PDA

View Full Version : Aliens: does and don'ts



Anonymouswizard
2015-11-27, 06:25 AM
I'm about to write up a Space Opera setting, but I get stuck when designing aliens. So I was wondering what the playground thought about making alien species and cultures.

LudicSavant
2015-11-27, 06:34 AM
Even if your aliens are heavily anthropomorphized, do develop an appreciation of the extreme diversity of human cultures. At the very least try to make your aliens seem more psychologically distinct from modern Americans than actual Americans from movies made 60 years ago.

Ravens_cry
2015-11-27, 06:44 AM
I'd love to stop seeing condescending aliens telling us how baaad we are.
Exhibit a) The extreme space hippie society that tells how ecologically bad we all are, while having some miracle natural equivalent to tech.
It rather undermines the moral, no?

Mastikator
2015-11-27, 07:28 AM
Don't make aliens just humans with special hats, aliens should be less related to humans than humans are to trees. One option is to invent a new "tree of life" for the planet where the alien evolved from. The planet could have different conditions that makes some evolutionary features we have impossible (like if the planet is in perpetual darkness then eyes might not evolve at all) and have other features that don't exist on Earth to be commonplace.

You could also take from the animal kingdom, for instance certain birds can sense magnetic fields (and use it to navigate). There might be an alien race that can do this, and as a result have not developed any concept for relative direction, they have no concept of forwards/backwards, left or right. Just north south east west, which they always had intrinsic knowledge of, and they might have magnets on their spaceships to help them navigate.

Think about how their physical features inform their experience of the world and how that defines their culture. You could have an alien that is telepathic, but only with each other and therefore doesn't have a concept of "the self". Like the borg but non-invasive.

Anonymouswizard
2015-11-27, 09:29 AM
Even if your aliens are heavily anthropomorphized, do develop an appreciation of the extreme diversity of human cultures. At the very least try to make your aliens seem more psychologically distinct from modern Americans than actual Americans from movies made 60 years ago.

I'm British, so they'll be psychologically different but all enjoy sarcasm.

In all seriousness, I need more help with this than biology.


I'd love to stop seeing condescending aliens telling us how baaad we are.
Exhibit a) The extreme space hippie society that tells how ecologically bad we all are, while having some miracle natural equivalent to tech.
It rather undermines the moral, no?

Hmm... Maybe if the space hippies want us to increase our tech level to theirs. They did the damaging the environment thing and want to help other species move past it.


Don't make aliens just humans with special hats, aliens should be less related to humans than humans are to trees. One option is to invent a new "tree of life" for the planet where the alien evolved from. The planet could have different conditions that makes some evolutionary features we have impossible (like if the planet is in perpetual darkness then eyes might not evolve at all) and have other features that don't exist on Earth to be commonplace.

You could also take from the animal kingdom, for instance certain birds can sense magnetic fields (and use it to navigate). There might be an alien race that can do this, and as a result have not developed any concept for relative direction, they have no concept of forwards/backwards, left or right. Just north south east west, which they always had intrinsic knowledge of, and they might have magnets on their spaceships to help them navigate.

Think about how their physical features inform their experience of the world and how that defines their culture. You could have an alien that is telepathic, but only with each other and therefore doesn't have a concept of "the self". Like the borg but non-invasive.

I'm not sure how they'd evolve yet, but my short 'federation' list is:
-Arachnids: these large spider-like beings have a highly social society, to the point of becoming paralysed when sseparated from other sapient creatures. They also place large importance on the sense of touch, due to poor eyesight. No hive mind.
-Sarus: lizard people, the one and only anthropomorphic race. Sharp vision but no binocular vision due to their eyes being on the sides of their head, and their skin is naturally radiation resistant. In contrast to the Arachnids they evolved from a species that tended to always be on the run, and many become explorers due to being uncomfortable staying still.
-Raptors: a very distant relation of the Saruas. Possibly, the general consensus is just a coincidentally similar genetic structure. They are one of the youngest species, and in contrast to the Sarus their ancestors seem to have been pack predators, and their forward facing eyes grant them binocular vision. The flying ones.
-Felions: a very warlike species of fur covered bipeds (thing gorilla walking rather than human though). Also obviously descended from hunters, with binocular vision, ability to sprint over short distances, and sharp teeth and claws.

Bobbybobby99
2015-11-27, 10:52 AM
There are dangers in making aliens based upon animals, in that they thus cease to be quite as alien. Try rolling randomly for limbs, as a start, while not having them be starfish. Why would they have hair, or skin? Why not seven pronged prehensile tails and a resemblance to a rock? Do they share a common ancestor, at least in bacterial form?

Aotrs Commander
2015-11-27, 11:00 AM
Try rolling randomly for limbs, as a start, while not having them be starfish. Why would they have hair, or skin? Why not seven pronged prehensile tails and a resemblance to a rock? Do they share a common ancestor, at least in bacterial form?

Actually, limbs is an issue where you should think carefully (something I'm doing myself), if you want to pay more attention to biology than Rule of Cool.

Convergeant solutions to the same problems are a thing, and there are two schools of thought as two whether, for example, terrestrial tetrapods are tetrapods because that was what panned out from random chance (like the number of digits on ttrapod feet/hand/etc) or because four legs is the most efficient number of legs for macrofauna locomotion.

Bobbybobby99
2015-11-27, 11:26 AM
I'm of the random chance theory, myself, at least in environment. Insects are plenty efficient with six, it's simply that their body plan is poorly adjusted to larger specimens in earths climate. You aren't dealing with earth's environment, except with humans, and often not even then.

Edit: Convergent solutions remain sensible if they share a common ancestor, less so if they're 'true' aliens. You don't often see convergent solutions between plants and animals, at least in the easily seen world, and they're likely more related to each other than the hypothetical aliens.

Lalliman
2015-11-27, 12:05 PM
I'm not sure how they'd evolve yet, but my short 'federation' list is:
-Arachnids: these large spider-like beings have a highly social society, to the point of becoming paralysed when separated from other sapient creatures. They also place large importance on the sense of touch, due to poor eyesight. No hive mind.
-Sarus: lizard people, the one and only anthropomorphic race. Sharp vision but no binocular vision due to their eyes being on the sides of their head, and their skin is naturally radiation resistant. In contrast to the Arachnids they evolved from a species that tended to always be on the run, and many become explorers due to being uncomfortable staying still.
-Raptors: a very distant relation of the Saruas. Possibly, the general consensus is just a coincidentally similar genetic structure. They are one of the youngest species, and in contrast to the Sarus their ancestors seem to have been pack predators, and their forward facing eyes grant them binocular vision. The flying ones.
-Felions: a very warlike species of fur covered bipeds (thing gorilla walking rather than human though). Also obviously descended from hunters, with binocular vision, ability to sprint over short distances, and sharp teeth and claws.
You've got some nice quirks there (I like the Arachnids' dependence on social contact) but they feel too familiar, as the others have said. For more inspiration on interesting anatomy, I highly suggest you watch the fictional documentary Alien Planet (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0453446/). Its entire shtick is essentially showing how weird and different alien life is likely to actually be. If you don't feel like taking the time to watch it, google Eosapien, which is the intelligent species of the depicted planet.

Some random suggestions for things you can do with their biology:
- Play with their size. REALLY play with it. At least 90% of sapient species in fiction are between 3 and 8 feet tall, because that's the size we humans are used to. It makes sense if you assume all life-bearing planets have a similar atmosphere and gravity to our own, but wouldn't it be interesting to have a species way smaller than a human? Like, the size of a hamster. Or a species much larger than a human that isn't the antagonist of the story? The aforementioned Eosapiens are about 30 foot tall due to their planet's low gravity.
- Play with the way they acquire sustenance. Once again, over 90% of fictional species require food and oxygen like we do, but why would it be that way? The Protoss from Starcraft, for example, live off energy absorbed from sunlight. They don't eat or breathe and as such have no mouth at all. With that in mind, consider what else you could do. A creature might absorb methane from its planet's atmosphere and use that to fuel itself, forcing it to bring methane tanks if it goes off-world. Even if they do eat fairly traditional food, you can get weird with the method of consumption. Who's to say they can't have mouths on the soles of their feet, that constantly eat the grass on which they walk?
- My biggest one: make them asymmetrical. Symmetry is something people rarely question when designing creatures. There's something so natural about symmetry, that when you see a creature that is absolutely not symmetrical, it'll immediately feel alien to you. An example that made a real impression on me are the Saruthi from the Eisenhorn trilogy. They're described (don't bother googling it, there are no images) as having five limbs attached to their body at seemingly random places, a head attached off-centre, and an eyeless face covered in a seemingly random, asymmetrical pattern of orifices, the function of which is never explained. Now that's alien.

I need to hurry outa here now, but I'll give some thought to the question of culture and maybe I can give you some suggestions on that later.

PS, I hope those names aren't the ones you actually plan to use. Or at least not the ones they call themselves by.

Draconi Redfir
2015-11-27, 12:25 PM
Try and find one aspect of something that could be their culture and hyper-focus on it, For example, maybe they're just really, really subconsciously obsessed with octagons for some reason. All of their computer screens are in octagon shape, all of their houses are octagons, their religions at least some way relate to the "octagon of life" and "the octagon of death", which each point being a different variable in the cycle.

or try and take something that is Taboo in our cultures, and make it normal, every day things for them. Cannibalism is seen as a right of passage, and a way to honour the dead by ensuring part of them continues to exist in the living, caste systems are great for determining hierarchy, figuring out how they're divided (blood colour, head shape, sex, subspecies, etc) can be a great way to form a society around them.

i myself created a fictional alien species with three sexes and a sex-based caste system, with the "females" being the dominant and most prominent castes, ruling businesses and space flights, the "incubators", the third caste that exists in the species to carry of the offspring to term, act as servants to the females, and the "males", being the weakest sex, but most powerful in determining the appearance of the offspring due to wacky genetics, are kept in a perpetual state of suspended animation, seen as little more then another stop on a shopping list. To help fuel this system, a female's power and influence is largely determined by wealth and offspring, one female will often have many incubators under her, any females she mothers can either be close allies or bitter rivals against her own cooperation, while Incubators born can be traded or sold away to other females to gain favour, money, or just as a gesture of kindness, and any males are often sold on the market for large sums of cash.

When designing an alien culture such as this, you need to take your human morals and put them away, this is not a human culture, and as a result they will not have the same standards of living, some things humans may see as completely abhorrent may be common place for them, while others (such as having naked and visible ears) may be completely tame to Humans, but seen as outrageous and horrid to the Aliens.

Try to collect a few features you think would be neat, maybe around three or four, then connect the dots between them, see how they relate to one another and how they interact. In the example posted above? I knew only four things started out. i wanted a sex-based caste system, i wanted three strains in their genetic code so three individual sexes genetically provide to the offspring, it had to be a money-focused economy akin the to star-tek ferengi, and it had to have space-fairing technology. Lining up a small group of features and making them talk to eachother can really help out with determining culture and psychology.

Mastikator
2015-11-27, 12:59 PM
I'm not sure how they'd evolve yet, but my short 'federation' list is:
-Arachnids: these large spider-like beings have a highly social society, to the point of becoming paralysed when sseparated from other sapient creatures. They also place large importance on the sense of touch, due to poor eyesight. No hive mind.
-Sarus: lizard people, the one and only anthropomorphic race. Sharp vision but no binocular vision due to their eyes being on the sides of their head, and their skin is naturally radiation resistant. In contrast to the Arachnids they evolved from a species that tended to always be on the run, and many become explorers due to being uncomfortable staying still.
-Raptors: a very distant relation of the Saruas. Possibly, the general consensus is just a coincidentally similar genetic structure. They are one of the youngest species, and in contrast to the Sarus their ancestors seem to have been pack predators, and their forward facing eyes grant them binocular vision. The flying ones.
-Felions: a very warlike species of fur covered bipeds (thing gorilla walking rather than human though). Also obviously descended from hunters, with binocular vision, ability to sprint over short distances, and sharp teeth and claws.
That's an interesting list, make sure each species has various "factions", humanity isn't exactly monolithic, nor are ants or wolves, no social animal is. For instance there might be different sub-races of felions, you know, races that aren't really races, (I know I'm treading on thin ice here), felions with merely differently colored fur and different cultures. The differences could be subtle enough that to the outside it does look pretty much the same but to them it's a big deal.
Another option is the Sarus, there aren't that many truly social reptiles, maybe this is a civilization of a nonsocial animal. Each individual does not really need a collective, maybe they don't actually have any real societies, rather each individual being fully atomized and independent and only interacts with another Sarus for trade. They might not even have trade nor a concept of money, laws or government.

Anonymouswizard
2015-11-27, 01:40 PM
You've got some nice quirks there (I like the Arachnids' dependence on social contact) but they feel too familiar, as the others have said. For more inspiration on interesting anatomy, I highly suggest you watch the fictional documentary Alien Planet (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0453446/). Its entire shtick is essentially showing how weird and different alien life is likely to actually be. If you don't feel like taking the time to watch it, google Eosapien, which is the intelligent species of the depicted planet.

I'll have a look. :smallsmile:


Some random suggestions for things you can do with their biology:
- Play with their size. REALLY play with it. At least 90% of sapient species in fiction are between 3 and 8 feet tall, because that's the size we humans are used to. It makes sense if you assume all life-bearing planets have a similar atmosphere and gravity to our own, but wouldn't it be interesting to have a species way smaller than a human? Like, the size of a hamster. Or a species much larger than a human that isn't the antagonist of the story? The aforementioned Eosapiens are about 30 foot tall due to their planet's low gravity.

I can't believe I forgot to note it. To be honest, when the species is a 2 metre fuzzy spider you forget about the others. The Felions are about 1.5 times as large as a human, and the Raptors are roughly pigeon sized. I haven't decided for the Sarus, they are lighter than the Felions but not particularly small.


