Alien: The Roleplaying Game
Aug-Sep '23
So, we played Alien (I'm told this was the Chariot of the Gods Module - so if you, whomever you are, care about spoilers, then I'd recommend moving on, friend. Might I recommend this post of mine?) and as is to be expected, we got annihilated.
John GMed and Will, Matt, Paul, (and later Zach), and I played a team of space truckers transporting Helium-3 (a valuable fuel that loses its potency - and value - the longer it's in transit) across the galaxy.
For those unfamiliar, each player has an agenda that evolves over time which is meant to encourage certain roleplaying characteristics. As the leader of our crew eager to "get ahead" in the space trucking industry without relying on my status as a contractor for "the company" (Waylon-Yutani), my character's motivation is to stick with my assigned mission (deliver the helium-3 as fast as possible) so that I can buy a new ship and eventually seek my own means of creating a trucking empire. In other words, end the game as rich as possible. Easy.
And just for ease of explaining it now, MU/TH/UR (pronounced 'mother') is an autonomous computer and intercom system that sort of operates across/between ships (almost like if it were possible to talk to Mac OS or Microsoft systems, that'd mean you could get information from all connected devices on the same OS).
We start the game on the ship UCS Montero a third of the way to our destination when we're woken up by MU/TH/UR out of cryosleep. We have lunch in the galley (we literally had sandwiches from Litteri's and san pellegrinos) and were then alerted to space junk coming toward the ship. Paul (a junkie space pilot) manages to take evasive action and avoids the space junk. Turns out, however, that it's not space junk but rather a ship that disappeared 70 years ago, the Chronus, and company (W-Y) protocol says we must investigate.
The lot of us argue and debate pretty intensely about whether or not we ought to investigate and we ultimately decide to board the Chronus. Finally, Paul manages to convince us to go aboard: "Fine, how about guns a little blazing?" (Puppy eyes).
We catch up to the Chronus which is just floating through space, totally dark, and we prepare to board, leaving one of our NPC's (Cham) behind to watch the Montero. Matt wanted to stay behind as well but I pull rank (a character-specific action) on him as our team leader and force him to stick with the rest of the crew.
We clamber onto the ship, not really kitted out for a fight (we have some pistols and a bolt gun). We do have a motion detector, however, which detects movement and we decide to sweep the first and second tiers of the ship. We split up in groups of two (myself and Matt and Will and Paul). Will and Paul go to check out the corporate suite where they find an industrial-like safe. By some magical stroke of luck, Will was not supposed to be able to open this on his own, but passing 3 successful comtech rolls, Will manages to open the safe and finds a bag of a $1M 'space bucks' which he takes with him and Paul. They conspire to keep it hidden (which apparently game broke my character's agenda but I didn't mind - I got my revenge in the end).
An out of pocket quote about this time of the game from Paul: "Cham's just a flirt."
I find a flamethrower meanwhile (fuck yeah) with Matt and Paul and Will then go to the medlab. They find strange alien specimens there. At that point, Will makes a decision to leave Paul alone to try and stow the money some place.
It's at this point that Paul, handling a strange jar, drops it, and ends up waking up an Alien (my notes on this exact part are kinda fuzzy). In any event, as Will books it down the hallway, Paul - the junkie pilot - ends up facing a stage 4 abomination.
Paul gets punched in the face, fails his agility role in response, and ends up freezing in place. Taking advantage of Paul's panic, the Alien tries to crush Paul's head and nearly succeeds. Instead, it jumps on his back as Paul stumbles away. Paul drops his weapon, panic freezes again, and gets his face bashed into the ground, resulting in his first critical injury (bloody eyes).
Matt and I run to the Med Bay, but it's took late and Paul dies (who now takes over Cham on the Montero). The alien then punches Matt, who rushed in, into the door. "Miller [my character] takes aim" and fires the flamethrower, spewing fire wildly around the room, spewing everything but the alien with fire. In response, the alien grabs me by the shoulders, screams in my ace, and throws me to the wall. Finally, tired of our incompetence, Matt takes out his bolt gun and in one single shot takes the dome off of the alien! Woohoo, first kill.
We run to check on our dead junkie pilot.
"I checked his vitals & he's dead, y'all!"
Will, who snuck onto the Montero as Paul (who took over Cham) clambered onto the Chronus, returns and pulls a sort of "oh shit, what happened here?" Before we can really ask him what happened since it was his responsibility to stick with his buddy, there's an alarm on the Montero: MU/TH/UR informs us that a ship malfunction will cause the Montero to self destruct in 10 minutes (Order 966). We determine that we have to get the Montero away from the Chronus if we're all going to survive. Will and I sprint to the Montero and Matt and Paul sprint to the cargo bay on the Chronus. I scramble up the umbilical connecting our two ships, detach it once Will is on the Montero, and then we set it on a course directly away from the Chronus. Once we're on our way, Will and I prepare to take the Daisy (a sort of space pick-up truck on the Montero) back to the Chronus. But I can't leave the Helium-3 (a highly unstable and combustible fuel) behind to explode without getting paid for it, so I resolve to load as much as I can onto the Daisy with only about 5 minutes to spare. Will sneakily puts his stolen $1M onto the Daisy while I hook up my heavy machinery and start loading the Daisy with Helium 3. If I failed a single roll, both Will and I would both die. I get one drum loaded. Practically sweating, I manage to load a second tank on the Daisy. That's it! We depart the Montero with only a minute to spare and gun it for the Chronus. The Montero explodes and it shakes us up pretty bad, but we survive. We fly into the cargo bay of the Chronus and I land it so poorly, that it gets wedged into the far corner, but not so bad that the Helium-3 goes off.
