Destroyer of Worlds is the second cinematic scenario for the Alien RPG, published by Free League. It’s a three act romp across a war torn moon, with the players taking on the roles of colonial marines thrown into a maelstrom of insurgency, bioweapon development and planetary invasion.
I’ve run this module twice now, once in the official Alien system and once in my own system.
I bought a physical copy of Destroyer of Worlds from a bricks and mortar store in Mega City 1 as well as the digital assets for foundry virtual table top. I can’t recall the exact pricing, but I think I’ve since had my money’s worth out of the physical module. The hand out maps in this module are an excellent edition, though I would have liked to have seen a mission brief handout including info on the AWOL marines for the players.
I’m on the fence with regards to the value of the foundry assets, I bought them because I was short on time to get the virtual tabletop set up. I don’t think they added a huge amount of wow factor or immersion for the players.
The first time I ran this scenario I ran it pretty much by the book and it took about 15 hours to complete. The only change I made was slightly tweaking some of the agendas as a few were a little bland.
The players had a blast and it served as a nice launchpad for a colonial marines campaign, with one player falling in love with their character (Chaplain) so much that they carried them over. I don’t feel like the Alien system held up particularly well to a module that has such a high potential for combat. By the time we got to act 3 people were struggling to pass any tests without panicking, despite having the chance to rest up to reduce their stress.
One of the big problems I have with the Alien RPG stress system really came out here in that the panic table can end up producing results that just don’t quite fit what is going on, or repeat results that break immersion when they happen multiple times. This puts quite a burden on the GM to try and make some of these results fit, or just pick a result which is too much GM fiat to my liking. On top of this the potential for a player to roll panic and nothing at all to happen if they score “keeping it together” feels like it wastes table time.
Running this module again I had the benefit of hindsight and tweaked a few things to try and get a more steady ramp of tension across the three acts. As one of my players was playing for the second time I prepared an entirely new fast for the players to pick from, with new agendas. I also opted to use my sci fi system both as a play test and to try and avoid some of the issues with the Alien system mentioned above.
On the second run through I really leaned in to the first act being a manhunt, keeping the alien in the shadows rather than an overt threat. This produced much more tension over the sessions as I got to bait and switch a few times with when a showdown with the xenomorphs was going to happen.
The second act was kept as a desperate race to get back to the fort with insurgent ambushes and some meddling from Leyland Yutani. I slowly built up the pressure here, looking to get the party to exhaust some of their resources (inventory items and stress) so that they’d be feeling the desperation for the final act.
I did make a fairly major change to the plot here, removing the act 2 finale that is suggested in the module. I’ve seen online that I’m not the only one who has done this. Going into the specifics would necessitate spoilers, but in short I feel like this part of the scenario only serves to railroad the players, cutting down their options too much.
Destroyer of Worlds has a really great final act and in both of my playthroughs it had all the best bits of Aliens: Ambushes from vents, pitched battles in corridors, pulse rifles and a mad race to escape before the whole place was blown sky high by a nuke.
If you want some extra insights on this scenario RPG Nook and One Shot Adventures have got videos on this module over on youtube that I found useful.
This module has some neat ideas in it, the events and setting are a framework for letting your players scratch their Colonial Marines itch. That being said, I have some concerns that as written the module is a railroad with quite limited options for creative solutions from the players.
I’d strongly recommend running act 1 and act 2 as point crawls, in the same location but with vastly different objectives and obstacles for the players in each act. In act 1 they should be investigating, soaking up the atmosphere on the moon and getting jumpy. Act 2 sees them possibly revisiting some locations from act 1 but with the goal of getting back to the fort and not getting caught by the insurgents or UPP. Cannibalise the events in the module to build yourself encounter tables for each location.
The final act should be viewed as a dungeon crawl into the depths of the fort. Let your players explore a little without piling on the pressure at first so that they can work out what they need to do to escape the moon. Then once they know where their objectives are turn the temperature up on them, especially if they are stomping around making a lot of noise and blowing stuff up (spoiler: of course they’re going to do that). I’d recommend making a condensed dungeon map for yourself, showing the main locations and the possible routes between them. You can then key this with encounter tables to keep the gameplay fluid at the table.
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Destroyer of Worlds is the second cinematic scenario for the Alien RPG, published by Free League. It’s a three act romp across a war torn moon, with the players taking on the roles of colonial marines thrown into a maelstrom of insurgency, bioweapon development and planetary invasion.
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