- Play with the way they acquire sustenance. Once again, over 90% of fictional species require food and oxygen like we do, but why would it be that way? The Protoss from Starcraft, for example, live off energy absorbed from sunlight. They don't eat or breathe and as such have no mouth at all. With that in mind, consider what else you could do. A creature might absorb methane from its planet's atmosphere and use that to fuel itself, forcing it to bring methane tanks if it goes off-world. Even if they do eat fairly traditional food, you can get weird with the method of consumption. Who's to say they can't have mouths on the soles of their feet, that constantly eat the grass on which they walk?

All four of these require oxygen, but are adapted for different atmospheres. The Arachnids are also going to be fusion reactors, requiring large amounts of hydrogen (their 'eggs' have to be incubated in a extremely hot environment), because now you mention it the idea of aliens carrying around gas is cool. The Raptors and Surans can't eat solid food, but require sunlight to generate energy. Felions do ear solid food, but generally some food of hydrocarbon.


- My biggest one: make them asymmetrical. Symmetry is something people rarely question when designing creatures. There's something so natural about symmetry, that when you see a creature that is absolutely not symmetrical, it'll immediately feel alien to you. An example that made a real impression on me are the Saruthi from the Eisenhorn trilogy. They're described (don't bother googling it, there are no images) as having five limbs attached to their body at seemingly random places, a head attached off-centre, and an eyeless face covered in a seemingly random, asymmetrical pattern of orifices, the function of which is never explained. Now that's alien.

I'll consider his, but seeing how many earth animals have symmetry there's possibly an advantage to it.


I need to hurry outa here now, but I'll give some thought to the question of culture and maybe I can give you some suggestions on that later.

PS, I hope those names aren't the ones you actually plan to use. Or at least not the ones they call themselves by.

The names are placeholders until I get an idea of what their languages may be like.


Try and find one aspect of something that could be their culture and hyper-focus on it, For example, maybe they're just really, really subconsciously obsessed with octagons for some reason. All of their computer screens are in octagon shape, all of their houses are octagons, their religions at least some way relate to the "octagon of life" and "the octagon of death", which each point being a different variable in the cycle.

I don't want to go to far into 'race of hats' territory. There are differences, such as Arachnids counting in base 8, Raptors using base 24, and the fact each has a different familial structure (Sarus are 1 parent 1 child as standard, Felions tend to pack, and Arachnids having no word for family [to them there's no difference between your family and your community]), as well as other things that will come out as I develop them.


or try and take something that is Taboo in our cultures, and make it normal, every day things for them. Cannibalism is seen as a right of passage, and a way to honour the dead by ensuring part of them continues to exist in the living, caste systems are great for determining hierarchy, figuring out how they're divided (blood colour, head shape, sex, subspecies, etc) can be a great way to form a society around them.

Things that are and aren't taboo will vary between cultures, even within a species.


i myself created a fictional alien species with three sexes and a sex-based caste system, with the "females" being the dominant and most prominent castes, ruling businesses and space flights, the "incubators", the third caste that exists in the species to carry of the offspring to term, act as servants to the females, and the "males", being the weakest sex, but most powerful in determining the appearance of the offspring due to wacky genetics, are kept in a perpetual state of suspended animation, seen as little more then another stop on a shopping list. To help fuel this system, a female's power and influence is largely determined by wealth and offspring, one female will often have many incubators under her, any females she mothers can either be close allies or bitter rivals against her own cooperation, while Incubators born can be traded or sold away to other females to gain favour, money, or just as a gesture of kindness, and any males are often sold on the market for large sums of cash.

Wow, that's an interesting culture.


When designing an alien culture such as this, you need to take your human morals and put them away, this is not a human culture, and as a result they will not have the same standards of living, some things humans may see as completely abhorrent may be common place for them, while others (such as having naked and visible ears) may be completely tame to Humans, but seen as outrageous and horrid to the Aliens.

Try to collect a few features you think would be neat, maybe around three or four, then connect the dots between them, see how they relate to one another and how they interact. In the example posted above? I knew only four things started out. i wanted a sex-based caste system, i wanted three strains in their genetic code so three individual sexes genetically provide to the offspring, it had to be a money-focused economy akin the to star-tek ferengi, and it had to have space-fairing technology. Lining up a small group of features and making them talk to eachother can really help out with determining culture and psychology.

My human morals want o know why it's so dark where they are right now.


That's an interesting list, make sure each species has various "factions", humanity isn't exactly monolithic, nor are ants or wolves, no social animal is. For instance there might be different sub-races of felions, you know, races that aren't really races, (I know I'm treading on thin ice here), felions with merely differently colored fur and different cultures. The differences could be subtle enough that to the outside it does look pretty much the same but to them it's a big deal.

Oh, there are definitely different factions. Felions differentiate by fur pattern, and some grudges run deep. Arachnids can't tell that a black person might be treated differently from a white person by anyone, due to their standardised colouration, but it would rather you wouldn't compare it to those horrible soft-carapaces.


Another option is the Sarus, there aren't that many truly social reptiles, maybe this is a civilization of a nonsocial animal. Each individual does not really need a collective, maybe they don't actually have any real societies, rather each individual being fully atomized and independent and only interacts with another Sarus for trade. They might not even have trade nor a concept of money, laws or government.

People are not quite sure why the Sarus aren't stuck on their home planet. Sarus culture is a form of anarchy, where nobody can explain the rules without using that particular version of their language.

Lvl 2 Expert
2015-11-27, 02:22 PM
I think aliens are very setting dependent. Realistically the galaxy will probably be very diverse. Would a random alien species even have a two sided symmetrical body like we do? Would they have two sexes? Would they be anywhere near our size? Are their cells anywhere near the size of ours? Are they even made up of small cell like building blocks? Are they born small and helpless after which they develop? What do they use for building materials? And for energy? How do they take those things in? Aliens can in short be as strange as you want them to.

On the other side of the equation, it can be really fun to just go with space elves and Klingons. They're relatable. You don't need to explain every single little detail. And it's much easier to portray a consistent world. What would the homeworld of a sulfur breathing building sized semi-ceramic creature that really likes listening to Bach even be like? Small and sulfurylike...? Any step in between is also acceptable.

What TV shows often end up doing in the long run is have some really cool and diverse creatures, but with the majority being humans with a weird forehead. Most of them can be described as "humans, but with more ...". As a result, humans turn out really average, every episode you meet a creature that behaves more like this or that, but it evens out around humans (or what the writers think humans are like). I think it's cool to turn that around. The average intelligent species in the galaxy is a foot tall, has an external skeleton and lives underwater. Should be fun when plundering a derelict spacecraft. Humans, compared to the average, are seen as very intelligent individually but bad at cooperating and in general not nearly rude enough. Choices like that give flavor to your setting. See an armored monkey with fins scold a robotic crablike thing for not reflooding his quarters well enough after drycleaning? You're in this setting! The downside is that you're already steering the story and the possibilities for where things can go. The upside is that you're also creating some opportunities that wouldn't exist in "Star Trek without the copyrighted names".

And, as I said in the other thread, I love the idea of birdlike or generally flying aliens. Not humans with wings on their back, more like actual normal crows or parrots. Imagine what their cities could look like, in what number they could gather and live together. Walk your players through that scene. Rush hour, the sky is almost black with aliens, and still not a single traffic jam. A city of a billion sophonts sets out to get things done. Even if they have to make do with feet, beaks and spurs instead of hands (alternatively, there is no real reason they couldn't just have claws on their wings like some real life birds or something), there are some advantages in there.

LudicSavant
2015-11-27, 02:36 PM
I'm British, so they'll be psychologically different but all enjoy sarcasm.

In all seriousness, I need more help with this than biology.


I'm not sure how they'd evolve yet, but my short 'federation' list is:
-Arachnids: these large spider-like beings have a highly social society, to the point of becoming paralysed when sseparated from other sapient creatures. They also place large importance on the sense of touch, due to poor eyesight. No hive mind.

You might want to check out the "Other Humans" from Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker; they had poor eyesight and an inhumanly effective sense of touch, and this had a defining impact on their culture. They're also the least alien species of the many aliens in that story (hence being called the "Other Humans"), and yet still much more alien than the majority of aliens I've seen in fiction. Which says something about Star Maker.

The book in general puts a good deal of effort into crafting well-explained alien aliens, to the point that I've seen it topping lists for books with alien aliens. (http://listverse.com/2012/03/25/10-books-with-alien-aliens/)


-Sarus: lizard people, the one and only anthropomorphic race. Sharp vision but no binocular vision due to their eyes being on the sides of their head, and their skin is naturally radiation resistant. In contrast to the Arachnids they evolved from a species that tended to always be on the run, and many become explorers due to being uncomfortable staying still.
-Raptors: a very distant relation of the Saruas. Possibly, the general consensus is just a coincidentally similar genetic structure. They are one of the youngest species, and in contrast to the Sarus their ancestors seem to have been pack predators, and their forward facing eyes grant them binocular vision. The flying ones.
-Felions: a very warlike species of fur covered bipeds (thing gorilla walking rather than human though). Also obviously descended from hunters, with binocular vision, ability to sprint over short distances, and sharp teeth and claws.

What makes these different from humans, psychologically and culturally?

Telok
2015-11-27, 03:57 PM
One of H. Beam Piper's books, Uller Uprising (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19474), does some aliens pertty well. The dead tree version I have starts with the chemistry of two planets and how that affected the development of life on them.

Anonymouswizard
2015-11-27, 04:32 PM
I'll check out the book suggestions.


I think aliens are very setting dependent. Realistically the galaxy will probably be very diverse. Would a random alien species even have a two sided symmetrical body like we do? Would they have two sexes? Would they be anywhere near our size? Are their cells anywhere near the size of ours? Are they even made up of small cell like building blocks? Are they born small and helpless after which they develop? What do they use for building materials? And for energy? How do they take those things in? Aliens can in short be as strange as you want them to.

In short, there are really strange aliens in the galaxy, but I'm focusing on PC races right now. I have more ideas for how an intelligent cloud of plasma is believably psychologically different to a human, less clue how to do 'alien but solid'.


And, as I said in the other thread, I love the idea of birdlike or generally flying aliens. Not humans with wings on their back, more like actual normal crows or parrots. Imagine what their cities could look like, in what number they could gather and live together. Walk your players through that scene. Rush hour, the sky is almost black with aliens, and still not a single traffic jam. A city of a billion sophonts sets out to get things done. Even if they have to make do with feet, beaks and spurs instead of hands (alternatively, there is no real reason they couldn't just have claws on their wings like some real life birds or something), there are some advantages in there.

Really nice ideas for the Raptors there, actually.


What makes these different from humans, psychologically and culturally?

That's what I have trouble with. Raptors are fairly easy, they are perfectly symmetrical birds with four dimensional vision (four spacial dimensions, it helps them with FTL navigation when computers are down). Not certain on psychological yet.

The others I'm not certain of yet.


One of H. Beam Piper's books, Uller Uprising (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19474), does some aliens pertty well. The dead tree version I have starts with the chemistry of two planets and how that affected the development of life on them.

Hmmm... Need to check library.

Lord Raziere
2015-11-27, 05:07 PM
well, depends on whether you want to have fun with it or whether you want Truly Alien Aliens.

if you want to fun with it, just throw in any old species you feel comfortable with, in practice I doubt anyone is going to mind unless you are very misleading with how you communicated your intentions.

if you want truly alien stuff no mater what, well....I find that the very concept of civilization as we know it shouldn't apply to alien species, for example some of the ones I made:



Narelan:
A species of plant catfolk who are androgynous and are all connected by a single hive mind that calls itself Narela. Narela evolved without any other sentient species to interact with, and thus has no concept of war, social skills, non-equal resource distribution and indeed money, lying, storytelling, most forms of art, religion, culture, various other stuff and most importantly individuality because Narela is basically a really smart hermit inside millions of bodies on a single planet. Narela is currently sending out scouts to investigate other races, and most importantly, this concept called “individuality.”

The entire planet is basically Narela’s private project place. She makes vast works of art about the wind or the sea, she has a single incredibly powerful computer on the entire planet, mostly for storing information. any buildings that are made, are completely impersonal and without any regard for individual space. When her bodies sleep, they all sleep in the same room in one giant soft bed like platform. The entire planet is a finely tuned machine of various little bodies of Narelans walking about doing their jobs all at the same time without any conversation or noise happening, Narela directing her bodies every movement in a vast orchestra.


Here, this one is alien because in many ways, despite having technology and buildings and such, Narela isn't really a civilization because she is only one person with billions of bodies, and her entire planet is basically a big playground/workshop for her. many of the concepts that we take for granted are absent from this race simply because of one change- no individuality whatsoever. which ironically makes Narela herself one big individual.



Void Walkers:
This species is completely jet-black in appearance. Its form varies depending on the conditions it finds itself in, shifting itself to account for the gravity and climate and so on. This species doesn’t need to breath and can survive and travel through space without any need for vehicles. Thus this species can’t communicate with sound, and instead communicates with each other through blinking lights from its skin at each other at a rapid pace in their own complex version of morse code that spans the visible spectrum of light and even into infrared and ultraviolet, because they often don’t have atmospheres to communicate sound through. It gains energy by absorbing radiation around it, from sunlight to background cosmic radiation. They are also a very lonely race in that they’re constantly traveling across the universe and reproduce rarely.

The upshot is that they have no concept of technology, or indeed, civilization. A vast majority of the worlds they visit are rocky terrestrial ones without life or gas giants without life. They find beauty in the barren lonely places they travel through, not knowing much else in their existence. When they find another Void Walker across the vast span of time, they make sure to trade what they saw with each other in their super-morse code, then go their separate ways. When they finally find aliens who have developed civilization, they can be quite curious as to why those hills over there are so geometrical and metallic, why there are so many little stars and what are these things moving about? and they are quite friendly if you can ever manage to establish communication with one.


Meanwhile these beings don't even have a concept of technology. They never needed it. When you travel between planets all by yourself, why would you? As you can see, its hard to even communicate with these ones, as the default assumption is speaking through sound, when an alien species who can do this are evolved to use morse code because of the vacuum of space, and might not even know what plants are given that most planets don't have life on them. if one ever encountered Earth it would be caught completely off guard by the very existence of say, grass and would be seriously confused as to how a planet like ours exists at all, a bizarre anomaly it cannot explain.



