Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Pigs

 

Generic Alien Pig

Homer: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Lisa, honey, are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?

Lisa: No.

Homer: Ham?

Lisa: No.

Homer: Pork chops?

Lisa: Dad! Those all come from the same animal!

Homer: [Chuckles] Yeah, right Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal. – The Simpsons, Pigs of Eden

Pigs aren’t likely the sort of animal most people think of when it comes to interesting space animals, but pigs make a huge impact on our civilization as domesticated animals. Thus, this offers me an excuse to discuss something particularly near and dear to my heart, which is space opera cuisine. What are space aliens even eating?

But pigs can be more interesting than that, so interesting in fact that they actually have an entry in GURPS Basic: they can be boar. I’ll get into space deer later, but boar and deer tend to be the classic hunting prey, though they’re quite distinct in their symbolism and imagery, with the deer requiring cunning to defeat, and the boar requiring bravery. Do aliens have a creature on their world that is both delicious and requires great fortitude to defeat?

 

Alien Pigs in GURPS Space

Pigs are, famously, omnivores. And yes, they will hunt down and kill animals according to the research I did, though they tend to favor scavenging or easy-to-kill prey, such as fallen nestlings. And, naturally, they tend to be walkers (though pigs are built for digging with their head, though I wouldn’t call them burrowers), and I think their native territory tends to be woodlands.

When it comes to size, pigs seem to clock in at about SM +0, though it evidently varies and SM+1 isn’t out of the question.

When it comes to their Body Plan, again, we have the normal, bilateral, two limbs per side, no tail this time, and no manipulating limbs. Pigs have an internal skeleton.

For Skin, pigs by default, don’t have skin: they have fur. It’s just that they drop to the “normal skin” level of the fur entry, but wild pigs definitely have thick, bristling fur. I’m not exactly sure where the entry should go: I tend to lean towards fur over hide (for DR 1), but I can’t seem to find much support for this other than their reputation for being tough and a single snippet of text from wikipedia referring to “their subcutaneous armour” and Pizard does give them DR 1 in the wild boar entry. If we went directly for skin, one with a layer of blubber would be an interesting way of expressing their weight, but it would imply a rather arctic sort of pig. Similarly, the same level of defense for scales would give them Heavy Scales (DR 3), thick feathers (temperature tolerance 2) or a heavy exoskeleton (DR 3)

When it comes to Sex, normal pigs have two sexes, live-bearing and they tend to have 4-6 piglets per litter, suggesting Median to Moderate R strategy.

When it comes to Senses, given their connection with digging and no special benefits to superior sight, we might expect bad vision and/or colorblindness. Their hearing is probably decent, suggesting at least an extended range, though parabolic hearing seems common among herbivorous mammals. Touch should, perhaps, be rather good, certainly at least human level touch (I expect the snout is quite sensitive). Finally, pigs have a famously great sense of smell given their ability to track down truffles, so we might expect discriminatory smell. Peripheral vision is likely common.

When it comes to Alien Minds, we probably expect alien pgs to be “Low Intelligence” on average, though as omnivores, they push towards higher intelligence, so a little extra IQ isn’t crazy (though their tendency towards r-strategy might counter this). The average mating behavior would lean towards permanent pair bonds, but what I can find from actual boars seems more like harem mating without a permanent harem. Regardless, social organization seems to focus on the “Sounder” which might be classed as a “small group.”

This gives them a generic Psychological Profile of Chauvinism +2 (Racial Intolerance), Concentration +0, Curiosity +1 (Curious 12), Egoism +0 or +1 (depending on how you class their reproduction), Empathy +1 (Responsive), Gregariousness +0, Imagination +1 and Suspicion +0.

Generic Alien Pig Stats

Use the stats on page B458, though note that Pizard has more detailed stats here. I would go with Pizard’s domesticated pigs as a basis (as I do with some of the variations below).

Variations

Infinite Meat Pig

If the point of our pig is to eat meat, there are some interesting possibilities: there are animals (typically shellfish) that will regrown limbs and I’ve read of (but cannot find a current reference to) fisherman who will find the animal trim its claws, and then send it back and repeat the process, “harvesting” the meat. There are lizards that drop their tail when a predator grabs it, which both means the predator no longer has the main bulk of the animal, and a little bit of tail to snack on. Why not the same with our alien pigs? It becomes a perfect meat animal.

Naturally, this suggests at least Regrowth, and we could take it another level and offer at least Rapid Healing all the way up to Slow Regeneration (Bio-Tech suggests that regular regeneration is plausible, but the rapidity with with which that would generate proteins is the sort of economic idea I don’t want to tackle here).

