I have decided to run a solo-campaign for fun and to test the new Twilight: 2000 4e rules. Playing an RPG solo, how is that possible, you might be forgiven to ask!? Well, the game has a solo-rules component and is – even as a group game – quite a “gamist” hex crawl. It is designed to be player driven with random elements being key components to a campaign.
The resulting narrative is based on character goals (called Big Dreams in the game), motivations and responses to whatever they encounter. A classic goal is “Escape back to America” or establish a “safe haven – a base”, but that is very long term. A more immediate goal is: survive – get away from the advancing Soviets.
My intentions are to document the game on this blog, mainly focusing on the narrative, but with brief explanations of core elements and references to the rules when I feel it is appropriate and to demonstrate how they inform the narrative. This will allow people not familiar with the game to follow the game. I’ve added small dialogue and fiction elements in order to bring out the character motivations and personalities.
Twilight: 2000 by Free League was released end 2021 in its 4th edition using a variant of the Year Zero game engine.
Why this solo game and posts?
I thought it would be fun!
It would be interesting to see how a narrative would develop using the solo rules
I would familiarize myself with the rules, hopefully for a future campaign
To provide a game example to other referees or potential referees
To do so, I have created four player characters using the game’s Life Path system, where the character is fairly randomized (you roll stats, and start with an 18 year old, aging 1D6 year for each new career step). I have adjusted a couple of minor details to make for an interesting group.
I’ll be using Roll20 as the VTT to play the game.
The game and background
In short, Twilight: 2000 is a survival game in a past that never was. Our timelines diverges after 1991. The Soviet Union remains after a coup against Jeltsin – but the Warsaw pact was dissolved and Poland allies with the West. It ends in an escalating conflict, which turns into all out NATO – Soviet warfare with Poland on the NATO side. Nuclear weapons are exchanged, but the two sides show enough restraint to avoid complete nuclear holocaust. The result is nuclear winter, collapsed infrastructure, famine and disease. When the game begins, NATO has tried a last push in Poland, called Operation Reset, but they underestimate Soviet strength, and it fails. The characters are part of the collapsed 5th US mechanized division, and are given the final message by HQ: “You are on your own. Good luck!”. They must now survive, as the Soviet forces expends their last effort in a counter-attack.
The default is that most of the characters are soldiers, but they can also be government agents or civilians of a wide variety of backgrounds.
Twilight: 2000 differs from most role-playing games in that there are zero supernatural elements (not that you can’t run a great zombie apocalypse game with it!). It is all about humans. Human failure, morality, hard decisions, violence, hope, friendship, loyalty – or disloyalty. Stuff that incredible dramas are made of.
The ruleset is fairly crunchy – simple at its core, but with many details and modifiers. Survival requires multiple rolls per day to determine weather, drive a vehicle (if you have one) on wartorn roads or off-road, spotting potential hazards (encounters), setting camp, foraging and hunting, maintaining equipment weekly etc.
The core mechanics is four attributes with a value of A to D. Each letter represents a dice. A is D12, B=D10, C=D8 and D is D6. The 12 skills have similar values + F which is no skill, and you add them together in a dice pool. When attempting a task, you need to roll a six or higher. You can attempt all skills using only your attribute dice. Rolling a 10-12 counts as two successes. More successes can give extra damage for example.
Captain Charlie King, until a year or two ago a reservist, intelligence officer and desk jockey Lieutenant Krysia Zielinski, brigade liaison officer from the Polish armed forces Corporal Jason Kelly, only survivor of a mortar team PFC Juan Pérez, keen eyed US army rifle-man
*Use the links to see PNGs of their character sheets.
Intentionally, there are also obvious conflicts in the Moral Codes of the characters.
The Solo Rules
For the solo rules, you turn up the randomness. The game comes with 52 random encounters selected by drawing cards from a regular deck. These can be everything from meeting a group of US stragglers, vehicles hit with a tactical nuclear weapon, Soviet soldiers to civilian refugees etc. The solo rules add an “oracle” where you also draw playing cards. Red is a boon. Black is a hazard. And further information can be gained from the exact number on a table – for example, 6 of black: mildly dangerous or Red Ace: life saving. In addition, there is a similar table to determine NPC intentions. It is up to the player to interpret these and represent characters and the world fairly to create the narrative.
The core set has four ready to play “Scenario Sites”, which I won’t be using. They are quite complex places with multiple NPCs and plots. Using them would also introduce major spoilers.
If you think that sounds interesting, more details of the characters and the first day of the lives of these survivors is ready:
This article could also be called: Why should I try The One Ring RPG? But I picked this title, because there are 50 million D&D players and many have never tried another roleplaying game. Many would like to, but which one to pick? I think there are many arguments for why The One Ring RPG should be a top option.
This article is also a review, but it is NOT a comparison as to which game is best. I love D&D, but the One Ring does things differently – and sometimes better – than the most popular RPG in the world. I have used D&D 5e as context for The One Ring’s mechanics, because that helps explain them to a large audience.
Reading this article, I hope that you get a taste for this game, or get inspired by the mechanics, whether you are a D&D player or not!
In short, I think the One Ring 2nd edition is an excellent fantasy RPG and a great pick for D&D players who want to try something new, yet familiar. The game will appeal to a lot of fantasy lovers, and I think it can be a great way to introduce new people to roleplaying games. The game is designed by Francesco Nepitello and Marco Maggi, and now published by Free League Publishing (Mörk Borg, the Alien RPG, Tales from the Loop, Vaesen and many other award winning, great games).
The rules are fairly simple and the setting is familiar to anyone interested in fantasy. Furthermore, the game system facilitates characters and stories that fit the world and captures the mood of Middle-earth perfectly. The artwork is amazing and the writing oozes of the designers’s love for Tolkien’s world.
This game lets you step right into the Prancing Pony, smell the pipeweed, hear the songs and meet an intimidating Ranger. Or perhaps you cross the cold Misty Mountains as a homesick hobbit alongside a couple of doughty Durin’s Folk to recover lost treasure while being hunted by orcs of Angmar? I could go on but you get it!
Below, I’ve listed some of the things that the One Ring does well, and less well, for quick reference.
There are two major reasons, why the two games are very different: their design history and being generic versus focused on one setting.
The original D&D was a system cobbled together as they invented it – and expanded upon it gradually – ending up with a hodgepodge of mechanics. More than 30 years later, the designers of D&D 5th edition created a game that is faithful to the first editions of the game, but fairly modern in design, with a very robust and fun tactical combat system.
I have not played the One Ring 1ed, so I can’t compare it to that. I can compare it to Adventures in Middle-earth, which was the D&D 5e edition conversion of The One Ring 1st ed. I have written several articles about it. It was not without flaws, but if you really want to stick to 5e rules that game is an option for you. As the books are out of print, they have become fairly pricey, though.
D&D is also a fairly generic fantasy roleplaying game which can be used to create many types of heroic fantasy games, and is easy to homebrew monsters, magic and worlds for, which is a big advantage. It can also be used for gothic horror, low magic fantasy etc., but isn’t really tailored for it.
The One Ring is different. It is a consistent modern system that focuses on creating a very particular game experience. The rules are interlinked to enhance the game’s particular focus, mood, tone and themes. After the bullet points below, I will go through the major parts of the core rulebook and provide insight into how the new edition of The One Ring works – using D&D to provide context. Players who aren’t D&D fans will still get a solid understanding of the game. If you are used to many different games, many of the mechanics will be familiar to you.
First, a quick summary.
What does The One Ring 2ed do well?:
Low magic, high fantasy
Mood, atmosphere and epic adventures (with a taste of sorrow and futility)
Provides a perfect “Middle-earth experience”
Character development in the hands of the players
Travel and exploration
Combat and logistics at a more narrative level
What does The One Ring do less well?:
Tactical combat on a grid
Hackability – this is not meant to be a generic system, but is tied closely to the source material
Long dungeon crawls and hack & slash
The One Ring (2ed) is probably for you if:
You want to adventure in Middle-earth
You want to try a low-magic fantasy RPG
You want a fantasy RPG with more focus on narrative and less focus on tactical combat
You want to try an RPG with interesting mechanics that support the core aspects of the game
The One Ring (2ed) is probably NOT for you if:
You don’t like the Middle-earth setting
You prefer high magic games, with lots of flashy spells, magic loot and big BOOMS!
