Alien RPG: Building Better Worlds

Alien The Roleplaying Game

by Andrew E.C. Gaska

Building Better Worlds is a complete campaign module for the award-winning official ALIEN roleplaying game, giving you all the tools you need to run a full open-world campaign as a pioneering explorer or colonist. This book includes:

History of Colonization – the story of humanity’s reach for the stars.
Creating Explorers & Colonists – expanded character creation rules for life on the frontier.
Gear & Ships – an extensive chapter with new gear and spaceships, gloriously illustrated.
Extrasolar Species Catalog – new Xenomorphic creatures to encounter.
The Lost Worlds – the framework and backstory for a frontier campaign.
Expeditions – six thrilling expeditions into uncharted space, playable in any order.
The Endgame – the final showdown with everything at stake.
The Appendix – create your own frontier and colonize it.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Science Fiction, Horror

304 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 2023

About the author

With two decades of experience in the comics and video game industries, author Andrew E.C. Gaska is the Senior Development Editor at Lion Forge LLC. Having previously freelanced for Lion Forge’s Labs division as a script, pitch, and proposal writer, he now generates original IP for the brand, developing both comics and animation projects while working closely with creative teams to guide their vision to fruition.

He is founder/creative director of the guerrilla integrated-media studio BLAM! Ventures, and for the past three years has worked as a freelance franchise consultant to 20TH CENTURY FOX, writing series reference bibles, maintaining continuity, streamlining in-universe canon, and creating detailed timelines for the legacy franchises of ALIEN®, Predator®, and Planet of the Apes®. He was also a sequential storytelling instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York and for seventeen years served as a visual consultant to Rockstar Games on the Grand Theft Auto series, Red Dead Revolver, and all other releases.

Known as ‘Drew’ to his friends, his online sci-fi and sociopolitical essays on social media and at rogue-reviewer.com draw controversial debate and discussion from all sides. His graphic novels and prose works include Critical Millennium™, Space:1999™, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century®: The Draconian Fire Saga, Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes®, Tales from the Forbidden Zone: The Unknown Ape™, and the upcoming novel, Death of the Planet of the Apes®.

Drew resides in Gulf Breeze, Florida with his affectionately glutinous feline, Adrien. Find out more about his upcoming projects at www.blamventures.com

Reviews

[Sleepy Boy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would have preferred just a smidge more types of creatures in this source book but other than that it's excellent!

[Alexander Peterhans · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid addition to the Alien RPG, I feel it could've focused more on telling small adventures instead of interplanetary exploration. A colony campaign to me would mean a game more about the day to day running of a colony in the hard as nails world of the RPG. There are rules for running a colony, but they're more about tables.

The included campaign is interesting, but is more about aforementioned interplanetary exploration, and it leans heavily on a new enemy. I feel you have to be really careful adding new creatures to the Alien universe - it takes away some of the wonder, and turns the xenomorph in a kind of animal, albeit it an extremely dangerous one.

One of the new creatures is the xenomorph Empress, a sort of super-Queen, and I know that I would not use it in my campaign. Bigger is not always better.

One of my complaints from the core book remains - I feel all creatures should get their own illustration, especially because all these abominations, neomorphs, deacons etc start to blend together. I know, there's only so much space in a book, but I think it's important.

3.5 stars

[Gonzalo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have you ever thought about how Star Trek would work in the ALIEN universe? Me neither, but now I have the answer. Within this book, you will find out how to explore strange new (unwelcoming) worlds, to seek out new (murderous) life, and new (to you) civilizations. "Building better worlds" is the kind of book I did not think I needed (except that need all the ALIEN RPG books) or wanted (I was hoping for a Space Truckers book first), but when you get to read it, it is a great addition to the game. Like the Colonial Marines supplement, about a third of the book is player-facing material: two new archetypes, new talents for all, more toys, additional background...These is the kind of things I do not actively seek myself, and for the most part, I find relatively dull to read. But I know my gaming self, and once I get into the fry, most of these options become quite useful. You also get more Xenos, which I believe it is a good thing, even if I agree with another reviewer that it would be great to see some art for these creatures. The art pieces in this book are superb (the style is really growing on me), why not show us the baddies? Sure, monsters are less scary once you have seen them, but we GMs need to base our descriptions on something! Now, the really good stuff is at the end. At the very end you have an appendix that will help you, well, build worlds better, perhaps even on the fly, and get your players the feeling they are cataloguing a place no human has returned from before. Before you get to that however, there is the campaign. It is the bulk of the book, and the reason for me to read it now. It works pretty much like the Colonial Marines one: six scenarios that can be played in any order, and a big (plot twist included) finale. I will not go into the details, so as not to spoil the story to a potential reader. But, to make this a circular review: if you like ALIEN AND Star Trek, I believe you are going to enjoy this campaign immensely.

