TEXT: tabletopgaming.co.uk
  January 2020
  tabletopgaming.co.uk
  tabletopgaming.co.uk
  Making your 
  tabletop a 
  safe space
  Sébastien Pauchon 
  on his two-player 
  trading classic
  T H E  R O L E P L A Y I N G  G A M E
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  U N L O C K ! : 
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  PLAYED
  THE BITS BIZ
  Inside Anvil Industry
  CRITICAL ROLE: VOX MACHINA
  Our painting guide brings the actual play series to life
  Game hacking 
  with Osprey’s
  Blue Book series
  Game hacking 
  HAVE IT
  YOUR WAY
  Making your 
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  FIRST
  BOOM AND BUST
  M A G N AT E :  T H E  F I R S T  C I T Y
  MEGA GAMES
  A  F R O N T L I N E  E V E N T  R E P O R T 
  Sébastien Pauchon 
  MAKING
  JAIPUR
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  January 2020
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  In this issue
  06 AT A GLANCE
  09 FIRST TURN
  Jonathan Ying on Star Wars: Imperial Assault
  10 TEN OF THE BEST
  Time Travel games to take you through to a 
  new year
  13 ROLE CALL
  14 HAVE YOU PLAYED?
  Drawing cards from the deep dark in Abyss
  16 MAGNATE: THE 
  FIRST CITY
  We talk boom, bust and Monopoly with 
  James Naylor
  18  ALL THE JAHRES
  Hanabi is a small package oﬀering a big bang
  21  MY FAVOURITE GAME
  Michael Fox of Hub Games on the thrill of 
  hostile takeovers in Aquire
  22  ALIEN RPG
  We talk horror, space and death with the 
  creators of Alien: The Roleplaying Game
  28  THE INDEPENDENT SHELF
  We try to Escape From Hades
  30 HOW WE MADE
  We talk to Sébastien Pauchon trading spice 
  and camels in Jaipur
  35 THROUGH THE AGES
  37 CARDBOARD MANIFESTO 
  Theme, you’re doing it wrong
  38 MICROGAME OF THE 
  MONTH: NINJA VS ROBOTS 
  40 BLUE BOOKS
  Welcome to the world of games hacking
  44 SAFETY FIRST
  Making safe spaces out of your tabletop
  47 AROUND THE WORLD
  IN 80 PLAYS
  50 MEGA GAMES
  Reporting on the Mega Games trend from a 
  sixty-player game of Watch the Skies
  53  UNEARTHED ARTEFACTS
  54  ANVIL INDUSTRY
  Making a living from making miniatures
  61  PLAYED
  83 PAINTING GUIDE
  Critial Role’s Vox Machina, Trinket and all
  88 DUNGEON MASTER’S 
  GUIDE TO ROLEPLAYING
  91 EVENT REPORT
  95  SHOP SPOTLIGHT
  98 TABLETOP TIME MACHINE    
  4
  January 2020
  ON THE COVER!
  
  22
  January 2020
  
  tabletopgaming.co.uk
  23
  T
  he other members of the crew 
  had descended into the dark and 
  cavernous belly of the ship, hoping 
  to fnd the captain of our original 
  vessel. Here, in the medical bay, 
  something very unfriendly has emerged 
  from an NPC. Recklessly, a member of the 
  crew attempted to kick it hard. Tis was the 
  same character who had injected herself with 
  what she assumed would be some kind of 
  inoculation. She managed to snatch it from the 
  hands of the scientist, but injected it into the 
  wrong part of her body. Its efectiveness will 
  be unknown without ocular application. In the 
  end, this wouldn’t matter. Te company man 
  with a gun standing behind her fancied taking 
  a shot at the newly emerged horror. He’s not 
  got a great aim. He misses it, and in the process, 
  shoots her in the back.