You just want to relax bashing monsters and looting their stuff (I love that too, sometimes)
You prefer games with extensive character customization options
That was the short version. Do you want to know more? Then, read on dear guest.
Where and when does the game take place?
The default game is set between the events of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings in the Eriador region, where you find places like Hobbiton, Bree, the Old Forest, three petrified trolls, the Barrow Downs and many other locations known from the source material. It also contains a number of locations not featured prominently in the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit, such as Fornost and Tharbad.
More specifically, the game is meant to begin around 2965. This takes the setting forward from the 1st edition (and Adventures in Middle Earth) which begins around 2947, and shifts the geographical focus away from Wilderland – the region beyond the Misty Mountains with Mirkwood and the Lonely Mountain. At least for now.
That said, you can use the rules to play in any area of Middle-earth, and even shift the time to the Second Age or the Fourth, if you find that suits your purpose. Sourcebooks for many of the well known regions came out for the previous edition of the game. Furthermore, you can pick up sourcebooks for Middle-Earth Role Playing, which came out in the early 80’s.
Core system
The system in The One Ring is very player-facing.
Characters in The One Ring have three attributes: strength, heart and wits. They range from 2-7 – rarely 8. For each attribute there are six associated skills. As strength covers everything physical, from keen eyes to a great singing voice, skills associated with strength include things like Awe, Athletics and Awareness. Heart covers skills like the Travel, Insight and Courtesy while Wits has skills like Lore, Riddle and Persuade. Combat skills are separated and there are only four: axes, spears, swords and bows. Ranks in skills go from 1-6, but beginning characters typically have ranks from 0-3.
The game uses a dice pool system to resolve actions. Players roll one or more dice and if the total added together reaches the target number, you succeed at your task. The player rolls one Feat Dice (D12) and any success dice (D6) they get – which usually comes from your skills or combat abilities – or two D12 and take the highest/lowest if the character has advantage/disadvantage, which is called ‘favoured/illfavoured’ in this game.
EXAMPLE: Let’s say the Hobbit Mirabella tries to sneak past an orc guard. She has three ranks in Stealth, so you roll 3D6, but the player has picked Stealth to be a favoured skill, so she rolls 2d12, picks the highest and adds the result of the 3D6. Does she succeed? In The One Ring, the Target Number isn’t decided by the game master, it is player-facing. As a player, your target number is derived from your own character. If you try a Wits skill, you roll against 20 minus your wits. As Stealth is a wits skill, Mirabella with Wits 5, would need to roll a total of 15 to sneak past the orc. Certain conditions may make rolls harder or easier, of course, usually by adding or subtracting success dice.
However, the dice have some additional features. In the accompanying dice set, the 12 on the D12 is marked with the G rune and if you roll a 12 your action always succeeds. The 11 on the D12 is the Eye of Sauron and counts as zero – or worse depending on circumstances. On the D6, sixes gives you a superior success, and you can convert sixes to bonuses in the game, such as doing a task silently, more damage or cancel a failure for another character. You can use normal D12s or D6s to play, or get the special dice for the game.
On the surface, the core system of The One Ring is more complex than rolling 1D20 and adding a number. But in play, The One Ring doesn’t have dozens of complex special abilities and hundreds of – cool – but complex – spells. Looking at the sum of its parts, the One Ring will be simpler for the vast majority of players.
The gameplay has a structure divided into an Adventuring Phase, where the Loremaster (DM/GM) has primary control, and a Fellowship Phase, where the players have primary control. You could say it is the ‘play’ and ‘downtime’ phases. Unlike D&D however, the One Ring has different rule structures for three important aspects of the adventuring phase: combat, journeys and councils. Further, there are concrete rules for their downtime, which fits the setting and interacts with the recovery of the characters, advancement of the characters and further exploration of the setting.
Below, I will try to describe – as briefly as I can – how the different parts work, and what makes them cool.
Characters
The characters you can play are explicitly heroes. However, they can be lost to The Shadow through greed, pride, wrath and a few other things.
Cultures and Callings The character’s abilities are mainly defined by their Culture, not by their “class” which is named Callings. Examples of Cultures include: Men of Bree, Hobbit of the Shire, Elf of Lindon and Dunedaín.
When you create your character, each Culture has six different distributions of attributes you can pick from (or roll a random distribution). How these are distributed depends on the Culture, but all of them contain 21 attribute points, so they are equal, but different. For example, Men of Bree get a maximum of 4 in Strength whereas Dwarves of Durin’s Folk get 7, but max 4 in Heart.
On top of the three primary stats (strength, heart and wits), you also calculate three derived stats: endurance, hope and parry.
This distribution are for Durin’s Folk – meaning dwarves.
Endurance is basically your hit points (but more interesting, so I will get back to that). Hope you can spend to get bonus D6s and Parry is the target number for monsters to hit you – ie your armour class.
These three derived stats differ from Culture to Culture. Bardings have an Endurance score of their strength +20, but Hobbits only get +18.
Finally, each Culture comes with a couple of special bonuses called Cultural Blessings. For example the Dunedaín gets: Kings of Men, and receives a bonus attribute point.
After picking Culture, you select your Calling. The calling is what motivates the character to go on adventures. The six callings are: Captain, Champion, Messenger, Scholar, Treasure Hunter and Warden. The mechanical effects are slight, but they define their Shadow Weakness, such as Lure of Secrets and Path of Despair (more on that later).
Virtues, Rewards and Gear The One Ring operates with equipment and treasure at a higher level of abstraction than most fantasy RPGs, such as D&D. All characters are expected to have normal travelling gear, but are allowed a number of “useful items”, depending on their culture’s prosperity level. These items can help the character using a particular skill under certain circumstances, such as a great pipe or a liquor to infuse strength. Characters also start with the weapons and armour they desire, again based on their prosperity. The abstraction also applies to treasure which isn’t counted in an exact number of coins, but Treasure Rating. When you gather a specific amount of treasure, your prosperity rating goes up.
At the beginning of the game each character gets one general Virtue and one Reward. As the character gains experience they can gain more virtues and rewards. Virtues are akin to Feats in D&D 5e. and includes general abilities such as Dourhanded and Prowess, and virtues tied to your culture, which you can’t begin the game with but must buy with experience, such as: Dragon Slayer, Elbereth Gilthoniel! and Brave at a Pinch. Rewards are special gear with a mechanical advantage, typically weapons or armor you have earned, such as a Keen sword or Cunningly Made mail shirt.
Derived stats
I want to mention the three derived stats in a bit greater detail, because, particularly Endurance, is a very interesting mechanic.
Your parry rating is the value which adversaries must roll to hit your character. Enemies don’t have a parry rating though. Instead, players roll against their character’s Strength target number, to see if they hit modified by the adversary’s parry rating – normally 0-3. Shields and other factors can add to a character’s parry rating, whereas armor helps you avoid Wounds.
Hope are points players can use to fuel certain abilities (sometimes to make a success ‘magical’) and to add additional D6’s to their rolls. Characters don’t recover Hope that easily, so they should be spent wisely.
Endurance is like Hit Points, and you can lose them from attacks or simply from events on your journey. When you reach zero you drop unconscious. But it is also related to your encumbrance rating (which is called Load in The One Ring). So, when you don gear or armor or carry treasure, you add Load, and when your endurance rating drops below your Load score, the character becomes Weary, which is bad because all rolls of 1,2 and 3 on the D6 then counts as zero.
The mechanical effect of this is that players must weigh carefully the benefit of more armor, shields, weapons etc. versus their ability to fight after a long journey or last through multiple encounters. In D&D, and many other games, more armor is almost always better, but that is not the case in The One Ring. The core mechanic is further supported by the explicit action of dropping your shield or helmet, to decrease your Load during combat, and the explicit rules for pack animals (if your prosperity rating is high enough) or you can bury the treasure you found, because each point of treasure counts as one Load point.