Kargalask:
This species of alien has no concept of peace. To them, there is only war and chaos. That is all they know. They are fine with this. Mostly because they need such things to grow and reproduce, and thus take joy in them. This species throughout their growing years attack their peers in combat and eat the loser, the loser however is still alive and aware- they are just absorbed into the winner’s body and their knowledge and strength added into the winner’s. The loser just mentally sighs and waits for the day it gets to win. The Kargalask keeps doing this, devouring and absorbing its peers and especially their friends and lovers, as they want to eat them they most and know that their friends would love to eat the winner in turn, and becoming stronger.

Until it reaches the second stage of its life cycle, where the Kargalask’s patchwork memories, DNA, strengths, talents and whatnot start mixing together and forming new people from the old ones, the entire Kargalask body being an incubator for many new people at a time. The Kargalask fights for as long as it can to make sure new people have had time to mix and grow within itself, as while the third stage of its life cycle can start any time, its best to optimize it for maximum new and different people in addition to the old ones coming back.

In the third stage of its lifecycle, the Kargalask finds itself a great fight- and gets slaughtered utterly. The various pieces of itself fall onto the ground, and over the course of weeks begin feeding on the nutrients of the nearby soil and regenerating themselves into full bodies with old people getting a second chance to be winners and new people just having awareness for the first time in a full body, but also having basic knowledge and some memories from the people they were mixed from, and thus begins the cycle again of Kargalask’s fighting and eating each other.

A single Kargalask becomes a community of them within a single body, the winner being the leader of the community while all the other Kargalask-minds within are the helpers and advisers of the winner. This is needed, because the world of the Kargalasks is full of predators, dangerous environmental disasters and treacherous terrain. Their fighting and eating of each other is needed for them to best work together. Thus they find joy in attacking and eating each other, because it means they get to be together with a Kargalask, even if it means being the loser.

As for the Kargalask appearance:
Their basic form looks like muscular scaly people with shark fangs and three-fingered very long and sharp claws on both hands and feet, with scorpion tails with edged tips that can can be used as a dagger in combat. As they gain the strength, biomass and knowledge of others however, they begin to change and undergo metamorphosis of their own design, often growing extra arms, growing hard chitinous exoskeletal armor, tentacles for grabbing or even pterodactyl-like wings for flight, as well as water-breathing capabilities. They of course can regenerate and its hard to truly kill a Kargalask. A Kargalask of course, doesn’t see any reason why you would want them to cease to exist, to them being a monstrous super-fighting badass against the entire world who is eventually slaughtered to give birth to more monstrous badasses is its natural part of its biology, and would be horrified at the concept of peace as then they wouldn’t be able to grow, learn, progress and reproduce if everything became safe. They need danger to truly live.


and this alien species, having no concept of peace might be incompatible with what we think of civilization at all, as their entire biology is dependent upon war and cannibalism, things we consider hellish and taboo, and technically might not even have a proper conception of death, or at least one we wouldn't be familiar with. they would probably be confused as to how we aren't stagnant and stuck in eternal stasis, or how we can call anything what we have a community if we all have separate bodies.

in short, to make something truly alien, find reasons they are unable to understand the most basic parts of our existence that we take as factual and given daily and extrapolate how thing work without needing to understand such things.

Kami2awa
2015-11-27, 05:30 PM
I think however, that you shouldn't make aliens too alien in the context of an RPG. If you have beings that are truly impossible to understand then they become little more than a wandering monster that you have to avoid or fight, or possibly even become part of the scenery. If you can't talk to or interact with the intelligent, bioluminescent space whales sweeping majestically across the skies of your fictional planet, then they are really just a background detail.

To be more interesting, it should be possible to deal with aliens on some level, to talk to them about subjects you can both understand, and to give them motivations that, while they might be weird to humans, can be understood within the world they live in.

People rather scorn aliens like the Ferengi or Klingons nowadays because their cultures are very human-like with some aspects written large, but this allows them to be used for myriad different plots in the Star Trek universe. You can fight them, trade with them, negotiate with them, befriend them, go to bed with them (if you're Captain Kirk) and so on.

On the other hand, the truly alien creatures the Enterprise crew meet (like the Crystalline Entity from the pilot of TNG) rarely feature in more than one or two episodes, because you can't do very much with them - they don't have the motivation to act as characters.

Draconi Redfir
2015-11-27, 05:37 PM
On the topic of Alien-aliens, i can highly recommend the Moties for "The Mote in God's Eye" and it's subsequent book "The Gripping Hand."

The Moties are a breed of alien that have been trapped orbiting one star in a gigantic black gass cloud, with only ever one other star to observe, and the only warp-point outside of their system lead directly into the center of that one star they could observe, so any moties trying to warp out of the system died instantly as a result.

The species as a whole suffered a "Breed or die" biology, undergoing radical chemical imbalances if they don't reproduce in their lifetime. They actually hop between the sexes to help with this, starting as female, getting pregnant, giving birth, and then switching to male for a time to impregnate others before switching back to Female. As a result their society undergoes huge booms and busts they refer to as "cycles" massive population booms in which they salvage everything they can find (very efficiently i might add) and make use of it no matter what it is, having limited matter and metal to work with in their system. After some time though, large populations, dwindling resources, and arguing "leader" castes cause the entire population to engage in total planet-wide war, wiping out huge chunks of the population and reverting them to stone-age technologies and intelligence.

Biologically, the Species never developed Vertebra, their "spine" is more akin to three long bones along their back that connects to their hip in a sort of ball-joint pattern, giving them a very odd gait and hunch any time they want to bend over. Being a species of efficacy, they are naturally very interested in human spines when they encounter them. Not counting things such as warrior-castes, most Moties have very oblong upper bodies, sporting one large goblin-like ear on one side of their head, as well as two thin and frail tool-using hands on the torso beneath it. On the opposite side of those two arms there is a single beefy "gripping hand", sporting two fingers and a thumb, with muscles so large that it actually directly connects to the side of their head that does not have an ear, leaving them needing to move their entire torso just to turn their head.

The species itself has been so largely altered by genetic engineering, inter-breeding between castes, and evolution, that it's impossible to tell what they looked like before becoming so asymmetrical.

Tvtyrant
2015-11-27, 05:45 PM
I really like whale sized or larger sentient life, which have much more difficulties in nearly every technological respect then humans. Spaceships sized for 10 humans could not fit one of them, bullets are almost as lethal to them but hiding in cover is all but impossible, they have to spend almost all of their time eating.

LudicSavant
2015-11-27, 05:54 PM
That's what I have trouble with. Raptors are fairly easy, they are perfectly symmetrical birds with four dimensional vision (four spacial dimensions, it helps them with FTL navigation when computers are down). Not certain on psychological yet. What does it even mean to see in "four spacial dimensions"? What's the fourth one?

Anonymouswizard
2015-11-27, 06:44 PM
I'll respond to the others tomorrow, need sleep, but this one brings up a world building detail tangentially related.


What does it even mean to see in "four spacial dimensions"? What's the fourth one?

The setting assumes infinite spacial dimensions, all perpendicular to each other. Although 90% of beings encountered so far act in the 'human 3'. Some species naturally see more than three, some see less, and not all see the same three. In game terms this doesn't mean much, it's flavour, and I'm willing to drop it if it becomes complex.

Even if I drop species sensing in more or less dimensions, the infinite spacial dimensions are the basis of one variety of FTL drive (the other being warp). By moving in multiple dimensions you can generally move straighter.

LudicSavant
2015-11-27, 07:55 PM
The setting assumes infinite spacial dimensions, all perpendicular to each other. Although 90% of beings encountered so far act in the 'human 3'. Some species naturally see more than three, some see less, and not all see the same three. In game terms this doesn't mean much, it's flavour, and I'm willing to drop it if it becomes complex.

Even if I drop species sensing in more or less dimensions, the infinite spacial dimensions are the basis of one variety of FTL drive (the other being warp). By moving in multiple dimensions you can generally move straighter.

In flavor terms it doesn't mean much either unless you can describe what a having an extra spacial dimension actually even means for the raptors, besides getting a +1 to use FTL gadgets.

You'd potentially get more mileage out of something as simple as considering the cultural implications of if your raptors had eyesight similar to many birds (such as seeing ultraviolet trails). Or any of the more interesting mating habits of various bird species.

Broken Crown
2015-11-27, 08:43 PM
My biggest one: make them asymmetrical. Symmetry is something people rarely question when designing creatures. There's something so natural about symmetry, that when you see a creature that is absolutely not symmetrical, it'll immediately feel alien to you.

The thing about symmetry is that it's very useful if you have to move, so you would expect it to evolve sooner or later. Imagine trying to walk around on three legs, all of different lengths, and you can see how symmetry might come in handy.

Here on Earth, just about every mobile organism is highly symmetrical, while immobile ones (like trees and sponges) don't bother with it.

---

Another good source to check out for ideas for aliens is a book called "Wonderful Life" by Stephen Jay Gould. It's about the diversity of early complex organisms during the Cambrian era, many of which are delightfully strange and are completely unrelated to anything alive today; they might as well have evolved on another planet.

---

One thought I had for making aliens behave in genuinely alien ways is to randomize their behaviour to some extent, making them act in ways that sometimes have no apparent connection to the PCs' behaviour. For example, every time a human addresses to a Dg'dg'dg'brrrvian, there is a 2% chance that the Dg'dg'dg'brrrvian will (roll d6) 1-2: Attack the human for a perceived insult; 3: Attempt to lay eggs in the human's kidneys; or 4-6: Incorporate the human in a spontaneous performance art piece. This should be especially unnerving if it happens in the middle of a totally ordinary conversation, and will remind the players that they're dealing with a being they may be able to talk to, but which they don't actually understand.

goto124
2015-11-28, 12:38 AM
Or any of the more interesting mating habits of various bird species.


Superb birb-of-paradise (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dx2CUMtZ-0)
Manakin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o42C6ajjqWg)
Galapagos Albatross (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFwgCh1hh4U)

JoeJ
2015-11-28, 01:17 AM
In short, there are really strange aliens in the galaxy, but I'm focusing on PC races right now. I have more ideas for how an intelligent cloud of plasma is believably psychologically different to a human, less clue how to do 'alien but solid'.

For PC races you probably shouldn't even be looking at anything very alien. Humans-in-rubber-suits aliens are a much better choice for races that players are expected to be able to roleplay. The only exception would be if the player creates the race themself. In that case, there's at least a chance they'll think through the physiology, environment, and history well enough to come up with something memorable. If it's you doing the creation, and then you expect the players to understand and adhere to what you're created, you're almost certainly going to be disappointed.

Mutazoia
2015-11-28, 03:14 AM
Coming up with new aliens is a tricky job, at least as far as playable races go. You can't really get too far off of the humanoid model before you start creating more problems than the species is usually worth.

A species social norms as an example: An aquatic species would most likely not have any kind of nudity taboo, and would find those species that tend to think of nudity as "bad" odd at best. Your spider based species would be one I wouldn't suggest as a player race....have you ever researched spider mating habits? The female eats the male after mating...and in a lot of species the offspring eat the mother after they hatch. The further away you get from the "human norm" in physical make-up, the further away you get in the mental/social department as well.

And then we get into the physical differences. Unless you are going to do a "dryder" or centar-like creature with a human torso on a spider's body, manipulating pretty much anything that isn't specifically designed for them is going to be more or less impossible, which would make it hard for a player character to use 90% of the gear they pick up over the course of the campaign.

Generally speaking, the 2-4 legs and 2-4 arms rule is a good one to stick to. One good exception was in the old Star Frontiers game, where one of the player races was basically a giant amoeba that could change the number of arms and legs it had pretty much at will. Anything with out a solid form, such as an hyper intelligent color of the shade of blue, while great fluff, will generally be less fun to play, since they way they interact with the universe around them will be drastically different than a solid, non energy/though based life form. Being super smart but unable to touch anything will get old quick...especially when it comes time to try to seduce the cute alien chick.

Once I played around with creating a race that was based off of the movie version of the Guild Navigators from Dune. Hyper intelligent, with a bloated body that needed a special environment tank to survive. Not much fun as a player race, since they had to stay in that tank when off their native planet (gas planet, btw). Needless to say, I ended up making it an NPC/fluff race.

Also, I would avoid the usual "alien" tropes as much as possible. Just about every sci-fi universe has a "cat person" alien. The Catians from Star Trek, the Cathar from Star Wars, the Kzin from Ringworld... cat people are pretty much over done at this point. As are "space elves". Vulcans are pretty much space elves, and Eldar ARE space elves....

Basically, when coming up with a new alien species, you will need to balance playability with the fluff factor and find a good balance. Your aliens should make sense for the world they come from, so you can rule out some racial types (as far as player races go anyway) by coming up with the world they evolved on first. Races from Gas Giants would be cool, but not make a good player race, for example (again). Aquatic races evolving on a water world could still be mammals and breath air, but would probably run the risk of drying out and dying,, and they probably wouldn't fare too well in Earth gravity or higher...the same with avian species. Their hollow bone structure would snap easily under stronger gravity than they are adapted to....

goto124
2015-11-28, 03:23 AM
Or play a game with all PCs taking on monster alien races, and go crazy :smalltongue:

Lord Raziere
2015-11-28, 04:11 AM
Basically, when coming up with a new alien species, you will need to balance playability with the fluff factor and find a good balance. Your aliens should make sense for the world they come from, so you can rule out some racial types (as far as player races go anyway) by coming up with the world they evolved on first. Races from Gas Giants would be cool, but not make a good player race, for example (again). Aquatic races evolving on a water world could still be mammals and breath air, but would probably run the risk of drying out and dying,, and they probably wouldn't fare too well in Earth gravity or higher...the same with avian species. Their hollow bone structure would snap easily under stronger gravity than they are adapted to....

or.....you know...since this is the far future...and these are all presumably space-faring species.....they have made cybernetics to deal with these kinds of problems....

