jimmiwazere
Lay member
By JimmiWazEre
Opinionated Tabletop Gaming Chap
TL/DR - Love, love, love the system and the adventure, loath the rulebook or module layouts. Had an absolute blast running it and my players enjoyed it too. Made us hungry to play Destroyer of Worlds next.
This post probably contains spoilers. If you’re thinking about GMing this, then please read on, but if you’re a player - you have been warned.
Oh, and this post also contains affiliate links in case you want to pick up the game.
This is Captain Miller, last surviving crew member of the USCSS Montero. Signing off.
Thus ended last Sunday’s 6 hour long adventure; Chariot of the Gods for Alien RPG by Free league.
I want to use this post to share my thoughts about it, and the system in general. I liked it, lots. But it’s not quite as straightforward as that.
A bit of preamble about the 1e Ruleset First
CotG is the starter set adventure, so it seems only fair to assume that most people might be experiencing the core rules for the first time too. Now, built off the Year Zero Engine, I love the core rules of Alien RPG. Let me open there, but I do not like the rulebook.
Possibly a good place to start is with the fact that Freeleague are releasing a new edition* of Alien RPG in September 2025, and they say that they’re doing it to address many of the community issues with the current rulebook.
It’s a smart move because as lovely a ‘thing’ (full of lore and art) that the 1e core rulebook is, and as fundamentally great that the rule system is - the rulebook itself doesn’t appear to have been written with enough effective consideration towards functionality.
*Totally compatible with minimal tweaks required to play it with existing adventures.
How not to Design a rulebook
Let me give you an example - so, on your character sheet, there’s something called “Air”. As GM, you’ll want to know the game mechanics for how Air runs down, and what happens when it runs out. So you’re gonna go to the index and search for “Air” - because if it’s a named stat on the official character sheet, it should be in the index, right?
It’s not there.
You pause, think a moment, and maybe you realise to look under “Consumables” instead, because Air on your sheet is listed under a section titled Consumables. That takes you to page 34. Page 34 mentions that consumables decrease, and for those rules, you’re told to go to page 35.
As for what happens when you run out of air? Page 34 vaguely tells you to “see Chapter 4”.
What, the entire chapter? Or am I now expected to scan through a bunch of pages until I stumble across the answer?
To be fair. the chapter 4 thing is an error with my printed version of the rulebook, it’s actually in chapter 5, but even new revisions don’t tell you that it’s specifically page 110. I scanned through all of chapter 4, and then most of chapter 5 before I found that.
Yes, even reading alone, that was as enjoyable as it sounds.
But all that aside, I’d just had to read hundreds of words presented in long form prose, I’d had to mentally separate the actual rules from the sea of guff about how too much carbon dioxide is dangerous, and not having air is bad for you. That’s exhausting.
As someone familiar with breathing, I don’t need a paragraph telling me that not having air is bad, especially when I’m at the game table. I just want to know how your game handles it mechanically.
How to Design a rulebook
Designers - I love you, you made one of my favourite games, but the rules for air should be searchable by index, on one page, and be concise like this:
Whenever it makes narrative sense (such as after physical exertion), have players roll a number of d6 equal to their current air supply. For every [1] rolled, reduce their air by 1.
Once a player’s air hits 0, they must make a Stamina check every round to stay conscious. Starting from the second round, reduce their dice pool by 1 each time.
If they ever fail a Stamina check, they drop to 0 health and must make a death roll each round until they’re either supplied with air, or they until die from asphyxiation.
Much better. Concise, no waffle, no page flipping. If future editions took this kind of structure to heart, it’d be a huge win.
The Year Zero Engine
I’ve spoken before about the central mechanic before, so I don’t need to repeat that here - but I’m a big fan of the overall elegance of the system. Simple character sheets and flat stats go a long way towards keeping the flow of gameplay going, and Freeleague have done a really good job with the Year Zero Game Engine here.
I’m also a massive fan of the way Alien RPG avoids GM Conflict of Interest, by having you roll for the monsters actions. After about an hour of building tension, my players were set upon by an abomination in the hallway. It was a perfect introduction to the terror of the world when the dice gods decided that the abomination would lunge forward, grip Paige’s character; Davies’ skull and crush it like a swollen pimple.
Life is cheap in Alien, but when you’ve got a healthy backlog of fleshed out NPCs with character sheets, it takes the sting out of character death.
I asked one of my players, Alan, for his perspective after the session:
Can’t say it fairer than that. Thanks Alan.
My Experience With Chariot of the Gods
Split over three distinct acts, CotG is a one shot, or “cinematic” adventure that took my group about 6-7 hours to finish.
I’m gonna be straight up with you - the key thing that I love about this is module is that after act 1, most of the GM’s hard work is over.
Those first couple of hours you’re setting the scene and ratcheting up the tension. It’s very description heavy, and you’re introducing lots of new events and NPCs.
But then act 2 hits, and the game sort of just starts running itself. You see, all the actors have secret evolving motivations written on cards that you hand out as the game progresses. These motivations often set them at odds against each other, creating situations where the players must compromise, or outright start sabotaging each other.
A good way to think about it is that a GM’s primary role is to toss spanners into the works for players to fix. Indeed, in Act 1 you’ll be doing this a good amount. By act 2 however, the players are tossing their own spanners into the works, and at each other, and as GM this frees you up to take much more of a reactive, and backseat roll. It gives you space to breath and scheme, and it means that when you do need to toss a spanner of your own, it can be much more carefully thought out for maximum appropriate impact.
This isn’t an accident - this is the consequence of fantastic adventure writing.
But enough about my thought’s here, here’s what Alan had to say:
Prep Work
The CotG book is really interestingly laid out. The front of the book essentially provides an overview of the adventure, the seed, and an impression of things to come. The back of the book contains an appendix of the stats for the monsters in the adventure. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
It’s the middle of the book that’s really clever. You see most adventure modules sort of smush area descriptions in together with plot events that happen when you set off certain triggers. Not CtoG.
Here, the second part of the book goes over room descriptions one by one. And once that’s done, it goes over the key events (“spanners”) which it leaves up the GM to place as they see fit on a per act basis.
I find this really helpful, because it means that I can get a focused understanding of the key events in the module, all in a concise section of the book, without having to search through two dozen room descriptions to find them.
I have a gripe though
Unfortunately it can’t all be rivers of milk and honey. Similar to the issue of verbosity in the rulebook, CtoG is also needlessly wordy when it comes to room descriptions - which for me at least, pretty much makes running it from the official book impossible.
Check this out:
It’s not even the longest room description, and it’s still far too much to expect a GM to read this all at the table. If you read my piece on making good adventure prep notes, you’ll know what work I had to do next in order to turn this mini essay into usable notes at the game table. If not, we’ll, go check that out right now - it’s totally game changing (props to Annie from DIY & Dragons for the method).
Conclusion
Despite my issues with verbosity and layout choices (How dare you make me read, book!), I absolutely love this system and adventure. If you have players that can get on board with a horror setting, and especially if they like the idea of covertly working against each other - then Chariot of the Gods by Free league gets a good ol’ Fonzy thumbs up from me.
Have you played Alien RPG yet? Tell me about your experiences in the comment below - I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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Either way, catch you laters, alligators.
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