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Aotrs Commander
2014-09-08, 11:29 AM
I have come to a point where I will have a lot of thinking time in the next six months.

This is as well, as my next campaign world is going to tax all my creative powers.

The basic premise is something I've always wanted to do an entirely alien "fantasy" world. So the same sort of set-up as for typical fantasy adventures (sorta), but on an entirely un-Earth-like world. For starters, the world Andorlaine the Evenstar is a tide-locked planet in orbit around a distant star. The star itself sometimes dims (lasting decades to hundreds of years, with hundreds to thousands of years between dimming periods). (It took me about eight weeks or talking to astrophyicists and crunching numbers to get a suitable "unlikely but theorheritcally plausible" set-up.)

So, from the outset, this world is going to be extremely alien. There is no day, no night and no seasons so speak of. (Nor is this a recent advent.) Timekeeping itself is going to be a bit of challenge... And only really getting anywhere because the baseline is the orbit of the rapidly rotating moon (which takes six Earth days to orbit). I plan to have - of for simplicity of rules for either D&D 3.X or Rolemaster (whichever I in the end choose to use as the mechanics of choice) of having the smaller time units break down into as near as damn it hours/minutes/seconds. ("Days," as a 24-hour period, is another question.) So the players are gong to have a degree of adjustment before we evern start to the unfamiliar.

The actually inhabitants? Currently a blank slate. Given that this is a "fantasy" world there is no limit on the number of sentient/sapient species... Nor, with this being alien, of their shape.

But the crux of the question of this thread is thus: How far is too far?

On the one hand, I emphatically do not want to have analogous not-humans (humans proper are absolutely RIGHT out)... But on the other hand, I don't want to hand out the players a load of non-humanoid creatures that will make their fragile brains bleed because they are so different. (Now, bear in mind my current campaign world has a fair number of non-humanoid races (unicorns, gryphons, giant crow-falcons to name but three), so this is not necessarily a new area for either me or my players in terms game mechanics and whatnot: for 3.Aotrs, I spent some time working out stuff like what gear they could wear/carry and such.)

I have, before you ask, just sent out this question to THEM, but I also wanted to get a wider opinion as well.

So, denizens of the playground, I ask: how alien would something have to be (in terms of physical shape) before you couldn't cope with it as a character to play?

Can you only cope with humanoids or quadupeds or taurids (etc)? What's the point you stop and say "nah, I can't get my head round that, there's too many dangly bits!" or something?

braveheart
2014-09-08, 11:54 AM
I think that for most players a sentient race needs to have dexterous arms and hands, however the number of them, as well as the number of legs (or other method of locomotion) need only to be agile enough to easily traverse diverse terrains (no wheels or treads) also I think it would be interesting to see how the players would respond if all creatures had spiderlike mobility on walls

Segev
2014-09-08, 11:57 AM
For me, it's when it starts behaving in a manner that is literally insane by human standards. "Alien," even "blue and orange morality," is still logically followable from its starting premises. Human emotion, in all its seemingly irrational spectra, is still actually quite rational if you grasp WHAT drives it gives.

I can handle just about any physical form you can think of, as long as it fits into three-dimensional euclidean space.

Daishain
2014-09-08, 12:06 PM
In terms of just dealing with physical form, there are few practical limits. It may take a while for a player to get used to the body and its capabilities, not to mention properly exploiting said capabilities, but most people with a lick of imagination should be able to adjust.

Where it can get... difficult, is in terms of actually identifying with the creatures well enough to roleplay with them. Its all well and good to figure out how to effectively create and control an ectoplasmic pseudopod to pick things up with. But just what the hell would motivate a sentient blob of thick gasses? (aside from perhaps a desire to avoid strong winds)

Aotrs Commander
2014-09-08, 12:15 PM
Where it can get... difficult, is in terms of actually identifying with the creatures well enough to roleplay with them. Its all well and good to figure out how to effectively create and control an ectoplasmic pseudopod to pick things up with. But just what the hell would motivate a sentient blob of thick gasses? (aside from perhaps a desire to avoid strong winds)

And that's where the real question lies, isn't it?

Perforce, these creatures will not - cannot - be incomprehensibly alien, because my players will actually have to y'know, PLAY them. But I need to try and hit the right balance between "alien and alien culture" and "ability for lesser mortals to be able to roleplay them."

If you will forgive me, the My Little Pony fandom is a good example - you're looking at something that's an entirely nonhuman body-shape, but they are still, well, people. (And the MLP world is pretty out-there even by fantasy world standards.) I sort of want to go a bit further than that sort of thing - but one needs to know where to stop. Obviously, what feedback I can drag from my players 1 is the most important factor, but I figured it was an interesting enough question for a wider audience.



1Plus side of a very compliant group: I can say, "I'mma run this" and they all go "yeah, sure, whatever dude." Downside, when I ask for them to think about it, or what they want, it's like getting blood from a stone...!

boomwolf
2014-09-08, 12:17 PM
There is no such thing as too alien, as long inner logic applies.

It need not be human logic, or even earthly logic-but some form of logic that works withing the parameters of that world. as long reverse-analysis can follow why they look like they look, and why they act like they act-its a plausible alien.

I'd even say that getting more alien is better. I'm sick of all the "human with different ears and facial features" or "human/animal hybrid" races.

Aotrs Commander
2014-09-08, 12:19 PM
I'd even say that getting more alien is better. I'm sick of all the "human with different ears and facial features" or "human/animal hybrid" races.

Oh, definitely! I abhor the latter especially...!

DigoDragon
2014-09-08, 12:23 PM
Communication is a major wall for me. If I can't hold any meaningful communication where we can have translatable concepts, it's just not worth dealing with. For example, In Star Control II, there's a mysterious race called the Orz. For some reason their language is so bizarre that the Universal Translator cannot figure out all the words. Sometimes even context gets misplaced. Their description of what they are is pretty out there, and after a while I get to the point where if an Orz ship tries hailing me, I just open up with Hellbore cannons.

ComatosePhoenix
2014-09-08, 12:48 PM
Just a question, is this going to be Fantasy Alien such as warwind? Or a more traditional Sci-fi setting?

Scale of the creatures is an important thing to consider, on one hand its more relistic to have a wide variety of shapes and sizes for the aliens, on the other hand finding out that your selected race is about 4" tall might be a bit disconcerting.

Also a lot of people have mentioned Eldritch tentacle horrors, amorphous blobs, and intelligent gasses, but one of the best non human structures for aliens is Insect, or arthropod bodies. solid carapaces and similarly developed bodies time tested for survival.

Tengu_temp
2014-09-08, 02:25 PM
Any creature who is so alien that it's hard to give it a meaningful personality unrelated to its specific racial or cultural gimmicks is too alien to be a PC.

Similarily, creatures too weird for you to imagine them just doing ordinary, everyday things are too alien.

Also, when it comes to language - don't use made-up terms when ordinary ones are readily available. Nobody will take your alien race seriously if they call their children "farmlings".

Fable Wright
2014-09-08, 03:29 PM
Honestly, nature itself acts as a desensitizing agent here. Have you ever really looked at the world? At caterpillars, frogs, and spiders? At some of the crazy reproductive cycles at the bottom of the ocean? You get some extraordinarily bizarre stuff. And people are familiar with all those kinds of strange properties, but they still lend themselves to an alien environment. As to your main question? The only thing that I get hung up on are antennae that extend in front of the face. Any more than two and I'm just out of there. I can play as pretty much any arthropod, arachnid, cephalopod, reptile, amphibian, bird or eldritch abomination with any number of dangly bits you could create, just as long as they don't have more than three antennae extending from their facial parts.

Also, if I may make a suggestion? Spider-like creatures, given some kind of polyp-like insect they could raise as a food source that they don't need to compete for, seem like a good place to start with building civilization. The innate ability to make organic adhesive and non-adhesive building materials with higher tensile strength than steel seems useful in laying the groundwork for cross-species interrelations, and they already have cultural aspects you could extrapolate from different contemporary spider webmaking techniques. (Ever heard of Diving Bell spiders? Trapdoor spiders? Scorpion-Tailed Spider colonies? These could easily turn into cultures in an otherwise interbred spider society.)

SiuiS
2014-09-08, 05:02 PM
I like the idea of a gelatinous cluster hivemind of philosophical hippies.

Aotrs Commander
2014-09-08, 05:06 PM
Just a question, is this going to be Fantasy Alien such as warwind? Or a more traditional Sci-fi setting?

Never heard of warwind, so I can't comment on that... But the idea is that it's basically fantasy-level tech on an entirely alien planet. But the thing about the periodic dimming periods is that it's so far apart (usually) when it happens, the current civilisation usually comes a cropper and gest wiped out. Some of them got pretty advanced (but pre-(significant) spaceflight), so there will be a few sci-fi elements in there are well. (Imagine if tomorrow, the sun suddenly dimmed considerably and all the plants started changing colour (and composition) and their ranges changed, with the attendant climate alterations... Human civilisation would be pretty screwed.) The current nominal thought is that one of the oldest civilisations made to to a bit post-modern Earth (though not necessarily in all the same sort of technologies - some higher, some lower).

The first nominal campaign or adventure path will likely centre on a late paleolithic/neolithic level tribe, driven from their swamp home by a massive flood, with the only way to go down The Long Walk, a dead straight massive road embankment that runs hundreds (at al) of miles, down which they will have to travel, lead by the PCs to find a new place to settle. Being so primitive, it means a) the PCs don't have so much of a culural shift to star with, b) the PCs will actually be DEFINING thing about how the later games set more in the future happen and c) it's pretty novel. Especially when EVERYTHING is treasure. Never mind a Bag of Holding, a BAG is treasure! (And of course, with it being fantasy, I am going to be heavily playing up the superstitious angle that such primitives would have on technological items... When the PCs find something they think is a sword, and someone says not to touch it because it's an evil spirit... That might actually be the case! Or it is made of a metal that is an allergen to the race (as in, it penetrates their DR sort of thing). The point being, the PCs won't know or have any way to find out, which should ad a great deal of fun and experimentation to even basic treasure!


Scale of the creatures is an important thing to consider, on one hand its more relistic to have a wide variety of shapes and sizes for the aliens, on the other hand finding out that your selected race is about 4" tall might be a bit disconcerting.

Also a lot of people have mentioned Eldritch tentacle horrors, amorphous blobs, and intelligent gasses, but one of the best non human structures for aliens is Insect, or arthropod bodies. solid carapaces and similarly developed bodies time tested for survival.

I hadn't thought about size. But I am leaning, as I usually do, to a world very heavily grounded in real-world mechanics (hense the hours spent of orbital mechancis and not just hand-waving it as "magic/technology did it") - from where you can jump up to the fantastic, and have it be more fantastical - so given Andorlaine is 1.018G (it's actually got a surface gravity of 9.9965 m/s², as it's about 7% bigger but only 99.4% as dense than Earth) and brain sizes (to say nothing of not having to bend the game mechanics too far), I envision the primary races will be human-sized.


Communication is a major wall for me. If I can't hold any meaningful communication where we can have translatable concepts, it's just not worth dealing with. For example, In Star Control II, there's a mysterious race called the Orz. For some reason their language is so bizarre that the Universal Translator cannot figure out all the words. Sometimes even context gets misplaced. Their description of what they are is pretty out there, and after a while I get to the point where if an Orz ship tries hailing me, I just open up with Hellbore cannons.

