ALIEN - Contracted: Turning the cult sci-fi horror franchise into a better RPG setting

This is the first in a series of posts on / for ALIEN/S RPGs. As in table top roleplaying. Currently there are two, official iterations of RPGs for the beloved, slimy, space-cyberpunk, body-horror/creature-horror/cosmic-horror franchise: the long-since out of print 1991 ALIENS RPG by Leading Edge Publishing, and the 2020 RPG by Free League Publishing. Both are, in my mind, lacking. The 1991 game has pretty awful, slow, hyper-crunchy rules, and is generally a rather slap-dash affair. The game does expand the setting a small bit and generally presents something that's playable, but could still be more. The 2020 product is gorgeous. A lot of money went into the art direction and overall design of the books. The rules, the actual game here, are very tight, presenting a game that emulates survival stealth horror more than anything. What's lacking in the newer game is the worldbuilding. The world of the 2180s just never quite comes together. Where the 1991 game was too sparse, the 2020 game takes everything and the kitchen sink from the ALIEN/S franchise and mashes it together. The result is... Messy. 

I will give the 2020 game this: official interviews with lead writer Andrew Gaska indicate that the team was quite limited in what they could actually do. They could only use existing background information for the RPG. They could not produce much new stuff of their own design, as that would not pass the muster of 20th Century Fox Studios' "franchise control." So the result is a background setting that's glued together with one hand tied behind the writers' backs. 

 And that's the beautiful thing about unlicensed fan projects - They have no such restraints. Now here is where I want to take the setting, the questions I have, and some suggested answers/solutions to those questions.

One of the issues I have with the setting as presented is that it feels very... Small. The RPG doesn't expand things, and it seems difficult to explore stories beyond the narrow confines of "xenomorph exists - W-Y wants it - hijinks ensue!" This is likely due to the nature of the contract and license, and the stipulation that the writers could not meaningfully expand the setting beyond already existing materials. Basically, the (excellent) video game ALIEN ISOLATION did more there than the RPG. But then this was more of a flagship title that could do more to expand and reshape the setting, with fewer limitations.

Basically, I want to try and expand the ALIEN/S universe so that Weyland-Yutani is no longer quite as prominent, the Xenomorphs are no longer as central and also are no longer as predictable and more alien again. I would like for other stories than ones directly related to the creatures be more readily playable. I want to lay out how the setting can have some more internal consistency while drawing upon more real-world influences and fewer self-references / references from other ancillary materials from the broader franchise.

And because this expansion of the universe is in many ways a contraction in which I lop off parts that I don't think are too fitting, I thought I'd call this thing ALIEN CONTRACTED.

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Where does CONTRACTED's world building differ from ALIEN RPG?

This is all down to the setting and world building. 

One of the places I start is with Weyland-Yutani. Sure, it is a big company. But it's not the only company. The setting grows if we can dial W-Y's dominance down a bit. Let's have them be a bit more like, say, Lockheed/Martin. They have their own agenda, but ultimately are more interested in lucrative public/private partnerships than in being their own nation-state. W-Y builds better worlds that will come under the jurisdiction of specific nation-states. The official ALIEN universe seems quite tiny due to just how much W-Y dominates everything. And in the FLP RPG I can trace this back, directly, to the official WEYLAND-YUTANI REPORT. This is a 2016 book presenting a fictionalized account of the Big Bad Company about its then-centuries long quest to capture the Xenomorph. This book contains an official timeline and history of Weyland-Yutani, that seems... Weird. A huge problem is that according to this book, Weyland-Yutani and Peter Weyland, the founder of the company, are the true lynchpins of humanity in the twenty-second century. Weyland personally invented all the things that make the setting: androids, faster-than-light travel, crysleep/hypersleep chambers, and atmosphere processing/terraforming. Worse, Weyland-Yutani solved both climate change, and cured cancer. The RPG unquestioningly takes this timeline and history of the world over. This singular focus on Weyland-Yutani and Peter Weyland makes the setting seem claustrophobically small.