  Tis isn’t the way I expected the frst character 
  to die in my playthrough of Alien RPG’s 
  standalone cinematic scenario, Chariot of the 
  Gods, but it speaks to the breadth and depth of 
  death options in the new game from Free League 
  Publishing. Te Swedish developers of Mutant: 
  Year Zero and Tales from the Loop have taken on 
  the tense space horror of the Alien franchise and 
  found so many wonderful ways for us to die on 
  the outer edges of the cosmos. I spoke to Tomas 
  Härenstam, the co-founder and CEO of Free 
  League, who directed and designed the rules for 
  Alien RPG, about how the publisher made the 
  vast and threatening universe of Alien into a place 
  where people would want to have adventures.
  “Really, what we wanted to do with this RPG 
  is two things. First of, to give a really cinematic 
  experience of playing in an RPG of an Alien
  movie. To get that sense of space horror – mainly 
  from the frst Alien movie – in the scenarios and 
  also in the mechanics. And the second objective 
  of the game is to give players a chance to really 
  dive into the Alien universe,” says Härenstam, 
  alluding to the two game modes which come 
  packed in with the roleplaying game. Te latter 
  is the traditional campaign mode of the game, 
  designed for longer play, and giving players the 
  chance to get into the nitty-gritty of life out in the 
  frontiers. Te frst is the brutal, quick, and deadly 
  cinematic mode. Tese are ‘one-shot’ scenarios 
  which are designed to be played out over a few 
  sessions at most, and contain dramatic elements 
  that wouldn’t work in the longer campaign 
  mode, like player death.
  APPROACHING HORROR
  Once you’re over the initial excitement of the 
  very idea of an Alien roleplaying game at all, 
  there comes the question of how it could be 
  implemented. It’s almost an impossible brief 
  – creating a sci-f horror scenario where the 
  most famous antagonist in the universe is an 
  unstoppable killing machine, a pure expression 
  of primal terror. What attracts so many to the 
  Alien flms, especially the frst, is the sense 
  of the sublime in the horrors that are being 
  faced. Te feeling of godless insignifcance of 
  human actions, and existence, when faced with 
  something that represents a fundamental and 
  awesome threat. While in many RPGs there 
  is confict, there’s often a good chance of the 
  protagonists surviving – the ‘overcoming the 
  monster’ narrative is so well trod that we now 
  often expect to overcome the monster. Here 
  we’re not often aforded quite so much leeway. 
  And with multiple storytellers, how can a game 
  approach this kind of horror collaboratively?
  “Tat was the big question,” says Härenstam, 
  “Horror in RPGs is always quite tricky because 
  horror is such a visceral emotion. In an RPG that 
  can be hard to get across. And before you can get 
  the actual horror, you have the tension building.” 
  Free League approached this problem by 
  including swathes of accessible direction within 
  the book, as well as baking in the required ‘stages 
  of horror’ for efective terror into the mechanics 
  of the game. Te guidance for the ‘Games 
  Mother’ (a very good, if obvious pun on the 
  name given to the central onboard computers 
  of many ships) includes developing a sense of 
  tension. It encourages those running the game 
  to take time building up the threat of the things 
  in the shadows. Te environmental details are 
  also all there to ofer the haunted house sense 
  creaking and groaning hallways. Debris strewn 
  medical rooms, and personal quarters all but 
  destroyed in a long-forgotten incident.
  In space, only the GM can hear you scream
  MOTHER KNOWS BEST
  Words by Christopher John Eggett | Images courtesy of Free League 
  
  24
  January 2020
  A L I E N  T H E  R O L E P L AY I N G  G A M E
  24
  January 2020
   And in that, it’s also about a sensory 
  experience. Te world of Alien RPG is dangerous, 
  and not only because of what we do know, but 
  because of what we can’t quite make out in the 
  darkness. Hearing a hiss of an airlock somewhere 
  nearby when everyone is accounted for, or of 
  what sounds like footsteps in the shadows or 
  in the walls can trigger all kinds of low-level 
  tension for players. Tere is scope too, to create 
  a misunderstanding of something in the dark 
  as threat – believing your eyes is the best you 
  can do, and that only goes so far. Te ships and 
  systems themselves are also obscuring for player 
  characters. A GM can easily have something 
  reported from the ships systems designed to 
  throw players of, or to alert them to the potential 
  of a threat approaching somewhere in the ship. 
