Fria Ligans forum

Like others i feel the longevity of campaign-mode will come form a variety of non-movie and non-xenomorph experiences. 

I was definitely glad to see mention of much broader themes in the starter-kit (Good job Free League  )
So i thought I might start a convo about things you want to run for your players that are on-theme but not from official lore.

Some ideas:

• A former marine, now leader of an independent colony is rumored to have gone mad and will need to be 'managed' if the region is to be controlled (Think: Apocalypse Now)
  
• Drug Smugglers have been tracked back to a commercial space station where they are somehow transferring narcotics. Can the group discover how they are concealing the drugs? Does the group report them, or a cut a deal?
  
• A long lost cargo container intended for a political leader, turns out contain 20 high-end, very expensive, pleasure-synths. If word of this gets out it could be politically damning, or incredibly lucrative for the group.
  
• Communications with a comms-relay-station have gone dark. Upon arrival the party discover the station's occupants have been growing genetically engineered narcotics; but not without disturbing consequences.
  
• On a remote colony a bacteria in the water is causing the infected to see violent hallucinations, which manifest as shadowy human-like killers, but are they hallucinations?
  
• An ophiocordyceps fungus causes mold like fungus and spores to grow from human-hosts causing them to attack others (Think: Clickers from Last of Us) 
  
• Rations are lower than expected, and things are not in their correct place. Perhaps there is a stow-away on board? 
  
• A shady merchant offers a deal which seems too good to be true, but only it the crew sabotage a competitor.

 
That's all i have for now, i'll update as i think of more.
But I'd love to hear other people's ideas.

Others:

• Morse code, by AlexanderMars

One campaign idea I've been mulling over, waiting impatiently for the full game to magically appear before me:
In the aftermath of the Hadley's Hope disaster (and probably a bunch of other major corporate screw-ups that kill people), someone at the ICC decides to form a "Science Enforcement Division" to quell some of the public uneasiness over the fear of mad scientists going rogue and wiping out colonies. They are tasked to assess any rumors of abuses of science and tech (most of it taking place in the Frontier, where there is less government oversight) that could threaten public safety. But of course, the big corps still hold all the cards, so the job is largely tasked through the understaffed, ill-equipped, rife with corruption Colonial Marshals Bureau who are the only law enforcement presence out in the Frontier. They are to form up small teams of experts (the player characters) to deal with potential scenarios wherever they occur. These teams are formally called "Hazard Crisis Units", but they are more derisively referred to as "Sci Marshals". What are you gonna do? Arrest a xenomorph? I'm thinking this will give a player group the ability to draw from different backgrounds and have a reason to travel all over the place. Fighting a bio-engineered horror on a distant colony? Check. Maneuvering through the minefields of corporate maneuvering on Earth? Check. Dodging bullets in the middle of a Marine assault against an armed insurrection to secure a weapon of mass destruction? Check. Deal with hidden agendas within the Bureau and within your own team? Check and double check!

Hi all. Long time fan of the films (and lurker of AVP Galaxy). I'm new to table top games, but really looking forward to this one (the starter kit is great!). 

I think some campaigns that deal more with the corporate side of things could be interesting. Maybe not full campaigns, but at least some major parts of them. It could be really interesting experiencing more of the Burke / Ash side of things.

The years in between Covenant and Alien could be solid for those types of stories, among others.

I can't see myself ever running the game as an ongoing campaign.

Alien deserves to be a horror game and a horror game is nigh impossible to maintain long term. Keeping horror elements going week after week month after month without loosing their punch is just.... staggering.

Instead I will break up a normal game with a series of potentially loosely connected one/2 shots. Short stories that tell a complete concise story but might have implications or elements that come back in other short stories latter. Everyone gets the chance to play their regularly scheduled Fantasy and then a night of horror, decompress with some fantasy and then back to the horror.

Small bit about me, I have a degree in game design and a history of LOVING the alien franchise.

I wrote a outline of sorts for a alien video game a few years back that I intend to just turn into a scenario for this.

The players are part of a independent salvage crew that end up being in the wrong place at the wrong time. As they find a damaged ship with the cryo pods still intact a Weyland Yutani ship arrives and takes the players crew along with the pods. The players wake up on an orbital station that acts as a go between for transitioning people and supplies from the planet/moons surface to a docking yard and doubles as a sciences lab within the stations bowels where Weyland Yutani are doing xenomorph stuff. The players come to in the middle of an attack on the station by the USMC who are now more or less at war with Weyland Yutani.

The Marines are not there to save the players. They are there to take action against WY. At best the players are civilians in the middle of a battlefield and could be acceptable collateral damage. At worse they are seen as WY assets and fair game. WY personal mercenary forces will be about as well, skirmishing with the USMC forces and not friendly to the players. And of course, in the attack the USMC unwittingly let some "Biological samples" loose having the xenomorphs run rampant across the station. Survive. Scavenge weapons and supplies. Get off the station. Potentially some of the players may already be impregnated by WT because of course they were using the bodies as breeding stock.