Yes, a race designed for PC use does actually have to be able to be understood! You have to design them as a people, rather than a monster.


Any creature who is so alien that it's hard to give it a meaningful personality unrelated to its specific racial or cultural gimmicks is too alien to be a PC.

Similarily, creatures too weird for you to imagine them just doing ordinary, everyday things are too alien.

Good points.


Also, when it comes to language - don't use made-up terms when ordinary ones are readily available. Nobody will take your alien race seriously if they call their children "farmlings".

Eeh... I think there's a bit of give and take there. If you don't use the English word... you don't use an English word period. If they call children "gruzars" or something, it'd be less distracting... And for some things (not that I think that specific example is one of them, mind) I think having an alien word gives a better flavour.

The real danger is in things like measurements, because people have a hard enough time "seeing" things in real-world measurements as it is, without telling them something is fifteen flurblewanges tall. So there I shal pull a Tolkien and say that the actual units used by the characters would be something different (and, being me, define what those units are compared to metric/imperial) but that in play, we would only use imperial measures (since both D&D and RM use imperial).


Honestly, nature itself acts as a desensitizing agent here. Have you ever really looked at the world? At caterpillars, frogs, and spiders? At some of the crazy reproductive cycles at the bottom of the ocean? You get some extraordinarily bizarre stuff. And people are familiar with all those kinds of strange properties, but they still lend themselves to an alien environment.

Oh hells, yes. As a lay student of natural history, it never ceases to amaze me the sort of stuff you find in the natural world. You couldn't make some of it up!


As to your main question? The only thing that I get hung up on are antennae that extend in front of the face. Any more than two and I'm just out of there. I can play as pretty much any arthropod, arachnid, cephalopod, reptile, amphibian, bird or eldritch abomination with any number of dangly bits you could create, just as long as they don't have more than three antennae extending from their facial parts.

Also, if I may make a suggestion? Spider-like creatures, given some kind of polyp-like insect they could raise as a food source that they don't need to compete for, seem like a good place to start with building civilization. The innate ability to make organic adhesive and non-adhesive building materials with higher tensile strength than steel seems useful in laying the groundwork for cross-species interrelations, and they already have cultural aspects you could extrapolate from different contemporary spider webmaking techniques. (Ever heard of Diving Bell spiders? Trapdoor spiders? Scorpion-Tailed Spider colonies? These could easily turn into cultures in an otherwise interbred spider society.)

Interesting thought. Mind you, I gotta be a bit careful... I am sometimes a bit way too free with spider-like creatures! (The last lot of technoligcal robot aliens the players encountered - while searching for components from what amounted to the alien's old abandonded Space IKEA were spider-like (http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u172/AotrsCommander/secretproj3.png), so I don't want to get too into... type...shape...casting...?

Palanan
2014-09-08, 05:48 PM
Two thoughts here:

First, if you haven't read it, I really recommend A Deepness in the Sky (http://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355/) for a superbly done alien culture. Their homeworld orbits a variable star which goes quiescent on a cycle of centuries. --Not the same setup as your system, of course, but the book is an excellent example of how alien biology, culture, and even military strategy can be shaped and derived from the cyclical changes in their planetary environment.

Second, when I first saw the thread title, my instant reaction was "Tsochari!" And after reading through a little more, I'm still thinking Tsochari. They're my single favorite creepy thing from Lords of Madness, and I would love to play one of those. They're alien and bizarre, true--but their minds are still capable of communicating with humans, and they're even able to cast some of the same spells.

So that would be my answer. A Tsochari would be decidedly alien, but not incomprehensibly so, and that's what I'd love to play in this setting. Perhaps wearing one of the other races as a comfy overcoat.

Aotrs Commander
2014-09-08, 06:49 PM
Two thoughts here:

First, if you haven't read it, I really recommend A Deepness in the Sky (http://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355/) for a superbly done alien culture. Their homeworld orbits a variable star which goes quiescent on a cycle of centuries. --Not the same setup as your system, of course, but the book is an excellent example of how alien biology, culture, and even military strategy can be shaped and derived from the cyclical changes in their planetary environment.

Second, when I first saw the thread title, my instant reaction was "Tsochari!" And after reading through a little more, I'm still thinking Tsochari. They're my single favorite creepy thing from Lords of Madness, and I would love to play one of those. They're alien and bizarre, true--but their minds are still capable of communicating with humans, and they're even able to cast some of the same spells.

So that would be my answer. A Tsochari would be decidedly alien, but not incomprehensibly so, and that's what I'd love to play in this setting. Perhaps wearing one of the other races as a comfy overcoat.

That book does sound very interesting - I am going to put that straight on my amazon wish list! I tend now only to get books to read for when I go away on holiday, and stock up over birthday (in October) and Christmas for the following year and with the things of recent years coming to a close, this is a welcome suggestion; thank you for the recommendation.

Tsochari I'm not familiar with, but a google search gave me the idea. I think there was a similar sort of creature in Rolemaster's (well, Spacemaster's) Aliens and Artifacts.

A good point, I think, because that is an example of something that's probably no suited for a PC race (or rather, as a primary PC race); which is good, because we're establoishing boundary conditions! Once the things it can't be are considered, then it makes what it can be more easily defined!

J-H
2014-09-08, 07:10 PM
Take a look at some of the writings of Hal Clement. Specifically Close to Critical (high-pressure Venus type environment) and Mission of Gravity (flattened sphere with high rotational period - 500 Gs at the equator, 4 Gs at the poles).

Dexam
2014-09-08, 11:29 PM
For me, personally, too alien is still not alien enough - but I'm weird like that. :smallwink:

I guess you really need to judge the attitudes of your players. If most of them are "average" or "normal" (as much as I detest those terms), they will be well and truly comfortable with pop-culture alien species, so I'd suggest trying to take it no more than a couple of steps beyond that. If they're fans of hard-core sci-fi or real-world science, then a couple of steps again beyond that. (Sorry for the fairly generic and loosely-defined advice here).

Strongly recommended reading: "Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Evolving-Alien-Science-Extraterrestrial-Life/dp/0091879272)" by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (if those names seem familiar, they are the co-authors of The Science of Discworld series with Sir Terry Pratchett). Do whatever it takes to get your grasping appendages of choice on a copy of this - it will be well worth it. Then I suggest lending it your players to read. :smallsmile:

An additional suggestion: if you want your alien world to make "sense", then start from the ground up and build an ecology (or several). You've mentioned tidal locking, frequent regular dimming of its parent star, relatively Earth-like mass and density. This is a good starting point, but if we want to reach the goal of "carbon-based life with an oxygen atmosphere" (mentioned in the other thread), we need to build from here. Is it tectonically active, and are there active volcanoes? What are the extremes of temperature at each of the poles (i.e. the "day" pole and the "night" pole)? Free oxygen in the atmosphere is incredibly rare - something living needs to put it there, so I'm assuming large bodies of liquid water for bacterial and microbial life to turn CO2 into O2. What is the atmospheric density like (i.e. Earth-like or something more akin to Venus)? What's the lithosphere like? I'm assuming a rotating molten iron core to produce a magnetic field to protect developing life from solar and cosmic radiation. I'm also thinking that a tidally locked planet with a decent atmosphere is going to have very extreme weather conditions - nearly constant prevailing storm winds flowing from the high-pressure "day" pole to the low-pressure "night" pole, with sufficient ocean current and geological activity to keep things mixed up a bit - so your life forms need to be able to survive that - assuming that they are land or air based life forms; oceanic lifeforms are a different kettle of fish. I'm also assuming that the regular periods of solar dimming produce an associated planetary cooling? If so, your ecosystem inhabitants will need to be able to take advantage of that, perhaps going dormant for long periods of time.

These are just a small handful of points to consider before we can even start reaching the point of multi-cellular life. Let me know if you would like to read more of my ponderings in this matter.

Fable Wright
2014-09-09, 01:03 AM
Interesting thought. Mind you, I gotta be a bit careful... I am sometimes a bit way too free with spider-like creatures! (The last lot of technoligcal robot aliens the players encountered - while searching for components from what amounted to the alien's old abandonded Space IKEA were spider-like (http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u172/AotrsCommander/secretproj3.png), so I don't want to get too into... type...shape...casting...?
Those are different enough from spiders that I doubt the players will accuse you of shapecasting. The legs are far too stocky, there are no fine-manipulation mandibles, and they don't appear to have half their body converted into a materials manufacturing plant. (These being robots, though, it's hard to tell.) The only similarity is the bent-leg shape, and any other distinguishing characteristics added to the arachnoid civilizing race (like a bemandibled ophidian head and neck grafted onto otherwise arachnid body, allowing for far more reach and versatility in the creature's strike range and object manipulation) would probably make the players entirely forget about the semi-related leg structure.

boomwolf
2014-09-09, 02:03 AM
If you want another example of an alien mind, from a book I've long forgotten it's name there were some aliens that looked like bipedal wolves.
Body-wise nothing special, but their mind is where it gets weird: up to four of these form a small "hive mind" of sorts, making the four bodies a single mental entity, however while all traits, thoughts, memories and behaviors are shared, each of the original bodies is still the origin of them, so if one dies-the entire psych changes as the traits he brought with him dies, and later of another can take his place and alter the psych yet again as he incorporates his own traits.

This gives some interesting questions, for example one of them was made of bodies A,B,C,D but body D died and later got replaced by body E-so is it still the same "person" any more?
Furthermore, body E actually killed someone (quite brutally) while he was part of E,F,G,H-so is E the killer? or is E,F,G,H? and what does it mean for A,B,C,E? is he the killer? he definally REMEMBER doing it, but he was part of a totally different mindset at a time.

Add in the mix their fear of getting too close to others as the connections might get switched around (the connections are NOT voluntary, they just happen) and the results of that on the most basic things in life, luckily newborns don't form links or even giving birth would have been a threat of a mental mixture, but once they grow-it starts becoming a risk just to take care of them.
And mating as a whole, do you mate with "yourself"? do you risk mixing you mental with "another"? all these things create one weird-ass race.


You want to make seriously alien life, don't decide on how they look and act as your base, just make up a defining feature about them, and then work out what will happen to a creature that is burdened/gifted by that feature.

Broken Crown
2014-09-09, 04:41 AM
If you want another example of an alien mind, from a book I've long forgotten it's name there were some aliens that looked like bipedal wolves.
Body-wise nothing special, but their mind is where it gets weird: up to four of these form a small "hive mind" of sorts, making the four bodies a single mental entity, however while all traits, thoughts, memories and behaviors are shared, each of the original bodies is still the origin of them, so if one dies-the entire psych changes as the traits he brought with him dies, and later of another can take his place and alter the psych yet again as he incorporates his own traits.
That sounds like the main alien species from A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge, who also wrote the aforementioned A Deepness in the Sky. (I don't remember them being bipedal, though.) Both are excellent books, with some very interesting ideas about what really alien sentient life could be like.

