ALIEN the Roleplaying Game (Colonial Marines Operations Manual)

The Colonial Marine Operations Manual is a supplementary product for Alien the Roleplaying Game. If this is your first exposure to the game you can read our reviews of the Core Rulebook and Starter Box, then come back here.

I started my original Alien RPG review with a confession. I’m nothing if not consistent when it comes to kicking dead horses, so I have a confession. It’s not as big of a confession as the last one, but a confession nevertheless. I screwed up and started writing this too early. I hate working from PDFs, but was on the road, needed reading material, and had this handy to start. I thought Colonial Marines Operations Manual came before the Destroyer of Worlds cinematic campaign box. It doesn’t. In fact, one of the cool things about the Colonial Marines Sourcebook is that it actively references the previous storyline put out in Chariot of the Gods and Destroyer of Worlds. If you have those, that’s great. You are in for a treat as your players create a massive campaign, along with the new Heart of Darkness cinematic campaign box. 

Even though Colonial Marines references those previous missions, they aren’t mandatory to have played in any way. The book is split into three sections, and I’m starting at the end here by talking adventures. The Missions included are not a linear cinematic campaign, but more along the lines of a series of individual television episodes with a vivid story arc and a big season-ending finale. There are six full blown adventures (roughly 20 pages each) that can be played in any order, and another six side missions that can be dropped in to spread things out. Again, having not looked at Destroyer of Worlds yet I don’t know how much, if any, of this could be integrated and intermixed with that. All of the main missions form parts of a “Metapuzzle” that allows the players to unknowingly learn what they will need to know going into a seventh climactic adventure.

Each Adventure is formatted the same. They each start with a brief introduction (intended for the Game Mother), a quick note on any specialty gear they have been given by the Corps, “What’s the situation, MU/TH/UR?” for the players and What’s really going on for the GM and how the different Metapuzzle pieces could be learned by the players. After the Players arrive at their Insertion point, the GM gets everything they could need to run the adventure. Locations, Maps, NPCs, all that good stuff that has all the spoilers in it. 

The adventures are very well constructed to be easy to run for the GM and fun to run through for the players. Free League consistently puts out five-star, three-thumbs up, products and the Colonial Marines Operations Manual is no different. They even include a section on Alternative Uses for the locations, allowing them to be tweaked and used again in a home-brew campaign. If there’s one thing that even the real world military and corporate overloads like, it’s consistency. So one Spaceport, or Relay Station, or Science Facility is going to be largely the same as the next, even if that’s not what the structure may be housing at the moment.

Backing up a few chapters lands us at the start of the very large and detailed Game Mother Section of the book. Starting with the ins and outs of a general Marine Campaign, the makeup of a landing team, and the military structure they fall within. Then it’s some Systems and Bases that players could find themselves, off-the-books Black Projects being conducted by different governments and corporations, and finally using The Frontier War as an overarching campaign setting.

Backing up again and we find ourselves at the beginning of the book and the beginning of the Player’s Section. The universe created in the Alien movie franchise may not be the first thing you think of when someone asks you to rattle off big pangalactic space settings, but it nevertheless is one of the biggest and most well-fleshed out. This book goes through a decent sized history lesson, focusing on the United States Colonial Marine Corps (USMC), its predecessors and their contemporaries. I would be remiss if I didn’t give special mention to the Canadian Colonial Armed Forces (CCAF). We Canadians have always been pretty darned effective in Amphibious Warfare, Security, and Defence. There is no “peacekeeping” in this future, only peacemaking. With the perfunctory academics out of the way, it become time to pick up a very big gun. Arguably the most important chapters for players involve Making Marines and of course their Gear. 

The Core Rulebook does a good job of character creation, including Pilots and Officers within the USMC. It has to, that’s why it’s called the Core rulebook. By the same token, it’s not called the Corps rulebook. The Making Marines chapter goes into greater detail and allows for the creation of Marines with all sorts of different Military Occupation Specialities, and then equip them with anything from a pistol to a destroyer-class starship. Well, vehicles and ships are included in the Gear chapter, but you don’t really equip your character with those. It might be more accurate to say you equip that ship with your marine. But you get the point.

This book could easily be adjusted to work in a ton of game systems. Although, I don’t really know why you’d want to try to bring any of the Player Section into a different system. Most of the setting information could be ported over, but the Mutant Zero Engine is a perfectly good system all on its own. But the seven adventure campaign could be adapted into any number of systems or settings. Even just working with, and using, the Metapuzzle style of adventure connection makes the Colonial Marines Operations Manual a must-have. You wouldn’t want to drop a bunch of kids directly into these adventures, but some of the major plot points, and again the Metapuzzle (adapted well out of its original context) would make for a majorly messed up campaign for Tales From The Loop or Things From the Flood (which uses the same rule system, minus the violent horror elements). 

If you enjoy the sort of dark/horror sci-fi that is the Alien franchise but haven’t already played the Alien RPG, you should. If you play any sort of sci-fi RPG, this is probably worth picking up, full stop. There aren’t many campaign books out there that would be easy enough to be worth adapting to other rules systems, but this is definitely one of them. But really, just go Alien.

ALIEN The Roleplaying Game has its own website at alien-rpg.com.

You can find Free League Publishing online at www.freeleaguepublishing.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/FriaLigan.