You all know the movie aliens I hope because those are the bastards I am refering to. I'm looking for ideas on how to incorporate them into a mission or series of missions. Go the stats for them all figured out and how the blood is going to affect armor (going to teach the terminators a thing or two).

WS BS S x2 T Ag x2 Int Per WP Fel

45 15 40 41 55 35 60 20 ---

Just the generic warrior. Still need to figure skills and talents for it. Any ideas on those?

Save yourself the effort and just use Genestealers.

Gamibash said:

Genestealers are fashioned after Xenomorphs, except much more dangerous.

Well the current group has a knack for burning anything nid to the ground in at least five combat rounds or so it seems. Besides I think the acid for blood slowly eating through marine armor would be interesting especially if one of the huggers gets a unhelmed marine…

Gamibash said:

I'm not sure your stats will stand up better than the published Tyranid stats (especially genestealers from TEP). If it were me, I'd just use Tyranids and give them acid blood as a mutation- take toxic property and modify it for your needs. I would be careful though to not make it too potent, as while on one hand you want to scare your players and give them a sense or mortality you also don't want to take away the aspect of them being The Emperor's Finest. I'd also make sure to balance the encounters or acid for hand to hand specialists- no one likes to play an Assault Marine in a mission where if they engage in hand to hand combat they'll wind up melted.

Even if you're going for an "Aliens" adventure with a non-Tyranid enemy to throw the PCs for a loop, I'm lazy so I'd still steal the published Tyranid stat, modify toxic, and then change the exterior description of them.

To be honest, /most/ enemies I throw at my PCs are dead or the PCs are spending fate within 5 combat rounds anyhow. Seeing that when I play 1 combat round can take 30 minutes, anything over 5 rounds of solid combat can drown the better part of a session.

Including stuff from other 'universes' always ruins the mood for me; I always think "Why stop there? Why not have Superman and Buffy the Vampire Slayer show up to save the day, instead of my universe-specific PC?'

Adeptus-B said:

Surely there is a distinction between including a monstrous alien in a game about killing monstrous aliens and including a cartoon super-hero or a high-school vampire-hunter.

kjakan said:

There is, but I do agree somewhat with Adeptus. Most 'universes' have specific themes and imagry associated with them. 40k's is very specific, and to include Aliens from that particular series is taking a completely different universe, theme, and imagry and shoving it into 40k. Other fiction comes with it's own baggage and players' preconceived notions of how it should work, so in this particular case when you take an "Alien" and put it into 40k and don't 40k-a-size it (like they did with genestealers), players may be left wondering why the aliens are 100 times more powerful than they were in the film and how it doesn't make sense that acid can burn through terminator armor, or why they're making fear checks, or why their .75 cal bolt rounds do the same or less than the 10mm (.40 cal) rounds from the movie, etc.

There are rules for an Acid Blood biomorph in… I wanna say Jericho Reach.

It *does* seem a bit odd to include Alien continuity Aliens in 40K since it's already got Tyranids which are effectively based on the Xenomorphs from Aliens . It'd be sort of like including Elves and Orcs as beings distinct from Eldar and Orks.

Maybe the question should have been :

Witch stats would you give to a tyrannid breed like the Alien in the Alien movies?

Maybe a genestealer or tyranid warrior heir.

Okay, if your guys are going to burn down genestealer stats anyway, take another approach.

The Ordo Xenos has been observing a new and potentially devastating tyranid xeno-form originating on the outskirts of Hive Fleet Dagon. Reports from survivors of the attacks of this breed indicate that they are an infiltration organism that are capable of independant breeding. A secondary organism deposits a fist sized seed pod into the vitals of the victim and disorientates the victims mind, making them largely forget the incident. Between a day and a week later, the gestating creature has absorbed enough nutrients to burst forth in a spray of gore, and begin to hunt non-tyranid creatures around it.

The civilian void station, Vendegrath Orbital, was towed into position around a gas giant where its crew were informed they would be siphoning gaseous promethium for the crusade efforts. The location was secretly selected by the Ordo as a prime hunting ground for this new xenos threat. Within four months of their deployment, the crew of Vendigrath Orbital granted clearance to a inter-system garbage scow to dock. One of the scows crew was infected with the organism which subsequently gestated, burst free, and infected the Vendegrath crew before eventually being destroyed by a vengeful crew armed with refining lasers. Fortunately, the infection was spread, and the Ordos now have twenty field subjects to experiment on to discover the weakness of this news species.

The Deathwatch have been summoned, as the creatures are lethal to humans within moments of their eruption. Moreover, the Imperial Guard would be ill suited to dealing with the creatures - they would be too likely to kill them, rather than contain them should the unthinkable happen and one of the victims erupt before they are escored to the cyrogenic pods on board the astartes vessel.

The mission is a simple one. Escort twenty prisoners across a space station to cyrogenic pods. if any of them don't make it, capture (not kill) the greatures and store THEM in cyrogenics pods. They're not a threat to the astartes of the Deathwatch, but their acid will certainly damage the armour. if your players just kill them outright, the Inquisition will start stripping renown like it's going out of fashion. You can time the chest bursters to pop out whenever you want to - probably at really unpleasant moments. if your players insist on terminator armour all the time, this mission will punish their slow moving asses.

Thebigjul said:

Ah- in that case, I say hormagaunts with the acid blood biomorph: the aliens in Aliens were pretty easy to one-shot, and had to rely on overwhelming numbers against the (drastically inferior to Astartes) Colonial Marines.

Adeptus-B said:

They were via the Colonial Marines, and a direct import should have them horded up, I agree

However if you want the Astartes to feel like the Colonial Marines did (and keep the fiction that it takes 1 human host to gestate 1 xenos), I'd go with genestealers or warriors as Thebigjul suggests and make it more of an Astartes versus Elites combat.

@professor_kylan: That was a great way of 40k-a-sizing the Aliens story.