  And this brings us on to body horror. It 
  wouldn’t be Alien without the plastic reality 
  of scrungy things bursting forth from NPCs. 
  Härenstam defers to Andrew E. C. Gaska, the 
  writer of the Chariot of the Gods cinematic 
  scenario on this aspect. Gaska created much 
  of the setting work for the game, and as such, 
  conjured a great deal of the physical reality 
  players face. In these scenarios there are a 
  number of powerful descriptions for GMs to 
  use that provoke visceral reactions from players. 
  Often these disgusting events happen to NPCs, 
  which is a helpful part of the cinematic mode for 
  GMs, as it’s not always going to be easy to fnd 
  the right tone. “Running scenarios with body 
  horror elements can easily tip over and become 
  too much. You kind of have to hit the right note. I 
  think that can be a challenge. But a fun one.” Says 
  Härenstam. Getting this tone right is important 
  because they are often the pay-of of longer-
  term environmental threats. If the whole game 
  is about building tension to the point of confict 
  and drama, then overdoing these moments of 
  nastiness could leave things falling fat. Helpfully 
  there is a mechanic built into the game to ensure 
  tension is always being built upon.
  “So, it’s this kind of increasing tension that 
  will eventually explode in one way or the other,” 
  says Härenstam “It’s a key thing in the game 
  mechanics themselves. You get these stress dice, 
  which will actually make you more efective. 
  Tey will help you to an extent – but then if you 
  get too many of them, they will trigger panic 
  efects.” Te stress and panic system is one of 
  the most important tweaks to Free Leagues 
  own Year Zero system. Tis system is one of 
  dice pools. You gain dice for your relevant skills, 
  attributes and gear and generally you want to 
  roll sixes. In Alien RPG a stressful situation will 
  give you stress dice to roll as well – this works the 
  same way as the other dice for rolling success but 
  rolling a one triggers a panic efect.
  “Te more stress you have, the more efective 
  you become. But you also increase the chance 
  of rolling ones, which can trigger panic,” 
  says Härenstam, “so that’s the trade of.” Tis 
  functions with the push mechanic too. If you 
  fail a roll in Alien RPG you can always reroll 
  once, but you will add a stress dice to your dice 
  pool. Players have to ask themselves whether 
  they really want to push the dice roll – is it 
  really worth it? With that, there’s a risk-reward 
  in every dice roll. Panic can cause knock-on 
  efects for players and their party. Tese efects 
  can range from developing a nervous twitch 
  that increases the stress levels of nearby player 
  characters, through to freezing in place, going 
  berserk or even turning catatonic. On top of this, 
  rolling too much panic can give you permanent 
  psychological damage in campaign play. “If you 
  sufer really extreme stress efects, you can get 
  permanent psychological damage. Tat’s true. 
  But then this doesn’t happen too quickly, but it 
  can happen,” says Härenstam.
  Te efects of stress are one of the background 
  threats, like the rest of the environment. Te 
  ships that most of the action takes place on are 
  STAGE IV: 
  STAGE IV:
  SCOUT
  SCOUT
  STAGE V: 
  STAGE V:
  SOLDIER
  SOLDIER
  STAGE VI: 
  STAGE VI:
  QUEEN
  QUEEN
  
  25
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  25
  When we do come face to face with an 
  Xenomorph, seeing and understanding it 
  more doesn’t necessarily make for a better 
  chance of survival. Tere are no smart choices 
  in that moment. Meeting with an alien doesn’t 
  always spell death, but it is unpredictable. 
  “Te xenomorphs, the way they attack and 
  the damage they do, that all depends on these 
  signature attacks that are randomized,” says 
  Härenstam “which means you’re never really 
  sure what they will do. It’s never going to be that 
  the xenomorph is just going to do another attack, 
  just like the one they did the round before. And 
  you just know what’s going to happen.” Teses 
  signature attacks are right out of the flms, from 
  tail spikes and head bites to the facehugger’s 
  extremely evocative ‘Te Final Embrace’ – which 
  is exactly what you think it is.
  THIS TIME IT’S WAR
  All of this is to say, you’re going to die, a lot. At 
  least in cinematic mode. Yet character death in 
  an RPG doesn’t always ft well with the level of 
  investment players may have in their characters. 
  “Tat’s such a big thing in many games, how 
  to handle character death,” says Härenstam, 
  citing the various games from Free League where 
  characters cannot die, such as Tales from the 
  Loop. “But in Alien, just to sort of get the sense of 
  the movies. I mean, characters must be able to 
  die and they should die quite a lot. In cinematic 
  mode you should be really lucky if you actually 
  make it through alive. Just like in the alien movie, 
  most of the crew, they will die along the way and 
  you have to have that sense here as well.”
  Tis is certainly true of my experience in 
  cinematic mode. Te players I was ‘mothering’ 
  through the experience didn’t last all that long. 
  Tey’d split up and ended up in a stressful 
  situation where they made some poor choices 
  and bad rolls. It wasn’t a problem though, 
  eliminated players don’t stay out for long.
  “Te cinematic scenarios usually have a 
  number of NPCs that are easily transformed 
  into player characters. You can actually pick up 
  another character and play to fnish the scenario, 
  and not have to leave the game,” explains 
  Härenstam. Tere’s something videogamey 
  about the way that death is treated in this mode. 
  Insert another coin, and pick up where you 
  left of in another body with new agendas and 
  allegiances. It’s great. And, what’s more, it’s an 
  important and satisfying part of play. “Tat felt 
  like an important thing to do. Te player death 
  is much more part of cinematic play. And those 
  are only meant to last one to three sessions, 
  clunky, huge beasts. Oil refneries moving 
  through space like slowly drifting trash. Tey 
  are brutal machines made for utility that our 
  human characters rattle around within, and 
  yet, being in the bellies of these beasts feels 
  like home in comparison with the gaping 
  emptiness of space. Tat emptiness that you 
  and your crew are foating in dangerous, and 
  your ships comparatively fragile. As such, 
  exploring the rotten space hulks between the 
  stars is exactly as dangerous as you would 
  expect it to be. 
  “Tere’s more general dangers like blowing 
  a hole in the hull that will decompress an 
  entire section of the ship,” says Härenstam, 
  “and that’s something that we felt needed to 
  be a part of the game. Alien is semi-hard sci-f 
  I guess, so it’s not super realistic in every detail 
  – but we did still feel that space and being on a 
  spaceship needs to feel dangerous in itself. Like 
  radioactivity or a vacuum, there is just a danger 
  to being in space.” Tis makes any actions 
  you take while playing the game seem more 
  threatening and your life more precarious. 
  Your resources are limited too. Not only in 
  the obvious, such as ammunition, but also 
  in the amount of air in your tank – a danger 
  compounded by the fact that when you remove 
  your helmet in an unknown ship full of alien 
  eggs, you don’t know what you’ll breathe in.
  “I think what can really work is when 
  you sufer both [the xenomorph and 
  environmental threats] at the same time. 
  Maybe you start of with facing a xenomorph, 
  and then, something happens that also 
  decompresses part of the ship. Or the other 
  way around; you’re out space walking to fx a 
  damaged engine and then something happens 
  with the xenomorph.” says Härenstam “you 
  can get that doubling efect that can be really 
  troubling for players and a lot of fun.”
  With the whole environment against you 
  as well as occasionally being hunted, games 
  of Alien RPG can quickly spiral out of control. 
  “I think the diference may be that even 
  though the vacuum and these [environmental 
  threats] are very dangerous, they’re kind 
  of dangerous in a way that you can know. 
  At least you have an idea of how it works. 
  Whereas, the xenomorphs are much more 
  unpredictable,” says Härenstam. In this there 
  is a statement about how the whole of Alien 
  RPG relies on characters taking calculated risks 
  based on information that’s obscured from 
  them, whether that’s by the dark shadows of 
  a groaning hull or the sometimes unreliable 
  readouts of machines. 
