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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:Most people realize Aliens is a killer title, but I still don't think it gets nearly as much credit as it deserves. Just... Aliens. That is simply a masterstroke of brilliant elegance right there. And it's just so freakin' evocative, too. No one has to ask "so what's the deal with this Alien sequel, what's it about" because you hear the title and you know exactly what the concept is and your mind immediately starts forming images trying to fathom just how much higher the stakes have suddenly been raised. And it's all accomplished without numerals, no subtitles, not even any extra words, just add one single little letter at the end. 
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Jan 2, 2020 21:49
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Biplane posted:Thought about Aliens just now. 
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Jan 2, 2020 22:13
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I also thought about Aliens (the Xenomorph)
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Jan 2, 2020 22:14
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Kaiju Cage Match posted:I also thought about Aliens (the Xenomorph) Sup 
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Jan 2, 2020 22:19
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Owlbear Camus posted:Cameron was young. He had just directed Terminator. Cameron had called a meeting to discuss his "next project." Everyone knew Cameron had written a treatment for Alien 2 that nobody would touch because Alien was not a massive financial success. Alien 2 was not on the table. We expected a professional pitch from Cameron, an outline and a treatment of what he had in mind with a cursory budget; perhaps a couple assistants to run a slide show. Instead Cameron walked in the room without so much as a piece of paper. He went to the chalk board in the room and simply wrote the word ALIEN. Then he added an 'S' to make ALIENS. Dramatically, he drew two vertical lines through the 'S', ALIEN$. He turned around and grinned. We green-lit the project that day for $18 million. I of course love that the Aliens title has its own goddamned origin myth, but I always hated how it claims the original wasn't a big hit, both because that's an outrageous falsehood and also because it isn't even necessary.
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Jan 2, 2020 22:22
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Owlbear Camus posted:Is there a canonical/semi-canonical source for how much a synthetic costs in the Aliens universe? The crew's synthetic might be provided by their mortgage or insurance company as a way to protect the investment. I am pretty sure I didn't see costs in the new RPG. What I did see was a system for hidden agendas for all the PCs to make cinematic-style games more interesting; and a synthetic belonging to your insurance company will certainly have some obvious agendas.
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Jan 2, 2020 22:24
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I'd much rather be called "synthetic" than an "artificial person", the former sounds way cooler and also who in the world would want to identify as a fake person? I mean besides Bishop apparently. And Lil Wayne.
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Jan 2, 2020 22:26
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mllaneza posted:The crew's synthetic might be provided by their mortgage or insurance company as a way to protect the investment. I am pretty sure I didn't see costs in the new RPG. What I did see was a system for hidden agendas for all the PCs to make cinematic-style games more interesting; and a synthetic belonging to your insurance company will certainly have some obvious agendas. This rules and I'm going to float it by the player as another option.
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Jan 2, 2020 22:47
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Cat$... No wait....
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Jan 2, 2020 23:12
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I think one of the comics mentions dollarpound prices for combat androids.
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Jan 2, 2020 23:32
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Owlbear Camus posted:Is there a canonical/semi-canonical source for how much a synthetic costs in the Aliens universe? Sex bot for a rich dude.
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Jan 3, 2020 02:49
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Sentient power loader.
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Jan 3, 2020 03:35
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Owlbear Camus posted:Is there a canonical/semi-canonical source for how much a synthetic costs in the Aliens universe? One of those synthetics built by synthetics that's hiding out from being purged?
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Jan 3, 2020 03:39
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frogge posted:One of those synthetics built by synthetics that's hiding out from being purged? This takes place in 2183, well before the events of Resurrection, which I'm glad of. I do like the idea of her being the ship mortgage company's version of that device that raises your insurance rates if you make too many rolling stops. Going back to the scenario itself, I think I should have a wormy corporate guy hiding out from the predators. Sort of like a cross between Newt and Burke, desperate to make a deal to get out of there (with some tech so everyone is Set Up For Life).
