Alien RPG Evolved Edition

Before you begin your game of Alien RPG Evolved Edition, you'll need to choose a game mode: a cinematic, three-act one-shot session, or a campaign, a longer-term multi-session affair telling a continuous story. Given that Alien is a horror game, it's also a good time to discuss safety tools. Cinematic games typically use pregenerated characters, while players will often create their own characters for a campaign.

Alien RPG Evolved Edition uses pools of six-sided dice, or d6s. These pools include dice from a character's relevant attribute (Strength, Agility, Wits, and Empathy), the dice from their relevant skill, plus any Stress dice they have. When your character attempts something difficult or dangerous, roll them all together, and if you roll any 6s, you succeed. 1s on Stress dice trigger a stress response, which may reduce your character's effectiveness. Characters accumulate stress through the high-pressure situations the game often puts them through, giving them extra dice, but increasing the risk of stress response. If you roll extra 6s, you might gain extra benefits; if you roll none, your character fails. You can take Stress to "push" your roll, rerolling all your dice and taking the combined result (including all the Stress you accrued).

As you explore derelict spaceships and doomed colonies, movement, stealth, and combat may all become important elements of your game. In Stealth Mode, characters must balance how quickly and quietly they can move with how much they can observe around them as they go. If you get into a fight, against other humans it's your weapons and armor against theirs. But against alien xenomorphs, the GM secretly rolls on a table of their behaviors to find out what inhuman attack or monstrous weapon it might use. In extreme circumstances, this can trigger stress or even panic, an extreme response that can incapacitate an entire party of humans. You'll need to manage stress, oxygen, power, and ammunition if you hope to get out alive.