The Endurance mechanic beautifully creates interesting choices for the players AND it means that the fiction of the game will emulate the source material, where few characters wear armor and treasure is buried for later or left behind. I really dig that!
I am a bit baffled, however, that it seems like a strong starting character with 26 in Endurance, who wears a mail coat, helmet, spear and great shield is left with only 1 point of Endurance. That figure can be mitigated with Virtues and Rewards, but still. It might work mechanically for player characters, but it seems like the heavily armoure bands of Bardings or Gondor aren’t viable (dwarves halve the Load, so they are).
The Shadow
The concept of Shadow in the game affects both the characters and the adventure, so I’ll deal with it here at a high level.
There is one overall foe in the game and that is obviously Sauron and all his servants. In The One Ring, player characters are heroes and explicitly adversaries of Sauron.
In the game, there also is a very clear dichotomy between Servant’s of the Enemy, which are irredeemably Evil, and other foes like regular robbers, haughty elven guards or Dunland raiders, which are not.
I very much subscribe to the views that Matt Coleville lays out in the video “Everyone Loves Zombies”, basically saying that players sometimes need to face foes they can unambiguously fight and slay without feeling bad about it, and sometimes they should face foes where there are moral complexities. I am therefore very happy with how explicit this is done in the One Ring, and the support it has from the game system.
The mechanic to support this for characters is called Shadow points. Characters will gain Shadow points when they indulge in their darkest desires or from the fear and despair which the Enemy can induce. Players can roll to resist gaining points of course. Simple Greed, whenever the characters discover treasure, can result in Shadow points and they can gain them from Misdeeds: actions that are unheroic, such as stealing, threatening with violence or ending the life of a foe who isn’t evil. Further, dark sorcery can cause shadow point “damage”.
The result of accumulating shadow points is a descent along your character’s Shadow Path and into madness, and ultimately the end of the character as a PC. Whenever a character’s Shadow points reach the level of their Hope they have a Bout of Madness – a loss of control to their worst inclinations, like Boromir trying to take the ring or Thorin being overcome by greed for a while. This takes the character one step down their Shadow Path. A character’s Shadow Path is determined by his calling, and they have evocative names like Dragon Sickness (greed) and Lure of Power. Each path has four stages of character flaws – roleplaying traits for the character. As an example, Lure of Power goes from resentful to tyrannical.
Mechanically, it has more features than this and ties into the down-time phase for example, but this covers the basics.
There is also a group-level mechanic. When more experienced heroes work against Sauron, it is possible that the enemy will respond. This is governed by the Eye of Sauron mechanic, which is a meter that slowly fills during an adventure when the heroes use magic or gain shadow points. When it reaches a certain point – depending on a number of factors – it has a negative narrative impact on the characters. It could be a direct attack on them, or perhaps the quarry they chase gets away or someone they thought an ally becomes an enemy.
I will need to play a longer game to really judge how the shadow points mechanic works in practice. In Adventures in Middle-earth (the 5e version of the game) the accumulation of shadow points seemed too slow to have a big impact, but it seems to be a bigger factor in this edition.
Adventuring
The adventuring phase has three major mechanical components, but in practice works like any other RPG with an adventure composed of various scenes or with the group exploring a location, like a dungeon.
Combat Combat in The One Ring has been designed for play without miniatures, but using minis or drawing on a mat or screen can still be helpful.
When combat begins, there is usually first an opportunity for both sides to use missile fire before the melee begins.
Subsequently, during the melee, each character selects one of four stances: forward, open, defensive and rearward. The stance you pick also determines the order in which you act and gives access to particular actions, such as intimidate foes or rally comrades. Only the rearward enables characters to use ranged weapons, and it can be restricted, depending on how many enemies there are compared to the characters. The enemies are then distributed between the different PCs.
I will not go into great detail on the mechanics, but there are some interesting features: Players can decide to halve the endurance damage they receive by deciding to get knocked back (an fall prone), and rolling sixes enables special bonuses/effects, depending on which type of weapon you use.
Endurance represents grit and the slow grinding down of your ability to defend yourself, where the final blow knocks you out of the fight – just like hit points in D&D. BUT! in The One Ring you can also get Wounded (similar to the Major Wound mechanic in Call of Cthulhu 7ed). Rolling 10 or 12 on the D12 causes a piercing blow (some effects can modify this) which can cause a Wound. Characters now roll a Protection roll – 1D12 and add the D6s they get from their armor. To avoid the Wound they must roll equal or higher than the Injury Rating of the weapon they were hurt by.
Only by getting Wounded can your character die. At the first Wound there is a 1 in 12 chance that you go down and is dying. A second wound always causes the character to drop and become “dying” and only a successful heal check will prevent them from dying within the hour.
One of the things I really like about the weapons is that spears are very viable and more likely to cause Wounds, if you roll 6s on your attack. Too often in fantasy games, swords are the superior weapon. Furthermore, I like that missile weapons don’t have a range. It is rarely relevant in RPGs anyway and just an annoying thing to track.
In addition, weapons that are special or magical can influence many aspects of combat, and characters can perform additional actions based on their stance, certain virtues etc.
Councils Whenever the group tries to convince one or more important NPCs to aid them, the Loremaster can use the rules for councils. It works like a skill challenge or an extended test, where the characters have to gain a number of successes using different skills to convince for example Lord Elrond, a village council or the Shire Mayor to do what they want.
Journeys Travel is a huge part of Tolkien’s writing, and it is supported by rules for travel. When the group is on a journey, the players designate four roles between them: Guide, Hunter, Look-out and Scout (similar to the Forbidden Lands RPG).
The group decides on a path, and the game comes with a hex map of Eriador, where the different areas are colour coded depending on their difficulty, and a few places have additional dangers. When the group starts marching, their Travel skill determines how long they get before they encounter an event.
The maps for the game are beautiful and evocative!
The events aren’t combat encounters (they could be in Adventures in Middle-earth), but things like Ill Choices, Mishaps and Shortcuts that the group must face. The events are randomly determined and targets one of the four roles. Through narrative and a skill roll, the group determines how they overcome the event. Failure can result in fatigue, which counts as Load, and can make the characters Weary. With luck, the events can also be beneficial by meeting a potential friend on the road, for example.
The game also comes with a nice Journey Log, where players can record their journey’s and any sights they might see or people they meet.
This system does not prevent you from springing combat on your players or adding more complex locations or events to the journey. I think it has been designed to add story and mood to the game, while not preventing your characters from ultimately reaching their journey’s goal – they might be weakened by their fatigue when they get there, though.
The Fellowship & the Fellowship Phase
In keeping with the source material, the group of characters isn’t a group of self serving sell-swords or loot happy anti-heroes. They are a fellowship – a Company working together – and there are some mechanics to support that.
First of all, each character has Fellowship focus – another character whom he or she is has a special bond with – and when they aid that person with Hope, the character gains two dice instead of one. However, if the character is seriously injured or suffers a bout of madness the character who has a bond with them gains a point of Shadow.
Typically the Fellowship is supported by a Patron – a benevolent and experienced NPC who aids and guides the group. This could be one of the very well known characters from Middle-earth such as Bilbo, Gandalf or Elrond or one of the lesser known figures, such as Círdan the Shipwright or Gilraen (Aragorn’s mother).
The players normally decide which Patron they wish to have at the outset of the game. Each patron comes with a special ability the group gains and adds a bonus to the group’s Fellowship Rating. The Fellowship Rating is a pool of points the group has which they (most often) can use to regain Hope, but having Gandalf the Grey as Patron allows them to spend Fellowship points to make Shadow rolls favoured, for example.
Bilbo is a potential patron of the Fellowship.
In the Fellowship Phase – the down time period of the game – the players take more control of the narrative. They normally stay at their Safe Haven – such as Bree or Rivendell – and can then select a few actions (called Undertakings) they wish to do during this period. During the winter season (Yuletide) there are also some additional special options, as that period is typically several months, and allows the characters to go back to their families or kin, visit far off patrons and the like. Undertakings include Gather Rumours, Study Magic Item, Strengthen Fellowship and Write a Song (yes, songs have a mechanical effect!).
The Fellowship phase is also the time where Hope can be renewed Shadow scars can be healed – and it is the time that players can spend their hard earned XP!
