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

[tyrannosaurusjones]

Just to clarify -- I'm not trying to write the queen out or off -- I'm just putting a different take forward. I LOVE drawing that thing and it would've ABSOLUTELY appeared, it just would've been posited as something else.

I kinda have to agree with the notes on the RPG. I admire the work that's gone in, but far out it reeks of grandiose deep dives. Clara's map is fantastic, but it lost me a lot in the connective tissues and trying to tie things together. My personal opinion has always been to make the alien as alien as possible. It's about how people deal with what's going on, and an RPG is about people playing out and reacting to those situations. Problem with playing an ALIEN RPG is that you know how the aliens work as a player, so it kinda stilts the experience in a sense. It's the same as when you read the books or comics or watch the films. You know what to expect now. I wanted to try and do something that made the experience feel fresh. Like you're watching a sequel for the first time and it's adding those new ideas in and building in new surprises. I feel like a lot of Alien EU stuff, as fun as it is, lost that.

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

This is kinda what we figured with "big ugly" in Defiance. Aliens would evolve into something else if they weren't around a queen. Aliens with a queen were simple minded because they didn't need to be anything but protective monsters. Aliens without a queen became smarter, aggressive, and would either eggmorph until a queen came biologically, or evolve into something that either created or became a queen.

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

As long as I'm involved...

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.

I mean... You're kind of proposing the same thing, though it leans closer to the above.

 

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.

Obvious is my problem. Nothing about the original alien and its lifecycle is remotely obvious in my eyes. Something that makes more sense to me is that the queen is either an engineered factory-creature or a genetic evolution from parasitism. Both of which would've played into what was meant to be one of my Predator stories...

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.

That's what big ugly was doing in Defiance. Been on record about that a few times and its why the eggmorphing was in Defiance. Best of both worlds.

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.

That last bit is key. Isolation changed the entire emotional core of Aliens in the same way, so...

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.

Right, but you're talking about a guy who has watched the company he worked for do exactly what you're talking about... and though he says it's ridiculous there's a lot in the details about that character's actions I didn't mention in the tweet...!

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.

Yeah, but also I disagree, even with self check-outs at supermarkets, you still need staff on hand. And Alien is cyberpunk at its core so... I know plenty of scientists in a lot of fields, and you wouldn't have synths just doing this remotely. We've also seen the problems with synths at this point... because... literally every Alien film!

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.

EXACTLY. I might be leaning away from SOME tropes, but at the end of the day, this is what the Alien saga is ultimately about in my mind, and in my notes it still makes sense that they're dealing with a pandora's box created from something not even the potential creators understood, creators of which the humans don't necessarily understand. Aliens upon aliens upon aliens trying to be interpreted by humans? HUGE margins for misinterpretation and error...

[Kimarhi]

I think the queen has become too much of a staple of the franchise for the movies (or EU tied into the movies) to one off, but I like it as an alternative take fine. 

[SiL]

After the chest bursting is done and the adult is revealed Alien is a pretty by the numbers monster flick. Even the android is just the mad scientist protecting the beast trope. People commented on it at release (some critics even called the adult the least interesting stage - even design wise!)

I always go back to Jaws when people say the beast is cooked or needs some new form or trait to keep it interesting. We know what a shark is. We know how they work. The film is scary because it's well told.

The last time I watched Alien I did so at night, with the lights off, phone well out of reach. I just watched the damn movie and nothing else. And despite knowing it backwards, I still needed to turn the lights on before going upstairs afterwards. It was great.

The Alien is an eight foot acid bleeding monster that wants to either rape you or eat your brains. It doesn't really need to be anything more than that.

[Necronomicon II]

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.

This. All of this.