More corporations, more companies, more competition makes the universe bigger and overall more real-feeling. Let's come up with more companies like Seegson. Interstellar shipping companies. MAERSK but interstellar. And since ALIEN is an old-school cyberpunk universe, so looking to Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020 would yield a few ideas as to what kind of operations could populate this place. There should be a few private military outfits, more starship builders, more companies that specialize in synthetics. We could leave the Tyrell Corporation around. Or the Wallace Corporation, for that matter. Diversify the setting. That also introduces more conflict.

And to see how we can do that, look at ALIEN ISOLATION. In the first level the player encounters a smattering of companies that exist alongside that game's big corporate villains, Seegson and W-Y: Watasumi Efficient Machine Solutions, HanTec, and Mühler & Milland. All of these are companies the Torrens, the ship the protagonist travels in, flew for. Here ALIEN ISOLATION does a much better job of expanding the setting. The game introduces the Seegson Corporation in great detail, but also features a whole lot of other companies and corporations that are mentioned in passing. Sure, W-Y is still the big bad, but not the only player in town. The game and its artbook are generally great to fill the ALIEN universe with everyday items without going for "well the brand of diapers you buy is Weyland-Yutani."

Also the corporate-nation state relationships as portrayed in the FLP RPG make little sense, neither in terms of real-world logic nor in genre conventions. Corporations don't want to act like nation-states, that costs too much money and is generally not beneficial to the bottom line. Yes, corporations and nation-states act in conjunction, but not like this. What corporations want is unfettered access to tax-payer money in form of government contracts. Why would corporations engage in extra-planetary colonization if not prompted by government mandates? Corporations don't collect taxes. Corporations don't write legislation - or enforce it. Yes they have their hands in those things, but not directly. Again, this introduces more conflict. W-Y has to compete with other companies for government contracts to build new colonies to fall under specific jurisdictions. W-Y should not themselves have a massive contingent of mercenaries, but hire on troops from dedicated corporate partners that specialize in these matters. Also since W-Y cooperates with the USCM corps, they don't need much of their own military. It's much cheaper to have a nation-state foot that bill.

That corporations have cleaned up earth and cured cancer and then independently of governments headed to the stars just seems out of touch with the spirit of Alien. There is no real rhyme or reason as to why space colonization happened. To get away from earth? But they fixed it! Just because? The canonical take seems to be that corporations settled space to get more resources, but to what end?

One thing I do like about the FLP game is that they state space faring favors neurodiversity and that neuroatypical people generally can deal with being in space better. Because being in space is extremely disconcerting. It's both agoraphobia triggering AND claustrophobia triggering at the same time. You're in a very cramped space that separates you from a dark, endless void

What pieces of ALIEN/S media is canonical in CONTRACTED?

Alien, Aliens Director's Cut, Alien 3 Assembly Cut. Alien Isolation. Those are the main pieces of franchise media that can -mostly- stand as they are. The ALIEN Director's Cut scenes that show the creature turning the crew members into eggs should also be considered canonical. Also since ALIEN ISOLATION is canonical, that means the ALIENS Extended Cut is canonical, what with that cut introducing Amanda Ripley.

The William Gibson script for ALIEN3 has some interesting elements, but it cannot be canonical if Alien 3 as it is remains in our canon. The parts that CONTRACTED adopts are: the League of Progressive Peoples, Anchorpoint Station, Bodymorphs, Xenomorph cells infecting android tissue, xenomorphs spreading through microbes.

Anchorpoint remains intact. Since ALIEN3 happened as is, the events of the William Gibson script can not have happened. But we can take over the setting.

