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Yeah... I do not have a lot to say, really. Sounds like a great and emotionally invested story jj_kapelusz. It's a xeno-adjacent tale, and I do like those a lot. It is the easiest/clearest way to do a non-xeno, Alien-esque story Well done!

I'm mulling over doing a post on a similar endeavor I did, revolving around a bunch of Christian mercenaries who encountered "the devil" (=xenos) and reacted to that with murderous, religious ferver, but I'm not right there yet. But that, too, was one of those xenos-but-only-in-the-background things, and it went hard in the religiosity direction ('cause I'm a Scholar of Religions/"Religiologist" by training and love that kinda stuff).

But yeah... Great stuff!

I have not had any issues with running a non-Alien game so far. I am GM for a Colonial Marines campaign, where right now the marines are on a peacekeeping operation on a frontier world. They have encountered separatists and some local fauna, but no Xenomorphs.

Right now the focus is sorting out who is really responsible for the troubles plaguing the colony, and putting an end to it. Some unfriendly animals have shown up, but nothing an M41A or two couldn’t handle. This is the “prologue” of sorts for the players to get used to the game, flesh out characters and bond. It’s also letting them “level up” a bit before playing in the big leagues.

They will eventually run into a xenomorph in a later “mission” and we will see how they fare. By then the stakes will be much higher with their fleshed out characters. By then they should have some interesting talents/skills to play and be ultimate badasses. Or go out in a blaze of gory, erm, glory.

HI All

Awesome discussion, and great topic, Angelman.

I'm with Exile, in dipping into my 40 year Traveller library for some great ship & stations floorplans. Love the Map/Monster/Treasure summary of the Aliens franchise too.

To your question on how to make all that feel Alien, without the Xenos, here is my suggestion:

I'm filling out the Lost Worlds sector with a partial history of what happened during the abandonment beyond what's in BBW, but before the Big Bads' appear, since my players want to know. While much history is lost, I have taken the Aliens theme of Space Action, and Destroyer of Worlds, but through the view of post-war clean-up. It is pretty bleak, but that makes the human win every time they rescue or re-home someone much sweeter, so I make sure we get one of those every session.

<Lost Worlds spoiler warning>
In my campaign, the technological collapse described in Lost Worlds campaign was quite slow, and not uniformly distributed, with lots of technological experimentation as short range interstellar trade and industrial capacity broke down. Some of the lost colonies attempted to rebuild their own short range interstellar fleets. Naturally wars broke out after the Isolation started, mainly within originally unsettled systems. Now, 3 generations later, there are LOTS of ship wreaks, and random flotsam & jetsam in decaying or long period orbits. What military pilots call ‘clutter’. (What they call ‘threats’ is the relativistic stuff).

My party are encouraged to investigate those to log trajectory and tag when possible for UNCSA traffic control points, tradable for ICC license violation waivers, not everything is money...The reason I encourage this is to set the mood that this was a fairly mundane functional civilization, and that make the weird and awe-inspiring elements a contrast.

Although the Children of the Two Divines(CotD) are now searching the sector for ship parts & hyperdrive co-ordinates,
IMC they ignore all this ‘local scrap’ ( for now), as the ship parts don’t easily mesh with Middle Heaven Standard parts, anymore thanks to the 70+ years of technology divergence. Some of the FTL drives are totally different tech to Weyland's Tachyon Shunt approach(Traveller's Fire, Fusion & Steel and T5 have great material on alternate FTL options - Interplanetary Hop(AlCubbire), Skip(T2300 Stutterwarp, most similar to Aliens Tach Shunt), Jump(constant time J-space).

(We can start another topic on the really interesting physics & speculative sci-fi ideas for long distance travel that Engineers might be able to do - Leap(my understanding of the Lychgate as a 'keyhole drive' opening a closed wormhole network), zero time intragalactic Long Jump tech like Stargate or Dune's psi-transfer, Intergalactic megaparsec jumps like Mass Effect, Great Void crossing drive ideas like Dark Matter Ramjets on your Dyson Sphere , Univeral travel, and Beyond our Universe... See Ian M. Banks Sublimation. But I digress as usual )

This amount of 'junk' also explains why it's taken them a year already without success.

