ALIEN RPG Evolved Edition Ships, Space, and Colonies Guide

Introduction

Ships and settlements are the infrastructure of survival in ALIEN RPG Evolved Edition. A ship carries the crew through distance, but depends on systems that can fail. A colony promises a destination, but depends on labor, supplies, pressure doors, processors, and people who cannot simply leave when conditions get worse.

This guide covers both halves of that infrastructure. The first part treats the ship as a working location with travel time, modules, zones, damage, and repairs. The second treats Frontier colonies as play locations built on dependencies and scarcity. The last part ties them together so the route between locations becomes part of the scenario. For the history of the colonies, the corporations, and charted space, see the ALIEN RPG setting and lore guide.

A ship should be a problem factory, not a safe lobby between scenes. The damage tables include a broken coffee maker for a reason: the book wants mundane systems to matter, and a Game Mother who skips shipboard time is throwing away free tension.

Hot Take

Hypersleep is the rule GMs cut first to save table time, and it is usually the wrong cut. Skipping straight to the destination throws away the questions this guide raises about who stays awake, what work has to finish before the crew goes under, and what is different when they wake, and those questions are where a colony or ship scenario actually gets its hooks planted.

Treat the FTL countdown as a scene with its own decisions instead of a loading screen, and the arrival lands with a problem already waiting instead of a blank slate.

Make Infrastructure Matter

The core rules give ships and settlements systems that people depend on: breathable air, power, communications, navigation, cryosleep, medical support, cargo capacity, pressure protection, and repair capability. Use those systems as real conditions for play. For each important system, answer three questions:

1. What does it make possible for the crew or settlement?
2. Who is immediately affected if it fails?
3. What does restoring it cost in time, supplies, access, or trust?

Do not treat a failure as a generic obstacle. Make it change the route, the available information, the supply count, or the people the crew can protect.

Ship Rules: Run the Ship as a Working Location

A ship carries the crew, but it also depends on air scrubbers, power, navigation, communication, maintenance, modules, and people who know how to keep each system running. When one part fails, the ship creates an objective, a route problem, a repair scene, or an argument about what can be saved. The book notes that most FTL ships are corporate or military property and most crews are contracted, which is a useful source of orders the crew may not like.

Start With the Ship's Job

Before choosing a ship class, decide what the ship has to do for the campaign or scenario. The core book tracks commercial ships by class, with light A to G classes and the Class M workhorses of the UA and 3WE, and each class differs in crew size, length, FTL rating, hull, and module slots.

Do not detail every room. Detail the places that affect a decision: bridge, engineering, airlock, medlab, cargo, cryo deck, computer access, crew quarters, escape craft, and any location tied to the current job.

Make Travel Create Play

Every FTL-capable ship has an FTL rating: the days it takes to cross one parsec, with a lower rating meaning a faster ship and no current ship rated below 1. Multiply the rating by the parsecs traveled. The book's example is a rating 6 drive covering 9 parsecs in 54 days. An engineer can try to overcharge the engines once per week with a shift of work and a HEAVY MACHINERY roll, lowering the rating by one for a week, but a failure starts a chain of rolls that can end with a reactor breach or the ship exploding. A ship towing external cargo on a tractor hitch doubles its FTL rating.

Long FTL trips usually happen in hypersleep, which saves resources and protects travelers from Neurological Distortion Disorder. A character who stays awake rolls a D6 after each period of days equal to the ship's FTL rating, adding +1 to each roll after the first. Results climb from no effect to paranoia, epilepsy, dementia, and finally psychosis. Hypersleep has its own cost: a rude awakening counts as an attack with six base dice, and any time in hypersleep leaves the sleeper fatigued.

Those rules give travel decisions weight:

• Who stays awake to maintain the ship or watch an unusual situation, and for how long?
• What work must be finished before the crew enters stasis?
• What information, injury, agenda, or system fault is waiting when people wake?
• What does an early wake-up cost in readiness, supplies, or trust?

Ships with the Planetfall Capacity upgrade can land, which takes about a shift and a PILOTING roll. Failure causes minor component damage, and the crew then chooses whether to abort or roll again with worse stakes, up to a crash. Travel works best when it changes the starting conditions at the next destination rather than skipping to it.

Map the Ship as Zones and Systems

The core rules divide maps into zones, usually a room, a corridor, or an area up to about 25 meters across, with open or blocked borders, doors and hatches, and crawlspaces where even friendly characters block line of sight. Use ship zones when position, movement, stealth, combat, decompression, or a task under pressure matters.

The Combat Rules Guide covers the core zone procedure when a shipboard situation turns into stealth or combat.

