What do you think?
Rate this book
Aliens Adventure Game
This time it's war
Now you can be a part of the danger and excitement of the hit movie Aliens, from Twentieth Century Fox! From the ruins of the Colony that was a destroyed by the Aliens to the chaos and greed of Earth itself, the Aliens Adventure Game pits you against Aliens, other dangerous lifeforms, and corrupt Humans as you find out what it takes to be a member of the Colonial Marine Corps.
Another Glorious Day in the Corps!
The accent of the game is on the Aliens, of course, but there is far, far more. For those who want to go beyond the Aliens and the Corps, there is a whole galaxy of deceit and danger in the bleak Corporate future of the Aliens storyline. Try your hand at one of the other possibilities offered; corporate mercenary, explorer, businessman... your choices are limited only by your imagination.
The Aliens Adventure Game prominently features full color and black and white art from the movie, as well as fast, fun game mechanics. Fast paced and intense, Aliens is sure to thrill anyone who enjoyed the movie.
Included are Sections covering:
Character Generation
Colonial Marine Background
Other Character Backgrounds
General and Professional Skills
Specialized Skills and Training
Personal Equipment
Individual Combat
Ground, Air, and Space Vehicles and Combat
Worlds, Colonies, and Outposts
Missions and Campaign Settings
Alien Lifeforms and, of course,
The Aliens - Abilities, Metabolism, and Scenario Ideas.
Now you can be a part of the danger and excitement of the hit movie Aliens, from Twentieth Century Fox! From the ruins of the Colony that was a destroyed by the Aliens to the chaos and greed of Earth itself, the Aliens Adventure Game pits you against Aliens, other dangerous lifeforms, and corrupt Humans as you find out what it takes to be a member of the Colonial Marine Corps.
Another Glorious Day in the Corps!
The accent of the game is on the Aliens, of course, but there is far, far more. For those who want to go beyond the Aliens and the Corps, there is a whole galaxy of deceit and danger in the bleak Corporate future of the Aliens storyline. Try your hand at one of the other possibilities offered; corporate mercenary, explorer, businessman... your choices are limited only by your imagination.
The Aliens Adventure Game prominently features full color and black and white art from the movie, as well as fast, fun game mechanics. Fast paced and intense, Aliens is sure to thrill anyone who enjoyed the movie.
Included are Sections covering:
Character Generation
Colonial Marine Background
Other Character Backgrounds
General and Professional Skills
Specialized Skills and Training
Personal Equipment
Individual Combat
Ground, Air, and Space Vehicles and Combat
Worlds, Colonies, and Outposts
Missions and Campaign Settings
Alien Lifeforms and, of course,
The Aliens - Abilities, Metabolism, and Scenario Ideas.
194 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
2 people are currently reading
4 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 16, 2016
"For the sake of this adventure [after the events of ALIENS], Ripley, Hicks, and Newt are assumed to be quarantined by Weyland-Yutani, to prevent their information from getting out." (p.157) If they only knew...
This book contains a good system for skill-based character creation, solid rules for combat (personal and vehicle/spaceship combat) and how to rank up in the Colonial Marines. But more importantly, it doesn't limit the characters to being Marines; the book also covers different types of mercenaries, explorers, synthetics, and there are no reasons players couldn't play scientists and Corporate stooges and the like. Leading Edge already had a good RPG system in place with their PHOENIX COMMAND COMBAT SYSTEM and LIVING STEEL HIGH-TECH ADVENTURE GAME (both of which can be used to enhance the bare-bones rules, and a page of some easy conversions is included in ALIENS ADVENTURE GAME) but I can't really judge the rules since I have never played or tested them.
