The Alien movies, especially Alien and Aliens hold a special place in my fandom heart. I loved the late 80’s, early 90’s Dark Horse comics. Even some of the books are pretty good.
So with the introduction of the Evolutions and Timelines rules in the Blaster magazine (available on DriveThruRPG) it was only a matter of time really before I tried to add xenomorphs using these additional rules.
But aren’t there miniature based games already for this franchise? And yes indeed there are, like the official Galeforce 9 Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps and it’s expansions (link at the end of the post). However I think Last Days has a much more flexible rule set that will allow for a great cinematic xenomorph experience.
Getting miniatures for us to use is pretty easy. And doesn’t require us to buy a game that we are only interested in it’s miniatures for. Galeforce 9 actually sell the miniatures for their game separately! It is these miniatures that will determine the various evolutions that I will spec out for use with Last Days.
How many miniatures will you need? 24 alien warrior miniatures (3x the number of tokens we’ll be using), 1 alien queen, 5 eggs (closed) and 5 open eggs, finally ideally we should have 5 face huggers. I appreciate that this will require buying multiple copies of figure packs. But at the moment these are the cheapest way to get the figures.
As you have probably guessed from the posts title this isn’t everything needed to play Last Days using Xenomorphs. There is a lot of work going into this (more than triffids). Which means it will take me much much longer to get these initial thoughts down. Despite not having finished the updated triffid stats I had to get this post written. The spawning stuff just hit me one morning and I needed it written down so I didn’t forget it.
But first my disclaimer.
Please note: These stats/rules have not been play tested. I repeat have not been play tested. They are my initial thoughts, and a work in progress. They are likely to change once I get a chance to play test them.
Setup:
During the game setup after the supply token deployment we are adding an eggs deployment stage.
The player that chose the deployment zone first will go first in deploying the eggs.
A Last Days Xenomorphs game will have at least five eggs deployed on the table.
The rules for deploying the eggs will be the same as those for deploying supply tokens with one exception. Eggs can be deployed next/near to other eggs.
“The first will always be deployed on ground level as close to the center of the board as possible. The other four will be deployed, two per player, anywhere on the table but not within 6” of a table edge, deployment zone,…”
Spawning:
For this I’m going to be using the alien tokens that you can get for the Alien role playing game (photo below). On one side you have a motion tracker symbol, and on the reverse side an image of an alien.
First we need to build a pool of tokens. To do this we will need one token with an alien queen on, and eight tokens with a regular alien on (token k in the image below). Turn them motion tracker symbol face up, and shuffle/mix up.
When an alien spawns instead of placing a miniature, a token gets placed instead, motion tracker symbol facing up. Until a character miniature has line of sight (LOS) on that token it remains a token and gets moved according to the rules.
Once a character has LOS the token gets flipped revealing the alien type to be added to the board. But this is aliens, life isn’t that simple or easy. You now roll 1d6, and half the value, rounding down. So you should get a value between 0-3. This is the number of xenomorphs that will be spawning at that tokens position. Unless it is an alien queen being spawned. There will only ever be one of them. By having a chance of zero aliens spawning we’re simulating a false motion tracker reading.
If a character is within 5ft (1 inch) of an egg it will open and spawn a face hugger. That egg can no longer spawn a face hugger. Replace the closed egg with an open egg, and place a face hugger between the egg and character.
That’s my thoughts so far. As the following to do list shows still a lot to do. I’ll try and get the triffids finished first though.
To do:
- Add a table for spawning for those without Alien RPG tokens.
- Stats for the Xenomorphs
- Timelines rules
- Play test
References: