Alien Desolation (Tristan Jones pitched/not happening comic/novels)

[Local Trouble]

There are three very key things you see in Labyrinth that I think make the alien more interesting than almost anything else, which I'd planned on bringing back up sort of quietly.

So would it be fair to say that Labyrinth was an inspiration for this?

[SiL]

I'm not in the business of trying to please everyone, I know I never will.

And you shouldn't be, you're an artist.

[Russ840]

This sounds so good to me. I have found the Alien content we have had these last 2 years so boring and uninspired. It almost pisses me off not getting this lol

[Still Collating...]

These past 2 years have had too much focus on the Pathogen, writing synths wrongly and stumbling upon Engineer ruins left and right without any meaningful story progression (cause of fears of Scott's potential next movie making new material non canon). Only now that the RPG exists has there even been an effort to progress things. Though the first two novels of this new wave are a miss to say the least, especially when it comes to portraying the effects of the Pathogen. Alex White and the RPG tried to tackle this smartly, yet here we are back again at the level of "does whatever the writer wants" that was first seen in Fire and Stone.

Kinda liked it more what the old waves of Dark Horse comics/novels did with the EU. Too much focus on the Pathogen and Engineers now without knowing how to handle them correctly or what to do with them at all for the most part.

I agree that Aliens is not perfect by a long shot and I do see the criticisms of specific scenes and writing decisions. But the Queen is not one of them. And she has been an integral part of the movies, timeline and EU ever since.
Again, to each their own, everyone has a part of the story they like more or less, I do get that. But if I understand things correctly, I personally would not be in love with the idea of having each Alien be a unique variant strain, never to be seen again. Cause that would again open the gates to writers to do whatever they want, make crazy mutant Aliens as chaotic as the Pathogen's treatment as of late. Just my opinion of course.
I do appreciate Tristan's art to an immense degree though.

I'm with SiL on this one, writers have mishandled the use of the term "bugs" and how they like to write the Aliens as thick as a brick sometimes. Insects are horrifying and alien to us and fascinating. I wish writers would go down that path without writing them as "bugs" in a derogatory way.

And Labyrinth had a Queen in the preview/flashback comic and she was awesome. The all out hive attack scene was really memorable. Humans trying out new tech and failing spectacularly. 

[Whiskeybrewer]

These past 2 years have had too much focus on the Pathogen, writing synths wrongly and stumbling upon Engineer ruins left and right without any meaningful story progression (cause of fears of Scott's potential next movie making new material non canon). Only now that the RPG exists has there even been an effort to progress things. Though the first two novels of this new wave are a miss to say the least, especially when it comes to portraying the effects of the Pathogen. Alex White and the RPG tried to tackle this smartly, yet here we are back again at the level of "does whatever the writer wants" that was first seen in Fire and Stone.

Kinda liked it more what the old waves of Dark Horse comics/novels did with the EU. Too much focus on the Pathogen and Engineers now without knowing how to handle them correctly or what to do with them at all for the most part.

I agree that Aliens is not perfect by a long shot and I do see the criticisms of specific scenes and writing decisions. But the Queen is not one of them. And she has been an integral part of the movies, timeline and EU ever since.
Again, to each their own, everyone has a part of the story they like more or less, I do get that. But if I understand things correctly, I personally would not be in love with the idea of having each Alien be a unique variant strain, never to be seen again. Cause that would again open the gates to writers to do whatever they want, make crazy mutant Aliens as chaotic as the Pathogen's treatment as of late. Just my opinion of course.
I do appreciate Tristan's art to an immense degree though.

I'm with SiL on this one, writers have mishandled the use of the term "bugs" and how they like to write the Aliens as thick as a brick sometimes. Insects are horrifying and alien to us and fascinating. I wish writers would go down that path without writing them as "bugs" in a derogatory way.

And Labyrinth had a Queen in the preview/flashback comic and she was awesome. The all out hive attack scene was really memorable. Humans trying out new tech and failing spectacularly. 

Backsplash was a fantastic story indeed

[VeteranSergeant]

Can't agree on the RPG being written 'smartly."  Gaska seems like an enthusiastic fan of the franchise, but the RPG's back story reads like bad fan fiction, or like it was written by an author desperate to create reasons for the RPG to exist, rather than creating a near-future world that has a rational, logical back story to it.

I always go back to the dialog from the Marines in the movie.  They are profoundly bored.  They talk like they were recruited with the promise of space action and being badasses, but rarely, if ever, actually get to do anything interesting. Their dinner conversations are about space prostitutes, they complain in briefings about not getting in real fights, and they are utterly unconcerned about some nasty alien that killed some space truckers.  They literally named their dropship, a spaceplane covered in missiles and a rotary cannon, "Bug Stomper." You don't give your spaceplane nose art likening it to a pest control company if you're using your missiles and guns on actual bad guys.

"Is this going to be a stand up fight, or another bug hunt?"

The RPG, by contrast, especially in the Colonial Marines book, sets up this goofy Call of Duty In Space setting where there are these big battles between governments, who, with 300 surveyed worlds, are having costly wars over resources as opposed to just looking for new planets to get them from. Space travel in Alien is slow and expensive. Weyland Yutani and the ICC are incredibly concerned with how much the Nostromo and its cargo cost. Burke is incredibly concerned with how much their colony cost, which is likely factored in with Van Leuwen's description of it "takes decades" to terraform. I mean, think about how rare a planet like LV-426 might be. It has near-Earth gravity and a stable atmosphere. And yet it doesn't even rate a garrison or any planetary defenses and nobody is worried that it might have gotten attacked, because they send a dozen Marines to check it out when it goes quiet, lol. And the Marines are only told there's an armored mountain lion that some woman says her ship picked up there once.

The RPG is trying to turn the Alien universe into something closer to Firefly, but with more shooting. Bears no recognizable likeness to what we saw in the original films. Not to mention turning the Arcturians from transgender prostitutes into actual human-adjacent aliens. I mean, think about how stupid that is written in the RPG.  The discovery of near-human aliens who worship "sky gods" that close to Earth? That's a paradigm shifting scientific discovery. Shatters everything we have assumed about evolution and our place in the universe. The RPG treats Arcturus like it's a scientific novelty that Weyland Yutani just kinda holds on to and lets pesky scientists journey to.  And that's because, to the RPG, it's just "a place you can go" for an adventure, and not part of a coherent, well-thought-out RPG setting. I mean, Arcturus is own entire RPG setting, but to the Alien RPG, it's like 4 pages of text in a book about the Colonial Marines so your characters can also have sex with Arcturians and some of them will not worry if they are male or female.  Destroyer of Worlds is legitimately one of the dumbest RPG adventures I've ever read, with its incomprehensible back story and faction motivations, battles lacking any coherent depiction of a battlespace to the point they'd make 40K authors embarrassed, and a railroad plot designed only to reach the next action setpiece.

William Gibson's Alien III had some interesting ideas for space politics, but even Gibson was like "Nah, nobody would actually have real wars in the future. Just more space posturing like the Cold War." The RPG took Gibson's idea of the UPP, scraping up the 3WE from an old Ron Cobb sketch (amusingly a short-lived political alliance that was already defunct by the time of the first movie), and hit the ground running with a plot taken from a first person shooter game so that your RPG Marines actually have things to do other than complain about cornbread and brag to civilians about how cool your guns are.

Can't get much more "does whatever the writer wants" than that.

[BlueMarsalis79]

I love the RPG, and you are absolutely completely correct.

[SiL]

Most Alien media doesn't quite get what makes the Alien franchise fairly unique in scifi.

[S.E.B.]

Can't agree on the RPG being written 'smartly."  Gaska seems like an enthusiastic fan of the franchise, but the RPG's back story reads like bad fan fiction, or like it was written by an author desperate to create reasons for the RPG to exist, rather than creating a near-future world that has a rational, logical back story to it.

I always go back to the dialog from the Marines in the movie.  They are profoundly bored.  They talk like they were recruited with the promise of space action and being badasses, but rarely, if ever, actually get to do anything interesting. Their dinner conversations are about space prostitutes, they complain in briefings about not getting in real fights, and they are utterly unconcerned about some nasty alien that killed some space truckers.  They literally named their dropship, a spaceplane covered in missiles and a rotary cannon, "Bug Stomper." You don't give your spaceplane nose art likening it to a pest control company if you're using your missiles and guns on actual bad guys.

"Is this going to be a stand up fight, or another bug hunt?"

The RPG, by contrast, especially in the Colonial Marines book, sets up this goofy Call of Duty In Space setting where there are these big battles between governments, who, with 300 surveyed worlds, are having costly wars over resources as opposed to just looking for new planets to get them from. Space travel in Alien is slow and expensive. Weyland Yutani and the ICC are incredibly concerned with how much the Nostromo and its cargo cost. Burke is incredibly concerned with how much their colony cost, which is likely factored in with Van Leuwen's description of it "takes decades" to terraform. I mean, think about how rare a planet like LV-426 might be. It has near-Earth gravity and a stable atmosphere. And yet it doesn't even rate a garrison or any planetary defenses and nobody is worried that it might have gotten attacked, because they send a dozen Marines to check it out when it goes quiet, lol. And the Marines are only told there's an armored mountain lion that some woman says her ship picked up there once.