  
  26
  January 2020
  A L I E N  T H E  R O L E P L AY I N G  G A M E
  probably not more than that. And they are one-
  shots. So you’re not meant to continue playing 
  with these characters.”
  Te deaths you experience, because there is a 
  chance to rejoin later actually feel like a satisfying 
  end to some of your characters. Tis is in part 
  because of the conficts you’re experiencing 
  while playing, and also because of the speed of 
  play. Cinematic mode is rapid, like returning to 
  a facehugger that you’ve left in the kennels for a 
  week while you were on holiday. Each scenario 
  takes place over three acts, with a rising tension 
  throughout each. What’s more is that each 
  pre-generated character has their own secret 
  agenda dealt out by the GM which changes with 
  each act. Tis allows for very natural play, and a 
  cranking up of the tension when it’s needed.
  “In the fnal act things really start to 
  unravel,” says Härenstam, “the idea is that it’s 
  fne for characters to die because that’s just 
  part of the fnale. It’s part of the climax of this 
  scenario.” In the fnal stages, these scenarios 
  can be high-confict free-for-alls that see 
  nearly every aspect of a story resolved, even if 
  that means in a very permanent way for your 
  character “If your character dies, that can be 
  as rewarding in a sense as him or her living on. 
  Tat’s part of the philosophy.”
  A LONG LIFE ON THE 
  FRONTIER
  Game mothers have a lot to do in cinematic 
  play, simply because there is so much 
  going on. While often a roleplaying game is 
  deeply collaborative, here there is a sense of 
  interruption from the GM. It’s less that the GM 
  is railroading the story and more that they’re 
  encouraged to throw spanners in the air-vents 
  to keep the players on their toes. Campaign play 
  on the other hand is designed to be much more 
  of a slow burn, with a more traditional give and 
  take between players and their GM. 
  For those that have only seen the flms, they 
  may be unaware of the extended Alien universe 
  of comic books and videogames. Tis universe 
  is only hinted at in the main line of Alien flms. 
  “It’s not very clear what’s actually canonical” 
  says Härenstam, talking about building this 
  world. Tis fact has been turned to Free League’s 
  advantage in the RPG, where the wildest 
  excesses of the flms can be ignored (think Alien 
  vs Predator, some of the Prometheus silliness, 
  Resurrection) and the confict comes from more 
  human aspects of the setting. In many ways the 
  book ties up some of the loose ends that the 
  canon of the flms had left sprayed about like so 
  much acidic xenomorph blood.
  “Te whole game is set shortly after Aliens – 
  the second movie – where there’s an escalating 
  confict between the diferent colonies of this 
  universe. Tis is a sort of ‘wild west’ situation 
  where there are diferent powers; corporations, 
  but also governments and colonies,” says 
  Härenstam “there’s an increasing amount of 
  confict between them. In the campaign mode 
  you really are free to explore these conficts using 
  that big star map that we have. You can explore 
  the current situation as you see ft, whether 
  you’re a colonial marine, an explorer or a space 
  trucker or something else entirely.”
  Te game is set in a specifc year, 2183, around 
  four years after the events of Aliens. Te potential 
  for world building is huge. Small directions to 
  the GM for building worlds in solar systems 
  like “Human presence in a star system will be 
  established on the most lucrative planet, not 
  the most Earth-like,” tell you a lot about how 
  this setting remains hostile, but in a much more 
  human way.
  For players in this mode, there’s likely to 
  be a lot less death, at least, when it comes to 
  player characters. Te xenomorph is used 
  diferently here, and GMs are advised not 
  to use them all the time. Tat’s one of the 
  reasons that a full range of xenomorph types 
  have been included, allowing for a variance 
  of threat level – and the amount of confict 
  from the second most dangerous creatures 
  in the Alien universe, humans.
  “Te core system is the same, but a 
  campaign mode doesn’t necessarily involve as
  lethal threats. It can, I mean you can run into 
  the worst kinds of horrors – but you can also play 
  missions that don’t involve xenomorphs at all.” 
