Alien races: The Bizzarre form VS the vaguely humanoid form

[Umbran]

Folks looking for strange critters might want to look into the "Uplift" novels written by David Brin. You get everything from critters near-human to things with wheels.

 

[The Green Adam]

A subject near and dear to me...

As someone who runs SciFi campaigns often, I believe Thasmodious really started us off on the right path. Humanoid aliens will be out there if anything is because we are out there. Something (or several somethings to be precise) in our overall design and genetic make up works for the task of avoiding danger, hunting for food, building things, etc.

Now, if biology and zoology has taught us anything its that there are numerous ways for life to achieve similar results. I never fill my universe with purely humanoid 'forehead-bumps-of-the-week' aliens. As a matter of fact, I've run a lot of Star Trek campaigns (A LOT!) and even in Trek there are a number of not-very-near human and total weirdie aliens (bonus points if you know where that reference is from!).

In my last Trek campaign one of the players was a Xelatian, a single eyed, squid-like sophont that was garbed in a special containment suit/uniform that gave the illusion of humanoid form. In another campaign the same player (who has since become famous/infamous for potraying freaky and bizarre aliens) played the three-armed, three-legged Edoans, known to those who watched the Star Trek Animated Series.

The key is to create a believable, playable personality and view point. An Alien may simulate an Earth culture or mind set but if they really 'don't think like us' they are far more intriguing and alien whether they look like orange Humans or twelve-legged, arboreal, dimorphic mollusks.

Traveller has always been fairly good at this. See if you can find any information on the less Human major and minor races of Traveller like Hivers, K'Kree, Newts (Bwaps), Crenduthaar, Vegans, the Devi and numerous others are great examples of strange appearences and strange attitudes combined. Of course Traveller also has Humans transplanted to other worlds by a highly advanced species of alien Ancients.

Traveller: 2300 was also very good at showing creatures that were alien in appearence yet very human in their thinking and somewhat humanoid aliens that were on a different plane of thought all together. Check out the Kafer, Pentapods, Ebers and Xiang. All are good examples of how divergent evolution might generate very different social dynamics for an alien intelligence.

On the subject of size, I'm not certain I grasp why its important except on a case by case basis. We (Humans) are not necessarily the largest of creatures by far on this big, blue marble of ours. I love to shake up the players assumptions with aggressive, world conquering 2 ft. tall bugs, peaceful Dinosaur/Rhino centaurs (Traveller's Virushi for example) or creatures that live unusually short or long lifespans. The possibilities on the formation of alien life forms are endless - don't pigeon hole yourself to one type or theme.

Unless...on a final note, one of my friends ran a SF campaign where most of the sentient alien species had evolved from some variant of Dinosaurs or Dinosaur like creatures. After all, that's what should have happened here except that an unusual series of events (meteor, climate change, etc.) threw off the nature order of things.

AD
"Never Give Up, Never Surrender!"

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering, as far as believable/playable alien races go in a sci-fi / space opera game is concerned, what is more attractive to you, a race that is nothing like a human in form and function (no human features whatsoever), or a race that has some humanoid elements ( legs, a discernible head/mouth/eyes, arms, etc)?

I'm of the opinion, that if you make a PC race_too_bizarre, your much more likely to have that race rejected by players.

On the other hand, if you make the race_too_human in concept, people don't believe it's an alien race.

So, how "alien" should an alien be?

Please provide examples of what you think is bad, and what you think works.

I like Starfish Aliens. However, such species should probably not be allowed as PC races.

Just another reason why sci-fi is so much harder to run than fantasy.

 

[El Mahdi]

Unless...on a final note, one of my friends ran a SF campaign where most of the sentient alien species had evolved from some variant of Dinosaurs or Dinosaur like creatures. After all, that's what should have happened here except that an unusual series of events (meteor, climate change, etc.) threw off the nature order of things.

Or, unless higher levels of sentience, such as ourselves, is the exception rather than the rule.

 

[TwinBahamut]

I generally agree with that, though I think carbon-based and breathing oxygen is taking it a bit too far, could be silicon-based. And not even all organisms on Earth need oxygen.

