Alien RPG - First Look

We're playing a two session game of Fria Ligan's Alien RPG, using the Chariot of the Gods scenario.

Like every Fria Ligan game I've encountered, Alien uses the Year Zero engine, once again modified to suit the specific game.  Four attributes, each with three associated skills, makes for a solid base and also makes every attribute equally valuable.  (Compare with Coriolis, where Wits has significantly more associated skills than Strength.)  The skills make sense for the setting, with Heavy Machinery being the one that most stands out to me - it's not one that shows up in most games, but you know in Alien that at some point you're going to want to get in an power loader.

Besides the skill and attribute sitting in the middle of the character sheet, there's various other bits and pieces going on around the edge.  One of them is resources - air, water, power, food.  Irrelevant when you're on your own ship but absolutely critical as you explore a derelict vessel in your exo suit.  Rather than any kind of tedious resource management, it uses a variation on the innovative system from the Black Hack - roll a number of dice equal to your current rating, and subtract any 1s.  There's also a system for tracking radiation exposure, similar to the one in Coriolis.

Stress is probably the mechanic we were most aware of in the game.  Any time you make a skill roll, you add additional stress dice to your dice pool, equal to your current stress rating.  This means that a bit of stress makes you more likely to succeed in whatever you're doing.  It also means you're more likely to panic, because rolling a 1 on a stress die is a bad thing.  The official dice illustrate this nicely by putting a picture of a facehugger on the 1 face of the stress dice.

A panic roll is a d6 plus your current stress, and a table tells the GM what the result means.  As yet nobody has rolled particularly high on the panic table, with the highest results merely resulting in us spreading our stress to other nearby party members.  However, by the end of the session, my character was a 5 stress.  That means any time I make a roll, we don't know if she's going to be hyper-competant or completely freak out.  Things could get interesting next week.

There was a little concern that things might be a bit predictable.  We were all familiar with Alien and Aliens, and some of us had seen the other movies.  (I haven't, as it's one of those franchises where I'm reliably informed that any movie after the second can be safely ignored.)  We made a conscious effort to avoid metagaming and have our characters act like people who are only vaguely aware of rumours that there might be alien life out there, rather than our own instinct to expect facehuggers at any moment.

And of course we did encounter an alien, but not a xenomorph, facehugger, or anything else we remembered from the movies.  While we're only halfway through the adventure, it feels like it's an original story, not just a rehash of one of the Alien franchise movies.  While this adventure is intended as a one-off (we've already had one PC death and I'll be surprised if the rest of us all make it to the end) I can see this game working for a campaign.

Sci-fi horror is absolutely my favourite kind of horror, and I'm really excited about how well this game handles it.  While there's a limit to how much I can tell from a single session, at this point it's looking really really good.