Ideas for alien races

[Jhaelen]

Derren. Sucking all the life out of the room since 2002.

Sounds like a cool idea for an alien race...

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Quoting myself from elsewhere, alien PCs, one of whose races I never named...

As you can guess from Dr. Zeus, above, i do like nifty anthropomorphic characters.

Another one was a version of pulp-era/Sci-Fi types like Adam Strange, Flash Gordon, Buck Rodgers and Commando Cody. He was a crash landed alien scout, a heavyworlder. He had some advanced sensory & survival tech in his uniform, plus some jump jets and a handy blaster pistol for a sidearm. Had a small, golden bird-like robot drone for recon, too. As a heavyworlder, he was physically stronger and more durable than humans.

Oh yeah...and he looked like a bipedal, 7'8" tall pink elephant. Home world: Snuffleupagron 5.





(Winos hated him.)

Another heavyworlder alien was Thredd. It was essentially a many mile long, super-dense, sentient metallic-looking cord, usually contracted into coils forming a vaguely humanoid mass. It was carbon based, with most of his structures based on buckytubes, buckyballs and diamond lattices. It communicated like humans- making noise by creating vibrations with chord structures- but the structures in particular were just body sections. As such, it sounded quite odd & metallic.

As a result of his physical construction, it was incredibly tough and resistant to on physical damage. However, it was very succeptible to electrical damage- moreso than humans.

 

[Derren]

Derren. Sucking all the life out of the room since 2002.

Very constructive...
I once made a similar character in Traveller for testing purposes (Uplifted dolphin. Yes that is an official race) and quickly realized that it is very hard and often impossible to play together with normal characters except in very specific settings.

So unless you plan to make a rather defining feature of that race irrelevant by offering easy, never breaking tech solutions everywhere I stand by my judgment that a purely aquatic race is not playable in mixed groups.

 

[Morrus]

Charn. Winged, bug-eyed beings with clawed feet which allow them to perch on the smallest of surfaces. Charn do not feel pain, and for this reason they are often used as shock troops; they have a reputation for violence and cruelty. Charn also have the ability to breath fire a short distance, which makes them formidable melee opponents.

 

[Lylandra]

Uh, nice!
Here's a short description for a race I developed a few years ago for our Sci-fi Campaign:

Ashmodai
The Ashmodai are a medium-sized humanoid race with brown skin and either light (ashifin) or dark (sinofin) markings on their bodies. They grow three horns on their upper forehead, one big central horn and two smaller ones on the side. They also grow small tentacle-like fins which point upwards from their jawline. They take great pride in their horns and many decorate their central horn with rings, paintings or carvings.

Ashmodai are very intelligent and love playing all sorts of (tactical, psychological, mathematical) games. They have a natural knack for psionics which they describe as "extension of their minds". Thei bodies are thin and agile, but not really sturdy. They are curious and love trying out all sorts of occupations or activities until they find one they really like (then they pursue that, "master" it and find something new to learn).

Ashmodai are an androgynous race, and they can switch between their "male" and "female" form over a course of three weeks. Switching does not change much in terms of visible physiology ("females" have bigger secondary horns), but they tend to behave differently: "males" tend to be lively, cheerful and are great in making friends. They love bright colours and are generally easy-going, emotional and spontaneous. "females" prefer darker hues and tend to act stern and serious. They can be pretty fixated on their aims and on their selves. As they prefer thinking over spontanbeous emotional reactions, they are less vulnerable to trauma, but also much slower to act.

Ashmodai seldom stay with one partner over their life span. Instead, they always love trying something new, especially when they can do it in their other form.

 

[monsmord]

(Uplifted dolphin. Yes that is an official race)

Bwahahaha! OMG, why have I never played Traveller?!

So unless you plan to make a rather defining feature of that race irrelevant by offering easy, never breaking tech solutions everywhere I stand by my judgment that a purely aquatic race is not playable in mixed groups.

I feel ya, and would hesitate to incorporate them in a fantasy setting, but would counter that any interplanetary sci-fi setting requires readily-available and largely reliable tech solutions just to happen at all - environment suits, air supplies, radiation proofing, very fast vehicles, energy sources, communications, etc. If a setting includes androids, cyborgs, and robots/AIs, these characters ARE tech, and must be assumed to be easy and never-breaking. I don't think it unreasonable to have an aquatic race be tech-dependent for exploration/integration, since everyone else in such a setting will be as well, to one degree or other. Even if every planet the PCs visit is "class M" and every PC is an oxygen-breathing carbon-based life form, they can't get there and back again or face down bizarre alien threats without a lot of awesome tech they can count on.

