Aliens in your Universe

[KawangaKid]

In the Universes of DC & Marvel, the existence of alien races is quite well-known.

 

In DC, there was an "anti-alien" push very similar to the anti-mutant push of the Marvel Mutants. All folks know that Super is an alien, and certainly Starfire of the Titans and the Silver Age Hawkman were known as other aliens. And let's not forget INVASION! when several alien races decided to invade earth to control the meta-human population.

 

In Marvel, there's the Shi'ar, the Skrulls, Galactus is more of a force of nature but I think he's pretty alien... and so on.

 

How many alien races in your campaign? How do you deal with the issue? Or do you ignore it (in classic comics tradition)?

[Hermit]

Re: Aliens in your Universe

 

I bought the Terran Empire book for Star Hero, which also has some details (if set some time in the future in a sci fi instead of super heroic setting) on many of the races in the Champion's Universe 5th Ed. It turned out to be a good investment

 

I fully intend to get a super hero group on Malva someday.

[JmOz]

Re: Aliens in your Universe

 

My world has a few aliens in residence, the population knows they exist, but they have no clue how offten there are issues with them (They think that except for the ocasional hero/villain/misunderstanding between shipwrecked survivor that aliens leave the earth alone...The truth is that a team of powerful heroes protects them before they get to earth).

 

Certain govermental personal/departments know the truth.

[Count Zero]

Re: Aliens in your Universe

 

In my setting aliens exist but the world does not know they exist. It is the same with magic in my setting. It is very rare and powerful and wizards are the only character types allowed to have VPP.

 

The U.N. and the world governments have concealed their existance from the world in order to prepare them properly for the existance of aliens. The U.N. has UNTIL and a super team called Stormwatch has a pair of top secret teams which contain alien landings. While Stormwatch has other teams which enforce international law, it is the two teams (Blue and Black) which deal with supernatural and alien threats and conceal them.

 

Later,

Jonathan

[Blue]

Re: Aliens in your Universe

 

I specifically asked players not to make Aliens or Time Travelers for my campaign.

 

So naturally I wound up with 1 Alien and 3 Time Travelers.

 

Anyway... They were forbidden to take any hunteds that are alien species because aside from the one player character there has been no (known) contact with alien races.

 

My reason: I'm planning an invasion, of course. There will be a minimum of 3 races intoduced seperately for this; all stolen from previously published materials.

[Enforcer84]

Re: Aliens in your Universe

 

I use the Metropolitan Extra Terrestrial Enclave. Only during an invasion they stepped up to the plate, defended the Earth and went to UNTIL with the idea of an Orbital "Welcome Station". Most of the Aliens from the book live on the Station and try to intercept extra terrestrial visitors to help them meet with the peoples of Earth safely.

 

They also keep tabs on the alien technology that comes along, distilling it and passing it on to UNTIL who has distributed it among the nations of the world.

[Dust Raven]

Re: Aliens in your Universe

 

In my setting aliens exist but the world does not know they exist. It is the same with magic in my setting. It is very rare and powerful and wizards are the only character types allowed to have VPP.

Thats close to what I have in my game. Currently, there 3 alien PCs (not all in the same campaign) and a few villains/npcs. The populous hears lots of stories about aliens, but the general belief is that its all a hoax. After all, if the guy down with day-glow skin was born and raised in Brooklyn, who's gonna believe the guy with blue hair is from outerspace?

 

I've still managed to introduce several aliens into my campaign world though, and due to player involvement in the campaign's comception, there are several alien societies, some of which don't interact with or have never heard of each other.

[TheEmerged]

Re: Aliens in your Universe

 

When we began talking about our current campaign the players and I came to several conclusions early. We wanted an "event-based" source of superpowers in the campaign (an Emergence), we wanted the event about 30 years ago but with a backdrop of pulp era heroics, we wanted to have a mixture of several different superheroic gaming universes but primarily populated with existing CU characters -- and we wanted to use the "established" galaxy from our "Introverse" campaign.

 

Introverse was the campaign we played Alternity in (the campaign world native to Alternity never appealed to us). I actually had a lot of work in it, down to mapping the galaxy, establishing what alien races lived where, the history of several of the galactic nations, writing the major and many of the minor alien races up...

 

In brief, we had a galaxy already built and we decided to use it. It didn't work out *quite* as well as I might have liked, but it's certainly within acceptable standards.

 

For one thing, part of the "backstory" is that Earth is unknown to any galactic nation outside of the territory we're already in -- and that territory is the reasonably benevolant. They've placed a moratorium on contacting us because they're studying us to find out why we're so backward given the resources here.

 

As such there has not been an alien invasion in the continuity and it's unlikely to happen until the Great Galactic War breaks out 'in about ten years'. Isvatha V'han is known to be interdimensional as oppossed to interplanetary.