If a character gets a reward from his culture – an grievous weapon, close fitting armor or the like – this is where the player narrates how they get it.
Lastly, the character can raise an heir. By spending XP and Treasure on raising an heir, the player can prepare a new character for when the current one dies or retires – a fun feature for a long campaign, and completely in keeping with the novels.
Adventures, Monsters, Magic & Lore
The game also comes with around 30 pages of information about Eriador, rules for generating magical treasure and Nameless Things from the dark, monster mechanics and 21 monster stat blocks and an example of a Landmark – an adventuring location with lore, NPCs, plot, treasure and monsters.
As is clear from the rules, the game is focused on adventures consisting of a number of scenes, potentially with a ‘dungeon style’ location. It is however not meant to be 4-6 encounters per adventuring day. I would expect to have combat in most sessions, but certainly not every session.
Lore & Landmarks
The lore in the book is a good foundation for gameplay briefly covering Bree-Land, the Shire (which is fully developed in the Starter Set), the Great East Road, the Green Way, the Barrow Downs and a few other locations.
It contains additional random tables for some of the locations and plenty of hooks for adventure. The tables include what you might find in a Troll Hole, what happens that night at the Prancing Pony or what you discover in an ancient ruin along the Green Way – could be a crumbling tower or a recently torched homestead? There are also NPCs for the characters to meet and problems that they need solved.
Looking at the original maps, they seem fairly empty of “civilization”, but in the lore and in the game, these regions contain many small villages and holdfasts, ruins of ancient keeps and so forth.
I like the tables, as they are a quick way to add the right flavour and a touch of something surprising to your game.
The Star of the Mist is a fully fleshed out adventuring location in the core rules. An additional book on Ruins was part of the kickstarter and in the works.
Adversaries Compared to many fantasy games, the list of monsters is shorter in Middle-earth, but there are several variations of trolls, orcs, undead and spiders the characters can face.
The rules governing monsters differ from characters, as they don’t have three different attributes, but only one, and they don’t have Hope but points of Hate or Resolve depending on the type of monster. These points can be used as additional dice, just like Hope, or to power special abilities – akin to Legendary Actions from D&D.
Personally, I wish the monsters had 2-3 abilities instead of the typical one to make combat a bit more interesting. The method for creating Nameless Things in the appendix actually contains quite a long list of abilities, which is good inspiration for mechanics to add to monsters.
The designers also left out several groups of monsters for future publications, such as Giant Spiders and Dragons.
I would also have liked stats for at least one very powerful creature, like a Ring Wraith or a dragon, to put things in perspective.
Magical items Characters are expected to find 1-3 magical treasures over the course of their adventures, but in The One Ring these items aren’t random – the characters are fated to find them.
In game terms, it means that the Loremaster is encouraged to draw up a list of 2-3 items for each character including names, a bit of lore and stats for each item. And when they find an appropriate treasure, the LM can pick one or more items from that list. This means that items are narratively bound to that character: they can’t be traded within the group and they will go with the character to her death, or into retirement (unless an heir has been raised).
A neat little feature is that you can spend an action in the Fellowship phase to unlock the next ability of the item, and if the player has spent valor in getting heirlooms from his culture, these “gifts” can be handed back, and in effect be “traded in” for upgrades to the wonderous artefact or magic weapon they recovered. It means the effort/xp spent earlier isn’t lost when they discover something better.
Final comments
I think The One Ring RPG 2nd edition is an excellent game fully focused on delivering the Middle-earth experience, enabling players to immerse themselves in Tolkien’s setting and have their own adventures meeting all the famous characters and foiling the plans of the Enemy. My imagination is certainly spurred.
The game is medium – towards light – crunch, and aims towards using rules to drive the narrative forward and make sure the game hits the right mood and atmosphere.
There are a lot of mechanics that I really like, and from my – very limited – experience the combat moved smoothly.
Reading the official forums, some fans of the 1st edition liked some aspects of the previous edition better. The previous edition had more mechanics for example for Councils and more uses for Hope. I can see that. As I understand it, in this edition, the designers have moved towards less rules for councils and more focus on letting the group narrate how it plays out. I think it is a matter of taste what you prefer.
If you have mostly played D&D 5th edition, I hope this article inspires you in your own game, and perhaps to pick up one of the many other great RPGs.
If you want to run a game with the same tone and mood as in Middle-earth, but in your own world with your homebrew evil overlord – whom the characters can actually defeat, instead of this other more important adventuring party! – I recommend the indie game Against the Darkmaster. It emulates the design of the old MERP/Rolemaster rules with more magic and crit tables, but with modern design. Funnily, also designed by Italians!
The One Ring 2nd Edition certainly touches the Middle-earth fan in me, and I hope to try it out as soon as I return to Copenhagen and my regular circle of gaming friends.
20 years ago, I co-wrote a thesis paper for my BA on gender, women and horror in the Alien films. We would have looked at it differently today, but the paper can still serve as an inspiration for Game Mothers and academics who wish to delve deeper into this universe and these topics.
Gender and gaming is a much more discussed issue today, thankfully, and I find it fitting to post this on International Women’s Day. The discussion of women and gender makes complete sense to me, especially when you discuss fictional universes and games, because it is so rewarding to examine them in the form of art and entertainment.
Ripley, as a character, undergoes radical changes through the four films, and we liken her death to the death of Christ.
Much of the theory used in the paper was already 20 years old when we used it, so from that perspective I think it could inspire others to dive deeper into the topic. That said, it is not a field I’m keeping on top of or working with, and there might be a lot of new more important theory out there which this article does not reflect.
The horror theory used I think can help Alien Game Mothers to more consciously incorporate horrific elements. As the paper describes, there are very strong links between what we consider horrific and women, reproduction, sex, birth and so on – themes that are extremely prevalent in the Alien universe. Understanding that theory can help GMs craft adventures, I believe.
The paper was written with my friend and fellow role-player, Per Frederiksen.
If these topics interest you, I suggest you give it a look!
The last message you hear on the radio from the battalion HQ is: “You’re on your own now.” Then it’s just static. The 5th US Mechanized Division is no more. It is just you, the sarge, a befuddled lieutenant you dragged out of a fox hole yesterday, Ramirez and her SAW and a local Polish kid, who had been running errands in the company. And an ol’ beat up truck nicknamed Hauler. How the hell are you going to escape the advancing Soviets, let alone get home?
This is the premise of one of my old role-playing loves, Twilight: 2000, a World War III post-apocalyptic game in a future that never was, now being republished by Swedish Free League Publishing, using another custom version of the Mutant Year-Zero ruleset.
In short, I think they’ve done an excellent job adapting their ruleset to make an intense game about humans and survival in a scary and hard future. I would very much enjoy to play or run it, and it is currently tied with Alien as the game I would most like to run for my next campaign (after I finish my now four years long D&D game).
The game system has the right level of abstraction versus crunch (to my taste), the design seems very well executed and the art and layout are excellent.
Why should I check this game out?
If you like post-apocalyptic games
If you enjoy more down to earth RPGs with some crunch
If you enjoy alternate history and the Cold War
If you want to explore very human emotions, conflicts and scenarios
If you enjoy movies like Black Hawk Down, Fury, Apocalypse Now, Mad Max etc.
A lot of military veterans play it
Alien RPG players, who want more crunch for combat in Alien, can get a lot of ideas from this game.
One of the parts that made me love the 2nd edition of the game was Tim Bradstreet’s atmospheric pencil illustrations. They added that sense of the setting being in a gritty, worn real world. They remind me of Hermann’s excellent Jeremiah comics.
It is in Alpha
I got access to the Alpha-version as a Kickstarter backer, and I will in this article give an overview of my initial thoughts, and maybe convince you to check it out, or give fans of the old version a few insights. It won’t be a game for everyone, but it would be great if the audience could grow. The full game is released in 2021.
Given that it is an Alpha version, the final version of the game will obviously differ from how I describe it here, and there is content clearly left out, like more locations for the characters to visit, rules for making a base and the experience system to a name a few.