Prometheus / Alien Covenant are more difficult. Here's things I would take over: the Engineers exist and created the Black Goo that is part of a hyper evolution / planetary life-seeding design - but if the Black Goo is used recklessly, it will hyper-evolve lifeforms that within a few cycles *always* result in the creation of something like the Xenomorph, which is an *accidental* evolutionary pinnacle. Hence the Neomorphs on Paradise/Planet 4 of ALIEN COVENANT which are not really Xenomorphs. David did not create the Xenomorphs by himself. He created a VARIANT since that is always where the Black Goo simply gravitates towards.

The reasoning for my interpretation here is that if the Engineers have the Black Goo, they would have no real need for Xenomorphs. They could just unleash the Goo on a planet and have it work its way. Of course there is a possibility that the Xenomorphs would ultimately be easier to control than the wild-type Goo creations… But that would run against the theme that the Xenomorphs *cannot* be controlled. Ultimately the Goo would be MUCH, MUCH more useful for the Company than the Xenos, but the irony is that they don't really understand that. Maybe David did. But also, the Goo would be even more devastatingly harmful to humanity as a whole…

The ALIENS COLONIAL MARINES TECHNICAL MANUAL (1996) provides a plethora of decent worldbuilding for the setting. What it lacks is who exactly the Colonial Marines are fighting and why. 

In terms of other, ancillary franchise media, some of the comics and novels offer ideas worth considering, but overall there is little in there that I would personally want to include. ALIENS - OUTBREAK is a decent alternative ALIEN 3 story, especially the idea of the Xenomorph cult is intriguing. Most other comics don't engage with ideas related to the setting that I find particularly interesting.

Anything else I would discard. ALIEN RESURRECTION is a fine sci-fi horror farce, but just doesn't fit into the setting I am building here. Most of the other comics and novels lack interesting additions. 

Now what do I add here? 

Earth

Earth should be overpopulated, crowded, and mostly a place to get away from. Still, most of humanity lives here. For the foreseeable future this will not change. The movers and shakers of the setting likely don't live on Earth simply because Earth is dirty and awful and it's easily possible to live someplace else where a very influential and wealthy person can basically create their own domain, far away from the rabble.

If we extrapolate from Blade Runner - assuming that both BR and ALIEN share the same timeline, then Earth is just ruined. While the FLP RPG describes that W-Y has essentially cleaned up the damage done by climate change, I find this both too optimistic and again too centered on W-Y as the absolute linchpin of the setting. It further shrinks everything down. Earth should suck. Really suck. Space also sucks, but in different ways. And maybe W-Y futzed around with trying to fix earth with terraforming, but how about they *failed* with those attempts because, well… I would liken this to the difference between renovating a house and building one new. In ALIEN CONTRACTED Earth is still a global warming hellhole, one that was made worse by corporations trying to meddle. Corporate hubris failed. Terraforming earth failed. Because FIXING earth's broken climate system turned out to be much more difficult and costly than creating a new atmosphere from scratch.

Why going off-world in the first place?

So off-world colonies are maybe not quite fun as advertised, but still "a place to begin again" for most people. For corporations off-world colonies, when they can get big enough, represent new markets. New markets to sell stuff to both individuals and governments and to other corporations.

I'm not sure if Earth should still be as central as it is. What does conflict between fractions in this universe look like if the factions' leaderships are all clustered together on Earth ultimately? Granted, there is a way to play up the *colonial* angle and have space colonies act like 18th century colonies.

When it comes to mass space settlement and viability, the big issue is always that if we want to stay realistic, there will always be the problem of getting off Earth and escaping the gravity well of our home planet. That's what massively curtails getting people and stuff off world. But I think that problem doesn't quite exist as much in the ALIEN universe. After all, star ships in the setting have artificial gravity. Also at least according to the Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual, FTL flight works by screwing around with gravity and mass. This would indicate to me that leaving planetary gravity wells in the setting is not something that is exclusively done with heavy lift rockets, but also with some rubber sciencey implements that can screw around with the mass of whatever needs to go in orbit. How exactly that happens doesn't matter, but to me, personally it matters that I can point to a consideration of how easy or hard it is getting stuff into space from a planetary surface. The Nostromo, a massively heavy ship, can take off from LV-246, which seems to have close to Earth's gravity, with little issue. The same is true for the iconic Cheyenne drop ships in Aliens. So as the movies demonstrate, gravity wells do not pose much of a challenge. Which, consequently, also makes resource mining on alien worlds more lucrative since getting those resources out of the gravity wells is no longer so expensive that planet lifting will eat up all possible profits.