Turn Modules Into Dependencies

Internal modules come in sizes I to V, from the size of a personal vehicle to the size of a large building, and a ship has a fixed number of slots of each size. A smaller module fits a bigger slot, but a bigger module never fits a smaller one. The book lists modules such as an artificial intelligence that runs the ship while the crew sleeps, air scrubbers rated for up to 10 people at size I and up to 2,500 at size IV, cargo bays, cryo decks, docking umbilicals, emergency escape vehicles, galleys, hangars, medlabs, salvage cranes, science labs, tractor hitches, and vehicle bays. ICC-sanctioned ships must carry enough escape vehicles for the whole crew.

Modules tell you what the crew can attempt and what fails if the system goes offline. Build each important module with three notes:

1. Function: What does the crew rely on it to do?
2. Failure: What immediate consequence follows if it stops working?
3. Fallback: Which person, route, tool, spare part, or hard choice could restore or replace it?

Failed air scrubbers are more than a repair roll. The minor damage table gives -2 dice to STAMINA rolls for a shift, then total air loss. That sets a deadline, pushes the crew toward engineering, creates a need for suits or sealed compartments, and can force a choice between a search and a retreat.

Use Damage and Repairs as Scenes

Ship armor works like personal armor. When a single attack deals at least 1 damage but less than half the ship's Hull rating, the ship takes minor component damage from a D66 table. Damage of at least half the Hull rating causes major component damage from a 2D6 table, and damage equal to the Hull rating destroys the ship and everyone aboard. Accumulated damage equal to the Hull rating disables the ship: sensors, engines, and weapons fail and the whole ship suffers explosive decompression, but it can still be repaired. Component damage adds a stress level, and a disabled ship triggers a panic roll.

Repairs take time, skill, tools, and usually spare parts. Hull repair uses one HEAVY MACHINERY roll per shift, with each success removing a point of damage. Component repairs use the rolls listed on the damage tables, one per shift, and each successful roll consumes a mechanical spare part for HEAVY MACHINERY or an electronic one for COMTECH. Spare parts cost roughly $100,000 for mechanical and twice that for electronic at an average spaceport, or a crew can scavenge them from a derelict with a shift of work and a skill roll, up to the wreck's full Hull score. That makes repair needs good fuel for jobs and detours.

Emergency repairs during ship combat take a stretch instead of a shift and need no parts, but the fix holds for only one shift. Hull and external repairs require a spacewalk or a dry dock.

Build a Shipboard Pressure Loop

1. Give the ship a job and a destination.
2. Establish a system, route, or module the job depends on.
3. Introduce evidence that the dependency is strained: an alert, an unusual reading, overdue maintenance, lost cargo, or a crew disagreement.
4. Make the crew choose what to inspect, repair, delay, conceal, or abandon.
5. Let the consequence change travel, access, supplies, or relationships.

For survival procedures when someone gets hurt aboard, read the Critical Injuries and Survival Guide.

Colonies as Play Locations

A colony works when scarcity has a face and a decision attached. A failed atmospheric processor, a late supply shipment, crowded quarters, a broken comms uplink, an unsafe mine, or a corporate order matters because named people need the system to work and the crew must decide what to repair, ration, reveal, protect, or leave behind. Use those pressures before adding an extraordinary threat, so the danger feels like it belongs to the place. This section stays on colonies as locations to run; the setting and lore guide covers how the Frontier and its powers came to be.

Start With a Colony Dependency

Most Frontier settlements exist because somebody needs something from that location: a mineral deposit, farm output, a processing facility, a waypoint, scientific work, or a strategic presence. The colony's purpose tells you what it cannot afford to lose.

The core book describes a range of colony conditions. Atmospheric processors can take decades to change a world, and most worlds under processing will never become Earth-like, only survivable without a pressure suit. Some need the processor running constantly to keep the air breathable, which makes it a target for rival powers and insurgents. Mineral-rich worlds that cannot be terraformed at all house workers and their families in pressurized surface facilities. Ocean, jungle, desert, arctic, and barren colony worlds are all common, and the environment should shape daily work rather than only the opening description.

Give the settlement one dependency at the center of the current scenario. The crew needs to understand what breaks next if no one acts, rather than run an economic simulation.

Make Scarcity Personal

The core book describes Frontier colonies in an economic depression, where supplies are limited and colonists are told to ration and improvise. That becomes play only when the shortage affects people the crew can see. Name the missing thing, the person or group who needs it, the deadline, and the choice that creates a cost.

The shortage should not dictate the correct answer. It should make every answer reveal priorities.