Bulhakov
2014-09-09, 10:08 AM
Also Deepness in the Sky has spider-like aliens ;)

Aotrs Commander
2014-09-09, 12:55 PM
For me, personally, too alien is still not alien enough - but I'm weird like that. :smallwink:

I guess you really need to judge the attitudes of your players. If most of them are "average" or "normal" (as much as I detest those terms), they will be well and truly comfortable with pop-culture alien species, so I'd suggest trying to take it no more than a couple of steps beyond that. If they're fans of hard-core sci-fi or real-world science, then a couple of steps again beyond that. (Sorry for the fairly generic and loosely-defined advice here).

Strongly recommended reading: "Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Evolving-Alien-Science-Extraterrestrial-Life/dp/0091879272)" by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (if those names seem familiar, they are the co-authors of The Science of Discworld series with Sir Terry Pratchett). Do whatever it takes to get your grasping appendages of choice on a copy of this - it will be well worth it. Then I suggest lending it your players to read. :smallsmile:

That actually is probably worth booting up the list instead of saving for holidays.


An additional suggestion: if you want your alien world to make "sense", then start from the ground up and build an ecology (or several). You've mentioned tidal locking, frequent regular dimming of its parent star, relatively Earth-like mass and density. This is a good starting point, but if we want to reach the goal of "carbon-based life with an oxygen atmosphere" (mentioned in the other thread), we need to build from here. Is it tectonically active, and are there active volcanoes? What are the extremes of temperature at each of the poles (i.e. the "day" pole and the "night" pole)? Free oxygen in the atmosphere is incredibly rare - something living needs to put it there, so I'm assuming large bodies of liquid water for bacterial and microbial life to turn CO2 into O2. What is the atmospheric density like (i.e. Earth-like or something more akin to Venus)? What's the lithosphere like? I'm assuming a rotating molten iron core to produce a magnetic field to protect developing life from solar and cosmic radiation. I'm also thinking that a tidally locked planet with a decent atmosphere is going to have very extreme weather conditions - nearly constant prevailing storm winds flowing from the high-pressure "day" pole to the low-pressure "night" pole, with sufficient ocean current and geological activity to keep things mixed up a bit - so your life forms need to be able to survive that - assuming that they are land or air based life forms; oceanic lifeforms are a different kettle of fish. I'm also assuming that the regular periods of solar dimming produce an associated planetary cooling? If so, your ecosystem inhabitants will need to be able to take advantage of that, perhaps going dormant for long periods of time.

These are just a small handful of points to consider before we can even start reaching the point of multi-cellular life. Let me know if you would like to read more of my ponderings in this matter.

Most of these questions I've already asked and researched up on. As you say, the boundary conditions are absolutely CRITICAL in this sort of situation, because it defines everything else. Hense two months of time talking on physics forums and crunching numbers and reading all sorts of scientific papers I could find on teh interwebs. I do try not to go into these things half-cocked!

The answer is, there is tectonic activity; partly due to a bit of "wobble" in the orbit caused by Andolaine's nearest neighbour, a gas giant further in in orbital resonace with it. (Besides, you gotta have mountains, right?)

Pole temperatures are more of a sticky issue. I can really only postulate: while there is a calculatable minimum and maximum, actually getting even a median or mean range is nearly entirely guesswork. In order to answer some of the questions I'd like to, I'd actually have to have some proper atmospheric modelling software and know how to use it properly; like the gentlemen and ladies that did the research for some of the scientific papers I've read up on. And even then, there's not always a concensus. So the temperatures is a bit of a "at best guess." I made a stab and theorhetical minimum and maximum, going from percentage difference recorded Earth temperatures and Earth's nominal black-body temperatures (which give about 104ºC-114ºC at the hot pole and -62 to -112ºC at 85º latitude). (Of course, the global average temperature - including extrapolation for greenhouse effect - was one of the earlier things I calculated, being something modified by stellar flux.)

The atmospheric composition is basically the same as Earth's - largely because if I strayed from that baseline, a lot of factors (like the critical clould albedo and greenhouse effect) then would be completely different and I couldn't even try to extrapolate of scientific data.

As to weather... The substellar point has a continuous hurricane, and air flows out at high altitude towards the cold pole and back at ground level at a fair rate (so there will be a preveiling wind towards the sun in most places). The upper atmosphere also super-rotates (based on one analysis I found).

The magnetosphere question is a more tricky one. Andorlaine is not orbiting a red dwarf star: it's tide-locked at 104AU out1. (R Coronae Borealis - the titular sample star for an RCB variable star - is a yellow supergiant with a nearly 100 sol radius and only 0.8 solar masses.) Given that the reason they dim is due to (it is thought) carbon clouds given off from the surface, and the distance involved, I don't know how much solar wind actually reaches the planet - though it might be considerable. Annoyingly, it appears to be an area that I can't remember coming up when I was talking on the physics forums (I must go check): but it may be simply a question that cannot be answered, given the poor understanding of RCB variable stars. (Note: Andorlaine's star is noted as being extremely unusual in staying in the yellow supergiant stage vastly longer than is typical; but the dimming periods in undergoes are also a couple of orders of magnitude longer in duration than R Coronae Borealis; it is hazarded that some sort of exotic element int he sun is causing it to burn "slower" or there may be some form of artifical system in place: the denizens of Andorlaine never got that far and it's too obscure for any space faring power to do more than cursorily look and guess, so will remain a mystery.)

The interesting thing about the dimming periods of R Coronae Borealis is that the IR spectrum absorbtion does not significantly tail off, like the apparent brightness does. So the while the temperature will drop, it won't be nearly as significant as the visible light spectrum. That is - it gets darker, but not (greatly) colder. (One of the several good reasons why R Coronae Borealis was an ideal choice as a base model!)

At both poles, life will be mostly micro-organisms extremophiles (and there may be almost nothing on the cold pole; though I am toying with the idea of a sea (possibly frozen) occupying that area, so there may be life there below the surface). The bulk of the life is around the terminator region. Floiage varies in colour the closer you move to the sunward side, gradually become darker (because of the additional pigments requires for photosynthesis) towards the dark side. (Plants will also change colour during the dimming period, going darker via those same pigments... Which of course comes as a terrible shock to an oblivious civilisation...!)

So yeah, I've thought a great deal about the boundary conditions, which is why I'm now in a position to actually start thinking about the flora and fauna in more than very vague terms!



1Tide-locking is a function of initial angular momentum, not distance. You get tide-locked planets around red dwarf stars or close in most often because the rate of tide-locking increases with distance. Anodrliane is assumed to have had a very low initial angular momentum for what ever reason.

Palanan
2014-09-09, 04:26 PM
Originally Posted by boomwolf
If you want another example of an alien mind, from a book I've long forgotten it's name there were some aliens that looked like bipedal wolves….

Broken Crown is correct, these are the Tines from A Fire Upon the Deep. Definitely not bipedal; they used their mouths in concert to manipulate what they needed to.

As I recall, they had special sensory patches which transmitted ultrasonic carrier waves, which was how the different individuals communicated and shared a common consciousness. It's been a long, long while since I've read it, but I seem to recall a sadistic villain who captured and isolated individuals from their pack-mind, with the result being a horrific descent into insanity.

Definitely a long time since I read it, but I remember very well how it blew me away at the time. Some of the references to internet technology are very outdated by now, but the overall concepts are impressive and the book is quite a read. Very much recommended--although if you have time to read just one, I'd say go with A Deepness in the Sky.


Originally Posted by Bulhakov
Also Deepness in the Sky has spider-like aliens ;)

...I was just not gonna mention that.

:smallbiggrin:


Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
Most of these questions I've already asked and researched up on.

It does sound like you've been doing a fair amount of background research.

Do you, by any chance, have a list of references?

Aotrs Commander
2014-09-09, 04:42 PM
It does sound like you've been doing a fair amount of background research.

I have a large spread sheet of calcualted data...!


Do you, by any chance, have a list of references?

Not really; most of it was stuff I found by just googling around the subject and terms that cropped up. (Google things ike tide-locke Earth or exoplanets and tide-locking.)

Though this (http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.0515)paper about the stabilising effect of cloud feedback was probably one of the more important ones. (Essentially, they did some modelling and found that if you get a planet with a lot of stellar flux (i.e energy from the sun), you get more clouds and the planetary albedo rises and keeps the temperature more stable.

Particularly important for Andorlaine given that it's sun is 20000 times as luminous as Sol. The planet gets 75% more solar flux than Earth does, but because this pushes the albedo up (to an extrapolated 0.54), the global equilibrium temperature is only 4K more than Earth's.

Wikipedia's article on the habitability of red dwarf stars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitability_of_red_dwarf_systems) is a good place to start.

I also drew some inspiration from the artist's impression of Gliese 667 Cc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_667_Cc); one look at that and I decided I NEEDED to have a distant biarny pair in the background for artistic effect!

Palanan
2014-09-09, 05:41 PM
Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
Not really; most of it was stuff I found by just googling around the subject and terms that cropped up.

Are you familiar with SolStation (http://www.solstation.com)? They're mainly focused on nearby stars, most within 10 pc, but their individual star profiles are pretty exhaustive and they link to some good resources.


Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
Particularly important for Andorlaine given that it's sun is 20000 times as luminous as Sol.

Gawd. You say the planet is 104 AU out; how many AU is that from the star's surface?


Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
[Andorlaine] is assumed to have had a very low initial angular momentum for what ever reason.

Maybe a massive impact early on?


Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
I also drew some inspiration from the artist's impression of Gliese 667 Cc; one look at that and I decided I NEEDED to have a distant biarny pair in the background for artistic effect!

This is one of my favorites; I have this as my wallpaper from time to time. It really is gorgeous.

Aotrs Commander
2014-09-09, 06:02 PM
Are you familiar with SolStation (http://www.solstation.com)? They're mainly focused on nearby stars, most within 10 pc, but their individual star profiles are pretty exhaustive and they link to some good resources.

Interesting, though I couldn't get the maps too work (something prevented Java from running them.) Work remembering though.


Gawd. You say the planet is 104 AU out; how many AU is that from the star's surface?

104. (Andorlaine is 104.6 AU out - even at a massive 96 Sol radii, the star is only 0.44 AU). It's very hot, though 6900K (it's a G0 yellow supergaint), hense the luminoisty of about 18800 Sol.

(By the by boys and girls, this means Andorlaine's solar year is just under 1200 Earth-years...)


Maybe a massive impact early on?

That was definitely among my primary theorhetical contenders, yes.

Ravens_cry
2014-09-09, 06:44 PM
Even typical races like elves and dwarves are pretty hard to get into their headspace when you consider they generally live for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
I would say, for an RPG, what is alien is too alien when a DM can unequivocally say, without exception in any situation, 'No, your race would not do that'.

SiuiS
2014-09-09, 07:49 PM
So did you ever find anything on why scientists believe all sentient life would likely be bipedal, etc.?

Ravens_cry
2014-09-09, 08:34 PM
So did you ever find anything on why scientists believe all sentient life would likely be bipedal, etc.?
There was the dinosauroid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troodon#The_.22Dinosauroid.22), but that's pretty much considered to be overly anthrocentric these days. Now, strictly bipedal as opposed to humanoid is somewhat likely on Earth for vertebrates, as they developed on a four limb plan, and evolution largely works with what it has (purposing something into a manipulator) than making something new, but even then, that doesn't necessarily mean bipedal. You might get centauroids like the elephant, which turned its nose into a manipulator. On an alien planet, with an alien evolutionary history, other patterns could emerge, and if you add directed change, through magic or plausible technology, well, the sky is not even the limit then.

