Hands on with Demiplane’s Alien RPG Nexus

After spending a few years with various virtual tabletops and being less than impressed, my opinion started to turn early into the demo I received with Demiplane’s app for Free League’s Alien RPG. One of many Demiplane’s growing line of RPG apps, including Paizo games, Avatar Legends, Vampire the Masquerade, and Candela Obscura, the add-on was a clear step above an automated character sheet and some resources. With style and usability on display, it’s clear why more tabletop groups are adopting this platform and planning on further support.

The first, and potentially most useful, inclusion, is the character creation toolkit. It starts off with enough pregens that you don’t need to know the game at all to get started. Take a premade character, and the only thing you need to know from there is to click the right skills and attributes to roll your dice.  Success, stress, and the option to push rolls are all calculated automatically. The only place you need to have system knowledge, whether for skill or damage calculations, is in knowing the base dice mechanic and how to read your success indicator. If you know the game even a little, and even then you don’t really need to have firm system knowledge, the character creator breaks your options down into a few simple choices. This is the one area where a virtual tabletop holds clear superiority to the table; this character creator moves quickly, lays out all of your options, and can have you ready to play in under 5 minutes even if you take time to consider your options. The entire process of setting out your origin (including housecat, in the vein of noble Jonesy), job, equipment, and stats are broken down into a few automated choices.

The options for Aliens are growing all the time. Demiplane has numerous supplements already uploaded, with more on the way. My demo contained all of the options for marine characters and the option for a marine campaign, with other adventure material available. The in-game resource to locate equipment, rules, or other important information to reference is much more usable than Roll20’s, and integrates more easily with the character sheet. The interface can also track your spaceship and make rolls for it, easing different modes of play without having to leave the application. All of this is supplemented by some wonderful style. The Alien interface gives you a few options, animating art from the sourcebooks to add touches of flair and keep the mood dour. It’s a step up from some of the more clinical virtual tabletop’s I have seen, with fewer awkward shortcuts necessary to use its features.

In the coming weeks I am going to be following up with Demiplane, to talk about the explosion of interest in virtual tabletops, and their partnerships with major publishers. With the slow implosion of Hasbro, the competition is gearing up to capitalize on an interested and underserved player base. Moreover, Demiplane is working on community tools to allow for custom interfaces and character sheets. We are a ways out from those tools being available, but I will have more information soon on what they might look like and when we can expect to access them.

If you want to check this out for yourself, you can head over to Demiplane. The Alien RPG module is now live, with more on the way soon.

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