Questions about Alien ruleset

Hey all, I am wanting to try a new system, kinda tired of 5e for now, and I’m looking for a good sci-fi ruleset that isn’t too crunchy. Starfinder is very crunchy so not really my thing, Star Trek is taking forever to come out and may never be done, so I was looking into the alien ruleset and had some questions.

How much automation is there in the ruleset? Would it be pretty easy for someone who has never played or run it to pick it up? How would it work for non-horror games? Is it a pretty robust ruleset? Thanks for any info.

Hi timdog88, Alien is based on the Year Zero Engine from Free League and as such is rules light with sufficient depth to provide interesting and lengthy adventures or campaigns. Alien RPG is SCI-FI and captures very well the horror feeling of the movies. For the feature set of the ruleset, you can check the ruleset documentation to make up your mind: https://fantasygroundsunity.atlassia...5569/Alien+RPG

Let me know in case of questions :)

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Originally Posted by timdog88

Hey all, I am wanting to try a new system, kinda tired of 5e for now, and I’m looking for a good sci-fi ruleset that isn’t too crunchy. Starfinder is very crunchy so not really my thing, Star Trek is taking forever to come out and may never be done, so I was looking into the alien ruleset and had some questions.

How much automation is there in the ruleset? Would it be pretty easy for someone who has never played or run it to pick it up? How would it work for non-horror games? Is it a pretty robust ruleset? Thanks for any info.

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1. There's quite a bit of automation for combat, but you'll definitely want to read the link Valyar provided. Some buttons have to pushed in combat for the automation to work correctly. Nothing complicated. And even if you don't hit the buttons, combat resolution is extremely easy to handle. I think ship combat automation is still borked, but we haven't used much ship combat in our campaign in a while. And when we have, manual combat was simple.

2. It's extremely easy to run. The Year Zero Engine is amazingly simple yet fun. I bought the ruleset and was running it within just a few days.

3. It works for non-horror fairly well. I've been running a campaign weekly for about a year now. We've started adding Coriolis elements to our campaign recently just to give it a little more space opera feel.

4. There's really not a lot involved with the actual game mechanics in Year Zero games, so the actual rules are pretty sparse. As far as lore, there's a decent amount. Outside of the core rulebook, there's only a small handful of modules (and they're great fun), and one supplemental book for Colonial Marines (which has a pretty large campaign included as well).