Alien: Chariot of the Gods is an introductory/one-shot adventure for Free League’s Alien RPG, written by Andrew E. C. Gaska and set in the universe of most of the Alien/Aliens movies. It was published in 2019.
Click here to see the Alien RPG on the Free League website
Click here to see the Alien RPG on DriveThruRPG
Click here to see the Alien: Chariot of the Gods adventure on DriveThruRPG
This episode is brought to you with support from Brent, one of our Kickstarter backers, who wanted to give a shout-out to his Youtube channel @Rolewise. Thanks, Brent!
Show Notes
These are the show notes for our Alien: Chariot of the Gods episode, where we delve further into things that we don’t have time to explore in detail in the podcast itself, with copious links.
The Alien franchise is well known, but in case you’re hazy on the details it’s a series of nine movies, two of which don’t count, plus many computer games, graphic novels, ordinary novels and other media. The movies are of variable quality but the first two are genre-defining explorations of the human race discovering it is not alone in the universe, the neighbours are here for dinner, and eggs are on the menu.
Inevitably Ross has run Chariot of the Gods already, across two episodes of Roleplaying Public Radio at the start of 2024, which you can listen to by clicking here. Not yet, though. Finish our episode first.
The Year Zero engine (or ‘Yearo Zero’ as I think of it) is Free League‘s in-house system of RPG mechanics, originally appearing in Mutant Year Zero (2016), hence the name. Free League tweaks it for different games but if you know other FL titles such as Blade Runner, Vaesen and Tales from the Loop, you’ll feel at home here, mechanically at least.
Chariots of the Gods? (1968) was Erich von Däniken’s hugely successful book about ancient aliens, based mostly on misinterpreting ancient images and texts, plus racism. The idea that aliens must have built the pyramids/Tikal/etc. because non-white people couldn’t possibly have been smart enough is the kind of theory only a racist and convicted fraudster would have come up with, and that was Erich von Däniken. Related fact: the editor of the book was the former editor of the Nazi Party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter.
‘Cinematic universe’ is a concept that’s come to the fore with the Marvel movies but is really a medium-specific form of the venerable idea of a ‘shared universe’, a single setting in which multiple stories are told by multiple creators. One of the most notable is the Cthulhu Mythos, another is Christianity. It turns out that Hasbro has one as well, the Hasbro Universe, meaning that G I Joe, Transformers and My Little Pony all take place in the same continuity as D&D, Magic and Monopoly.
Graphic design: the way that text and graphics are displayed in Alien was brilliantly described by the blog Typeset in the Future in 2014, and you can immediately see that its utilitarian design, the sort of thing you’d expect to find on a transport vessel where words need to be functional and readable, is completely at odds with the Alien RPG‘s standard page design of generic SF wonky green boxes. In particular, please stop using OCR-A to look science-fictiony. It’s a machine-readable font from 1966 that’s mainly associated with obsolete financial media like paper cheques, and only looks futuristic to old people.
Alien the movie that started all of this was written by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, directed by Ridley Scott and released in 1979. Critics often describe it as the greatest SF horror movie of all time but they are wrong because that’s The Thing.
The line we quote from Alien: Prometheus about ‘needless suffering’ is, we think, actually ‘unnecessary violence’ from this promo clip. A quick reminder that we record these episodes in one take, without rehearsal or overdubs. Errors sometimes creep in, and we try to correct them here.
‘Jailbreak’ is a scenario for Unknown Armies written by Greg Stolze of this parish, and which we will be covering later this season. Originally written in 1999, it’s about escaped convicts seeking refuge in a remote farmhouse where almost nothing is what it seems. You can download it for free here.
I (James) mentioned my theory of the Alien movies but didn’t really explain it properly. It goes like this: 1 and 2 are about as perfect a couplet as you’ll find in cinematic history, and while they have many themes, both are fundamentally about humanity (or small pockets of it) discovering it is not top dog in the universe, it is an unimportant prey species and there are much more powerful entities out there. 3 and 4 (Resurrection) are other people trying to tell new stories with the same foundation, and fundamentally not finding anything fresh to say. 5 and 6, Prometheus and Covenant, Ridley Scott’s second bite at the cherry, centre things on humanity being important in the cosmic landscape (without really explaining why), and seem to misunderstand the core premise of what made the first two movies so potent. And then you have Romulus, which is a fanfic remix. We do not recognise Alien vs Predator as part of the sequence and refuse to acknowledge the existence of its sequel.
Alien Isolation and other video games: some are good, some are bad, some were good but have aged badly, but it’s worth noting the vast majority of them are based on Aliens rather than any of the other movies, because the fundamental vocabulary of action video games is guns. Yes, the Alien 3-based arcade game Alien 3: The Gun (1993) exists but that’s so based around guns that you play marines firing two massive plastic M41A pulse rifles that are physically part of the cabinet, and it’s called Alien 3: The Gun.
Jennifer Crusie is actually a pseudonym for bestselling and award-winning romance author Jennifer Smith.
The sublime TV cop series with the never-solved murder is Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999), now finally available to stream, in the USA at least.
‘Lover in the Ice’ is Caleb Stokes’ Delta Green adventure from 2016, about hunting or being hunted by a lone powerful entity in industrial surroundings, with body horror. Highly rated.
