ALIEN RPG vs Eat the Reich
Compare ALIEN RPG and Eat the Reich side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| ALIEN RPG | Eat the Reich | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Scifi, Horror | Historical, Horror |
| Play Style | Horror, Survival, Deadly, Atmospheric, One-Shot Friendly, Gritty, Licensed IP | Pulp Action, Combat-Heavy, High-Power, One-Shot Friendly, Mission-Based, Playbook-Driven, Rules-Light |
| Core Mechanic | Roll a d6 dice pool (attribute + skill). Each 6 is a success. Stress adds extra dice: better odds, but stress dice that roll 1 trigger panic. Push rolls to reroll failures but gain stress. Cinematic mode for one-shots, Campaign mode for long-form play. | Roll a pool of d6s equal to your stat plus one die per piece of equipment or ability you activate; discard any die showing 3 or less, count 4–5 as a success, and 6 as a critical. The GM builds a separate Attack pool equal to the engaged Threat's rating and rolls it. You then allocate each remaining die to one of five slots, narrating one scene detail per die as you place it: advance an Objective, eliminate a Threat, defend against the GM's Attack dice, feed for Blood, or trigger a SPECIAL (criticals only). Any GM Attack dice you don't cancel with defence dice inflict Injuries. |
| Dice | d6 dice pool | d6 dice pool |
| Complexity | Medium | Low |
| Accessibility | Medium | Medium |
| Runnability | High | Low |
| License | All Rights Reserved (20th Century Studios license) | Proprietary |
| Cost | $$ | $$ |
| Publisher | Free League Publishing | Rowan, Rook and Decard |
| Year | 2025 | 2023 |
| Best For | Sci-fi horror campaigns and one-shots in the Alien universe, with a stress/panic system that mechanically drives tension. Supports both deadly cinematic one-shots and long-form campaign play. | Groups who want a self-contained, ultraviolent anti-fascist action romp playable in two or three short sessions with pregenerated characters and zero campaign overhead. |
| Highlights | Stress and panic system mechanically reinforces horror tension, two distinct play modes (Cinematic and Campaign), Evolved Edition streamlines rules and improves layout, well-supported licensed setting | Every die spent on attack is a die not spent defending or feeding for Blood, so each turn forces an explicit tradeoff between killing nazis, staying alive, and refueling the abilities that make you dangerous. Reinforcement rules ratchet pressure up each round (defeated Threats roll d6 to restore rating and every active Threat's Attack rating ticks up by one), so lingering in a scene gets steadily more lethal. Six pregenerated vampires with fixed mechanics but explicitly malleable backgrounds let the table skip session zero entirely and be drop-coffin-deployed into Paris within minutes of opening the book. |
| Considerations | Tightly bound to the Alien IP with limited genre flexibility, stress mechanics can feel punishing at high levels, Evolved Edition changes are modest over 1st edition | Built around a single fixed scenario (the assault on Hitler's Paris stronghold) with no support for other premises, settings, or open-ended campaign play. Character creation is reskin or hack-from-the-pregens only; the book offers no point-buy or formal chargen system. Splatter-violence tone and nazi subject matter are confrontational by design; the rulebook opens with content warnings, lines-and-veils guidance, and an evil-calibration checklist the table is expected to work through before play. |