None of this necessarily affects anything else about the pig, but I rather think it suggests a longer lifespan, which also suggests a greater level of investment. This doesn’t necessarily have to be so: most animals that regrow their limbs tend to be simple creatures with a strong-R strategy, and their regrowth is more of a masochistic survival strategy from a creature doomed to lose against predators and the regrowth is mostly a side-effect of their biology. Even so, if we went with a Strong-K, long-lived pig, this averages a roll of 10 on the Animal Intelligence level, which put them squarely at IQ 5… which their stats already put them at. Oh well. We could maybe justify removing Bestial, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide on the morality of keeping a presapient species penned up so you can regularly dismember it for its tasty drumsticks.

Lens (Infinite Meat Pig): Regeneration (Slow); Regrowth; Tail.

Maggot Pig

If we picture a pig as a walking ball of skin-clad meat, what might an alien version of that look like? Naturally, I thought of a giant maggot, as any normal, sane person would. Insects often go through a metamorphosis, and they need to build up plenty of stored energy to do so. Thus, they consume a great deal of food and store the calories to prepare for the change. If such a creature were eaten shortly before their metamorphosis, this might maximize their nutritional content!

So what might such a creature look like? Most pictures I found of giant maggot concept art (yes, I’ve ruined my pinterest recommendations) looks more like multi-limbed worms with flesh bodies than creatures with an exoskeletal carapace. With that in mind, such a creature might have a stronger emphasis on digging than a normal pig already has. We can increase the number of segments to three, so it has six limbs, with a combination skeleton of exoskeleton (its limbs, mouth nd core) and hydrostatic (the big, pulsing mass of white flesh that makes up the majority of the creature). It might have a soft skin exterior, but with some armored parts (the face and limbs). It would probably be cold blooded (and need a nice, warm place to stay and grow). Naturally, rather than having continuous growth, this creature undergoes Metamorphosis. That is, however, not pertinent to our current stats. Given its insectile nature, we’re likely looking at an egg-laying species with a strong-R strategy.

We might reduce its vision even further; it’s probably going to live in a dark burrow somewhere feasting on whatever was prepared for it, and relying on smell and feel anyway, so it might have something like Near Blindness. It’s unlikely to have a better sense of smell (Pigs already have a great sense of smell) but it might have a better sense of touch, perhaps Vibration Sense. It will probably have a vastly inferior IQ, however, but be used to living in much larger swarms (you might refer to a large group of maggot pigs as an “infestation.”)

This would give us a new psychological profile: Chauvinism +2 (Racial Intolerance), Concentration +0, Curiosity -1 (Staid), Egoism -1 (Humble), Empathy +0, Gregariousness +1 to +3 (depending on if you think of them as “Hive” or not), Imagination +0 and Suspicion +1 (Fearful 1).

This is likely sufficiently different to be worth a new profile; I personally picture these as smaller than normal pigs, but that’s not strictly necessary.

What do they turn into after they go through metamorphosis? A big insect, of course! What big insect? I don’t know. Perhaps it’ll be a beautiful giant butterfly, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

ST: 7 (9 HP)	Basic Speed: 5.0	SM: -1
DX: 10	Basic Move: 4
IQ: 1	Perception: 12
HT: 10	Will: 10	DR: 1 (Head/legs only)

Traits: Acute Smell 3; Appearance (Hideous); Blindness (Detect Like and Dark); Congenial; Cuddles with warm-blooded beings; Discriminatory Smell; Domestic Animal; Gluttony (12); Hexapod; Reduced Consumption 2 (Cast Iron Stomach); Sharp Teeth; Subsonic Hearing (Must be in contact with ground); Weakness (Chemical Irritants/Salt on skin, 1d/second)

Giant Murder Pig

Pigs seem harmless, but their wild ancestors (or wild descendants, if allowed to go feral) are most definitely not safe. Boar spears had big cross-pieces for a reason: they kept the boar from just pushing farther up the spear to gore you. There’s no reason an alien pig would be any safer.

We don’t really need to speculate as to what such a creature would look like. Pizard has stats for wild boar that go up to 500 kilograms, which begins to border on the size of giant warthogs. The stats are close enough to the somewhat more gameable (and more lethal) Boar from GURPS DF 5: Allies, page 6.

But in case you’ve been messing with various stats and want to layer a lens on your pig (for example, giant murder maggot pigs), here’s a lens:

Lens (Murder Pig): +10 ST; +5 HP; +1 Basic Move; +1 SM; +2 DR; Bad Temper (12); Berserk (12); Combat Reflexes; High Pain Threshold; Impaling Striker (Tusks, Cannot Parry, Limited Arc, Front); Recovery; Unfazeable.