As sourcebook, it does offer some generic info about the world but not enough details for GM's. Weapons, equipment and vehicles/starships bear generic names (smartguns are named "machine gun" for example) and stats, and one would need to supplement the information with other sources such as ALIENS: COLONIAL MARINES TECHNICAL MANUAL, ALIEN: THE WEYLAND-YUTANI REPORT and the like. The book also introduces several colonized worlds divided into space sectors,with very interesting descriptions (this is the only book to date to expand on the Arcturans mentioned in the movie) as well as a bunch of new Corporations who discovered them (Weyland-Yutani is only one of many). But all those planets and alien lifeforms (like the imposing Harvesters of Tartarus) have been ignored by subsequent sources, sadly rendering them non-canon. A lot of ideas can be gleaned from them however, and an imaginative GM can create a very playable campaign world. Leading Edge Games also published an ALIENS BOARDGAME and its EXPANSION the year before, and those include maps for Hadley's Hope and other colonies which can be used in the RPG.
The few campaign and mission ideas included in the book are mostly based on what was known at the time it was written, mainly ALIEN and ALIENS (the comics are totally ignored). So they are strangely prescient of events later covered in video games (COLONIAL MARINES, INFESTATION) and even PROMETHEUS (deciphering the coordinates inside the Engineers' ship, here called Giants, and explore beyond the Human-discovered worlds). Obviously, the game is limited by the information that was available in 1991; much more has been revealed about the universe since then. For example, in this book they don't seem to know that Humans have discovered faster-than-light travel in the 21st century, and instead created a space travel technology called a Jump Drive which warps space. And their chapter devoted to the Xenomorph's life cycle and biology is pretty dead-on, but again no mention of the creatures taking on attributes of their hosts since that concept came up later in ALIEN 3. Also, no dates are given and only vague references to the foundation of the ICC and the Marine Corps are given, while today we know the exact dates that all the movies take place on.
The world of ALIENS is a perfect setting for RPG campaigns, but this book is really only the beginning. To make an interesting game GMs need to use a LOT of other material to supplement the information (aside from previously mentioned sources, ideas can be taken from ALIEN 3, ALIEN RESURRECTION, AVP, AVP-R, PROMETHEUS and tons of comics and novels and video games). And if one includes the Yautja species from the PREDATOR franchise it opens up a whole other ballgame. If one is not comfortable using Leading Edge's rules, which are VERY table-centric and technical, other rule systems can be used such as Chaosium's Basic RPG, GDW's 2300 AD, or even Wizards of the Coast's d20 Modern rules. But realistically, Xenomorphs should be a very rare sight in the setting: aside from the eggs found on LV-426, there are very few reported sightings and thus should be very rarely encountered in the game. A very good explanation should be developed if the players do encounter them, and the event could be history-making since many Corporations would be interested in the data, or if Yautja and/or Engineers are incorporated into it they could provide a link to the Xenomorphs. Most games should technically be run-of-the-mill adventures; if players run Colonial Marines or Mercenaries, many types of standard missions and duties are described in the book that can be used for adventure ideas such as civil order, investigations, corporate transitions and recon. Those types of adventure should be 99% of the game, and Xenomorphs should not be used as the main opponent in every game unless the GM is planning to affect the entire fictional history of humanity's future.
A few recommended novels and comics.
(As a sidenote: Leading Edge also published other RPG's based on movie licenses using the same rules, namely Bram Stoker's DRACULA and THE LAWNMOWER MAN [!])
This book contains a good system for skill-based character creation, solid rules for combat (personal and vehicle/spaceship combat) and how to rank up in the Colonial Marines. But more importantly, it doesn't limit the characters to being Marines; the book also covers different types of mercenaries, explorers, synthetics, and there are no reasons players couldn't play scientists and Corporate stooges and the like. Leading Edge already had a good RPG system in place with their PHOENIX COMMAND COMBAT SYSTEM and LIVING STEEL HIGH-TECH ADVENTURE GAME (both of which can be used to enhance the bare-bones rules, and a page of some easy conversions is included in ALIENS ADVENTURE GAME) but I can't really judge the rules since I have never played or tested them.