I should say that this is the 4th edition of the game. My first experience with the setting was in 8th or 9th grade, where we would play the 2nd edition at my friend Tonny’s house. I just loved it. We didn’t follow all the rules (which are complex and old fashioned), and back then I already found the skill system and character creation rules annoying, because it was impossible to make a young and skilled character. But it was where my love of the post-apocalyptic setting was established, and I was already lurking on Twilight 2000 fora when news of the new edition hit.
Tell me some more…
So, what is the game about? Well, the world has basically collapsed after the next world war. The war included significant exchanges of – mainly tactical – nuclear weapons between NATO and the Soviet Union. Nuclear winter and the collapse of infrastructure has caused wide-spread famine and disease and the and civilian authority has mostly broken down. It is a very bleak world, but Free League notes that you need to add some hope, or the whole thing becomes too depressing!
It is also worth noting that the designers clearly state that this is not a game about soldiers or the military, it is about survivors, which I really like.
The default campaign is that your unit was part of a last-ditch NATO offensive that failed, and when your division is defeated outside of a Polish town called Kalisz, you are simply let go. The group of characters are a few soldiers from this division, and maybe a couple of civilians or a CIA spy. They also might have a vehicle, but that is usually randomly determined at the start of the game. The immediate goal will be to avoid – ie flee – the oncoming Soviet troops. But then what? That it is really up to the players to decide, depending on their motivations and characters. They might try to get to comparative safety in France, or see if they can find a ship to take them home somewhere in Western Europe, or they might decide to settle down and create their own base, or perhaps follow the new meta-plot line of Operation Reset? What is certain is that it will be difficult to survive and there will be hard choices ahead.
The second campaign option in the book is playing in a collapsed Sweden, which got involved in the war. Free League is Swedish, so I find it a great addition. Especially since the Baltic Sea is a key theatre for a WWIII scenario involving Russia. Sweden has been nuked, has US Marines fighting alongside Swedish regulars and partisans against Soviet troops, and a wounded US aircraft carrier has been parked in Stockholm. A fine new twist.
The game comes with big hex maps for both Poland and Sweden.
Each hex is 10 kilometers (about 6 miles), and the referee will typically draw one encounter per hex.
Who can I play?
There are two ways to make a character: picking one of the archetypes or going through a Life Path. The key difference is the level of control you have over what your character will become. If you pick one of the archetypes (Civilian, Grunt, Gunner, Kid, Mechanic, Medic, Officer, Operator and Spook), you will have a high degree of control over the character you want to play, and they are equally skilled.
The second choice starts you out as an 18-year-old, and lets you pick the different steps in your career – both civilian and military. Each step will make you 1D6 years older, and at each step you gain skills and potentially specialties and promotion, but you also roll to see if your attributes drop or if the war breaks out, at which point you get a “final” War Career. This system is more random and can make your character both more or less skilled than the archetypes. It emulates the system the old GDW games, which Twilight: 2000 was one of and Traveller was another, in which – infamously – your character could die during character creation!
The Free League version is more abstract, which is also in line with the more stream-lined set of skills. It takes up six small pages, whereas the second edition has 12 full pages with for example 18 different officer careers – eg Naval Aviator Officer or Ranger Officer. In this edition they make do with one officer career. I think it is plenty for a core book, and for the fans who want a higher level of detail, it will be easy to make your own or – I’m sure – Free League will add new options in supplements, such as aviators.
I tried the Life Path process and ended up generating an American (you can also play a local or a Soviet), which grew up as a street kid, but who joined the military and became a medic (Combat Service Support). She only served two terms before the war broke out when she was 25 years old. Compared to the Medic archetype, she had one more stat point and three specialties versus one for the archetype, but three fewer skill ranks. Definitely a viable character, and the extra stat point she was lucky to retain, will be consistently useful, if she lives long enough in game!
The system For the people who’ve played other Free League games, the Twilight: 2000 system will feel familiar, but there is still a significant departure in the core mechanic. I’m going to gloss over details here, but put simply:
The game has a dice pool system, but the core dice is one from your attribute and one from your skill. You need to roll a six or higher to have a success, but your rating goes from A-F. A is a D12, B is a D10, C is a D8, D is a D6 and F is nothing (which only applies to skills). Rolling 10 or higher counts as two successes. Modifiers increase or decrease the dice you use. It is reminiscent of the rules for artifact dice in Forbidden Lands – their fantasy RPG. So, you want to try to sneak past a sentry, and you have Agility B and Recon C, you roll a D10 and a D8 and try to roll a six. If you roll two ones, you have a mishap. As in other Free League games, you can “push” the roll once, and roll again, but this causes stress or damage.
So, that is the basics. You can also have skill specializations, eg Machine Gunner or Forward Observer, but there are no talents to add additional capabilities (at least yet, I hope they add them).
There are also a couple of new mechanics.
You have a stat called Courage Under Fire, which you typically need to roll when getting shot at. Furthermore, your unit has a morale equal to the highest Command skill level in the group.
When you fire a weapon, they’ve also added Ammo Dice as a mechanic – a D6. For each of the dice you roll you get an additional chance to hit by rolling more sixes. Additional hits can be applied to nearby enemies. If you roll ones, they contribute to the chance of rolling a mishap, which will degrade your weapon. When you are done, you add the D6 together, and that is the ammo you just used. Simple and elegant – at least on paper. I haven’t tested it.
In some of the other Mutant-Year Zero games, you also rolled dice for water and food every day, but in Twilight: 2000 you need to keep track of daily rations. It was an abstraction I liked, and I hope they will reintroduce. But, of course, characters in a modern world have more options for storing and carrying rations.
Combat:
Combat is quite tactical, and the default assumption is that you use a hex map (10m a hex) and the counters that comes with the game. This is where most of the crunch comes in. You need rules for various weapons, from knives to mortars to phosphorous grenades. You need to know how mines, barb wire, chemical weapons and explosions work and you need to get vehicles, from motorcycles to main battle tanks, into the mix.
The dangers of combat are accentuated by a nasty critical hit system. If you get a critical hit in the head or torso, they will nearly all be fatal, unless you get medical attention. Just moving a fatally wounded will force a Stamina roll to avoid death – a mechanic I’ve never encountered in a game. I won’t explain the system here, but I like it. It fits with the game.
The system is very deadly compared to other current games, as there is no way to mitigate getting hit using “Fate Points”, “Luck Points” or the like. A medic will be a critical component to a group.
In addition to suffering damage, you can also suffer Stress, like in the Alien RPG. It happens when you push, see a mate get critically injured or if you experience other traumatic events. If you reach zero, you are incapacitated by fear, and someone with the Command skill needs to revive you (like in Alien), but there is no “panic roll”. You can risk long term effects though, like phobias and alcoholism.
The system is less complex than previous editions and has the right level of abstraction for me.
For comparison: In the second edition of the game calculating the Concussion Effect of demolitions, you needed to “divide the DP value of the charge by 2, extract the square root of the result, and multiply by 5.”
I prefer not using a calculator, when I play RPGs.
In this edition, you look at the map, and roll a number of base dice depending on the blast power of the explosion, and for each hex beyond the center you reduce the dice with one step.
The vehicle rules are where I see the most complexity.
In this, and previous editions, vehicles play a significant role. You need to maintain them and find or make fuel (from an alcohol still), and you need to repair them if you can, when they get shot at.
The vehicle can have different armor on each side, which means its facing on the map matters. Furthermore, a hit that does not penetrate the armor might have an effect, and a penetrating hit might continue to damage other parts of the vehicle. This includes the crew and passengers of course, and as a GM I am a little concerned by the likelihood of a TPK if their vehicle is hit with an explosive shell that penetrates the armor. It is realistic – but not that much fun – if 75%+ of the group is killed by a T-72 hidden behind a road-block…
Equipment Your kit is essential for your survival, so the game spends quite some pages on various guns, vehicles, accessories, grenades, explosives etc. Compared to previous editions there are fewer small arms, fewer vehicles and less details on equipment in the core book. The section takes up more than 40 pages in the Alpha edition (versus 78 in 2nd edition), so it isn’t like they breeze over it, especially compared to other current games.
What I loved then – and now – is that all the vehicles and weapons each have an illustration – in color in this edition.
