Let's Read the ALIEN RPG

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Cessna said:
Vasquez is subjected to an "illegal alien" joke. If it is all one nation, how would that work?

This is just one example. There are many other changes like this.

Sorry, it just seems unnecessary and inconsistent to me.
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I mean, my half hispanic Puerto Rican wife still gets jokes like these (and hell, she was also born fucking Biloxi, Mississippi, the mainland US, and her mother was born in California (her grandmother was born in Puerto Rico).

Puerto Rican. You know, part of the US. Not to even mention that her dad is the whitest white asshole I've ever met (fuck that guy).
 
The United Americas were created during the shooting of Alien in 1979 in Ron Cobb's setting notes:

USconcept.jpg

It's just one of the things Cameron chose not to make on-screen use of when making Aliens, like the Ovamorphing. It's mentioned in tie-in books for Aliens however.
 
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Séadna said:
The United Americas were created during the shooting of Alien in 1979 in Ron Cobb's setting notes:

View attachment 69543

It's just one of the things Cameron chose not to make on-screen use of when making Aliens, like the Ovamorphing. It's mentioned in tie-in books for Aliens however.
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Interesting, I didn't know this.

I suppose the larger problem is that as such there are multiple Alien canons, leaving the game to decide which to use.
 
Cessna said:
Vasquez is subjected to an "illegal alien" joke. If it is all one nation, how would that work?

This is just one example. There are many other changes like this.

Sorry, it just seems unnecessary and inconsistent to me.
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I think this could more easily explained as an artifact of the script rather than a serious comment stemming from the lore.
 
Cessna said:
Vasquez is subjected to an "illegal alien" joke. If it is all one nation, how would that work?

This is just one example. There are many other changes like this.

Sorry, it just seems unnecessary and inconsistent to me.
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The policy of transportation to Australia ended in 1868, but I still get convict jokes all the time.
 
Cessna said:
I suppose the larger problem is that as such there are multiple Alien canons, leaving the game to decide which to use.
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It's more that there is no canon because Fox/Disney has no idea what to do with the IP, so all the licensees have free reign to do whatever and fans are left to make sense of it. I can't be bothered to invest in the ttrpg because 1) it includes obviously stupid stuff like the Engineers and 2) Disney will inevitably produce material that completely contradicts it, just like what Fox did to Dark Horse's continuity by releasing Alien 3 and Resurrection. Dark Horse had to scramble to make sense of it, including by retconning Earth War to feature a robot clone of Ripley and exclaiming that there was an internet outage that erased the evidence of the alien/human war by the time of Resurrection.

In some cases the synthesis produces interesting results that I don't think would've happened if there was a proper creative director, like the Amengi being responsible for genetically engineering the modern Yautja from Hish-qu-ten and then being enslaved by their former slaves thereby explaining who maintains their tech despite their tribal culture...

But this is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic while it is sinking, because the idiots running Disney don't give a crap about the continuity or fan concerns. This is why I hate Intellectual Property (IP) law and think IP should be made illegal. My advice to anyone who cares about this IP: give up on it and make your own. You'll be much happier that way.
 
For those interested, the "canon" of the setting is currently decided by Andrew Gaska as The Mad Hatter The Mad Hatter mentioned above.

This is why you see details that first appeared in the RPG in the recent games Aliens: Fire Team and Aliens: Dark Descent. When Gaska introduces something major, as happened with Heart of Darkness, Disney have to approve it, but so far they seem grand with leaving him in charge.
 
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Someone else posted this, but I figured it was cool enough to duplicate here:

(Posted to the ALIEN RPG forum: https://forum.frialigan.se/viewtopic.php?t=11894 )

In the feedback to Building Better Worlds, it was noted that Gemini Exoplanet was listed as an affiliate of Seegson and elsewhere listed as working with Weyland-Yutani which may have been a mistake in the printing:

https://forum.frialigan.se/viewtopic.php?p=86843#p86861

I can't speak for the writers whether it was unintentional or not, what I can speak to from personal experience is how strange some corporate rivalry can get.

Biritish Petroleum has traded Fortune list positions with Exxon/Mobil a number of times since the turn of the century.

Market news pitches this as bitter economic warfare, rivalry, etc.

BP also built and installed the Thunderhorse platform in the Gulf of Mexico which included a seabed pipeline terminal with a pipeline and fiber-optics back to shore.

Rather than build their own, ExxonMobil joined BP in a joint-venture around access to that pipeline terminal from their lease block next to the block where Thunderhorse was setup.

So... rivals can work together if the situation is economically viable enough.

ExxonMobil did the math and found it was far more cost effective to lease space in the terminal and pipeline back to shore than it was to build their own.