As sourcebook, it does offer some generic info about the world but not enough details for GM's. Weapons, equipment and vehicles/starships bear generic names (smartguns are named "machine gun" for example) and stats, and one would need to supplement the information with other sources such as ALIENS: COLONIAL MARINES TECHNICAL MANUAL, ALIEN: THE WEYLAND-YUTANI REPORT and the like. The book also introduces several colonized worlds divided into space sectors,with very interesting descriptions (this is the only book to date to expand on the Arcturans mentioned in the movie) as well as a bunch of new Corporations who discovered them (Weyland-Yutani is only one of many). But all those planets and alien lifeforms (like the imposing Harvesters of Tartarus) have been ignored by subsequent sources, sadly rendering them non-canon. A lot of ideas can be gleaned from them however, and an imaginative GM can create a very playable campaign world. Leading Edge Games also published an ALIENS BOARDGAME and its EXPANSION the year before, and those include maps for Hadley's Hope and other colonies which can be used in the RPG.
The few campaign and mission ideas included in the book are mostly based on what was known at the time it was written, mainly ALIEN and ALIENS (the comics are totally ignored). So they are strangely prescient of events later covered in video games (COLONIAL MARINES, INFESTATION) and even PROMETHEUS (deciphering the coordinates inside the Engineers' ship, here called Giants, and explore beyond the Human-discovered worlds). Obviously, the game is limited by the information that was available in 1991; much more has been revealed about the universe since then. For example, in this book they don't seem to know that Humans have discovered faster-than-light travel in the 21st century, and instead created a space travel technology called a Jump Drive which warps space. And their chapter devoted to the Xenomorph's life cycle and biology is pretty dead-on, but again no mention of the creatures taking on attributes of their hosts since that concept came up later in ALIEN 3. Also, no dates are given and only vague references to the foundation of the ICC and the Marine Corps are given, while today we know the exact dates that all the movies take place on.
The world of ALIENS is a perfect setting for RPG campaigns, but this book is really only the beginning. To make an interesting game GMs need to use a LOT of other material to supplement the information (aside from previously mentioned sources, ideas can be taken from ALIEN 3, ALIEN RESURRECTION, AVP, AVP-R, PROMETHEUS and tons of comics and novels and video games). And if one includes the Yautja species from the PREDATOR franchise it opens up a whole other ballgame. If one is not comfortable using Leading Edge's rules, which are VERY table-centric and technical, other rule systems can be used such as Chaosium's Basic RPG, GDW's 2300 AD, or even Wizards of the Coast's d20 Modern rules. But realistically, Xenomorphs should be a very rare sight in the setting: aside from the eggs found on LV-426, there are very few reported sightings and thus should be very rarely encountered in the game. A very good explanation should be developed if the players do encounter them, and the event could be history-making since many Corporations would be interested in the data, or if Yautja and/or Engineers are incorporated into it they could provide a link to the Xenomorphs. Most games should technically be run-of-the-mill adventures; if players run Colonial Marines or Mercenaries, many types of standard missions and duties are described in the book that can be used for adventure ideas such as civil order, investigations, corporate transitions and recon. Those types of adventure should be 99% of the game, and Xenomorphs should not be used as the main opponent in every game unless the GM is planning to affect the entire fictional history of humanity's future.
A few recommended novels and comics.
(As a sidenote: Leading Edge also published other RPG's based on movie licenses using the same rules, namely Bram Stoker's DRACULA and THE LAWNMOWER MAN [!])
January 27, 2011
I am still shaking my head in dismay at this travesty. Aliens is, by far, one of my all time favorite settings. I fully admit that. I have just about all the action figures from when I was a kid; I'll still buy figures in this particular series even now! I have all the video games, I have the collectible card game, I have all the comics, and I even have all the novels! So imagine my excitement when I found out a Role Playing Game was produced in this universe. I really enjoy tabletop RPG's quite a bit, so I was pretty excited to delve into this and maybe run some games with my gaming group. After reading this, that is definitely not going to happen.