To me, it seems a bit excessive that the Polish weapons get so much space, as they are basically identical to the Soviet weapons, but with different names.
There are no aircraft and only a few boats. However, especially the maritime aspects Free League has promised to follow up on, as sailing down the Vistula river to the Baltic Sea (and then home?) has always been a key part of the game.
Sand box play True to the original, the game is a ‘sand box style’ game. The new edition core books does a better job supporting that style, however.
The original did have a solid section on Encounters and some adventuring sites, but the originals were more generic, whereas Free League has organized them to be drawn from a regular deck of cards and include intentions and drama to many of the pre-written encounter. The referee can then add additional meaning to by including references to the different factions that are also described in the game or play off on previous events. For example, if the referee draws 7 of Clubs, it will be a group of angry starving refugees, but if it is 7 of Hearts it will be three orphan kids in a house and marauders approaching.
There are also a few encounters that feel too similar, and won’t work close together, such as the four different nuclear craters, which differ very slightly. I hope they beef them up a bit.
The game also includes random radio chatter, two pages of “mood elements” and a list of rumors, which is highly useful. It also has a solid system for survival, making camp, scrounging and trade.
That said, although the events and random encounters of previous edition aren’t as “ready to play” as this version, because the Referee will need to roll additional dice and check more tables, there is plenty of inspiration to be drawn from them.
In the Alpha edition there is only one premade location, but they should include four in the full game. The style will be familiar to people who owns or plays Mutant Year Zero or Forbidden Lands. The description contains a map with locations and brief descriptions, NPCs with motivations and rumours and plot hooks.
There is a Meta-plot about Operation Reset, but the Alpha-edition has few details on it. In the previous editions there were also actual “adventures” with a plot-line like you will find for most RPGs. I assume they will reappear.
The Backstory The 1st edition of the game was published in 1984, when the Cold War was still a thing and the year 2000 in an unknown future.
As it turned out, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were a lot weaker than they appeared. Therefore, when you in 2020 make a game, where you start with the original conclusion (a clash between NATO and the Soviets in the middle of Poland around year 2000, and a global nuclear exchange) and go backwards to write an alternate history to get to that point, you will inevitably strain realism.
I am completely fine with that, and ultimately, for most games, the details of the backstory won’t matter the slightest, because it has little to no impact on the game – just like the ancient lore in most fantasy games has very little relevance to the actual game – so who cares what China did? Or if Israel was attacked by a coalition of Soviet and Middle-Eastern forces? You have more immediate problems!
There are however a minority of long-time fans, for whom creating a “realistic” backstory is almost a sub-hobby in it itself, and – funnily enough – most of them claim to have made a backstory that IS “realistic”, from their perspective. They are right of course in saying that the Soviets would never have the capacity to invade the UK, much less supply their troops there. But that won’t matter to the vast majority of players. I say this, to flag to newcomers that there are some vocal critics out there.
If am I to criticize the current backstory a bit myself (ironic isn’t it), I think the brief backstory needs to touch on what China and India are doing in this conflict, as they are the two most populous countries in the world and nuclear powers to boot.
To me, Free League, strikes a balance where the die-hard fans of the previous editions can still recognize the game that they love and making the game relevant and accessible to new players
Conclusions & concerns The problem with the old editions were – in my view – that they were very simulationist and not very playable for more casual players. What Free League have basically done is to take their default system, which is already meant for survival-games, and use modern game design conventions to make the game enjoyable for the more casual player.
It is still the most complex – crunchy, if you will – iteration of the Mutant Year-Zero ruleset, and I think one of the reasons is that you still need to provide game mechanical variety in a game with nothing supernatural. It is just humans with guns, motivations – and sometimes tanks or mortars – that you need to worry about. Therefore, there must be a meaningful difference between a Soviet T-72 and T-80 tank.
The Alpha edition seems very well done to me, and most of my points of critique are minor or a matter of taste.
To me, Free League, strikes a balance where the die-hard fans of the previous editions can still recognize the game that they love and making the game relevant and accessible to new players. Hopefully, that means that the veteran players will see an influx of “new blood”.
It will however be important for new players to “manage expectations” when they join a group. There are many current fans out there, who are experts on weapons and military life and who enjoy debating various Soviet tank configurations. Some seem to be very focused on “realism”, which I’m sure may include everything from extensive details on various ammunition types to the inclusion of slavery and sexual violence in the game. If lots of logistics or very dark topics are to your gaming taste, go play! But others with different perspectives on gaming might not, and I think in this game in particular, a solid conversation on what the game will feature and what it won’t, will be critical.
In my experience, even the sand box style of gameplay can be hard to manage and is not to everyone’s taste.
I will certainly look forward to this game, and I might even be able to convince my usual group to give it a go. If you’ve read this far, perhaps you will too?
I have loved the ALIEN franchise, since I saw Aliens with my father when I was maybe 10 or 11. It is still my most memorable movie experience. So, the ALIEN RPG, from Swedish Free League, was a must buy when it came out in December 2019.
I’ve played it for a total of around 15 hours (on Roll20), and I now finally have found time to write a review.
The game won a Gold Ennie at 2020’s virtual GENCON, so it is fair to say that it is very well made game! But picking up a role-playing game also comes down to taste, personal preference and just what game you wish to run right now. So, in this blog post, I’ll try to answer: is this a game for me? You will get the short and sweet points first. In the second part, I go into more depth on the mechanics and content of the book. In a future post, I will write my thoughts on the scenario Chariot of the Gods.
In Short: What is the Alien RPG? The game is a retro-future horror role-playing game built faithfully to the franchise (and officially licensed). It uses the Year-Zero game engine, which is a dice-pool system – like most Free League RPGs.
The game is designed for two modes: cinematic play and campaign play. The cinematic play emulates an ALIEN movie and is a single adventure in three acts. It means, each character has a secret motivation, they can’t trust each other, are likely to do irrational things and aliens are probably going to kill some – if not all – of the them.
In the campaign you are likely to play either colonial marines, space truckers or colonists, and alien life forms aren’t meant to be introduced right away. Instead, the game features more mundane missions and jobs among corporate giants and working class grunts trying to make a living.
The book is around 400 pages and about half is system and the rest is lore, Game Mother information, a short adventure and a location.
The system emulates the stress and horror of the alien universe and it is fairly simple. Combat and action are cinematic, but there are enough character options for a short to medium-long campaign.
Ripley is the greatest female action movie protagonist of all time, and is an almost unique figure in the 80’s movie landscape.
What do I think of the ALIEN RPG? The game looks amazing, has a great atmosphere and was a lot of fun to play.
The game enables you to immerse yourself in the Alien universe; a scary, uncaring, capitalistic future where no-one will really care that you scream you lungs out or have your skull pierced by a xenomorph tail spike.
The game has a fairly narrow scope, which I think works to its advantage. The system has been tailored to create the Alien-experience, primarily adding stress dice to the player’s dice pool, when they exert themselves or things go wrong (more on that below).
Because of the relative simplicity of the rules, the widely known universe and the cinematic style, I think it is one of the best options out there for introducing new players to the hobby .
Characters will die in ALIEN. A weapon and some armor might save you… but don’t let the xenomorphs get close.
The artwork and art direction is fantastic, and the book is easy to read and make sense of. However, I have read and played other Free League games, which makes the system familiar to me.
There is enough background and lore in the book to really get my creative juices flowing and I wish I had the time to run an extra campaign using Alien.
That said, I’m sure it isn’t a game for everyone. It is science fiction. It is dark. It is easy to lose a character. It is about body horror and being fairly insignificant in a world of grey and questionable morals. The system is also not very granular. So, not everyone’s cup of tea.
Why should I buy the Alien RPG?
You want to play a space-horror game
You want to run shorter adventures with a cinematic style for your group
You would like to introduce D&D players to another genre/system
You want to introduce new people to role-playing, but they aren’t into fantasy
You love the Alien universe.
Why should I pass on the Alien RPG?
