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Alien Aliens


Nothere

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So between the Worthless Humans, Danger Humans, and look of your campain threads I have a question. No doubt it's been asked. but I'm doing it again anyway.

 

n your campaign what is the state of aliens. Is it all pretty much standard human, Altered humans to adapt to various planets. Rubber headed aliens, or truly alien sorts of aliens?

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While not unique, I've used Aboleth from D&D as an alien species. I've used the sholarron (sp?) from Terran Empire, though my players never really pursued that lead. I've used pure psionic beings and Lovecraftian-esque elder beings. One of my player races was pretty alien. Most though, were pretty bog standard humanoids.

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I made the alien species for the Terracide setting as alien as I could manage. None of them are playable as PCs at all. None of them breath oxygen. Only one of them uses a spoken language humans can understand. (But it can't be reproduced by human vocal chords.) All of them have psychologies different enough that humans have trouble understanding their motives and morals. For example: The Celestial Guard fought a "war" with the Titans for half a century only to discover the Titans thought it was some sort of game. And the Titans didn't consider the Guard vessels opponents so much as playing pieces used to keep score. Nobody knows what an actual war with the Titans looks like, and they really don't want to....

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Okay, I'm sold on Xavier's setting...

 

For the background of my Planetary Romance setting, I had the cladists (genetically altered humans) as quasi-aliens; a few advanced genuinely alien races who were nevertheless enough like humans for meaningful interaction; and, further in the background, even stranger and more powerful aliens who mystified even the Galactics. For instance:

* The PCs on the planet of Sard encountered refugee "beastmen" from the Huxley colony, progeny of a program to engineer humans who could live without high technology. (That was their creators' story, anyway. Some people speculate the geneticists just wanted furries.)

* The Zyradu lacked emotions in any human sense: They acted entirely on rational calculation of profit, risk, and loss, like the ideal rational actors of economic theory or realpolitik. Since perfect information is never possible, though, they divided into ideological factions based on different ecological and technological survival strategies: Discrete Genome, Commensal Adapter, Parasite, Steel Integral, Symbiont Void, and so on.

* Nobody knows whether the moon-sized, black glass Toroids are ships or single entities. They appear and disappear, occasionally rip apart asteroids and funnel the rubble into the central hole (where it vanishes), and generally act entigmatically while showing no awareness of other creatures.

 

And others.

 

Dean Shomshak

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I created a species of psionic shrubs (specifically rhododendrons) once which had developed intelligence and psi powers together in order to dissuade animals from eating them. They had a couple of client species (a carnivore and an insectivore IIRC) that they had uplifted to barely intelligent. Might still have my notes somewhere about them; this was 15 years ago or more.

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Altered hummans and rubber headed/suited aliens. Most of the aliens that humans in my setting interact with are humanoid. The excuse for this is the same one that Star Trek uses....an advanced and ancient race eons past travelled throughout the galaxy and seeded the living worlds they found with the blueprint for humanoid life (based on their own physiology).

 

As far as alien cultures go this is a pretty standard space opera setting, so the cultures dont get too weird, I do however try to shake up the stereotypes a bit. For example, the ancient and powerful contemplative race not only acts mysreriously, they pretty much do whatever they want. This includes things like showing up in the middle of a war between rival factions and ending it by destroying both sides simultaneously. Assassinating powerful political figures in broad daylight during a galactic wide broadcast and wiping an entire planet with a population of several million settlers out of existence with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. And everyone knows they cant do a damned thing about it, because this race is just so ridiculously powerful. Fortunately for some reason, these people favor humans and were the ones who gave humans hyperspace technology. Yet they refused to help at all when humanity ran into a hostile race of alien reptiles who very nearly halted humanities advance into the galaxy. Enigmatic doesnt begin to describe them.

 

But of course, this beint Space Opera, there are a host of beings while nof necessarily good for PCs, will make excellent obstacles or mysteries to solve. I have a player who is making a.character now and he wanted to be some form of human/alien hybrid with the alien being an energy based creature. So I had to create an alien being who uses humans as hosts while it slowly feeds on their bio-energy, eventually leaving them an empty husk. The characters father was infested with one of these energy vampires when he impregnated the characters mother and some of the energy vampires DNA got mixed in the process. This made the character a hybrid with three parents. In addition to this, 5he characters genes which controlled psychic powers were switched on and he came out with the psychokinetic ability to control energy, with a natural ability to leech power from living beings to bolster his own abilities (Transfer)

 

I have stolen a lot of different aliens from various sources....GURPS Aliens and Planetary Atluses, Alrernity Stardrive and Battlelords of the 23rd century just to name a few.

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