Mutazoia
2015-11-28, 04:29 AM
or.....you know...since this is the far future...and these are all presumably space-faring species.....they have made cybernetics to deal with these kinds of problems....

Yes...and locking an inside an environmental "encounter suit" makes great fluff for a book or a movie/TV show, but not so much fun for a PC in an RPG. Now you have to deal with not only your characters HP (or equivalent) during combat, but now you have to keep track of your encounter suit's condition. Sure...it could function like armor, but a suit breach could kill your character before he/she/it even takes a single HP of damage from weapons fire (depending on your species environmental tolerances). Imagine having to lock your human character (in any setting) inside a space suit 24/7 and having to keep constant track of it's condition as well as yours. Or even better....imagine taking a trip to Paris and having to wear a space suit from the moment you board the plane (or train) and not being able to take it off until you get home. You can't reasonably expect that every place your character visits, or even the ship they are using, to have special environmental suites for every species in the galaxy.

Sure...it's not a bad idea (read fluff) for some species. But my point remains....depending on the world they evolve on, they may or may not need an encounter suit just to go 90% of the locations they will visit in the galaxy...and that's something you are going to have to keep in mind when you are designing alien species. One or two aliens in encounter suits is good fluff...every alien in an encounter suit....not so much.

Anonymouswizard
2015-11-28, 06:07 AM
A species social norms as an example: An aquatic species would most likely not have any kind of nudity taboo, and would find those species that tend to think of nudity as "bad" odd at best. Your spider based species would be one I wouldn't suggest as a player race....have you ever researched spider mating habits? The female eats the male after mating...and in a lot of species the offspring eat the mother after they hatch. The further away you get from the "human norm" in physical make-up, the further away you get in the mental/social department as well.

They aren't earth spiders, and I'd rather gloss over reproduction for now, but it doesn't quite work the same way.


And then we get into the physical differences. Unless you are going to do a "dryder" or centar-like creature with a human torso on a spider's body, manipulating pretty much anything that isn't specifically designed for them is going to be more or less impossible, which would make it hard for a player character to use 90% of the gear they pick up over the course of the campaign.

Each leg ends in a 'spike' consisting of two large claws and a small clawwhich can move to a human hand-ish shape.


Also, I would avoid the usual "alien" tropes as much as possible. Just about every sci-fi universe has a "cat person" alien. The Catians from Star Trek, the Cathar from Star Wars, the Kzin from Ringworld... cat people are pretty much over done at this point. As are "space elves". Vulcans are pretty much space elves, and Eldar ARE space elves....

Yep, which is why my setting ajusts the body shape of the cat race.


Basically, when coming up with a new alien species, you will need to balance playability with the fluff factor and find a good balance. Your aliens should make sense for the world they come from, so you can rule out some racial types (as far as player races go anyway) by coming up with the world they evolved on first. Races from Gas Giants would be cool, but not make a good player race, for example (again). Aquatic races evolving on a water world could still be mammals and breath air, but would probably run the risk of drying out and dying,, and they probably wouldn't fare too well in Earth gravity or higher...the same with avian species. Their hollow bone structure would snap easily under stronger gravity than they are adapted to....

I'll take this into consideration.


Or play a game with all PCs taking on monster alien races, and go crazy :smalltongue:

This was the original idea for the game. It's now shifted so that humans do exist, but have a quarrentine zone to protect their 'barbaric way of life, without even hyperdrives'.


For the record, I'm abandoning multiple spacial dimensions for everything except hyperspace.

Mutazoia
2015-11-28, 06:22 AM
They aren't earth spiders, and I'd rather gloss over reproduction for now, but it doesn't quite work the same way. Each leg ends in a 'spike' consisting of two large claws and a small clawwhich can move to a human hand-ish shape.

Unless those "spikes" are soft and bendable, they are still going to present a problem with fine manipulation. For example, put our hands in the "Vulcan" salute. Now try to...say...brush your hair with out bending any of your knuckle joints... not too difficult. Now try a task that requires you to bend your fingers around an object. Also, if the "spike" is hard, then it probably will not have any nerve endings, meaning they are not going to have a great sense of touch...so about equal to trying to feel things with only your fingernails.

I would suggest, instead, giving them a more chitinous exoskeleton with soft 'pads' at the 'fingertips'. You can keep the three 'fingered' hand, but I would recommend giving them a couple of joints to allow for finer manipulation ability. It would be hard to work tools (and thus develop technology to space faring status) with out fine manipulators. You could even make the 'pads' covered in fine spider hair, instead of just skin...giving them a better sense of touch than any human could hope for.

And just for kicks....remember....earth spiders get drunk off of caffeine.....

Iron Angel
2015-11-28, 07:11 AM
I'm British, so they'll be psychologically different but all enjoy sarcasm.

In all seriousness, I need more help with this than biology.



Hmm... Maybe if the space hippies want us to increase our tech level to theirs. They did the damaging the environment thing and want to help other species move past it.



I'm not sure how they'd evolve yet, but my short 'federation' list is:
-Arachnids: these large spider-like beings have a highly social society, to the point of becoming paralysed when sseparated from other sapient creatures. They also place large importance on the sense of touch, due to poor eyesight. No hive mind.
-Sarus: lizard people, the one and only anthropomorphic race. Sharp vision but no binocular vision due to their eyes being on the sides of their head, and their skin is naturally radiation resistant. In contrast to the Arachnids they evolved from a species that tended to always be on the run, and many become explorers due to being uncomfortable staying still.
-Raptors: a very distant relation of the Saruas. Possibly, the general consensus is just a coincidentally similar genetic structure. They are one of the youngest species, and in contrast to the Sarus their ancestors seem to have been pack predators, and their forward facing eyes grant them binocular vision. The flying ones.
-Felions: a very warlike species of fur covered bipeds (thing gorilla walking rather than human though). Also obviously descended from hunters, with binocular vision, ability to sprint over short distances, and sharp teeth and claws.
Biology is rather easy. Remember that nature chose us fore a reason. Walking upright, having forward facing eyes, high stamina, fine manipulation, and intelligence were all critical keys to success. Thats how I justify aliens as generally being upright-walking with two arms and two legs: Evolution is about efficiency, and the model presented is the most effective while also being the most efficient. Now that may be less true on other worlds where conditions for survival are radically different, but generally speaking, the upright four limbed swiveling head thing is a big success in terms of effectiveness.

A good way to develop alien cultures is to think of something extreme and strange, and model their culture around it.

I am currently creating a similar setting, and one of my races is a species that worships the Vashyr Doctrine, which is an ancient black monolith of unknown origin with all of their laws written on it. It is immutable, incorruptible, and its determinations are final. It is a massive wall of text (literally) that controls every aspect of their lives, and they are fanatically loyal to its edicts. What they DON'T know is that the slab is actually ancient military safety and conduct instructions for a colossal bomb installation which happens to be the core of their planet, and that all of the prophecies laid out on it are actually stages for the bomb arming. All of the prophecies have come true except the last. Poor translation due to too little text to form a real cipher at first, and then never being questioned again, have led to this. The civilization that made it is long extinct by now, but a meteor impact started the bomb's arming but also caused its arming timer to malfunction, causing it to arm very slowly. The planet was intended to be a trap to lure the enemy into it, and then detonate it to win the war, as the builders were losing badly and it was to be used as their last shot to destroy the enemy, but they were all exterminated before it could be armed and their enemy never even knew it existed. This is going to be a major plot point in the over-arching plot of my game.

They are literally living on a bomb. And they worship its arming procedures. This wouldn't be too bad except the race that developed there got a huge jump-start technologically from all of the ancient tech there and are the most advanced, most militaristic, and most powerful race in the galaxy.

And the players have to figure out a way to get to the core and disarm it before it detonates and wipes out the whole sector. You don't think their leader is going to BELIEVE the players do you?

Its crazy things like that which lead to interesting narratives. Honestly once you get the concept down things start writing themselves, and the real challenge for me so far is making the other races as interesting as the Vashyr.

Mastikator
2015-11-28, 07:32 AM
On the topic of space cats, you don't have to refer to cats. Just "the Felions are bipedal humanoid, covered in fur have big ears, claws and fangs. Because they are covered in fur they never invented clothes, the closest they have is backpacks and armor".
Claws, fangs and fur is pretty common. But you could switch it up by making them lay eggs rather than give birth. Or have three genders, all three needed to reproduce. Make them age like lobsters, ie they don't. They just grow bigger with creeping risk of cancer.
The cells in their body have not one but two nucleus's and the proteins that make up their cells are based on both silicon and carbon. So they can't digest any human food, nor can humans digest their food.
Their fur is more like primitive feathers, probably what dinosaurs had. Make them have green fur because their ancestors used to live in the tree tops.

Lvl 2 Expert
2015-12-01, 01:49 PM
Biology is rather easy. Remember that nature chose us fore a reason. Walking upright, having forward facing eyes, high stamina, fine manipulation, and intelligence were all critical keys to success. Thats how I justify aliens as generally being upright-walking with two arms and two legs: Evolution is about efficiency, and the model presented is the most effective while also being the most efficient. Now that may be less true on other worlds where conditions for survival are radically different, but generally speaking, the upright four limbed swiveling head thing is a big success in terms of effectiveness.

I like to disagree. Free hands are great for a technological civilization, but there are multiple ways to get those. A dinosaur like posture for instance wouldn't be bad. Or maybe they have trunks, or incredibly handy feet, or tentacles, or four legs and two hands. Most of the other things you name can be great for developing a technological culture, but don't have to be. Forward facing eyes are mostly good for things like jumping from tree to tree, or onto a prey. It helps us very much in delicate tasks that we perform with our hands, but you could get the same result with better feedback from the muscle coils or by moving your head like a bird. High stamina is a defining point of our species, but not really a necessity for technology and culture. A species with low stamina would probably just invent different ways of hunting. Agriculture would look pretty different too. The swiveling head? It can be helpful, but the only reason it's even kind of important is the fact that we only have two eyes and they both face forward. Two small extra eyes in the back of your head with some spacing between them ad who needs a neck? Humans are also pretty injury prone. We're an ape species that fell out of the trees a few million years ago. I won't deny we've accomplished a lot, but we have made some compromises in becoming bipedal and large.

EDIT after a pretty long time: I forgot an important drawback of our shape. Our brain size is limited by our hip size. Birth is incredibly dangerous for both mother and child in humans, a problem that arises because our way of walking, with a single pair of legs straight beneath our body, benefits from small (but sturdy) hips. The current state is an unsatisfying compromise. Even our jaws suffer, they get sacrificed to make the head smaller so that it might fit. That's why so many people need braces. It's not just perfectionism.

As a justification for a setting it's fine. If you have to describe everything weird it's good not to have too many weird things, you'd never stop explaining. Bipedal aliens are fine. But in the general discussion on alien intelligent life, I'd be surprised if our body type really was the standard.

Segev
2015-12-01, 02:34 PM
Human nudity taboos arise from several sources, but mainly surrounding reproduction and temperature regulation. The latter leads us to adapting the former based on environment, but the former is a heavy influence on the way we actually approach it.

Dodging around the subject of WHY, as I find myself getting too lost in the weeds and probably having to resort to less comfortable language for a fun-time internet board, suffice it to say that humans get uncomfortable with public displays of mating behavior, though the line of intimacy permitted is socially influenced.

Humans also tend to view bodily fluids as, if not utterly repulsive, at least a bit repugnant (and different fluids are going to be variously disdained). The only exception we seem to have is for tears, and that's probably because they have such a strong emotional element in and of themselves. (That said, a culture that viewed tears as much a gross thing to find as other *ahem* emotionally stimulated bodily fluids could be an interesting one. They would likely view crying as at least as private and embarrassing a thing as what a teenaged boy experiences when he first discovers that girls are hot.) We find sweat acceptable if a bit unpleasant, spitting to be rude (and being spat upon yucky), snot to be disgusting (especially to touch), and other excretions usually go downhill in our estimation from there. But "clean" implies a certain amount of "dry" and "not dripping anything anywhere."

Other biologies may not view these things the same way. Consider a mucous-covered species, perhaps slug-like. They couldn't consider their mucous on surfaces to be unpleasant, and would probably design their tools and other objects to be robust against the substance. They would probably find a lack of it somewhat disconcerting, because it implies unhealthy and discomfort.

They might, on the other hand, have a nudity taboo based on specialized clothing designed to hold the mucous to the skin in dryer environments.

A species for whom reproduction was not a particularly emotionally-intense experience, but merely part of what they do, probably wouldn't have sexually-inspired nudity taboos, either. Be careful with this; it can come off like the space hippies telling humans how bad they are for their environments if it's portrayed as humans being "hung up" on something. It should be something that is utilitarian to this species, if you're going to go that way.

One alien race I designed, for example, were insectile, with arachnoid males and wasp-like females that did not have physically compatible sexual organs. The larval stage of their species was a natural shapeshifter, able to genetically tailor themselves to slowly morph forms over several hours, and served as mediators for the reproductive exchange. Adult males and females, unaided by the hermaphroditic mediators, would both lay egg-like sacs periodically, which would hatch into unintelligent drones. The only time it was considered private and taboo to discuss or do publicly was when it was a pair of juveniles coming together to pupate; their pod would hatch with one male and one female leaving, with a brood of eggs for fully-intelligent young left behind.


For your spider-people, regarding their sense of touch, I'd make them have hard spikes for their manipulatory appendages. But give them a particularly fine sense of touch via millions of micro-fine hairs that grow from the chitin. It breaks off a lot, but grows back just as readily, and the sensations of those hairs brushing things gives them particularly sensitive texture-sense, though not particularly good temperature-sense and only passable fluid-sense (wet/dry is hard for them, because they mainly feel the motion of fluid across the hairs, not the evaporatory effects that humans use in part to detect "wetness").

