A Xenomorph is you. Conceived from Ridley Scott's darkest dreams of all-consuming sexuality and overwhelming lethality, you are more than a beast; you are a symbol of our primal fears. You are the repressed and long denied serpent in man. You are that which cannot be contained, that bursts forth into life. You are that which will not be refused, you take what you want and you use whom you will; devouring all in your insatiable appetites.
I plan for this game to take place in 2 stages. First - a suggestion game to showcase the life-cycles of the xenomorph and to shakedown possible game mechanics. Second - as our xenomorph breeds, we could introduce player controlled xenomorphs.
Game Flow:
The game has the following cycles:
1. Hunting
2. Breeding & Nesting
3. Infestation
4. Conquest?
5. We get wiped out?
6. We infiltrate some other hapless colony, ship or planet and start the cycle all over again.
The Xenomorph Life-Cycle and evolution hierachies:
Any drone has the potential to turn into a queen. Within organized nests, there are pecking orders that dictate how the next most dominant creature "grows into" the next queen. Solitary drones also undergo gradual hormonal changes until they become queen aliens.
There are two primary ways of xenomorph reproduction that are canon in the Alien universe. The first is from facehuggers spawned from eggs laid by the queens that insert ovipositors into potential hosts to lay the "seeds" from which baby chestbursters spring forth. The second, is that in the absence of a queen, any drone can create facehugger eggs from the biological matter of a cocooned victim. A lone drone creating its own nest would abduct several victims and cocoon them - some of which would be morphed into eggs and the others kept as imprisoned hosts for the facehuggers to implant on.
Drawing from the expanded universe, there are a series of progressive stages and "classes" in the life of our little xenomorph on its path to omnipotence:
1. facehugger -> facerape -> Chestburster
2. Drone - Your typical xenomorph
3. Warrior - Accepted to be a senior drone, differs in appearance from the basic drone by having a ridged head in place of a smooth one.
4. Praetorians - Twice the size of a drone, this is the final stage before a xenomorph molts into a queen. In Alien v Predator: Extinction, there are 2 interesting subclasses of Praetorians that we can include:
- Ravagers and Colossal Ravagers: Giant Xenomorphs with extra pointy bits, used by organized hives as shock troops. They look like Tyranid hive tyrants.
- Carriers: Queen sized Praetorians that serve as mobile carriers and hanger bays for fleets of facehuggers.
5. Queens - A giant xenomorph that craps eggs to spawn facehuggers
6. Empresses - Queens of Queens that rule over networks of nests and queens. They may also oversee interplanetary conquest for the species.
Biology:
Your xenomorph has a number of natural weapons that are really all phallic euphamisms, including:
1. A head within a head that can penetrate heads to bite a chunk out of the juicy brains within. (In AvP Requiem this head within a head also impregnates victims with baby aliens)
2. Teeth and claws
3. A stabby tail.
Your sensory suite includes a form of electrolocation: which allows you to see the auras of any lifeforms and detect heartbeats from miles away.
It is rumored that xenomorph blood is actually ClF3, which also explains their extreme combustibility, the ability for their blood to melt bulkheads, and its rapid dissipation in air.
The xenomorph is portrayed as both vulnerable and invulnerable to small arms of all calibres. This is explained away by saying that the drone molts and coats its outer layers with hardened materials ("polarized silicon" or silicon carbide) as it matures.
The law of reverse ninjitsu applies in the extreme. A lone drone is always harder to deal with than a planet-wide hive. Within organized nests, the individual will always put the survival of the group before its own needs.
Level ups:
In our game, your basic drone earns its right to mature by killing things or harvesting them for breeding. All direct offspring of a player controlled drone are subordinate to it. Kills of subordinates are kills of the player. Kills are retained even if our nest is wiped out and we start over by stowing away on some ship to repeat the cycle all over again.
Other player controlled units can upgrade using the player's experience points from kills. 1 kill is 1 point.
You go from drone to warrior with 10 kills.
Warriors to Praetorians with 100 kills
Praetorians to queens or special castes with 1000 kills.
Dice:
We roll RTD dice for anything I feel that we might need to roll dice for.
1 - Disastrous failure
2 - Normal Failure
3 - Near miss or partial success
4 - Normal Success
5 - Epic Success
6 - Disastrous Success
Inventories:
You don't get any. Exception for the carrier class, which is a facehuggers' aircraft carrier on legs.
Starting Scenario:
Weyland Yutani Corporation has grown you into a drone in a lab in the middle of nowhere from a captured egg specimen. You matured in a matter of days, and now your every instinct tells you to escape, kill and breed.
You look out from a containment chamber made from reinforced glass. Your hands and feet are bound by metal chains that restrain you through tension and are attached to the walls of the cell. You sense that they cannot hold you.
You detect several hundred lifeforms nearby. Perhaps this lab is near a settlement of some kind. Or it could be a military facility.
What do we do next?
What kind of planet are we on?
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Topic: Xenomorph - RTD, Concept testing SG (Read 1589 times)