You can add a lot of dynamics to your Alien story universe by making rivals into strange bedfellows from time to time to subvert the expectations of the players.
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AppleJax said:
It's more that there is no canon because Fox/Disney has no idea what to do with the IP, so all the licensees have free reign to do whatever and fans are left to make sense of it. I can't be bothered to invest in the ttrpg because 1) it includes obviously stupid stuff like the Engineers and 2) Disney will inevitably produce material that completely contradicts it, just like what Fox did to Dark Horse's continuity by releasing Alien 3 and Resurrection. Dark Horse had to scramble to make sense of it, including by retconning Earth War to feature a robot clone of Ripley and exclaiming that there was an internet outage that erased the evidence of the alien/human war by the time of Resurrection.
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Straight up, it is a VERY good game. One of my favorites, even.

- The presence of the engineers and all that silliness is very, very minor and easily ignored. It's firmly grounded in the first two films.
- I know I was just complaining about inconsistency/canon, but anything Disney does could also be easily ignored.

The system is sound and straightforward and it take place in a setting that, minor annoyances aside, is excellent.
 
I guess I don't have the same hate on for the lore stuff from the prequels. I didn't mind either film (although they weren't a patch on the originals) and I thought the engineers were cool. *shrug*
 
AppleJax said:
Like I’d trust the idiots at Disney to have a coherent concept of canon.
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It’s not like I want to back Disney, but to be fair, unless there’s a single creative mind (and people who know what they’re doing to remind him), without suits getting involved, there really can’t be canon.
 
CRKrueger said:
It’s not like I want to back Disney, but to be fair, unless there’s a single creative mind (and people who know what they’re doing to remind him), without suits getting involved, there really can’t be canon.
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And even then, Lucas never did a particularly good job of keeping a coherent canon with Star Wars despite having complete control over it. He did much better with it then Disney though.

It doesn't matter though, as part of the fun of being a GM is being able to make your own canon for your campaign.
 
Cessna said:
Straight up, it is a VERY good game. One of my favorites, even.

- The presence of the engineers and all that silliness is very, very minor and easily ignored. It's firmly grounded in the first two films.
- I know I was just complaining about inconsistency/canon, but anything Disney does could also be easily ignored.

The system is sound and straightforward and it take place in a setting that, minor annoyances aside, is excellent.
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No thanks. Fox and Disney long ago destroyed all my goodwill. I’ll make my own bug hunter IPs and release them into public domain. I encourage everyone else to do the same. Corpos only have power so long as we pay attention to them.

CRKrueger said:
It’s not like I want to back Disney, but to be fair, unless there’s a single creative mind (and people who know what they’re doing to remind him), without suits getting involved, there really can’t be canon.
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Canon is overrated anyway. The Cthulhu mythos doesn’t have one and that’s worked out really well for it. It isn’t copyrighted either, so fans have free reign to do whatever.
 
My personal Cannon (since everyone's doing it):

Prometheus
Covenant
Alien
Aliens

Blade Runner
Soldier
Bladerunner 2049

The Thing

Predator
Predator 2
(Predators and Prey were fineish but very ignorable)

Robocop
Robocop 2

Terminator
Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles

Dune (The Frank Herbert books)
The Dune Encyclopedia

Some of the Dark Horse comics

(and yeah, I'm counting all of these as the same universe)
 
AppleJax said:
Alien 3 never needed to bring back Ripley. It’s an example of what I call “small universe syndrome.” The studios are full of idiots who refuse to let the universe expand organically so they force it to revolve around a recurring character and his/her immediate family. The new TV show in development (assuming the strike didn’t kill it) is finally trying to go the anthology route, but it’s too little too late. The IP is shit now what with all that engineer garbage and completely unnecessary Blade Runner callbacks. It’s called Alien, not Terminator. It needs extensive retconning or even outright rebooting by someone who actually understands it, likes it, and can write. Or just let it die and stop being stupid. Which isn’t going to happen, unfortunately.

This is just par for the course for IPs now. I hate copyright law.
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I think the whole Alien franchise would have been improved if Alien 3 introduced a whole new set of characters instead of turning into the Ripley v Aliens franchise. They would have been able to explore new ideas instead of turning 3 and 4 into weird super hero movies, because lets face it by 4, Ripley was basically a full blown superhero.

Alien Resurrection without the goofy Alien hybrid plot could have been a pretty good movie instead of what it was and I'm one of those oddballs that liked AR.

I think a big part of what made the Aliens v Predator games work well, is they moved on from Ripley and returned to the aliens being scary ass monsters.
 
