Alien Evolved

Free League released a new version of their popular science fiction horror roleplaying game based on the movie series, Alien The Roleplaying Game (2020). This new release is known as the Evolved Edition (2025). We’ve played the original game’s cinematic adventures a couple of times, and enjoyed it a lot, but I can see the need for a new edition as there are rough edges.

Alien RPG is a licensed game based on the movie series. It is not content to be a retelling of the movies, and instead positions itself as serious science fiction roleplaying, focusing on themes of humanity’s hubris, motherhood, family, artificial intelligence, and faith, creator versus their creations.

The game uses a modified version of the Year Zero Engine, powering most of Free League’s offering, including Blade Runner and The Walking Dead roleplaying games. It suits Alien really well, even if my favorite version of these rules, and the best match of mechanics to themes, is in Twilight: 2000.

The game comes in two very different flavors: cinematic play and campaign play. I’ve only ever run the cinematic mode. It comes with prewritten adventures and characters, set up to mimic the arc of an Alien movie, typically with infighting between the player characters, and a sticky end for most, if not all, characters.

Campaign play is what you would expect from any science fiction roleplaying game, focusing on one of three campaign frameworks: space truckers, colonial marines, or frontier colonists. I find the problem with all of these frameworks is that once you show the aliens, it will be difficult to de-escalate.

What’s new

Evolved edition comes out with a new Starter Set, containing a lightly expanded version of the short cinematic adventure Hope’s Last Day, originally featured in the first edition rulebook. It focuses on the experiences of the colonists on LV-246, shortly before the events seen in the movie Aliens. You also get a condensed rulebook, which is everything you need to run the contained adventure, or indeed another cinematic adventure: no need to buy the separate hardcover rulebook unless you’re interested in campaign play, world lore, the solo play rules, or character creation.

Compared to the original starter set, Hope’s Last Day is a lot more contained and straightforward, resembling a haunted house more than a sandbox. There is little room for roleplay or character interaction, even if the prewritten character motivations give the players cause to wander and cause trouble. It’s designed to be run in a single session and I’ll give it a go like that, but my gut feeling is it’s better served as a two-part experience.

While I appreciate updating the starter set for the new edition, I’m not sold on replacing the original starter set’s adventure with Hope’s Last Day. While it’s nice to get very high quality maps and tokens for the adventure, this is really limited compared to what you got in the original starter set, which could power three nights of great entertainment, and had a lot of replay value. On the other hand, I can see how the original adventure could be tricky to run, and especially new Game Mothers might struggle with it. This is considerably easier to grasp.

In addition to the new starter set, there’s a new cinematic adventure, Rapture Protocol, starting a new series of adventures called the Jeremiah Arc. The adventure riffs on Alien 3, but does so in a less straightforward manner than the previous cinematic adventures. While the setup resembles Alien 3, the adventure is not set on a prison planet, nor is there a Ripley stand-in with a gestating queen xenomorph. I like the way this expands on the world, tackling questions of faith, and shining a light on the precursor aliens – without answering any questions.

The scenes that have been lifted from the movies are used very well. I love that you get to try the molten metal solution, and how the company arrives at the end to mop up any stragglers.

I haven’t run the adventure yet, but this reads extremely unforgiving. The players are going to need to contend with multiple xenomorphs and hostile humans, while being severely outgunned, and kicked when they’re (probably) down. As usual for Alien cinematic adventures, the prewritten characters come with conflicting motivations and are likely to come to player on player blows in the final act. My group loves that, yours may vary.

There’s also a new Game Mother Screen. It’s really moody, replicating an in-world MU/TH/UR mainframe terminal on the player facing side.

What’s changed

I’ve had issues with the Alien rules, primarily around the stress mechanic. It’s central to the way the game works and the key driver of its tension. In early game, it works beautifully. Unfortunately, as stress totals mount up towards the game’s climax, the rules start to creak. I’m not surprised that this is the main area that sees changes in the new edition.

The book is more compact (313 vs 393 pages), which might be surprising if you consider it’s expanded from the original. The new layout by Johan Nohr is a lot more economical and considerably easier to read, without being cramped.