Granted this game came out in the early 90's, well before Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, and well before major stories in the comics took hold and pre-Alien 3. (This is early writing is also painfully obvious when you read about how they think internet shopping will be in the future. I got a chuckle out of that actually.) The fact it was pre-Alien 3 gave me a little hope for it, because that movie was a terrible follow-up to the action packed Aliens movie. I am disappointed in Leading Edge for producing a game like this and it kind of turned me off to trying to track down some other games they've produced as well. After reading this I'm not too surprised the company did not survive over the years, however, their miniatures line for the Terminator 2 and Aliens series are quite awesome. In that they certainly succeeded. Anyway, I should get into what I dislike about this.
Maybe it's because I'm reading it way after the fact, but I simply hate their system. I don't actually need to play through a campaign to know it's not going to be fun, I've played enough RPG's in my day to understand game mechanics very well and I know what I do and don't find fun. Going into combat with this system is a grueling exercise. It is entirely based on tables. Tables are not a terrible thing, I mean I enjoy playing Warhammer 40k, but there is seriously a limit to how many tables you have to look at versus when you stop having fun. In certain combat scenarios, if you hit things just right, you could look at up to NINE tables to figure out what happened to your character. For a SINGLE combat sequence, which is only supposed to last a few seconds at most in game time! I'm sorry, but that just doesn't sound like a lot of fun. I understand they wanted to add a degree of realism into the system, but this is absurd. Part of the interest in gaming is that you can do things that you can't do in the real world! While the Aliens setting is incredibly realistic, all the table searching will have any player inundated with tables rather than actual game play.
One mechanic that they particular harp on is how "this isn't like your other role playing games", by that they mean they got rid of hit points. Hit Points are a pretty simplistic and fast paced process to judge damage. Instead this system has a couple different kinds of damage factors, but they both deal Physical Damage. You then have to check your physical damage to your Knockout Value. (This has a huge range and the examples tout numbers in the three thousand ranges!) Anyway, if you hit a specific value you have to then get medical treatment, which you have to cross reference with ANOTHER table to find out how long you can last without being healed. Naturally this is after cross referencing your Physical Damage table with your Damage Total table to see if you can be revived! All of this stuff is abbreviated too, so we have your PD, referenced with your DT, to see if you get an RR. Of course if you're trying to hit something everything goes against your SRM. Ugh... I'm already NOT having fun playing this game!
Alright, so the combat system is an absolute travesty. Maybe the other content isn't so bad. That's not entirely true. It does have its good points, but it certainly doesn't outweigh the bad. For the record though, they do say that anything here should be modified by the GM, which is fine to say if you don't have to virtually overhaul their entire game system! For example, the treatment of Alien physiology in this is absolutely god awful in my opinion. Granted at the time the Adventure Game was written, they might not have had a lot of these details, but I seriously think some of them were quite implicit from the film. One of the most blatant errors is the part on Alien vision. Aliens don't have eyes. It's blatantly obvious they don't, I have no idea why they have this in the book and relate it to have a visual spectrum. They are not like the Predator! I also disagreed heavily with the concept that the Alien warriors also lay eggs. This is another aspect that I thought was pretty clear did not happen in the film. Finally, the other major issue I had with the Aliens was the face huggers can also implant embryos in dead bodies. That just seems plain counter intuitive to how an organism like this should work. The Chestburster only eats the dead flesh AFTER it comes out. It's supposed to grow inside a living host first! This was so disappointing. Luckily the Comics never used any of this tripe to move their stories along.
One thing I did like about this was the Marine character sheets. Despite all the table viewing, I thought the development and treatment of Marine characters was decently well done. It's basically one of the only things I'm not going to have to overhaul and rewrite if I want to competently play in the Aliens universe the way I believe it should be played! The book also feels very disorganized and disjointed sometimes. Like the table methods are so interrelated that it made the explanation on how to use them feel out of place. Like one chapter will discuss how a certain mechanic works, but it relates to this other thing a few chapters later and by the time you've gotten to that after reading three other chapters, you've already basically forgotten how to connect the two. They also try to grow the Aliens universe by introducing the whole ICC system of planets, which is very cool. I liked that a lot. However, they introduce these new insect like creatures on one planet called Harvesters. Are there any illustrations of these? Nope, we don't have illustrations, instead they went with movie screen shots, which are cool, but they're useless when trying to envision new creatures. They seem to keep touting these new encounters with the Harvesters over encounters with the Aliens... seriously; I bought this RPG to play against Aliens, not some other facsimile. I do agree that it's a good idea to introduce new material, but to use it in examples as much as they did was disappointing.