But this also means that getting large amounts of people off world isn't much of a problem. And with artificial gravity being a thing, large off-world colonies can fairly easily exist. Of course, the machines that negate gravity are likely prohibitively expensive to build and maintain, so that only corporations, nation-state entities, and military can afford them.

Borders in space

This is a concept introduced mostly by the Gibson script and its introduction of the UPP. Which is fine, conceptually. It makes for easier RPG map creation if you can show a star map with clear territorial boundaries. But in terms of interesting world building, this is thinking in too terrestrial terms. Two-dimensional star maps are… Difficult and incomplete. Interstellar borders would be impossible to control, especially with the tech level of the ALIEN universe. Instead I would propose a universe with no real, fixed, traditional borders in space, but instead with a chaotic smattering of colonized systems with little cohesion. Blockades, border skirmishes, etc. are not really things that would happen in a setting like this. A star system can have planets that are each held by a different party. There can still be a frontier though, a part of space that is at the, well, edge of colonized, explored space.

Actual Cold War inspirations

The neo Cold War between the UPP and the rest of the world deserves some more attention. I found the history of Tetris for example would make an interesting inspiration, in which a UPP engineer develops something that someone on the other side of the space iron curtain would like to sell. https://youtu.be/_fQtxKmgJC8

Other worldbuilding considerations to dig out from Prometheus/Covenant:

• Peter Weyland sure was smart, but he wasn't the hyper-genius. He did not *personally* invent androids, terraforming, *and* the FTL drive. Can we please not. Weyland in CONTRACTED is more of an Elon Musk like figure: a charlatan with good PR. Sure he would CLAIM that he did those things. But actually his companies and his own engineers (not himself, personally) did invent SOME of the technology that lead to SOME breakthroughs. He invested his money well and cheated others out of theirs, bullied other companies out of their patents, and underpaid his workers which lead to his stupefying, ultimately unearned hyper robber baron wealth. Come on. The ALIEN universe is supposed to have an anti-capitalist message. Let's not have Peter Weyland be an actual superhuman. He can be powerful, yes. Full of hubris, yes. Done SOME of the things he said, yes. But only from a certain point of view. And not ALL the things he and his fans say he did. The ALIEN RPG reads like corporate propaganda in that vein. Weyland-Yutani can still be a big, important company. But it's much better if it is "some Anglo-Jap shop" like described in the ALIENS CM TECHNICAL MANUAL. That way the setting can breathe more and have more room for other stuff to happen that doesn't always and inevitably come back to W-Y.

• The COVENANT was not the one and only colony ship of its kind. It was one out of many. By stating the the Covenant was the first and apparently the only ship of its kind, the Alien setting again grows small. This should have been one of many. Not even the first. Just like the Nostromo was not the ONLY ore freighter.

What does the Company need the Xenomorphs for? What are the concrete uses?

This is something that has always remained nebulous and poorly thought out and not very satisfying for me. There is a "bio-weapons division" of WY that wants to get their hands on Xenomorphs for reasons not quite clear. For "weaponization" - but what that actually looks like is very vague. On the one hand, the Xenomorphs *are* a living weapon of mass destruction, a civilization ender - at least in the timeline in which David doesn't stumble into inventing them. On the other hand… Well? What could a ruthless research laboratory - corporate or otherwise - actually do with access to xenomorph material?

