[Space] How alien are your aliens?

[Phantasm]

My setting's aliens:

- capitalist starfish alien slavers

- floating telekinetic rocks

- theropod warriors

- snakes! (Why'd it have to be snakes?)

- graceful butterflies, build vertically without elevators/stairs

- humanoid robots

- space orks


So kind of a mixture. Their psychologies aren't so alien as to make them incomprehensible to humans, though humans are sometimes incomprehensible to a few of them ("Humans open fire on each other? Inconceivable!").

[Flyndaran]

One of my aliens are cuttlefish like creatures with three main ideological factions.
One has genetically modified themselves to handle space ships, microgravity, free floating in air, and photosynthetic symbiotes to lower food requirements. (The Greenies.)

Another has altered themselves to handle confined spaces and fresh water to live inside robotic suits for long periods vaguely like Daleks. (I never could think of a good name.)

The third main faction wishes to merely adapt to any habitable planet's oceans' sea floors. (The deep ones, naturally.)

[johndallman]

The only alien species I've created for a game were Martians for a steampunk campaign. They looked vaguely like the Droyne from Traveller (bipedal winged lizardfolk), but this was coincidental, because I've only ever played one session of Traveller which featured no aliens.

Their psychology was human enough to allow conversation, but they had a very different society, and naturally assumed that human societies worked like theirs. They were thus puzzled when they demonstrated technological superiority and Earth did not surrender. The PCs eventually managed to arrange a peace treaty.

[AlexanderHowl]

Of course, the problem is balancing alienness with playability. If your aliens are monsters, it does not really matter, as they are threats to your PCs (similar to the xenomorphs in Aliens) and the only question is the level of threats experienced. In my experience, the higher the level of threat, the more satisfactory the experience for the PCs, but I have generally played with people who do not mind high casualty rates.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by RyanW

For those of you who have run SF campaigns, do you find there is a sweet spot on how alien you tend to make your aliens (assume "playable race" sort of alien species)? On the one extreme, I find rubber forehead aliens too unrealistic to be really satisfying. On the other, really alien aliens can be very difficult to play.

The most obvious limits to the theoretically possible in favor of the playable is that they should be of a size and sensory range that allows deep interaction with the rest of the PCs.

Unless the game is meant to be Lovecraftian or Hard Sci Fi, I prefer to either have physically alien Aliens with human personalities or very human looking Aliens with Alien personalities. For the latter I go for a Blue and Orange Morality. I also like a slow build creepy with human-looking aliens.

Mind you, if it's Star Trek/Flash Gordon Space Opera/Planetary Romance, I stay in genre (until I pull a C. L.Moore).

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

I a;ways had multiple categories, depending on what story I had.

Near-human (psychologically at least) for space-opera tales.

More realisticly-alien aliens for hard-sciency stories.

And ALIEN aliens for when I wanted to make my players freak out.

Incidentally, I find the Lovecraftian aliens being quite nice for space opera. (Mi-Go for mysterious aliens, Moon-Beasts and Men From Leng for pirates, several of the lesser Mythos races for invaders, Great Old Ones for menaces, etc.)

[AlexanderHowl]

Well, Star Trek has an excuse that the majority of aliens are descended from a common biological ancestor from an earlier galactic civilization, so it is an inversion of the genre convention (the reason for the similarities, and the interbreeding, is that they are subspecies of a very successful species, not because every alien is inherently humanoid). Entities like Apollo from TOS and Q from TNG are just representations of very successful subspecies that achieved greater technology than the Precursors (Apollo's subspecies going extinct despite their success while Q's subspecies surviving through transcending space and time).

It is also a good explanation for the success of the Borg, as they really only have to deal with different subspecies of the same species. When they encounter really alien species, the Borg tend to exterminate them, ignore them, or get their rear ends kicked by them (see Species 8472 from Voyager). While there is no evidence of such a galactic civilization in OTL, it is not beyond possibility in a timeline where warp travel is possible (and actually makes more sense than the idea that there were no galactic civilizations for 13 billion years).

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Well, Star Trek has an excuse that the majority of aliens are descended from a common biological ancestor from an earlier galactic civilization

I prefer Traveller's version - humanoid aliens are the descendants of humans transported off Earth long ago by a precursor race - over Star Trek's "everyone is descended from a humanoid precursor alien." It more neatly avoids problems with trying to figure out how the Terran fossil record ties together.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by RyanW

I prefer Traveller's version - humanoid aliens are the descendants of humans transported off Earth long ago by a precursor race - over Star Trek's "everyone is descended from a humanoid precursor alien." It more neatly avoids problems with trying to figure out how the Terran fossil record ties together.

That's the approach I take in my world, too, only even more so. In my world, alien powers moved not only humans and near-human hominids from Earth, but over the last 500 megayears or so have terraformed countless worlds to host Earth-derived biospheres. So there's a lot of our kind of life out there, and lots of human and near human aliens.

Originally Posted by RyanW

For those of you who have run SF campaigns, do you find there is a sweet spot on how alien you tend to make your aliens (assume "playable race" sort of alien species)? On the one extreme, I find rubber forehead aliens too unrealistic to be really satisfying. On the other, really alien aliens can be very difficult to play.

The most obvious limits to the theoretically possible in favor of the playable is that they should be of a size and sensory range that allows deep interaction with the rest of the PCs.

In my world, the space-opera-ish human and near-human aliens (all of them descended from Earth, thousands of years ago) provide the aliens you can sit at a table in a cantina with, or have a fist fight with, or romance with. (Only other H. sapiens can produce fertile offspring with Terrans, but some of our cousins can produce sterile hybrids (mules)).

These are the aliens who breathe the same air we do and live in approximately comparable environments. (Some of them like it much colder or warmer than H. sapiens, or higher pressures or slightly different air composition, but all are human or very, very near-human.)

There are also true aliens, not linked to our kind of life at all. Among them are a breed of chlorine-breathing life forms, and a cryogenic race (and associated biosphere) that think liquid helium is comfy. They can interact with Terrans, but they aren't candidates for romance or even usually friendship or other close connections. They are alien, and most of what interaction happens is hostile or tense.

This is esp. true of the cryogenic race, none of them can exist in our environment for a moment, and vice versa, it would be instantly lethal.

[AlexanderHowl]

Humans have existed on Earth, in one form of another, for two million years, so a lot could have happened in that time. It would not be beyond the realm of possibility for an aliens species to have gathered breeding populations for food, pets, slaves, or servants. A species that started with an average of IQ 13 (quite possible using Space) and then further increased to an average of IQ 17 (quite possible with TL12 genetic engineering from Biotech) might see humans like we see monkeys, bright animals that make silly pets.