Sea Pig

I had mentioned the idea of “skin with blubber” and that seems like an interesting option, but it makes me think of an aquatic mammal. We could make an aquatic variation of the big: a tusked creature with flippers and a fat body that… hey, that critter looks awfully familiar! We can easily conceive of amphibious pigs as something like a walrus or a hippo, depending on our purposes and intent. We can change from fur to skin (with blubber), and either give them Semi-Aquatic (flippers) or Amphibious (they’re just especially good at swimming). In both cases, they’ll need some level of Doesn’t Breath; the most fitting variation is probably Oxygen Storage.

Lens (Sea Pig): Improve DR to 4 and Temperature Tolerance to 3; add No Legs (Semi-Aquatic) and Doesn’t Breath (Oxygen Storage)

Lens (River Pig): Improve DR to 4 and Temperature Tolerance to 3; add Amphibious and Doesn’t Breath (Oxygen Storage).

What Do Space Pigs Taste Like?

Alas, this is not the sort of thing RPGs often get into, because people would rather fight monsters than debate what they’d taste like. So, after some research, I can tell you that, for the most part, meat tastes like meat. Chances are, we couldn’t even process alien proteins, but assuming we could, the machinery that makes up muscle is probably going to be the same everywhere, especially in a space opera that doesn’t sit there worrying about alternate digestible protein bases for musculature. So assuming we can base our assumptions off earthly animals, we can make some broad suggestions as to how to describe alien meat.

We can break meat down, roughly, into four groups

• White Meat

• Red Meat

• Game

• Fish

White meat (“Chicken breast meat”) is close to pure protein and water. In a sense, it’s “meat with no additional flavors.” This is why so many things “taste like chicken.” It’s a good, generic default for the flavor of an alien.

Red meat (“Steak”) is rich in myoglobin, which helps the muscles utilize oxygen. “Red meat” is meat that is better at long-term endurance, such as standing or walking for long periods. If your animal is a creature that puts sustained pressures on its muscles, they might taste more beefy.

Some meat (Venison, for example) might be described as gamey. In my experience liver is a good example of what gamey meat tastes like. This is largely the result of a more intense umami flavor, an especially savory meat, and it’s far more common in long-lived animals (domestic animals tend to be slaughtered quite young), or in aged meats (this was, in fact, one of the reasons medieval nobility “aged” their meat, though dry aging has some other culinary benefits). It’s arguably just a more intense flavor of meat.

Fish is arguably “just” a white meat, but its suffused with certain chemicals to allow the creature to remain submerged in water for extended periods of time. Most aquatic creatures should “taste like fish.”

As an aside, other meat is possible. Prasinohaema virens, the green tree skink, has bright green blood and meat. Green blood is a staple in sci-fi, and it might result in green, rather than red, meat. In the case of the green tree skink, this is the result biliverdin, a form of bile pigment that might be a defense mechanism against malaria. I can’t find any details on what green tree skink meat tastes like, and it might be toxic. Octopuses and many crustaceans use hemocyanin to give their blood a distinct blue hue, though it should be noted this doesn’t result in blue meat, but we might expect a blue meat to taste a bit like crab or octopus, but with a more intense flavor. It should be noted that hemocynanin is a less efficient means of transporting oxygen, so you might not see it in warm-blooded creatures.

Beyond that, the real flavor carrier of meat is fat, as many flavors are fat soluble, and a variety of fats end up jammed into fat cells. What flavors carry in fat? The answer is “A lot of them!” For example, squirrel meat supposedly has a notably “nutty” flavor, likely because the oil compounds from the nuts they consume end up in their fat content. Hot spices, like capsicum or the “numbing heat” of hydroxy alpha sanshool (found in sichuan peppers or the Japanese pepper) carry especially well in fats too. Essentially, any “fat soluble flavor” could potentially end up in their bodies. These make the most sense if it’s something they consume, but the animal might produce the fat or flavor too; some animals may do this as a defensive mechanism, suffusing their meat with a particular chemical to alter their taste, such as the sleeper shark and its strong, ammonia taste caused by suffusing its flesh with urea.

Finally, most meat will just taste like meat. It’s all largely the same material, barring unique alien bio-chemistry. The primary way to flavor meat is via cooking method. A leg of smoked turkey tasted very similar to a leg of smoked ham, and well-seared ostrich meat resembles well-seared steak. Many animals chosen as meat animals are chosen because of their ease of domestication and the amount of meat production, rather than specific concerns of taste.