My Theme for all this technological & military-industrial diversity is that ‘humanity when in a crisis is prone to arms races. And shiny new armour & weapons gives a sense of pride and physical security, reduces dangerous youth boredom, anarchy, underemployment, falling birth rates and elites’ despair when your society is in terminal decline…’ and it delays the bleak post-societal lifestyle choices of ‘indefinite cryo sleep(have power & tech), piracy(have transportation) or cannibalism(have air & water)’ before planetary extinction.

Horrifically the latter 2 groups refer to the formers’ as ‘Meat Locker Worlds’ !! Post-extinction places are Tomb-Worlds, if they still have names. Any region with a Tomb World numbering system is a sad place.

Lonely Horror in space...

DX

That's an interesting take, DeusXLondon, with lots of lore potential and much atmosphere added to the Lost Worlds setting. It also gives you a shorthand for downtime/off-screen exploration: "Three weeks have passed since last mission, and you have spent it clearing some space junk in [NAME] system. The shipwrecks had all been looted dozens of times before, but you did manage to secure a few tons of scrap metal although there were little of high value left in the rubble. Now, you're all gathered in the galley for an evening meal when MU/TH/UR alerts you of an incoming transmission from Gaius." ...or whatever.

I'm diggin' it!

That's an interesting take, DeusXLondon, with lots of lore potential and much atmosphere added to the Lost Worlds setting.
...
when MU/TH/UR alerts you of an incoming transmission from Gaius." ...or whatever.

I'm diggin' it!

Thanks, Angelman. Glad you dig it. And yeah, this gives great downtime activity, and makes pirates and other suspect ships much harder to spot vs the Lost World's very empty sector, where everything artificial moving in space is worth investigating. The first ghost hulk salvage is exciting, the 300th less so, but it's a steady small pay check with big possible upside.

Speaking of Incoming transmissions - the other fun physics thing you can do with the remains of old space battles is plot roughly where the light speed spherical radio bubble shell might be, since all that battle coms chatter might be tight-beam lasers, but ship reactor explosions, nuke EMP and unencrypted distress calls will be omni-directional. So similar to Alien:Covenant's triggering radio chatter interception, when the players are doing something else but a bit bored, recognisable decades old human radio signals can be detected from other systems thought uninhabited.

As a GM, since the Lost Worlds timeline isn't tightly defined so no-one knows when or where the battle happened, plus the starmap is a flat projection of 3D stars and there are plenty of counter-intuitive radio effects in space like gravitational lensing , you can use the signals as breadcrumbs to get them to go anywhere you like... And lower tech encrypted radio traffic would be fairly easy for a more advanced ship's mainframe to crack with a few good com tech rolls.

My example I plan to use: From a stray radio broadcast ’ <static> we’ve found the Queen of New Orleans, it’s an intact Southern Alliance Atlanta class carrier, a treasure ship….breaching the airlock now” then radio silence with maybe later a frantic “This is no treasure it’s a tomb….”, and finally only “Oh, god, they’re moving…save yourselves! sounds of pulse rifle fire , <signal lost>"

This should raise enough questions: "When did this happen? Who did it happen to? Who are the Southern Alliance? Why doesn't the New Orleans appear in any period 3WE/UAS or UPP fleet catalogues? Treasure you say?"... Even hardened players will be tempted to take a look, especially if they are already in salvage rather than rescue mode And if they then decide, "hmm, way too much voodoo zombi foreshadowing there, that's a hard Nope!', they are enjoying the Lost Worlds Sandbox autonomy experience and are much more likely to go with whatever dangerous mission Gaius has for them

{As Exile said monster, map & treasure is all you need - and here solvable puzzle, partial map, known horror but anticipation of unknown monster, unknown treasure very much on theme for Aliens. I don't like to overuse Alien 1 & 3's survival horror, so I do give my players decent treasure they can use on ship upgrades, with a little creative thinking and work to convert the tech, as this increases the shared sense of ownership too.}

DX