Rather than a nudity taboo, since they're not visually stimulated, they might have an eating taboo. It's rude and gross to share a meal, so they politely hide it when they're eating to make sure nobody else touches their food. Possibly a territory taboo as well; they need frequent tactile contact, but need private space to do things like eat, so they view the center of personal space as taboo to encroach upon while staying to the edges of it to maintain contact with each other. Being caught "alone" is almost as bad as a human being caught naked in public.

LudicSavant
2015-12-01, 02:51 PM
And just for kicks....remember....earth spiders get drunk off of caffeine.....

This is your web on drugs. (http://www.trinity.edu/jdunn/spiderdrugs.htm)

That's how we scare the spider-kids into not using stimulants!

Douche
2015-12-01, 04:25 PM
I assume that if they are sentient and free willed, they wouldn't really be too different from mankind, at least in terms of our interaction with them.

They might have different motivations though.

Have a race who cannot be considered adult until they have succeeded their parent and slain them.
A cyborg race that only seeks to assimilate technology to achieve perfection.
A zerg (Starcraft) copy that uses forced evolution to create specialized warriors and/or information keepers, who scour the universe assimilating other races to incorporate their strengths into their own genetic compendium.
Beings of pure energy, acting essentially as gods/angels, protecting the order of the universe
Beings of pure chaos, Cthulhu-like monstrosities whose form and goals are beyond human comprehension
Proud warrior race
A planet of people who are identical to humans, perhaps implying that humanity was in fact put on Earth by some precursor race (Pyramids build by aliens or whatever)
Nanomachine swarms


I dunno, that's just what I came up with... None of it is even an original idea, lol.

Anonymouswizard
2015-12-01, 05:47 PM
*really interesting stuff*

I, um, have to go away and work out these nudity taboos for my species not. :smallredface:


For your spider-people, regarding their sense of touch, I'd make them have hard spikes for their manipulatory appendages. But give them a particularly fine sense of touch via millions of micro-fine hairs that grow from the chitin. It breaks off a lot, but grows back just as readily, and the sensations of those hairs brushing things gives them particularly sensitive texture-sense, though not particularly good temperature-sense and only passable fluid-sense (wet/dry is hard for them, because they mainly feel the motion of fluid across the hairs, not the evaporatory effects that humans use in part to detect "wetness").

Rather than a nudity taboo, since they're not visually stimulated, they might have an eating taboo. It's rude and gross to share a meal, so they politely hide it when they're eating to make sure nobody else touches their food. Possibly a territory taboo as well; they need frequent tactile contact, but need private space to do things like eat, so they view the center of personal space as taboo to encroach upon while staying to the edges of it to maintain contact with each other. Being caught "alone" is almost as bad as a human being caught naked in public.

Really interesting ideas on the spider taboos, and the idea for the sense of touch is exactly what I was planning on. Some of them are even noticeably fuzzy, it's a noted ethnic sub group among other species.


A zerg (Starcraft) copy that uses forced evolution to create specialized warriors and/or information keepers, who scour the universe assimilating other races to incorporate their strengths into their own genetic compendium.

Ummm... this is what the spider literally aren't. In essence, I came up with the idea for the spiders by taking the pseudo-arachnids from Starship Troopers, and running in the exact opposite direction of both the film bugs and zer/'nids/whatever while still keeping the basic idea.


A planet of people who are identical to humans, perhaps implying that humanity was in fact put on Earth by some precursor race (Pyramids build by aliens or whatever)

I hate this idea. I hate it whenever sci-fi brings it up. Why can't humans have just evolved from earth-life? It's much simpler.

I also hate alien races turning out to be humans, for the record.

nedz
2015-12-01, 05:54 PM
There's lots of ideas around in the world of SF.

One you could play with is the Shikasta concept. Basically this is an alien culture which visits earth to modify our religions, and has been doing so since the beginning. So they know all of our history, maybe better than we do, and have extensive libraries full of research papers on us. They are somewhat liberal-paternalistic in their view towards us, as you might expect.

Grytorm
2015-12-02, 12:23 AM
Sorry if this is not constructive toward the spider thing. But I like the idea of giant antspider like things living who originally lived in large insular colonies. Colonies are organized around Queens, but most members are potential Queens in their youth. They live on a rocky world, and the protospecies developed in more montainous area where it was difficult to establish new colonies, which is why they developed their lifecycle to produce large numbers of potential Queens trying to go elsewhere. But the more intelligent variety developed near a more low lying area where contact between broods was much more necessary.

Draconi Redfir
2015-12-02, 04:54 AM
I hate this idea. I hate it whenever sci-fi brings it up. Why can't humans have just evolved from earth-life? It's much simpler.

I also hate alien races turning out to be humans, for the record.

Agreed. i also hate any sci-fi/fantasy settings where incredibly interesting species or races exist with their own rich cutlures and heritages, but hten it's revealed "oh they're only there because alines/gods/magic did it."

it's just so boring! it'd be so much better to have them evolve naturally on their own, to see what pressures and stimuli brought them to what they are!

it's part of the reason why in any D&D setting i personally host, Trolls will be hyper-evolved starfish.

Slartibartfast
2015-12-02, 09:15 PM
Table of Contents:


I know this isn't a main topic of the thread anymore, but the subject of symmetry came up a few times with some misleading/flat out wrong facts, and I want to set the record straight and maybe even be educational.
You can skip to the dashed line if you just want to see how I relate this back to roleplaying.
If science really bores you, i have a second dashed line before more direct game design stuff.


===========

All life on Earth displays one of two kinds of symmetry. Most animals are bilaterally symmetric, meaning they have two halves which are the same but mirrored. Other animals, primarily sea creatures like starfish and sea anemones, as well as most plants, are radially symmetric, meaning that if you draw any straight line that goes through their center, you'll end up with mirrored halves.

This is for many reasons, but the most prominent is that it is an evolutionary and genetic shortcut. Your left arm and right arm are made from the same genes! In mammals, the egg has a bunch of chemicals which are concentrated at the four sides (I'm not sure why it's four, when the egg is effectively a sphere). As the egg divides, the cell can then estimate where in the body it is by tasting the concentrations of each of the four directional chemicals. That way, you get to use the same "arm" genetics for both halves of your body, and simply (heheh, "simply") mirror them.

Radially symmetric things can therefore use a very basic genome and more or less copy and paste it in a circle to get a full creature. It's a little more complicated than that (look up the golden ration appearing in the angle between leaves on plant stalks), but that's a simple understanding of things.

===========

So from an evolution standpoint, symmetry is actually easier than not symmetry. If your aliens are assumed to have evolved from a simple base organism like a bacteria, the equivalent to single-celled life for their world, you have to (I'll discuss exactly how "have to" below) consider how each point of complexity got there, and why.

Following the development of eyes actually starts with flatworms who had a mildly photosensitive "spot", basically only good at detecting light versus dark, that got increasingly more complex as minor mutations made it better at sensing things, as it became more "useful" (in the sense of survival and breeding) to sense light, like hunting and running from hunters. Bifocal vision is all about rapid depth perception: the angle at which your eyes need to point to focus on an object tells you how far away it is, which is useful for a lot of predatory tasks, and later fine manipulation tasks.

Back to symmetry a little, an asymmetric being is comparatively really hard. You need different genes to determine each unique limb or feature, or at least a much more complex or random system for placing these features on the body. In the case you decide to use randomness, you probably end up with a lot of variation in individuals, a high infant mortality rate, and birth defects are more or less assumed: If all your organs actually work, you're either a freak accident or a manifestation of god. This species would probably also run a lot of problems with degenerative diseases and probably has a terribly short lifespan, because its biology is so chaotic. Alternately, it might compensate by being highly (but inconsistently) regenerative, growing back different limbs than the one it lost, or just patching tissue back together with scars and losing function but staying alive. The more regenerative it is, notch up its cancer risk.

===========

This comes back to a more fundamental and important question for your campaign, stemming from a fundamental fact. Science is hard.

Both in the sense that we call it hard science to distinguish it from made up science, and in the sense that evolution is inherently made of more tiny minutiae than a human can count interacting on a scale of time too broad for the human mind to encapsulate. Trying to mimic evolution "properly" is effectively impossible.

So the question is, how hard do you want your science?

If you want to be able to point to the evolution of your species and how it effected their culture and development, make them as varied as they need to be. If you want to focus a campaign on "alien-ness", let players play species with fundamentally inhuman philosophies and perspectives, and get them to meld themselves into what defines that species and act and perform as that alien.

If you want a bit of spice to a campaign reflecting on human culture, the Star Trek route has a lot of merit. It lets you amplify aspects of human culture and draw attention to them, allowing you to make subtle but powerful statements about broad social, political, religious, etc. aspects of human nature/culture/society/etc.

If you want a sandboxier campaign about the players being aliens, you can let the Rule of Cool take over when the science doesn't make the aliens alien enough. If you have a species you and your players really love that communes with matter itself on a fundamental level and are therefore both natural shapeshifters and effectively sorcerers capable of "earthbending" any kind of matter into new shapes and forms, who cares if it's based on string theory or magic or just unexplained?

tl;dr For better or worse, the way you design and implement alien species, even in the context of creating a roleplaying setting, has as much wiggle room and variation as roleplaying itself. So to speak, there are "crunchier" and "softer" species designs, with focuses on different aspects (human-relatability, human-playability, alien-ness, plot importance, culture, etc). To some extent you're just going to have to do what's right for you. You seem to have a base set of creatures you're working with and fine-tuning, and if your players are cool with the dynamics they present, just go with it. Decide which are the core and important precepts of your aliens, and make everything else consistent with those defining aspects. [/UnhelpfullyPermissiveThesis]

VoxRationis
2015-12-02, 09:28 PM
I hate this idea. I hate it whenever sci-fi brings it up. Why can't humans have just evolved from earth-life? It's much simpler.
Agreed. We've got so much evidence of continuity of terrestrial life from a point a billion years ago that to have aliens responsible for anything more recent than the initial synthesis of RNA breaks suspension of disbelief. It's much more plausible to have a far future setting where humans seeded the galaxy with life.

Malifice
2015-12-03, 12:56 AM
I'm British, so they'll be psychologically different but all enjoy sarcasm.

In all seriousness, I need more help with this than biology.



Hmm... Maybe if the space hippies want us to increase our tech level to theirs. They did the damaging the environment thing and want to help other species move past it.



I'm not sure how they'd evolve yet, but my short 'federation' list is:
-Arachnids: these large spider-like beings have a highly social society, to the point of becoming paralysed when sseparated from other sapient creatures. They also place large importance on the sense of touch, due to poor eyesight. No hive mind.
-Sarus: lizard people, the one and only anthropomorphic race. Sharp vision but no binocular vision due to their eyes being on the sides of their head, and their skin is naturally radiation resistant. In contrast to the Arachnids they evolved from a species that tended to always be on the run, and many become explorers due to being uncomfortable staying still.
-Raptors: a very distant relation of the Saruas. Possibly, the general consensus is just a coincidentally similar genetic structure. They are one of the youngest species, and in contrast to the Sarus their ancestors seem to have been pack predators, and their forward facing eyes grant them binocular vision. The flying ones.
-Felions: a very warlike species of fur covered bipeds (thing gorilla walking rather than human though). Also obviously descended from hunters, with binocular vision, ability to sprint over short distances, and sharp teeth and claws.

Have some of them not be carbon+water based. Hydrocarbon or ammonia are solid options. Also; consider nutrition. Species with different DNA to humans cant digest earth protiens (they might be able to break them down after ingestion, but will get no nourishment from it).

Have you raptor species DNA totally differnt in structure to Earth DNA (mmeaning they need to eat their own food).

Also consider gravity differences. They have a huge impact on life.

Lvl 2 Expert
2015-12-03, 01:30 AM
Agreed. We've got so much evidence of continuity of terrestrial life from a point a billion years ago that to have aliens responsible for anything more recent than the initial synthesis of RNA breaks suspension of disbelief. It's much more plausible to have a far future setting where humans seeded the galaxy with life.

I'm not a fan of the idea either, but let's play devil's advocate here. I know in Star trek it's used to explain all the rubber forehead aliens. We all look so similar because we all come from DNA seeded across the galaxy that's destined/programmed to eventually develop into a humanoid shape in at least one evolutionary line.

Yeah, it's bogus, but it also is some kind of explanation for a weird feature of their universe...

Satinavian
2015-12-03, 04:03 AM
I think aliens are very setting dependent. Realistically the galaxy will probably be very diverse. Would a random alien species even have a two sided symmetrical body like we do?Because symmetry is a pretty good thing. It corresponds to the symmetry of your environment and let your adaptation work in all directions. Noticable, nearly no bigger creature has symmetric uppe and lower halfs because the environment does not have a corresponding symmetry. But other directions ? either they are axially symmetric or they can rotate around the gravity axis and have left/right symmetry. Every alien that evolved on something like a planet should work similar.

Would they have two sexes?Sexual reproduction makes faster evolution and is a good thing. It should be expected in aliens. You don't need two sexes for this, hermaphrodites seem to work just fine. But more than two sexes which actually contribute genetic information to further generations are not necessary and to complicated and thus evolutionary bad. You can have more than two sexes if every one but two are sterile (or can only reproduce asexually while evolution still happens with the two main sexes). I guess you could also have hermaprodites and additional infertile other sexes even without any obvious earthen example. But i wouldn't use more than two normal reproductive active sexes.

You can also do a lot of things with development cycles and metamorphoses.

Would they be anywhere near our size? Well, no. But size has a lot of implications. Don't vary just the size to make something more exotic.

Are their cells anywhere near the size of ours? Are they even made up of small cell like building blocks?Well, no. But they would need some other kind of internal structure. I would not make them some giant amoeba, because that would imply really slow metabolism and really low thinking because diffusion is not fast.

Are they born small and helpless after which they develop?Small ? Yes. Helpless ? No. Total biomass has to grow during life cycle.

What do they use for building materials? And for energy? How do they take those things in?As long as it makes sense, do what you want. But for Hard SF you should not only consider energy but also entropy. Not every kind of energy is feasable to use.