You want a crunchy game that tries to simulate life in space and combat between people in the future
You want a game with a vast scope that you can use for any kind of science fiction game
You want a game that can support a years-long campaign
AN IN DEPTH LOOK AT THE ALIEN RPG
Below I will go into more depth with contents of the rule-book and the rules. My views are mixed in between and I end with a conclusion. If you have questions or want to discuss the game, post in the comments or reach out on Twitter (@RasmusNord01).
The System
Characters The players can pick from nine different careers. These are mostly well-known types from the ALIEN franchise, such as Colonial Marine, Company Agent, Kid, Medic and Officer. They are broad in scope, so the Officer could be a Colonial Marine Officer, a Navigator or Captain on a ship or a colony leader-type.
You can also play a colonial marshal, which looks to be inspired by the 1981-movie Outland, where Sir Connery plays a “space sheriff” on Jupiter’s moon Io. The look of the film fits very well with the ALIEN universe, and if your players haven’t seen it, you can steal the plot…
The game only has four different characteristics (Strength, Agility, Empathy and Wits), and each is associated with three skills. This means 12 broad skills and keeping it simple. For example, Mobility covers stealth, dodging, jumping and risky climbs, which in some systems would be three separate skills. Piloting covers all kinds of driving and flying, so you don’t need separate skills for driving a quad bike, flying a drop ship and driving a tank – for power loaders you do however need Heavy Machinery.
Each career has access to three talents unique to them, and all characters have access to about 30 general talents. The career talents are what enables characters to do something none of the other characters can do.
The special talents are interesting, and some are unlike what you see in most games. For example, the officer can get the Pull Rank talent, and with a successful roll can force both PCs and NPCs to do as they are told. The Company Agent “Rat Fuck Sonofabitch” has his personal safety top of mind and can make another character the target of an attack aimed at her (with a successful manipulation roll).
The Pull Rank talent is one example of how the Year Zero system has in-built mechanics for social interaction, which I think works better than fluffy “diplomacy” or “persuasion” in other games, where the actual outcome is often left to the GM.
There are also rules for synthetics … excuse me, artificial persons. They are in most ways better than a human PC, but they also have a few limitations.
Mechanics & Stress The system is made up of dice pools of D6s. You add your relevant characteristic with the right skill and possibly ‘gear dice’ if you have the right tool and then you try to roll a 6. If you fail, you can try to ‘push’ the roll one time by describing the extra effort (you have the same idea in Call of Cthulhu 7th ed) and re-rolling the dice. However, when you do, you get a stress level. Each stress level adds a stress dice, and if you roll a 1 (a Facehugger on the custom dice) on one of those, you risk going into a panic.
The stress mechanic is a key part of the way ALIEN simulates the films and the horror in them. My players named them – sardonically – ‘Hero Dice’, because they do enable you to accomplish greater feats, but they can also make things go very wrong.
If you push, and still fail, there will also often be a negative consequence, including damage to your characteristics, broken equipment and so on.
In our cinematic game, the problem was that, as things spiraled out of control, we rapidly tried all the different outcomes of the panic roll.
The intention is that you roll rarely – only when it is dramatic. One of the reasons is that there is only one retry. After that, the characters will have to do something different to reach their goal. The added bonus is that it keeps the game moving forward.
ALIEN also has a feature I’ve not seen in other Mutant Year Zero-games. Each skill comes with a number of Stunts players can pick, if they roll more than one success. For a ranged attack roll that could be an extra point of damage, but you can also pin down your enemy, the target drops a weapon, is pushed back or drops down. Or in Comtech, you gain additional information or are able to hide your tracks in the system. I like that, and it is very player facing as they get to pick the stunt.
Panic is rolled with 1D6 and adding your stress level. If you roll a total of 6 or lower, you keep it together. From 7-15 bad things happen – you can freeze, go berserk or flee, for example, and often increase the stress level of nearby PCs through your erratic behavior.
In our cinematic game, the problem was that, as things spiraled out of control, we very rapidly tried all the different outcomes of the panic roll. Thus, you become familiar with it – as a player – much quicker than a long critical table, and that was a criticism from my players: the results of panic were quickly unsurprising. That is one of our main criticisms of the system.
Combat & gear Combat in ALIEN is very lethal – especially against Xenomorphs. I’ve killed a character with s couple of dice rolls (xenomorph attack, character was unable to parry, the space suit armor didn’t stop it (second roll) and the attack happened to be an auto-kill crit to the head).
People firing guns at each other using cover and with armor is a little less lethal, but still deadly. Rifles and shotguns do a minimum of two or three damage points, so characters who aren’t particularly strong will be “broken” if they are hit and have no armor. If you are broken, you roll on the critical table, which can be everything from a minor cut to a broken leg or pierced skull. There are no Fate Points to avoid a killing blow, no Death Saves or re-rolls on the critical table. If you get a bad critical, you need to make a new character.
Xenos also have their own critical table, which means they might get blown away when they reach zero health, or they could be playing dead, or lashing out in a final berserk move. That mechanic works well, although I wish it had more than five outcomes.
Unlike some Year Zero Engine games, the characters have Health Levels. In other games, the damage is taken directly from the Strength characteristic. I’m not sure why they’ve made this design decision? Damage to character’s strength can lead to a death spiral, but since melee combat is less prevalent in ALIEN, compared to Forbidden Lands or Mutant Year Zero, it seems less of an issue.
A great design feature is that monsters don’t follow the exact same system as a character. Xenomorphs have their own list of six random attacks they’ll use – usually twice per round, as they have more actions than humans. The system is also used in Forbidden Lands and works very well with the iconic killing blows of the xenomorphs.
This section also covers the many (bad) conditions you can suffer from, such as radiation, drowning, fire and vacuum.
The gear section is robust and has all the gear you recognize from the movies, plus additional items, such as various drugs.
The vehicle section only has six vehicles, all recognizable. That seems a bit light, but can easily be fleshed out in a supplement.
My only real gripe here is a lack of information on how the weapons for example work in zero-g. Can the rifles fire in space, where there is no oxygen, for example? They do include rules for hitting the hull with shots from your pulse rifle and the potential resulting explosive decompression…
Colonies typically have shit weather, shit food, boring backbreaking work and lousy pay, but at least the coffee is good – and free!
Hard Life Among the Stars Between the sections on gear and spacecraft, there is a section on life in the ALIEN universe, which is very player facing. It includes the basics on how space travel works, but also covers topics such as media, salaries, entertainment, religion and law enforcement. It is fairly short, but important.
I would have liked – and it could be placed in this section – more how zero gravity, low gravity, radiation and other similar aspects of living in space is dealt with.
Spacecraft and space combat The space ship section has examples of iconic crafts, like the Sulaco, and a modular system to build your own ships or upgrade existing craft.
ALIEN RPG is the first interstellar science fiction game, where the size of cargo ships makes a bit of economic sense. In many games, characters will be doing interstellar travel with just a couple of dozen tons of cargo – around the capacity of a big modern truck. In contrast, modern bulk carriers or crude carriers have 300,000+ tons of ore, grain or oil on board.
Even current coastal cargo ships have much greater cargo capacity than what you see “traders” typically haul in games like Traveller, Fading Suns, Space Master and so on. I really like that, as it fits with the gritty economic system of the game.
Space combat is described as quick and deadly – which would fit with the rest of the game’s approach to design. The system does have a couple of fun features, but not a ton of detail. It resembles the system used in Free League’s occult Arabian nights inspired science-fiction game Coriolis, but has been simplified.
I like that the captain on each side (a player and the GM) secretly picks his orders for each “role” on the ship. On top, there are four different roles for the various crew members: gunner, pilot, engineer and sensor operator, who have a total of 14 different actions, such as Target Lock, Accelerate, Maneuver, Fire Weapon and Launch Countermeasures.
I haven’t tried it, but with 14 actions split between the four roles, it seems like it doesn’t offer a lot of options – and how often do you want to ram another space ship, really?
On the fun side, there are however a lot of different component damage options, split between minor and major, like: coffee maker malfunction (!) and Intercoms disabled to AI offline and critical crew injury. These malfunctions are also used outside of combat, and are cool.
On a side note, the game and the adventure Chariot of the Gods doesn’t really take into account the mass and speed space craft must move with, and what would realistically happen if they collide (megaton explosive events).
