Customer Reviews

Aliens Adventure Game

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The Aliens Adventure Game can elicit negative reactions from modern gamers, repelled by its rule complexity. RPGs published in recent years have had their emphasis on background and ease of play. Now that pen-and-paper RPGs must compete with video games and MMORPGs, woe to the RPG that slows down play unnecessarily.

This wasn't always the case. RPGs evolved from wargames, which typically had reams of rules eagerly consumed by the players. The Aliens Adventure Game was published in a time when you could write a simple computer program yourself in BASIC, print it out on your tractor-feed printer, and give it to your buddy.

So ignore the rules. What's left?

Plenty. The background is based on the first two movies: Alien and Aliens. And the authors flesh out this rather paltry source material with some of their own extrapolations, which you may or may not like. I feel it maintains the spirit of the Aliens universe.

Chapter 4 goes into detail about the Aliens. Background, Life Cycle, Metabolism, Lairs, and the infamous Facehuggers.

But this book really should have been titled "The USCM Adventure Game," except that few would have understood what that meant. Chapter 3: Setting is 37 pages of source material intended to take your USCM character beyond traditional Alien-hunting and to other worlds, other problems. Creating Marine strike teams, missions, and what happens when the mission is over. Other sectors of space, other worlds. Page 59 has a map of settled space, and several of the worlds are described in the pages that follow. My favorite is Tartarus, which has a 20-year day, and a 20-year night. It has been recently plagued by the Harvesters, enormous armored, burrowing animals that are ruining a once-prosperous colony.

Chapter 5 describes equipment that USCM characters would encounter, from hand-held sensors to frigates and warships.

Chapter 8 suggests scenarios, campaign settings and mission ideas for referees.

One of the aspects of the book that I love are all the movie quotes in the sidebars. "He's dead. You're dog meat, pal." (Hudson). The sourcebook is graced with numerous B&W stills, as well as 8 gorgeous pages of color photos from the Aliens movie.

So I view this book as more of a resource, a mine of material, than a ready-to-play game. And seen in that light, my personal copy of the Aliens Adventure Game will always have a place in my RPG collection.

An excellent companion I would suggest is the Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual

I am still shaking my head in dismay at this travesty. Aliens is, by far, one of my all time favorite settings. I fully admit that. I have just about all the action figures from when I was a kid; I'll still buy figures in this particular series even now! I have all the video games, I have the collectible card game, I have all the comics, and I even have all the novels! So imagine my excitement when I found out a Role Playing Game was produced in this universe. I really enjoy tabletop RPG's quite a bit, so I was pretty excited to delve into this and maybe run some games with my gaming group. After reading this, that is definitely not going to happen.

Granted this game came out in the early 90's, well before Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, and well before major stories in the comics took hold and pre-Alien 3. (This is early writing is also painfully obvious when you read about how they think internet shopping will be in the future. I got a chuckle out of that actually.) The fact it was pre-Alien 3 gave me a little hope for it, because that movie was a terrible follow-up to the action packed Aliens movie. I am disappointed in Leading Edge for producing a game like this and it kind of turned me off to trying to track down some other games they've produced as well. After reading this I'm not too surprised the company did not survive over the years, however, their miniatures line for the Terminator 2 and Aliens series are quite awesome. In that they certainly succeeded. Anyway, I should get into what I dislike about this.

Maybe it's because I'm reading it way after the fact, but I simply hate their system. I don't actually need to play through a campaign to know it's not going to be fun, I've played enough RPG's in my day to understand game mechanics very well and I know what I do and don't find fun. Going into combat with this system is a grueling exercise. It is entirely based on tables. Tables are not a terrible thing, I mean I enjoy playing Warhammer 40k, but there is seriously a limit to how many tables you have to look at versus when you stop having fun. In certain combat scenarios, if you hit things just right, you could look at up to NINE tables to figure out what happened to your character. For a SINGLE combat sequence, which is only supposed to last a few seconds at most in game time! I'm sorry, but that just doesn't sound like a lot of fun. I understand they wanted to add a degree of realism into the system, but this is absurd. Part of the interest in gaming is that you can do things that you can't do in the real world! While the Aliens setting is incredibly realistic, all the table searching will have any player inundated with tables rather than actual game play.