That said, and given Morrus's notion that this species are particularly skilled at medicine, I'd think a permanent or semi-permanent biologic solution would be more suitable. If their science is "magical" enough, they may even have it both ways - perhaps they can create a new racial ability to reconfigure their tails to become 2-4 limbs that can "zip" together to reform the swimming tail (with a penalty to swim speed compared with non-augmented members of their race). Weirder yet would be lengthening and strengthening their tails a bit to be more snake/eel-like, so they can slither rather than walk, or coil the tail like a spring and leap, which would still allow them to swim to a degree. You know, similar to yuan-ti or Medusa from Clash of the Titans. This requires the science/tech up front, but would be largely one-and-done, leaving the PC free from worrying about long-term gear.

And with THAT said, were I to run a sci-fi game with non-human PCs, I'd be looking for ways to highlight and exploit such specific limitations and weaknesses to present character-driven challenges for them to overcome. If a player wanted an aquatic race, I'd be keen to point out where things could go wrong, and probably make them happen if the player started taking things too much for granted or didn't seem to be playing the character as "fish out of water".

 

[Calithorne]

In most science fiction settings, aliens are just humans with ridges glued to their foreheads, or plastic pointy ears. A truly alien race would be unplayable by a human, because we would not even be able to comprehend the way they think.

 

[Jhaelen]

... and then there's the 'Eclipse Phase' RPG in which you play transhumans that look (, behave, and think) way more alien than any aliens in other sci-fi RPGs...

 

[monsmord]

In most science fiction settings, aliens are just humans with ridges glued to their foreheads, or plastic pointy ears. A truly alien race would be unplayable by a human, because we would not even be able to comprehend the way they think.

Agreed. My favorite aliens are the most inscrutable and with whom human contact is negligible or mind-blowing - the Monolith aliens (2001), Solaris, the Scramblers in Peter Watts' Blindsight, the Xeelee in Stephen Baxter's books, etc. Aliens in Star Trek and Star Wars bore me (as an adult - they didn't when I was young), even when I think they're really cool looking. But there's no way to make the truly alien aliens understandable, let alone playable, no matter how we try to restrain their technology or background concepts.

Still, role-playing is a way to experiment a bit with getting out of one's own head, much the same way writing and acting are. We can't truly think like aliens, but it's fun to try.

I love this thread!

 

[monsmord]

Please excuse me while I kvetch a moment...

<kvetch>
In a writing-oriented forum I frequent, a troll started a thread about organic aliens and reproduction/sex, how might it work, do they experience lust, can species interbreed, etc. Despite numerous answers about the diversity of solutions here on Terra alone (including at least one post from a biologist), and suggestions for sci-fi that postulates really interesting alien models, the poster rejected any answer other than the anthropocentric one they seemed to have wanted all along, and made some comments that demonstrated either bad-faith engagement with the thread and/or a limited understanding of Terran biology and systems. They even cited Star Trek because the show is purported to be, in the poster's words, "well known for the scientific reliability". Sigh.
</kvetch>

Alien-oriented sci-fi is often a tale of anthropomorphic animals and humans with prosthetic foreheads, a la Star Trek. Some of the great sci-fi authors exploited this: the Kzinti by Larry Niven, most of the aliens from the Chanur series by C. J. Cherryh, etc. That's absolutely fine if that's the story you want to tell, and it's especially helpful in an RPG, but these folks aren't really alien per se.

When I take the time to sit down and try to conceive an alien race - which I do more often than is necessary or healthy - I try to wrap it in whole cloth, starting with its origins and make-up. Is it carbon-based, or does it use silicon, germanium, or something entirely different? Is it "slow" life from a very cold environment? Is it even organic at all? Are its conditions of origin extremely hostile to Terrestrial chemistry? Did it evolve naturally, or was it the product of directed engineering of some type? With those examined, questions about how such a species survives and evolves can be considered logically based on those conditions, plus a little imagination. But even a carbon-based, land-walking, bilaterally-symmetrical oxygen-respiring alien could have wildly different reproductive needs, drives, and mechanisms from us - again, life on Earth shows us that even a single world will produce more than one answer (mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, et al).

Without getting into graphic posts or polarizing debate on Terran reproductive/gender values, how might you design an alien PC race with a different reproductive model from humans, and how would that shape their society, culture, outlook, and motivations? How would such an alien character interact with the game world?