Work is Scary

“A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!”—Blade Runner

Building Better Worlds is the second campaign supplement for Alien: The Roleplaying Game. It is unfortunately, the last supplement for Alien: The Roleplaying Game. It is fortunately, compatible with Alien: The Roleplaying Game – Evolved Edition, just as is every other release for Alien: The Roleplaying Game. There are several ways in which Alien: The Roleplaying Game can be played. It has three themes, two modes, and three models. The three themes are Space Horror and Sci-Fi Action, combined with a Sense of Wonder, whilst the two modes are Cinematic and Campaign. Cinematic mode is designed to emulate the drama of a film set within the Alien universe, and so emphasises high stakes, faster, more brutal play, and will be deadlier, whilst the Campaign mode is for longer, more traditional play, still brutal, if not deadly, but more survivable. Of the two, the Cinematic mode is suited to one-shots, to convention play, and as introductions to the mechanics and setting of Alien: The Roleplaying Game. The three models are Colonial Marines, essentially military missions like Aliens; Frontier Colonists—miners, prospectors, and settlers trying to survive for a better life on an all but barren planet; and Space Truckers—starship crews hauling goods and resources, as in Alien. Of the support to date, the trilogy of scenarios—Chariot of the Gods (also available in the Alien: The Roleplaying Game Starter Set), Destroyer of Worlds, and Heart of Darkness—have all been in the Cinematic mode, but for different models, focusing in turn upon Space Truckers, Colonial Marines, and Scientists. Together they form a thematically connected campaign, whereas the Colonial Marines Operations Manual not only detailed the United States Colonial Marine Corps, it also provided a full campaign for the Colonial Marines model. Building Better Worlds does the same, but for Frontier Colonists and Space Truckers.

Building Better Worlds is a book that will take you out—far out—into the Alien universe to the Outer Rim Territories as far as the frontier of the Weyland Isles Sector, and then quite literally beyond, that is, ‘Beyond the 20 Parsec Limit’ where there is little hope of help or rescue if an outpost or colony gets into trouble or needs rescuing. Building Better Worlds is a book about the future of humanity and finding new worlds, living on worlds and settlements far from Earth not always best suited to colonisation, about making the lengthy journeys between them, and surviving some of the deadliest of secrets and dangers in the galaxy. With Building Better Worlds, the Game Mother can run campaigns that focus on searching for and discovering new planets—hopefully suited to settlement or exploitation, if not both; on settling, working, and developing colonies; and on transporting goods and passengers between them. It is designed to be used by both player and Game Mother and so is book of two halves. The first half includes an explanation of the fundamentals of exploration and colonisation, the colonisation timeline, a mix of governmental non-governmental organisations, guidelines to creating suitable Player Characters as well as two new careers, numerous weapons, vehicles of all types, and other equipment, and some ideas around which campaigns could be based. This half, roughly a third of the book, is for the player, whilst the longer second half is for the Game Master. That half includes two catalogues, one of the systems and colonies of the frontier, the other of the parts of the Weyland-Yutani Extrasolar Species Catalogue that Weyland-Yutani does not want you to see, ‘The Lost Worlds’, a complete sandbox campaign beyond the frontier, and the expanded means to create new worlds and colonies, and for running a colony.

The supplement opens with the facts of colonisation and space travel. That it is heroic, that it is dirty, that it is dangerous, and that it is expensive. That explorers need to be hardy and well-trained and that the pay is invariably good, whilst colonists need to be even more hardy, prepared for life on another world, and expect to be paid little, if at all. Both are likely to need to pay back for their training, though this is easier for explorers who make more income, and both exploration and colonisation expeditions are going to be funded by wealthy corporations, governments, or institutions. The history of colonisation runs from 2029 CE and the Weyland Era to the 2190s and the Black Gold Rush following the terrorist nuclear bombings of petroleum supply colonies, the Colony Wars, and the Great Mother Mission launched to contact lost colonies. However, the explanation of events is organised by category and the timeline crammed into a two-page spread, so it is difficult to get a proper feel for the flow of events.

The organisations chapter includes descriptions of positions on Scientific Exploration Vehicular (SEV) Expeditions and the Extrasolar Colonization Administration (ECA), useful as potential roles for both Player Characters and NPCs, whilst the governmental organization and corporation descriptions are a mix of the familiar and unfamiliar. The Weyland-Yutani Corporation, the Seegson Corporation, United Americas, Colonial Marine Corps, Union of Progressive Peoples, and more will be familiar, expanding upon the information in both the Alien: The Roleplaying Game corebook and the Colonial Marines Operations Manual. The less familiar includes the Central Confederation of Africa, which is a minor, but rising interstellar power, and the New Albion Protectorate, a former colony located in the Weyland Isles, which seceded from the Three World Empire (3WE) and is prompting other colonies to follow suit in an effort commonly called ‘3WExit’ (you can tell that the author is British).

In terms of character options, Building Better World offers two new Careers as well as discussing how the different Careers from Alien: The Roleplaying Game can find their way onto exploration missions and colonisations expeditions and why they might join both, along with a table of possible personal agendas, which is very good. Each is also given two new Frontier Talents and two items of Frontier Gear. For example, the Frontier Talents for the Colonial Marshal are ‘Menacing’ and ‘Tough’, whilst the items of Frontier Gear are a ‘Bounty hunter/Investigator licence’ or ‘Handcuffs’. The two new Careers are the Wildcatter and the Entertainer. The Wildcatter is a prospector or surveyor who explores new worlds looking for resources or suitable sites for colonisation. The Entertainer is suggested as being a performer, croupier, unofficial club owner, waiter, barkeep, or other profession, which is less useful for most campaigns. It would need a static set-up—a base or a colony or a space station—to be a logical character option, and when things go sideways as they should, would also be the basis for a replacement Player Character.

There is a good selection of new gear and ships which can be found all across the frontier and beyond. New weapons, armour and suits, other equipment, vehicles, and spacecraft. The other equipment ranges from items as simple as a Folding Spade and Digging Fork (which of course, can be sued as a weapon) and as complex as the ‘Omni-Tech SDDG Sonic Deterrent Defence Grid’ designed to deter indigenous wildlife and pests from getting inside a perimeter. It is effective against humans though, inducing stress. The vehicles are typically large, multi-wheeled, and rugged, the COBB-C/D ‘Grasshopper Multivector Helijet’ an exception. The spaceships include the Lockmart Model 439SL Class 7 Excavator which has a heavy mining drill in its prow; the Weyland Heliades-Class, the first FTL-capable spacecraft; and colony vessels such as the Lockmart Model TB22C Borrowdale Class Transfer Vehicle and W-Y Model CY78.3 Affiance-Class U Colony Ship.

Surprisingly, the advice and suggestions for campaigns is in the half of Building Better Worlds for the player rather than in the section for the Game Mother. There are rules for surviving new environmental conditions, but the most interesting content here is the discussion of campaign types, set-ups, and expedition types. There are some colony classifications described too, including the ‘Shake and Bake’, ‘Extra Crispy’, ‘Giffy Popped’, and ‘Armed and Hammered’, that will give certain colonies similar feels. The two types of campaign discussed are Explorer and Colony Campaigns and together with the list of potential expedition types, such as supply and cargo runs, salvage ops, prospecting, scientific field-trips, and more, gives the Game Mother a decent range of ideas around which to base campaigns and plots. These are solid prompts, but as much they give the Game Mother some good starting points, the reader is left wanting more as each is worthy of further expansion and discussion.

For the Game Master, Building Better Worlds is also broken into two halves, one more general in nature, the other specific to the campaign, ‘The Lost Worlds’. The more general half begins with details of eighteen new systems located in the Outer Rim Territories, the Frontier, and Beyond the 20 Parsec Limit. Each has a description that gives its history and current status, plus list of stats and details that includes affiliation, classification, climate and temperature, terrain, notable colonies, population, and key resources. There are no hooks given so the Game Mother will need to work hard to develop these into fuller adventure locations with reasons why anyone would visit them. At half a page, they are underwritten and perhaps point towards the need for a world guide for Alien: The Roleplaying Game – Evolved Edition.

The second section is the ‘Weyland-Yutani Extrasolar Species Catalogue’. From Abominations and Fulfremmen (Perfected) to Protomorphs and and Xenomorphs, this is an expanded bestiary of your worst nightmares that nobody wants to meet and this being for Alien: The Roleplaying Game, unfortunately will. Many of these have been taken from the film Prometheus and the cinematic scenario, Heart of Darkness. Some also appear in the campaign that follows, but this still expands the options available to the Game Mother wanting to surprise and unnerve her players and their characters.

