ALIEN: The Best Adapted Roleplaying Game.

I was in highschool when I first played Leading Edge Games' Aliens: The Roleplaying Game. With literally nothing to compare it to in my then naive experience... it was awesome. A hexpaper plodding adventure using an all too complex Phoenix Command system. Breakout all the dice you've got. It was gonna be a long night. A ruleset that I could replay the 1986 sci-fi action film, ALIENS over and over again with my friends. It would quickly lose its luster as broader and easier game systems entered our lives. Leaving the Alien franchise as an indelible bookmark of my childhood, but a bookmark nonetheless. A bookmark nearly in danger of being forgotten.

Then in 2019, Twentieth Century Fox and Free League Publishing, the award-winning game publisher of the Tales from the Loop RPG, brought to life an incredible tabletop roleplaying game series set in the ALIEN universe.

Space is vast, dark, and not your friend. Gamma rays and neutrino bursts erupt from dying stars to cook you alive, black holes tear you apart, and the void itself boils your blood and seizes your brain. Try to scream and no one can hear you—hold your breath and you rupture your lungs. Space isn’t as empty as you’d think, either—its frontiers are ever expanding. Rival governments wage a cold war of aggression while greedy corporations vie for valuable resources. Colonists reach for the stars and gamble with their lives—each new world tamed is either feast or famine. And there are things lurking in the shadows of every asteroid—things strange and different and deadly.

Things alien.

This is the official ALIEN tabletop roleplaying game—a universe of body horror and corporate brinkmanship, where synthetic people play god while space truckers and marines serve host to newborn ghoulish creatures. It’s a harsh and unforgiving universe and you are nothing if not expendable.

Stay alive if you can.

ALIEN: The Roleplaying Game made masterful use of Free League Publishing's elegant Year Zero Engine. Particularly, a Stress Dice mechanic that feels made specifically for ALIEN. The beauty of the system being that it just requires a dice pool of D6s (common six-sided die). The simple risk and reward of pushing failed rolls with Stress dice makes for a palpable suspense that any player, both new or experienced, can really appreciate. You are able to focus on the immersion of the game and never stifled by the crunchiness of complex rules. A breath of fresh air for any RPG player. Any ALIEN fan can only hope to see a very long run for Free League's legacy of brilliantly simple tabletop board game adaptations.

"I admire its purity. A survivor unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality."

REVIEWS:

“Move over, Dungeons & Dragons, Swedish publisher Free League has released Alien: The Roleplaying Game, and it is as great as it is terrifying.”– TheGamer

“Free League Publishing has knocked it out of the orbit. It’s an interstellar masterpiece that honors the Alien legacy and builds on the stories that made the series great. It’s a sci-fi adventure that roleplaying fans will surely love, and it’s an accessible system for anyone interested in a good story and a rollicking good time.”– GameTyrant

“The real horror of Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi flick Alien has always been the creeping, slithering fear of the unknown. It’s impressive, then, that Free League has been able to craft a tabletop roleplaying game that can conjure up that same pitch-dark dread from the safety of your kitchen table.” – Dicebreaker