Create scenarios and adventures inspired by the Alien film franchise (soon to be joined by the Alien: Earth television show)!
Part 1 talked about the setting and encounter elements you need to truly invoke the Alien feel. This time, leet’s look at the creature itself.
The titular alien, the xenomorph, has a number of features displayed in the films, but in creating an Alien-like experience you don’t have to replicate them exactly. Acid blood, for example, is a signature xenomorph trait, but you can create an Alien-like encounter without including it.
Most importantly, the creature should be scary, which boils down to it 1) being potentially deadly, 2) hard to kill, and 3) attacking with a series of ambushes and traps and surprises. To evoke the right feeling, it should strike, do damage, then disappear, leaving the PCs to wonder where it is and fear its eventual return.
But what to use for the creature itself? Well, how much work do you want to put into it? Here are some options:
1. Use the Golmana Demon from the Monster Vault
If you’ve seen the picture of this demon in the Monster Vault, you know its look was inspired by the Alien xenomorph. It has the Spider Climb trait which enables it to climb up and down walls and ceilings and shafts, and it doesn’t need to rely on sight—it can attack in full darkness. It also has a cool screech ability and a set of torso claws to rip into its victims.
It’s a CR 7 creature, so not suitable for all levels, but it’s as close as you get to a xenomorph out of the box. If you don’t like that it’s a demon, change its creature type to Monstrosity or Aberration or whatever suits your needs.
2. Reskin an Existing Creature
If you don’t have time to create a bespoke creature, try reskinning an existing creature (one of my favorite GM tricks). Reskinning takes an existing creature’s stat block and changes its appearance, lore, and the way it presents to the players.
So while a creature’s stats are identical to those of a gnoll, your players see the dogman servant of the dead wizard. The large, pink, fleshy humanoid with the constantly regenerating tumorous growths? Under the surface, it’s a troll. You can go further and change a few things in the stat block like the creature type and a resistance or movement type. The nice thing about using an existing creature is that you can choose something with a CR value appropriate for your PCs. Here are some creatures from the Monster Vault, that could serve as the “alien creature” in your game:
CRs 1–5
Ankheg: These stats work really well in a xenomorph skin. An ankheg can burrow, allowing it to get around, often to places the PCs can’t go. It has an acid spray which evokes the feeling of the xenomorph’s acid blood, and it even has the Save for Later trait which helps it target and take out individual PCs without killing them.
Basilisk: The basilisk has poison spit which works fine, but it’s a breeze to change the damage type to acid. Its petrification ability, a classic, also neutralizes PCs without killing them. Change the gaze to a bonus action effect that works at range or requires a successful attack with a 10 or 15 foot reach, and call it a projectile tongue. Give it the Spider Climb trait, but keep it somewhat snakelike, letting it crawl up and down walls and ceilings.
Grick: The grick works well in this role with its Spider Climb and Stone Camouflage traits, enabling it to move along vertical surfaces and hide there. If your environment is different, change the camouflage to work in whatever terrain you’re using. You might add a ranged attack, though it’s not strictly necessary.
Mordovermis: The mordovermis works pretty much as is, even without changing its appearance. Its flying speed enables it to go pretty much anywhere, and its Sinuous Form trait lets it get into small spaces (and pop out of them). Its Transfixing Gaze is yet another trait that can temporarily neutralize a PC, though I suggest modifying it to stun rather than charm.
CRs 6–10
Drider: A drider is a recognizable creature to those familiar with it, but change the elfy part to something black and shiny and slimy, transform the spider body to something elongated and insect-like, and it starts to get to the right place. It has the Spider Climb trait and a Web Shot to neutralize PCs (which you can reskin as a sticky mucous). Ditch the longsword attack and make it some kind of slashing limb with the same stats.
Grick, Advanced: This is good for all the reasons mentioned above for the non-advanced grick. Plus it has additional traits. If you want to involve multiple creatures (see below), the Coordinated Strikes ability works very well.
