Alien: Evolved Edition is a roleplaying game from storied Swedish publisher Free League. Combining the widely used Year Zero engine with the tense, lonely world of the famous sci-fi horror series, Alien is probably the definitive way to experience the universe on tabletop.
Over the past few years the Alien franchise has had its ups and downs, ranging from one of the best survival horror games of all time in Alien: Isolation, to whatever the hell Ridley Scott was doing with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. But, in one crucial respect, Alien has really had something of a renaissance, and that’s on the tabletop.
Previously, if you wanted to experience Alien you had to pick up the Aliens Adventure Game. From Leading Edge Games, based on the infamously complex Phoenix Command System (designed by an actual NASA engineer), the Aliens Adventure Game is barely remembered for good reason. Which is a shame because the world of Alien has practically limitless potential for adventures.
In the past, Alien has inspired many generic systems to provide their own takes on iconic elements such as the xenomorphs, face huggers and colonial marines. But Free League’s Alien: The Roleplaying Game in 2019 was the first in decades to offers its own custom system to replicate the world of Ridley Scott’s film series.
While dedicated fans of the Year Zero system will quickly acclimate to Alien: Evolved Edition, the updated and revised edition of the game, others who’re more used to more mainstream systems such as D&D might struggle. So, here’s a brief, but detailed, overview of what Alien: Evolved Edition is all about.
The System
Alien: Evolved Edition is built on the Year Zero Engine, and pretty much every mechanic involves grabbing a handful of d6s and rolling them. Get at least one six and your task is successful; simple, right? Well, that’s where Alien puts a twist on the situation with the addition of Panic Dice.
Panic Dice are a bit like sanity in Call of Cthulhu, representing your character’s fraying mental state. But they do have an upside. As you grow more panicked you gain additional panic dice which supplement your existing pool, offering more chances to succeed, but at a cost. Rolling a one on a stress dice triggers a stress response, which can do everything from causing penalties to your dice pool, to simply causing the skill roll to fail no matter how many dice you roll.
Pretty much every underlying system is built off these simple rules. Air and ammo are tracked by rolling dice, lowering the ‘supply’ by the number of ones you get. And if it sounds oversimplified I don’t blame you, but in practice it makes for an elegant system that’s simple to learn and yet offers plenty of unpredictability. By taking away the bookkeeping, players and GM alike can focus on the moment-to-moment action.
The World & Background
Set in the immediate aftermath of Alien 3, Free League have neatly sidestepped many of the thorny continuity issues presented by Ridley Scott’s prequels in Alien: Evolved Edition. The Engineers, an ancient race of aliens, are of course still present, but the background lore is expanded to imply even more mysterious origins that preserve the mystery presented all the way back in the original Alien.
Alien: Evolved Edition also goes the extra mile to expand on the world of Alien with supplementary material. Alongside favourite baddies Weyland Yutani you have Lasalle Bionational, originally from the novels, and Seegson straight out of Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation. Add onto that the various world governments such as the United Americas, Union of Progressive Peoples and the Three-World Empire, and you have a surprising number of antagonists to harry your players that don’t pop out of eggs.
But, I’d be remiss not to mention everyone’s favourite spikey aliens. Alien: Evolved Edition makes them just as terrifying and deadly to all but the most well-prepared and heavily armed crew. You use a random table to determine actions, adding a level of unpredictability; and the chance of a random instant kill. But of course, nothing at all is stopping you from playing them as you please, and the book offers options to suit both desperate rearguard actions in a colonial marines game, to the predatory space slashers of the space trucker setting.
There’s also a grab-bag of additional enemies from the human side, and some selections from the wider Alien universe. Be that enormous tunnelling worms or locust-like insect swarms that consume all organic matter in a vicious feeding frenzy. Meaning, in short, you can run a pretty terrifying game with all manner of deadly enemies without the word ‘facehugger’ ever spilling from your lips.
About the only issue with the lore is that it’s very high level. As in you get details on the general makeup of different star systems and territories held by the different governments and corporations, but precious little on individual colonies or space stations. A detailed breakdown of what an average space station looks like, and the challenges people face aboard it, wouldn’t have gone amiss here.
Everything else
In terms of sheer material, Alien: Evolved Edition is chock-a-block with both lore and mechanical elements to draw on. You can play a space trucker, colonist, marine or even a synthetic, and there’s a whole table of pregenerated human enemies to fill a more xenomorph-lite campaign. If, like me, you were only familiar with the original two films you’ll also have a great primer on the wider Alien universe right up to the most recent film Alien: Romulus.
Of course, there are some systems that mystify me a bit, like ship combat; is Alien really a setting about stellar vessels shooting it out? But, all that being said most of the metaphorical fat falls squarely on the ‘nice to have’ end of the scale, rather than feeling like it bogs down the rest.
The art is also quite nice, offering a variety of proper technical illustrations to help you and your players visualise the world (the ship portraits are particularly nice), while also having a good amount of evocative, stylistic artwork to show the tension and mystery of the universe. The design of the book itself also draws heavily from the dark green of in-world computer terminals, which helps further ease you into the retro sci-fi atmosphere.
But is it any good?
Well, of course it is. If you’ve ever read up on the Aliens Adventure Game, you know exactly what depths the franchise has sunk to before on the tabletop. But Alien: Evolved Edition offers precisely what players and GMs want, with simple yet tense rules that cover all manner of scenarios which can take place in the depths of space. Meanwhile, the variety of equipment you have means that a marine will find surviving a lot easier than a random astronaut, at least until he runs into the Queen…
Having played a one-shot or two myself, I found Alien: Evolved Edition to be a great game for tense, deadly scenarios. If you want a full campaign there are tools for that, just be prepared to ease your players into the horror, or hold off on introducing Xenomorphs and other, deadlier, enemies until the time is right.
I’d have to play a more long-term campaign with Alien: Evolved Edition, but so far I’ve found that for single-session scenarios this is very straightforward to run. Systems to measure supplies and even time as they dwindle help you ratchet up the tension without seeming arbitrary, and even the random attacks tables can offer some surprising twists and turns.
You can find Alien: Evolved Edition at all good book stores, and on the Free League website.