JusticeZero
2014-09-09, 09:04 PM
As much as I approve of alien settings, have to give my usual warning here. That Is, you are nowhere near as clever as you think you are, and your world is ten times trickier than you think it is. There are going to be loopholes in your world, huge ones that you won't know about until someone, maybe a player, hacks the holy heck out of the world in what will suddenly be obvious as a blindingly obvious way. This will make you go back to start to adapt the world to fit.

SiuiS
2014-09-09, 09:09 PM
The manipulator is the point, aye. There's more to it, from height advantage to blood hydraulics, but the manipulator is key.

The last time I saw it directly was a pop article using real science papers to validate the Star Trek trend of aliens all being humans with funny foreheads. That's suspicious, for sure, but follow ups supported the base thesis and every now and the. I find someone who also knows the science in question. I never bother to save references though so I'm hoping the ever-meticulous AOTRS Commodore will be able to provide both clarity and closure.

Ravens_cry
2014-09-09, 10:09 PM
The manipulator is the point, aye. There's more to it, from height advantage to blood hydraulics, but the manipulator is key.

The last time I saw it directly was a pop article using real science papers to validate the Star Trek trend of aliens all being humans with funny foreheads. That's suspicious, for sure, but follow ups supported the base thesis and every now and the. I find someone who also knows the science in question. I never bother to save references though so I'm hoping the ever-meticulous AOTRS Commodore will be able to provide both clarity and closure.
The thing is though, a manipulator could take many forms, and not just our hands. Crows, Corvids, Macaws, and Parrots, among others, all use a combination of beak and talon quite adroitly, solving some quite complex puzzles. (http://www.wimp.com/crowsolves/) and even making tools. (http://io9.com/the-mysterious-tool-making-culture-shared-by-crows-and-1460350033) As mentioned, elephants also have manipulators that are a far cry from hands. A smaller elephant, with more natural enemies to force it to be more inventive and work together, may very well have developed full on tool using intelligence.

SiuiS
2014-09-10, 01:00 AM
The thing is though, a manipulator could take many forms, and not just our hands. Crows, Corvids, Macaws, and Parrots, among others, all use a combination of beak and talon quite adroitly, solving some quite complex puzzles. (http://www.wimp.com/crowsolves/) and even making tools. (http://io9.com/the-mysterious-tool-making-culture-shared-by-crows-and-1460350033) As mentioned, elephants also have manipulators that are a far cry from hands. A smaller elephant, with more natural enemies to force it to be more inventive and work together, may very well have developed full on tool using intelligence.

And yet neither one has achieved even caveman levels of society. It's not just tool use; it's a multitude of things. Blood hydraulics for a superior thinking machine, height advantage, focused binocular (minimum, I suppose spiders get a nod here :Smalltongue:) vision, height, etc., etc., some of which is gotten around (crows have flight for height advantage, for example, obviously). But unless something changes in their formulae, they won't have fire, or wheels, or abstract laws, let alone starships and laserbeams.

The question is, then, what is the minimum you could change to achieve this potential? I am merely referring to a work or body of work I can no longer find that attempts to answer this, sort of.

Aotrs Commander
2014-09-10, 02:09 AM
As much as I approve of alien settings, have to give my usual warning here. That Is, you are nowhere near as clever as you think you are, and your world is ten times trickier than you think it is. There are going to be loopholes in your world, huge ones that you won't know about until someone, maybe a player, hacks the holy heck out of the world in what will suddenly be obvious as a blindingly obvious way. This will make you go back to start to adapt the world to fit.

And this is why I do so much prep-work before hand, to minimise the amount of problems. I get better at with every new world is thinking around these things. This is why it takes me more time to write a day quest adventure than it does to play.

This is not, incidently, the first time I've tried something like this. It is about the third or forth attempt over the last twenty-five years to create and entirely alien roleplaying world; though the other were developed toi nothing like enough to be usuable enough. (For comparison, my last, current, campaign world simply tossed aside the entire 3.x bestiary and started re-imagining everything from mythological scratch; and simultaneously removed Vancian casting and removed wealth-by-level and replace the majority of Gear with a flat progression of inherent bonuses and dealt with about fifteen energy types, not five) - and I started that over ten years ago. (And it's still not "finished" though plenty into the point we can actually play on it.) This is not a campaign world I'm making for the use in one adventure/campaign: this will be a project that is likely to be ongoing for ten years at the least, and probably beyond that; just because I'm now thinking about Andorlaine doesn't mean we're going to stop playing on Dreemaehnyll, nor that world will stop being developed. (And I'm at least as thorough on plot-hole as the professionals - because I can afford to spend a lot more time on it,and because I solidly ground everything in real-world stuff before layeing on the fantasy/sci-fi. Actually, I tend to find to my mirth, when my players pick fault with holes in adventure, it's invariably a published one and not mine...! (The last one being "why is there a waterwheel on a tridal river?" I dunno, Pathfinder, you tell me? Tsk tsk...)


As to rest of responces, very quickly: No, SiuiS, not looked yet, not had time and everything else I will have to get back to later.

Ravens_cry
2014-09-10, 02:10 AM
@SiuiS:
Yes, it's a happy accident that we happened to slot into the precise ecological niche, the very fact we are here makes it all the more difficult for other species, since we have, if you will, home team advantage, already fitting into that 'slot'. Crows are disadvantaged by their size, stone tools that weigh as much as you do are of little use, but their social communication skills approach humans, being able to describe a specific human to other crows so they know to avoid them or not. How many humans can tell apart crows?. They can develop technology, analyze tools to know how to use them without trial and error, and pass on technology and techniques to others, including their young. In effect, culture and something very much like language. Given the differences in size and capabilities, I'd say they are at about the equivalent of paleolithic, better than some, if not many, of the pre-Homo hominids.

SiuiS
2014-09-10, 02:38 AM
@SiuiS:

That's the crux. Until one of us can grab some more facts, we're discussing opinion and no one cares. Other that my end-question of "what is the minimum we could change to make these crows worthwhile for this thread", we are out of things to discuss. We can't say if they're far enough along because we still haven't established the requisites. That's why I'm establishing requisites :smalltongue:

Well, suggesting someone else do. Phones re limiting. <_<

boomwolf
2014-09-10, 03:40 AM
Honestly I think the only real "requirement" for advance intelligence, is opposed thumbs (or equivalent, opposed claw works, even a tripod style claw might be enough. a crow leg as it is should be good enough-if not required to actually stand.) on a limb not required for stance that is precise enough to be used both to grab things gently, and to "crush" (to a degree even human hands can crush), in order to have the ability to "omni-manipulate" (can manipulate ANY shape)

And a central nerve system. not all animals have that, and its probably required for higher brain functions to have a brain after all.

This means that in theory, crows, spiders and such can all be, as they currently are, fit for higher intelligence one scaled properly (you probably need some minimal size to fit the required brain) and develop the needed limbs.

Mastikator
2014-09-10, 04:00 AM
The question is, then, what is the minimum you could change to achieve this potential? I am merely referring to a work or body of work I can no longer find that attempts to answer this, sort of.

Appendages that can create and manipulate tools with fine motor control.
Advanced vocal chords (or something equivalent) capable of a wide range of sounds with precise control so you can form a complex language with thousands of distinct sounds, so you can communicate information to others.
Large brains capable of learning huge amounts of information and retaining it for years, information about how to use tools, information about shelter and food, information about your other family members to keep track of if they are behaving well, this allows you to form a basic society.

This could mean tentacle appendages with small suction cups capable of manipulating any given tool. Bioluminecent skin that can glow on command in any configuration of colors (making images, basically) and quickly alter and a large brain.

You could have a glowing walking squid that communicates with light imagery and has a giant brain, it would be a plausible candidate for a advanced civilized alien space faring society.

Aotrs Commander
2014-09-10, 02:20 PM
The thing is though, a manipulator could take many forms, and not just our hands. Crows, Corvids, Macaws, and Parrots, among others, all use a combination of beak and talon quite adroitly, solving some quite complex puzzles. (http://www.wimp.com/crowsolves/) and even making tools. (http://io9.com/the-mysterious-tool-making-culture-shared-by-crows-and-1460350033) As mentioned, elephants also have manipulators that are a far cry from hands. A smaller elephant, with more natural enemies to force it to be more inventive and work together, may very well have developed full on tool using intelligence.

Both of those were fascinating and awesome. Bonus points for it being Chris Packham, who I remember twenty-plus-odd years ago from the Really Wild Show.

If it wasn't for the fact Dreemaenhyll (the current campaing world) already HAS giant crow-falcons (which have metal bones, are Smarter Than You and sometimes have metal feathers and breath lasers), I'd be tempted to make them psuedo-crow-people right there...!




And yet neither one has achieved even caveman levels of society. It's not just tool use; it's a multitude of things. Blood hydraulics for a superior thinking machine, height advantage, focused binocular (minimum, I suppose spiders get a nod here :Smalltongue:) vision, height, etc., etc., some of which is gotten around (crows have flight for height advantage, for example, obviously). But unless something changes in their formulae, they won't have fire, or wheels, or abstract laws, let alone starships and laserbeams.]

Ah... But the latter don't particularly need to use tools to feed. And the former don't live in complex socities. There is a known correlation between the size of primate brains and the size of their communanl groups. The larger they are, the more brain-power is needed to process complex social interaction.

But not all primates are tool users.

If we take what that other article linked suggests, then, for a sentient/sapient race to emerge it probably requires BOTH the affinity for tools (as a product on environmental conditions) AND large and complex socialital groups.




Honestly I think the only real "requirement" for advance intelligence, is opposed thumbs (or equivalent, opposed claw works, even a tripod style claw might be enough. a crow leg as it is should be good enough-if not required to actually stand.) on a limb not required for stance that is precise enough to be used both to grab things gently, and to "crush" (to a degree even human hands can crush), in order to have the ability to "omni-manipulate" (can manipulate ANY shape)

And a central nerve system. not all animals have that, and its probably required for higher brain functions to have a brain after all.

This means that in theory, crows, spiders and such can all be, as they currently are, fit for higher intelligence one scaled properly (you probably need some minimal size to fit the required brain) and develop the needed limbs.

As I recall, the brain is pretty much a set size (if anything like a terrestrial creature) for density of computational ability. You won't get a non-magical species the size of a crow with a Earth-standard brain, because, as stated, the brain has to be a certain size to be able to have all the processing power. There's likely to be some give-and-take with alien brains, but it's a fairly safe bet you'd expect sentient/sapients of simialr physiology to have at least brains roughly the same size as humans.



Having had a quick read-around on a google search (that book Dexam suggested yesterday was dispatched from amazon today, I'd be surprised if they don't cover in more detail!)

There is a good argument for homonid form, based on practial criterion.

One: To be a tool-user, you need to have access to things to make tools with. This puts you pretty much on land.

Two: Further, a glance at the smartest creatures tends to come up with omnivores or predators, which deal with a wide range of foods, and thus need a bigger brain.

Three: You will want to be thus moving around on land optimally, which requires bilateral symmetry - so paired limbs.

Four: Creatures with bilateral symmetry tend to have the sense organs located at the front. So you are likely to have a head of sorts. If you have eyes (which you probably will, for colour vision), you'll probably have two, as that's the minimum for optimal distance judging... You probably won't have many more, since that's generally a requirement when eyesight is not as good (as for spiders).

Five: You will need at least one pair of manipuble limbs - and ones capable of fine movement. (You are unlikely to get anything with much less than four digits, as this makes manipulation more difficult, and large numbers of fingers increase brain-power to co-ordinate, so you are unlikely to get much more than a modest spread above that number; and the exact number is largely more a factor of "roll of the dice" beyond those criterion.) You are likely, then to lose at least one pair of limbs to form your manipulators, and thus expect to be partially upright.

Six: This is where the question becomes more murky. Evolutionarily, the number of limbs has reduced (insects and spiders and such have less than their ancestors, and least we forget, millipedes and centipedes are a very primitive body-plan). Four is a working minimum (you need to have one to move on and one to transform into manipulators). Now, the question of whether you would have four or more is not as clear. Six legs requires more co-ordination to run with, but it's not impossible. So you could have a quadruped with two arms not unreasonably. That said, it's probably more likely - though by no means certain - that you'd get a hominoid shape.

This of course ignores any potential unusual phsyologies or abilities i.e. telekineisis or some kind of granular jamming (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKOI_lVDPpw) limb (one plausible explanation for how MLP ponies use their hooves. Or the Power Puff Girls.)

So, the theories suggest that there is likely to be a bias in the direction of hominoid, based purely on evolutionary practicality (sans other migitating factors). Though it's likely to be a bias, not an absolute rule.

(Note: SiuiS, I didn't see anywhere that mentioned anything about height being a particular factor... Upright stances seems to come more from "move two limbs to manipulators" and having to adjust locomotion. (Whether the chicken comes before the egg on whether you develop manipulatoirs because you use tools, or because you have deveopled an upright stance is a question that's still uncertain even in human evolution; there are plausible reasons for either way. It's Dinosaurs=> birds via fly up or fly down all over again.)

I didn't find any particualrly scientfic papers, mind, just some scientific analysises. Maybe said book will have some suggestions - they often do, so I'll get back to you on that one.




Still working on the magnetosphere question, Dexam...!

Palanan
2014-09-10, 06:09 PM
Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
This is not a campaign world I'm making for the use in one adventure/campaign: this will be a project that is likely to be ongoing for ten years at the least, and probably beyond that….

First, I'm very impressed with the basic concept so far, and this seems like an extremely cool project.

But without getting into details of niches and brain size, let me make a broader suggestion: ditch the hominid bauplann entirely, and don't use familiar forms unless you absolutely have to.

Why? Because you're developing a world utterly unlike our own, and completely different from any campaign setting I can think of. I appreciate your interest in grounding everything very firmly in cutting-edge science--but by following our own development too closely, you run the risk of being profoundly constrained later on.

This is a fundamentally alien planet. You have the opportunity to create something entirely new here, so let your imagination run absolutely wild, naked and laughing all across this world. Look at everywhere on Andorlaine you think life can't occur--and then come up with something that lives there. Don't nibble at the edges of the safely known and plausible; fling yourself far beyond the borders of sense and reason, and see what you discover there.

And then, once you've dreamed the impossible, you can circle around and fill in the details as required, tap and polish and finesse wherever needed. But don't be bound too closely, nor too soon, to the forms and histories native to our world--because on Andorlaine, they're the maladapted aliens. Your job is to find all the natives on your world, in all the places we'd never think to look.

EvilAnagram
2014-09-10, 11:34 PM
The advice I give to undergrads is that, generally speaking, characters who do not have an understandable and resonant motivation will never connect with an audience. If your world's inhabitants are so alien that your players cannot relate to them, they're too alien.

Ravens_cry
2014-09-11, 12:36 AM
Weirdness for weirdness sake just feels unconnected. Oh, it can be kind of awesome sometimes, but it doesn't really make a world.

Palanan
2014-09-11, 11:39 AM
Originally Posted by EvilAnagram
If your world's inhabitants are so alien that your players cannot relate to them, they're too alien.

I would see this as a fascinating roleplaying challenge. I suppose others might not.

Also, keep in mind this isn't a performance for a general audience; this is a game world for players who will know ahead of time just how bizarre it will be. Completely different dynamic.


Originally Posted by Ravens_cry
Weirdness for weirdness sake just feels unconnected.

Following this logic, why not just design a seasonal planet with a modest axial tilt, orbiting tamely at 1 AU around a nice little G2V sun?

And yet we have a tidally locked, wide-orbiting planet around an RCB variable. The OP stated right off that "from the outset, this world is going to be extremely alien."

Given this, and everything else that's been described about this planet, it's the bipeds that would feel absurdly out of place here. Whatever lives here should be just as alien--and dare one say, just as extreme--as the planet itself.

Dexam
2014-09-11, 12:06 PM
I've been thinking some more about this thread, and I've come up with what I consider to be a minimum set of requirements for an alien species to be relatable to a player - which is the entire purpose of this conversation. It closely matches your "homonid" criterion:

In no particular order:

1. Mobility. Players will want their characters to be able to move around, be it walking/running, swimming, flying, climbing, slithering, rolling, and so on.

2. A fine manipulator of some description. Players will want their characters to be able to interact with their environment, grasp things, use tools, etc. Hands and claws are more familiar; if you want to go exotic, then trunks, tentacles, or some kind of gripping tail are options.

3. Sensory organs. Vision in the visible light wavelength is highly likely; colour vision less so, especially if your hypothetical species has evolved further towards the "night" pole. Hearing is also highly likely, as is touch, and possibly taste/scent/some other chemical reaction based response. Other sensory options are available, including but not limited to echolocation, infrared and UV vision, electroreception, magnetoreception, vibratory sensors - it also depends on how comfortable you are describing things to your players that are outside their range of "human" sensation.

4. Intelligence. Your players will want their characters to have at least some sense of self-awareness and individuality, and the ability learn, reason, solve problems, etc.

5. Extelligence. Sometimes referred to as "cultural capital", this is the really important one. Players will want their characters to have some kind of culture and social interaction, which means communication and the ability to pass on or receive learning from others. Stories, songs, music, poems, drawings, sculptures, writing, bioluminescent displays, "mind-melds" - this is what will make your species truly relatable, and therefore playable.

As far as I see it, everything else is window-dressing. Give me the environmental parameters of where you want your players to start out, and I can probably design/"evolve" you a semi-suitable species. The rest depends on how willing/able you are as a GM to constantly describe the "alien-ness" of the species to your players; and how willing/able your players are to play such characters - which is something only you can answer.

Mastikator
2014-09-11, 12:07 PM
The advice I give to undergrads is that, generally speaking, characters who do not have an understandable and resonant motivation will never connect with an audience. If your world's inhabitants are so alien that your players cannot relate to them, they're too alien.

Unless they're supposed to be unable to relate to them, in which case "too alien" is the bare minimum.

Ravens_cry
2014-09-11, 01:06 PM
Following this logic, why not just design a seasonal planet with a modest axial tilt, orbiting tamely at 1 AU around a nice little G2V sun?

And yet we have a tidally locked, wide-orbiting planet around an RCB variable. The OP stated right off that "from the outset, this world is going to be extremely alien."

Given this, and everything else that's been described about this planet, it's the bipeds that would feel absurdly out of place here. Whatever lives here should be just as alien--and dare one say, just as extreme--as the planet itself.
Actually, that's not what I am talking about at all, though I fail to see how such conditions would significantly alter, one way or the other, the chance of bipedal life developing. No, I am talking about simply throwing features in a big pot willy nilly with no thought as to why they exist how they would affects things, culturally and evolutionarily, leaving an empty feeling the creator is just doing it to gloat and say 'Aren't I just clever enough to kiss?!'
We don't necessarily have that here, but it's something to watch for.

EvilAnagram
2014-09-11, 01:23 PM
Unless they're supposed to be unable to relate to them, in which case "too alien" is the bare minimum.

That's why I said, "generally speaking." You're right, Cthulhu shouldn't be relatable at all, but the sailor who found the island once it surfaced should be.


I would see this as a fascinating roleplaying challenge. I suppose others might not.

Also, keep in mind this isn't a performance for a general audience; this is a game world for players who will know ahead of time just how bizarre it will be. Completely different dynamic.

Without motivation, it's very hard to roleplay. That's why actors tend to be extremely concerned with what motivates a character. It helps them enter the character's head space and give a performance that seems more realistic. In game worlds, it's still difficult to step into a character you do not understand. Almost impossible. And it's extremely hard to care about that character.

Aotrs Commander
2014-09-11, 01:40 PM
First, I'm very impressed with the basic concept so far, and this seems like an extremely cool project.

But without getting into details of niches and brain size, let me make a broader suggestion: ditch the hominid bauplann entirely, and don't use familiar forms unless you absolutely have to.

Why? Because you're developing a world utterly unlike our own, and completely different from any campaign setting I can think of. I appreciate your interest in grounding everything very firmly in cutting-edge science--but by following our own development too closely, you run the risk of being profoundly constrained later on.

This is a fundamentally alien planet. You have the opportunity to create something entirely new here, so let your imagination run absolutely wild, naked and laughing all across this world. Look at everywhere on Andorlaine you think life can't occur--and then come up with something that lives there. Don't nibble at the edges of the safely known and plausible; fling yourself far beyond the borders of sense and reason, and see what you discover there.

And then, once you've dreamed the impossible, you can circle around and fill in the details as required, tap and polish and finesse wherever needed. But don't be bound too closely, nor too soon, to the forms and histories native to our world--because on Andorlaine, they're the maladapted aliens. Your job is to find all the natives on your world, in all the places we'd never think to look.

But go too far off what can be extrapolated from the terrestrial and you can't get the science right (or at least making a spirited attempt to do same). (And make no mistake, getting the science RIGHT is an absolutely fundemental function of how my engineer's mind works and thus my world-building.) Creatively, I'm an engineer, not and artist or philospher. If it can't stand even basic analysis from real-world physics... It's not worth doing. I build with numbers, if not quite first, then very solidly second or third.


And yet we have a tidally locked, wide-orbiting planet around an RCB variable. The OP stated right off that "from the outset, this world is going to be extremely alien."

Given this, and everything else that's been described about this planet, it's the bipeds that would feel absurdly out of place here. Whatever lives here should be just as alien--and dare one say, just as extreme--as the planet itself.

If I wasn't bothered1 about the science, though, I would had just have had a world - or a plane - lit by a magical light-source than mysteriously went dark every so often when Evil Things emerged or something (since that was the base idea for Andorliane). The tide-locked RCB system was the method of GETTING that result (after discussion, debate and input from other people, both here and on the physics forum) without resort to my ultimate athema "A Wizard/Sufficiently Advanced Technology Did It." (If you must resort to that, you must make a spirited attempt to explain HOW they did it.) So it's alien - but it is also fundementally grounded in real science. The same perforce must apply to the inhabitants. That's, like... 75% of the whole point. I could just make anything up that struck me, yes... But it wouldn't feel right.



Further, if you diverge too far, you risk things ceasing to be alien and becoming meaningless nonsense. As the general concensus has been, if it's so alien the players cannot relate to it at all, it's worth nothing. If I tell the players that they are foozbillers of the wumbfane of spiddldiv, sent out to wibbleflange the kurlflong spoodlewumps with extreme hoolpoolphiss, they are quite within their rights to throw things at me...!




3. Sensory organs. Vision in the visible light wavelength is highly likely; colour vision less so, especially if your hypothetical species has evolved further towards the "night" pole. Hearing is also highly likely, as is touch, and possibly taste/scent/some other chemical reaction based response. Other sensory options are available, including but not limited to echolocation, infrared and UV vision, electroreception, magnetoreception, vibratory sensors - it also depends on how comfortable you are describing things to your players that are outside their range of "human" sensation.

I am half-considering maybe one exotic sense. I suspect one would be feasible to manage without becoming meaningless or too hard to phrase into human terms (the danger in it is the old "how do you explian colour to a person who's always been blind?")



The nightside is - nominally - largely un populated by sentient/sapient species. I really am tempted to an ecology that functions of the minimal (but still brighter than on Earth) reflected moonlight, but without magical assistance or supplementary energy input, the amount is still way too low (even extremeophile microrganisms might be pushing it). And/or a possibly frozen night-side sea. Of course, there are definitely Things that live on the nightside, that will expand across to the sunside when the sun dims, but that's definitely in the realm of the "fantasy" portion of the world, and at the moment, that's very much on the back burner to the "mundane" side of things. I haven't even decided whether to go for Rolemaster or D&D as the basis for the world for the specific reason D&D is arguably too magic-heavy at the outset. I want the world to stand on its own first, before deleving into magic too much.

(In the hypothetical Long Walk, for example, the PCs will have no spellcasters - they will be far too primitive for such an advanced idea. But they will be living in a world they really don't understand, where everything SEEMS magic. And - as came out when I talked to my socialital-engineering mate - you can keep the PCs on their toes on the fact that everything around them might be evil spirits... when magic does exist and so it actually might be! But the idea is, the characters won't be able to tell magic and technology apart, understanding neither. By adding the element of uncertainty, it makes the players more careful, because they can't just assume if they find a strange smooth-stone object like a spear-head that's too flat and long that it's a sword they can just pick up and use... Because it might do Bad Stuff to them. That sort of thing.)




Unless they're supposed to be unable to relate to them, in which case "too alien" is the bare minimum.

Indeed; at that point, of course, what you get is functionally monsters.



1Some might say "bothered" would translate to "anal-rentative obsession far beyind what is necessary." They would probably be right.

Palanan
2014-09-11, 01:57 PM
Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
So it's alien - but it is also fundementally grounded in real science.

I'm not saying not to; that's central to your entire approach, which I think is sound.

But you're developing a very, very different world from our own, and I don't see a reason to be limited to strict copies of what we see here on Earth. There is a tremendous potential in what you're doing here, and it sings out to me with amazing possibilities.


Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
The nightside is - nominally - largely un populated by sentient/sapient species. I really am tempted to an ecology that functions of the minimal (but still brighter than on Earth) reflected moonlight….

Why not a nightside ecosystem based on chemosynthesis? Essentially something like Riftia communities, but at the surface rather than at the bottom of an ocean. That opens up all sorts of options.




Originally Posted by Ravens_cry
No, I am talking about simply throwing features in a big pot willy nilly with no thought as to why they exist [or] how they would affects things….

We don't necessarily have that here, but it's something to watch for.

I don't see any sign of that here; much the reverse. And what you describe is certainly not what I'm suggesting.


Originally Posted by EvilAnagram
Without motivation, it's very hard to role-play…. In game worlds, it's still difficult to step into a character you do not understand. Almost impossible. And it's extremely hard to care about that character.

I hear you, and I don't disagree with what you're saying.

But even with a radically different physical shape, I think there would be some basic commonalities that a roleplayer could relate to, such as:


1. An organism will need "food," some sort of energy supply to keep its metabolism turning over. Securing access to that energy supply will be an overriding motivation, unless other factors intercede.

2. Expanding on this, an organism will want a space where it can be safe around that energy supply. This may or may not translate to "territory," but safe access to food will likely involve securing space around that food, either through confrontation, guile or negotiation. (Among many other possibilities.)

3. With a stable and secure source of food, an organism will reproduce, and it will do everything in its capacity to ensure the safety of its progeny and their progeny. Different organisms have a dizzying array of strategies for this--some of which involve direct parental care, and many others which don't--but there is always some provision for helping the progeny survive.

4. And if there's a medium of exchange involved, then acquiring more of that medium contributes to each of these.

This is hardly a comprehensive list, just off the top of my head, but I see a lot of motivation in here.



Also, on a different note, "ogodogodmyguyisgonnadie!!" tends to bring out the empathy in just about any player.

:smalltongue:

Mastikator
2014-09-11, 02:01 PM
That's why I said, "generally speaking." You're right, Cthulhu shouldn't be relatable at all, but the sailor who found the island once it surfaced should be.


Unrelatable doesn't necessarily mean malicious, hostile or even harmful, it might be an alien that can relate to humans but not vice versa. There must be a "sweet spot" between monster alien and relatable alien.

Palanan
2014-09-11, 02:13 PM
Originally Posted by Mastikator
There must be a "sweet spot" between monster alien and relatable alien.

Absolutely so. This in itself would be a great roleplaying concept.



Orson Scott Card is well-known for his concept of varelse, which he uses to define any alien race that's so incomprehensible that no communication is possible. For him, this automatically means that a war of genocide is the only option for interaction.

I find this extremely narrow and limiting, and as Mastikator suggests, I think there must be a tremendous spectrum of possibilities. I see a lot of potential for Aotrs to explore that spectrum in the world he's developing here. As a DM, this really fires my imagination; and as a player, I would love to get into the mind of a species that's evolved on this planet. Chemoautotroph with internal sulfur-reducing symbionts? I'm there.

SiuiS
2014-09-11, 02:43 PM
The advice I give to undergrads is that, generally speaking, characters who do not have an understandable and resonant motivation will never connect with an audience. If your world's inhabitants are so alien that your players cannot relate to them, they're too alien.


Weirdness for weirdness sake just feels unconnected. Oh, it can be kind of awesome sometimes, but it doesn't really make a world.

I am surprised at how often this gets repeated.
I understand you all haven't been arguing with the man with the mithril skull as long as I have over just this, but given the foundation in actual science (as opposed to armchair. Science) and the dedication of this being added into an already complex multiverse which the players already grasp, can't we give the undead abomination some faith?


*


Bleakbane, do you know how those fresh-water seas deep in the ocean work? Something about differing pressures and currents, right? Could it be possible for the dark-side of the planet to have frozen seas which house semi-habitable pockets of fluid and dynamic energy exchanges at the periphery?

Aotrs Commander
2014-09-11, 03:40 PM
Why not a nightside ecosystem based on chemosynthesis? Essentially something like Riftia communities, but at the surface rather than at the bottom of an ocean. That opens up all sorts of options.

That is another possibility under consideration, especially for the night side sea.


I am surprised at how often this gets repeated.
I understand you all haven't been arguing with the man with the mithril skull as long as I have over just this, but given the foundation in actual science (as opposed to armchair. Science) and the dedication of this being added into an already complex multiverse which the players already grasp, can't we give the undead abomination some faith?

*tips helmet*


Bleakbane, do you know how those fresh-water seas deep in the ocean work? Something about differing pressures and currents, right? Could it be possible for the dark-side of the planet to have frozen seas which house semi-habitable pockets of fluid and dynamic energy exchanges at the periphery?

I'd have to look into it more thoroughly, but between that and chemosynthesis, I think a living nightside sea is very possible. The land-side may require a bit more... creative liberties... with physics though...!

The main issue at the moment (aside from the night side being towards the back burner) is whether or not the sea would actually be frozen at the surface or not (since that makes a fairly big difference!), about which there is conflicting theories; and short of a tame professional exosolar scientist with a planetary modelling program, it's not one I think I can easily answer. At some point, I suspect, I'll just have to make a choice, but with the knowledge that I might have to be prepared to bovine excrement a rationalisation later!




Unrelatable doesn't necessarily mean malicious, hostile or even harmful, it might be an alien that can relate to humans but not vice versa. There must be a "sweet spot" between monster alien and relatable alien.

Determining that is really what this thread is aiming for.



Another thing to bring up for consideration... As I've intimated a couple of times, I have a mate who's an artist slash cartoonist. Very bright chap, but suffers terribly with Aspurger's. He is currently working on a comic project, which is essentially just world-building, for his world, which us steam (definitely NOT "punk"). He's a bit of social-political expert though, so what he's done is take an Earth-like world, with humans... But of made-up ethnicities and cultures. And by "made-up" I don't mean, like, Ferelden or Varisian or Elene or something (to pick at random from thre different sources!) I mean like, there are no analogues to modern human ethnicites. There are pink people and brown people and orange-y people, but they are no actual ethnicity you find on Earth. And he's completely constructed the culture, from historical principles, through things like the effect of religions and economics and all that sort. Plus, being an artist, he is able to do stuff like think about what the lamps and architecture look like and create a style for each nation. (I fairly frequently use a derivative culture as a basis that I can pump for historical stuff to work from as a base; like I say, engineer, not artist.) It's absolutely fascinating stuff - quite the opposite of anything I work at. Funnily enough, I use him from a source on that sort of thing, he uses me for one on more engineering-y sorts of things!) (I am slowly pursuading him into putting it out eventually - he realises the necessity, but he is having to work up the nerve due to his condition.) Anyway, he looks at the typical "everyone is equal" thing we tend to have in fantasy with our modern sensibilites and go "but how did that come about at that time, because that's not how cultures evolved on Earth?" Something I never would have thought to ask. (I have had a discussion or two with him on possible causes of that... Short possibility => monsters + adventurers, ironically enough...) But a culture with more defined roles (I won't say "gender" in this case, since of course that is not a given with aliens, nor might there be even only two!) might itself be a bit uncomfortbaly alien to wrap your head around and not necessarily in a good way.

Point of all that is, you have to a be a bit careful how alien you make the mindset/culture, since humans have trouble relating to humans sometimes! (See also: culutral difference between nations.) I think a bit of "less is more" probably is the thing to go for culturally. Within reason.

As I say, though - the Long Walk is going to likely be the first foray onto Andorlaine (for several good reasons, among them it requires the "least" amount of detail, since you can essentially do it as a ground up, rather than top-down) and that willbe dealing with a vary primitive culture. So the PCs will likely be informing the development of the culture of the campaign world.

Y'know... assuming they don't get everyone killed or something, which is always a possibilty...!



As a general aside, when I actually get started on Andorlaine proper, I may well post a thread somewhere on the forums, showcasing it as I go; I'm getting the impression there would be bit of interest, yes?

Palanan
2014-09-11, 04:58 PM
Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
As a general aside, when I actually get started on Andorlaine proper, I may well post a thread somewhere on the forums, showcasing it as I go; I'm getting the impression there would be bit of interest, yes?

Yes, and the world-building subforum (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?57-World-Building) of Homebrew would be the natural spot for it.


Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
The land-side may require a bit more... creative liberties... with physics though...!

Well, not necessarily. Without competition from photosynthesizers, you could certainly have a terrestrial nightside ecosystem based on chemosynthesis. A Yellowstone-like habitat could provide both heat and the necessary sulfur compounds, and a string of these along a rift zone would give you the equivalent of a sulfuric archipelago, strung out across as much of the nightside as you like.

Enough vulcanism would also solve the question of whether or not the watery portions of the nightside are frozen. I could see a patchwork of sulfuric rift-vents across large portions of the nightside, with some open water if it's near enough, surrounded by a much larger portion of the nightside hemisphere that's either frozen solid or salty-liquid with a klick or two of frozen crust.


Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
Anyway, he looks at the typical "everyone is equal" thing we tend to have in fantasy with our modern sensibilites and go "but how did that come about at that time, because that's not how cultures evolved on Earth?"

At last, someone else who dares ask that question. I like your friend.


Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
Determining that is really what this thread is aiming for.

Clearly different people have very different standards for what constitutes a "relatable alien." If you're just doing this as a personal project, with the only players likely to be your friends, then this will depend a great deal on what your circle of prospective players considers "relatable" enough.

Personally I see this as having the potential to be a genuinely mind-blowing campaign setting, something science-based yet bizzarely imaginative that challenges all manner of assumptions. But not everyone looks for those qualities in a setting.

Naturally it's your project and your parameters to define. Whichever way you go, I hope you start a thread in Homebrew so we can watch this world take shape.

.

Ettina
2014-09-11, 05:32 PM
And yet neither one has achieved even caveman levels of society.

What are the defining features of caveman-style society, as opposed to animal-style?

It gets tricky when you think that, in hominid evolution, there seems to be no single point at which 'society' formed. Different features of human society evolved at different times.

SiuiS
2014-09-12, 03:08 AM
Another thing to bring up for consideration... As I've intimated a couple of times, I have a mate who's an artist slash cartoonist. Very bright chap, but suffers terribly with Aspurger's. He is currently working on a comic project, which is essentially just world-building, for his world, which us steam (definitely NOT "punk"). He's a bit of social-political expert though, so what he's done is take an Earth-like world, with humans... But of made-up ethnicities and cultures. And by "made-up" I don't mean, like, Ferelden or Varisian or Elene or something (to pick at random from thre different sources!) I mean like, there are no analogues to modern human ethnicites. There are pink people and brown people and orange-y people, but they are no actual ethnicity you find on Earth. And he's completely constructed the culture, from historical principles, through things like the effect of religions and economics and all that sort. Plus, being an artist, he is able to do stuff like think about what the lamps and architecture look like and create a style for each nation. (I fairly frequently use a derivative culture as a basis that I can pump for historical stuff to work from as a base; like I say, engineer, not artist.) It's absolutely fascinating stuff - quite the opposite of anything I work at. Funnily enough, I use him from a source on that sort of thing, he uses me for one on more engineering-y sorts of things!) (I am slowly persuading him into putting it out eventually - he realises the necessity, but he is having to work up the nerve due to his condition.) Anyway, he looks at the typical "everyone is equal" thing we tend to have in fantasy with our modern sensibilites and go "but how did that come about at that time, because that's not how cultures evolved on Earth?" Something I never would have thought to ask. (I have had a discussion or two with him on possible causes of that... Short possibility => monsters + adventurers, ironically enough...) But a culture with more defined roles (I won't say "gender" in this case, since of course that is not a given with aliens, nor might there be even only two!) might itself be a bit uncomfortably alien to wrap your head around and not necessarily in a good way.

Does your friend digitize his work? I would be profoundly interested in that.

Also, the questions of why X race are all equal in games when they weren't historically is easy to answer. What a game needs and what history has had are not the same; You can found a game solely in history if you like, but it must be a choice. No one will fault you for making this choice consciously and in full light of the facts. It's only when the facts are ignored or forced to serve that there is an issue . Both schools of thought are completely valid because both are tools which should serve to create a thing as desired.

Next two people, my computer is messing up.
Palanen, many people ask that question. it's usually more a question of if they are knowledgable enough and trusted enough to not be rooted in bias when they do.

Ettina, I was vague for just that reason. Locking down those parameters would be answering the question. I wouldn't mind it being answered, but I would prefer it to come from a citeable background. So I would be unable to myself provide an answer.

Aotrs Commander
2014-09-12, 12:50 PM
Does your friend digitize his work? I would be profoundly interested in that.

He does, and he will most likely be putting it up as a webcomic first when he eventually does release it. At the moment, he's buffering himself with a year or two of comics (at one per week) first... And to work himself up to actually publishing.

(He's, I should add, a proper cartoonist by profession, and has won awards and had stuff shown at places and things, so it's not like he's just some guy with half a plan!) He's got a unique art-style, too; it's mostly black and white (plus a few paintings) but it's all very light and dark. He did sctually do a web comic a few years back called the Chian Empire (which was political satire, based on a fictional totalatarian dictatorship. You could probably still find on a google search, I guess, to give you some idea of what I mean. Obviously, given it was, what, must be nearly ten years ago, he's MUCH better now. Which is why I keep gently prodding him to eventually release it; you know I'm not an artist, but even I can appreciate the sheer effort he puts into everything. These are not your comics bereft of backgrounds, like all too many entries on Atop the Forth Wall... Indeed, I'd say the world behind them is often more interesting to look at than the characters many times!)

Palanan
2014-09-12, 02:55 PM
Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
I have, before you ask, just sent out this question to THEM, but I also wanted to get a wider opinion as well.

Out of curiosity, have you heard back from any of your players yet? What did they say about all this?



And, since this world has really caught my interest, here's a few more questions for you:


Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
The star itself sometimes dims (lasting decades to hundreds of years, with hundreds to thousands of years between dimming periods).

As I mentioned before, this is very much like the star in A Deepness in the Sky. Is the cycle of dimming somewhat predictable, or completely irregular? Has it become more or less variable, and has the star's energy output increased or decreased during its lifetime?

It sounds like you'll have global-scale variation in climate over a human-equivalent lifetime, which means the potential for any number of adaptive responses from the biota. However, I wouldn't automatically assume that every period of dimming involves a complete crash and reset of the current civilization; their forebears will have evolved with these events, and the sapients themselves may have adaptive responses.

You really, really need to read A Deepness in the Sky. Vernor Vinge is absolutely elegant with his approach to these very issues.


Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
There is no day, no night and no seasons [to] speak of.

But you will have these long-term "star seasons," which will almost certainly be defining periods of time in any cultures that arise--perhaps like the Mayan calendar, with a complex interlocking system of dates.

And you'll have your Phoebe-like moon…speaking of which:


Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
[Andorlaine has a] rapidly rotating moon (which takes six Earth days to orbit).

Do you mean rapidly rotating, or rapidly orbiting, or both?

Also, how large is this moon, and how far away from the surface of Andorlaine?

And, what other planets are in the system? You mention a gas giant, but are there others as well? If so, their orbits (and phases, for any of them within 103 AU of the star) will be of keen importance to any observers on the planet's surface, and if you have a number of cisAndorlaine worlds circling the star, their back-and-forth could eventually form the basis of an extremely sophisticated timekeeping system.


Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
As to weather... The substellar point has a continuous hurricane, and air flows out at high altitude towards the cold pole and back at ground level at a fair rate (so there will be a prev[a]iling wind towards the sun in most places). The upper atmosphere also super-rotates (based on one analysis I found).

The question, though, is what happens during a dimming period, when the star's output isn't driving your substellar hurricane. Could be that a dimming period is actually more conducive to certain behaviors, such as animal migrations, because the surface winds aren't as intense.

I suspect windmills will be popular on this world, and perhaps turbine farms for the more advanced societies--at least during the periods of stronger stellar activity. If the star's dimming is at all predictable, then you may have a complex situation in which some species and societies take advantage of the higher-energy periods, and others thrive in the dimmer stretches. There might even be a long-term cycle of seesawing dominance between the biota of a photosynthetic ecosystem and the chemoautotrophs.


Originally Posted by Aotrs Commander
…the world Andorlaine the Evenstar is a tide-locked planet in orbit around a distant star.

Worlds aren't born tidally locked, so you'll need to work out how long ago that happened, and how far along life was on Andorlaine when the lock became fact. This will be crucial to understanding what flora and fauna existed prior to the lock, and how much of the biota was able to adapt to the radically different conditions afterward. This in turn will require sketching out the climate early in Andorlaine's life, as well as during the transition to the tidal lock.

Also, have you worked out the boundary conditions between dayside and nightside? How easy is it to cross between sides? It's easy to assume that nightside life would die of heat exposure, and dayside creatures would quickly freeze; but there may be "amphibians," in the root sense of the word, which are able to cross between the two sides--perhaps creatures which evolved before the tidal lock was complete, and which still undertake great migrations from dayside to night and back again, depending on changes in resources from dimming cycles or other factors.

Aotrs Commander
2014-09-12, 05:13 PM
Out of curiosity, have you heard back from any of your players yet? What did they say about all this?

As usual, getting feedback out of them is like getting blood out of a stone!

So far, out of the... twelve players I play with (not all at once, granted, though our Monday group is a bloated nine players plus DM nowadays... This ia ABSOLUTE limit.. and really a bit too many since we have weeks where we only get four or five, which puts a bit of a load on things...!)

I have had the following responce (quoted verbatim) "iys a blank canvas. make its as alien as your imagination and common sense goes"

And one of the newest players replied with "what the...?" though I'm not sure what for, since he does know about the campaign world I'm planning and I did explain it in the email (as much as I did here), soo... I dunno.



As I mentioned before, this is very much like the star in A Deepness in the Sky. Is the cycle of dimming somewhat predictable, or completely irregular? Has it become more or less variable, and has the star's energy output increased or decreased during its lifetime?

Irregular, and at variable intervals, but always hundreds to thousands of years apart.

The flora and fauna, of course, are adapted to this change, as its been constant long enough for life to have evolved to cope. What tends to happen, though, is the civilisations rise up and hit the point where when the dimming period hits, they basically become unsustainable due to the change. (Kind of like how modern society is unsustainable without refridgeration technology.) As food becomes scarcer - because the natural flora and fauna go into, for the sake or argument, let's call it "winter" or "night" behavior, the sentient civilisations collapse because they can't feed themselves fast enough. And they thus collapse rapidly and the events fade into myth and legend... If they are even remembered at all.

Imagine a world where it's always summer, and so always growing season. You get a nice big society going, with plenty of food... And then BANG! it's suddenly autumn and winter. All the plants start doing strange things, animals hide away a bit more and so are much harder to find and aren't breeding as fast (as they're conservaing energy). Maybe your species is starting to have changes in too, you're suddenly always sluggish and tired or something or even more frightening things. (At the back of my mind, I remember there was a Doctor Who issue - Third Doctor, I think - where a planet had a very slow rotation and when it went to summer or winter or something, all the population mutated into another sort of creature. But because it happened so infrequently, no-one knew what was happening and they were panicking a bit.) Your population is too big to sustain with the current food sources (nothing will GROW properly!) and everyone starts starving. The change is fairly rapid (weeks/months) but goes on for years, decades or even centuries... But the food problem is going to hit hard and fast, before your civilisation, caught flat-footed, is able to adjust fast enough.