• Shadowrun-like guardian critters: the Xenomorphs are formidable, and unleashing them onto a (human-settled) enemy planet could end that planet quickly. BUT - if we stick to the movies, who would be an enemy deserving of such treatment? The FLP game introduces the Union of Progressive Peoples from the Gibson Script, an ersatz Soviet Union in space that the capitalist parts of the human race are in a state of cold war with. That raises the question: is warfare using LIVING WEAPONS a thing in the ALIEN universe? The marines talk about bug hunts. What if those missions are not about fighting "cockroaches the size of poodles" but cleaning up neo-genetic monstrosities cooked up in UPP labs? Monstrosities unleashed by rivaling corporations? Through this, the "bio weapons division" gets a different reason for existing beyond a vague "they want the Xenomorphs because they want them." This would imply a sort of war-beast warfare, that is not quite like the ways in which the comics etc. have portrayed "weaponized" xenomorphs as glorified, shrieky k-9 units. 

  And of course all of these applications have the tendency guarantee to go extremely wrong.

• Xenomorphs as weapons of mass destruction: that's what they already are. Drop a few eggs on a planet, let them do their thing. But then what? Congratulations, you created a planet full of deadly living weapons.

• Xenomorphs as source of new wetware implants: this would move away from using the whole creatures and into using alien materials and DNA parts to create… What exactly? The Weyalnd-Yutani Report introduces a few ideas here, but doesn't quite push the envelope. The xenomorphs are BIOMECHANICAL creatures, they are not (quite / solely) carbon based. So how would you make them compatible with people? But then facehuggers / chestbursters already interact with human tissue. Would there be a way to use them to create implants? Cures? 

  Of course here the horror would be to have some science team find miraculous applications for Xenomorph stuff only to find out that after a while everything leads back to chest/body bursters. This treatment was supposed to make people significantly hardened to radiation. Side effect is that after half a year, a chestburster develops and WHOOPS we have an outbreak. - But Xenomorphs have such fascinating abilities that WY might want to recreate. Hardened to radiation. No need for oxygen or atmosphere. Biological armor. What if we could add those traits to a new human gene line? We can deal with the side-effects later.

• Android development: Xenomorphs are biomechanical. Androids are… Well this IS technically the same universe as Blade Runner, so ANDROIDS/Replicants are ALSO biomechanical. Therefore, crossing Xenomorphs and androids would probably be an even better fit than humans. Bonus: Androids infused with Xeno wetware would (probably?) not start to have chestbursters. They will however start growing Ovomorphs. And WHOOPS we have an outbreak again.

  - Other materials: Material science divisions would probably be quite interested in the secreted resin, and other things the creatures do. 
  

A common thread here is that xenomorph tech is ultimately always unusable because it always results in new outbreaks. This leads me to...

Xenomorph / Engineer Black Goo Rules

1: Xenomorph biotech can not be tamed. No matter what the WY scientists think, no matter how good they are, any and all variations lead to outbreaks. Implant a person with a piece of wetware that is based on Xenomorph DNA? After a few months they will give birth to a -burster. Create an android / replicant with Xenomorph traits? After a few months they will grow an ovomoprh and either spread Xeno microbes or a facehugger.

2: Xenomorphs cannot be tamed. The only utility they would have is to drop eggs on a hostile planet and then quarantine the planet forever. There is no off-switch. They are absolute.

3: Black Goo that is weaponized or uncontrolled - so essentially all of it out there since there are no more Engineers around this part of the galaxy who could control it - will inevitably and always lead to the creation of a variation of the Xenomorph. This might take a few generations (Shaw -> Star polyp -> engineer -> deacon / Paradise inhabitants -> unknown number of generations -> spore fungi -> Ledward/Hallet -> Neomorph, etc.) but something with Xenomorph-like features eventually always emerges if the Goo is left to do what it does for long enough.

That is my personal interpretation of the Engineer murals seen in PROMETHEUS.

What other creatures are there**?**

The universe is a very big place, and while the Engineers were busy in their time, they and their creation are not the only things out there that make people run and hide.