Toadmaster said:
I think the whole Alien franchise would have been improved if Alien 3 introduced a whole new set of characters instead of turning into the Ripley v Aliens franchise. They would have been able to explore new ideas instead of turning 3 and 4 into weird super hero movies, because lets face it by 4, Ripley was basically a full blown superhero.
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I think if they were going to kill Newt and Hicks offscreen, they should have just killed them all in a crash, and the Alien escape the crash, and then have the prison figuring it out on their own.
 
The best way to keep your players on their toes is to disregard all the sequels to Alien and include these movies as part of your Alien RPG universe. They think they're gonna run into a "xenomorph," instead it's a naked Mathilda May or Jeff Goldblum.

Earth Girls Are Easy
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Killer Klowns from Outer Space
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Lifeforce
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Mac and Me
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I thought Alien 3 had two kinda cool ideas which might have made up 15% of it's runtime, and the other 85% was mostly boring and pointless. It didn't descend into the pure schlock of #4, but I'm happy to never view it again, and if I'd had the chance to not view it the first time again, I'd take it.
 
I’ve never seen 3 because after you all told me what happened to Newt and Hicks, I have no interest. The first two were fine enough, although they would never be favorite movies of mine.
 
Endless Flight said:
I’ve never seen 3 because after you all told me what happened to Newt and Hicks, I have no interest. The first two were fine enough, although they would never be favorite movies of mine.
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Interesting, I never really cared much about Newt and Hicks. From the first viewing I thought they were artifacts of a Cameron script, not anything that really made sense set next to the first movie. Not ineffective mind, but not central. Everyone dies. This is Alien.
 
Fenris-77 said:
Interesting, I never really cared much about Newt and Hicks. From the first viewing I thought they were artifacts of a Cameron script, not anything that really made sense set next to the first movie. Not ineffective mind, but not central. Everyone dies. This is Alien.
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If they would have died another way, I might have given it a watch.
 
If Dumb and Dumber was part of the cannon, it would explain why the projenitors gave up on humanity.
 
Fenris-77 said:
Interesting, I never really cared much about Newt and Hicks. From the first viewing I thought they were artifacts of a Cameron script, not anything that really made sense set next to the first movie. Not ineffective mind, but not central. Everyone dies. This is Alien.
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I think they were resolutions of Ripley's character development during the film and they resolve her character arc by creating a family to replace the one that time dilation stole. If any character should've been retired at the end of that one, it's Ripley. Either Newt or Hicks could have become protagonists going forward, if Alien 3 didn't happen at the tail end of "Star Power" Hollywood.
 
CRKrueger said:
It was the 80’s. :shade: The big point of the firefight is to highlight why this young Predator on his first hunt becomes so focused on Harrigan. There aren’t any more firefights of that type in the rest of the movie.
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One of my favourite films of all time is John Woo's Hardboiled, whose opening gunfight is extended and brilliant. So it's not that it's a gunfight per se, more that I just found it boring.

But as you say, I'm willing to give it another shot after that scene next time. I don't FF through any scene in a movie (except for rewatches if my fav films) on principle so I'll have to just sit it out.
 
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Séadna said:
For those interested, the "canon" of the setting is currently decided by Andrew Gaska as The Mad Hatter The Mad Hatter mentioned above.

This is why you see details that first appeared in the RPG in the recent games Aliens: Fire Team and Aliens: Dark Descent. When Gaska introduces something major, as happened with Heart of Darkness, Disney have to approve it, but so far they seem grand with leaving him in charge.
Click to expand...

For me there is no 'canon' for Alien. There is the first film and that's it.
 
Toadmaster said:
I think the whole Alien franchise would have been improved if Alien 3 introduced a whole new set of characters instead of turning into the Ripley v Aliens franchise.
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As much as I found it hard to deal with Hicks, Bishop, and Newt dying at the start of the movie, I think Aliens left Alien3 with a major issue in how to move on to its new characters when it had left so many ones alive. It was brutal but it was necessary to make space for Alien3’s new characters, many of which I consider to be as strong and interesting as those of the two previous movies.
Toadmaster said:
They would have been able to explore new ideas instead of turning 3 and 4 into weird super hero movies, because let’s face it by 4, Ripley was basically a full blown superhero.
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Agree with Alien 4. However, in Alien3 Ripley is the monster not the superhero. She may seem more decisive and capable but this is only because she is willing to achieve her goals at whatever the cost, much like the xenomorph.

I actually really like the fact that the first three movies see Ripley go from victim to hero to monster.
 