The second half of the section for the Game Mother is ‘The Lost Worlds’, a campaign that takes up just under half of Building Better Worlds. It builds off the timeline given earlier and set in the 2190s, concerns the Great Mother Mission. This is a combined multi-national, multi-corporation humanitarian, recontact, and recolonisation expedition launched by the United Nations Interstellar Settlement Corps to discover what happened to the settlements and peoples of the Far Spinward Colonies following their isolation from the Outer Rim due to a series of massive solar ejections, gamma bursts, and waves of radiation. It has been seventy-five years since contact was lost and numerous vested interests want to know what has happened to the millions of people who settled the region. There is even hope that if successful, the Great Mother Mission will serve as an example of co-operation and goodwill in the face of increased hostilities between the United Americas and the Union of Progressive Peoples. Of course, the expedition is rife with tensions and issues, both political and corporate, and these will drive the actions of the expedition members NPCs for much of the campaign and influence those of the Player Characters too.

The Player Characters are members of the expedition assigned to the UNCSS Solovetsky Island, one of Great Mother Mission’s four Magellan-class J Science Exploration Vessels (SEV). They can take just about any role about ship, but need to be free to conduct planet-based missions too. Otherwise, the players have a lot of freedom in terms of what characters they can create and roleplay. The campaign consists of seven chapters or expeditions, the first six of which can be played in any order as a sandbox, the completion of each one reward the players and their characters with another piece of the campaign’s metapuzzle, whilst the seventh serves as the campaign’s finale. Alternatively, they can be run as one-shots, but that would negate the tension and mystery that builds as the campaign progresses. The lose structure of the campaign also means that the Game Master has room to create her own scenarios set on other worlds in the Far Spinward Colonies. She may want to do that to have her Player Characters discover what happened to the other colonies that were not necessarily affected by the campaign’s emerging threat. The campaign includes a Session Zero for set-up and guidance on how to handle downtime scenes between the expeditions, as well as list of events that can occur as necessary or because of the Player Characters’ actions.

Over the course of the campaign, the Player Characters will visit colonies riven by a family feud, divided into extreme haves and have-nots, on the edge of insurrection, and seemingly empty bar strict automation. They will also conduct a search and rescue mission for a lost expedition vessel and even help set up and run a colony. The latter makes use of the colony creation and operation rules and advice in the supplement’s appendix which also include expanded rules for creating star systems and planets. Structurally, since ‘The Lost Worlds’ can be played in any order, it does lack a sense of space or urgency as written. Rather urgency is going to build from the narrative and the discoveries that the Player Characters make as opposed to inbuilt timing mechanism. Thus, by the end of the sixth part of the campaign, the Player Characters will have uncovered, even encountered, and hopefully understood the nature of a threat to not just the Far Spinward Colonies, but all of occupied space. Again and again, the Player Characters will find signs of ‘alien’ activity and even be confronted by it, but where in a Cinematic scenario, the objectives are simply survival and escape, here they are also to learn and wonder at some the secrets that the campaign will reveal.

Building Better Worlds does feel as if it should be two books, one focusing on its themes of colonisation and exploration, the other on its campaign. Perhaps as two books, the one devoted to colonisation and exploration would have had more room for colonies of the Alien universe to be expanded upon and detailed. Plus, ‘The Lost Worlds’ is more of a re-exploratory campaign than an exploratory campaign and were it not for the expedition where the Player Characters get to set up and run a colony, that part of the supplement would have been ignored. However, this does not mean that as just the one book, Building Better Worlds is a bad book by any stretch of the imagination.

Physically, Building Better Worlds is a great looking book. It is well written and the artwork is as excellent as you would expect for the line. As with other books for Alien: The Roleplaying Game, the layout is fairly open and thus easier to read. Being for the first edition of the roleplaying game, it still uses the black background that some readers have an issue with.

Building Better Worlds expands Alien: The Roleplaying Game—and consequently Alien: The Roleplaying Game – Evolved Edition—with a wealth of options, campaign ideas and playstyles, threats and other dangers, that all together open the possibilities of the roleplaying game’s Campaign mode and the Frontier Colonist campaign model. It then showcases them with a great campaign that delivers an escalating combination of horror and hubris.

The Other OSR: Black Powder and Brimstone

The Vaterländer Empire is in purgatory. The Holy Empire of the Sanguine Church is rent by a schism of faith. The Church of Holy Blood, governed by the Grand Magister from the Holy City of Mars, has administered to the faithful for a thousand years. The Church has launched rituals of bloodletting and the imbibing of sanguine sacraments in honour of the Torn Prophet and launched crusades upon the unfaithful. However, some call it decadent, accuse it of corruption, and there arose schisms when some wanted worship to be less excessive and more ascetic. They were called heretics and put to the torch by the Inquisition, yet they found a voice in Luther Martin, who taught that the God of Light and the Torn Prophet’s teachings be taught and experienced by the common man as well as the clergy. To that end, the text of the Torn Prophet was printed in the common tongue, the first of what the Church of Holy Blood regarded as acts of high blasphemy… As Luther Martin’s words drew an ever greater flock, the Church of Holy Blood declared them and Luther Martin to be heretics and he was assassinated. Those who followed his teachings broke with the Church of Holy Blood and from the schism arose two faiths—the Orthodoxy of the Church of Light and the Puritans of the Church of Light. As the Emperor of the Holy Empire of the Sanguine Church led his armies into the Vaterländer Empire to put down the heresy of the Puritans. The peasantry and the zealots of the Puritans of the Church of Light rose up in the city of Deliverance and rounded up the tax collectors and the priests and burned them alive in what was once Festival Square, but is now Execution Square. The Vaterländer Empire split into the Holy Confederacy of the Puritan Church and those loyal to the Church of Light and Holy Emperor.

As religious war spread, cities burned, thousands died, and neighbouring powers took advantage of the weakened Holy Empire of the Sanguine Church. Svea and Orla funded the Puritans and as one city and town after another declared its allegiance to one side or the other, one faith or the other, or even none, no army could protect them all. So out went the call for mercenaries on all sides, and as long as they are paid, such free companies will serve their paymasters, but if not, they become as much of a threat as the enemy extracting the pay they are owed, in the process, making the populace suffer further. The Inquisition and its witchfinders scour the broken land in search of corruption, signs of the dark arts, and demons, ready to torture, burn, and hang all it suspects, all in service of the Orthodoxy of the Church of Light, yet almost as fanatically as the Puritans. The Inquisition cannot be everywhere and where a witch would be burned where the Puritans hold sway, a wise woman would be revered where the Orthodoxy remains, and demons frolic, come to Vaterländ to revel in the pain and suffering. Worse, even worse than the plague and famine that rolls back and forth across the land, is the Staggering Pox that blights the dead of the battlefields in their shallow graves and forces them to walk again… Another year of Purgatory and winter seems longer and colder than the last…

This is the setting for Black Powder and Brimstone, a roleplaying game which is very obviously inspired by the events of the Thirty Years’ War, the civil war which tore the Holy Roman Empire apart between 1618 and 1648, born of the Reformation that divided Christendom in Western Europe. Published by Free League Publishing following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it is compatible with Mörk Borg, the Swedish pre-apocalypse Old School Renaissance style roleplaying game designed by Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell and also published by Free League Publishing. This is a setting in which the Player Characters not only have to survive the horrors of war, but also the fanaticism of the faithful, the unnatural and the occult as well as the attentions of the Inquisition in ferreting out signs of apostasy and heresy. Vaterländ is a land where demons lurk and cultists skulk, flagellants scourge themselves into apoplexies of piety and pain, mercenaries and armies tramp the land taking what they want when they feel they have not been given what they are owed, the night folk dart out of the black swathes of forest at night in search of human flesh, the Bandersnatch takes lost children to who knows where, and the Staggering Pox casts a sickly green shadow... They may simply survive or they may form free companies, mercenaries for hire by either side, and so gain employment and responsibilities.

A Player Character in Black Powder and Brimstone has four stats—Strength, Agility, Presence, and Toughness. These range in value between -3 and +3. The values are determined by rolling three six-sided dice, modified by the character’s Archetype and Subclass. The five Archetypes are Mercenary Deserter, Bounty Hunter, Witch, Opportunist, and Practioneer. The Subclasses for the Mercenary Deserter are Rifleman, Greatswordsman (who comes with a Zweihander) and Grenadier; for the Bounty Hunter they are Pistolier, Master Trapper, and Beast Hunter; for the Witch, they are Woods Witch, Herbalist, and Hexen; those for the Opportunist are Adventurer, Sneak Thief, and Silver-Tongued Trickster; and for Practioneer, they consist of Vow of War, Vow of Healing, and Vow of Sustencance. Each Archetype provides the Stat bonuses, some gold, and a little background, whilst the Subclasses provide equipment and a special ability. A set of optional tables provide various character traits including a background skill.

