If you were to create one in the SW universe what would be the stat block for it (minion, and queen)

This is what I was thinking

minions

soak 2 wounds 4

brawn- 3 agility- 3 int- 1 cunning- 2 will-1 pres-1

athletics, perception, stealth, survival, vigilance, brawl

Teeth, claws, tail attacks, acid blood

talent-

Queen (nemisis)

soak 4 wounds 18 strain 12

brawn- 4 agility- 4 int- 1 cunning- 2 will-1 pres-1

athletics 2, perception 1, stealth 2, survival 3, vigilance 2, brawl 3

Teeth, claws, tail attacks, acid blood

talent- Adversary, crippling blow, deadly accuracy, Feral strength

Unless you're running a predator campaign, I would not make a Xenomorph a minion. It does them a great disservice to make them easy kills. I would stat them as beefy rivals at the very least.

Wait, they have a soak of two but three Brawn? That doesn't make sense. Did you intend to add them together for 5 perhaps? Still seems underwhelming.

yes but if you think about it as if 10 of them are coming at you all in one minion group. That would make them pretty beefy. Also if you think about the stats for a stormtrooper who is supposed to be well trained, they are also stated as minions.

If I have 10 of them coming at the players as rivals, that would take forever to play through.

Ahh missed that Fang thanks. Was just putting it together as I was typing it into the post.

I just came up with the idea of having the pc's running into a ship in space if they ever fail a astro check bad. And have the xenomorphs on there. Thought it would be fun.

Ahh missed that Fang thanks. Was just putting it together as I was typing it into the post.

I just came up with the idea of having the pc's running into a ship in space if they ever fail a astro check bad. And have the xenomorphs on there. Thought it would be fun.

It could be fun, but I think that kaosoe and I think that Aliens are best represented as a singular threat. I suspect we both remember Alien and Aliens when a single alien or two was a serious threat. Yes, there was a minion version when a chain gun was involved in Aliens, but as a general rule I like them to be scary and nasty.

How about this then if I did them as rivals instead of minions

soak 6 wounds 16

brawn- 3 agility- 3 int- 1 cunning- 2 will-1 pres-1

athletics 2, perception 2, stealth 3, survival 3, vigilance 2, brawl 3

Teeth, claws, +4, brawl, crit 3, pierce 2, vicious 2

tail attacks, +3, brawl, crit 3, Pierce 2, Knockdown vicious 1

acid blood - if engaged when takes dmg, attacker must take 5dmg with breach 2

talent-

Queen (nemisis)

soak 7 wounds 22 strain 12

brawn- 4 agility- 4 int- 1 cunning- 2 will-1 pres-1

athletics 3, perception 1, stealth 3, survival 3, vigilance 2, brawl 4

Teeth, claws, +4, brawl, crit 3, pierce 3, vicious 2

tail attacks, +3, brawl, crit 3, Pierce 2, Knockdown, vicious 1, concussive

acid blood - if engaged when takes dmg, attacker must take 5dmg with breach 2

talent- Adversary, crippling blow, deadly accuracy, Feral strength

Unless you're running a predator campaign, I would not make a Xenomorph a minion. It does them a great disservice to make them easy kills. I would stat them as beefy rivals at the very least.

Depends on the movie they're in. Alien? Nemesis for sure. Aliens? Minions - lots and lots of minions. Pity they never made another alien movie beyond those two, so we have nothing else to go by.

THEY NEVER MADE ANY MORE ALIEN MOVIES. NEVER.

Do you want the xenomorphs from the Alien movie, or the Aliens movie? I would stat them differently. The one in the first movie is a Nemesis. The ones in the second movie, I would make high-stat Minions.

Minion status is not just a power thing, it's how a GM can handle them in combat - a streamlining benefit. If you have multiple of the same type of creature, Minion is extremely convenient. And if you watch the Aliens movie, they're usually either fully alive or fully dead. That means Minion to me. When they're coming out of the goddamn walls, you want to be handling that as a pile of minions. And that remains pretty terrifying - if you're in a corridor and there are a dozen of these things emerging all around you, you're not going to be saying "it's okay, they're minions". But as GM you will be saying "it's okay, I don't have to track a dozen different wound thresholds and status effects". And in that scenario, you want Drake to be able to stick his shotgun in one of their mouths and kill it, not whittle down the points on one out of twelve as a maths exercise. It's not as if the death of one of them is going to make it less scary when you have a pack of them chasing after your armoured transport.

Minions absolutely can be high stat, high soak and dangerous. The main difference is that you get the simplicity when you run them and that they tend to be alive or dead, which is more dramatic anyway than whittling points down on xeno #4.

Now if we're talking the Xenomorph from the first film, that's a whole different situation. Nemesis right there!

yes but if you think about it as if 10 of them are coming at you all in one minion group. That would make them pretty beefy. Also if you think about the stats for a stormtrooper who is supposed to be well trained, they are also stated as minions.