We hop off the Daisy and the four of us sort of hi-five/hug, at which point the lights on the ship come up and the ship comes out of cryosleep. We book it for the cryochambers on the upper levels.
When we get to the cryochamber doors, we're struck by a frightening sight. The doors are welded shut from the inside. Terrifying claw marks are visible from the outside. Using our cutting torch, we break down the doors to the cryochamber, and inside we find 4 members of the Chronus ill, and coming out of a deep cryosleep. The rest of the room is strewn with long dead bodies of the rest of the crew.
"Out of the pan, and into the friar."
The team leader of the Chronus, Reid, is just about to start questioning us when one of the four crew members, still coming to his feet, begins to turn on the spot into an alien. Blood spurts from his nose and ears. One of his eyeballs shoots across the room. It's a blood burster! Matt opens fire on the creature, doing some damage. I in turn try to set the creature alight with my flame thrower. The alien, singed and frightened, scampers off into the vents and disappears.
Once we all calm down, Reid answers questions for us on Dr. Cooper (who turned into a blood burster) and produces an anti-dote which is supposed to prevent turning into an Alien. I immediately wrestle it from Reid's grasp and stab myself in the leg with it, much to Reid's scorn.
After much discussion, we devise teams from both ships to split up and fix the ship. Will goes to see MU/TH/UR, Paul & Matt go to fix the air scrubber shaft, and Reid and I cover the hallway outside. Crawling into the shaft, Paul & Matt discover a huge white creature lurking over them: "You crawled into the getting got hole." The creature jumps down onto Paul, pierces his throat, and ruptures his jugular. It's an adult neomorph! It pins Matt and almost kills him. To divert the neomorph's attack, Matt pulls Paul's body on top of him, and the neomorph eats the head of Paul's already dead body clean off. It then attacks Matt again, taking out his jugular.
Paul take's over Reid's character, and the two of us rush into the shaft. Before we can do anything, the neomorph grabs me and screams in my face, "and I pee a little." It then slashes my arm with its tail, but I manage to brush it off for the most part. Paul, out for revenge, shoots at it with his shotgun and I follow up with a burst from my flamethrower. The creature almost dies, but before we can kill it flees into the shaft. We fix the air scrubbers.
"Chuck Nora descends from the heavens." -- Zach joins us for the next session as an android.
Taking stock of the air scrubber debacle, Matt is taken back to the examination room by everyone and we take time to discuss what happened and what our plan is.
"Will made me laugh and now I have avocado coming out of my nose."
Will fixes Zach's arm, which was damaged, and Matt gets healed (I'm going to assume we found a replacement jugular from him, but the jury's still out on how that one worked). Paul takes out the data pack he took from Cham and now the Chronus crew members know that Will and Paul broke into the safe in the corporate suite (and that the $1M space bucks are likely gone).
We start out on the next quest, determining to stick together: fixing the coms array. We move through A deck and arrive at the vestibules.
Will, again wanting to go speak with MU/TH/UR refuses to do what I ask so I excommunicate him from the crew. Zach, Matt, and I then exit the ship, tethered to the ship to fix the coms array.
The coms array is obstructed by a person in a space suit. Matt takes out his pulse rifle and tries to shoot it to see if it's alive. He hits the figure, which wakes up, pissed. We move in to attack. I run forward and go into overwatch. The creature attacks Zach and the two grapple arm in arm, falling over each other and onto the surface of the ship. Zach pushes the alien off of him and I shoot it in the dome with my harpoon gun. With the harpoon in its head, it starts pulling me toward it as I refuse to let go of my gun. It tries to attack me but misses, falls over top of me, and as it falls I drift past it. I then proceed to beat the shit out of it with my maintenance jack. Zach gets fucked up in turn by the alien but manages to kill it.
We fix the coms array and then return to the cockpit. Will and Zach decide to go see MU/TH/UR and Paul, Zach and I go to fix the reactor core. Back in the cockpit though, the remaining crew (NPCs) start losing it. Their W-Y corporate person starts killing one of the other NPCs so Zach runs back to stop her. Paul and I meanwhile reach the reactor. We encounter another abomination but we do battle with it and kill it by setting it on fire and throwing a molotov cocktail on it to boot. We fix the core and the ship boots back to life, with an automatic course set for earth.
In the cockpit, all hell breaks loose. Matt runs in to shoot Zach, who loses an arm, and Zach takes the gun off Zach. Paul and I then reach the cockpit. Will then robs Paul in front of our eyes, taking the data disk, and then tries to shoot me in the side with the shotgun. Zach dives in front of me though, absorbing the blast. Will then kills another Chronus crew member trying to escape (who turns into an alien).
With fleeing and panic as my only options at this point, I break from the group and sprint for daisy in the cargo bay. Zach sprints after me. The rest run for the escape pods. Will destroys the pods, however, turns out he's been an android this whole time, and then tries to kill everyone else.
Zach tries to stop me from escaping, but fails. Paul shows up, mercking Zach, and I in turn set the daisy on fire with my flamethrower, causing the helium-3 takes on board to explode, destroying the entire bottom of the ship and killing everyone down there. Only Matt is left alive, who with no other option and aliens on his tail, flees back to the cryochambers. He uses the cutting torch to seal himself into the room, goes into cryosleep, and the ship plummets into the dark, stalked by aliens, its future uncertain.
A great game! So much chaos at the end though. We're in the midst of playing another game, which we'll finish in January most likely.
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