[Space] Interactions between species

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Frost

I am looking at running a campaign that is more or less stock space opera (ok with a bit of a hard SF undertone- it's still me) but with exclusively non humanoid, if not full on starfish, aliens.

While I am still at a very early stage so I don't know the species I want to use I am trying to figure out how the fundamentals will work and would appreciate any experience or ideas you have.

It's going to involve questions of both 'kind' and 'degree'. You'll need to ask yourself what sort of general interactions you want to have happening, and build out from there.

My big questions are:

How do these species interact?

I am assuming that for the sake of my sanity that all my species are going to have carbon/ water chemistry and breathe oxygen but that still leaves room for a lot of conflicting needs. How are environments organised to meet the needs of more than one species?

It depends on what the differences are (kind) and how much so (degree). Water and oxygen still leaves a lot of room for fine-detail chemical weirdness, for ex. The reason arsenic is so poisonous is that it's one level down on the periodic table from phosphorus, and shares enough of phosporus' personality to interfere with the phosphorus chemistry in our cells. It would be entirely plausible for arsenic to be a vital nutrient for a water-and-oxygen life form. (In fact, some real world Terran animals do require micro-amounts of arsenic to live.)

If they get this arsenic in their food, that would be relatively easy to accommodate. Restaurants and other food suppliers would just have to make very sure the phosphorus-eaters' food and arsenic eater's food were clearly labeled and kept very separate. (I have a suspicion that a species that needed large amounts of arsenic to live might find phosphorus about as deadly as we do arsenic.)

OTOH, if they breathe the arsenic somehow, or absorb it from the environment directly...that could be problematic.

But that's just an illustration of how various even water-and-oxygen could be.

How do I handle equipment?

I know there are rules for differing sizes for armour suits and other life support items but how best to handle (or even describe) gear for species with different manipulators has me stumped.

Thanks in advance.

Well, if the aliens are too physically different...they probably won't handle it. Past a certain point, creatures would begin to mostly associate with their own kind, or creatures more similar to their own kind, and you'd rarely run into their gear, and vice versa. So the issue would mostly be within a certain size range.

This would be even more true of different environments. A sapient squid and
a human might interact on business or fight over something, but they aren't likely to closely socialize, it would take very weird circumstances for them to both be in the same cantina. So again, it would be the 'mostly human like' aliens you'd mostly directly interact with.

Even if they are interacting violently, a human and a sapient squid (or such an entity) would be unable to fight directly. They can't endure each other's home environment for more than a few moments. So it would really be their equipment fighting.

Way, way back in the days of Doc Smith, he described a vast multi-species galactic association ('Civilization'). But it was mostly the more similar-ish species that interacted most often. Humans can go into a cantina with a Chickladorian, and they can both enjoy themselves. Not so much with an ammonia-breather or a Palainian.

So if you have radically different aliens, even water-and-oxygen ones, interaction becomes iffy except at a remove. Even if you meet face-to-'face', one side or the other or both will be in an unpleasant, dangerous environment or otherwise inconvenienced, and will probably be eager to finish the business and get away.

If you want Trekish direct interactions, you probably need to make some of your aliens similar in size, similar in environment, and so forth.

Within that relatively narrow gap is where the differences would begin to matter. A bird-like alien might have hollow bones and be fragilely built, and as a result his preferred surroundings might be padded and otherwise designed to avoid 'hard knocks'. Even if he can't fly, like an ostrich or something, his home might carpeted floor, walls, and even ceiling, and his clothing might be heavily padded because his bones can easily break.

A biped who had one strong hand/arm for heavy work, and one weaker but more dexterous arm for fine work, might prefer an environment that's heavily bisected. All his tools always on one side, for ex.

To use Doc Smith as an illustration again, one of his alien species, the Rigellians, had no sense of hearing. They were all 100% deaf to sound. Their cities are not entirely unlike ours, but they are hellish for humans to visit because no effort at all, ever, has been more to moderate sound, to avoid unpleasant sounds, it's a nightmarish cacophony. A human who had to spend much time in such a city would require ear protection for both the preservation of his hearing and alleviating the torment of the noise.

(Imagine scraping chalkboard, multiplied a thousandfold, and loud enough to damage your hearing, 24/7/365.)

A flying species might build cities that a human would consider vertiginous. Imagine doors that open on 500 foot drops, routinely. Walkways might span vast gaps with no railings.

A sapient who evolved from a heavily predated species might be very agoraphobic, by human standards, esp. if the predators were flying creatures. Imagine having a friend or associate who has to make a Will roll every time he goes out in the street in a human city, because the street is unroofed. A city with a lot of members of that species, or a neighborhood with a lot of them, might end up roofing their streets because of that.

Imagine a creature whose manipulators have a sense of touch far finer than a human hand. Imagine that they are also color-blind and have poor vision (or different vision, like a predator's motion-sensing eyes instea of human 'focused' eyes). So?

So their equipment doesn't have blinking indicator lights or display screens. Instead, it has vibration-pads, which convey complex information to the sense of touch. One of their radscanners might make no noise and have no lights or dials or screens, but instead that handle vibrates in patterns that tell how much radiation is present and what forms. A human using one might feel nothing at all or just a vibration that they can't discern any pattern in, because of the difference in the senses.

(Or maybe rare humans can use their gear, 1 in 100,000 have a sense of touch good enough to learn to use it.)