Boot

I love the Alien movies. The look, the feel of the universe--it all feels very Traveller to me.

I've written about this before, but HBO is showing all four Alien movies in order, back to back, right now, starting with the Director's Cut of Alien, so I'm inspired.

I think you could easily use the Classic Traveller rule set with an ATU set in the universe of the Alien movies very easily. You just need to change a few assumptions about the OTU.

Of course, it's no longer feudal, and no alien races have been encountered. You'd base your universe off the movies, of course.

I think you'd have to change a CT law about the Jump drive. In stead of one week in jump, the ship would jump one week per X amount parsecs, where X = the ship's jump number. Thus, a Jump-3 vessel would jump 3 parsecs per week but could stay in jumpspace indefinitely, allowing the ship to travel vast differences.

In the first movie, the ship's navigator says that they haven't even hit the outer rim yet when Mother brings all of the crew out of cold sleep to investigate the alien signal. That tells you, right there, that the jump space tech in that universe is capable of extremely long jumps. It just takes time. Lots of time. That's why they put the crew into cold sleep.

BTW, CT low berth units would have to be better at keeping people alive.

And, to match the Alien universe, the TL for human-like cyborgs would have to be lowered from TL 16 to that of the universe.

It'd be a pretty easy ruleset to use to create your own Alien universe. I'm thinking it'd be neat to run a game set right after Alien 3. Ripley is dead, and now the story moves on with the players' crew.

Maybe they're a supply ship that came and went during the events of Alien 3.

I've also thought about combining the Alien universe with that of Blade Runner and Outland. I thought all three of those would work together nicely.

Maybe even take some stuff from the old RPG, High Colonies.





EDIT: Oh, and don't forget that there's CT stats on the Alien in The Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society.

2nd EDIT: For campaign ideas, look no farther than the various Alien novels or the five comic book omnibuses--these are all full of ideas that a crafty GM could use in a game. Next year, a new novel is coming out that will serve as an immediate prequel to the first Alien movie. Alien: Out of the Shadows is supposed to return us to Ellen Ripley and to never-before-revealed secrets of the Weyland-Yutani Corporations...secrets that lead into the events of the second film, Aliens. I think even the novelizations of the movies would probably be worth reading for an enterprising GM who wanted to mine some material.