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Jan 3, 2020 17:42
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Owlbear Camus posted:This takes place in 2183, well before the events of Resurrection, which I'm glad of. There's your Space Bard right there. "I roll to seduce all the other players over a percentage!"
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Jan 3, 2020 21:03
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https://twitter.com/DPRK_News/status/1210302048824176640
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Jan 3, 2020 23:26
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this says "made" and not "released" so I can gently caress with this juche.
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Jan 3, 2020 23:39
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I was playing Mad Max today, and I ran into a couple of Buzzards (the Russian guys with the spiky cars in Fury Road). My on-board mechanic goes "Oh no, we're in Buzzard territory! They mostly come out at night... Mostly..."
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Jan 4, 2020 00:56
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Just noticed that a bunch of Alien movies are on HBO streaming right now. Got Resurrection playing in the background while I'm making dinner.* *My own recipie. Way more dangerous. Jay_Zombie fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Jan 4, 2020 |
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Jan 4, 2020 01:27
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The Zombie Guy posted:I was playing Mad Max today, and I ran into a couple of Buzzards (the Russian guys with the spiky cars in Fury Road). My on-board mechanic goes "Oh no, we're in Buzzard territory! They mostly come out at night... Mostly..." Severely underrated game.
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Jan 4, 2020 01:56
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The Zombie Guy posted:I was playing Mad Max today, and I ran into a couple of Buzzards (the Russian guys with the spiky cars in Fury Road). My on-board mechanic goes "Oh no, we're in Buzzard territory! They mostly come out at night... Mostly..." It goes on sale for as low as $5. It really captures the setting, the environment is vast a beautifully barren, the combat has a visceral impact to it that very few games achieve. And you get a harpoon gun that you can use to snag dudes out of their cars with. Highly recommended. frogge posted:One of those synthetics built by synthetics that's hiding out from being purged? I have an RPG scenario I'm working on involving a colony of rogue synthetics. Was there a source for this or is it just an obvious development of the Blade Runner 'verse ?
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Jan 4, 2020 02:34
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nC5TBv3sfU
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Jan 4, 2020 02:42
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Jay_Zombie posted:Got Resurrection playing in the background while I'm making dinner.*
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Jan 4, 2020 02:49
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So is there anything to say that the derelict ship was destroyed or not. Some say the thermonuclear explosion destroyed it but we know the ship wasn't remotely near the settlement. People had been on the world for over two decades and never once came across it, nor did any fly overs or surveys even see it so it stands to say it must had been in a rather isolated spot far off. They only found it because Burke informed them of the exact location coordinates due to the previous discovery of it, and if it wasn't destroyed.....well, after Aliens you can bet they'd send more to investigate what happened. That means looking over what Burke sent transmission wise, knowing where he sent the colonist to look.
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Jan 4, 2020 04:40
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One of my artist friends posted this:   quote:Now that the holidays are over I’m finally able to post this piece I made for a certain someone. Check out his Instagram for cool poo poo. He often attends Weekend Wasteland & does bitchin' costumes for it.
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Jan 4, 2020 05:03
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The Zombie Guy posted:I was playing Mad Max today, and I ran into a couple of Buzzards (the Russian guys with the spiky cars in Fury Road). My on-board mechanic goes "Oh no, we're in Buzzard territory! They mostly come out at night... Mostly..."  haha I was too, that game is a lot of fun.
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Jan 4, 2020 05:12
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mllaneza posted:
Not sure if it's really a spoiler but it's a throwaway line/side-plotline in Alien Resurrection that also has a bit of lore behind it in books/comics/games/etc.. when it comes to tabletop RPGs really you have leeway to do whatever you want as long as the veneer of the original box stuff stays and the rule of cool is observed. I ran a Firefly TTRPG campaign that kinda morphed into an Expanse game and fun was had by all. frogge fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Jan 4, 2020 |
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Jan 4, 2020 07:41
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gary oldmans diary posted:what do you put in this poo poo, bouillon cubes? Just for color.