Certainly silicon-based life may be possible (and I actually have a few ideas for such life-forms that I am fond of), but from what I understand, they are far less likely to ever occur than carbon-based life, for two reasons. First, carbon reacts with the necessary compounds more readily than silicon, so if carbon is available than it will replace silicon (and as such carbon would be toxic to silicon-based life). Second, silicon reacts more slowly than carbon, so any silicon-based life will grow and develop much more slowly than carbon-based life.

I say breathing oxygen simply because there is a reason almost all life on this planet breathes oxygen (C0₂ has oxygen, so that count for this discussion). I am not sure what it is, but there is certainly a reason for it. I know, for example, that it is almost impossible that something will depend on nitrogen gas the same way humans depend on oxygen, simply because nitrogen gas is in an extremely low energy state that makes it hard to process. It doesn't want to bond to things the same way that oxygen does (oxygen oxidates things readily, that is why rust happens).

Once you even limit yourself to talking about just carbon-based life, you immediately realize a number of similarities that must exist among all kinds of life. For example, most if not all carbon based life will use sugar and lipids in their metabolism, for all the same reasons that Earth-based life does. Some things may use other hydrocarbons, like butane or octane, but that would be far less common. Also, while some forms of life can survive on geothermal power, life really needs access to sunlight in order to get enough energy to prosper. Life won't get very far on a planet too distant from a star, even if other conditions are right.

Mortality is probably given, considering that more complex life cannot come into existence ex nihilo, hence some sort of development and evolution must be there, which probably means that something has changed and died to make place for the new beings (though their mortality is not given, considering what technology can do - but they have that concept), which gives us a common psychogical element.

I will go farther and say that mortality is a given, even with technological assistance. First, true immortality is impossible, since nothing can be totally immune to damage or disease, and the more complex a being is the more it becomes vulnerable to such things (plants are more resistant to damage than humans, but are nowhere near as complex). That leaves the question of aging, but I don't believe it is possible for something to be immune to that either. Ultimately, aging is the total effect of countless errors emerging from the trillions of biological processes occurring throughout the human body at every moment. Since it is impossible for such a process to occur perfectly trillions of times, gradual errors will creep into the system. And any mechanism designed to correct these gradual errors will itself need to run trillions of processes, which themselves are vulnerable to error. A machine designed to keep something from aging will eventually age and wear down itself. Considering that even ridiculously simple things like cars and computers have vastly shorter lifespans than humans, there is no reason to suspect that a much more complicated machine will work more efficiently.

Possibly even resource conflicts (fighting over food), hence the concept of conflict and war.

No possibly about this. Resources are finite, and there will always be competition over them. The nature of the resource and the nature of the competition varies greatly, but the basic concept is universal. While I will not say that this means war is universal, it does mean that concepts like the predator/prey relationship, the idea of survival of the fittest, competition for sunlight, etc, are all important.

Movement: You can move through gas, liquids, and solids - flying, swimming, burrowing and move on transitions - that's some form of wheel, rolling, crawling or leg, we haven't found much else that works.

I am skeptical of the wheel idea (if it were possible, something on Earth would have done so already), but other than that I agree.

Fingers: If they want to build and manipulate stuff, they need some sorf of instrument, it's just like that. Could be pincers, suckers, whatever, but it must have relatively fine control.

I will put this more as an aspect of intelligent alien life, but yeah, this is true. The evolutionary need for advanced intelligence goes hand in hand with manipulating the outside world and communication skills. There is no association between intelligence and being bipedal (hominids learned to walk long before they got smart), but there is one between being intelligent, having dextrous hands used to build things, and being able to talk.

Not a bad list, really, but there are certainly a few more that you are missing.

First off, far and away the clearest thing that you are missing is transmission of genetic material, AKA sex. This is one of the very first things developed by Earth bacteria billions of years ago, and it has continued since for a very clear reason: things that exchange genetic material evolve much more rapidly than things that do not. The nature of this exchange can probably vary greatly (it would be absurd to think that static male and female genders, as expressed on earth, would be universal), but it will exist in any kind of complex alien life.

This may not need to be said, but any kind of life needs some way to regulate its internal biochemistry, so any kind of alien life will need to make use of the restroom once in a while.