Hag, Ambush: Full disclosure, I designed the ambush hag, but I think it works really well in this role. It already looks monstrous and that appearance can be pushed even farther to make it more alien. It has Spider Climb and a Poison Spray. I would giving it a more predatory and cunning intelligence instead of the hag’s cognitive thinking. I’d also ditch the spellcasting, replacing it with a restraining or neutralizing effect one of the other creatures in the list employs.
CRs 10+
At CR 10 and up, reskinning gets harder, because creatures tend to be more distinct (like dragons or liches). These creatures are often bigger than we want for this type of scenario and generally more intelligent. You can still make use of some of them, but you have to do more work, or depart more significantly from the Alien template.
The behir, for example, works well, but not at Huge size. Reduce it to Large and change its Constrict trait to work on Medium or smaller creatures. A purple worm might work but needs way more modification since it’s built around being big and swallowing creatures.
For a higher CR creature, you’re better off taking a lower CR creature and making it more powerful. Overall though, a xenomorph-style creature works best at CR 10 or below. Once PCs get higher level spells, some of the threat and scariness start to level off.
3. Create Your Own Creature
If you have the time and inclination, the final option is to create your own alien creature from scratch. You can make it exactly how you want it, with the exact abilities you have in mind. You can mimic the xenomorph’s acid blood, its ballistic second jaw, and any new surprises. It’s your creation.
Make sure that the creature has some kind of stealth ability, some way to neutralize or restrain PCs to amp up the tension, and some kind of special movement to allow it to appear suddenly and escape with ease. The benefit with a new creation is that you can customize it to your specific setting, to the appropriate CR, and make it fit perfectly.
The Xenomorph Lifecycle
Up until now I’ve only addressed the xenomorph itself, and not the other parts of its lifecycle—the eggs and facehugger. While these are iconic and cool Alien elements, they aren’t necessary to create an Alien-like scenario.
Still, they’re cool. Personally, I would alter the facehugger to make it slightly different and less recognizable. Perhaps your version restrains a creature’s torso and injects the egg with a tail-like piercing extension. The PCs defeat the creature in combat and then try to deal with the wounds the creature created, not knowing there’s an egg inside the victim. Or maybe the PCs find a pod that they can’t identify, and rather than a creature, it spits a gob of sticky, mucous-like material that hits a creature in the face, forming a gooey globe around its head. The PCs must remove it (which might be as easy as spending time pulling it apart, with Strength checks or the like) but by then, it’s already inserted the egg in the creature’s mouth.
Now, we wouldn’t want to do this to a PC, at least not initially. It’s best for a chestburster to emerge from an NPC or other creature first, when the PCs can see it and draw a line from the facehugger scenarios above. This sets them up for the more horrifying event of having a facehugger insert an egg into a PC next, and then find a way to deal with it before it grows and bursts free. This could be as simple as a restoration spell, or finding some kind of potion or magic item, or tracking down someone who can remove it, depending on your needs and PC capabilities.
Introducing earlier stages of the creature also sets up other adventure possibilities. Once they know the facehugger stage leads to another creature, you can have them discover, perhaps even after they’ve neutralized or escaped the alien creature, that an NPC or other creature was infected and managed to escape ahead of them. They then must track down that infected creature and deal with it before another alien creature emerges.
This works best if they’ve already had to deal with a creature and recognize the severity of the threat. Even better, have that creature headed in the direction of a town or people that the PCs care about to give them more of a reason to pursue.
Multiple Alien Creatures
If one is good, how about more? This was the whole deal with Aliens, after all.
A single alien creature is still a strong choice, because defeating one makes the rest less scary. But if you want to amp it up, start with a single encounter, stressing the creature’s power and terror. Once the PCs have experienced that and had time to recover, introduce multiples to communicate the terror of scale.
One example is to use the grick stat block for the initial alien creature. Then, when you introduce multiples, introduce the advanced grick as a boss (or, say, queen) and take advantage of its ability to aid other gricks.
If you draw on this for your own adventures, let us know what you tried and how it went in the Kobold Discord!
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