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Jan 5, 2020 01:11
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kim jong un is a genius
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Jan 5, 2020 02:41
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Keltar posted:So is there anything to say that the derelict ship was destroyed or not. Some say the thermonuclear explosion destroyed it but we know the ship wasn't remotely near the settlement. People had been on the world for over two decades and never once came across it, nor did any fly overs or surveys even see it so it stands to say it must had been in a rather isolated spot far off. They only found it because Burke informed them of the exact location coordinates due to the previous discovery of it, and if it wasn't destroyed.....well, after Aliens you can bet they'd send more to investigate what happened. That means looking over what Burke sent transmission wise, knowing where he sent the colonist to look. 1. It survived The special edition of 'Aliens' tells us it's "out beyond the Ilium [mountain] range", and the USCM Tech Manual's final chapter explicitly says the Derelict survived because it was shielded by those mountains when the atmosphere processor blew up. The Derelict's survival is a plot point in the first AvP game on PC, as well as Aliens: Colonial Marines 2. It's gone Bishop quotes a figure of 40 megatons for the atmosphere processor's explosion, and that's not insignificant - here is a diagram of what a 40 megaton bomb would do to Washington, D.C. would do, for example. Basically, anything in a 5 mile radius is wiped off the map; sure we don't know where the Derelict is in relation to the colony, but it stands to reason that it wasn't too far away. 'Alien Resurrection' implies that the Derelict is gone not only with its premise (why bother going to the trouble of cloning Ripley when they could just go to the Derelict and grab a bunch of eggs?) but with General Perez's line that "Ellen Ripley died trying to wipe this species out; for all intents and purposes, she succeeded." Meaning that when she died in 'Alien3', there were no more Aliens left anywhere, which means the Derelict and its cargo must be gone. The movie's novelization also outright says the Derelict is gone, although the novelization goofs up the size of the explosion and says it was literally the size of Nebraska; Nukemap only lets me simulate up to a 100 megaton detonation, and that's nowhere close to covering Nebraska, which has a radius of around 210 miles. 3. It's ambiguous The Weyland-Yutani Report is noncommittal on the Derelict's fate, only saying that it's not a viable source of specimens; that can mean a lot of things, though - the Derelict might be there but the eggs are dead, or the Derelict still exists but retrieving eggs from it isn't feasible for WY as of the time of the book's setting (post Alien Resurrection) for any number of reasons. The new Alien RPG is also intentionally vague, outright stating that they leave the Derelict's fate up to the GM's discretion. We know Engineer ships are hardy (the one in 'Prometheus' takes a direct impact from a spaceship and survives said impact and crashing back to the ground without any real damage) but they're not indestructible (the Derelict itself has visible damage due to seismic activity between 'Alien' and 'Aliens'). Personally I like to think it didn't get destroyed.
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Jan 5, 2020 06:49
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The only constraints I am aware of about the Derelict's location are: * Not so far away from the colony that a prospector's ATV can't reach it. * Not so close that one of the prospectors hadn't already stumbled across it. * On the other side of a mountain range. * Not so far away that the chestburster in Newt's dad wouldn't have "hatched" before they got back to the colony. It's remotely possible that it popped on the way back, followed mom and the kids back to the colony, matured, and started capturing people. I just don't think it's at all likely. That holds travel time to under about 12 hours. At an average 10kph cross country speed - not totally unreasonable given there's a mountain range to cross - that puts the Derelict anywhere up to 100km from the colony as an extremely conservative estimate. Ten hours travel time at 20kph doubles that, 30 kph adds another 100km to the range. There are very few things that will slow down a thermonuclear explosion, but a mountain range is one of them. My guess is 30-80 km from the colony, with at least one substantial ridge line in between. It could be several times that, but it won't be much less. I'm also completely willing to accept that the orbital photo reconnaissance survey of the colony site missed it; and there would necessarily have been some orbital photo coverage of the site before construction started. Either it was too far away for hi-res coverage, or the Derelict site was mapped, but the expert system processing the imagery didn't "see" an artifact there. It's probably plainly visible if you know what an Engineer ship looks like, but until we got a good look at an Engineer ship, nobody had any idea that technological artifacts could look like that. So naturally the photo processing software wouldn't be trained to flag fit.