  Explains Härenstam, admitting what we might 
  have suspected, “You cannot have xenomorphs 
  in every single planet you go to. I mean, they can, 
  but it will just get, you know, boring.” Instead, 
  to keep interest up, they should be teased of-
  screen, be an adjacent part of the story that gets 
  slowly revealed.
  And this is a key challenge facing the team at 
  Free League. How to make an Alien game that 
  can be played as a campaign? After all, once 
  you have seen an xenomorph, it can’t just go 
  back into its box, egg, or chest. But that’s the 
  Characters 
  must be able to 
  die and they should 
  die quite a lot
  
  tabletopgaming.co.uk
  27
  beauty of it really. Players are tempted into 
  imagining the worst during campaign play 
  because of knowledge outside of what their 
  characters know. While character knowledge 
  of an xenomorph can take away or soften 
  the feeling of danger if used repeatedly, the 
  lingering threat of knowledge only held by 
  the player can play a part in keeping longer 
  campaigns full of fear.
  “It’s actually a double-edged sword in a way,” 
  says Härenstam, “because also having that 
  knowledge can also increase tension. You don’t 
  know exactly what’s going to happen, but you 
  know, it’s going to be bad because you’ve seen 
  the movies.” 
  Tis is balanced with the use of downtime, 
  a mysterious art in the world of roleplaying 
  games. “You’ll need to fnd some downtime 
  between the intense action sequences because 
  you need to relieve the stress and lose those 
  stress dice” says Härenstam. Here, the beneft of 
  reducing your stress dice gives an obvious place 
  to settle between high intensity action that is 
  really desired by players, mechanically. Tere’s 
  a narrative appeal which is also important to the 
  genre, “downtime gives that kind of ebb and fow 
  between horror or action. Downtime with some 
  banter and that – you have to have that, even in 
  cinematic scenarios. In campaign of course you 
  can have longer periods of downtime.”
  Downtime in campaigns brings us on to the 
  next expansions and cinematic scenarios, both 
  of which are already in the works for Alien RPG. 
  Te frst major supplement to the game covers 
  colonial marines – and includes systems for 
  dealing with downtime, although, it is stressed, 
  that this isn’t an update to the core rules, simply a 
  way of adding additional systems into the game. 
  Tis expansion is being worked on by Härenstam 
  along with Gaska and Paul Elliot (HOSTILE) and 
  promises more lore, gear and to be an “open 
  campaign.”  Tis is a sandbox style campaign that 
  provides a plot and a narrative, but with massive 
  scope to deviate from the main through-line of the 
  story. In addition, Gaska is creating a cinematic 
  scenario that in some way follows on from Chariot 
  of the Gods – although of course, not with any of 
  the characters from that scenario, for very obvious 
  ‘third act’ reasons. 
  We’ll have to wait until August 2020 next year 
  to fnd out more about the fresh horrors waiting 
  for us beyond the Outer Veil. 
  Until then we’ll have to settle 
  with making our way through 
  space, and trying not to think 
  about that sound coming 
  from the vents. 
  READ OUR 
  REVIEW OF 
  ALIEN: THE 
  ROLEPLAYING 
  GAME ON 
  PAGE 63
  
  TRY THIS IF 
  YOU LIKED… 
  CALL OF 
  CTHULHU
  Though the settings 
  are about as 
  diﬀerent as you 
  could imagine, Alien 
  RPG captures the 
  same despair, dread 
  and pile of dead 
  characters created 
  by classic Call of 
  Cthulhu adventures.
  ❚ PLAY IT? Y E S
  An incredible horror experience that 
  absolutely excels at one-shot scenarios.
  T
  here are plenty of horror games 
  on the market, but few manage 
  to tap into the unsettling, 
  bone-gnawing terror that Alien: Te 
  Roleplaying game can conjure up with 
  just a few well-chosen descriptions and 
  careless dice rolls. 
  From an initial movie about a bunch 
  of space-truckers and their run-in with a 
  single monster through to the expanded 
  timeline of Prometheus, the Alien 
  universe has always revolved around fear 
  of the unknown; the fear, appropriately 
  enough, of the alien. Tis isn’t the easiest 
  thing to capture at the tabletop, but with 
  a few clever decisions and a stark focus 
  on cranking up the tension the Alien 
  RPG does everything it can to summon 
  up feelings of dread, whether you’re 
  in a darkened kitchen or a crowded 
  convention hall.
