History TabletopGame / AlienTheRoleplayingGame

** '''Church of Immaculate Incubation''' - Another group believing the end-times are near, the Church of Immaculate Incubation believes that only those who accept the "seed of God" into their hearts and are transformed into higher beings will enduring the coming apocalypse, and all this informed by the dreams of their seers. They illegally distribute copies of [[Film/{{Alien3}} Robert Morse's book]] ''Space Beast'', the "dragon" described therein matching their seers' description of "destroying angels" who will herald the end-of-days. Most people consider them kooky but otherwise harmless.

* CanonDiscontinuity: {{Zigzagged|Trope}} - The only movie that the RPG makes no references to is ''Film/AlienResurrection'', but that's only because the book's timeline takes the 2180s as the 'present' day. In-universe, 2180 is the year that the rebuilt Anchorhead opens, and the year after [[Film/{{Aliens}} the Sulaco investigates Hadley's Hope]] and [[Film/Alien3 the survivors subsequently land on Fiorina 161.]] ''Resurrection'' takes place over 200 years later. and whether those events happen or not is up to the Game Mother. The RPG does use the ''Mantis''-class ship, since Ripley 8 notes that the ''Betty'' is "older than I am", therefore the class must date back to at least the 2170s, if not the 2120s.

** '''Church of Immaculate Incubation''' - Another group believing the end-times are near, the Church of Immaculate Incubation believes that only those who accept the "seed of God" into their hearts and are transformed into higher beings will enduring the coming apocalypse, and all this informed by the dreams of their seers. They illegally distribute copies of [[Film/{{Alien3}} Robert Morse's book]] ''Space Beast'', the "dragon" described therein matching their seers' description of avenging angels who will herald the end-of-days. Most people consider them kooky but otherwise harmless.
*** '''Children of the Two Divines''' - An offshoot of the Church of Immaculate Incubation, the Children of the Two Divines are a more militant sect led by a pair of professional dreamers they regard as prophets. They believe that the key to salvation lies beyond the frontier and seek to make a journey to find it. Having committed to this course, they don't have much use for human society more generally and are willing to do terrible things in the name of furthering their cause of finding salvation.

* MutagenicGoo: Agent A0-3959X.91-15, "the black goo", a genetic accelerant developed by [[{{Precursors}} The Engineers]]. It has the power to create, reshape, and destroy life, but it has to be properly programmed to do so. When not programmed, any living thing that comes into direct contact with the black goo will either die horribly, give birth to monsters, or become a monster themselves.

* OutsideContextProblem: Across the frontier, along the regions where the United Americas and the Union of Progressive People's areas of influence butt up against each other, many colonies have been destroyed following the same pattern: ships arrive from FTL impossibly close to a planet, disable all nearby hardware with a powerful EMP attack, and then drop biological weaponry on the colony that causes a rapidly reproducing virus-like condition that ends with the afflicted mutating and then disintegrating into a vapor, before disappearing back into FTL. The UA blames it on undeclared attacks by the UPP, the UPP blames it on undeclared attacks by the UA, and these so-called "Border Bombers" have escalated the SpaceColdWar between them into a dangerous stage if cooler heads on each side don't prevail.[[note]]While the rulebook has a few hints to drop about the nature of these colony-obliterating bombings, it gives no explicate canonical explanation for it and discourages the Game Mother from settling the question with the players, since leaving it as [[NothingIsScarier a vague and unknown threat is better for tension]]...[[/note]]

** '''LV-223''': The planet that ''Film/{{Prometheus}}'' is set on. The combination of uncontained [[MutagenicGoo black goo]] that spread among the local biosphere, along with an excavation shuttle piloted there by colonists escaping from the fall of the nearby Hadley's Hope colony that, unfortunately for the former crew, contained xenomorphs. Those xenomorphs have reacted with the black goo, mutating them into new and even deadlier forms. The evolution on the planet is out of control and virtually everything there is highly aggressive.

* LostColony: The Far Spinward Colonies were a set of colonies established far out from Earth during the early phases of human interstellar colonization. However, unexpected solar ejecta and radiation storms played hell with hyperspace navigation and communication between them and Earth. In response to this, the "Twenty Parsec Limit" was established, where colonies founded further out from Earth than that would be not entitled to support from the homeworld and are on their own. At time of the game's present, it has been three-quarters of a century that these colonies have been lost and out of contact. In an attempt to reconcile belligerent super-nations in the wake of the Frontier War, the United Nations has proposed an international mission to reestablish contact with these isolated colonies, the "Great Mother Mission".

* LighterAndSofter: "Campaign" gameplay as opposed to "Cinematic" gameplay. The later is intended to be lethal and have a short discrete story that can be covered in a few sessions (essentially, it's meant to replicate the experience of an ''Alien'' film, complete with almost everyone getting a gruesome death at some point). The former is generally less likely to kill off player characters at any given moment and the Game Mother is encouraged to lay off the xenomorphs since it wouldn't make sense to encounter them every place the players go. Instead various other human opposition such as mercenaries, cultists, or corporate agents and other hostile alien wildlife are session-to-session fare, with the xenomorphs only showing up directly during big climatic story beats. Of course, "lighter and softer" is just relative in this case, as it's still a horror game and players should expect scary moments, close calls, and only the ''occasional'' CharacterDeath.

* SignatureTeamTransport: In both Colonial Marines and Space Truckers campaign modes, the player characters will typically be living primarily aboard ship, and will typically be operating and directing it. That doesn't necessarily mean they have complete freedom though, as Colonial Marines need to respond to redeployment orders and Space Truckers need to complete delivery contracts. These also make for excellent adventure hooks for a Game Mother to pull, as keeping a ship maintained and fueled is an ordeal in itself and can be used to drive the players forward, even if it means putting themselves into a situation that smells a little risky...

* SettlingTheFrontier: A big part of the setting, and in fact one of the archetypes for campaign play is for the players to be early-in colonists. The frontier is where new mineral deposits are tapped, new worlds are scouted for potential colonization, where the hard work of initial terraforming is done, and where a lot of material needs to be moved back and forth. However, it's also a place of potential danger and discovery, and the place where humankind is most likely to run into something left behind by those who preceded them. Most campaigns are assumed to take place in part or in whole out on the fringes of interstellar human civilization.

** '''Hyperdyne Systems / Hyperdyne Corporation''' has long been a leader in the development of synthetics, made famous for the Dave series of androids. An ill-fated attempt to expand into space colonization ventures of the Hyades Cluster coupled with several other missteps put them in a position to be bought-out in a hostile takeover by Weyland-Yutani who made them a subsidiary brand. However this proved to be short-lived, as Hyperdyne was able to buy themselves back out of ownership of Weyland-Yutani and become independent again. During this transition, the head of their synthetic development program, Michael Bishop, designer of the android series that bares his name, was retained by Weyland-Yutani in a deal to offer him the position of Chief Executive Officer.