This weekend, I debuted a little RPG adventure called Alien Survivor — a one-shot survival-horror scenario in the vein of Alien and Pitch Black, using variations on the rules found in the great indie adventure, Lady Blackbird. I wanted to get this thing out the door, but I only had part of a single weekend to work on it, so I gave myself 20 hours to put together the scenario materials I created for my home-brew single-night game, and the Alien Survivor PDF is the result.

Download the complete Alien Survivor PDF right here.

Over at my writing/design site, Word Studio, you can also get a version of the PDF just for players, detailing just the information that the PCs should have. Look for it here.

Please note that this is version 0.9 — it’s something shy of total completeness, but you can play it as written. I did. You’ll want a GM comfortable with improvisation, though, and players comfortable with character death.

I’ve run one-shot games like this for years, using a bunch of different game systems, and they always have a rule: Only one player character can survive.

Sometimes no one survived. One time, two characters survived. But usually we stuck to the rule. Ordinarily I don’t recommend whittling down the number of active players in an RPG session down to one, but sometimes it’s good fun.

Time permitting, I’ll post some more about the design decisions behind the game here and there. Questions and comments are welcome, as what you’re seeing right now is just emerged from a small amount of work and thought. The thing has plenty of room for improvement.

I released this because I wanted to get it off my desk, and because I’m trying to do more and, as they say, fail faster. Enough little failures, enough little lessons learned, and I stand a better chance of stumbling onto something good enough to warrant success.

We’re also discussing the game over at this Story Games discussion thread.

If you take the time to download it, thanks in advance. Have fun.