LV-426

Apparently, there is an official Alien Day and as it happens it was at 04.26 because the first time when the Xenomorphs were discovered in the original 1979 Ridley Scott film.

LV-426 or later called Acheron. I love how this actually has a hidden meaning because Acheron is an existing river in Greece also in Greek Mythology it is one of the entrances to the Underworld, the “river of sorrow”. The nearby ruins of Necromanteion as the name suggest used for necromancy in ancient time.

So that day a lot of things happened. Bad and good and ugly too. I discovered a colleague of mine got Covid and we hung out a lot the previous day so I decided to cancel my Luxembourg trip not to possibly infect my friends (well thankfully my 4 jabs did the job and I’m perfectly fine 🙂 ) So I was in a bad mood but thankfully Free League Publishing saved the day with a new book preorder, which I will link here 🙂 I do have all the books and extras for the Alien RPG! We did play 3-4 times already on the meetup and also in a private setting. I do really love the Alien universe.

The mechanism is very well built not only increasing the tension with storytelling but also with additional stress dice, and stress can be your friend and can be your enemy in the worst moment possible. (One single facehugger is enough to fail the roll and give your faith to the Game Mother’s hands and imagination which become the sharp teeth, the lurking shadows, the quietly waiting Alien in the airshafts etc.)

We already played the starter set cinematic scenario called “Chariot of the Gods” which ended up… SPOILER ALERT! (to able to read it please select text because it’s only a CSS trick to hide the content 😀 )

The Synthetic was escaping with some samples and with the ship’s cat, the captain was going down with Cronus, the pirates miscalculated themself and let one of the Xeno on their ship, which will be a hok into the world again because where is that pirate ship and where the Synth ended up with that EEV and with the black glue…

In the rule book, there is also one tiny, originally one-scene scenario: Hope’s last days. Which I renamed and extended a bit for Meetup plays. Based on the ideas from Alien: River of Pain (This is an awesome cast and drama play if you like those)

Here I had to think and cover a big plothole from Alien 2, namely if in the original movie the signal from the derelict ship could be picked up from space how was the established colony not able to pick up that signal? I rewatched the original Alien movie which for me suggests WY knew about the signal before so the Nostromo did not randomly pick it up. As for the game, the following went down. SPOILER ALERT!

I set the scenario earlier when there were no aliens on the base yet. But just right after they received the message from Carter Burke to investigate something on a certain part of the moon (yes LV-426 is a moon) the colony was happily buzzing human hive until 2 guys secretly went to the site before the “wildcatters” and brought back a facehugger but they where scared to talk about it so the eventually there was one alien on the premises which no one knows about. The science team arrived right after the Jordan family left to investigate the coordinates and take over command of the base. They know a bit more about what they are dealing with but they did not say a thing till the obvious infestation where it gets way too late for everybody. My players here were more technical people, engineers etc. I did kill 2 of them but spear characters were ready so they could continue playing. Eventually, 2 of them managed to unlock the ship on the docking station (overriding the lockdown command) both PC here are impregnated with aliens and they know about it. However, the surprise comes after they leave the moon’s atmosphere there is a ship waiting for them. The Church of the Immaculate Incubation. They dumped the derelict ship signal after they discovered it before the colony was established. They pick up our remaining PC to their old, battled ship and fly away…

Talking about books and stories here is my growing RPG collection. Probably you can spot it by now, but I’m a huge horror fan!