On the other side of the equation, it can be really fun to just go with space elves and Klingons. They're relatable. You don't need to explain every single little detail. And it's much easier to portray a consistent world. What would the homeworld of a sulfur breathing building sized semi-ceramic creature that really likes listening to Bach even be like? Small and sulfurylike...? Any step in between is also acceptable.Yes, that is another problem. Really strange aliens might be really difficult to interact with. That might result in a really boring story which is all about humans and has aliens basically as window dressing. It's maybe more realistic but not necessarily what you want for an RPG

And, as I said in the other thread, I love the idea of birdlike or generally flying aliens.I really like the idea of aliens living in a gas giant athmosphere. They might be quite big and living in a perpetual state between flying and swimming and without even a concept of "ground". Even the concepts "gas, fluid, solid" might not be known outside of scientist circles.

nedz
2015-12-03, 08:11 AM
Table of Contents:


I know this isn't a main topic of the thread anymore, but the subject of symmetry came up a few times with some misleading/flat out wrong facts, and I want to set the record straight and maybe even be educational.
You can skip to the dashed line if you just want to see how I relate this back to roleplaying.
If science really bores you, i have a second dashed line before more direct game design stuff.


===========

All life on Earth displays one of two kinds of symmetry. Most animals are bilaterally symmetric, meaning they have two halves which are the same but mirrored. Other animals, primarily sea creatures like starfish and sea anemones, as well as most plants, are radially symmetric, meaning that if you draw any straight line that goes through their center, you'll end up with mirrored halves.

This is for many reasons, but the most prominent is that it is an evolutionary and genetic shortcut. Your left arm and right arm are made from the same genes! In mammals, the egg has a bunch of chemicals which are concentrated at the four sides (I'm not sure why it's four, when the egg is effectively a sphere). As the egg divides, the cell can then estimate where in the body it is by tasting the concentrations of each of the four directional chemicals. That way, you get to use the same "arm" genetics for both halves of your body, and simply (heheh, "simply") mirror them.

Radially symmetric things can therefore use a very basic genome and more or less copy and paste it in a circle to get a full creature. It's a little more complicated than that (look up the golden ration appearing in the angle between leaves on plant stalks), but that's a simple understanding of things.

===========

So from an evolution standpoint, symmetry is actually easier than not symmetry. If your aliens are assumed to have evolved from a simple base organism like a bacteria, the equivalent to single-celled life for their world, you have to (I'll discuss exactly how "have to" below) consider how each point of complexity got there, and why.

Following the development of eyes actually starts with flatworms who had a mildly photosensitive "spot", basically only good at detecting light versus dark, that got increasingly more complex as minor mutations made it better at sensing things, as it became more "useful" (in the sense of survival and breeding) to sense light, like hunting and running from hunters. Bifocal vision is all about rapid depth perception: the angle at which your eyes need to point to focus on an object tells you how far away it is, which is useful for a lot of predatory tasks, and later fine manipulation tasks.

Back to symmetry a little, an asymmetric being is comparatively really hard. You need different genes to determine each unique limb or feature, or at least a much more complex or random system for placing these features on the body. In the case you decide to use randomness, you probably end up with a lot of variation in individuals, a high infant mortality rate, and birth defects are more or less assumed: If all your organs actually work, you're either a freak accident or a manifestation of god. This species would probably also run a lot of problems with degenerative diseases and probably has a terribly short lifespan, because its biology is so chaotic. Alternately, it might compensate by being highly (but inconsistently) regenerative, growing back different limbs than the one it lost, or just patching tissue back together with scars and losing function but staying alive. The more regenerative it is, notch up its cancer risk.

===========

This comes back to a more fundamental and important question for your campaign, stemming from a fundamental fact. Science is hard.

Both in the sense that we call it hard science to distinguish it from made up science, and in the sense that evolution is inherently made of more tiny minutiae than a human can count interacting on a scale of time too broad for the human mind to encapsulate. Trying to mimic evolution "properly" is effectively impossible.

So the question is, how hard do you want your science?

If you want to be able to point to the evolution of your species and how it effected their culture and development, make them as varied as they need to be. If you want to focus a campaign on "alien-ness", let players play species with fundamentally inhuman philosophies and perspectives, and get them to meld themselves into what defines that species and act and perform as that alien.

If you want a bit of spice to a campaign reflecting on human culture, the Star Trek route has a lot of merit. It lets you amplify aspects of human culture and draw attention to them, allowing you to make subtle but powerful statements about broad social, political, religious, etc. aspects of human nature/culture/society/etc.

If you want a sandboxier campaign about the players being aliens, you can let the Rule of Cool take over when the science doesn't make the aliens alien enough. If you have a species you and your players really love that communes with matter itself on a fundamental level and are therefore both natural shapeshifters and effectively sorcerers capable of "earthbending" any kind of matter into new shapes and forms, who cares if it's based on string theory or magic or just unexplained?

tl;dr For better or worse, the way you design and implement alien species, even in the context of creating a roleplaying setting, has as much wiggle room and variation as roleplaying itself. So to speak, there are "crunchier" and "softer" species designs, with focuses on different aspects (human-relatability, human-playability, alien-ness, plot importance, culture, etc). To some extent you're just going to have to do what's right for you. You seem to have a base set of creatures you're working with and fine-tuning, and if your players are cool with the dynamics they present, just go with it. Decide which are the core and important precepts of your aliens, and make everything else consistent with those defining aspects. [/UnhelpfullyPermissiveThesis]
Symmetry is important but so is symmetry breaking. Your arms are fairly symmetrical to each other, as are your legs, but, whilst they contain the same structures, your left arm is not symmetrical with your left leg. IIRC this is due to symmetry breaking within the HOX genes.

I'm not a fan of the idea either, but let's play devil's advocate here. I know in Star trek it's used to explain all the rubber forehead aliens. We all look so similar because we all come from DNA seeded across the galaxy that's destined/programmed to eventually develop into a humanoid shape in at least one evolutionary line.

Yeah, it's bogus, but it also is some kind of explanation for a weird feature of their universe...

It's relatively easy to demonstrate that Panspermia is neither necessary nor sufficient. Theories which are neither necessary nor sufficient are not necessarily wrong, but they are usually discarded.

It is also relatively easy to demonstrate that the makers of Star Trek could only hire Human actors.

JoeJ
2015-12-03, 11:07 PM
I'm not a fan of the idea either, but let's play devil's advocate here. I know in Star trek it's used to explain all the rubber forehead aliens. We all look so similar because we all come from DNA seeded across the galaxy that's destined/programmed to eventually develop into a humanoid shape in at least one evolutionary line.

Yeah, it's bogus, but it also is some kind of explanation for a weird feature of their universe...

Traveler did it in reverse. Humans evolved on Earth, but thousands of years ago the Ancients transported some of them to other planets.

Shadowsend
2015-12-03, 11:54 PM
Best computer game I've played with aliens has been Star Control 2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Control_races).

Draconi Redfir
2015-12-04, 02:24 AM
Traveler did it in reverse. Humans evolved on Earth, but thousands of years ago the Ancients transported some of them to other planets.

as did star gate. humans are from earth, but they were also a great slave-race to various anciant aliens posing as gods, so they picked up a bunch and left them on various planets to rule over, eventually forgetting about earth entirely.

FatR
2015-12-04, 08:02 AM
I'm about to write up a Space Opera setting, but I get stuck when designing aliens. So I was wondering what the playground thought about making alien species and cultures.

Dos: Your first concern should be "What function - a function relevant to the actual games I want to run - this alien race plays in the setting?" Note - fetish fuel and illustrating whatever political points you think are relevant are perfectly acceptable setting functions, and I'd say the second has much more artistic merit than merely proving the extent of your imagination. Your second concern should be "Do I think they are cool?"

Don'ts: "Realistic aliens". Realistic aliens do not exist, period, and even if, perchance, they do, they can never ever be encountered by humanity. Just admit that your Space Opera is, well, Space Opera. "Alien aliens". The whole idea defeats itself the second you attempt to make them actually function in the setting, unless we talk about entities which are practically impossible to communicate with, like Solaris or Photino Birds, and which setting function amounts to that of natural phenomena or relentless killer robots.

Slartibartfast
2015-12-04, 12:54 PM
Symmetry is important but so is symmetry breaking. Your arms are fairly symmetrical to each other, as are your legs, but, whilst they contain the same structures, your left arm is not symmetrical with your left leg. IIRC this is due to symmetry breaking within the HOX genes.

You seem to express a decent amount of biological and genetic knowledge with a seemingly out of place understanding of geometry, not to be rude. Specifically speaking, what does "symmetry breaking" mean? You seem to use it to refer to things which are not symmetrical to each other, which makes "breaking" an inappropriate word. In a bilaterally symmetric being like a human, there is a unique plane across which the body is mirrored, essentially cutting the body in half down the spine. The legs differing from the arms are not a violation of symmetry, there simply was no symmetry there to begin with.

Similarly, this isn't a "symmetry break" in the HOX genes. I haven't studied the specific genes of early development in detail, but my first guess would be either that there are different HOX genes for arms and legs, or an epigenetic usage of a "limb" HOX gene that distinguishes the growth of the two limb types. Given that very few animals have matching forelimbs and hindlimbs, different HOX genes seems most likely, at least given that I didn't bother to look anything up.

But to agree with your point, yes it is important that a being is not perfectly symmetrical, otherwise you get a perfect sphere or creature which is essentially a "ball of stuff" like a sea urchin (the only spherically symmetric creature I can think of). Even radially symmetric creatures generally have an axis around which they can draw their planes of symmetry, but in the perpendicular direction symmetry is not established.

At this point however we're getting deep into biology and/or math and not the game-relevant point "should my aliens display symmetry".

nedz
2015-12-04, 01:59 PM
Symmetry exists in all branches of mathematics - not just geometry.

SimonMoon6
2015-12-04, 02:20 PM
Don't make aliens just humans with special hats.

I'd add to this. Star Trek aliens are often just humans with bumps on their heads. Doctor Who (modern series) tends to instead have aliens that are humans with animal heads: domestic cat heads, fly heads, rhino heads, lion heads (yawn)... but the best aliens are the ones that are truly aliens, aliens who don't look like a man in a costume (such as the Daleks).

So, don't just make aliens who are humans with special heads.

To me, the way to make a great alien race is to think: why did they develop this way? For example, if you want an alien which is a humanoid fly, having lost the only thing that actually makes flies useful from an evolutionary perspective (the ability to fly, hence the name "fly"), realize that this is pretty stupid and requires a lot of justification.

A humanoid lizard race is entirely credible (as long as it's not humans (down to the mammary glands) with a reptile head). But what drives them? Why are they the way they are? Is their planet warm and dry all over? (Keep in mind that the Earth is our best example of a planet with life on it, and Earth is not a ____ (fill in the blank) planet, so a desert planet or ocean planet (etc) is really goofy.) People are motivated by what they have and what they need. If they have tools for building, is there something they don't have? Are resources scarce enough that they can only survive through cooperation? Or perhaps resources are even more scarce and they can only survive through violence, producing a warlike culture? Or are resources plentiful enough that they can be lazy, sunning themselves all day long?

Just don't make a skunk-man race and a bunny-man race and a lion-man race unless you want your world to be a very silly place.

Better aliens are a mixture of "strange non-humanoid creatures" and "humanoids who developed a bit differently but don't have silly furry animal heads".

Slartibartfast
2015-12-04, 02:36 PM
To expound on silly headed aliens:

Designing a species will obviously vary based on what you want your species to accomplish, but also keep in mind you can design it from different directions.

If you want your species to have that "alien" feel, ignore their world and development for a bit. Start with how they are; find something about the alien that makes them fundamentally inhuman. After all, what "alien" really means is foreign or different, so find what makes them different. Once you have that kernel, explore what other features of their physiology, psychology, culture, etc. need to be complementarily inhuman, which can or should be human, and even if they should have tension or seeming paradox between their aspects. For example, an "alien" aspect that cannibalism is not only an accepted but required portion of their social/religious standards, and strong family values with communal support. Explore how these inhuman aspects intertwine with their human societies, and how that "works", and it can make the game secretly a learning experience about what those sorts of values are/mean, which manifests to some (and disproportionately many roleplayers) as a "cool" thing.

But not everyone wants aliens for their psychological or social aspects. If you want aliens in more of a Ben10 sense - a great excuse for superpowers - then build around that. Come up with your alien powers, and work backwards to as much societal and cultural implications as you care for.

Ultimately, like all aspects of roleplaying, there is an unhelpful amount of "tailor to taste" that makes giving general advice nearly impossible.

The best general advice I can give is to figure out what, specifically, you want your aliens to do or be about (which can be hard to answer even for yourself) and then focus your design around that.

CharonsHelper
2015-12-04, 03:32 PM
I'd love to stop seeing condescending aliens telling us how baaad we are.
Exhibit a) The extreme space hippie society that tells how ecologically bad we all are, while having some miracle natural equivalent to tech.
It rather undermines the moral, no?

Ah... environmental propaganda masquerading as sci-fi.

VoxRationis
2015-12-04, 03:33 PM
A humanoid lizard race is entirely credible (as long as it's not humans (down to the mammary glands) with a reptile head). But what drives them? Why are they the way they are? Is their planet warm and dry all over? (Keep in mind that the Earth is our best example of a planet with life on it, and Earth is not a ____ (fill in the blank) planet, so a desert planet or ocean planet (etc) is really goofy.) People are motivated by what they have and what they need. If they have tools for building, is there something they don't have? Are resources scarce enough that they can only survive through cooperation? Or perhaps resources are even more scarce and they can only survive through violence, producing a warlike culture? Or are resources plentiful enough that they can be lazy, sunning themselves all day long?

Have you by any chance read the Galactic Commonwealth series by Alan Dean Foster? The primary "antagonistic" species of that series is a reptilian race from a (comparatively) arid planet (though it obviously has more water than most planets, on account of giving rise to a carbon- and water-based species).