In the end I'm going to have to seriously rewrite this game in order to make it even remotely fun to play. The only salvageable aspect of this game is in chapter 8, when they give you ideas for campaigns to run. Some of the campaign suggestions are really great and are definitely something I could see my friends and me playing through. I just wish they had more detail for them, like a full module. A final thing that bothered me about this book is they kept making reference to another game they wrote called "Phoenix Command". They would reference this in case we wanted clarification on rules... seriously... the rules in this should be complete! I like the Aliens series so much that I just might rewrite most of this game! I'll probably borrow the Marine character sheets and development from this book, but seriously I'm putting hit points back in. This added "realism" they've included by referencing a bunch of tables is not fun. This will be a huge project for me, but I really think I can do it better and more competently.
P.S. It IS worth getting if you're a collector like me though, I'll say that much.
Granted this game came out in the early 90's, well before Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, and well before major stories in the comics took hold and pre-Alien 3. (This is early writing is also painfully obvious when you read about how they think internet shopping will be in the future. I got a chuckle out of that actually.) The fact it was pre-Alien 3 gave me a little hope for it, because that movie was a terrible follow-up to the action packed Aliens movie. I am disappointed in Leading Edge for producing a game like this and it kind of turned me off to trying to track down some other games they've produced as well. After reading this I'm not too surprised the company did not survive over the years, however, their miniatures line for the Terminator 2 and Aliens series are quite awesome. In that they certainly succeeded. Anyway, I should get into what I dislike about this.
Maybe it's because I'm reading it way after the fact, but I simply hate their system. I don't actually need to play through a campaign to know it's not going to be fun, I've played enough RPG's in my day to understand game mechanics very well and I know what I do and don't find fun. Going into combat with this system is a grueling exercise. It is entirely based on tables. Tables are not a terrible thing, I mean I enjoy playing Warhammer 40k, but there is seriously a limit to how many tables you have to look at versus when you stop having fun. In certain combat scenarios, if you hit things just right, you could look at up to NINE tables to figure out what happened to your character. For a SINGLE combat sequence, which is only supposed to last a few seconds at most in game time! I'm sorry, but that just doesn't sound like a lot of fun. I understand they wanted to add a degree of realism into the system, but this is absurd. Part of the interest in gaming is that you can do things that you can't do in the real world! While the Aliens setting is incredibly realistic, all the table searching will have any player inundated with tables rather than actual game play.
One mechanic that they particular harp on is how "this isn't like your other role playing games", by that they mean they got rid of hit points. Hit Points are a pretty simplistic and fast paced process to judge damage. Instead this system has a couple different kinds of damage factors, but they both deal Physical Damage. You then have to check your physical damage to your Knockout Value. (This has a huge range and the examples tout numbers in the three thousand ranges!) Anyway, if you hit a specific value you have to then get medical treatment, which you have to cross reference with ANOTHER table to find out how long you can last without being healed. Naturally this is after cross referencing your Physical Damage table with your Damage Total table to see if you can be revived! All of this stuff is abbreviated too, so we have your PD, referenced with your DT, to see if you get an RR. Of course if you're trying to hit something everything goes against your SRM. Ugh... I'm already NOT having fun playing this game!