Hope’s Last Day, the introductory adventure from the original rulebook, is now part of the Starter Set. It’s been replaced by Last Survivor: solo play rules, and a new lifepath system for character creation.

Otherwise the structure and broad content of the rules are identical. Most of the text remains the same. In addition to the revised stress mechanic, the stealth and combat rules have been rewritten.

The first real change is on page 26: Resolve. This is a new statistic, being the average of your Wits and Empathy. It’s used to resist stress and panic, helping players pile on stress dice without the mechanic becoming too overbearing.

Supply Rolls remain a great way of pushing the game’s survival theme to the front. A lot of things can be treated with supply rolls: air reserves, ammunition, power, even time – anything you’re at risk of running out of.

Careers, nine in total, equivalent to character classes in other games, suffer from the same problem they do in Blade Runner RPG: they are under developed. They’re great for rolling up one character with a lot of thematic detail. As soon as you have two from the same template in the game, you’re likely to have repeat details. All of these random tables could use double the content. They’re not bad, they’re just too short.

Stress Response is a new mechanic. This adds a new step to handling stress. You get a more generic stress response with mechanical effects, instead of the agency removing panic effects in the original game. Your Resolve helps with these, as well.

Panic Responses are now reserved for truly signature moments: witnessing someone die next to you, a xenomorph getting in close, and the like. They will not trigger randomly, it’s always by the Game Mother’s call. I like this a lot! A poorly timed panic response in the original game could really mess with the game’s tone. The actual effects are largely the same, but tuned to be less agency removing in the low end – you’re still likely to freeze, attack indiscriminately, or flee, if your stress is maxed out and you roll on this table.

There are still just the twelve Skills. It’s a good skill list with nothing you wouldn’t use in an Alien adventure. There are minor adjustments to things like static modifiers becoming added or subtracted dice.

Talents are Career specific powers. They have all been rewritten to be a lot more concise and streamlined, in many cases also changing their mechanical effects. These are thoughtful, substantial improvements over the originals.

In time and space, Turns have become Stretches, and Engaged has become Adjacent. Countdowns are now tracked as Supply Rolls. This is a good idea!

Stealth Mode happens whenever you’re moving on a map. This has been completely rewritten for clarity and intent. Mechanically, the player characters now only move one zone per Stretch, representing 5-10 minutes, assuming that they’re careful as they do so. Whenever they enter the same space as a non-player character, a passive open opposed Observation roll determines which side sees the other first. They then get to choose if they want to declare their presence, ambush the other party, hide in their zone, or back out of their zone to an adjacent zone. I like how clear these options are, and the mechanics are straightforward. I can potentially see a lot of passive rolling, though.

Immediately upon a PC detecting an NPC or vice versa, initiative is drawn to highlight how tense these encounters are, even if no one is obviously immediately hostile.

Combat has been rewritten. Stunts as a concept are gone, which is welcome, as they broke the natural flow of the game. Instead, if you’re going for a special outcome like a shove or a disarm, you state that upfront, and then your attack doesn’t do damage but rather achieves that outcome, if successful.

We still have the same action economy, with the eleven full (typically requiring a die roll) and quick (typically not requiring a die roll) actions, and you can take either one of both, or two quick actions. It’s not a Dungeons & Dragons type situation where system mastery is required for effective play, and all the options are natural – they’re things you might imagine doing in the situation. The lists have been both cut down a bit and edited for clarity, again a clear improvement over the original, if not a major change.

There’s a new Friendly Fire rule. It’s not uncommon to have a situation where someone (panic) fires at a target next to a friendly, and now we have mechanics for determining if the buddy gets hit.

Ammunition tracking is still done via Supply Rolls. A new option is conserving ammo, which you can do by spending an extra success from an attack roll. Very thematic and a meaningful choice, I like it.

Armor has been streamlined to be a direct subtraction of incoming damage, instead of a roll. Good!

