First pass at… Aliens

After reading through the different versions of rules a couple of times, I felt fairly strongly that it was important to come up with the goal of the alien team first. Whilst I would’ve liked to be able to “plug-in” a mission at the end (so we can replay the game but with a different objective), the mission dictates everything - how/why they interact with the humans, how the humans perceive the aliens, what the ultimate goal on Earth is (to define mechanics) etc. 

In the famous Shut up and sit down WTS playthrough, the aliens were completely peaceful, merely trying to determine if Humans were ready to be accepted into the intergalactic council. Whilst easy to implement, I saw 2 problems with this: 1) It’s not the most interesting of themes and 2) It has been done before and there’s a chance that Human players would know what the alien goals were going into the game. 

So my Alien-control friend and I brainstormed ideas. We wanted the story to fit the following criteria:

• Interesting main mission

• Options for completion (so we’re not railroading their story)

• They appear aggressive to Humans (to give Humans additional reason to shoot them down, outside of artifact acquisition.)

• Reasons to go all over the map

• Possible side missions (more reasons to go around the map)

After that first session, I went away and wrote something down that met those criteria fairly well.