Ottilie Schönlein
Archetype: Witch
Subclass: Hexen
Abilities: Curse (-2/+2 penalty/bonus), Black Candles, Deck of Cards
Strength 0 Agility 0 Presence +3 Toughness +1
Hit Points: 12
Background: Running from a deal gone wrong
Spells: Invisibility, Befuddlement
Character Traits: Ottilie is sullen; Ottilie wants to write a book; Ottilie’s setback is rudeness; Ottilie is good at dancing; Ottilie’s passion is being creative; Ottilie most notable physical feature is her jewellery

Collectively, the Player Characters can form a Free Company. This costs a lot of gold to register, but the members should have a shared goal and will share both treasure and income. If a Player Character is killed whilst a member of a Free Company, a new one can enlist at the same Level and degree of income. Beyond that, being a member of a Free Company does not provide any benefits. It is supported with rules for hiring mercenaries and a very light means of handling combat between detachments.

Mechanically, Black Powder and Brimstone is, like Mörk Borg, player-facing. In other words, the players roll the dice, not the Game Master. This particularly applies to combat whereas as well as rolling for his character to stab a witch, a player also rolls avoid being bitten by the witch rat familiar. To have his character undertake an action, a player rolls a twenty-sided die, aiming to roll equal to or over a Difficulty Rating from six and simple to eighteen and impossible, with an average Difficulty Rating being ten or twelve. To this he adds the value of the stat.

In addition to setting the Difficulty Rating of a task, the Game Master can determine the Position and Impact based upon the situation. These do not adjust the Difficulty Rating, but set out the consequences of the action, Position the outcome if a failure, Impact if a success. Position can either be ‘Shaky’, ‘Risky’, or ‘Dire’, that is, not as bad as it could have been, as bad as expected, or worse than was imagined. There is scope for the player to negotiate with the Game Master as which degree of Position or Impact applies to the situation and a player can even trade Position for Impact, making a task easier to complete, but not be as effective. Position and Impact are also applied to negotiations, a player typically having his character attempting to shift an NPC’s disposition from Hostile/Strong through Indifferent/Fair to Positive/Strong.

Combat uses the same core mechanic. Initiative is simply determined by who acts first, but combat order is rolled with any Player Character with a positive Agility stat at an advantage. Mêlée combat uses the Strength stat, both magic and ranged combat use Presence, and Defence uses Agility. The rules cover stealth, the breaking of morale, cover, attacks of opportunity, grappling and stunning, and more, including simple chase rules for mounted combat. There are a handful of possible outcomes given for rolls of natural one or twenty in combat for mêlée, ranged combat, and using magic. If a character is reduced to zero or negative Hit Points, his player must make a Toughness check. If successful, the character is simply Broken, but fail and he might fall unconscious, suffer a wound, or bleed to death. A wicked scar might be small or might be missing nose or a limb. Worse, there is a chance that rusty, unclean weapons will cause an infection beyond the wound itself…

Most of the weapons have special rules. For example, on roll of eighteen plus, a zweihänder will cut a man in half, whilst its cumbersome nature means that it is at a penalty to use in enclosed spaces, whereas a club will knock someone out on a roll of sixteen or more. All black powder weapons have a misfire die, an eight-sided die rolled in addition to the attack roll. On a roll of two, the weapon misfires, one a roll of one it explodes and injures the wielder—the aarquebus is worse! All take a round to reload, but the advantage of these black powder weapons is that they ignore armour. Armor simply reduces damage for other attacks.

A Player Character also has access to ‘Devil’s Luck’. This can be spent to either lower the Difficulty Rating of a task or to activate a Dark Power. A Dark Power might be to deal maximum damage, neutralise a critical roll or a fumble, allow a reroll of any die, or ignore all damage dealt to a Player Character. However, it has its consequences, as the Player Character might gain a mutation, like small bony horns sprouting from his head or growing an extra finger on his hand.

A Witch can cast between one and four spells per day. Casting a spell is a simple Presence roll, but if failed, the Witch is left temporarily dizzy and whilst dizzy cannot successfully cast another spell. Only a Witch can learn spells, although other Player Characters can consume various potions for similar effects. Spells include Cursed Ammunition which hits easier and harder, but the wielder suffers damage; Wound Eater causes the target to suffer all damage temporarily that the caster would otherwise suffer; Back from the Brink brings a fresh corpse back to life, but reduces his total Hit Points. The spell list is not extensive and includes three spells—Spectral Skeletons, Raise the Dead, and Death Glare—that can only be learned from Gothel, the Mistress of Twilight. A mishap will occur if the Witch’s player rolls a one on the spell casting roll.

For the Game Master there is revelations about the setting and some decent advice on running the game and creating scenarios. The former includes applying ‘Yes and…’ and ‘No, but…’, using failed rolls to make something happen rather negate the action, and the use of countdown clocks, all very modern for an Old School Renaissance-style roleplaying. The latter is backed up with some short frameworks around which the Game Master can build a plot, some sample plot hooks, and a set of tables to generate adventures, locations—and inns in particular, and even dungeons. There is also quite a large bestiary, of which mutants, bandits, free company mercenaries, and puritan martials are the most mundane. More outré monsters include the Grave Colossus, walking graveyards with a hatred of grave robbers, Dryads, and a host of demons. There is even a weird swerve into Science Fiction in the form of the Watchers, cowardly aliens which conduct experiments in secret. There is also a full gallery of villains, friends, and adversaries, some of which more than a little tongue in cheek, like the world-renowned thief, Carmen San Dominira, and Lord Flash, a British mercenary with a silver tongue and a lot of luck, unlike those he leads into battle.

Rounding out Black Powder and Brimstone is a short scenario, ‘The House of Pain and Loss’. The Player Characters arrive in the town of Koch. It is rundown due to the war and the higher taxes, but the town noticeboard has several notices nailed to it asking about the whereabouts of several missing women. There is little to learn in the town except that the local nobleman, Count Lethgar, has not been seen since the death of his wife and that the wife of the innkeeper is missing. The inference is that there might be a creature of the night abroad and it might be the count. It is an easy assumption to come to since the plot to the scenario is underwhelmingly straightforward, ending in an investigation of the count’s manse and discovering his secrets. Annoyingly, the Game Master has to ‘read to find out’ what the plot is as there is no explanation at the start of the scenario, which can played in the same session as the players create their characters.

Physically, Black Powder and Brimstone is stunning. The artwork has a cartoonishly grim and gothic style that is really eye-catching and pivotal in conveying the sense of the game and its world, enticing the viewer to look, find out, and want to play. Black Powder and Brimstone really is a cool looking book. However, it does need an edit.

There is a lot to like about Black Powder and Brimstone. The setting—and the artwork are enthralling, since this is one of the few roleplaying games to specifically draw upon the Thirty Years’ War for its key inspiration. There have been other roleplaying games to do the same, most notably Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but that does not draw so directly upon the religious schism and the resulting war. Indeed, it could be argued that Black Powder and Brimstone is the Old School Renaissance answer to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but the historical parallels between the setting of Black Powder and Brimstone and the Thirty Years’ War and the emphasis upon horror rather than fantasy in Black Powder and Brimstone suggests otherwise. (In fact, it could be said that the parallels between the setting of Black Powder and Brimstone and the Thirty Years’ War are a bit too on the nose, such as naming the instigator of the Reformation, ‘Luther Martin’.) Yet Black Powder and Brimstone is not a wholly satisfying design. Mechanically, it is underdeveloped, in the main, the ‘Position’ and ‘Impact’ mechanic feeling bolted on and being more narrative in play, at odds with the Old School sensibility of Mörk Borg. As an extension of that, the social mechanics are best described as a statement of intent rather than a set of rules. Other issues are more minor, but Black Powder and Brimstone seems to be trying to be modern, yet old and not quite right as either.

The other issue is the setting and what to do with it. That the included scenario is so uninspiring is the coda to the issue of what the Player Characters are going to be doing in setting. There are some plot hooks and advice, but there is no discussion of long term or campaign play.

