The Generic Space Opera Bestiary -- Introduction

 

I've been putting this off for a long time, because it's a lot of work with very little payoff, but I can put it off no longer: Psi-Wars needs a bestiary.  Space Opera is rather in the worst possible place when it comes to animals, because animals take a ton of work to write up, it's difficult for them to plausibly provide a challenge, the players are unlikely to be interested in exploring interesting biological facts of strange, evolutionary creatures, and realistically the GM is even limited in where he can use this critters.  But Space Opera, especially those that descend from Planetary Romance as Psi-Wars does, needs monsters that heroic, square-jawed heroes can wrestle into submission or fight off with their blaster rifle.  It needs interesting background color to remind they players that they're on an alien world.  We need them, and if we lack detail the players will notice, so it's just got to take the time that it takes.

I've complained about this before, but when I did, I had dismissed the idea of wildlife, the generic critters in the background, things like alien songbirds or alien rats or alien fish. I got some feedback that, yeah, actually, people would like that. It doesn't need a ton of detail or carefully balanced stats, but some ideas on how to make alien songbirds that a GM can toss in the background might be nice. That seemed like a nice, narrow, easily definable goal, so I began to collect my thoughts on it.  How could I make some quick and easy "wildlife" that you could pepper a sci-fi game with?

There's a few easy ways: you can steal from existing content. There's scattered space bestiaries across various pyramid issues, and perhaps at some point I should collect them all into one list.  There's also the 3e Space Bestiary, which is a decent book: it's 3e, of course, so you'd have to update the stats, but in a lot of cases, you're just looking for background color, so that hardly matters.  Finally, there's GURPS Space, which you can use to roll-up critters.  It was this last, though, that I found the most interesting and worthy of writing about in detail.

What occurred to me as I gathered my thoughts on the topic and hunted across all of my various and sundry books for inspirations was that I didn't want weird, starfish alien-critters (or, at least, not always weird starfish alien-critters).  No, I wanted space opera critters, which tend to be normal, familiar earth critters carefully reskinned. Barsoom has woola, a martian dog, and thoats, which are martian horses. Star Wars has blurgs, which are clearly alien horses, and the Bantha, which is clearly an alien elephant.  We don't actually need weird and strange alien creatures, we need familiar creatures with just a tinge of alien to them: feather-dogs and scaled, two legged raptor-horses.

GURPS Space offers a unique opportunity for this. Yes, of course, you can just use its alien creation system as intended and just randomly roll things, but I've always used it as a speculative biology system.  A certain set of constraints creates probable outcomes: herd animals tend to be gregarious; warmblooded creatures are more likely to give live birth, carnivores are more likely to have fast forms of movement and herbivores more likely to have armor. If you take a given ecological niche and then explore its edges, you can find lots of interesting variations that you can explore. Given the essential paramters of an alien horse or an alien dog, we can tweak some of the variables just slightly and see what else pops out.

Now, GURPS Space actually leaves a lot to be desired for a speculative biology system (that was never its actual intention, of course). It lacks a lot of core elements, like natural weaponry, and some of the results it offers are odd (like chasing carnivores are more likely to be gregarious, but not more likely to form large groups).  So there's only so far we can take this idea. But as I worked on this series (Yes, I've worked ahead), I began to draw on resources such as Pizard's Animalia (The closest we will ever get to a GURPS Bestiary for 4e), the speculative biology wiki and various works on animals in general (GURPS Basic and DF 5: Allies have a lot of details, and you can always look at the wikipedia entry for animals, though some can be rather barebones).  

What I found, more than anything else, is this process acts as a sort of brain storming.  By taking an essential animal idea and exploring its edges and its what-ifs, I found that ideas just spilled out.  There's been a lot about that I've been stymied on lately in Psi-Wars that I've realized come from a lack of understanding of animals: what do the Ranathim eat (what sort of domestic alien animals do they have)?  What sort of animal-based mythology do various cultures have? How does animal handling work in Psi-Wars? What are some good animal companion templates? Writing up these entries has given me a lot of inspiration and helped me see what some aspects of the setting might look like: this creature is obviously related to the Keleni and that creature is clearly from Moros, and so on.

So while this started out as an exploration of GURPS Space, what it has turned into is a realization that what I need is just subtle remixes of some existing creatures. I've also come to realize that there are a lot of interesting animals out there, which means this might blow up, but I'll try to keep it focused.  I have also found that there are some obvious niches in GURPS Space that might not exist as famously on Earth, so I also have some options for obvious speculative entries.

Introducing the Generic Space Opera Bestiary

"It's not an animated movie without a thing that's not a dog acting like a dog."

— Producer, Onward Pitch Meeting (via TV Tropes)

Let's explain how this series will work. Each entry will reference a base animal, one that's common and easily understood by the average Westerner (like myself). The point is not necessarily to explore the animal itself, but what the Speculative Wiki calls a guild, the biology of a creature exploiting a particular niche: bats and birds are both flying insectivores but they're not especially closely related.  For our purposes, though, they may fill their appropriate niche well enough to be lumped into the same category. After all, an alien flying insectivore will be neither a bird nor a bat (nor a dragonfly) but something else entirely; what matters to us are the lessons flying insectivores teach us, not the specifics of bird biology, except insofar as they inspire further ideas.  Which is, of course, the other half of this discussion: we're looking at how this creature will interact with a story.  A dog, for example, is often a bloodhound, whose purpose is to help the hero track a target.  We might have aliens that fill a similar role without necessarily being mammalian chasing carnivores.

So, after discussing the intent of the entry, I'll dive into how such a creature would be represented in GURPS Space.  I'll tend to try to keep it as close to the original creature as possible, but note that GURPS Space has some of its own ideas and cutoffs.  I'll be more or less using those, but this is simply for convenience: GURPS Space is an older work, and there are some better ways to handle particular traits: I will treat GURPS Space as a guide rather than as gospel.

After that, I will either create or reference a statblock for the generic creature.  These stats aren't especially important, nor will they be exhaustive: the point of (for example) an alien space rat is not to be the definition of a rat, but just to give you a rough idea of what one might look like and act as something you could just grab and play with.  Though in most cases you won't.  An alien space dog, without a serious boost, just isn't a threat to a space marine in power armor, or a psychic space knight.  In practice, you'll either not bother with the statblock, or you'll simplify it.

After that, I'll explore a few variant ideas and offer some lenses.  What might the same niche look like with an alternate body layout or different sensory suite or a different psychological make-up?  Some variations will be exceedingly obvious: dog with scales instead of fur, for example. I won't bother with anything that simple.  I'll tend to assume you want to see more extreme examples than that.  This, again, won't be exhaustive.  Doubtless, after seeing some of these, you'll think of several new variations on your own.  That's rather the point: to inspire some simple space animals to pepper your setting with.

This is not a Psi-Wars series.  I will use this as inspiration for Psi-Wars, but the creatures in here are not Psi-Wars creatures.  Instead, this is just how my process works: find a way to brainstorm, branch off of the brainstorm inspiration and then release them to my blog for your enjoyment.  The final step in the process will be to take the best elements, combine them together, give them names and give them write-ups. That last part won't be here, but will end up on the blog (I may discuss my reasoning on the blog, I don't know, we'll see).  I'll try to do a few of these a week, and I'll index them on this post, in case you want to quickly reference them, and update them as we go.

The current write-ups are:

• The Alien Rat
• The Alien Songbird
• The Alien Cat
• The Alien Dog
• The Alien Deer
• The Alien Pig
• The Alien Cow
• The Alien Tiger
• The Alien Bear