Reviews
Thanks to three decades of books, comics, and cinematic spinoffs, the ALIEN franchise has come to maintain a, ah, rather fragile relationship with the idea of canon. But while some may choose to nitpick the production design gap between the prequels and their predecessors, the fact that the franchise has always bent to the preferences of the storyteller – from Ridley Scott to Jean-Pierre Jeunet – remains one of its biggest strengths.
It is that same focus on creator flexibility that makes ALIEN: The Roleplaying Game such a good time at the table. The latest expansion – Building Better Worlds, a full campaign module for the series – leans into the newest corners of the ALIEN universe, allowing players to further bring together the classical and modern versions of the Alien movies into something ambitious and twisted.
For those who have not played ALIEN: The Roleplaying Game – but who felt their resolve weaken with each new shot in the Alien: Romulus trailer – Free League’s game is built off their popular Year Zero Engine, where D6 determine both the successes and failures of your crew. The game has two modes: campaign, which allows you to build a long-running narrative around interstellar conflict and extraterrestrial threats, and cinematic mode, which basically lets you play James Cameron’s Aliens in real-time. This latest expansion is focused more on the former, fleshing out the frontier territories and giving Game Mothers – the franchise’s variation of DMs – a more practical guidebook for planetside encounters.
Here Free League continues its impressive efforts to provide us with as much narrative framework as possible. In the original manual, setting writer Andrew E.C. Gaska walked a delicate line between establishing a sense of narrative continuity and allowing players to craft their best Dark Horse Comics-era one-shot. Building Better Worlds continues to refine the canon that Free League has painstakingly pieced together from licensed adaptations, expanding the corporate espionage between factions into a colonial wild west.
What was a handful of D66 tables in the original manual – expedition charts with things like sponsors, rewards, and missions – is grounded in a lot more backstory here. Ten pages of Building Better Worlds are dedicated to the history of frontier colonization among factions like the Three-World Empire and the Union of Progressive Peoples. This provides Game Mothers with two centuries of canon to pick and choose from, allowing them to construct campaigns around the ideologies and technologies of their players’ chosen factions.
That’s the bulk of what you get with this new book: a more robust campaign sandbox. While the game’s cinematic mode has always allowed players to embrace their inner colonial marines, these new narrative elements make it easier to build a months-long campaign in the ALIEN universe. Game Mothers now have a better sense of how colonies and corporations fit together, giving the broader narrative a kind of Mass Effect vibe; when you pop into a colony, you can construct several sessions’ worth of expeditions before moving onto the next location.
That said, those looking for new mechanics in Building Better Worlds won’t be entirely left in the cold. This new expansion introduces two new classes – the Entertainer, an empathy-based colonial entrepreneur, and the agility-based Wildcatter – and six new frontier-focused general talents for each of the existing classes, too. You want to play a Weyland-Yutani agent stationed on a remote research station? Try adding Born Leader, which allows you to roll a free manipulation after failing a command check – speaking to the kind of resourcefulness a company man must have when working without a lot of resources.
The expansion also draws heavily on the lore established in both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant to further expand the monster manual of proto-xenomorphs and abominations created by the prequels’ black goo. One of the more important creatures in the roleplaying games is the Fulfremmen, the race of Engineer-created humanoids whose role in the ALIEN universe has only grown with each new expansion. Not only are they given a proper place on the monster pecking order, they are the focus of The Lost Worlds, the book’s enormous 130+ page campaign module.
For those who prefer to operate within an established narrative framework, The Lost Worlds breaks down a campaign centered around lost colonies and Engineer progeny into six progressive expeditions and an action-packed finale. Building Better Worlds also breaks each expedition – each of which can take several sessions to complete – into their respective NPCs, locations, story beats, and even campaign-long puzzle components. Whether you prefer campaigns on rails or not, Free League is here to make damn sure those rails are polished until they shine.
If you like your ALIEN tabletop to be simple – a group of soldiers, creatures in the walls, bang-bang-bang – then Building Better Worlds may lean too much into the expanded universe of companies and canon. But if your love of the ALIEN universe is as tied to the corporate espionage and unethical biological engineering found in the books as the gothic space horror of Ridley Scott’s films, then you are going to love what this book has to offer.
But hey, if you’re really a fan, you’ll probably purchase this expansion as much for its continued service as the franchise’s de facto encyclopedia. Somehow, Free League has managed to add just the right amount of due diligence to the ALIEN universe to make it seem even bigger than ever – without sacrificing the mondo moments we’ve come to know and love.
Lead Writer: Andrew E.C. Gaska, Dave Semark
Publisher: Free League Publishing
This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 6 (August '24)
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