Black Powder and Brimstone is a really fantastic looking book with what looks to be a very gameable setting, but unfortunately it does not deliver that setting or that game as easily as it should have done. Its lack of development is going to leave the Game Master with some work to do and a lot of rulings during play to successfully run it. Hopefully a companion volume or some scenarios will go a long way to fixing that.

—oOo—

Free League Publishing will be at UK Games Expo which takes place on Friday, May 30th to Sunday June 1st, 2025.

I Sing The Mind Electric

The extinction is coming and America is dying. It began in 1974 in the wake of President Ford pardoning Nixon after Watergate and an assassination attempt on Ford. A civil rights spokesman was blamed and in the demonstrations that followed, the Capitol in Washington D.C. was stormed and the US Army was sent into to quell the protestors, resulting in hundreds of deaths when they opened fire with live ammunition. Across the USA, people took up arms in response and incidents of guerrilla warfare broke out across the country. Within a year, the conflict escalated and first California and then Texas seceded, and the country was in civil war. The Second Civil War lasted until 1984, prosecuted by the sophisticated drone technology adopted by the military following the development of scientific field of Neuronics. There were no winners and the former USA remains divided still thirteen years later. In the west, the nation of Pacifica has arisen out of the old state of California, its wealth built on Hollywood and further development and widespread adoption of neurotechnology. The biggest company in Pacifica and arguably the power behind its president, Sentre, made Neuronics available to the public through Neurocasters. Wearers of these high-tech devices are not only capable of controlling drones, but also of accessing neuroscapes, hyperreal landscapes. With the release of Mode 6 by Sentre last year, something changed—and changed for the worse. Some suggested a God awoke within the Machine, some say Pacifica’s enemies were attacking via the system, but whatever it was, users became addicted to their Neurocasters. They preferred it to real life. Some, deeply immersed in the virtual worlds that give them every experience they want, wear their Neurocasters until they die. Others roam the roads and the landscapes, stilling wearing their Neurocasters and controlling hulking great drones. Nobody was immune. As more and more people have become addicted to their Neurocasters, the more services and tasks have begun to break down. This lassitude is spreading and with it an impending apocalypse… Elsewhere there are rumours of technocults hiding out far from the cities and shambling mechanical creatures assembled by the Neuronic network rather than man. Yet there are a few who are immune to the effects of the Neurocasters and there a few who want to move, to become Travellers ready to make the long and dangerous journey to elsewhere, to get away, to find something, to find someone.

This is current situation in The Electric State Roleplaying Game, a pre-apocalyptic Science Fiction dystopia set in 1997, based on the book by Simon Stålenhag, whose artwork has also inspired the roleplaying games, Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the '80s That Never Was and Tales from the Flood. All three are published by Free League Publishing and all three use the Year Zero mechanics first seen in Mutant: Year Zero – Roleplaying at the End of Days. This is the 1997 of Nirvana and Sony Walkmans, Bart Simpson Tee-shirts and Nintendo Game Boys, hoop earrings and slackers, and so on. Recognisable were it not for the rise in advanced technology that has given the world drones, robots, and Neurocasters. It is a world in which the Player Characters want to get somewhere else. They each have their different reasons, but travelling together is safer than travelling alone. Society is not what it was with everyone immersed in the worlds of their Neurocasters. The landscape is not what it was, swathes left untended or poisoned from the Second Civil War. The Journey that these Travellers undertake is the focus of The Electric State Roleplaying Game, its route marked by a Starting Point and a Destination, and in between, Stops. Stops can be a place where the Travellers get food, petrol for the car, find a payphone, and then move on, but they can be a place of danger and mystery…

A Traveller in The Electric State Roleplaying Game has four Attributes—Strength, Agility, Wits, and Empathy, which are rated between two and six. Health and Hope are derived from this, with Hope being a personal resource that can be reduced to push rolls or traumatic events. He also has an Archetype, a role representing what he is. The options here include Artist, Criminal, Devotee, Doctor, Investigator, Outsider, Runaway Kid, Scientist, and Veteran. Perhaps the one signature Archetype is the Drone Pilot, who will not bodily appear in play necessarily, but instead be represented by the Drone that he constantly controls via his Neurocaster. Each Archetype provides options—either chosen or rolled for—in terms of starting Talent, Dream, Flaw, Neurocaster, and Personal Item. The Talent will either grant him extra dice under certain circumstances, such as ‘Drone operator’ or ‘Sleuth’, or provide a more specific benefit, such as ‘Medic’ being able to stabilize someone who is Incapacitated or ‘Neuroresistant’ which means the Traveller is better able to resist the Bliss of neurocasting. Beyond this, the details of Traveller are more personal than mechanical. These start off with a Dream and a Flaw. A Traveller’s Dream is their motivation, their push to go far and make the Journey rather than give into the easy lure of Neurocasting. His Flaw is something that will hold him back and something that he needs to overcome. Roleplaying the Dream and the Flaw will give a chance for the Traveller to improve. The Neurocaster is the model that he owns (though he may not own one) and he also has a Personal Item and a favourite song.

To create a Traveller, a player selects an Archetype and then rolls for the Attributes on a single six-sided die each, with the minimum roll being two Then he rolls for the Talent, Dream, Flaw, Neurocaster, Personal Item, and Favourite Song. This is not the complete Traveller creation process, but that is done collectively during the set-up for the Journey.

Name: Jake
Age: 17
Archetype: Outsider
Strength 3 Agility 5 Wits 6 Empathy 6
Health 4 Hope 6 Bliss 0
Talent: Stealthy
Dream: Get a normal life, like everyone else
Flaw: You don’t trust anyone.
Neurocaster: None
Personal Item: Dog
Favourite ’90s Song: Wannabe (Spice Girls)
Tensions: A dispute about hierarchy (Karen Brooks) [1], Religious or political differences. There’s reason Americans say never discuss religion or politics (Jesus Castillo) [1]

The Journey is the central part of the play to The Electric State Roleplaying Game. Setting this up is a collective process. This includes creating a personal Goal for each Traveller which lies at the end the Journey, whilst the Threat which is working to stop the Traveller from fulfilling his Goal. The Threat is created by the Game Master, whilst key to the Goal is the Kicker, the event that pushes the Traveller to decide to make the Journey in that moment. Together, the Travellers have a vehicle and a shared item, such as a bottle of hard liquor or walkie-talkies. Each Traveller also has a difficult relationship with one of the companions in their vehicle, which could be ‘Hidden contempt pent up for ages.’ or ‘Distrust. Something another Traveler does offends you deeply. It’s all you can do not to scream at them every time they do it.’. This is measured by Tension, which ranges between zero and three. If a Traveller acts against another Traveller who he has Tension with, the Tension value is used as bonus dice. It is possible to reduce Tension simply by talking things through or even arguing about relationships can reduce it and this will restore Hope, but equally, Tension can go up depending on circumstances and roleplaying.

Mechanically, The Electric State Roleplaying Game uses the Year Zero engine, so the rules are light and fairly quick, with dice rolls primarily intended for dramatic or difficult situations such as combat, hiding from members of a Technocult intent on inducting you, making repairs in a hurry, and so on. To have a Player Character undertake an action, a player rolls a number of Base dice equal to the appropriate Attribute (notably, The Electric State Roleplaying Game does not use skills or skill dice), modified by an applicable Talent and the difficulty. To this can be added Gear dice for weapons and other gear if used. Rolls of six on either count as Successes. One result is enough to succeed, whilst extra successes can be used to do it in a showy fashion, quickly, quietly, and so on. However, if the player does not roll any Successes, which is a failure, or needs more Successes, he can opt to Push. In this case, he rolls any dice that are not showing a one or a six, and any Successes rolled count towards the task.

However, any rolls of one after the Pushed roll, have negative effects. For the Base dice, they reduce the Traveller’s Hope for each one rolled, whilst ones on the Gear dice reduce the bonus provided by the Gear used. When Hope is reduced to zero, a Traveller suffers a Breakdown and is in danger of suffering further mental trauma.

Combat in The Electric State Roleplaying Game uses the same mechanics. Initiative is determined narratively, and when a Traveller gets to act, he has an action and move or two moves. An action be an attack, reloading, taking cover, rallying a demoralised comrade, and so on. If in close combat, the defender can choose to take the hit or fight back, in which case it becomes an opposed roll, whilst if being shot act, the defender can dodge, and that too is an opposed roll. Cover provides protection if Successes are rolled on its dice. If a Traveller’s Health is reduced to zero, he is Incapacitated and if he suffers damage equal to twice his Health in one hit, he is dead. If his Traveller is Incapacitated, the player makes three Death Rolls with four dice. If he rolls a total of three Successes in the course of the three rolls, he survives, if not, the Traveller is dead. It is also possible for another Traveller to rally one who is Incapacitated and the Medic Talent means he can be stabilised without the need for Death Rolls. An Incapacitated Traveller also suffers an injury, which can be anything from a broken finger to internal bleeding.