CharonsHelper
2015-12-04, 03:42 PM
I will say - when designing alien biology - there needs to be a REASON for them to be different.

Examples:

Limbs: They will probably have 4 limbs unless there is a REALLY good reason why not. More than 4 limbs and you either have significantly weaker limbs and/or needing to consume more calories - both which are bigger disadvantages than those advantages gained with extra limbs.

Eating: Eating is the most efficient way to get calories. The reason why plants can live on nothing but sunlight for energy is because they don't move significantly - so they don't use up nearly as much energy for their size.

Curiosity: I see this one a lot. Aliens aren't nearly as curious etc. as humans are. While fine to some degree - if a species has technology enough for space-travel, they need to be at least reasonably curious. (unless they have a benefactor species or some such)

I do like the vibe of aliens not just being humans with pointy ears or some such - but don't make them go all crazy weird for no reason either.

Slartibartfast
2015-12-04, 04:48 PM
Have you by any chance read the Galactic Commonwealth series by Alan Dean Foster? The primary "antagonistic" species of that series is a reptilian race from a (comparatively) arid planet (though it obviously has more water than most planets, on account of giving rise to a carbon- and water-based species).


I will say - when designing alien biology - there needs to be a REASON for them to be different.

Again, it depends on your goals. If you're trying to go for the hardest hard sci-fi, it's good to find a reason for their difference. On the other hand, one of my favorite aliens is the Alaspinian Miniature Dragon from Alan Dean Foster's "Pip and Flinx" series.

The Alaspinian Miniature Dragon is described as a snake with wings which can project a liquid stream of potent enzymes that basically eat through anything short of "glassteel" (the convenient science object which stops basically everything). As is also important to the plot, minidrags are empaths, as in telepathically sensing and projecting emotions (which the series strongly separates from telepaths, who sense and project thoughts).

Minidrags don't really have a reason to exist, and when considered closely, don't particularly make sense. But they're cool. And sometimes that's all it takes to make a good alien.

Lvl 2 Expert
2015-12-04, 05:07 PM
I will say - when designing alien biology - there needs to be a REASON for them to be different.

Examples:

Limbs: They will probably have 4 limbs unless there is a REALLY good reason why not. More than 4 limbs and you either have significantly weaker limbs and/or needing to consume more calories - both which are bigger disadvantages than those advantages gained with extra limbs.

Not nessecarily. Many animals on earth move around on four legs. For a species that needs wings or hands that configuration still makes sense. The reason we don't walk around on four legs is that we descend from an ancestor with four legs but no hands and a set of legs became a set of arms. But maybe aliens developed sensing antennae for use below ground into arms with hands, or maybe they descended from a type of flying lungfish kind of creature that came onto land with four legs as well as two wings. Or maybe they have an external skeleton that makes smaller limbs proportionally stronger, resulting in lots and lots of limbs.

It's all fine as justifications for a setting, but remember that aliens are also your chance to go completely wild. Why even try to come up with ways to limit their diversity? You could just as well focus on reasons to increase it.

nedz
2015-12-04, 05:31 PM
Limbs: They will probably have 4 limbs unless there is a REALLY good reason why not. More than 4 limbs and you either have significantly weaker limbs and/or needing to consume more calories - both which are bigger disadvantages than those advantages gained with extra limbs.

On Earth: all land vertebrates descended from a single species of tetrapod which left the water. This might not be the case elsewhere.

Slartibartfast
2015-12-04, 05:46 PM
Eating: Eating is the most efficient way to get calories. The reason why plants can live on nothing but sunlight for energy is because they don't move significantly - so they don't use up nearly as much energy for their size.

Eating and photosynthesis are equally efficient at gathering energy. Both methods absorb about 10% of the input energy from the source (light / consumed material) into the body. Animals eat food because they don't have chloroplasts and physically cannot photosynthesize.

Assuming a world without a lot of obstacles that cast shadows, especially near a brighter sun than ours, photosynthesis will end up being more efficient simply because there is more available sunlight to gather, and the cost of hunting and gathering material food hasn't been equivalently reduced, even if you still only retain 10% of it. Photosynthesizing creatures don't *need* to move, but eating animals have to spend energy to get energy.

Even if we're talking about an Earth-like world, if there are no plants, photosynthesizing animals are practically a must and not a prohibition. You need *something* as the basis of your food chain, be it photosynthesis or plants that feed off geothermal vents. There needs to be energy from outside the system to support life, unless you have aliens which (somehow) produce their own energy, in which case they don't eat anything anyways.

Segev
2015-12-04, 06:06 PM
One thing I did to play with it in the same setting that had the insectoid race was to have a misconception by the majority of races in the galaxy: telepathy was hand-in-hand with sentience/sapience, and was in fact the primary means of determining if a species was "intelligent" in the colloquial sense. (As in "an intelligent species.")

Therefore, when they discovered humans (who happened to look a lot like one of the other, much weirder races out there), they thought they'd discovered some sort of sub-sentient, highly-advanced species of "mere" animals. Animals with complex behaviors that are very interesting, but definitely not sapient since their minds were silent.

It wasn't until these strange creatures managed to not only get into space, but to use communication structures that were clearly not instinctive to coordinate attacks to drive the scientists' ships from orbit and they developed a branch of them which created a weird mental static (due to neural interfaces making radio waves that resonated on telepathic bands) that they realized their minds WERE working...but silently. And by then it was definitely a strained relation, because of how they'd experimented on humans they'd been kidnapping for many decades.

But the state of things "now" in the setting was that there were relations. Just awkward ones. Though individual humans were highly valued as middlemen precisely because they couldn't be telepathically read, now that the need for the development or learning of language is required to talk to them.

CharonsHelper
2015-12-05, 02:04 AM
Assuming a world without a lot of obstacles that cast shadows, especially near a brighter sun than ours,

If it were bright enough for creatures to get all of their energy from photosynthesis - then the planet would be far too hot for life as we know it.

I know that the plant/animal aliens are a common trope - but if you intend the science fiction to be at all hard, creatures which get all of their energy from photosynthesis and move faster than a snail simply can't happen.

SimonMoon6
2015-12-05, 01:26 PM
Have you by any chance read the Galactic Commonwealth series by Alan Dean Foster? The primary "antagonistic" species of that series is a reptilian race from a (comparatively) arid planet (though it obviously has more water than most planets, on account of giving rise to a carbon- and water-based species).

I haven't, at least I don't think so. I know I've read some Alan Dean Foster books as a kid, but none made much of an impression. The "reptile aliens from an arid planet" idea is far from original since if you want reptiles, well, reptiles like arid environments.

Lvl 2 Expert
2015-12-06, 03:53 PM
Eating and photosynthesis are equally efficient at gathering energy. Both methods absorb about 10% of the input energy from the source (light / consumed material) into the body. Animals eat food because they don't have chloroplasts and physically cannot photosynthesize.

Assuming a world without a lot of obstacles that cast shadows, especially near a brighter sun than ours, photosynthesis will end up being more efficient simply because there is more available sunlight to gather, and the cost of hunting and gathering material food hasn't been equivalently reduced, even if you still only retain 10% of it. Photosynthesizing creatures don't *need* to move, but eating animals have to spend energy to get energy.

Even if we're talking about an Earth-like world, if there are no plants, photosynthesizing animals are practically a must and not a prohibition. You need *something* as the basis of your food chain, be it photosynthesis or plants that feed off geothermal vents. There needs to be energy from outside the system to support life, unless you have aliens which (somehow) produce their own energy, in which case they don't eat anything anyways.

For a creature that has "expensive" parts (lots of movement, brainpower etc) photosynthesis is not the way to go though unless the sun is really, really bright. Randall Munroe of XKCD fame did a good explanation on that (https://what-if.xkcd.com/17/). Sunlight is not very concentrated, and 10% of a little is less than 10% of a lot.

But, you know, they could still run on nuclear power, or on some sort of inorganic chemicals being metabolized, or on the kinetic energy of standing in a river for most of the day, or...

Yes, they're kind of far out. Eating photosynthesizing lifeforms is probably common amongst the higher intelligences wherever they (photosynthesizing lifeforms) occur...

Slartibartfast
2015-12-08, 03:25 AM
@CharonsHelper @Lvl 2 Expert

Organic life would certainly have trouble developing large, complex, and highly active life that was purely photosynthetic. There certainly is a very questionable evolutionary path to evolving such, even if the practical problems were less severe (as in, why do they have so many motion organs when they could just be plants).

However, if we assume we're sci-fi enough they can be some kind of carbo-silicate life or some other molecular basis that makes being near a bright sun not instantly fatal. This still doesn't answer why they aren't plants.

Depending on how silly you think this sounds, you could try the following: These silicoids developed on a smaller planet with lots of pits and valleys, really more of a large asteroid than a true planet. They're in a Mercury-like orbit where there is WAY too much starlight, and solar flares might as well be on the surface. The creatures then have to play a dangerous game keeping themselves exposed enough to the light to feed without frying. For plot reasons some of them developed enough intelligence to start carving the asteroid into tools to shape better shelters and feeding areas, and eventually this transcended to full blown technology and a sentient species.

Honestly, I think the above situation sounds more hilarious than plausible, but if I wanted to make a species of small, constantly nervous rock-bugs, it's not a bad origin story.

---------

tl;dr I think the moral of the story is that you can turn basically anything into an alien species if you just spin it right, to almost any hardness of science. It just takes a little bit of cleverness, which is much easier (but not necessarily better) if you're willing to handwave parts.

-------------

Now to ruin my thesis:

In this specific example, you can make semi-plausible arguments against predators developing on my asteroid. After all, chasing things around is more likely to fry both you and your prey than actually provide a meal. In most other contexts though, eating other animals is pretty convenient. As you both pointed out, 10% efficiency only means things in relation to the starting energy, and other organisms are pretty energy dense, even if they don't necessarily have a high gross. So predators probably exist everywhere eventually unless they are somehow impractical. So the other moral of the story is that sometimes the only way to create a desired situation is to come up with vaguely plausible explanations why it "somehow works" and then not look at your explanations too directly. Which is almost like saying "hard science doesn't work for everything", but it isn't because I'm not looking at the data hard enough to follow through to that conclusion.

So... maybe I didn't think the full ramifications of photosynthesis through when I made my first post.

nedz
2015-12-08, 08:09 AM
Predators arose pretty early on earth, and the Predator-Prey relationship has driven evolution. This has happened directly, but also by reducing over population and providing space for new generations.

So, if you have a world without predators then you should have slower evolution - which, obviously, takes longer to produce more complex creatures.

raygun goth
2015-12-08, 11:49 AM
Predators arose pretty early on earth, and the Predator-Prey relationship has driven evolution. This has happened directly, but also by reducing over population and providing space for new generations.

So, if you have a world without predators then you should have slower evolution - which, obviously, takes longer to produce more complex creatures.

Plants are the main driver right now - nature is green in root and stem, not red in tooth and claw. Competition is what's important, which are not neccessarily predator-prey relationships.

Acacia trees grow taller to keep giraffes off their leaves. Giraffes develop long necks. The trees grow thorns. The giraffes develop harder and more prehensile tongues. The trees acquire a poison, and the poison eventually gets so strong it's deadly to the trees - so they release it when they're injured. The giraffes develop the ability to taste the toxin and stop eating that particular tree, moving on to another. The trees develop the ability to warn other nearby plants with pheromones so they release their toxins. The giraffes learn to eat upwind. Most recently? The trees have started to enslave ants.

Plants themselves actually make quite a lot of energy; even at 10% efficiency a plant that takes up anywhere from about a square foot to ten square feet of space (say, a pumpkin vine) is going to be crapping out a similar energy output to an adult human being. Some plants make so much energy they store it as huge nodules of starch. Plants don't move for the simple reason that they just didn't evolve that way - they don't have muscles because they didn't evolve them, not because their method of gathering food is inefficient (though - check this out, the total photosynthetic efficiency yield of Earth is, IIRC .8%-1.5%, of course, the plants are working with a huge total mass of energy. Photosynthetic organisms take up most of our planet's biomass). Plants have just decided to focus almost all their energy on reproduction and dispersal, which is why they're really great food sources. There's so much energy in many plants that they have the ability to produce good-tasting, highly energized gonads designed specifically to trick animals into eating them. They haven't evolved the ability to move because they don't need to.

Some plants have evolved movement apparatus that do work on a hydraulic system (see the Venus fly trap for a dramatic example of this system), but again. That's how they solved a problem in the plant way - the limit on evolution is such that a plant just won't ever develop anything we'd call "muscles" because that's just not in there - which is honestly my point: if you had a mobile creature abile to photosynthesize, it still wouldn't be a plant, because that's not part of the definition of "plant." Just like I'd feel weird even trying to apply the word "animal" to any motile, heterotrophic, multi-cellular creature with a fixed body plan that we encounter (at least at first) - that word has a very specific definition at the moment and it would only apply to certain things on Earth.

I submit "exozoon" with qualifiers - "photosynthetic motile exozoon" as an example. Because exozoon sounds awesome.

nedz
2015-12-08, 12:25 PM
Plants are the main driver right now - nature is green in root and stem, not red in tooth and claw. Competition is what's important, which are not necessarily predator-prey relationships.

Acacia trees grow taller to keep giraffes off their leaves. Giraffes develop long necks. The trees grow thorns. The giraffes develop harder and more prehensile tongues. The trees acquire a poison, and the poison eventually gets so strong it's deadly to the trees - so they release it when they're injured. The giraffes develop the ability to taste the toxin and stop eating that particular tree, moving on to another. The trees develop the ability to warn other nearby plants with pheromones so they release their toxins. The giraffes learn to eat upwind. Most recently? The trees have started to enslave ants.

But is this not a predator-prey relationship ?
It's an endless arms race.

If you wanted an example of competition which isn't a predator-prey relationship you could cite the race to fill a hole in the forest canopy. But this just encourages saplings to grow faster.

raygun goth
2015-12-08, 12:39 PM
But is this not a predator-prey relationship ?
It's an endless arms race.

