Alien RPG Evolved Edition Starter Set review: "My players were genuinely freaked out"

The Alien RPG is back! Or, if you're somebody like me who's been playing it regularly, it never really left.

The original Alien tabletop roleplaying game by Free League was pioneered by a starter one-shot called "Hope's Last Day," back then given out as part and parcel of the core rulebook. But now that Alien has been reinvented for a second, Evolved Edition, Hope's Last Day has also been rebuilt for that experience, with a whole new Starter Set to go with it, giving players the chance to leap directly into the fray with one of the best tabletop RPGs and experience a new era of grisly cosmic horror, and maybe also the chance to squash a xeno with a – wait, they didn't include the Power Loader?! Zero stars!

Alien RPG Evolved Edition Starter Set features & design

• A full set of nuanced game maps and accessories for play
• Enough rules to play this adventure, and not much further than that
• A lot of useful tools to meet inexperienced players halfway

The Alien Starter Set has pretty much everything that players need for a taste of the broader Alien RPG experience, and arguably a little extra. There's a short adventure – the aforementioned "Hope's Last Day" – a full set of dice, a truncated version of the rules, some character sheets, tokens featuring a lot of pale, worried characters, genuinely superb game maps, and even some cheat sheet handouts for the most common rules, so people don't have to keep asking the Game Master for help. There's even a little plastic Xenomorph mini! Cute. Well, cute-ish.

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To clarify, this is absolutely everything you'd need to play the attached module comfortably, though it's certainly not going to cover the full scope of the experience outside of the starter set. That might sound obvious, but some similar kits have a little more flexibility, allowing you to stretch what's there beyond the limits of the box. In this case, I'd say not so much – you can definitely use the tokens and cheat sheets for your own games, but the rules are slashed to the essentials without an ounce of fat, and there's only a few options for enemies and items included. What's here will serve you amply when it comes to running Hope's Last Day, but it'd be tough getting traction beyond that without buying the core rulebook.

Gameplay

• A superb escalation of tension across three acts
• Not a huge amount of opportunities for RP
• A major emphasis on vulnerability and quick fights

So let's talk about Hope's Last Day (from here on abbreviated to HLD). This adventure was originally a bonus extra included with the 1st Edition Alien RPG core rulebook, and oddly enough this rewritten version for the Starter Set feels a bit smaller, despite now having the starring role. That's not inherently bad – it's a slimmer form of what was there before, for better and worse.

In both versions, HLD takes place mere hours before the events of the second Alien movie, in the very same Hadley's Hope colony that would so famously push 1986 Sigourney Weaver to her limits. Players commandeer a group of workers who are returning to the colony from a survey expedition, only to come back to a war-torn outpost overrun by slinking horrors, the outbreak having occurred in their absence. The adventure quickly becomes an escape mission, one complicated by individual secret agendas designed to place the players at odds with one another. After all, it goes without saying that somebody will have to play a Weyland-Yutani douchebag trying to box up a live facehugger. Would it really be an Alien story otherwise?

With both incarnations in front of me and having run both of them, I can comfortably say that this is broadly the same adventure, but a little leaner and more focused. Chances for RP are a little thinner, but the pace is quicker and more control is placed in the hands of the Game Master – or "Game Mother", to use the appropriate terminology. Either way, the tone shifts organically from creeping tension in the opening act, as the players try to work out what's going on, to full-on action in the finale as they flee the growing horde of slathering atrocities.

If you want to know what's different to the original in terms of rules – well, our Alien RPG Evolved Rules review will give a broader summary, but a few pointers: stress is now tweaked and a little more thinly spread, so players don't start screaming and shooting guns in the air when they forget their computer password, and both players and enemies have generally had their durability toned down, resulting in high tension firefights where every attack could be fatal – a change that makes the fear all the more palpable.

Speaking from experience, my players were genuinely freaked out by the first act, which plays up the dread nicely. And that isn't even punctured by the reveal of the xenomorphs, as a single slobbering xeno managed to do enough damage and leave enough of an impression in a brief skirmish to make the players terrified of a second encounter. All participants agreed afterwards that it was one of the best horror TTRPG experiences they'd ever had in years of play, though were split on the aforementioned character agendas – less experienced players found them to be useful, while veterans saw them as unnecessary.

Should you buy the Alien RPG Evolved Edition Starter Set?

Bluntly, yes. If you've not played Free League's Alien before, this is probably the best entry point to one of the best TTRPGs out there. I'd say the Evolved Rules are only marginally better than the previous edition, but that's a marginal improvement over what was already a genuine masterpiece. Though I doubt anybody would need more than a couple of sessions to run Hope's Last Day, it's still a great module and lifting off point. Grab, savour it, and try to resist the urge to immediately buy the core rulebook afterwards. I can't lie to you about your chances on that score, but… Oh, you know the rest.

Ratings

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

How we tested the Alien RPG Evolved Edition Starter Set

I ran the Hope's Last Day module for two separate groups of players, following the rules as written as closely as possible. One group featured very experienced TTRPG players, the other less so, with one or two exceptions. I'd like to thank Benjamin, Elliott, Alex, Phoebe, Heather, Serena, Amy, Matt, my girlfriend Elizabeth, and Egg the Jack Russell for their involvement.

For more on our testing process, see the wider GamesRadar+ reviews policy.

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