 

Since "everyone knows" that there are no aliens on Earth and that all the novas (people with superpowers) are humans that erupted, anybody claiming to be an alien is viewed as being delusional. This includes "aliens" from Atlantis, for the record.

 

There are of course a couple of exceptions -- Firewing and his former lackey Quasar (of the Protectors) really are aliens, and Stingray really is from Atlantis. In Firewing & Quasar's case they were important enough to have around in the campaign that I simply changed their alien races to fit the existing universe.

 

What about cases like Howler, who believes her powers come from an alien artifact? She's only half right. The gem is an alien artifact but the powers are actually her own; the gem didn't graft to her she absorbed it.

 

And so on and so forth.

[Supreme]

Re: Aliens in your Universe

 

A friend of mine always had one rule about aliens, that I have shamelessly stolen for all of my campaigns. The rule is that no alien species has more inherent greater-than-human abilities. Thus, if you want to make someone who is an alien possessing super-powers, they have to be just as extraordinary back home as they are here. Generally, any powered aliens anyone encounters in my campaigns are so powered by their technology. Solves more than a few conceptual problems.

[Tech]

Re: Aliens in your Universe

 

The populace of Earth for my campaign in general is like real life; namely, some believe there are aliens, some don't and others aren't sure. A lot of people who see aliens think of them as freaks or examples that the government is experimenting on people or some other thought. There are aliens in the world but mostly are villains. Even when the heroes meet aliens, they think they're experiments gone bad or something.

[Guest Worldmaker]

Re: Aliens in your Universe

 

The general public in my campaign know aliens exist. The US government is working to build an FTL starship, but its been slow going. No one truly understands the technology involved.

 

In the GGU, the Daribi attacked in 1938 (on Halloween night, beginning their landings at Grover's Mills, New Jersey... I couldn't resist), but their invasions stalled when they proved to be vulnerable to earth's microbes. And they might as well have been... the Daribi turned out to be neanderthals who were transported to another solar system 150,000 years ago. No Daribi survived the invasion, and the tech was captured, studied, and used. (The background tech for the GGU is slightly higher than the real world.) However, no Daribi starships were captured (they stayed in orbit) and when they discovered that the Earth was poison for them, the ones in orbit left.

 

In 1969, an alien sleeper ship entered orbit around the earth. The passengers on that ship expected earth to be uninhabited because their initial probe (which arrived in the 1800's) found no sign of life. Of course, it was looking for the wrong things. The Tautiq (the passengers) have now assimilated into Terran life in the same manner as the Tenctonese from Alien Nation.

 

In 1979, the Monks (called that because of the appearance of their pressure suits) arrived in a STL light-sail craft. They sold the United Nations the design for a working faster-than-light motor, the chemical formula for a room-temperature superconductor, and a design for a matter/anti-matter reactor in exchange for two hundred gigabytes of human knowledge, art, and music plus perpetual refueling rights at the Terran System's gas giants. Human scientists have been working to actually put together all those pieces of tech ever since.

 

In 1984, the Xorn attacked. Imagine a cross between the Klingons and the Predators from Predator and you have the Xorn. When they were driven off the earth, they left behind all kinds of tech, not to mention prisoners captured by the humans. Most of the prisoners were members of the various Xorn slave races, though some actual Xorn were captured as well. Most of the slave race aliens have since taken up residence in various places around the globe as "alien residents", though some are still kept under lock and key.

 

Xorn tech, like the stuff the Monks sold the humans, is being carefully examined as well.

[Fenixcrest]

Re: Aliens in your Universe

 

In my campaign, Aliens definitely exist; however, few people believe in them, nor does the government confirm their existence (they may or may not know about them... it depends who asks.).

 

Of course, a few of the NPCs (and possibly PCs.. I dunno, still in development) have alien-induced origins.

[zornwil]

Re: Aliens in your Universe

 

Relatively little known of, i.e., the public doesn't know, but they exist. Actually they're quite active around Earth, too...

[nexus]

Re: Aliens in your Universe

 

Aliens are well known in my game. The Earth was invaded by a race of insect like predators called the Tyranthrax. Their defeat lead to the wide spread emergence of super powered beings.

[pinecone]

Re: Aliens in your Universe

 

In my game aliens are activly debunked by the government despite a major invasion (that was covered up with a "bogus" radio show) and while heros may know aliens exist the average joe beleives or doughts as they will. Any aliens spotted are explained as "mutants" and spirited away to protect the public from "contamination". The second invasion is just a matter of time. There are also other aliens running about but no official recognision.....

[zornwil]

Re: Aliens in your Universe

 

There is a Men-in-Black organization in my game as well, but they do all sorts of mysterious things, alongside suppressing evidence of aliens...oh and they're all like Agent Smith of the Matrix but slightly less cool-looking, all their faces look the same as "his" does. They have stupid codenames tough ("Archie", "Jughead", you get it...)