Also, all the same rules that limit the sizes of creatures will still apply. You can't have a single-celled organism get any bigger than they do on earth because the volume to surface area ratio changes radically, affecting the ability of the organism to move substances across its cell membrane. You won't find an Earth insect as big as a car because its exoskeleton would collapse and it wouldn't be able to process enough oxygen. You can't just radically increase the size of a person, holding proportions the same, or that person's bones would break from the staggering weight (for 2 x height, you get 2 x muscle strength, 4 x bone strength, and 8 x weight). Differing environments, gravity levels, and physiology affect things differently, but there are certain rules that affect them all equally.

There are all kinds of other rules, that should apply, as well. There is a clear advantage to having all of a creature's sensory organs located on a single appendage that can more independently of the main body, for example. Anything that uses electromagnetic waves to see will use a similar spectrum to our eyesight, not something with a wavelength too large to make things out clearly or too small to be easily detected. While it is hard to say what alien language will be like, it will at the very least contain a distinction between objects (nouns) and properties of objects (verbs,/adjectives). There are practical reasons that control all of these and more.

Huh, this post stretched out a bit longer than I thought it would...

 

[TwinBahamut]

I like Starfish Aliens. However, such species should probably not be allowed as PC races.

Just another reason why sci-fi is so much harder to run than fantasy.

That trope is a bit misnamed. Humans are starfish aliens. After all, like all vertebrates, we are ultimately descended from starfish, and starfish resemble humans far more than even insects do.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

THAT SAID, don't be telling me we can cross breed with these creatures or they would really look desirable to us... unless your game is really meant as implausible space opera or you have a reasonable explanation (far future genetic variants, progenitor experiements, etc.)

"We have failed to uphold Brannigan's Law. However I did make it with a hot alien babe. And in the end, is that not what man has dreamt of since first he looked up at the stars?"

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering, as far as believable/playable alien races go in a sci-fi / space opera game is concerned, what is more attractive to you, a race that is nothing like a human in form and function (no human features whatsoever), or a race that has some humanoid elements ( legs, a discernible head/mouth/eyes, arms, etc)?

I'm of the opinion, that if you make a PC race_too_bizarre, your much more likely to have that race rejected by players.

On the other hand, if you make the race_too_human in concept, people don't believe it's an alien race.

So, how "alien" should an alien be?

Please provide examples of what you think is bad, and what you think works.

Both poles are attractive to me, personally, but only if they're done well. CJ Cherryh's 8' tall Atevi are very humanoid with certain alien psychological quirks...and sound like a blast to play. Even more alien are Steven Donaldson's Amnion...though still humanoid.

Then there are Niven's Outsiders and Thrintun...or the panoply of races Brin's Uplift series delivers.

Or Greg Bear's gestalt alien race (From "Anvil of Stars")- called 'Brothers' by the humans, they're composed of non-sentient worm-like creatures (Cords) that join to form sentient individuals (Braids). I actually based a heavyworlder Supers PC on them.

As long as the alien/mutant race is done right, you can probably find a player to willing to play a PC of that species.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

As long as it has a means of communication (olfactory, verbal or telepathic), is capable of manipulating objects in some form and has a way of getting around I can recognize an alien as an [aberration/mutant] sentient being; they might not seem to be human[oid] but I always see them as such.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Personally, I like the idea of very bizarre aliens - but I would probably not consider them as Player Characters. But there need to be some either identifiable species, too.

The most bizarre forms of aliens that I might consider playable are spider-like, squid-like and blob-like.

As a believer in game balance, the hardest part from a design perspective might be creating a setting and a rule system that stays fair for all races. I think Sci-Fi settings might make this a little easier - for example, flight and communication are both no such big issues if technology enters into it. (Flight in combat is "dispelled" by ranged weapons. Hover technology, planes, jump-jets and so on replace it outside of combat. Communication becomes a non-issue once you have "Universal Translators")

Also, what about predatory squid?

And also, although not as unusual looking, what about higher sentient marine mammals such as dolphins and whale?. Imagine if we needed to make whale proof ships to protect them from intelligent blue whales using pack tactics to sink shipping traffic.

Read The Swarm" for something around the idea of "what happens if beings of the sea attack". (I heard it will be made into a movie, too.)