[Psionics] [Space] Psi Trek - Worldbuilding

[Flyndaran]

Or just the classic parallel reality with different physical laws.
But I agree aspects would tend toward Lovecraftian, D&D, or religious like later season of ST:DS9 if not carefully controlled.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

I have the feeling that a psionic setting with an Astral Plane is leaning more towards a horror or fantasy setting than sci-fi psionics, so introducing astral beings opens up some questions of metaphysics that you'll have to answer.

However, it's possible to make a sci-fi flavoured Astral Plane by relabelling it as "the Universal Gestalt Consciousness," "the Psionic Carrier Field" or even "the Quantum Realm," and keep most of the mechanics and just change the fluff.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Or just the classic parallel reality with different physical laws.
But I agree aspects would tend toward Lovecraftian, D&D, or religious like later season of ST:DS9 if not carefully controlled.

My personal conception of the astral plane is that it basically is the collective unconscious of all sophonts, so 'Universal Gestalt Consciousness' or 'Psionic Carrier Field' work pretty well. 'The Quantum Realm' fits the classic 'parallel reality with different physical laws.'

On the other hand, a number of TOS episodes, and some in later series, did get Lovecraftian in places (I'm blanking on examples beyond the Jack the Ripper entity in Wolf in the Fold, but I know I thought of several others some months ago), to the point that a friend of mine once played in a Star Trek themed Call of Cthulhu campaign ('Hailing Frequencies of Cthulhu,' I think), and felt that it fit well enough.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

'The Quantum Realm' fits the classic 'parallel reality with different physical laws.'

I'd quibble a little and say it's an "underlying" reality, at least for the MCU conception of it. Parallel implies there's no connection.

[Prince Charon]

Alien Races

As noted in the OP, the more humanoid aliens in this setting are intended to be descended from humans and related species taken from Earth in ancient times. However, that still leaves room for a number of options relating to alien sophonts:

1. Just write up 'close enough' templates for the various canon races. In most cases, they'll just be humans with an odd perk or quirk. (I won't try to convert the ones from GURPS Prime Directive for 3e, and I don't have the 4e version, so any similarity is the result of trying to create a template for roughly the same species in the same system.) This is my preferred option.

2. Create new races that fill the appropriate niches. In most cases, they'll still just be humans with an odd perk or quirk.

3. Convert or recreate some of the aliens from GURPS Aliens. This is my least favorite option, but it could be made to work.

4. Something I probably haven't thought of. If you have ideas you think would work better, please suggest them.


EDIT: Apparently we're doing mostly #1, with occasional examples of #2 and #3 (likely in the form of TGLS's #3a, below).

[TGLS]

I'll call this 3a: use the converted aliens from here. Still, for a Star Trek feel, most aliens should just be humans with bumpy foreheads and a planetary hat (maybe some stat pluses), so 1 or 2. Maybe add a couple from 3 for variety.

[Flyndaran]

Most, but not all, on screen aliens were humans in funny suits and nose bumps.
One could easily bring the or more of the inhuman ones to the front in a tabletop game without too much style divergence.
Though I suppose that may lead to one issue I always had with ST, that of them almost never using protective suits no matter how unknown the planet.
That might be more obvious with properly alien aliens.

[ericthered]

Any of those three options will work. The real question is what do you want to emphasize ?

#1 emphasizes the star-trek connection. It leans more heavily into this being a secret history of star-trek that has a lot more consistency than depicted on screen

#3 emphasizes the gurps connection, and may be the "easiest" route in terms of not doing work

#2 is what I would have expected this project to take, based purely on the psi-wars method.

If I may suggest for #4, it may be possible to make all of the variant human species/factions actual divergent humans. This does require either a long time for such "species" to develop (thus implying either precursors, time travel, or long time spans after first space flight) or genetic engineering though.

[Flyndaran]

ST:TNG does have precursors supposedly responsible for all the humanoids in the galaxy with their "seeding" of all the planets billions of years ago. This of course requires evolution to be very different there than it is here. But that's Star Trek science for you.

This idea may start to resemble Traveller a bit too much to some players.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

ST:TNG does have precursors supposedly responsible for all the humanoids in the galaxy with their "seeding" of all the planets billions of years ago. This of course requires evolution to be very different there than it is here. But that's Star Trek science for you.

This idea may start to resemble Traveller a bit too much to some players.

Not being a big Traveller fan, I'm not sure what you mean by that?

I will say that the seeding did not take place billions of years ago, though. In most cases, it took place thousands to tens of thousands of years ago, and in some cases, hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago (tens of millions is rather less likely, but I'm not going to totally dismiss the possibility of surviving dinosaurs somewhere out there, or similar beings). I'm not totally certain that sapient life in this setting existed billions of years ago.

EDIT: It isn't just sophonts who were seeded, entire biomes (or significant portions thereof) were sampled and recreated on terraformed worlds, much like in the Orichalcum Universe mentioned in the OP, and a number of other settings. Not all were successful, of course, as important things might be missed and left out, but quite often, 'life, uh, finds a way.'

[ericthered]

Traveller has lots of different human variants. It doesn't treat it as an off-hand explanation: its a deep setting element that comes up again and again. I'm not sure how much it actually effects play, but it gives the setting a flavor, and its possibly played up more than it should be.

On the other hand, scientists today WOULD go nuts if the first "aliens" we met were human, down to the DNA and reproduction.