Following along from the first iteration from Mailanka’s Musings Psi-Wars, I start with a basic concept. I’ll be writing this as I go rather than looking ahead and following his outline, so there may be some contradictions, changes in direction, or some rambling. Here goes…
Bug Hunt will be a generic vision of the colonial marines fighting the xenomorphs. That fills in the action sequences of the movie, but there’s also the background corporate politics to consider. The other movies also make us question ‘where did the alien come from?’ If we ignore all of that, Bug Hunt gives us Dungeon Fantasy in space. That’s probably the best starting point, but ultimately, if I wanted Dungeon Fantasy in space, I’d bust out Games Workshop Space Hulk. Aliens follows up the horror story of Alien with an action story with horror elements.
The marines, while equipped with some of the coolest military gear in any movie, are not impressive. They’re self-described as some ‘baddass hombres,’ but they end up coming up pretty short, and Ripley and a little girl end up having to save the day. In Bug Hunt, I want the marines to be those baddass hombres, so we’re going to start off with some competent characters.
The gear, while high on the coolness factor, looks pretty dated now. The weapons are bulky, and the motion detector and flame units feel like they were only included because they were used in the first movie. The computers and tech look like a joke, and modern HUDs are a lot more sophisticated than what the marines were using. I’ll use the gear from the movie as inspiration, but build up the loadouts from the ground up using future-ified, real-world combat, mission, etc. loads.
While the marines show up in Aliens and the story focuses on their experience, we could tell a drastically different story by picking another spot in the timeline. From the heading ‘The High Frontier’ on page 12 of GURPS Space, we are given a couple of plausible campaigns in Colony Alpha and Survivors and Refugees. Colony Alpha doesn’t give us much in the way of an Aliens game, but is more of a starting point for a survival game. Under ‘Military Campaigns’ we get to Starship Troopers, which sounds pretty fitting. Flipping a couple pages to 17, we get to ‘Media and Politics’ Agents of Terra would work if we wanted to focus on the corporate backstabbing and politics part of the setting.
The three most fitting campaign themes look to follow the Psi-Wars mold pretty closely, though with a very different feel:
For an actual “Bug Hunt” game, the Starship Troopers campaign is really the only fitting one, though we could start characters off as survivors, or we could turn marines into corporate spies readily enough. Starship Troopers feels like primary focus, but leaving that as the only gaming option puts us right back to Dungeon Fantasy in Space. My design steps so far continue to mirror Psi-Wars.
Moving onto scale and scope, I’m still undecided. Aliens doesn’t really touch on scale at all, and FTL travel is just an untouched and ignored afterthought. We’re told that the marines can expect backup in 17 days, while Prometheus has the ship traveling for two years. With current technology, travel to Mars is approximately nine months when orbits are lined up perfectly (with a 500-day wait for the proper window for a nine-month return journey. LV-426 is located 39 lightyears from Earth and is a three week journey (according to the Aliens script). If we assume that there is a marine outpost closer than earth, that accounts for the discrepancy with the 17-day rescue.
For a more “hard” science fiction take, we could follow the example from The Expanse, and stay within our own solar system. As I’m still undecided how I want to handle this, it may be a topic I revisit in the future. Aliens ignores it, so there’s always the option that I can ignore it as well. For communication, the Expanse deals with minutes and hours of delay. If we want days or weeks of delay, we’re going to have to have FTL travel.
As far as the key locations, the colonists, or marines need a somewhat inhospitable planet, moon, rock, whatever to colonize or come to the rescue of. Earth will still be the home of the Mega Corporations (and probably the marines as well). Humans are still the predominant race in the settting, with no other sentient races having been shown (implied yes, but mostly offscreen, and dead; Arturians are mentioned as jab at Frost).
Our key “factions” are our marines, (innocent) colonists, and the megacorps. Mega-Corporations are typically treated as evil organizations, and it’s hard to imagine a Megacorp of do-gooders (I need to standardize how I’m going to refer to the Mega Corporations).
Going to skip over FTL travel and communications for now, and focus on the stuff that happens on-screen. Tech level will be near future, and should be well covered by TL9. All of the weapons we see are conventional slug-throwers, flame throwers (which I’ve chosen to omit), with some references to particle weapons, ship weapons and some possible planet busters. I’ll have to continue working on this later and finish up the technology overview.
I should probably add something here.