Use Colony Infrastructure as a Source of Play

On a Frontier colony, infrastructure is survival made physical. Atmospheric processors, pressure doors, power systems, surface vehicles, antenna arrays, cargo facilities, communal quarters, medical areas, and maintenance routes are all places where people work and where a routine problem can become a crisis. The book calls the Weyland-Yutani atmospheric processors "giant fusion reactors" that still need constant monitoring and maintenance, and notes that colonies are often founded just to service them.

That creates clear stakes without forcing a monster into the scene. A routine inspection becomes a repair under time pressure. A disputed shutdown becomes a labor conflict. A damaged access route forces the crew to decide whether to expose themselves to the environment. When you introduce important infrastructure, write down three things:

1. What it provides: Air, power, food, access, transport, information, or income.
2. Who depends on it: A specific shift, family, medic, manager, or isolated outpost.
3. What complicates the fix: Missing parts, unsafe access, conflicting orders, limited time, or uncertain information.

Frontier Work and Distance

The core book's Frontier is full of unglamorous jobs: farmers, maintenance engineers, wildcatters, prospectors, miners, space truckers, marshals, managers, and soldiers. Those roles interlock. Prospectors survey and stake claims, miners often serve one-year contracts before rotating out, maintenance engineers keep the processors running, truckers haul supplies in and exports out, and corporations send security and assessment teams to check on their assets. Mercenaries, vagabonds, and privateers drift between colonies at the edges.

Use that chain to build credible problems:

• A delay in one job creates a hard choice for another group.
• A visiting crew knows only part of the settlement's history and must decide whom to trust.
• A contract makes the practical answer morally expensive.
• A manager, corporate assessor, or security detail has authority without sharing the workers' risk.
• A drifter or private operator offers an alternative with a hidden obligation.

Distance prevents easy resolution. Interstellar transmissions through the Network can take weeks or months, while messages inside a system range from real time to a short lag. Every transmission needs a working uplink to an antenna array, long-distance calls are expensive, and heavy traffic can leave a colony waiting days for authorized time. The book notes that general managers, marshals, and commanders often end up deciding by their own reading of policy because approval takes too long. Help is a possibility, not a button, so local decisions matter.

Run Colony Locations as Working Places

Choose a small set of locations that support the colony's purpose and its current crisis. Each should have a job, an obvious way in or out, and a reason the crew cannot ignore it.

Map only what becomes relevant to a choice. A route between the processor and the medical station matters if it can be blocked. A cargo bay matters if it holds the missing part. A communal area matters if the ration decision must be announced there.

Give Every Settlement a Decision Loop

1. Establish an ordinary job the settlement must complete.
2. Show a dependency beginning to fail or a resource becoming scarce.
3. Put a person or group in immediate danger from that failure.
4. Present at least two actions that each protect something different.
5. Let the choice change access, supplies, authority, relationships, or the next threat.

For example, a colony's atmospheric system has a recurring fault. The manager wants the crew to restart it before the next shift. An engineer says the restart could make the damage worse. A group in temporary quarters will lose heat if power is redirected. A supply ship is days away in-system, but the comms relay is unreliable. The scene needs a situation where the crew's values become action, rather than a hidden correct answer.

Raise the pressure by making results visible: a zone closes, a shift is delayed, rations change, a worker goes missing, an authority figure arrives, or a repair exposes evidence that changes the original problem. That keeps a settlement active instead of turning it into a map full of people waiting to be rescued.

Connect Shipboard and Colony Pressure

Space travel and settlement life should change one another. The crew arrives with a problem, discovers a dependency, and finds that their ship, cargo, or departure plan has become part of the solution.

For example, a transport reaches a remote colony with the spare part needed to restore an atmospheric processor. Its own air scrubber failed during the trip and needs the same category of part before it can safely leave. The settlement manager, the ship's engineer, and the workers all have legitimate claims. The scenario becomes about what the crew values and what consequences they accept, rather than about finding the one correct skill roll.

Distance should never turn the crew into spectators. Show the consequence in advance and offer actions with different costs: repair a relay, delay a departure, ration supplies, split the group, strike a local bargain, change the contract, or leave before things get worse. None is automatically safe, but each is a decision the players own.

Where To Go From Here

Take these infrastructure pressures into the scenes they were built for: pace the resulting stress and panic with the Stress and Panic guide, and set the governments and corporations that fight over these ships and colonies with the ALIEN RPG setting and lore guide.

Source Scope

Rules and setting details in this guide were checked against the ALIEN RPG Evolved Edition Core Rulebook sections on FTL travel and hypersleep, Living in Space, Deep Space Colonies, Communications on the Frontier, Spacecraft Basics, and Ship Damage and Repairs. Ship class tables, armaments, and full damage tables stay in the book. Return to the ALIEN RPG Evolved Edition root guide for the complete library map.