Building Better Worlds introduces exploration and colony building as campaign play for Alien the RPG. This setting is a great location to launch a new campaign, and plenty of worldbuilding support is provided.
My thanks to Free League for providing me a copy of Building Better Worlds to continue my coverage of Year Zero RPGs.
Building Better Worlds covers a mini-campaign and provides great support for colony play. In the back of the book are random tables to create a planet, and the colony established there that the PCs will be running. These rules are a great starting point for a campaign.
What makes colony play so interesting is that while colonists have appeared in the movies, an entire movie about running a colony has not been made, unlike space truckers or marines. A campaign about colony building breaks new ground in the Alien setting.
The World Equator
Equator is a single star system. The star is G Class Main Sequence white with a radius 1.6432 million km. Four gas giants, zero terrestrial planets, an ice planet, a gas giant moon, and no asteroid belts circle the main star. The ice planet, named Equator, has no radiation and has a diameter of 10,000 km and 1G. Atmosphere is breathable and cold at -50 C and arid with permafrost. A short day of six hours and a year of 260 days. It has multiple small and fast-moving moons. No axial tilt.
Most of Equator is land scoured by valleys and rents in the earth. The equator consists of huge impact craters packed with superb resources. The North Pole consists of mountain ranges with deep valleys with average resources, the Northern Hemisphere East has poor resources hidden in steep-sided river gorges, and the Northern Hemisphere West is covered with ancient earthquake crevasses with resources that are average. Extensive deserts of average resources cover the Southern Hemisphere East while the vast oceans of the Southern Hemisphere West has good resources. Finally, the South Pole has abysmal resources in deep and wide rift valleys.
Despite plentiful resources, the planet’s personality manifests as malevolent. Rocks seem to roll underfoot to break ankles, landslides take out buildings, and visitors seem to fall into rifts and crevasses with disturbing frequency.
The Colony on Equator
Seegson has set up a “Sloppy Joe” colony set up on the equator, with the Three World Empire paying for half the start up. Initially set up as farming colony, the out of the way colony is also a place to send political dissidents and other criminals. A Sloppy Joe colony starts with an APOLLO mainframe and a legion of working Joe androids sent in first to set up the initial settlement while the colonists are still enroute.
Unfortunately, unsupervised Joe work is often shabby, frequently creating additional challenges. It is entirely possible that Weyland-Yutani, working through Three World Empire channels, intends to skim profit from the colony without directly investing their own corporate money.
The colony has the following attributes: economy 4, potential 6, productivity 2, maintenance 1, science 2, and spirit 3. Combined, these attributes mean the colony has a development level of Inceptor, a brand new colony. At the beginning of the Cycle, after the colonists land, they can start one policy and one installation. The colony is short on quality material but high in potential, backed up with a solid economy and decent spirit. There are around 100 colonists in this colony.
Players will need to pick the first policy and installation to initiate. They will also need to assign PCs and NPCs to the Colony Command Team to determine the chain of command. However, an incident happens before they can enact that policy and start building.
The Colony Cycle
After the PCs discuss policy and consider building an installation, a colony incident happens. On this frozen planet that is hostile to human life, there is a terrible accident. An NPC on the command team is killed and all attribute scores drop by one. Was the NPC a victim of a terrible accident or was the leader murdered or killed by a xeno lifeform?
Panic is likely to set in at the colony and the PCs will have to investigate. The colony will also have a maintenance down to zero, meaning if something breaks they no longer have the ability to repair it.
An adventure follows with two objectives. One, the PCs need to determine if the death was just an unlucky accident: another time the angry planet snuffs out a human life. Or was someone, or something, behind the killing?
Two, the PCs need to get the maintenance back up and running. The best way to do that is to set a policy of All Hands On Deck or Mass Production. If the players seem unsure of this option, another NPC leader may suggest it. An adventure that combines a murder mystery with a desperate scramble to get repairs up and working again follows.
The Rest of the Book
Setting up Equator uses only the appendix of the book. Other chapters cover exploration and colonization, history of colonization, and organizations that support pushing out into the frontier. There are new talents and new careers. Supporting those new rules are new weapons, suits and armor, equipment, vehicles, and spacecraft.
Running a campaign is well supported with details on setting, styles, expeditions, and the challenges of frontier life. Descriptions of systems and colonies are provided including details on lost world. There is an entire chapter on xenos and a mini-campaign of seven adventures.
Should You Get Building Better Worlds?
If you have an interest in the Alien universe or want to run a campaign instead of a cinematic game, then yes, you’ll want this book. While the Colonial Marines Operations Manual provides for a memorable campaign, this colony campaign breaks new ground and opens up entirely new adventures never before deeply explored in the movies. PCs can take control of a colony and their own destinies as they carve a new life out of the dangerous stars.
A campaign set as a colony may feature many adventures with no xenos at all. While this might not work if you’re imagining the movies, instead, think of a mini-series set in the Alien universe. Dozens of adventures with xenos popping up every so often, but the vast majority of the action involves humans versus humans or humans versus hostile space and/or humans versus cold and ruthless bureaucracy and corporate greed. With xenos showing up unexpectedly, the scares cannot be predicted and that fear will fill the players’ roleplaying and infuse the campaign with dark malevolent life. No matter how well the colony is doing, the players will always sense that something that can’t be understood or easily fought is nearby in the dark between the light of the stars, just waiting for the right time to make an appearance and start killing people.
Which makes for an epic campaign set on a terrifying world inhabited by a struggling but resilient colony of PCs and NPCs. Who push back against the darkness, but know in their hearts that something worse than the cold indifference of space is coming for them from out in the blackness between the stars.
Picture credit: Pixabay
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