I understand the impulse and there are definitely similarities, but that does the overall experience of the game a disservice.

The system is a minimal and D20-based. Character generation is highly random (there are lots of random tables in general; in this the relationship to Mork Borg is undeniable). The game focuses around the characters and their hub — a ship or station — that they work to maintain, which often requires taking jobs in order to fund or salvage the necessary material for maintenance. For the most part, the game universe — the Tenebrous System — is gritty and prosaic.

It isn’t entirely without mystery, though. Character progression accrues Void Points, which can turn into mutations (limited special abilities) or corruption (weird side-effects that hint at a stranger truth to existence). Likewise, when a character dies, they role on the Death in Space table to have a vision of how they were meant to die, implying something is fundamentally wrong with existence as the character experienced it. That…is extremely interesting!

Unlike the highly orchestrated Coriolis, Death in Space feels like a toy box and no clear indication of the right or wrong way to play with them. Want to play an Expanse-style game? Go for it. Want to do Dead Space? That’s maybe a little trickier, but doable. The implied universe is fascinating on its own merits but, after all, it remains just that: implied.

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