Ah yes. The Law of Conservation of Ninjutsu . I understand now.

Camouflage: Add boosts to Stealth checks if in their "natural" terrain.

Acid Blood: when the Alien takes damage, all creatures engaged with the Alien suffers 5 wounds with Breach 2

I would also give an adversary level or higher a special attack:

Grapple: Brawl attack with Ensnare 3

Unless you're running a predator campaign, I would not make a Xenomorph a minion. It does them a great disservice to make them easy kills. I would stat them as beefy rivals at the very least.

Depends on the movie they're in. Alien? Nemesis for sure. Aliens? Minions - lots and lots of minions. Pity they never made another alien movie beyond those two, so we have nothing else to go by.

THEY NEVER MADE ANY MORE ALIEN MOVIES. NEVER.

Another great movie franchise cut short was Highlander. You'd think they would have made a second Highlander movie, considering how great the first one was...

How about stats for the Yuuzhan Vong?

(ducks behind the sofa and laughs like an imp)

Unless you're running a predator campaign, I would not make a Xenomorph a minion. It does them a great disservice to make them easy kills. I would stat them as beefy rivals at the very least.

Depends on the movie they're in. Alien? Nemesis for sure. Aliens? Minions - lots and lots of minions. Pity they never made another alien movie beyond those two, so we have nothing else to go by.

THEY NEVER MADE ANY MORE ALIEN MOVIES. NEVER.

Another great movie franchise cut short was Highlander. You'd think they would have made a second Highlander movie, considering how great the first one was...

At least it had a good TV show, for the time.

Unless you're running a predator campaign, I would not make a Xenomorph a minion. It does them a great disservice to make them easy kills. I would stat them as beefy rivals at the very least.

Depends on the movie they're in. Alien? Nemesis for sure. Aliens? Minions - lots and lots of minions. Pity they never made another alien movie beyond those two, so we have nothing else to go by.

THEY NEVER MADE ANY MORE ALIEN MOVIES. NEVER.

Another great movie franchise cut short was Highlander. You'd think they would have made a second Highlander movie, considering how great the first one was...

What? You don't have the planet Zeist in your galaxy? That second movie was awesome for the franchise!

To wind up fans of the franchise, that's my go-to line. They're talking about how cool Highlander X or whatever is and I go, "Oh yeah, didn't they come from the planet Zeist?" and watch them loose their **** minds. (:

Unless you're running a predator campaign, I would not make a Xenomorph a minion. It does them a great disservice to make them easy kills. I would stat them as beefy rivals at the very least.

Depends on the movie they're in. Alien? Nemesis for sure. Aliens? Minions - lots and lots of minions. Pity they never made another alien movie beyond those two, so we have nothing else to go by.

THEY NEVER MADE ANY MORE ALIEN MOVIES. NEVER.

Another great movie franchise cut short was Highlander. You'd think they would have made a second Highlander movie, considering how great the first one was...

Or The Matrix, was a great movie, would have loved to see more Neo... Too bad they never made a sequel there either.

Wait, they have a soak of two but three Brawn? That doesn't make sense. Did you intend to add them together for 5 perhaps? Still seems underwhelming.

NPCs don't follow the same rules as PCs. They can have a 3 brawn and soak of 2 if you want them to. Its not very common, but there are a handful of adversaries in the published materials that have discrepancies in their brawn and starting soak.

What? You don't have the planet Zeist in your galaxy? That second movie was awesome for the franchise!

To wind up fans of the franchise, that's my go-to line. They're talking about how cool Highlander X or whatever is and I go, "Oh yeah, didn't they come from the planet Zeist?" and watch them loose their **** minds. (:

Hehe, yeah... "Planet Zeist"... good one! As if... I bet next you'll be telling me that the immortals were actually aliens, that MacLeod wasn't even really a highlander to begin with, that he and Ramirez really knew each other on this supposed "planet" before they met in the first movie, that Ramirez can miraculously raise himself back from the dead, and that they completely waste the acting talents of SEAN FREAKIN' CONNERY on some idiotic, contrived, and retconned drivel of a plot that makes no sense.

Oh, you guys... Always with the jokes!

Unless you're running a predator campaign, I would not make a Xenomorph a minion. It does them a great disservice to make them easy kills. I would stat them as beefy rivals at the very least.

Depends on the movie they're in. Alien? Nemesis for sure. Aliens? Minions - lots and lots of minions. Pity they never made another alien movie beyond those two, so we have nothing else to go by.

THEY NEVER MADE ANY MORE ALIEN MOVIES. NEVER.

But Alien 3 was a good movie - played up the threat of a single xenomorph again, and they had no real weapons to combat it, other than their environment.

Unless you're running a predator campaign, I would not make a Xenomorph a minion. It does them a great disservice to make them easy kills. I would stat them as beefy rivals at the very least.