Especially since many of the civilisations are low-tech (i.e. "fantasy" the-levels). The one that lasted longest, theorhetically one of the older ones, the one that was circa 20th-21st century Earth sort of level, was advanced, happened to occur during an unusually long period between dimming. While advanced, though, it was still just too big to be able to react fast enough to save enough people and collapsed.

(This is also discounting what... things come out of the night-side to eagerly feed on the day-side denizens with their range expanded. Which is another base-line oncept I have had from the begining... The land of eternal evening falls into a night which lasts for centuries and can the protagonist nation weather the tide of horrors and environmental changes? And find out what is going on and perhaps how to survive it?)

Obviously, the more civilisations there have been, the more chance there is of someone finally managing to preserve the tale of what happened in the hopes that the next ones can survive. (A bit like the cycle the Reapers induced in Mass Effect.) To start with, the Long Walk would be taking place fairly "recently" in time after the fall of the high-tech race. (The PC's tribe may be survivors, reduced to a primitive state by the collapse, or simply a new race risen to sentience/sapience.) The dimming won't ever even come up in that campaign.

Games would be set in much later period, where you'd get, let's call it the "Mass Effect Fantasy" mode, where the fall of night is actually happening, and there are (oft-discounted) myths and legends of a time when the sun went dim, and perhaps more, lying in forgotten ruins from races that did not survive...

So, basically, the idea is that the dimming happens frequently enough on a geological timescale for it to be unremarkable (like summer to winter is), but rarely enough that sentient/sapient races aren't really aware of it until it hits; it's always long enough ago it's well out of their racial memories.

Essentially, too, the assumption is being made (at this nebulous stage) that all the prior civilisations failed their Save Verses Collapse when the dimming hit. It's not a garenteed thing, but it's a high enough "DC" that so far, by chance, no-one has made it. Until the "Mass Effect" time-period, as its namesake, where they probably will. The dimming and fallen civilisations are sort of setting the stage for that time period, you see; even the Long Walk will define in some ways the later period.

(This thing about playing a campaign world in two time periods is not a new thing for me - my current campaign world Dreemaenhyll currently has parties in two time periods - the middle of the Dark Wars, the last big fight with the Dark Lord verses everyone else, and the present, where the northern nations are starting pulling out of the dark age that resulted when they beat him (and the Dark Lord's forces are also putting themselves back together: one of the parties is even his side.)




Do you mean rapidly rotating, or rapidly orbiting, or both?

Also, how large is this moon, and how far away from the surface of Andorlaine?


The moon took a LOT of work to try and fit in feasibly. It was the single most difficult thing to do so far.

Andorliane's moon is a capture, a small body from further out in the solar system. It rotates around the planet quite fast - a full rotation in six Earth days. In addition, it rotates on its own axis once every three days. This has interesting implications, since on one side is a dark feature - possibly an impact crater or something else - that otherwise marrs a pale reflective surface with a high concentration of silver and magnesium oxide (deposited when the moon's water-ice photodissociated.) The dark feature is fully visible when the moon is closest to the sun (in the middle of its day-side orbit), and thus is likened to the opening and closing of an eye... Hense the title of Eye of the Moon, which has all sorts of mystical connotations. As the rotation is exactly half the orbit time, it also means that the Eye of the Moon is never visible from the night side (since it's always facing away from the sun at the middle of it's orbit because it rotates 360º for every 180º it orbits.) The moon appears (like the sun, as if co-incidently happens) roughly the same size in the sky as Earth's sun and moon1.

It is 609km in radius, at a distance of roughly 142000km. Due to the magnesium and silver on the surface, it has a high albedo (0.4) and is thus brighter than Luna is from Earth. (-13.19 verses -12.74 apparent magnitude, or as a very rough estimation in Lux, 0.4 Lux as opposed to 0.27). It is slightly denser than Luna, but the small size means it has only about 0.063 G surface gravity (or 0.62 m/s2). Due to the distance, Andorlaine's moon imparts a tidal force on the planet equicilent to Luna on Earth.

("Wait," I hear you cry. "Wouldn't that accelerate the planet out of tide-lock?" Yes, it eventually will. However, the rate of tidal acceleration is really not an easily calculatable factor - you'd actually need the actual planet's geopgraphy map to even begin - but it is also very small. Luna would eventually tide-lock Earth; except it will have broken free of the orbit by then! Andorlaine's moon is not slowing down, but speeding up the planet (though the planet it slowing it down so that it will eventually be tide-locked to Andorlaine), so it will eventually impact the surface before that happens - and again, the amount of acceleration is minimal. By which I mean, Luna slows Earth by the order of 1 millisecond of day length per century. So, assuming the rate of tidal acceleration is constant (which it won't be), it would take about three trillion years for Andorlaine's moon to speed up its rotation out of tide-lock to a 24-hour day. So, while on a solar-system scale, Andorlaine's moon is a temporay feature, on a even evolutionary time-scale it may as well be a constant.)




And, what other planets are in the system? You mention a gas giant, but are there others as well? If so, their orbits (and phases, for any of them within 103 AU of the star) will be of keen importance to any observers on the planet's surface, and if you have a number of cisAndorlaine worlds circling the star, their back-and-forth could eventually form the basis of an extremely sophisticated timekeeping system.

So far, there will be other planets/ stellar bodies (proposed 14-15 total in th system), but only the neighbouring gas giant is confirmed, and that is 25 AU away at a radius of about 80AU from the star. At the distance Andorliane is out, it takes nearly 1200 years to orbit the sun, and the gas giant takes 800. Given how late the discovery of Uranus and Neptune at 20-30AU from Earth (and vastly less of an orbital timescale), I think the distances involved would mean that most of the other planets are probablt not detectable from Andorlaine without telescopes, so they will probably not have a great impact on the culture. If I understand aright, too, the really slow orbit of Andorlaine would also mean the stars in the sky would be much more fixed.

Of note, of course, is the distance binary companion pair, 3000 AU from the star (with apparent magnitude of -9.8 and -8.6 - basically a near-clone of Alpha Centauri if they were that close to Earth), which orbit around each other every 77 years and around Andorlaine's star every 98000 years.




The question, though, is what happens during a dimming period, when the star's output isn't driving your substellar hurricane. Could be that a dimming period is actually more conducive to certain behaviors, such as animal migrations, because the surface winds aren't as intense.

Don't forget it's only the visible light that dims - the infra-red spectrum emissions are largely unaffected. It's another reason why this particular set-up is viable; it gets "dark", but not "cold." (So unlike the book you reference, the planet doesn't need to go into a hibernation period because the atmosphere freezes, if I understand what you've said about it aright.)


suspect windmills will be popular on this world, and perhaps turbine farms for the more advanced societies

Alsomst certainly. As well as some interesting tactical considerations - you always want to be attacking down wind (a bit like on Earth you want the wind-guage or the sun at your back).


There might even be a long-term cycle of seesawing dominance between the biota of a photosynthetic ecosystem and the chemoautotrophs.

Quite possibly, as as stated, stuff from the night-side is intended to be able to expand its range during the dimming periods.




Worlds aren't born tidally locked, so you'll need to work out how long ago that happened, and how far along life was on Andorlaine when the lock became fact. This will be crucial to understanding what flora and fauna existed prior to the lock, and how much of the biota was able to adapt to the radically different conditions afterward. This in turn will require sketching out the climate early in Andorlaine's life, as well as during the transition to the tidal lock.

It is assumed that Andorlaine started out with a very low angular momentum (perhaps due to a large impact early in its formation), and has thus been tide-locked for the majority of its life. The moon is probably "only" a few billions years-old capture... But long enough that both conditions have lasted more-or-less the entire span of evolution of life on the planet.


Also, have you worked out the boundary conditions between dayside and nightside? How easy is it to cross between sides? It's easy to assume that nightside life would die of heat exposure, and dayside creatures would quickly freeze; but there may be "amphibians," in the root sense of the word, which are able to cross between the two sides--perhaps creatures which evolved before the tidal lock was complete, and which still undertake great migrations from dayside to night and back again, depending on changes in resources from dimming cycles or other factors.

The climate will graduate, like on Earth does, from very hot at the substellar point, to very cold at the cold pole. The temperature will likely drop sharpest a little way beyond the terminaor, once you get out of the backscatter region (i.e. on a rotating planet, the time when the sun is below the horizon but there's still light), but other than that, it'll be a fairly steady change. The actual temperature range... is a much stickier question, as it's not something I can calculate. I've made an educated guess at the extremes of temperature, and work on the basis the rest will probably fall in between them. But it won't be extreme enough that creatures would instantly die if you teleported from one bit to another (or at least not any more than you would die teleporting from Antartica to the the Amazon or the Sahara - you're probably buggered if you're a specially adapted life-form to one extreme or the other, but you can probably survive for a bit from in-between, given some proper equipment).



1I REEALLY wanted it bigger, but you can't have it without putting the tidal forces unreasonably high. Basically because for it to be a certain size, it has to be at a certain distance (obviously) - and orbit speed of a body (and thus tidal acceleration) is a factor of distance.

The sun being the same apparent size was merely one of those odd coincidences!

bulbaquil
2014-09-12, 08:09 PM
It sounds like your players might well be running the gamut from "the weirder, the better" to "umm, hold on a second while I obtain the seven Ph.D.'s I'll need to understand this," which complicates things but is also going to be true of the gaming community as a whole.

Still, what you're doing here seems to be more on the lines of full-blown conworlding rather than simple campaign setting creation (and much kudos to you on all your research), so - even though I personally am the type of player who seldom plays anything more exotic than tiefling and thinks that Klingons, Andorians, Vulcans, and the other Star Trek races are plenty "alien" enough - I'd say the sky's the limit here. If a player likes the idea of a campaign based in your setting, they'll be receptive to playing in it; if a player can't stand the setting, odds are they won't play in it any more than someone who's sick and tired of Faerûn would be willing to play yet another game based in Faerûn.

JusticeZero
2014-09-15, 04:52 PM
There's a lot of post -facto reasons being given for humans to be the smart ones. There really only needs to be the one: the entirety of human history is shorter than one "turn". In evolutionary time. There could have been a dead heat with ten species developing intelligence, and it would look like it does because as soon as a species has what we think of as "intelligence" down, it completely destroys the action economy with it and nothing else progresses before the first one goes interstellar or whatever.

Aotrs Commander
2014-09-19, 12:04 PM
It has gone a bit quiet, since a) I'm slowly reading Evolving the Alien - though I'm not sure how useful it will be in the long run, since it's main thrust is advocating towards very alien (which is the bit that falls into Bit Difficult For Lesser Mortals To Roleplay) and b) trying to resolve that magnetosphere issue Dezam raised. So far, I've not and any reponses to my inquiries on the physics forums I frequent (actually, we have a sub-forum here, don't we? Have to try that at some point...) and there's (according to my inital searches) some debate as to how much difference the magnetosphere makes in practise. Never mind any idea of how much solar wind a star puts out.