One mechanic that they particular harp on is how "this isn't like your other role playing games", by that they mean they got rid of hit points. Hit Points are a pretty simplistic and fast paced process to judge damage. Instead this system has a couple different kinds of damage factors, but they both deal Physical Damage. You then have to check your physical damage to your Knockout Value. (This has a huge range and the examples tout numbers in the three thousand ranges!) Anyway, if you hit a specific value you have to then get medical treatment, which you have to cross reference with ANOTHER table to find out how long you can last without being healed. Naturally this is after cross referencing your Physical Damage table with your Damage Total table to see if you can be revived! All of this stuff is abbreviated too, so we have your PD, referenced with your DT, to see if you get an RR. Of course if you're trying to hit something everything goes against your SRM. Ugh... I'm already NOT having fun playing this game!

Alright, so the combat system is an absolute travesty. Maybe the other content isn't so bad. That's not entirely true. It does have its good points, but it certainly doesn't outweigh the bad. For the record though, they do say that anything here should be modified by the GM, which is fine to say if you don't have to virtually overhaul their entire game system! For example, the treatment of Alien physiology in this is absolutely god awful in my opinion. Granted at the time the Adventure Game was written, they might not have had a lot of these details, but I seriously think some of them were quite implicit from the film. One of the most blatant errors is the part on Alien vision. Aliens don't have eyes. It's blatantly obvious they don't, I have no idea why they have this in the book and relate it to have a visual spectrum. They are not like the Predator! I also disagreed heavily with the concept that the Alien warriors also lay eggs. This is another aspect that I thought was pretty clear did not happen in the film. Finally, the other major issue I had with the Aliens was the face huggers can also implant embryos in dead bodies. That just seems plain counter intuitive to how an organism like this should work. The Chestburster only eats the dead flesh AFTER it comes out. It's supposed to grow inside a living host first! This was so disappointing. Luckily the Comics never used any of this tripe to move their stories along.

One thing I did like about this was the Marine character sheets. Despite all the table viewing, I thought the development and treatment of Marine characters was decently well done. It's basically one of the only things I'm not going to have to overhaul and rewrite if I want to competently play in the Aliens universe the way I believe it should be played! The book also feels very disorganized and disjointed sometimes. Like the table methods are so interrelated that it made the explanation on how to use them feel out of place. Like one chapter will discuss how a certain mechanic works, but it relates to this other thing a few chapters later and by the time you've gotten to that after reading three other chapters, you've already basically forgotten how to connect the two. They also try to grow the Aliens universe by introducing the whole ICC system of planets, which is very cool. I liked that a lot. However, they introduce these new insect like creatures on one planet called Harvesters. Are there any illustrations of these? Nope, we don't have illustrations, instead they went with movie screen shots, which are cool, but they're useless when trying to envision new creatures. They seem to keep touting these new encounters with the Harvesters over encounters with the Aliens... seriously; I bought this RPG to play against Aliens, not some other facsimile. I do agree that it's a good idea to introduce new material, but to use it in examples as much as they did was disappointing.

In the end I'm going to have to seriously rewrite this game in order to make it even remotely fun to play. The only salvageable aspect of this game is in chapter 8, when they give you ideas for campaigns to run. Some of the campaign suggestions are really great and are definitely something I could see my friends and me playing through. I just wish they had more detail for them, like a full module. A final thing that bothered me about this book is they kept making reference to another game they wrote called "Phoenix Command". They would reference this in case we wanted clarification on rules... seriously... the rules in this should be complete! I like the Aliens series so much that I just might rewrite most of this game! I'll probably borrow the Marine character sheets and development from this book, but seriously I'm putting hit points back in. This added "realism" they've included by referencing a bunch of tables is not fun. This will be a huge project for me, but I really think I can do it better and more competently.


P.S. It IS worth getting if you're a collector like me though, I'll say that much.

I have been looking to buy this game for the last 18 years. I am a GM of 28 years & have played over 24 different games. This game is much like the Traveler game system...meaning that you cant play it. I agree that it has to be rewritten, but I am just going to use the game for background & play it in the Rifts game system.