Welcome to "What's the story, Mother?"

WTSM is my latest intellectual playground on the Internet. Here I'm going to fulfill a long-standing wish to create a project that's been well over 30 years in the making and that is to have a sandbox to play with ALIEN, ALIENS, BLADE RUNNER, OUTLAND, PREDATOR and PREDATOR 2 all in one spot. I think I started my love for this project in the late '80s when I bought the first edition of R. Talsorian Games "Cyberpunk" and, thinking of how Blade Runner and ALIEN had a tenuous link and given my love for ALIENS, I began to create a supplement for RTG bringing ALIEN, ALIENS and the USCMC into the dark future world of Cyberpunk. 

That's right, newbies! 

Long before you had Johnny Silverarm or whatever his name is in the video game, there was a pen-and-paper RPG that we played back in the days before DOOM or Xbox. A P&P RPG that the video game was based upon.

Days gone by years long ago.

Here in WTSM?, you will find new fiction, anecdotes, original art, technology, discussions, musings, alternate rules/items/weapons/drugs/vehicles/starships for the Free League ALIEN role-playing game, and other good stuff. If you've been a fan of my Terminator 2029 AD website, I think you're going to like this because I plan to put the same effort and time into this ALIEN website as I have on the Terminator site.

Terminator and ALIENS are both James Cameron franchises and they're a hell of a lot of fun to play with. While Cameron never kicked ALIEN in the nuts as he did to the Terminator franchise in Dark Fate, I still like to draw lines on what I consider canon and what I refuse to accept at all. I'm one of those fans that other fans hate, the kind that picks and chooses their fandom. I don't believe that just because you like ALIEN and ALIENS you have to also like ALIEN 3 and Prometheus and the entire three-ring crap-show circus that followed after those two original movies and their blockbuster sequels.

I also reserve the right, as a discerning fan, to tell Cameron and Ridley Scott to KMA when they do stuff like Dark Fate and Prometheus, and to shake their hand and offer congratulations when they produce stuff like ALIEN, ALIENS, Terminator, and T2. I'm a fan who appreciates a great story instead of a blatant cash grab. I can do this because I'm old enough to have seen ALIEN, ALIENS, TERMINATOR, T2, BLADE RUNNER, OUTLAND, PREDATOR and PREDATOR 2 all in the theater and all when I was younger. It's been hard to see the decline of these great franchises into desperate cameo-strewn cash grabs so maybe that's why I'm doing this blog ... maybe I want to see if my imagination is as good as Scott's and Cameron's and that my stuff can both dovetail and play well in their creations.

So, here's the new blog/website, geared towards giving you my take on my ALIEN stuff (much better than the canon stuff, I hope) and the ALIEN universe. In that mix, I'm going to throw in some Predator, give my take on the Space Jockey / Engineers, and give you the tools you need to play with my toys in the Free League ALIEN role-playing game (or if you want, do some work yourself and adapt my stuff to YOUR RPG environment).

- Christopher Shields (2024)