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Regarding canon I think can mean either:

  • What is generally accepted among the vast body of "stuff" produced. By generally accepted I mean what most stories going forward can be expected to use since most people either like it or assume its presence.
    Generally speaking this is how folklore works. Once Guinevere was introduced she became generally expected as Arthur's wife, though of course one still gets stories where she isn't. This word is used in folklore studies to refer to things like "the canonical version of the Titanomachy".

  • What a corporation uses as a base for future material. That's the sense I mean when I say Gaska is in charge of "canon", i.e. Gaska decides what material others will use to build games, novels, etc.

  • The "true" version of a story, whereby "true" here I mean treating as if it were like historical fact. This mostly applies to single author works in the 20th/21st centuries. Such as how Oda might alter the tankōbon releases of One Piece to make changes compared to the magazine versions since "X could not have been there at that time" and so forth

Obviously there is no hard boundary between these things, since for example Gaska will have used elements of what people accept and some reasoning about the timeline to form the corporate canon.

Voros said:
For me there is no 'canon' for Alien. There is the first film and that's it.
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Do you mean you see the first film as an artistically closed work in need of no sequels or similar?
 
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I wasn't a fan of Alien 3 and would have probably preferred it as a self contained story without Ripley. I've not seen Alien 4, Prometheus and I've avoided the likes of AVP and any extended universe novels so for me the Xenomorphs are still just extraterrestrial, man-sized ants which is how I like them.

Funnily enough I preferred Predator 2 to Predator 1 when they came out (I peg them as equals nowadays) because of the world building and more down to earth protagonist (I never took to the likes of Commando, Rambo 2 etc that seemed to command the eighties). Predators was ok but the hunted should never have been able to return to Earth. Prey was ok but yeah, that girl's tribe is fuxxored.
 
Séadna said:
Regarding canon I think can mean either:
  • What is generally accepted among the vast body of "stuff" produced. By generally accepted I mean what most stories going forward can be expected to use since most people either like it or assume its presence.
    Generally speaking this is how folklore works. Once Guinevere was introduced she became generally expected as Arthur's wife, though of course one still gets stories where she isn't. This word is used in folklore studies to refer to things like "the canonical version of the Titanomachy".

  • What a corporation uses as a base for future material. That's the sense I mean when I say Gaska is in charge of "canon", i.e. Gaska decides what material others will use to build games, novels, etc.

  • The "true" version of a story, whereby "true" here I mean treating as if it were like historical fact. This mostly applies to single author works in the 20th/21st centuries. Such as how Oda might alter the tankōbon releases of One Piece to make changes compared to the magazine versions since "X could not have been there at that time" and so forth

Obviously there is no hard boundary between these things, since for example Gaska will have used elements of what people accept and some reasoning about the timeline to form the corporate canon.
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When I said "canon" I was making reference to "Head Canon" - the concept popularized in online fandom circles wherein a fan decides what parts form their idealized vision of the franchise. I figured that was implied, especially when I went for my "Everything is Dune" fan theory, only bringing it up to say, if I were to use "canon" in the straight sense I'd be going with something in between the first and second bulleted interpretations - What is reasonably expected as a core or defining element of the franchise, but also subject to the what material is produced going forward being (on a tier-basis where films are often at the top) default canon no matter what (meaning it has the power to rewrite existing canon - e.g. the Force Awakens).

(unless we're talking about "The Canon", which I consider entirely in literature terms and it is a pretty stodgy, pretentious, and inflexible list of specific works).

There's this great Youtube Channel called Watchtower Database, that is exclusively devoted to making videos about the Timm-Dini DC Animated Universe, and they spend hours talking about canon. Like a good 75% of their content that I've seen is focused on whether this or that comic book series or tie-in product is canon, whether The BtAS is a different canon from JLA, trying to find canon explanations for stuff like the character design changes in the final season of Batman (the kind of stuff that you had to do to earn a Marvel No-Prize back in the day). I find it incredibly entertaining, myself. Like, good fan theories that can recontextualize a work and give you a fresh way to re view old favourites.
 
Predator was badass because you have this special forces squad who are severely outmatched even with all their weapons and military savvy. It takes Dutch using prehistoric methods to take out the predator. My favorite sequence is basically from when Dutch falls into the lake to the finish.
 
Endless Flight said:
Predator was badass because you have this special forces squad who are severely outmatched even with all their weapons and military savvy. It takes Dutch using prehistoric methods to take out the predator. My favorite sequence is basically from when Dutch falls into the lake to the finish.
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I view it as a bunch of guys who think they are in an action genre movie but it turns out it's a horror genre movie and Schwarzenegger is the Final Girl.

(It's also on a very short list of films that I think of when I try to visualize what a good GI Joe film would look like)
 
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