Care to share a couple of sentences on the plot and how it went and all?
Sorry-- the few days turned into a few weeks (my RPG-time has been all about preparing new TOR2E campaign stuff).
Here are some
too lengthy notes on what i did re. my Alien Norsemen Saga (named, of course:
Ragnarök).
• I just started because I like Viking tropes (books I read as a kid) and Alien, so thought that combining the two would be nice
• I decided to base my main story plot points on real life events, because I find it cool to brush with History, and feel we influenced/changed it as a player
• I thus went with Lindisfarne, in 793 AD, which is considered the start of the Viking Era. That is the place, and when, Vikings raided a monastery off the East Coast of England, just south of Scotland.
• to get my PCs there, I came up with the following story (I used maps of the start of the Viking Era to choose places, and I did some research on who was ruling at the time in these places etc.):
- the entire group of PCs are Vikings from Trondheim (way up North), and they serve one of the King's daughters
- the action starts when the group arrives in Aarhus (then an "important" trading post between the North Sea & the Baltic) to do business with the Danes, and prepare to go traiding/raiding to the East
- the King's daughter is attacked by an assassin who seems to be some kind of Cultist* and who does not succeed in killing her, but does spray her with some strange black gooey liquid!
(*: the Cult seems based around the idea of the "Theotokos", the Christian Mother of God, or... Queen Mother!)
- the King's daughter whom the PCs serve, and like, is dying. Through research, they here there is some fabled "magical" cure in some lands that might lie to the West, among those heathen Christians
- thus they face the hardship of crossing where no Viking had gone before, and reach the monastery of Lindisfarne (a really cool fortress on an island place IRL) where they will find out that some strange character (an abbot name Brendan) rules over the tunnels dug under the monastery. The PCs end up facing their first Xeno'-- a Queen! Because Brendan has a Xeno-Queen chained down there, and uses Queen Jelly as a cure-all that he can "sell" to get power and influence. The PCs save the King's daughter before she changes-- hopefully (into a Xeno)
That was the First Chapter
From there, the PCs now know there is some Secret (heretic) Cult buried within the Christian Faith, that venerates this Xeno Queen as some sort of Avatar of the Virgin Mary.
And they saw how the acid destroyed there weapons and armor, and thus come the next two chapters:
Chapter Two - Getting Weapons - the PCs travel back East into the Frankish Empire to acquire Ulfberht swords (historic: a better kind of steel being developed then & there) that I decided would resist Alien acid (there are events/obstacles in getting armed, including info' on the Sect, that is actively going against them)
Chapter Three - Getting "Armor" - back in Chapter One, in the first adventure, I had introduced a lady "witch doctor" (African priest) who was in Aarhus as a counselor to the local lord. Her real reason being to try and find out about, and help against, the Demons (Xenos) that had started plaguing her nation. The PCs hook up with her and now travel waaaaaaaay South to the Kingdom of Takrur (historically an important Empire in Ghana/Senegal, starting at the time). The goal: help the people from Takrur, get info' (on meeting Drones, Scouts, Warrior Xenos), and as they travel up river into the jungle (on their Viking Boat-- I went with the "Heart of Darkness" theme) they recover a special mud that protects the body from the acid.
Luckily, the Xenos they meet cannot reproduce, or very little, since they strangely die fast. They are bio-engineered.
Chapter Four - Brendan
With allies, info', weapons, "armor" (using the mud reduces acid, soaking X amount of damage before being used up), the PCs go back West to England, to finally manage to track down this Brendan-- Abbot Brendan, based in Ireland (using the model of the older RL Saint Brendan).
The key discovery is that something impossible has happened: this Brendan is actually from the future. He seems to be a disciple of a powerful God named Weyland-Yutani, and managed to be sent back in time from his future. He has brought some eggs with him that create this Xenos. And he has a hit list of people to slay (making his Cult for that purpose).
The PCs do not yet know the people he wants to kill (like their King's daughter) are actually the ancestors of "Brendan"'s enemy in the future. The King's daughter is Ripley's ancestor, in Takrur he was going after Dennis Parker's ancestors (the chief engineer from
Alien)
The End?-- no...
Because, though they manage to destroy all of Abbot Brendan's organization and plans etc., Brendan has escaped.
That was
Season 1
Season 2 was to see the PCs having to pursue Brendan as he travels West, far far far to the West (using "The Voyage of Saint Brendan" for the obstacles)-- until they reach the Americas (linking this to Vinland & L'Anse aux Meadows where the Vikings truly reached the New World).
Once there, our Viking PCs (along with their African allies, and some PCs had re-rolled as Takrur warriors, Welsh archers, and Frankish cavaliers etc.) will of course meet the Native Americans-- obstacles, fighting etc., but end up allying with them, because, now, Brendan has unleashed Xenos that can reproduce-- the Wendigo!
Now it is a battle to not see them overrun Eastern North America... and maybe more?
Oh, here is what the PCs would finally see upon coming face to face with Brendan in the very end:
(our friend wanted to get rid of Ripley and all the others by mucking up their ancestral lineage-- so he can then go get the eggs instead of them in Alien's first trip... and become rich & powerful)
It has stuff I enjoy (History meets make-believe ; mixing tropes - Aliens, Vikings, "Indians", Black Africa ; the past & the future) does not make great sense (I just hand-waved how the one shot time travel worked) and is quite "pulp-fiction" like... but it was fun for me, and it seems for the players (I might try to re-run it with a bit more fleshing out one day).