  Tis is achieved with a core ruleset 
  based on the same, simple system used 
  by several other games developed by 
  Free League, including Tales from the 
  Loop and Forbidden Lands. Skills and 
  stats add dice to a pool, and when you 
  want to try something risky you throw 
  them all and try to get sixes. If you 
  get at least one you succeed, whether 
  that means sneaking past a handful of 
  egg-sacs without rupturing them or 
  clobbering a merc over the head with 
  a wrench.
  Te biggest twist that Alien adds to the 
  system is one that ties the rules neatly 
  into the idea of rising, creeping horror. 
  As characters press themselves or watch 
  their friends be torn apart by monsters, 
  Some of this can be attributed to 
  the punishing, lethal nature of the 
  pre-written cinematic scenarios, but a 
  lot of the sleek efciency comes from 
  the careful decision of which rules and 
  ideas to cut out. Tere’s no character 
  creation, no umm-ing and ahh-ing over 
  weapon loadouts and no need to fddle 
  about with any systems that don’t relate 
  directly to the situation at hand. You just 
  turn up, roll your dice and pray that you 
  survive the night.
  Of course, this ease of play is balanced 
  out by the sky-high stakes when a 
  campaign game eventually stumbles 
  into a truly deadly threat, but the crew 
  probably won’t be facing these every 
  week. For every tense showdown with 
  monstrous aliens, you can probably 
  expect a couple run-ins with pushy 
  Colonial Marines or some corporate 
  drones, and while these can still be fun 
  they aren’t exactly the reason why most 
  of us pick up an Alien game.
  When you’re in one-shot cinematic 
  mode, Alien is an incredible game. If you 
  have just one night to play and are after 
  some seriously scary roleplaying, it’s one 
  of the best choices out there. Campaign 
  mode has the potential to eclipse even 
  this, but if you go down this road you’ll 
  need to accept that between the peaks of 
  an excellent horror game lie a few sessions 
  of merely okay sci-f adventure. 
  RICHARD JANSENPARKES
  they accumulate an extra pool of stress 
  dice. Tese dice can generate successes 
  just like their skills and stats – adrenaline 
  pushing them to new heights – but if they 
  roll poorly the terror can overwhelm 
  their character, causing them to freeze, 
  empty their entire magazine or run into 
  the open.
  It’s a neat little addition to the rules 
  that does a wonderful job of raising the 
  tension, and not just in-game either. 
  Passing checks with just your basic dice 
  pool can be tough, so you’re encouraged 
  to push for re-rolls and stress dice right 
  from the start of the adventure, but in 
  the back of everyone’s mind lingers the 
  knowledge of what that stress can cause 
  when the real dangers appear.
  Tis isn’t the only twist to Alien, 
  however. Perhaps the most interesting 
  aspect of the game is that it’s actually two 
  games in a single book. Kind of.
  One of these is a fairly conventional 
  sci-f RPG designed for campaigns that 
  might run for weeks or months at a time. 
  Te other – known as ‘cinematic mode’ 
  – is specially built for one-of scenarios. 
  You aren’t really expected to ever run a 
  second game using the same characters, 
  because most of them are probably 
  going to be dead.
  Te rules don’t really change between 
  the two, but while campaign mode 
  is where the meat of the details and 
  character options lie, cinematic mode 
  is where strengths of Alien shine their 
  brightest. It’s here that the terror is at its 
  most accessible, the rules at the slickest 
  and the tone at its darkest.
  Te Terror of the Deep (Space)
  ALIEN: THE ROLEPLAYING GAME
  15+
  £39
  392+
  63
  tabletopgaming.co.uk
  tabletopgaming.co.uk
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Alien RPG (Year Zero Engine) [multi]/Magazines/Selected Articles/Alien - Tabletop Gaming [January 2020].pdf