The most important mechanic in The Electric State Roleplaying Game is Hope. It is a measure of a Traveller’s motivation and it can be lost in a variety of ways, such rolling ones on a Pushed roll or suffering a Traumatic Event like seeing a friend get badly hurt or being confronted by your worst fear. When it is reduced to zero, the Traveller suffers a Breakdown and potentially from mental trauma ranging from ‘Confused’ to ‘Personality Split’. The challenge after losing Hope is that there no automatic means of recovering it. Instead, the players and their Travellers have to work at it. It is possible for a Traveller to be rallied following a Breakdown and this will restore Hope, but otherwise the two means to increase Hope are to reduce Tension with another Traveller or spend time with an item of Gear that will increase Hope, like a dog or a Walkman, or a religious book. Certainly, in the case of Tension, this requires dedicated roleplaying between two players, and The Electric State Roleplaying Game makes clear that time should be set aside for this. Further, these scenes should not always be about reducing Tension, but about increasing it. This is because in the long term, if there is no Tension between one Traveller and another, there is no reason to reduce it and thus no means to increase Hope. It also reduces scope for interpersonal roleplay. This then is the ‘Hope Loop’ at the heart of The Electric State Roleplaying Game.

The ‘Hope Loop’ in The Electric State Roleplaying Game is complicated by Bliss. One of the most interesting aspects of roleplaying game is how Hope and Bliss interact. Bliss is a measure of a Traveller’s addiction to using his Neurocaster. A Traveller is going to be spending most of his time on the road or at Stops along the Journey, so in the physical, rather than the virtual worlds. However, this does not mean he will never have to enter a Neuroscape, which can be global or local, as he may need to find information, use or hack a system linked to the Neuroscape—such as drones and alarms, or interact or fight with the other avatars in the Neuroscape. It is possible to act in the physical world whilst Neurocasting, but it is slow and the option are limited. It is also possible for Travellers to help another who is Neurocasting.

However, any time a player fails a roll whilst his Traveller is Neurocasting, whether any ones were rolled or not, his Bliss increases by one. This is before the player chooses to Push the roll, which whilst the Traveller is Neurocasting, has its own extra danger. This is because any rolls of one after a player has Pushed a roll reduce his Traveller’s Hope by one each, and Bliss has dire effects if it equals or exceeds the value of a Traveller’s Hope. If this happens, the Traveller is trapped in the Neuroscape, is lost in the ‘Electric State’, and cannot willingly disconnect himself from it. A Traveller lost in the ‘Electric State’ can be forcibly disconnected, but this has disturbing consequences. It automatically reduces his Hope to zero, which again causes a Breakdown.

Bliss is lost at a point per day spent without doing any Neurocasting. However, this has its own dangers too, since there is a chance that the point lost that day will become permanent. Effectively reducing a Traveller’s Hope in the long term and modelling the effect that Neuroscaping has had on society with the introduction of Mode 6.

The focus of play in The Electric State Roleplaying Game is the Journey. As described earlier, setting this up involves deciding on a Starting Point, Destination, and the route. It also involves choosing the number of Stops, each one an adventure in itself that the Travellers’ Dreams and Flaws will drive them to explore. The number of Stops determines the overall play length, from one Stop for a one-shot to a long Journey of eight or more stops. The Game Master creates these Stops using the advice and prompts given in the roleplaying game, including a Setting, the Blocker (which what makes the Travellers pause their journey), and Threats, as well as adding a Countdown that is triggered by the arrival of the Travellers and will push events forward during the playthrough of the Stop. There is good advice for both creating and running Stops, including playing Neuroscapes, and it is supported by a range of threats each of which has their own example Countdown. Mechanically, this makes them easy to insert into a Stop. The Threats include people, such as cultists or local business leaders as well as the expected technological ones, like drone growths and robots, and environmental ones, such as extreme weather or disease. There are only two entries listed for the technological and environmental, which feels too few in either case. There are rules for travel and chases to reflect the nature of play as a Journey.

The Game Master is also provided with a complete mini-campaign, ‘Into the Dust’, which takes up a fifth of the book. This is a three-part Journey, though it could easily be expanded and some of the stops could be used as one-shots, which takes the Travellers from San Francisco Memorial City into the Blackwelt Exclusion Zone (former state of Nevada), but a long route which takes them south via the Sierra Nevadas and the Mojave desert in a run-down 1993 Buick Roadmaster Estate. Between them, the Stops involve a cult, a murder mystery, and a strange festival, and between the Stops, there are encounters that the Game Master can use to make the Journey even more interesting and exciting. There is also a pre-generated Traveller with their own Goals and Threats for each of the Archetypes in the roleplaying game, giving the players plenty of choice. Overall, this is the basis for a decent campaign that could expanded to eight or more Stops. Lastly, in The Electric State Roleplaying Game,  there are rules for solo play.

Physically, The Electric State Roleplaying Game is very well presented. It is clean and tidy and easy to read. Of course, what makes it stand out is the artwork of Simon Stålenhag which depicts an American landscape in decline as Neurocasters wander like zombies and kitschy robots loom and lurk almost everywhere. The Game Master should absolutely be using this artwork to show off the state of Pacifica.

The Electric State Roleplaying Game is not a traditional roleplaying game in that its world is designed for long term play. The story of the Travellers is going to be told in a single Journey rather than in multiple Journeys because the surviving Travellers are going to need new Goals if they are to set out again. Further, there is not a huge scope for development mechanically as arguably, if a Traveller is only doing the one Journey, however long it is, there does not need to be. The emphasis on Pacifica as a setting and journeying across it also limits the scope of the roleplaying game. These are not criticisms, because instead, what The Electric State Roleplaying Game is, is a narrative, storytelling roleplaying game designed for one-shots and short campaigns that tell specific stories about Journeys across a strange new landscape within which there is scope for interaction, discovery, and horror. In this way, The Electric State Roleplaying Game adds a new twist to the classic American road trip.

The Other OSR: Book of Beasts

With Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts, the number of creatures and threats with which to menace the Player Characters doubles! Published by Free League Publishing, Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts provides twenty-eight descriptions of monsters fierce and fearsome adding to the twenty-three given in the core rulebook for the ‘Retro Open-World Survival Fantasy RPG’, Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World. Every entry comes with a short piece of colour fiction, full stats and abilities, and a table of Monster Attacks. That though is not all. For there is also a table for the player to roll his character’s Lore skill and so determine what Insights he might have into the creature. Then there is not one but two random encounters, each with some flavoursome description and an indication of the terrain types where the monster might be found. Lastly, there is a description of the ‘Resources’ that might be harvested from a monster if the Player Characters manage to kill one. Last, but least, there is a superb illustration. Beautiful, rich, and detailed, every image of a creature in Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts is captivating. Any time that the Game Master shows one of these to her players, she really is going to amaze them.

So the Mummy is depicted as a dried husk of a warrior, grinning as it holds a victim by the throat in one hand, whilst readying a sword in the other. It is described as being in life a great lord who lusted after power, a lust that was not dimmed by the cold death of the crypt. In its unlife, it reigns over the steel and gold it was buried with and now jealously guards. Its body is hollowed out and empty and it hungers for the salts and juices that flow through the bodies of the living, having become a predatory cannibal in death. Some of this will be revealed in a Lore roll, but there is more that the Player Characters can learn. One of the random encounters is just a simple tomb description, whilst the other is a bit more exciting—a Mummy’s tomb that is already open and would have been plundered by some graverobbers were it not for the fact that they are being attacked by a Mummy and its servants!

In terms of stats, the Mummy is incredibly strong, but otherwise slow. It is unnaturally drawn to human entrails, but bound to its tombs. Its attacks include ‘Lordly Strike!’, which inflicts such a heavy blow that the defender is knocked prone, whilst with ‘Heart Constriction’, the Mummy makes a crushing genre with his fingers at an opponent who suffers a sudden and terrible pain in his chest and is potentially overcome with mortal terror! This is of course, in addition to the other four attacks listed for the Mummy, whilst the last entry in the monster description suggests the only Resource that can be harvested from a Mummy is the powder ground from its bones that when swallowed grants a bonus to the imbiber’s Strength.

