A few years ago, my brother wrote up some rules and ran a one-shot for a tabletop version of X-Com, the videogame franchise about fighting off an alien invasion on Earth, with a vibe like UFO (the 1970s TV series by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson about a secret alien-fighting organization) meets Squad Leader (the Avalon Hill tactical wargame). The idea was that, as a player, you invest some affection in your squaddies but never really get a chance to get to know them. A tabletop RPG could let you do that. I was taken by the concept and started tinkering with the rules, getting further and further from the original version as I kept running the game and revising it to make the game I brought to the table match the one in my head. I am getting very close; hence Alien War.
Every game of Alien War starts the same way: As a player, you make a character who’s a member of the UN’s Office of Outer Space Affairs (OOSA) Armed Detachment for Extraterrestrial Protection Tactics (ADEPT). You roll for your nation of origin (a country that commits peacekeeping forces to the UN) and your motivation for joining up (which might be, “They haunt my dreams,” or “It’s this or the stockade”). Once you give your character a name and assign some points to rank, experience, morale, and civilian background, you’re ready to deploy to the Alien Activity Zone (AAZ).
At this point, the GM doesn’t know where that is. Nor do they know what the aliens are like, what they want, or what they’re capable of. This makes the “roll call” when players introduce their characters really important, because it lets the GM ask PCs to expand on their backstories, speculate about the aliens, and pass on rumors or other information. A PC who can say, “I definitely know what they need,” for example, is licensed to invent details practically out of whole cloth. It’s an extreme version of that phenomenon where players think out loud at the table about what might be happening in the fiction and the GM goes, oh, right, yes, that would be cool. It works rather like a ouija board: the instrument responds to impulses whose operation is not perceived by those emitting them.
The process of setting up each mission evokes the five-paragraph operations order of military doctrine (situation, mission, execution, etc.) with PCs taking on duties like mission leader, scout, “loadmaster,” and liaison. Then you put a token representing the squad on the “ops grid” and let the mission leader move ’em out!
What I like about using the ops grid is that it structures the flow of events so that it’s possible for everything to proceed by the numbers (deploy, move to objective, all clear), to fall apart from the jump (snafu, can’t fix it, abort mission), or anywhere in between. By moving between the operations grid and the tactical sketch, maintaining their correspondence, the game gives a nice boots-on-the-ground feel.
If we actually meet some aliens–an event the game calls a “close encounter”–there’s a round of zoomed-in action that puts out PC wounds and injuries, intelligence gains, and increments of mission-effectiveness. If that takes place on the objective, it’s end of mission. If it doesn’t, we keep going until we get to the objective or the all clear.
During the debrief, the various bits of description that occurred on the mission are grist for players to answer the debriefing officer’s questions: What do the aliens want? What can we learn from them? Those feed back into the developing strategic situation, and get reincorporated as details in the next mission.
For a long time, I was trying to perfect a complicated economy of scenes back at base during which PCs could receive training, work the bureaucracy, and interact with each other and the world. Eventually, I realized that it was more fun and workable to just have a “base montage” of scenes between PCs with prompts like, “React to an unpopular decision by the brass,” or “Show us what happens when you test out some new equipment” or “Describe the unpleasant duty you are required to perform.” The effects that I thought belonged back at base actually fit better into the op order phase right before deployment.
After running it last weekend at Dreamation, a regional convention in New Jersey, I think all that remains is polishing. In four hours, we ran three increasingly consequential missions and two base montages. One of the players said, oh, yeah, I could run this, so I gave him my email and am hoping he reaches out; if he does, I’ll send him the rules and see what he does with them. But it’s nice when a game starts to do what you hoped it would.
