# Alien Romulus: A Warning for GMs tags: #thoughts #game/rpg/alien-the-rpg ![[Alien - The Roleplaying Game (cover).jpg]] ![[Those Dark Places (cover).jpg]] ![[Pressure (cover).jpg]] First, watch this:  That sums up a surprising amount about how I felt about **[Alien Romulus](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18412256/)**. Ultimately, it primarily served to remind me of better movies that I could be watching, making specific references to them which were nevertheless just subtly wrong enough to put me off what I was watching at the time, while bringing nothing new of any value. Sure, it was beautiful, but brainless. It failed as a movie (though not financially) for exactly the same reasons that a lot of badly run games fail. *You knew there had to be an RPG tie-in along here at some point; this is it.* The **[[Alien - The Roleplaying Game|Alien RPG]]** is an absolute work of art. Mechanically, it is shockingly on point. Thematically, the creators and writers of the game obviously love not just the Alien movies, but the genre of media that grew out of it. The lurking horror and escalating tension that is part and parcel of the Alien formula is a challenge to bring to the role-playing game space. Everybody knows that they are playing a game in a way that's far more explicit than the fact that everyone knows that they are watching a movie when the lights are down and the sound is dynamic and the visuals take up the entire front of their experience. If you want to bring people in to the state of mind that keeps them spellbound and occasionally horrified, you have to understand what they're there for, what they know, and how they can get invested in what's going on. It's a somewhat delicate balancing act and there's no way around it: It's hard. What you really can't do is *literally* steal scenes and setups from your inspirational movies, slap them right in front of the players, and expect them not to feel like they are playing out someone else's story — but with inferior acting. That's what **Alien Romulus** does. It takes a bunch of scrambled *"Do you remember when that cool thing happened?"* scenes and shots from the originals, mixes and matches them, and glues them clumsily together as if taking you through a high school funhouse just before Halloween. What happens when you do that at the gaming table? Things get silly. The players go out of their way to start injecting quotes, not because they are thematically relevant, but because you've already begun quoting other material, reminding them that there is something more engaging they could be doing that they already care about. They start predicting what's coming next because they know all you have in the bag is stuff that's already happened before that they have already seen and are fans of. If you do have some sort of deeper theme, it won't come across. You're assembling a Lego of a facade with the theme written on it in spray paint. None of it goes together. Nobody can take it seriously. It is the great trap of licensed TTRPGs that material the fans are already interested in and know well is too often the material guidepost to the experience of play. You have to go beyond what's already known to give the players the opportunity to see something new, which is connected to things that they love but not replicating the things that they love. When you tell their story it needs to be unique. Beyond that, you can't pretend that the lore just doesn't matter. You have to understand it. You have to internalize it. You have to know how things work on a starship, as it were, because your players most certainly will. Things need to make sensible cause and effect linkages to the things they already know, otherwise there's no way for them to make a reasonable connection between what you're putting in front of them and what they already know and love. If something blew up in the movie and was pretty well completely destroyed, the players can't find it somewhat intact, a few miles away from that explosion. If you've established that something in the future is not known, you can't really introduce the knowledge of that thing unless you simultaneously state "The players will not survive this and nothing they do will matter." If you've introduced an evil money-grubbing corporation which pursues insane science just for the kicks and also that they are perfectly willing to sacrifice human lives for the bottom line, you can't have them suddenly ignore the bottom line of billions of dollars of derelict space equipment and research data for no good reason over multiple years. If the players have a good time, it will be despite you, not because of you. **[[Alien - The Roleplaying Game|Alien]]** has a new edition coming out, which is fairly minor in terms of revision. The mechanics are going to be slightly streamlined, but still compatible with everything that's been published. There will be a new major campaign/scenario written by the author of **[[Those Dark Places]]**/**[[Those Dark Places|Pressure]]**, which I'm sure will blow the plot of Alien Romulus out of the water. Just as everything that has been published for **Alien**, interestingly enough, has done. I say that as someone who really doesn't like pre-created scenarios, but I can say that the RPG stuff is really good. When you sit down at the table to play an RPG with your friends, and you're all there to share an experience which lovingly references material that you all hold in common as something to bring you together, learn from **Alien Romulus**: - Reference but don't mimic - Call back but don't call out - Respect, don't replicate - Situations should make sense - History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme Do all that, and you will have not only a good time, but you'll have created an environment which is memorable in and of itself. It will be worthy of the inspiration.