All that being said, I doubt that space combat is what you play ALIEN for. I guess, in a Colonial Marine campaign, you could have multiple space battles, but in most games I would suspect it happens once or twice, if at all. The risk of losing your ship – if that is the “base” of your game, will also radically change the trajectory of your game.
The Alien Universe
The final part of the core book consists of advice to the GM, a decent section on the various governments, corporations and organizations. This is followed by a description of some of the key systems, planets and colonies.
The central tension of the world is between The United Americas and The Union of Progressive Peoples – a Cold War analogy – with various skirmishes, proxy wars and covert operations happening out in the rim.
In my view, there are a lot of interesting plot threads woven into all this lore, and plenty to get some solid ideas for campaigns and intrigues.
For example, the Interstellar Commerce Commission representative, Paul van Leuwen, who chaired Ripley’s tribunal, found out that a team of colonial marines along with Ripley were sent to LV-426 to investigate and now also has disappeared. He has launched his own investigation into what is going on, and he might need passage, or some freelance investigators to help him out…
The game takes place in the year 2180 and adheres to the canon of the movies and the excellent video game Alien: Isolation. It means the that the events and technology of Prometheus and Alien Covenant are part of the book, as is everything up to and including Alien 3. Alien Resurrection happens more than 200 years later, and is therefore not a part of the lore.
I think the lore sections gives you precisely enough info to spur your imagination, leaving plenty of room for making your own systems and colonies.
Along with lore, there is a detailed map of known space, which is featured inside the cover of the book. You can also buy a digital copy or on print.
The Weylan-Yutani Corporation is can be both employer and enemy. There are several competitors also featured in the book.
Economics is out of whack One of my few issues, is with the fictional economics of the game, including the population sizes on the colonies in the core systems.
According to the lore, some planets have been completely strip mined. This fits with the themes of greedy corporations and horror, but seems very implausible.
Earth has been intensively mined for more than 100 years and though we have caused plenty of damage, we are very, very far from having strip mined our home planet. Australia alone is estimated to have deposits of 24 billion tons of iron ore left.
Even if earth has depleted its own resources, and you need to build infrastructure in space, it doesn’t seem like there is enough population outside of earth to generate sufficient demand for strip mining entire planets. Nor the technology or manpower to actually accomplish such a task. But now I’m nit picking!
Alien Species The section on aliens is 40 pages long and is detailed enough for you to run a campaign.
It begins with details on the Engineers and alien technology, and then moves on to the various xenomorphs including other Extra Solar Species.
Especially the Xenomorph XX121 gets a lot of love, with information on all the different stages of its development, signature attacks for all of the stages and some hints about Empress and Queen Mother stages.
Cinematic Adventures Alien can be played in cinematic mode and campaign mode.
Cinematic mode is meant for “short” games, one-shots and conventions. A cinematic adventure has three acts, like most movies, and a key feature is pre-generated characters, who all have a personal agenda – a goal they need to achieve. The agendas increase the drama and make players take classic horror-movie style sub-optimal actions – like going off alone to the medical bay to steal drugs or go searching for the cat in an abandoned cargo bay, while a xenomorph is on the prowl.
In Chariot of the Gods, the characters even get new agendas in each Act, to push the action forward.
I must note that it took my group five 3-hour online sessions to get through Chariot of the Gods, and I skipped parts. I have though read online that others have done it in four hours and had fun.
Creating Campaigns There are three potential campaign frameworks laid out: Space Truckers, Colonial Marines and Frontier Colonists.
The chapter on campaign play is, mainly, a lot of charts that lets you generate your own star systems, plants, jobs, missions, colonies and so forth.
I experimented with it, and I have to say that the tables allow you to generate some inspiring combinations that really spurred my imagination.
However, unlike Forbidden Lands and Mutant Year Zero, I don’t think you can simply run a game based on the results of these random jobs and missions. Alien does not have a list of interesting random events like Forbidden Lands, nor several detailed locations. It only has the example of Novgorod Station and a handful of accompanying events at the station, which could be enough to get you started, but my players would expect more.
Especially for colonists and space truckers, the jobs seem too mundane for them to be really exiting. Even with the random complications and plot twists, you need – as a GM – to flesh out things a bit more in advance based on that random input. You have to make sure there is enough details on the intrigue and drama and probably a main protagonist to make it interesting.
A trip to deliver 2000 heads of cattle to a small colony station two parsecs away with the complication that “problems at the destination means they can’t get the cargo off – and perhaps the characters can help speed things along?” is cool, because it is mundane and “feels right”, but the real adventure orbits around the problem that “something is wrong” at the destination, which is hindering their delivery, and that characters must get involved in that. And I’m not saying it is xenomorphs – it could be malfunctioning Seegson droids, a weird AI, UPP infiltrators or something else entirely. My point is: you need to make that adventure, the NPCs, the plot and the location in advance to whatever detail suits you. The tables will only get you so far.
How does a job salvaging parts at the shuttered Fury 161 facility sound? All rumours about a “space dragon” are completely unfounded. Double pay? Done!
The random colonial marines’ missions naturally lend themselves more to being interesting and dramatic on their own: e.g. a Raid on a Sensor Site with a company agent along, who is meddling to secure corporate assets with the twist of sabotage on board with a UPP frigate on an intercept course. That sounds action packed, but you still need to craft the details: the map of the sensor site, the NPCs, the complications and so on – but at least the framework of something interesting is there already.
In my view, you also need to make a campaign arc that propels the characters towards meeting a xenomorph threat – a grand intrigue of some kind – that can connect the plots and adventures into a satisfying whole. The game doesn’t say a whole lot on that front, which is a bit disappointing.
As the game is deadly, it could make sense to have a bit of an ensemble cast. For example, the space trucker crew could be eight people for four players, with each player having two characters. Or the rest could be NPC’s until someone dies. It also leaves NPCs to put in danger – or kill horribly – for dramatic effect. Having 10 characters available for a squad of marines also makes sense, as some characters deaths seems to be inevitable.
The book ends with a short cinematic adventure, that takes place in the same location as the Aliens film: the colony Hadley’s Hope. The characters arrive back from a job at a processing plant (before the colonial marines and Ripley arrive) to find the colony deserted and a warning message sounding over the intercom. The characters must investigate and survive to catch a shuttle off the infested base.
The short adventure can be played in a couple of hours and comes with nice floor plans, PC’s and NPCs. A great place to start, if you want to introduce new people to the game, the genre or, perhaps especially, to role-playing games in general.
Alternately, the floor plans could be reused for your own adventure or campaign.
Conclusion
The ALIEN RPG is a fantastic game. It is tightly designed and sticks to its core themes.
The rules are designed to make the game feel like you are inside a piece of ALIEN fiction. It evokes the atmosphere and style of the franchise perfectly.
Inside the book, you will find everything you need to run a game, although the custom yellow stress dice with Facehuggers on, I think would make it run more smoothly (and you probably need two sets).
The art is great, and the book is easy to read – however during combat with xenomorphs, you do need to reference tables scattered all over the book. The rules are quite simple and very player facing.
That said, the style and themes are probably not for every gaming group, but I would argue that even for die-hard D&D/fantasy fans, an ALIEN cinematic adventure could be a great change of pace or palate cleanser between campaigns.
I would love to run a campaign in ALIEN, and I think it could easily stretch over 7-10 adventures – for me – a short to medium long campaign. But probably not more than that. The amount of character options and room for advancement would simply run out (see my calculation below) – unless you kill characters very frequently, which isn’t fun in a campaign.
The only real critique point in the rules are the amount of variation in the panic rolls and for critical hits on xenomorphs. I think the lack of variation could be a problem, especially in a campaign, and the panic roll mechanic is not easy to change.
My other slightly negative points are ultimately nit-picks, and every supplement for the game will be a ‘must buy’ for me.
Let’s say you play for 25 sessions, with on average 3.5 xp per session, which would leave you with almost 90 xp. At a cost of 5 XP per skill point or talent, that would purchase you: – 12 additional skill points (on top of the 10 a starting character has) – 2 extra career talents – and 4 additional general talents. At that point, a group will be extremely competent and covering all bases.
mindlands 