Keeping with the idea that using genetically engineered creatures for warfare is a thing in-universe, there is a whole array of war beasts out there, used in the war across the stars between corporations, the United Americas, Three World Empire and the Union of Progressive Peoples. War beasts and androids are used in conjunction on critical worlds in pre-colonization phases. War beasts are built in a similar way to androids, just that they are not terribly intelligent. Engagements of war beast on war beast are rare. The UPP's war beasts tend to be mostly gene engineered creatures, the corporate war beasts tend to feature heavier incorporation of cybernetic elements, which makes them more expensive to manufacture, but also more durable and easier to control.

Other bioweapons consist of swarms, essentially genetically altered insects, employed to attack and incapacitate enemies. 

Also there is the plethora of genengineered diseases.

But there are also other creature out there in the void that are of concern.

For example:

Some outward colonies have reported encounters with a microorganism that reanimates and reshapes dead tissue. This is not spreading like an infection, but the reanimated bodies and resulting creatures do tend to produce more death and thereby more creatures. Living beings are not affected, and the organisms can only infect bodies that have been dead for a few days, so the spread is slow. Where they exist, colonists need to be extremely careful in disposing of all dead bodies and keeping all meat and meat products sealed off. Where this microbe comes from is unclear. Was this a bioweapon by whoever the Engineers fought in their cosmic war? Was this a failed Engineer project? Did this creature develop independently? Not all life in the galaxy comes from the Engineers - or does it? If this is not Engineer related, then why can this microbe interact with carbon-based life?

Aggressive wildlife is often a problem in space colonies across the galaxy. But this wildlife is just, that: alien animals that have little other reason to oppose humans than just defense of their habitat. Some alien wildlife has nasty side effects on people, like triggering massive allergic reactions through secretions, other wildlife carries pathogens that have proven deadly to humans. And some extraterrestrial fauna is highly radioactive. Keeping extra-terrestrial creatures away from human habitats on colony worlds is not an easy endeavor and usually requires investment in xenobiologists to study the local flora and fauna to ensure the safety of the colonists. But more colonists are usually easy to find and xenbiological studies are usually not cheap, so many a colony will endure trouble with local wildlife until this trouble begins to cost enough to warrant bringing in scientists.

Where does the Derelict in ALIEN/ALIENS come from in CONTRACTED?

First of all, it's old. Very, very, very old. The Engineer in the pilot seat is *fossilized* that’s how old it is. If we want to make sure that Prometheus and Covenant fit in with the rest of the timeline, the Derelict *can not* have anything to do with the immediate events of those movies.

However! The derelict is on the moon LV-246, close to the Engineer installation in Prometheus on LV-233. The LV-233 installation was abandoned after some sort of accident. And it is not entirely impossible that the installation is similarly very, very, very old.

So: In the CONTRACTED timeline, the Engineers were involved in an interstellar war, which they lost, which was the reason they stopped coming to Earth or any of the other seeded planets. Who was the war against? Unknown. Internecine warfare, warfare against some other civilization / species that has long since gone extinct, or moved on, who knows. What matters is, the installation sprung a leak during this war, the Goo got out. It bred Xenmorphs. This is supported by the goo creating the starfish polyp within Dr. Shaw, which then results in the Deacon after the starfish infects an Engineer: weaponized / uncontrolled Goo *always* results in a hyper-evolution towards Xenomorphs as the end stage, the PERFECT ORGANISM. Just like life on earth keeps evolving into crabs.

So the Engineers started to evacuate LV-233 after becoming aware of the infestation, but at least one of the ships already had some Xenomorphs on board, they infected the pilot, the ship crashed on the nearby moon of LV246… Something along those lines. Maybe the pilot was infected before leaving. The details don't matter that much. But that's where the Xenos in ALIEN come from.

And since they are the inevitable pinnacle of Black Goo hyperevolution, and since weaponized Black Goo would have been used more freely across other planets… Chances are that there's a lot more creatures like the Xenomorph out there…