Atomik Alienz

Game: Atomik Alienz
Publisher: Atomik Vortex Studio
Series: generic
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 7th, February 2003
Reviewer’s Rating: 7/10   [ Good ]
Total Score: 7
Average Score: 7.00

Atomik Alienz is an intelligent supplement backed by an intelligent idea and written for intelligent gamers. Notice the keyword there? Don’t let the haxt0r spelling of aliens fool you, this PDF could almost pass as an academic paper on aliens – there’s even a list of references at the end. Sadly the PDF is without bookmarks and that’s a disappointment.

The 54 pages scroll quickly and there’s a hefty contents page at the start so the lack of bookmarks doesn’t quite give me nightmares in the same way as 120+ paged PDF rulebooks without bookmarks do. There’s a reason why the 54 pages scroll quickly – there are no illustrations nor is there a sidebar.

If you in search of alien pictures then Atomik Alienz will be a disappointment. I can’t help feeling that if you buy RPG sourcebooks for the pictures then you’re not going to like Atomik Alienz anyway.

Atomik Alienz isn’t a sourcebook though, nor is it a campaign setting, supplement, or other type of accessory that you’re likely to recognise. Well, probably. Atomik Alienz is an Add-On. You need Atomik Vortex Studio’s Atomik Add-On Booklet before you can use Alienz but since the booklet is free this isn’t a grumble. In fact, it’s a boon.

The Add-Ons been designed to be used with any game system. The Add-On Booklet explains how to map its generic terms and measures onto the specifics of your game system and includes examples for d20, GURPS, Fudge and more. Since the Add-On Booklet is free I recommend downloading that first and seeing whether the idea is an anthemion to your gaming sensibilities. If you take that road then walk carefully; I don’t think the Add-On Booklet is a patch on Atomik Alienz. The former is about rules and the latter is an interesting read about aliens.

Aliens are quintessentially sci-fi (with the superhero genre holding a tiny corner) and there are lots of different flavours of sci-fi. Atomik Alienz tries its best to cater for all the sci-fi, everything from flamboyant space operas, through cinematic styles and to hard science face of sci-fi. It’s good that it tries.

The extra effort certainly does help move from an Atomik Alienz mindset to space opera one but you will have deliberately make the move. Atomik Alienz begins with chapters that remind me of astronomy discussions and moves then to something of a xeno-biology discussion.

The add-on is concerned with getting things right, getting them balanced, getting them believable and accurate. There’s nothing wrong with any of that but it’s very much in the realm of hard sci-fi.

For example, as a way of mulling over how many planets might be populated with aliens in the galaxy, Atomik Alienz explains Drake’s Equation and suggests alternative weights for the variables. Drake’s Equation isn’t something Atomik Vortex Studio has made up, I recognise it from watching too much Discovery Channel and a Google of the term points us into the heart of SETI. Our moon’s unusual; most planets don’t have one.

Our Milky Way is stable because of Sagittarius A, the black hole, and the void around it in the centre of the galaxy. A star of the M-Class is red and unlikely to be able to support life (or rather the plants that support life) but a G-Class star certainly can. Our own star is G-Class. If you’re debating the number of planets around the star and what orbits they should have then turned to the Titius-Bode law and the explanation of it in Atomik Alienz. If you’re thinking about that then you’re naturally worried about the length of an orbital year on the planet, Kepler’s Law will help out. Amazingly, Atomik Alienz never enters the classroom lesson zone and I found all the astronomy interesting. At times there’s probably more science than you might need for a RPG, some of it is quite technical but it’s never dull.

Then we get on to the aliens. Make no mistake either; this download add-on is about the aliens. There might be a look at the planets so we can see how many different types of aliens there might be and how similar they might be but there are no distractions along the lines of spaceships, weird weapons and wonderful equipment. There is a look at alien civilisations and that is because the context of alien evolution is important; aquatic aliens would have a different culture and mindset from those evolved from herd grazing animals. I quite agree; a laser gun isn’t half as interesting as an alien race evolved from solitary predators that are formed into the Confederate Republic. So civilization is given as many studies as technology; government types looked at and technology levels codified and listed in a table. Most of the focus on aliens is on their biology; what colour is their blood and why, what do they breathe and why, how many legs do they have and why?

It’s little over halfway through this alien add-on that the point system for building your own alien makes its first appearance.

Roleplayers will be familiar with the idea; spend points to add impressive and helpful qualities to your alien race and claim points back by accepting disadvantages and hindrances.

By hook or by crook The Atomik Vortex Studio has managed to balance up the human biology build so that it costs a nice round 100 points. That is – when you pay the points for having two arms that end in hands with dexterous fingers, pay up for our range of senses, the ability to give birth to live young, lungs that hold the gaseous substance that we breathe and can hold it for about three minutes, our skin type (with hair follicles no less!), an endoskeleton, blood type, etc, etc it manages to settle nicely on 100.

If we build an alien with biology very similar to man’s except the alien has acute sonic sense above our hearing ability then it would cost more than the 100 evolutionary points. If the new alien had acute sonic sense but was perhaps cold-blooded and had to watch its temperature more carefully that we do then it might be back down to 100 points again.

There’s a lot to choose from. You really need to read through the download before you have half a chance of designing your own alien – that means you’ll not be taking a group of players through the process, for the first time, without much waiting and reading.

The minutia of alien design is such that Atomik Alienz is truly impressive but not perfect. Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” is impressive but it’s not a good RPG supplement or add-on at all!

Thankfully Atomik Alienz isn’t that severe, it’s still a good RPG add-on but you might start to wonder what Hawking or Asimov might say as you consider a prokaryotic multicellular carbon-based, hybrid fibril structure, mesomorphic musculature alien with osmosis circulation, chlorophyll circulatory fluid and a liquid lung system.

Scary huh? Alienz explains all those terms. Think of it as a way to impress your friends. That’s just the half of it though; to put those terms together I skimmed through the first third to a half of the alien bits shopping list and plucked purchases at random. There’s still a lot more of your alien to design. When you’re finished you’ll be either above, below or perhaps on the 100 point level and with the Atomik Add-On Booklet you’ll be able to work out how many extra points or dice you have for your character or how much you need to sacrifice from elsewhere. You could design a new d20 race this way if you wanted to – if you really wanted to.

There are a few pages of example alien races, along with their points cost at the end of the supplement. There’s an alien building worksheet too. Really, the usefulness of these two items shouldn’t be understated. The worksheet is extremely helpful and the examples offer much-needed confidence to the whole complex procedure.

If you’re a hard sci-fi fan or one of those roleplayers who strive to achieve absolute realism then Atomik Alienz is a must for you; especially the latter case where realism and aliens might appear to be mutually exclusive.

If you’re used to dungeon crawls, little stat-blocks for creatures and have never explored beyond one game system (or perhaps two when your usual game was upgraded by the publishers) then I think there’s a serious risk that you’ll fall over and pop a vein if you try to read Atomik Alienz.

I said at that the start that Atomik Alienz is an intelligent supplement backed by an intelligent idea and written for intelligent gamers. It’s very true. I think it just about gets away without being too intelligent, too academic for its own good. Just.

I like Atomik Alienz; I see stats and dice as the necessary evil in games and so I’m very much up for a generic add-on. At times the science and accuracy of Alienz goes beyond what I’d want for a game but it’s easier to ignore the text than it is to research the science in the first place. Atomik Alienz is a good product – and that’s no mean feat, it fights the hard fight rather than walking the easy, done and dusted routes. It’s a good product and perhaps very much more attractive to gamers looking for that something special.