So every monster and every creature in Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts is given this treatment to great effect. The entries are all easy to read and easy to use, and include things such as a Dread Raptor, Giant Spider—which has descriptions of hatchlings, adults, and elders, the Iron Dragon, the Nature Spirit, Rat King, Twisted Ent, and more. There are some great monsters here and they provide the Game Master with some fantastic new options in terms of presenting challengers to her players. However, that is not all that there is in the pages of Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts, although they do take up nearly two thirds of the book.

The content beyond the monsters in Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts begins with a random encounter table for the thirty-six encounters that follow. All of these again, have a single paragraph of colour fiction, suitable to read out to the players, and typically a half page of detail, though some have more. Stats are included where necessary, but there is always a list of the terrain where the encounter can take place. They range from finding a man locked in a hanging iron cage pleading to be let free and coming across an old battlefield that could be salvaged to going to the aid of a legendary brewer and being employed to track down the bandits that attacked him and having to placate the spirit of an orc lord after sitting on his somewhat bedraggled stone throne. Some are as simple as coming across a piece of statuary and the opportunity to learn some lore about the history of the region, whilst others are more complex like discovering a length of a Dwarven wall and with the aid of an expert on its history finding a way to the tomb of an ancient chieftain. Not all of them are quite ready to run though, so there are several which require more development than others, such as the meaning behind a coded message that is found on a dead pigeon. This is though, a good selection of encounters and scenario hooks.

Oddly, Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts has its own section of ‘Game Master Tools’ as if none of the previous content was for the Game Master and this section is for her eyes only. Of course, the whole book is for the Game Master. The section contains a list of traps, from nets, poison darts, and crusting boulders to domination, magical traps, and teleportation, which can be rolled for or selected, whilst ‘Books, Ballads, and Grimoires’ expands upon the ‘Carried Valuable Finds’ and ‘Carried Precious Finds’ from the Game-master’s Guide. These can all be studied and in return, a Player Character can gain a bonus, which can be a Talent or a skill increase. For example, ‘Easy Little Dwarfling’, a lullaby by Yendra grants the Lightning Fast Talent, whilst ‘Sweet, Courage, and Leverage’ by Nilia Trollvälte is a manual that increases the Might of anyone who studies it. Between the various categories, there are over seventy entries here and even just having the names of either the manuals and ballads, and their authors, adds to the immersive nature of the Forbidden Lands setting. A similar set of tables adds new artefacts to the roleplaying game, though they lack the description and detail given to those in the core rules.

‘Journeys’ adds further tables, but this time for nature of different locations or terrain types, ranging from plains, forests, and dark forests to quagmires, marshlands, and ruins, and then it does the same for camps, plus there is trio of quick and dirty weather tables. In general, the ‘Journeys’ only adds a little extra detail and the tables are limited in their number of entries. Strongholds form a major part of play in Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World, whether that is the Player Characters needing to investigate one, either to take and hold it as a base of operations or explore and scavenge its contents, or as a base of operations, work to make the surrounding area safer. ‘Rules for Strongholds’ adds to the rules found in the Player’s Handbook with a short table of events and a long table of potential servants, their personalities, and secrets. The table of events could have been much, much longer, whereas in a campaign, the Game Master will get much more out of the table of servants.

‘Potions & Poisons’ opens up a new aspect of play, especially for the Player Character with the Herbalist Talent. It allows a Player Character with this Talent to forage for herbs and with the addition of the new Alchemist Talent, him to brew and concoct various potions, tinctures, and more. There are rules here for a new function that can be added to the Player Characters’ stronghold, a Laboratory, which adds a bonus to brewing potions and poisons. In addition to the list of various alchemical potions, there is a list of poisons too, which is useful for the Poisoner Talent. There is a new rule what happens if too many potions are consumed in too short a time.

Lastly, Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts includes ‘Solo Rules’. This addition to various roleplaying games has become popular since the advent of COVID-19 and the extended periods of lockdown, enabling players to play face-to-face gaming at the table proved impossible. The rules here give the player, which of course, can be the Game Master, the means to explore the Forbidden Lands alone. The Player Character needs to be a little more powerful than a standard Player Character, and suggests that Lucky be taken as an extra General Talent. There are rules here for including a companion character, potentially a replacement Player Characters, and tables for the creating encounters and providing answers that the Player Character might have about the world around him. An ordinary deck of playing cards is required to generate the answers from what the rules call ‘Oracles’, covering simple ‘Yes/No’ questions, ‘Helpful/Hazardous’ situations, and more. As with other solo rules, the ones presented here make play more procedural than standard play and of course, they lack the capacity for roleplaying. Nevertheless, they are a useful option.

Physically, Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts is a black and white book, but an absolutely fantastic-looking one. The artwork is exquisite. Otherwise, the book is very well written and easy to read.

Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts is great addition to Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World and so much more than a simple bestiary. In fact, as a bestiary, it is not even simple. The monsters and creatures described are things out of nightmare and folklore, memorably menacing and dangerous. There is more to them than just encountering a gaggle of Goblins as in other roleplaying games, aided by the uncertainty of their different and random attacks, their lore, and of course, the encounter descriptions which accompany each entry. Then, there is the rest of the content in Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts—encounters, traps, alchemy and potions, and quite a lot more. Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts is not just a great bestiary for Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World, but a good companion to its rules as well.

Edge of the Abyss

Heart of Darkness brings to close the trilogy of scenarios for Alien: The Roleplaying Game begun with Chariot of the Gods—also available in the Alien: The Roleplaying Game Starter Set, and continued with Destroyer of Worlds. Like the other two, Heart of Darkness shares the same mode of play, but differs in terms of its campaign model. Thus, it is written for the roleplaying game’s Cinematic mode, and so is designed to emulate the drama of a film set within the Alien universe, emphasising high stakes situations, faster, more brutal play, and deadly encounters. However, where the campaign model for Chariot of the Gods is that of Space Truckers—star ship crews hauling goods and resources, as in Alien, and the campaign model for Destroyer of Worlds is that of Colonial Marines, essentially military missions like Aliens, the campaign model for Heart of Darkness is that of Scientists. This though, has no direct parallel with just the one film in the Alien franchise, but parallels in tone and setting can be made with both Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection. Further, as with the other scenarios, Heart of Darkness can be run as a standalone adventure, as what connects the three is their overall backstory, that of the evolution and development of the Xenomorph and in particular, the 26 Draconis Strain, and the consequences of mankind’s encounters with it and its corporations’ willingness to investigate it and desire to weaponise it in pursuit of profit. Those threads come to a head in Heart of Darkness.

Heart of Darkness—published by Free League Publishing—begins with the arrival an international scientific team at Erebos, a plasma trawling rig and platform stationed in in the Draconis 26 system in orbit above Ablassen Black Hole. Here the few science staff of the appropriately named station has discovered what could be a Xeno-extremophile, a new form of proto-plasmic organism found living in the accretion disc of the singularity. As the members of the scientific team, the Player Characters are to analyse and catalogue the new life form and return it for study, with promises of great rewards and recognition and payment upon completion of the assignment—a book deal, a corporate department head position, promise of tenure, and more. Erebos is no science station though, but a penal workstation whose prisoners have had their sentences purchased by Weyland-Yutani and been made to work operating the energy collection systems which siphon off the power of the black’s whirling, gyrating discordance of plasma and store it in giant batteries for shipment elsewhere. The conditions are hellish, not least because working so close to a black hole not only triggers, but accelerates Neurological Distortion Disorder—or NDD—the condition caused by exposure to Faster Than Light travel when not in cryosleep. This can cause paranoia and loss of memory, and underlies some of the challenges that the Player Characters will discover aboard the Erebos and the challenges that they will have to overcome in dealing with the situation aboard the station. If exposure to and analysis of the Draconis 26 Strain and its effects aboard the station underlie the physical horror of Heart of Darkness, then the effects of NDD exacerbate both its mental horror and the likely tensions between the Player Characters, who of course, have their own Agendas and the Player Characters and the NPCs who have no reason to trust each other.

However, when the Player Characters do arrive at Erebos, aboard the USCSS Cetorhina, a commercial plasma harvester/tanker, it is clear that there is something wrong. The station has been hit by meteors and is severely damaged, as evidenced by much it being dark. Worse is to come as when the ship attempts to dock, sudden gravitational shear from the black hole forces it to crash into the station. It is going to need repairs if it is going to leave the system, but before that, the Player Characters must find out what is going on aboard the heavily damaged station. Erebos is in complete disarray. There are sections which are open to space, others infested with some kind of biomechanical encrustation, and the survivors have divided into factions led by the station commander and one of the prisoners. Plus strange creatures lurk and stalk the corridors and rooms of the station, especially those encrusted by the biomechanical infestation. Not least of which is Adrien, the station’s emotional support tuxedo cat, who can even become a replacement Player Character should one of them die during the events of the scenario.

The emphasis in Heart of Darkness is on interaction and exploration. The Player Characters will need to explore much of Erebos in order to discover what has happened to it as well as find what the Xeno-extremophile file and whether it represents a threat or not. They will need to interest with the factions aboard the station too, both of which have their agendas and will want to recruit the Player Characters to their cause—or at least persuade them not to ally with the other faction. In addition there is another faction aboard the Erebos, which has its own very radical agenda and which very much wants the help of the Player Characters. There are greater consequences for helping—and indeed, not helping—this faction, than for getting involved in the other two factions and what they want. Indeed, their agendas are almost parochial by nature.

Then there is the interaction between the Player Characters. The seven include a Synthetic Psychologist who understands but cannot feel emotions, a radiobiologist with a calming manner, a very methodical biochemist, a close protection operative, a space sciences specialist on long term cultural exchange from the Union of Progressive Peoples, a biotechnologist with a prison tattoo, and the captain of the USCSS Cetorhina looking for a missing relative. Each has their own character sheet and a set of agenda cards which come into play as they arrive at the station and progress through the three acts of the scenario. As they are revealed to their respective characters and their players, they will begin to pull both apart as they attempt to fulfill competing objectives.

There is an undoubted fantastical scale to Heart of Darkness, its action and rivalries literally taking place under a baleful eye of destruction, but this is not an easy scenario to run. There is a lot going on, both in terms of the Player Characters’ agendas and the agendas of the other factions. The Player Characters have a lot of information to discover—and whilst it really is great that as scientists, the Player Characters will be making discoveries—a lot of that information could have been better presented, not just for the players, but also for the Game Mother to help her impart that information. A lot of the information—for example, the situation aboard the Erebos and its staff and penal-workers, some of the initially secret records which can be discovered later—could all have been presented as easy handouts to help the players and their characters more clearly understand the situation and react to it. Ideally, the Game Mother is going to have prepare these and similar handouts for her players, but they are not going to be as good as those included in the boxed set. Similarly, handouts with images of the NPCs, the aliens that the Player Characters will encounter, and even what they see when aboard the Erebos and elsewhere, all would have been useful. In fact, much of this is not illustrated in the book and exacerbates the difficulty of the Game Mother’s task in relaying what their characters can see to their players.

One aside to note is the inclusion of Adrien of the station’s cat. It adds a lightness of touch, even a comedic one, but his presence has the potential to become a distraction. Ultimately, the play of Heart of Darkness could become more about the damned cat and his survival rather than the resolution of the scenario.

Physically, Heart of Darkness comes in a well presented box. Inside is the scenario book, a large, thirty-four by twenty-two inches double-sided poster map of the Erebos plasma trawling space station, seven pre-generated Player Characters and their sheets, thirty-eight cards, deckplans of the USCSS Cetorhin and more, and four handouts. The thirty-eight cards consist of thirteen Story Cards, twenty-one Personal Agenda Cards, and four Equipment Cards. The Story cards are similar to the Personal Agenda cards, but reveal secret aspects of their particular Player Characters which again will affect their motivations and also drive the scenario’s plot further forward. The scenario book itself is organised into a set-up and explanation of the background, a description of 26 Draconis system, the various NPCs, and the Erebos station, the three acts of the scenario, and descriptions of the aliens infesting the station and pursuing their own objectives. Notably absent is the Xenomorph of Alien fame, instead the Player Characters in Heart of Darkness will be confronted with the squid-baby, the giant trilobite, and the deacon from Prometheus and an interesting evolution of the abominations from Chariot of the Gods, the first scenario in the trilogy. Of course, they are all dangerous, but with a great deal of care many of them can be skirted around. The second and third appendices of the book detail the new weapons, items of equipment, and spaceships which appear in the scenario.

Heart of Darkness is another great scenario for Alien: The Roleplaying Game. Like the other scenarios in the trilogy—especially Destroyer of Worlds—it has a lot of moving parts, but fortunately it does not overwhelm the Game Mother with too many Xenomorphs. If the tone and scale of Destroyer of Worlds was an action horror film, Heart of Darkness is existential in nature, a story of scientific hubris and horror, played out against a fantastic background that literally looms over the Player Characters and threatens to send them mad. Although it requires more preparation than it really should, Heart of Darkness brings Free League Publishing’s trilogy of scenarios for Alien: The Roleplaying Game to a fantastically frightening conclusion.

Frontier of Fear

If Alien: The Roleplaying Game is missing anything, it is two things. First, further details of the United States Colonial Marine Corps, what it is, what it does, what equipment it fields across space, and more, since after all, the marines feature so prominently in Aliens, the second of the two films to fundamentally inform and inspire the Alien: The Roleplaying Game. Second, it does not have an example of its Campaign mode of play. Alien: The Roleplaying Game is designed to be played in two different modes, Cinematic and Campaign. Cinematic mode is designed to emulate the drama of a film set within the Alien universe, and so emphasises high stakes, faster, more brutal play, and will be deadlier, whilst the Campaign mode is for longer, more traditional play, still brutal, if not deadly, but more survivable. To date, the only scenarios available for Alien: The Roleplaying Game—Chariot of the Gods (also found in the Alien Starter Set) and Destroyer of Worlds, are written for the Cinematic mode. All that changes with Alien: The Roleplaying Game – Colonial Marines Operations Manual.

The Colonial Marines Operations Manual is in effect, two books in one. The first book details the history and organisation of the USCMC, its equipment, the various forces which serve alongside it and against it, and the opposing forces’ equipment, and lastly, expanded USCMC marine creation. The history runs form the Weyland era through the foundation of the USCMC as part of the United States’ response to increased rivalries for resources and territory on the frontier, through police actions to free the near human Acturans from Chinese/Asian Nations Cooperative and later Dog War against the Chinese/Asian Nations Cooperative when it is revealed that it is stockpiling and testing biological weapons, the Oil Wars which stem from the hunt for more petroleum resources, and the more recent Frontier War between the United Americas and the Union of Progressive People spurred on by colonial unrest and rebellion on both sides of the border. There is much more going on than this, much of which will be revealed in the full campaign and all over the new biological weaponry—what it is, how it can be used, and what it really means. Both timeline and history greatly expand upon that given in Alien: The Roleplaying Game, almost too much so given the wealth of detail and in places, the wealth of acronyms!

The organisation of the USCMC runs from top to bottom, from its three Marine Space Forces which together protect the Core Systems and the frontier worlds, but much like the campaign to follow, it focuses upon the organisation at the platoon, section, squad, and fireteam levels. This is at the very personal level, the level at which the players will be roleplaying, that is they will be roleplaying members of a fireteam, a squad, a section, and thus a platoon. Other allied organisations, such as United States Aerospace Force and the Latin American Colonial Navy are covered, but not described in detail, as are those of other governments and organisations, such as the Royal Marine Commandos of the Three World Empire, the Space Operating Forces of the Union of Progressive People, and the Weyland-Yutani Commandos. Combined with the extensive list of the equipment, ranging from the VP-70MA6 pistol, Norcomm RPG122 Rocket Propelled Grenade Launcher, and Weyland-Yutani NSG23 Assault Rifle to the Alphatech XT-37 Stinger 4×4Fast Assault Vehicle, MI-220 Krokodil Series Armoured Dropship, and the VP-153D Kremlin Class Hunter-Destroyer, the Game Mother has a wealth of material with which to arm and equip not only the Player Character marines, much of it mundane—like jungle boots or BiMex personal shades, but also the forces opposing them too. With a little effort, an inventive Game Mother could even use this material and switch things around so that a scenario or even a campaign could be run with the Player Characters as soldiers serving the Three World Empire or the Union of Progressive People, for example.

In terms of USCMC characters, Colonial Marines Operations Manual expands the number of Military Occupational Speciality options. These include AFV (Armoured Fighting Vehicle) Marine, Assault Marine (Breacher), Automatic Rifleman (Smartgunner), Comtech Marine, CBRN (Chemical Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear) Marine, Dedicated Marksman, Dropship Crew, Hospital Corpsman, Forward Observer, and Rifleman. They all have their own Talent options, and there are five new Talents included, such as Bypass for jury-rigging your past locked doors or Hug the Dirt for making the maximum use of cover during a firefight. Marine Player Character creation follows the rules as per the core rules for the Alien: The Roleplaying Game, but with the addition of the Military Occupational Speciality options and Field Events tables for Enlisted, NCO, and Pilot and Crew Chief Marines.

