Handling money in Alien RPG and Mothership
Money in the Alien movie is all about them shares, all about them shares. Why? Because that is how you retire from the capitalist hellscape in which you work. Characters are working to accumulate enough shares that will allow them to earn enough money to retire someplace safe and comfortable. If all a character does is the job they are paid to do, they should be able to earn a modest retirement after, ohh, 30 years of toil for the corporation. But that’s not the stuff of adventure. Characters asked to do something extra and lucrative for the corporation are going to be awarded a bonus is shares to do it. Diverting to answer that distress call? 5 shares. Bringing back a poor unfortunate crew member implanted with an alien egg? 20 shares. Characters should get the opportunity to earn from 5-20 shares in an adventure, with the median at 10.
On a day to day basis, characters should be considered to have enough money to meet their basic demands. Buy a drink at the bar, buy a couple of drinks at the bar, spend the night at a flop house on a station, eat, drink, sleep, breathe. Reload their gun even. But upgrading guns, getting new equipment outside of the needs of their job, or giving a big bribe to that corporate stooge that is preventing you from getting off planet in a hurry? All those require actual cash on the character sheet. Where does that cash come from? It comes from converting those bonus shares into cash.
Shares are sold at market rates, typically 1000Cr, but the GM could roll 1d6x100+800Cr for the actual price at the moment of sale, and get as granular as you like. Obviously, the character would have to be someplace where they could get into contact with the stock market to sell the share.
There is a benefit and a drawback to shares, however. Once a character has 30 shares, they will have brochures or photos of their retirement plan and they can recover 1 stress point once act or session thinking about how great it will be to retire, just like with a signature item. Once a character has 60 shares, they can recover 2 stress points once per act or session thinking about retirement. However, once they have 90 shares or more, they are close to retirement and start every act or session with 1 extra stress and thinking about retirement only relieves 1 stress once per act or session. By the same token, every time a character with any amount of shares sells a share they have to make an Empathy roll or take an additional stress point as they see retirement slip a little farther away (Alien). In Mothership that should be a Fear Save, but an argument could be made for a Sanity Save.
A character can retire on 100 shares banked. This will allow for an immediate retirement with a modicum of comfort and safety, but nothing extravagant. Players are encouraged to define their retirement goal and talk about it in character “I can’t wait to buy the little farm on Fiji and get a sheep and a goat and raise horses.” If you like you can arrange for a single dangerous, high risk, high reward adventure that will allow the character to retire in comfort. It is advised that you define exactly what is necessary to get what additional comfort in retirement.