Alright, so the combat system is an absolute travesty. Maybe the other content isn't so bad. That's not entirely true. It does have its good points, but it certainly doesn't outweigh the bad. For the record though, they do say that anything here should be modified by the GM, which is fine to say if you don't have to virtually overhaul their entire game system! For example, the treatment of Alien physiology in this is absolutely god awful in my opinion. Granted at the time the Adventure Game was written, they might not have had a lot of these details, but I seriously think some of them were quite implicit from the film. One of the most blatant errors is the part on Alien vision. Aliens don't have eyes. It's blatantly obvious they don't, I have no idea why they have this in the book and relate it to have a visual spectrum. They are not like the Predator! I also disagreed heavily with the concept that the Alien warriors also lay eggs. This is another aspect that I thought was pretty clear did not happen in the film. Finally, the other major issue I had with the Aliens was the face huggers can also implant embryos in dead bodies. That just seems plain counter intuitive to how an organism like this should work. The Chestburster only eats the dead flesh AFTER it comes out. It's supposed to grow inside a living host first! This was so disappointing. Luckily the Comics never used any of this tripe to move their stories along.
One thing I did like about this was the Marine character sheets. Despite all the table viewing, I thought the development and treatment of Marine characters was decently well done. It's basically one of the only things I'm not going to have to overhaul and rewrite if I want to competently play in the Aliens universe the way I believe it should be played! The book also feels very disorganized and disjointed sometimes. Like the table methods are so interrelated that it made the explanation on how to use them feel out of place. Like one chapter will discuss how a certain mechanic works, but it relates to this other thing a few chapters later and by the time you've gotten to that after reading three other chapters, you've already basically forgotten how to connect the two. They also try to grow the Aliens universe by introducing the whole ICC system of planets, which is very cool. I liked that a lot. However, they introduce these new insect like creatures on one planet called Harvesters. Are there any illustrations of these? Nope, we don't have illustrations, instead they went with movie screen shots, which are cool, but they're useless when trying to envision new creatures. They seem to keep touting these new encounters with the Harvesters over encounters with the Aliens... seriously; I bought this RPG to play against Aliens, not some other facsimile. I do agree that it's a good idea to introduce new material, but to use it in examples as much as they did was disappointing.
In the end I'm going to have to seriously rewrite this game in order to make it even remotely fun to play. The only salvageable aspect of this game is in chapter 8, when they give you ideas for campaigns to run. Some of the campaign suggestions are really great and are definitely something I could see my friends and me playing through. I just wish they had more detail for them, like a full module. A final thing that bothered me about this book is they kept making reference to another game they wrote called "Phoenix Command". They would reference this in case we wanted clarification on rules... seriously... the rules in this should be complete! I like the Aliens series so much that I just might rewrite most of this game! I'll probably borrow the Marine character sheets and development from this book, but seriously I'm putting hit points back in. This added "realism" they've included by referencing a bunch of tables is not fun. This will be a huge project for me, but I really think I can do it better and more competently.
P.S. It IS worth getting if you're a collector like me though, I'll say that much.
February 4, 2019
Fantastic port of the Phoenix Command game engine to the Aliens Universe. Now you can be an awesome Colonial Marines, shooting Xenomorphs on the surface of LV-427. The rules have been simplified but there is a step-by-step guy to advancing to the Leading Edge of Phoenix Command. The world is well detailed and gritty, keeping the important themes from the Aliens movie. The entire galaxy and all the planets within are detailed. The Aliens are no weaker than they were in the movie, and a sense of tension is kept throughout gameplay as your Marine (which will have a fully outlined backstory and background, including what they did on their tour of service and what medals, if any, they were awarded) could become bug food in seconds. I played a quick game with a friend that ended with an ambush in the night on LV-427, in the ruins of Hadley's Hope, where the player shot the SL while trying to gun down an advancing alien. The SL was shot in the mouth, and died of shock four seconds later. The intense battle that followed resulted in all the marines being picked off or retreating, broken and bloodied, back towards their dropship. It totally captures the feeling of the movies. My one complaint is that the binding is pretty poor and the really nice full-color pictures keep falling out. I'm also lucky to actually have a copy, it's pretty hard to get your hands on one these days. But overall a great an atmospheric game.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews