Comments on: Aliens are Going to Kill Us All

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 14:48:13 +0000

(Joe Sixpack) I think it was here on TT, a suggestion of how to start a new campaign. Instead of “You meet in a bar” the players meet in an enormous jar in some monsterous alien’s Earth fauna collection.

I don’t remember seeing that — what a cool idea!

By: Echoes in an Empty World - Treasure Tables

Echoes in an Empty World - Treasure Tables — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 20:31:37 +0000

[...] I’ve been writing material for Twilight: 2013, so I guess I’ve just got post-apocalyptic scenarios on the brain. Close on the heels of last week’s Aliens are Going to Kill Us All comes another set of links from kottke: [...]

By: Bento

Bento — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:04:55 +0000

This reminds me of the game “Mechanoid Invasion” from Palladium. You’re on a planet that alien mechano-bugs have landed on and begun harvesting all your resources.

It was originally published in three small books set on your home planet, then on the alien ship after your world dies, and finally on the alien’s home planet. The second part always looked like fun – you play “mice” on the alien ship!

I always wanted to play that setting, but unfortunately I could never “grok” Palladium’s rules. Maybe I should resurrect it one day for my gaming group?

By: Joe_Sixpack

Joe_Sixpack — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 15:29:32 +0000

I think it was here on TT, a suggestion of how to start a new campaign. Instead of “You meet in a bar” the players meet in an enormous jar in some monsterous alien’s Earth fauna collection.

Quote from aliens masquerading as humans trying to aviod suspicion: “Is this one or your Earth jokes?!”

By: drow

drow — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 20:39:27 +0000

how first contact is likely to happen: one day, out of the blue, we finally receive the message. they’ve heard us, decoded our basic language, and are sending a starship. it uses a sophisticated fusion drive to accelerate to 0.9c, which puts it just a few months behind the message itself. telescopes are aimed, and pick up the deceleration plume just outside pluto’s orbit. months pass, and the starship draws closer and closer. in the meantime, human society radically reorganizes itself, sometimes violently. finally, due to a miscalculation involving different systems of measurement, the starship slams into mars and is completely destroyed.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 19:17:02 +0000

Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict is a great first contact scenario. Here you have a race of aliens that arrive on Earth and want to help us better ourselves…but they have other plans for us. What I liked about the series is that the aliens themselves weren’t one-dimensional. They had their own factions internal that didn’t like “the plan” either.

Another great first contact type scenario is Stargate, where a secret war against aliens threatening Earth is being waged. Here the players actually play the secret government forces, rather than the X-Files style of game where they play the people trying to uncover the conspiracy.

By: John Arcadian

John Arcadian — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 18:38:43 +0000

Alien invasion and Zombie Apocalypse are always two fun ones that kind of run in the same vein. Everyone has a reason to fight in these types of games. In other types of genre you have to have a reason for why your characters are doing the things they are doing, but in these genre it is easy. We fight to survive! That is kind of nice to have and it is outside the bounds of most people’s play style.

By: VV_GM

VV_GM — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 18:28:36 +0000

I like the alien invasion storyline because it is so flexible but universally understood by the players. I can add my twists like the aliens didn’t realize that they were hurting us (seriously, if you got FTL technology are you going to look at us as an advanced and intelligent species?), or that the aliens are not attacking but are tryign to make peaceful contact and we assume that it is an attack. yet the players just know that spacemen are popping up with laser guns and they’ll take it from there. I think it is a lot of fun to run these kinds of games as one shots.

By: Walt C

Walt C — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 18:10:29 +0000

I almost ran an “early days” Star Trek campaign using the movie “Contact” as inspiration.

The Klingons show up and attack without warning, starting the Earth-Klingon War. It seems they got our transmission of Hitler’s speech and thought it was a challenge to their honor.

By: Rick the Wonder Algae

Rick the Wonder Algae — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:43:30 +0000

I’d travel light years away for earth women. Why wouldn’t aliens?

By: Telas

Telas — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:21:54 +0000

Jared D. is rapidly turning into a celebrity, complete with the mandatory virtual lobotomy. (needless and somewhat inflammatory rant redacted) But GG&S was a great book; don’t let his subsequent celebrity take away from that. (See: Stallone and Rocky I vs. …well everything else he’s done.)

We’ve been shouting our presence for decades; if they’re listening, they’ve probably already called the Interstellar Police to complain about our racket. The Galactic Homeowner’s Association probably has the paperwork already going…

And if aliens are out there, they’re going to be so fantastically different from any of our preconceived notions that there is very little we can do to prepare.

But for gaming (wow, that took a lot to get to gaming on a gaming site, didn’t it?), the field, as you say, is wide open. Perhaps the ones who contact us are mean and nasty, but it’s because they’re in a war for survival against something much, much worse… Now that sounds fun.

By: longcoat000

longcoat000 — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:55:36 +0000

But slave-taking Martians with Q36 explosive space modulators are what role-playing is all about! Didn’t you get the gamer-geek handbook?