Depends on the movie they're in. Alien? Nemesis for sure. Aliens? Minions - lots and lots of minions. Pity they never made another alien movie beyond those two, so we have nothing else to go by.

THEY NEVER MADE ANY MORE ALIEN MOVIES. NEVER.

But Alien 3 was a good movie - played up the threat of a single xenomorph again, and they had no real weapons to combat it, other than their environment.

I was just gonna whip up a post along these lines, but you beat me to it. Alien3 is actually my second-favourite of the series (behind the original classic). It falls on its face once or twice, but there's just so much artistry there that I can watch it again and again. Also, Weaver's finest performance in the series (in my opinion).

Good to know I have a kindred spirit!

Yea, it's my 2nd favourite too, but then, I tend to put Aliens in a separate category of 'action movies', rather than more horror/thriller, and in that category it excels.

But Alien 3 was a good movie - played up the threat of a single xenomorph again, and they had no real weapons to combat it, other than their environment.

I got the Alien box a month or so ago, watching all four with an objective, critical eye (and not just fanboy rage). The movie looks gorgeous, the sets look great and I'll give it to David Fincher - he took a turd of a script and put a very nice shine on it. The director's cut is the superior cut of the film to be sure. However at the end of the day, it's still a turd.

And killing two main characters like total punks, off-screen? Just because you didn't want to deal with them in the movie? That's terrible story telling.

Okay. Here you go - a full write-up of the Xenomorphs from the Alien and Aliens movies:

http://1drv.ms/1FwDLTV

I'll re-print the actual content below, but I recommend the PDF version in the link as it's more game-ready and lists all the traits.

I stole the idea of a Camouflage trait for them from Inquisitor Tremayne because it was, quite frankly, a really good idea.

Anyway, there are two versions depending on which film you wish to emulate. The version from the first movie is a Nemesis. The versions from the second film are Minions. Do NOT make the mistake that anything scary has to be a Rival. That's not how the rules work. Anyway, I gave my reasons for that earlier. One mistake I feel you made with your own Minion version of them was to give them skills like Stealth. It's a common mistake because you go down the list and see what you think they'll be good at (and indeed my Nemesis version from the first movie DOES have Stealth). But when you are creating Minions you have to moderate this approach. If you have one Xenomorph, Stealth wont do anything for them. If you have five in a Minion group they're suddenly almost impossible for the PCs to detect. And that is counter-intuitive. With Minions you need to give them only Skills that should properly scale. So I have given mine Brawl only which is correct - if you have a pack of these on you, then they're going to be more likely to hit, but not harder to notice. Anyway, don't worry about that - everybody does that. Only give Minions "Quantity" skills, not the "Quality" skills.

Alright, that's enough pre-amble. Below are the Aliens versions of the Xenomorphs. Be warned if you sic these on your players, they can be exceedingly deadly in the right circumstances. Remember to make good use of the environment if you run an Aliens game. Recall from the movies how often bad luck or poor planning conspired against the humans in that film. ("But if they fire, wont they rupture the primary cooling system?").

EDIT: Actually, formatting and laying all this out in the forum is a bit of a nightmare. I'm going to just leave the attached PDF above for now. I might post them into the forum later. If this is a problem for anyone just let me know and I'll happily paste them into the forum instead.

EDIT EDIT: I'm going to tack on a few design notes about what I wanted to achieve. Note the Drone Minions version. It actually has a Soak higher than its Wound Threshold. This is fine. What it tends to lead to is in the minion group of Xenomorphs, they shrug off a lot of light attacks (Vasquez keeps firing her pistol at it but it just keeps coming) but die properly when something should kill them (Hick's shotgun to the head of one of them). If I'm running a pack of these things, I don't want to deal with a pile of slightly injured ones. I want alive and terrifying or dead in a grisly fashion. I made their secondary jaws very damaging but circumstance specific. Those jaws seem to be able to punch through metal helmets, but they're short-range and the aliens only seem to use them when their opponent is surprised or pinned. So a Xenomorph might knock someone down and pounce on them and THEN they will punch through that character's chest plate and eat their heart, not in general combat. I tried to represent a number of traits as Talents or Abilities rather than simply high stats or skills. This let me do cool things with them (such as Unnatural Biology or making the Face Hugger hard to hit) without making them generally overpowered. So for example, with Unnatural Biology, they can shrug off a lot of environmental effects without having an absurdly high Soak score. I'm thinking when Fire seems more annoying to them than harmful, or when they swim in Aliens 4 (which is a beautiful scene whatever the film's flaws). The last thing you want with these Aliens is for a PC to break out a tazer and start stunning these things into unconsciousness. So now, if you rig up a cunning trap that redirects a power coupling across the metal grill flaw, you can get one of these things lying there and twitching, it's going to pull out your tazer darts and keep coming. Make no mistake - these things are pretty deadly.

I'm reserving this post slot to edit in the stats later when I have time.