[Jean-Francois Boivin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love how knowledgeable the author is, and also very creative. Aside from some rules additions and new gear, vehicles and ships, and lots of lore about exploring planets and generating colonies, he wrote an amazing multi-mission campaign titled "The Lost Colonies". He took 18 of Weyland Industries colonies that were created for the (wonderfully partly reproduced here) ProjectPrometheus.com website to promote the movie's release in 2012, in a section of the site called "Discover New Worlds", and made it into a whole story: since the in-universe website was set around 2094, it is now discovered there was a space anomaly in 2110 that cut off this part of colonized space from the core worlds and they were cut-off from the rest of the galaxy and left on their own until 2185-86, the time of the campaign. What happened to people (and other things) living on those colonies? That what the PCs discover through the very open-ended campaign in 7 established scenarios, plus room to create many more planets and expeditions.

I love also all the little references to the Expanded Universe, both canon and non-canon: aside from the ProjectPrometheus site, there is a character from Dark Horse Comics' Aliens: Apocalypse - The Destroying Angels , reference to the planet Rim (from the revised Mark Verheiden comic series from 1988-1991), scenes and ships very reminiscent of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, and creatures and other planets from previous novels and comics. I am currently running the campaign and it's a blast!

[Haakon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this book mostly for the colony creation and running bit, which is tagged as an appendix with mostly tables in the back of the book, with some of the explanation not being very intuitive. It's ok, but had expected more.

The setting material (history of colonization of the stars and the like) I greatly enjoyed, and the way layout/editing is done I never felt swamped with dry information.

The usual weird choice of adding more xenomorphs with different changes, but not having illustrations, making the whole "monster" bit of the Alien game increasingly more confusing and less interesting. When you open other Free League game books like Dragonbane and Væsen that does monster entries so well it gets even more mind boggling why they dropped that in this game of all places...

The ship plans and equipment stuff on the other hand is very well done, but short on illustrations beyond plans that goes along with the lack of monster illustrations.

The campaign included has the usual modern adventure design issue of having long descriptions for some rooms but is missing a good short first description and important information hidden in large chunks of text. Combined with lack of illustrations this is not ideal. Add to that some "twist" bits that lacks hard ideas and tips to run and just some "x amount of enemies chase players, this might be deadly" sort of deal. Good framework, lots of things to mine, but I would never ever run this without redoing all the meat and potatoes of the adventures. Not happy with this.

All in all, there's some good stuff in here. But in no way something I think I will reference much, or feel like will add much to the game.

[Benjamin]

How? Free League had another good sale, and I'd heard good things about this book, even though I'm a little tired of the Alien product line (and also: there's a second edition coming out already?!).

What? This is the colonist supplement: some new character options, gear; the history of colonizing the Far Spinward area (which, natch, was isolated for a while and is absolutely filled with Engineer ruins) and the remaining colonies; and a sandboxy (but not really) campaign where you take part in a UN-driven attempt to reconnect with the colonies, hindered by all the monsters and internal strife.

Yeah, so? There is one thing in the adventure that bugs me and that I will spoil now: there's an overarching plot where the monsters want you to think they are going to use an Engineer artifact to travel through space, so that they can lure the UN mission in and take over their spaceship. It's not a fatal flaw but I dislike missions like this that rely on the players being smart enough to find the breadcrumbs and dumb enough not to figure out that they are being tricked.

Besides that, this was a pretty good book, and helps to lay out a bit of the overarching universe here, with different species (and sometimes human cults) worshipping the xenomorphs.