Critical injuries have been revised. It’s largely the same approach with D66 unhappy outcomes, but not quite as unforgiving as the original list. These read more playable at the table. There are a lot more modifiers, fewer agency stripping conditions. Mental trauma (triggered by having a high panic result during a session) options have been expanded into a D66 table from the six options in the original game.

Vehicle rules and gear and technology sections are unchanged.

There are new rules for overcharging FTL drives in space travel, as well as making planetfall. They’re to the point, adding tension to situations that would otherwise be up to the Game Mother to judge.

There are two new, even bigger classes of spaceships (the U and X classes). The components and rules around them have stayed the same. As a detail, where the original book references the time being 2183 AD, the Evolved edition talks about the 2180s. There are now multiple examples of the various classes of spaceships.

Space combat has been rewritten, but is mechanically almost identical. Crew positions are the same, if slightly reworded. Initiative works differently – you don’t draw cards, instead it’s an opposed Command roll. The combat phases remain the same. The Maneuver action from the movement phase has been dropped, as the new edition doesn’t use initiative cards. Space Panic Responses have been rewritten to be, again, less agency limiting, easier to play at the table. Component damage tables remain the same. There’s new rules on particle beam weapons – countermeasures don’t work against them, they only do component damage (no hull damage), and they dissipate over range. Repair rules remain the same.

Game Mother principles and the themes of the game (space horror, sci-fi action, sense of wonder) are unchanged, just easier on the eyes. There is slightly expanded advice on delivering horror at the table, using fear of the unknown, loss of control, and horrible choices as devices.

Governments and corporations are unchanged. There is a little more detail on the Far Reach systems.

On Xenomorphs, there’s a mook rule, dubbed “Aliens mode”: for that war movie feel, you can decide that multiple aliens can just die when hit with heavy weaponry, instead of rolling on the Broken Xenomorph table. There are slight adjustments to the Xenomorph attacks.

Campaign frames, star system creation, and the job generator are mostly unchanged, just easier to read and use. The creation tables are good stuff, and should easily power a game of traveling the stars, looking to get paid. The reward/bonus tables have been reworked. There is more detail across the board for things like which specific company is sponsoring a job.

The Encounters have been expanded in a major way, with lots more to throw at the players during play. Shore Leave is a downtime rule useful for all campaigns. This is all good stuff, and a meaningful addition to the new edition.

The Novgorod Station deep dive remains the same, but it has been substantially expanded with a whole Tartarus Sector briefing. This is plenty to start a game with!

Life Paths are an alternative way of building characters. You get to go on an adventure right there in the character creation, with some control over where you end up, but mostly throwing yourself on the whims of the dice, culminating in a company’s psych evaluation of how much of a screw-up you are. I’ve always loved this approach to character creation, and this looks like a good implementation. I’d love to create a whole crew this way.

There is no introductory adventure like Hope’s Last Day in the original book, as that is now part of the new starter set. I don’t think that’s a big loss, as the expanded setting information on the Tartarus Sector is plenty. And it allows us to get in the last treat:

Rounding off Evolved edition is Last Survivor: solo play rules for Alien roleplaying. These are meant as single session experiences where you will likely perish. The Game Mother is replaced by MAAM: the Mother Analysis and Answer Matrices (a thematic oracle, that is). It uses timers to create tension and bounds for play, again in the shape of Supply Rolls. There are rules for solo stealth, too, and even solo space combat. It’s a comprehensive rule set over 17 pages, not an afterthought. I’m tempted to try it myself, even if I’ve never really got going with solo games before.

The index is just one page, which doesn’t immediately appear adequate. I haven’t tried it during play yet, so hard to judge, though.

Verdict

I am impressed by this new edition, moreso than I expected to be. The layout and usability of the book has taken a gigantic leap forward, and all the changes and additions are thoughtful and welcome. If you’re at all interested in science fiction or horror gaming, this is a good book to pick up.

For just having an Alien experience, go ahead and pick up the new Starter Set and some of the cinematic adventures – the old ones are compatible with the new edition, I don’t think you’d have any real trouble, maybe needing to replace a few Talents that aren’t around anymore. You don’t need the rulebook for anything unless you want to cook your own adventures.