The Expanse RPG is published by Green Ronin, based on the hard-SF books and TV series of the same name, and is very good.
TSR’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: Odyssey 2 modules for the Star Frontiers RPG, written by Frank Mentzer (I think these got mentioned in the James Bond 007 episode but we didn’t link to them there) are very odd, and it’s never been properly explained why they exist. Straight RPG adaptations of two movies that aren’t suitable for that sort of thing at all.
On the other hand Jack Kirby’s adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey for Marvel Comics is a thing of awe and wonder. It’s a ten-issue Kirbyised retelling of the Kubrick movie, published in 1976, eight years after the movie had come out, with some names and details changed, and it is unconstrained by the end of the movie in issue 6. He wanted to follow it up with an adaption of The Prisoner, but that never came to pass and the universe is poorer for it.
‘Convergence’, mentioned in passing, is the Delta Green adventure ‘Convergence’ that we covered in season 3 episode 2.
Making it back to Earth is, of course, the end of Alien Resurrection. Also the end of Saturn 3, the robot-based Alien-alike. If you don’t know Saturn 3, imagine an early-1980s SF/horror movie starring Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett and Harvey Keitel, scripted by Martin Amis. Now ask yourself why you’ve never heard of it. The answer is that it is very bad.
‘You die, the girl dies, everybody dies’ is a line from the animated movie Heavy Metal, spoken by Ard in the Den/Richard Corben sequence. Heavy Metal was based on the mature-readers comic anthology magazine of the same name (itself based on the French BD magazine Métal hurlant) and not on any musical genre or group of metalloid elements with a density of more than 5 g/cm3.
The Alien War Live Experience was an early immersive-drama attraction that ran in the basement of the Trocadero Centre in central London from 1993 to 1996. Groups of visitors were escorted through an infested Weyland-Yutani base (including actual movie props) by marines armed with pulse rifles. Encounters included face-huggers, an egg chamber, an attack by alien warriors repelled by the marines, and a moment in an elevator where one of the guests (a stooge) is snatched by an alien. It was opened by Sigourney Weaver, was apparently true to the source material, and genuinely scary. Not to be confused with 2017’s ‘Alien Escape’ at Madame Tussauds.
Chatting with a friend a few days ago, I discovered that Alien War had been one of the formative experiences in his journey to becoming a top-level video games writer, ARG and immersive experience designer. He told me that the UK box set of Alien 1-3 on VHS came with a voucher that let you jump the queue at the attraction and he did, at least six times, falling in love with the way it immersed visitors in the world and atmosphere of the films. He pointed me at various videos made at the time, of which this is probably the best.
The Alien Special Edition DVD interview with Ridley Scott, I mis-remembered: David Hughes interviewed Danny Boyle for the Alien director’s cut, not Ridley Scott. This is the interview that includes Boyle talking about how he went in to watch Alien knowing only that it was a movie about men’s fear of being penetrated. I don’t know who did the Ridley Scott interview, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t done in the basement of the Picture Production Company in Soho, where we worked.
Colonial Marines Technical Manual was written by Lee Brimmicombe-Wood and edited by the aforementioned David Hughes. It was released in 1995 and is still in print. Essentially an in-world RPG sourcebook without game stats, it’s a great read. Lee is a respected wargame designer and videogame producer these days.
Sniper! Bug Hunter is an Alien-inspired tactical unit-based wargame designed by Steve Winter and released by TSR in 1988, based on SPI’s Sniper! man-to-man combat rules, created by Jim Dunnigan in 1973. (For more on Dunnigan, SPI and TSR, listen to our James Bond 007 RPG episode.) Click the link, look at that gorgeous Keith Parkinson cover and tell me that’s not an Alien ripoff as egregious as the Tyranids in Warhammer 40K. It should also be noted that this, a game blatantly based on Alien/Aliens, describes human units as ‘men’ throughout. The later TSR Amazing Engine RPG AM3: Bug Hunters by Lester Smith (1993) is set in the same universe but has a more Starship Troopers vibe.
The Aliens board game from 1989 is an early co-op design, published by Leading Edge. It’s ‘fast and intense’, helped by a very lethal algorithm that governs the aliens’ movement and attacks, but suffers from cheap components and only having three scenarios in the box (compared to eight in Bug Hunter). Rare and collectible these days.
Mothership is an indie RPG of ‘sci-fi horror’, which owes a debt to the Alien franchise but also to much classic SF cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. We’ll be talking about it later this season.
Very shortly we will be adding a ‘There is one Star Wars movie…’ shirt to our merch store.
The Bad Movie Bible has done several videos on Alien rip-off movies in its Borrowing Blockbusters series:
Alien knock-offs of the 1980s
Alien knock-offs of the 1990s
Aliens knock-offs
We make particular mention of Xtro, a British SF/horror movie from 1983, not so much inspired by Alien as cashing in on it, made by nobody you’ve heard of and starring nobody you’ve heard of either. Made for $60,000, it took $1m at the box office, which gives you some idea of how starved we were for SF of any kind back then.
The hosts of this episode were Ross Payton, Greg Stolze and James Wallis, with audio editing by Ross and show notes by James. If anything in this episode has spurred your interest then come and discuss it on our Discord.
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