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Jan 5, 2020 08:17
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mllaneza posted:
This is a good point in 2019. Remember that the future of 1986 probably didn't predict that you could use a computer to do these things. In 1986, it would have been someone pouring over a pile of images on a light table, and from above just looked like an interesting rock formation, so not something of high importance to investigate immediately.
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Jan 5, 2020 16:52
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https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Derelict_(LV-426)quote:The Colonial Marines Technical Manual contains several transcripts describing how the company rediscovers the derelict on LV-426 and subsequently sends a science team to investigate. Is the Tech Manual canon?
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Jan 5, 2020 17:13
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happyhippy posted:https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Derelict_(LV-426) Yes, and it gets heavily referenced in pretty much any other source out there. That said, I'm a pretty strong advocate of the idea that "canon" is a useless nonsense-concept and people are better off accepting what they like and ignoring what they don't.
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Jan 5, 2020 17:16
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Just ordered it from Amazon, looking forward to read it.
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Jan 5, 2020 17:23
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happyhippy posted:Just ordered it from Amazon, looking forward to read it. Keep in mind that it is literally written like an actual technical manual that a Colonial Marine would get, so it's appropriately dry reading. Also the book came out in 1995 and technically only covers the first two movies, sort of - because of licensing issues the author actually only had the rights to reference things from 'Aliens', but he got away with talking about the Nostromo since it gets name-dropped during Ripley's interrogation and the Narcissus since it shows up on-screen. The book obliquely references the events of 'Alien3' in the final chapter, and it gets away with giving specs for the EEV because it stands to reason that the Sulaco would have an emergency escape system whether 'Alien3' existed or not.  If you also want an excellent companion book, Alien: The Blueprints is loving ridiculous and visually expands on a lot of the things the Tech Manual talks about. It's a little light on content from 'Alien Resurrection' but other than that it's really, really good.
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Jan 5, 2020 18:25
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I couldn't find a source for someone having homebrewed Predators for the new Alien RPG, so I made a rough draft myself: Alien Trophy Hunters The Alien trophy hunters are humanoid and wear minimal clothing over their powerfully built 7+ foot frames. The main differences are a large, crested head with “dreadlock” style hair, long, sharp claw-like nails at the ends of hands and feet, and crab-like mandibles on their faces. All considered, they are surprisingly humanoid which may speak to a common progenitor seeding from the Engineers. The almost always wear masks which allow them to see outside of the normal “visible” electromagnetic spectrum in various modes. Their most commonly used weapons are a telescoping spear, powered chakram-style throwing disk that returns to the user, retracting wrist-blades, and shoulder-mounted helmet-guided miniature plasma caster. Their culture is centered around the Hunt as a sublime, religious experience that confers social status, communes with the divine, and imparts critical skills. They will hunt sapient species and relish particularly dangerous hunts. They take trophies from their kills. Usually the skull/cranial structure or its equivalent, but when hunting tool-using species they have been known to take particularly ornate or interesting gear, including weapons wielded by quarry that put up a good fight. It is anathema to kill prey that is categorically helpless, such as unarmed, untrained humans (the technical staff of Clarity Point was slaughtered not as part of a hunt, but executed for profaning the sacred lodge with their trespass.) Trophy hunters have signature attacks like Xenomorphs, but they draw from two sets: Ranged and Engaged. The trophy hunters relish in the sport of “honorable” hunting and will hunt armed prey with delight. They will “toy with” their prey and sometimes engage in activities akin to the Plains Indians notion of “counting coup” before the hunt’s bloody conclusion. They will usually not engage in “overkill” and have a concept of “fair chase” will they will downgrade their weapons used to match their prey. For example a human who made a show of challenging a Hunter with a melee weapon would likely be met with a spear or blade from the Hunter as well. Note that this handicapping still categorically weights things in the Hunter’s favor: Think of a human hunting an elk with a bow or muzzle-loader because it’s more “sporting” than a cartridge-firing rifle, a little more of a chance for the quarry, but human hunter isn’t about to put on a helmet with horns and try to headbutt it to death. Some say that in the early 21st century they visited Earth in an effort to give their species Autism because they viewed it as a superpower, but credible research into the species would prove this to be a terrible and poorly shot and written hoax. ACTIVE CAMOUFLAGE: The trophy hunters employ active camouflage that hides them in the visible light spectrum by contorting lightwaves and making them appear like a distorted “ghost” against any background. All ranged attacks against a Hunter using this tech get -3 to the skill mod, melee -2. Observation rolls to spot are also at -3. Even when spotted, the creature is an indistinct blur like a heat mirage. Storied Elder, Alien Trophy Hunter Speed: 2 Health: 10 Skills: Close Combat 9 Ranged Combat 12 Observation 10 Survival 10 Medical Aid 6 Stamina 7 Armor rating: 7 Glory Seeker, Alien Trophy Hunter Speed: 3 Health: 11 Skills: Close Combat 10 Ranged Combat 11 Observation 11 Survival 8 Stamina 8 Armor rating 7 Signature Attacks (Ranged): 1-2: Terrifying Taunt: The hunter uses an inhuman call, a display of martial prowess, or most unnervingly an eerily mimicked phrase from a quarry it has observed, hunted, and perhaps killed. Anyone who hears/observes gains 1 stress level. 2-3: Shooting to stun: The hunter uses a net or caltrop to knock one victim at up to long range to the ground. The victim must make a panic roll, and make a Mobility roll to get free as a slow action. (they may attempt again on subsequent rounds and other characters can assist) 4-5: Time for Blood: Roll a ranged combat attack against the victim, base damage 4. If hit, they are immediately Broken. 6: Taking a trophy: Roll a ranged combat attack against the victim, base damage 4. If hit, they suffer critical result 66. The Hunter will attempt to retrieve them and disengage. Signature attacks (Engaged): 1-2: Terrifying Taunt: The hunter uses an inhuman call, a display of martial prowess, or most unnervingly an eerily mimicked phrase from a quarry it has observed, hunted, and perhaps killed. Anyone who hears/observes gains 1 stress level. 2-3: Pin: The hunter makes a Close Combat attack, base damage 1. The target is knocked prone and must make an immediate panic roll. 4: Draw blood: The Hunter uses a melee weapon to injure their prey as a show of dominance. Roll a Close Combat attack, base damage 3. If successful, the character suffers an automatic crit, however roll 2D3 to determine the result. 5: Impale. The hunter uses a weapon to run their target through and pin them. Roll a Close Combat attack, base damage 4. On a hit, roll a 43+d3 and apply the critial result. The target is immobilized and may attempt a Stamina roll to gird themselves enough to pull the weapon out, suffering a second critical result. 6: Taking a Trophy. Roll a close combat attack against the victim, base damage 4. On a hit, the target is decapitate. Witnesses gain 2 stress and make an immediate panic roll. The hunter will attempt to retrieve a trophy and disengage. Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Jan 5, 2020 |
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Jan 5, 2020 21:30
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You are a goddamn treasure thank you. I just bought the Alien RPG and the Cinema Campaign, and I'm gonna run it in a week or two. Any recommendations from people who have played it already? Common things to watch out for/avoid or things to make sure you do?
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Jan 5, 2020 22:24
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mind the walrus posted:You are a goddamn treasure thank you. Don’t trust the xenomorphs, they will betray and harm you.
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Jan 5, 2020 22:28
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To kill the alien, you must take its life.
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Jan 5, 2020 22:35
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