The RPG is trying to turn the Alien universe into something closer to Firefly, but with more shooting. Bears no recognizable likeness to what we saw in the original films. Not to mention turning the Arcturians from transgender prostitutes into actual human-adjacent aliens. I mean, think about how stupid that is written in the RPG.  The discovery of near-human aliens who worship "sky gods" that close to Earth? That's a paradigm shifting scientific discovery. Shatters everything we have assumed about evolution and our place in the universe. The RPG treats Arcturus like it's a scientific novelty that Weyland Yutani just kinda holds on to and lets pesky scientists journey to.  And that's because, to the RPG, it's just "a place you can go" for an adventure, and not part of a coherent, well-thought-out RPG setting. I mean, Arcturus is own entire RPG setting, but to the Alien RPG, it's like 4 pages of text in a book about the Colonial Marines so your characters can also have sex with Arcturians and some of them will not worry if they are male or female.  Destroyer of Worlds is legitimately one of the dumbest RPG adventures I've ever read, with its incomprehensible back story and faction motivations, battles lacking any coherent depiction of a battlespace to the point they'd make 40K authors embarrassed, and a railroad plot designed only to reach the next action setpiece.

William Gibson's Alien III had some interesting ideas for space politics, but even Gibson was like "Nah, nobody would actually have real wars in the future. Just more space posturing like the Cold War." The RPG took Gibson's idea of the UPP, scraping up the 3WE from an old Ron Cobb sketch (amusingly a short-lived political alliance that was already defunct by the time of the first movie), and hit the ground running with a plot taken from a first person shooter game so that your RPG Marines actually have things to do other than complain about cornbread and brag to civilians about how cool your guns are.

Can't get much more "does whatever the writer wants" than that.

Yup.

As much as I love incredible the effort, the pretty artwork and all the hard work that has been put into the Alien RPG, I must agree that they kind of made the Alien universe a little bit too goofy, simplistic and generic. I don't think that that was their original intention, but their mission to somewhat compile and unite as much of the Alien media as possible into one neatly wrapped up package, inadvertently and unfortunately, had that negative effect on the final product.

I also absolutely revile and abhor the idea of the Arcturians being actual extraterrestrials and not just a large population of sexually alternative and surgically altered humans having llllooootttttsss of fun-fun on the colonies and outposts in the Arcturus system.

[xShadowFoxX]

There's a thing called Desolation?

This sucks. That was the name of my fan project.

[PAS Spinelli]

 This pitch sounds great, although I'm not a fan of Amanda meeting her end like this or completely writing off the Queen as a one off thing.
 In my own opinion, if the Queen was to ever be retconned, she should be in a way that didn't make her a "leader", they are a hive mind, but if they are to be made to have self awareness like the Queen, then all of them should be made self aware like her instead of her being the only one, the Queen shouldn't be a one per hive kind of deal, but rather a common breeder made to preserve hosts instead of continuously wasting them with eggmorphing, and she should be born completely out of it too, rather than being a normal Xenomorph that eventually turns into a one to lead a hive

[dnicholson277]

Hate the idea of the Queen being a one off mutant.

I would prefer the idea of a Queen Alien to be the result of the situation the Alien is in.

So in Aliens...lots of hosts in a close environment theyd need an egg making machine and a hive because you need alot of eggs faster.

On a desert planet you'd need faster aliens with an adapted method to get face huggers onto humans.

I don't mean Kennet type variants just different society's with subtle differences.

[Kimarhi]

A decade from now they will probably release this as an alternative what if like they did with Gibson's Alien 3.

[Xenomorphine]

I like a number of things (like the black ooze being derrived from the Alien, which I've often theorised), but, yeah, the Queen is too obviously a part of the default reproductive system to be dismissed like that, in my view. Especially since she's clearly optimised, symmetrical, etcetera. That's far from what a cancerous-style genetic mutant would look like.

I still say there's room for a future story to depict egg-transformation as an emergency method to obtain, specifically, Queen-hosting facehuggers. That makes everything fit together.

Amanda suffocating to death on LV-426 would have been... Hmm... I don't know. Like, there's some interesting poetic irony in there, but it would have also felt like it cheapened Ellen's discovery about her in the film, because we'd know, in hindsight, that she's heading off to where her remains would be and just has no idea, which would have weird vibes. Depends how it's executed.

I mean, I personally don't embrace the EU version of Amanda as canonical, regardless. But in a comic, could have been an interesting hypothetical, depending on the eventual execution.

A rogue biologist declaring it's ridiculous to try and weaponise the Alien, I would disagree with. So long as the controlled laboratory conditions are there (and protocols are followed), without cutting corners, the Alien should be a lot easier to manage than, say, ebola, anthrax and all the other crazy plagues which have been kept in isolation in special facilities for decades. Especially if you do it on something like an orbital platform. They wouldn't even need a live creature. 'Resurrection' depicted a fairly incompetent operation and not how it would realistically be handled.

Heck, by that point in time, it would probably just be run by droids, anyhow. Zero human employees. Entire sections able to be flooded with radiation, ultrasonic countermeasures and a lot more. We only ever see very superficial, cartoonish depictions of how handling the Alien (or, at least, the DNA) would really be done.

Now, warning against an organisation trying to get ahold of them, which doesn't exactly have a great track record in safety? The 'wrong' people? Now you're talking! There are even some real historical examples of stuff like that to reinforce their point.

[chromhart]

I loved the idea of the queen being a varient. I hated the queen but I loved the design. I totally wish this could have been made.