Lets create together a couple of cool alien races

[Lord Morte]

What kind of variant human races did you design that way?

One that I thought about are sort of dwarves:

I've designed several. There are the space-faring Selenites, who adapted to low-gravity worlds and orbital habitats, the gnome-like Grabers, who adapted to a heavy-gravity world, the amphibous Tritons, who adapted to an ocean world, and the religious Mannites, who adapted to a barren desert world. These are the mainly environmental adaptions. The Goreans and Spartans each adapted to thier environments but it is social issues that define them. The Goreans lost the advanced technology of thier forebears and fall back to early Iron age technology, while the Spartans found themselves under constant threat of attack by an actual alien race, the saurian Varanid.

The Mules and Binaries were both created; the Mules as slave labour and the Binaries as an attempt to avoid lethal levels of radiation. The Martians are a human variant created by social engineering.

I'm considering posting a few to the boards to get some feedback.

 

[Lord Morte]

I have ideas for creating a different type of Greys, that IMO will be more different, detailed, and thought out (and no need for +4 ability score adjustments and telepathic powers). It will be for me the most alien PC race, that is most alien when it comes to playing one. Then, I love Mi-Go like characters, but I hardly see them played (or being played as "humans in funny latex suits").

An idea I had was that the Greys are actually psionic illusions created by a Cthulu-eque race in order to hide their horrific, mind-breaking nature. Most abductions are purely psychic encounters as the aliens project into the abductee's mind over a distance of light years. Their purpose in all this is to encourage belief in extraterrestial life in antcipation of the day that their hive-ship arrives in Earth space.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

A good place to look is on Earth. There have been several major extinctions early in Earth's history, such as the Cambrian explosion and Permian extinctions (or is it the other way around?). The best known is the trilobite, so don't use it, but do a web search on these creatures.

Find one that looks cool and make it into an alien. It's realistic, it's something that could be alive, and your players probably have no clue what it is.

 

[Turanil]

A good place to look is on Earth. There have been several major extinctions early in Earth's history, such as the Cambrian explosion and Permian extinctions (or is it the other way around?). The best known is the trilobite, so don't use it, but do a web search on these creatures.

I will get a look and see if I find interesting stuff. One of the things I was thinking about was this: Velociraptors. It seems to me that these creatures had all the characteristics necessary to evolve into intelligent species (ahem, at least from little observations in Jurassic Park movie). I like to imagine that they could have had an elaborate civilization, although centered mainly where the big asteroid who put an end to the dinosaurs' age, fell. Now, they could have left Earth in spaceships, maybe captured by some aliens (and maybe alien of a Cthulian nature ), then brought on other worlds as warrior slaves. But eons later they are back to Earth. In fact, where they have been away for 65 millions of years, lets use relativity: they have had some starships traveling almost at light speed, and being extremely far away from Earth (maybe another galaxy entirely), they were absent only a few thousands years of subjective time, but 65 My passed on earth. Mmmmh... maybe this idea is somewhat ludicrous...

Or maybe in the meantime they colonized many worlds and created their own empire. Then, in the meantime their empire crumbled until only remained a few sparse planets. Now they are back to Earth, the mythical cradle of their galactic race. However, there is different factions: some are agressive and warlike, others more enlightened and begnin. They would be interesting as the most oldest technological alien race of this part of the Galaxy.