Name: Lance Corporal Mandip ‘Drone’ Nogueira
Career: USCMC Marine
Military Occupational Speciality: Comtech
Appearance: Short, tidy hair
Personal Agenda: The death of your buddy has spooked you—now you secretly fear combat and confrontation. You need to overcome your fear.
Event: In a protracted bug hunt, you ran out of ammo and had to go hand-to-hand with an entrenching tool.
Gear: M41A Pulse Rifle, Seegson System Diagnostic Device, Entrenching Tool

Stress Level: 0
Health: 3

Strength 3 Agility 3 Wits 5 Empathy 3

Talent: Remote

Skills
Close Combat 1, Comtech 3, Mobility 1, Observation 2, Ranged Combat 2, Stamina 1, Survival 1

Throughout both background to the USCMC and the campaign, the central idea is that the life of the average marine is tough and often dangerously exciting. Sure, a recruit gets taken off his rockball of a colony home world with its badly smelling atmosphere, trained to serve, given a big gun with lots of bullets, fed and watered whilst sending a paycheque home to mum and dad, but… That marine and his platoon is going to get sent to one hellhole after another, shot at (and worse) by insurrectionists, fanatics, and soldiers from other governments, run into environments which will kill him, go on bug hunts against creatures which will kill him (and no, that really does not mean Xenomorphs), and more. And when that is not happening, spend years in hypersleep as his family gets old and he effectively does not. All this is the ‘horror’ which the marine has to deal with on a mostly daily basis, but there is worse… Not just the Xenomorphs and their numerous variants, which are terrifying enough, but there is the horror of just what those in power (and sometimes not) will do to obtain, understand, and ultimately weaponise the Xenomorphs and their numerous variants according to their own agenda. That is the basis for ‘The Frontier War’ campaign in Alien: The Roleplaying Game – Colonial Marines Operations Manual.

The Alien: The Roleplaying Game has already seen a scenario which combines its Cinematic mode with its Colonial Marines model—Destroyer of Worlds, and that scenario serves two purposes as far the ‘The Frontier War’ campaign. Most obviously, the two contrast each other, Destroyer of Worlds throwing danger after threat in an unrelenting torrent that drives a desperate race for survival, whereas ‘The Frontier War’ plays outs its threats and dangers enabling the Game Mother to ratchet up the tension over months of play rather than a few sessions. It also enables the Game Mother to eke out the paranoia and the fear of the unknown, and gives room for the players and their characters to try and work just what is going on, whereas in Cinematic mode, there is an obvious immediacy. Destroyer of Worlds can also serve as a prequel to ‘The Frontier War’, foreshadowing many of the events to come during the course of the campaign. This is not necessarily as a direct prequel, that is, the Player Character survivors of Destroyer of Worlds should not be played in ‘The Frontier War’. Rather, the terrible knowledge and experiences gained by the survivors from Kruger 60 AEM can serve as a source of rumours and horrifying tales for the Player Characters of the new campaign, and so give them a sense of foreboding. That said, Destroyer of Worlds could not be played after ‘The Frontier War’ since the pair share a lot of background and secrets.

The campaign assumes that the Player Characters are assigned to Kilo Company of the 33rd Marine Assault Unit and stationed aboard the USS Tamb’ltam, a Conestoga-class troop transport/light assault starship. The ship is fully detailed, but only a few members of Kilo Company are, providing a number of NPCs that can also be used as ready-to-play pre-generated replacement Player Characters, whilst still providing scope for the players to create their replacements as necessary and the story allows. Further, the Player Characters are all assigned to the same squad, so the campaign is ideally suited for four Player Characters, perhaps five at most. Just as the film Aliens, the Player Characters are grunts—marine privates and NCOs—and whilst not technically in command, ‘The Frontier War’ is written to ensure that they have a high degree of autonomy. This is at odds with the typical chain of command you would expect of the genre, but in terms of play, it provides several benefits. It places the Player Characters at the centre of the action, even if accompanied by fellow military forces, and rather than have their overly beholden to that chain of command, the players can influence the direction in which the campaign goes and thus enjoy it more.

In addition to the advice for Game Mother on how to run the campaign, ‘The Frontier War’ includes a wealth of background on the frontier and border regions where it takes place and on the numerous factions involved in the events of the campaign and both their secrets and their motivations. At times it feels like too much, but the Game Mother will need to read and understand it as part of her preparation to run the campaign. The campaign itself consists of seven parts; six missions followed by a seventh part which provides a finale to the campaign. The six parts can be played in any order, as directed by the events and the players. In turn, they will see the Player Characters sent to rescue survivors of a crashed hospital ship, respond to a terrorist hostage situation on the only world where humanity has encountered an extra-terrestrial intelligent species, investigate a testing facility in Union of Progressive People space which might be linked to the Border Bombings first seen during the events of Destroyer of Worlds, mount a rescue mission on a world about to be invaded by Union of Progressive People forces, investigate an isolated station which could be the source of strange signals, evacuate survivors from a world following a mining accident, and… All seven of the missions are highly detailed, with detailed maps, floorplans, and deck plans, suggestions as to possible random events, and alternative uses, that is, how to use the content in the mission elsewhere (potentially meaning that the Game Mother could simply run each of the missions separately, but that would mean ignoring the scope of ‘The Frontier War’ campaign). Lastly, they all have ‘Metapuzzle Pieces’ which represent Epiphanies—or major clues to the campaign’s overarching plot—that the Player Characters can discover during the course of mission, and as they collect more and more, begin to work out what is going on…

In addition to the main campaign itself, sixteen mission types, such as combat patrol, peacekeeping, and snatch and grab, are also detailed. These are intended to be developed and run by the Game Mother herself in between the parts of the main campaign, not only to extend its play, but also to highlight how the will not necessarily be the main focus of the Player Characters and their commanding officers all the time. There is advice on how to bring elements of the actual campaign into those missions as necessary and there is a guide too for handling downtime for the Player Characters between missions.

Physically, Alien: The Roleplaying Game – Colonial Marines Operations Manual is as good as you would expect it to be for the line. The writing is excellent, often in tone that you imagine a fellow member of the USCMC might use, and as much as it develops the Alien Universe as somewhere to roleplay, there are one or two nods beyond its franchise too, such as Blade Runner and Outland, if the reader knows what to look for. The book looks fantastic with great artwork—though not as much and a lot of it different in tone to that of the core rulebook, perhaps more heroic, but definitely more militaristic—than the other books for Alien: The Roleplaying Game. As with other books, the layout is fairly open, so that it does not feel as dense a book as this normally might. It also means that it is much easier to read. However, the lack of an index is major omission, especially given that this is a campaign and the Game Mother will need to study the book carefully to fully grasp what is going on in the campaign. A lesser issue is the lack of a list of acronyms, which really would have helped with reading both through the general history and the background to the campaign.

One main issue in coming to understand both the scope of ‘The Frontier War’ and the scope of the history presented at the start of the supplement, is that it is difficult to grasp the astrography of the campaign’s setting and how the various stars and their planets relate to each other. The star charts feel just too small to be effective, so perhaps the Game Mother might want to develop some star charts that she can have out on the table ready to show where the Player Characters are going and where the frontier and political borders are.

As two books in one, the good news is that Alien: The Roleplaying Game – Colonial Marines Operations Manual does both of them very well. What is effectively the first book, widens the scope of what is possible in running a campaign or scenario based around the USCMC, not just in terms of types of marines the players can roleplay and missions they can undertake, but also the enemies they might face in doing so. And that is in addition to the material which also develops the Alien Universe, both this first part of the book and the campaign that follows it. Then with the second book, Alien: The Roleplaying Game – Colonial Marines Operations Manual delivers the three themes of Alien: The Roleplaying Game—Space Horror, Sci-Fi Action, and a Sense of Wonder, in a horrifically good, desperately deadly (but not too deadly), and epically grand military-conspiracy horror campaign. If you still think that the Alien: The Roleplaying Game is just good for one-shots in its Cinematic mode, think again; Alien: The Roleplaying Game – Colonial Marines Operations Manual is proof that the Campaign mode for Alien: The Roleplaying Game is not just workable, but will provide months’ worth of military horror gaming.