I picture it playing out similar in tone to Deadspace 1. 

A first step in a story that can span many characters and many scenarios telling the story of the battle waging across the stars.

Ever since I discovered that there is a slight possibility that Alien and Blade Runner may actually share the same universe, the whole cyberpunk horror concept has been bubbling around inside my head.

That mixed with a healthy dose of frontier exploration and sneaky corporate maneuverings behind the scenes.   Heck yah.. this thing is a gold mine of ideas!

There are so many small scenes in the Aliens movies that in the past I glossed over I'm sure could be used for campaign ideas. I just recently rewatched Aliens and right in the beginning there's a salvage crew that finds the USS Sulaco adrift and upon seeing Ripley in hypersleep complain "Well boys there goes our salvage..." or something like that and I thought to myself, huh I wonder what happens to them afterwards... maybe something "stays" with them that isn't discovered till they are comfortably cruising the galaxy some time later. The thing I am looking forward to most in the full core book is the fleshing out of the universe and all the stuff that goes on outside the small isolated experiences of the films, the good ones anyway. Hell even if there were some future expansion set in the "future", ala Alien Resurrection, could provide SOME interesting material for a one off... I guess a PC could take out a xenomorph with a well placed behind the back basketball toss...

There are so many small scenes in the Aliens movies that in the past I glossed over I'm sure could be used for campaign ideas. I just recently rewatched Aliens and right in the beginning there's a salvage crew that finds the USS Sulaco adrift and upon seeing Ripley in hypersleep complain "Well boys there goes our salvage..." or something like that and I thought to myself, huh I wonder what happens to them afterwards... maybe something "stays" with them that isn't discovered till they are comfortably cruising the galaxy some time later. The thing I am looking forward to most in the full core book is the fleshing out of the universe and all the stuff that goes on outside the small isolated experiences of the films, the good ones anyway. Hell even if there were some future expansion set in the "future", ala Alien Resurrection, could provide SOME interesting material for a one off... I guess a PC could take out a xenomorph with a well placed behind the back basketball toss...

Alien: Out of the Shadows
The salvage team find the Narcissus escape shuttle from the Nostromo, not the Sulaco  

You should listen to the dramatisation audio books (Audible), there is one specifically taking place after Ripley and Jones are located whilst drifting, and THINGS happen soon afterwards.... 

Aliens: Out of the Shadows
Awaking from a hyper sleep aboard her shuttle lost deep in space, Ellen Ripley, the last human survivor of the salvage ship Nostromo, faces a familiar foe and even more terrifying adversaries. The mining ship Marion has had a catastrophic collision with its own dropship and now the crew face unimaginable horror —and Ripley just may be their only hope.

Not as good as Aliens:River of Pain though, about the colonist (and a few Marines) setting up defences and then the "first" battle of Hadleys Hope, which ends with Ripley and the Marines landing as in the Aliens movie as we know it.

An Idea I was thinking about is "USNSS Providence"... operated by the United States Public Health Service. Job? Go find out what the hell Weyland-Yutani is hiding in LV-426.

It's an excuse to mix Colonial Marines and Merchant spacers, but with government doctors in charge...

(for those unfamiliar, the USPHS is a uniformed service with no enlisted; the same is true of the NOAA Uniformed Corps. When they need non-officers, they hire merchant seamen and/or borrow USN Ratings for afloat jobs, while ashore they hire as GS civil service employees; they've also {very} occasionally been provided marines for port security and/or crowd control.)

The problem is that Hadley's Hope is a nuked crater and the USCM have that report on record on the Sulaco.

Sure, the derelict ship might still be out there (probably is) but the WY site to investigate is non existent.

The problem is that Hadley's Hope is a nuked crater and the USCM have that report on record on the Sulaco.

Sure, the derelict ship might still be out there (probably is) but the WY site to investigate is non existent.

Only if you're set well after 2183... The Sulaco is, in the stock timeline presented in the cinematic starter, still missing in action, presumed lost, The Nostromo is known to have been lost, one survivor found, and LV-426 the location for the Nostromo's loss... but there are implications WY didn't tell the United Americas everything.  And, based upon dialogue in Aliens, there are plenty of non-xenomorph threats that Marines have been shooting at. We also know that there were ZERO survivors from the Sulaco - all the survivors died at Fiorina 161 (or in transit to it). 

Likewise, looking at photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, literally built mostly of light wood and paper, there was plenty left to examine.

And I'm certain, a trip to Hadley's hope in 2183 is likely to still have surviving xenomorphs.