The Alien Franchise ticks all of the boxes for me. Horror, Spaceships, Aliens, and Space Marines.
This book is packed with details. It's hundreds of pages of rules, setting information, and pictures. I can't wait to review it.
I struggled to find a copy online and paid a tiny bit more at Great Escape, but ended up with exactly what I wanted. They do have a starter set for less, but I decided to skip over that for the moment. Don't let that fool you, I will be buying the starter set, because I love those things.
Now that I am parsing the rules, I will purchase some dice for this game. One of the nice things about this ruleset is the trackable consumables. I have a half dozen Atlas Games The White Box Set for tracking every conceivable item.
From the photo to the left, you can see I got impatient and created some of my own dice and a box to hold them. I need to print some character sheets. I'll use these.
The box was laser-cut. For the dice, I used DollarStore wood cubes and a set of steel dies to punch the numbers in. They are very rustic, fitting the crapsack world of Alien.
Anyway, back to the rules set. It's several hundred pages. The rules are well organized, neat, and easy to read, but it is still 300+ pages to digest. This is going to take a while.
The art is really nice. It captures the world of Weyland-Yutani, across all eras. The shifts from Corporate White and Green, to gritty images of the nooks and crannies where humans and Xenomorphs really compete.
While this is horror-based, the art doesn't descend into gore. It also doesn't try to reproduce the films. There are a few pictures where you think you see Ripley or Hudson, but they don't come off as copies of the film. They capture the films from a slightly different angle than what you saw on-screen, as if you were tapped into a different helmet feed. I like it.
I can't wait to dig into this RPG, play, and review it.
