Of course, it makes sense that the Alien RPG attracts people who are mainly interested in the Alien brand. That’s just fine to me. Knowing the lore, also the parts that are outside the movies, is important. You can develop a game by knowing the lore in detail.
However, the Alien RPG isn’t just about getting the lore details correct. It’s also a game, actually a very specific one. All the Year Zero games are strongly influenced by Apocalypse World, an American indiegame made by Vincent Baker. That’s not just my personal opinion, the creators of the game have talked about that in public. And you only need to read the Wikipedia article about Apocalypse World to see the similarities between Mutant Year Zero and Apocalypse World. Those games are very similar.
You can say a lot about what indiegames have brought to the gaming industry the past 10-15 years or so. But if I should just mention one thing (that is most relevant here), it would be that most indiegames does something very specific. You usually can’t just do what ever you like in the game. Instead you do very certain things and there are specific rules for that. Baker, as I mentioned above, has done several very specific games. If you read the Wikipedia article about him, you can see what his other games are about. Some of them are quite bizarre (like ”kill puppies for satan”).
Why is all that even relevant when we are talking about a star map? As I said in a previous post, there are three career paths in the Alien RPG. Those are all quite indie: it’s something specific you do. And the specifics are supported by a lot of rules. And the rules are supporting the setting. The upcoming supplements will be about the career paths (and not about, for example, spaceships or vehicles, even though stuff like that will probably be included). What you actually DO in the game is specific, not general. The game designers have made their own interpration of the Alien universe (even though with corporate brand blessing from Fox).
So if you really want to grasp what the game (and not just the entire franchise) is about, look at the career paths. They are the core of the game. They tell you what to do - just like in most indiegames or indie influenced games. Surviving is for sure important in this game, but it’s not a career path. As I said, those are more specific.
Since most indiegames are very limited in what you are supposed to do, you only put stuff in the game if it really matters to what you are supposed to do in the game. A map isn’t there just because it looks nice. It’s a game tool, and as such, it should add something to the three career paths (or group concepts as I said when I introduced the term in Swedish, although there have allways been group concepts in roleplaying games, but they are often not explicitly described). You could say that what they are supposed to do is limited by the map. Maybe they might go to places outside the map, but, as I said, that could be a conceptual thing. You would have to develop the map (add more mapps or detail some known areas further), perhaps through some new game mechanic. Some kind of secret corporate maps would be my suggestion, simply because it would make sense.
I also mentioned the hexcrawl. It’s something in between old school and indie. And it gives you a hint of what to do with a map in a game. It points out locations that are (or at least could be) important. And important in this case should mean important to the three career paths - the marines, the colonists and the truckers. They are the people doing things in this game (at least so far). That’s why I want to add a fourth career path - the explorers. They are already there in the franchise, and they would by definition expand the starmap. I think that would be a cool thing, and for sure very much in line with the lore.
Maybe I needed to explain all this. After all, we are talking about a map in a game. I want to discuss what the map actually means in the Alien RPG specifically. This is a forum for that game (obviously). And it isn’t just any game, it’s a game with strong indie influences and some old school style hex crawl. What does that mean to the map?
I have noticed that there sometimes are clashes between brand fans and game fans (in the Alien case, I’m both, but I wouldn’t have been here if it wasn’t a Swedish game). We approach things differently. I wrote this post to bridge that gap.
Vincent Baker on Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Baker
(A sidenote to this: Fria Ligan is standing on the shoulders of others. If they didn’t, their games wouldn’t look like they do. They are a bit like Steve Jobs and Apple in that regard: developing and promoting concepts created by others. Vincent Baker and several other indie creators should be invited to many release parties... But that can be discussed somewhere else.)