If you wanted an example of competition which isn't a predator-prey relationship you could cite the race to fill a hole in the forest canopy. But this just encourages saplings to grow faster.

Herbivory is not predation, predation specifically requires the death of prey - but you are essentially correct that it is consumer-based system of competition.

In Australia, competition for light has resulted less in rapid-growing saplings and more in trees that explode and catch fire when lightning strikes them - this is the eucalyptus strategy.

Segev
2015-12-08, 01:12 PM
Herbivory is not predation, predation specifically requires the death of prey - but you are essentially correct that it is consumer-based system of competition.

In Australia, competition for light has resulted less in rapid-growing saplings and more in trees that explode and catch fire when lightning strikes them - this is the eucalyptus strategy.

So a regenerative creature, like a cow with troll regen, that could be harvested for meat and then regrow without killing the creature, would not count as predation?

This is an interesting idea, if only because it comes off as rather creepy to most modern minds. I know that when I came up with the idea of a Lunar in an Exalted game who fed his village by transforming into a cow, letting them cut off haunches of meat, and then healing himself, it was a decidedly disturbing (if highly practical) thought.

(I also once played a Lunar who developed a madness from some game mechanics. Said madness was cannibalism. Being a sweet kid, he didn't want to HURT people to sate his unusual hunger...so he carved bits of himself off and healed the wounds. It was something he kept secret only because it made other people horrified. He got used to the pain.)

CharonsHelper
2015-12-08, 02:15 PM
So a regenerative creature, like a cow with troll regen, that could be harvested for meat and then regrow without killing the creature, would not count as predation?

You could easily do that with blood drinkers - since as the Red Cross tells you - you make up for lost blood pretty quick. (Burns quite a few calories to do. I think it's 600-700 per pint. Another reason to give!) The alien livestock could be bred specifically to produce blood quickly - similarly to how we've bred chickens to lay eggs far more often than they otherwise would.

Grim Portent
2015-12-08, 02:19 PM
So a regenerative creature, like a cow with troll regen, that could be harvested for meat and then regrow without killing the creature, would not count as predation?

It could be argued to be a form of parasitism.

I believe vampire bats, leeches and so forth are considered parasites, this is similar to their feeding behavior but with flesh rather than blood.

Slartibartfast
2015-12-08, 03:09 PM
Plants are the main driver right now - nature is green in root and stem, not red in tooth and claw. Competition is what's important, which are not neccessarily predator-prey relationships.

That's sort of two conflicting ideas there. Yes, you don't need predation to focus evolution, but it still *does* focus evolution.

Another interesting thought experiment is a halcyon environment. If there isn't anything to kill off your creatures besides age and accidents, how do they evolve? "They won't" is the only clearly wrong answer. There will still be an impetus to remain reproductively viable, but that's not a major limitation, especially because you don't have to be reproductively viable with a large population. My first guess is you would see random mutations and speciation without any practical basis. Creatures would end up with a bunch of random features, as long as those features didn't kill them ("I evolved vestigial lungs! *bleh*"). From a storytelling standpoint, it's either carte blanche to do basically anything, or a trap where whatever you describe happening will be seen as implausible or arbitrary, regardless of what it is.


[SUMMARY: Stuff about the definitions of "plant" and "animal"]

I submit "exozoon" with qualifiers - "photosynthetic motile exozoon" as an example. Because exozoon sounds awesome.

"Plant" and "animal" are pretty specific words, defining details down to the cellular structure and genetics, and it's a pretty safe assumption that, as they are used to describe Earth organisms, neither will apply to alien life. Photosynthetic motile exozoon is a much better term on grounds of descriptiveness, and I approve! On the other hand, most characters (and players) are gonna get tired of saying anything with that many syllables more than a few times; it's a term lacking the communicative efficacy of "plant".

That said, in the hypothetical future where humanity encounters aliens, there will likely be a strong desire to continue to use the words "plant" and "animal" to describe aliens if possible, so it's likely that the words will undergo redefinition and the current definitions will be specific qualifications of terran plants and terran animals.

Also, why exozoon and not just zoon? To specify that it's not an endosymbiont etc, has its own body? Or just cause it sounds cool? All are acceptable answers.

@predation w/o death discussion

Under current technical definitions, eating parts of an animal that grow back seems like a pretty clear case of parasitism, just like vampire bats drinking blood. That said, it's an almost identical circumstance to herbivores stripping leaves and branches, and a questionable analogous situation to eating fruit off trees/bushes, and we don't typically class that as parasitism. It's possible that our naming conventions are biased or inconsistent.

GM.Casper
2015-12-09, 01:34 PM
Don't have...
Hive minds. They are a tired cliche.
Energy beings, especially not 'pure energy'. It doesn't even make any sense. Are they meant to be plasma based? Gaseous? Self organizing electromagnetic fields? (in which case they need some rather specific mediums to live in). Just calling them 'energy beings' is a lame copout.
Animal people. Also too cliche. At least mix and mach from several animals so that they are not immediately recognizable. Like, take the behavioral patterns from one species, appearance from completely different ones.
Humanoids. There should be many different body patterns, not just upright standing two-handed, two-legged folks.

You are not making a TV-series with a limited FX budget here. Be creative.

Segev
2015-12-09, 01:38 PM
Don't have...
Hive minds. They are a tired cliche.
Energy beings, especially not 'pure energy'. It doesn't even make any sense. Are they meant to plasma based? Gaseous? Self organizing electromagnetic fields? (in which case they need some rather specific mediums to live in). Just calling them 'energy beings' is a lame copout.
Animal people. Also too cliche. At least mix and mach from several animals so that they are not immediately recognizable. Like, take the behavioral patterns from one species, appearance from completely different ones.
Humanoids. There should be many different body patterns, not just upright standing two-handed, two-legged folks.

You are not making a TV-series with a limited FX budget here. Be creative.

You realize that you've actually severely limited his options, not encouraged him to expand them, here, right? "Make them truly alien, but not in any way that anybody's done it before!"

VoxRationis
2015-12-09, 01:50 PM
I'm going to have to agree with him about the energy beings, though. They're a transparent sci-fi-speak analogue to spirits or gods, and are almost never used as anything but such, turning whatever they're encountered in into a lecture on morality (either from the beings or to them) on account of the humanoid protagonists being unable to deal with them through any method but discourse. To make matters worse, they don't even make sense as a concept.

GM.Casper
2015-12-09, 02:45 PM
This made be dust off and upgrade my random alien species generator. Here a few output samples, describing them at the ‘stone age’ development stage:

Favored Environment: Rivers & Lakes
Feeding: Trapping Carnivore, Scavenger
Movement: Walking, Floating
Body Symmetry: Bilateral
Body Segments: Three
Limbs: 4
Tail: Simple
Manipulators: 2 good
Skeleton: Hydrostatic
Skin: Scales and shell
Skin Covering: -
Breathing: Lungs with storage
Temperature: Warm-blooded
Growth: Continuous Growth
Sexes: Two sexes
Gestation: Spawning/Pollinating
Children: r-strategy: 1d6+3, moderate care
Personality: Peaceful, Loner, Cautious, Focused, Trusting, Incurious, Unimaginative, Playful

These aliens live in rivers where they use nets made from excreted substances to catch stuff flouting downstream, and they will eat it whether it’s still alive or not.
Their bodies consist of three roughly equal sized sections covered by flexible shells while limbs are covered with scales. Front two limbs are good manipulators but the rear two are solely for locomotion. Instead of internal skeletons their limbs are held up by hydrostatic pressure.
They are warm-blooded and lay eggs that are externally pollinated. Usually they hatch about half a dozen children at once, only few of who survive to adulthood.
Personality wise they tend to be somewhat solitary, territorial creatures who live in small family units. They are peaceful and cautious creatures who don’t care to stray far from their homes and familiar territory.



Favored Environment: Coastal
Feeding: Gathering Herbivore
Movement: Swim/Slither
Body Symmetry: Asymetric
Body Segments: One (stretched)
Limbs: 3
Tail: Striker
Manipulators: 2 good, 1 bad
Skeleton: Internal
Skin: Light Exoskeleton
Skin Covering: Spines
Breathing: Lungs
Temperature: Partial Regulation
Growth: Molting
Sexes: Two sexes, Switching
Gestation: Live-bearing, Parasitic (Dead) Young
Children: k: 1or2, extensive care
Personality: Egoist, Peaceful, Social, Trusting, Inquisitive, Very Creative, Very Playful

And here we have some sort of ugly skittering creatures who spawn their young into dead animal carcasses, but are actually rather congenial folk.




Favored Environment: Woodlands
Feeding: Gathering Herbivore, Chasing Carnivore
Movement: Walking, Climbing
Body Symmetry: Bilateral
Body Segments: Two (large and small)
Limbs: 4
Tail: -
Manipulators: 2 good
Skeleton: Internal
Skin: Normal Skin
Skin Covering: Partial hair
Breathing: Lungs
Temperature: Warm-blooded
Growth: Continuous Growth
Sexes: Two sexes
Gestation: Live-bearing
Children: K-strategy: 1, extensive care
Personality: Aggressive, Social, Careful, Curious, Very Creative, Playful

And here we have humans expressed with the same system. Handmade, because the odds of generating them randomly is less than 1 per 1000 just for the physical characteristics alone.

Anonymouswizard
2015-12-09, 02:49 PM
To start, I haven't responded in a while because the thread was too interesting and I didn't want to ruin it.


Don't have...
Hive minds. They are a tired cliche.
Energy beings, especially not 'pure energy'. It doesn't even make any sense. Are they meant to be plasma based? Gaseous? Self organizing electromagnetic fields? (in which case they need some rather specific mediums to live in). Just calling them 'energy beings' is a lame copout.
Animal people. Also too cliche. At least mix and mach from several animals so that they are not immediately recognizable. Like, take the behavioral patterns from one species, appearance from completely different ones.
Humanoids. There should be many different body patterns, not just upright standing two-handed, two-legged folks.

You are not making a TV-series with a limited FX budget here. Be creative.

Okay, most of these I don't have. I do have a 'hive minded plasma being' species, but it's not clear if they are alive, or merely animate. All that's known is they are fixed by neither duct tape or WD40, it's baffled the engineers of the universe.

I have multiple nonhuman species (some of them are annoying to build the templates for, as I'm using GURPS and the spiders at the moment have 8 limbs, each a striker, a manipulator, and a locomotor). I am trying to vary my animal people from stereotypes, most of them aren't even biologically similar to the species they represent.


You realize that you've actually severely limited his options, not encouraged him to expand them, here, right? "Make them truly alien, but not in any way that anybody's done it before!"

I guess I can't do the truly alien now, Lovecraft has that in a n-dimensional bag of 1d100 SAN loss.

CharonsHelper
2015-12-09, 10:10 PM
Don't have...
Hive minds. They are a tired cliche.
Energy beings, especially not 'pure energy'. It doesn't even make any sense. Are they meant to be plasma based? Gaseous? Self organizing electromagnetic fields? (in which case they need some rather specific mediums to live in). Just calling them 'energy beings' is a lame copout.
Animal people. Also too cliche. At least mix and mach from several animals so that they are not immediately recognizable. Like, take the behavioral patterns from one species, appearance from completely different ones.
Humanoids. There should be many different body patterns, not just upright standing two-handed, two-legged folks.

You are not making a TV-series with a limited FX budget here. Be creative.

I agree with the energy beings.

However - some of the others are fine. Remember - RPGs have a different purpose than a novel/movie.

Part of what people play RPGs for is to play out their favorite tropes in a game. If I was writing a novel would I have hive-mind aliens? Probably not - as you say, it's been done. In an RPG it's fine though; its one of the foes which can be fun to go up against if you've played Starcraft, read Ender's Game, or watched Starship Troopers. I'd say the same for humanoid aliens, especially if you want them to be playable. Playing a character which is too inhuman would be jarring for a lot of players.

Kami2awa
2015-12-11, 07:14 AM
The Cthulhu mythos has some fun alien qualities that could be applied to alien cultures.

The Mi-Go seem to regard surgery in much the same way as humans regard putting on clothes. If they need to go somewhere dangerous, they will surgically alter themselves to survive it just as a human would put on a protective suit. Their encounters with humans often go badly because they don't ask for consent on this...

The Great Race of Yith are pure scientists, and see no problem with body-swapping with other beings to learn about their civilisation. They are, however, peaceful and gentle to the trapped beings during the swap.

The Deep Ones are able to interbreed outside their own species - an alien race might work in the same way as they do, with the adult stage being amphibious while the young live on land.

Another example of a very odd intelligent species are Phillip Pulman's elephant-like Mulefa, who only have 1 "hand" each and so have to work in pairs for all but the most basic tasks, and roll around their world on wheels made from a symbiotic plant seed.

You were saying no hive minds, but what about a local hive mind where each creature has half a dozen distinct bodies, perhaps specialised for different tasks, but just one consciousness?

dargman69
2015-12-11, 01:59 PM
The dead tree version I have starts with the chemistry of two planets and how that affected the development of life on them.

Wardog
2015-12-12, 08:36 PM
I'm not a fan of the idea either, but let's play devil's advocate here. I know in Star trek it's used to explain all the rubber forehead aliens. We all look so similar because we all come from DNA seeded across the galaxy that's destined/programmed to eventually develop into a humanoid shape in at least one evolutionary line.

Yeah, it's bogus, but it also is some kind of explanation for a weird feature of their universe...

I think the Star Trek explanation would have been more reasonable if they had gone for the Babylon 5 route of having the precursor aliens actively medelling in the development of the various species.

What they actually went with doesn't make much sense scientifically, because all life on Earth has a common origin in the primordial soup, so duplicating that soup on other planets means a Vulcan could still end up as different from a human as a human is from tree.

LudicSavant
2015-12-12, 08:38 PM
You realize that you've actually severely limited his options, not encouraged him to expand them, here, right? "Make them truly alien, but not in any way that anybody's done it before!"

Plenty of people have done aliens that don't fit any of those molds.