A Zero-Template Retrospective

 And that's it for my Zero-Template Challenge.  I hope you liked it, but judging from the comments and the responses on my discord, you did.

Let's touch on the specific races.

Karkadann

They seem good, a nice addition, and people were impressed by how much you could do with just a few features.  I think they highlight the core benefit of this challenge: it forces you to think about what makes your race different rather than pre-spending points somewhere (a DX +2 race with Combat Reflexes is probably much less interesting to a player than the Karkadann).  Someone also expressed surprise at the amount of lore; that's a lot easier to do when you have a lot of lore to draw on (world-building tends to snowball after awhile).

So they're in.  I'll work out some additional details.  I don't think they'll remain as a zero-template race, but most of the changes will be to either exaggerate particular elements or to give them a little more obvious physiology.

Vithani

Uh, these were passionately received.  It resulted in a lot of very heated commentary, not against them, not against one another, just the sort of commentary I often see when passions run high.  People really liked this race a lot.  It got comments, it got people planning characters, it got deep discussions about their proper place in the universe, what symbolism they needed to be a part of, etc.

They're definitely going in, and like the Karkadann, they'll get some adjustment... though less than I initially thought!  I will probably price things more fairly (Low Pressure Lungs should give points back, given how rarely it will benefit them, unless they also get some sort of extremely short-term vacuum support, which they might get, I don't know).  I'm rather inclined to at least keep Night-Adapted Vision; I might keep Ultravision too; people weren't too bothered by it, but I feel like it's the sort of thing a GM or PC would forget.  There might be some ways to tone it down, though.

Aura is popular, so we'll keep it.  I may reword their destiny, and give them back Dreamer.

I think the big lesson of the Vithani, other than sexy aliens with good art are popular, is that you can probably get a lot more mileage out of Power-Ups 9 than you think.  If the attributes are reworked for one specific race, it can create a very different sort of experience for that race.  I don't think I'd use it that much in Psi-Wars unless it's for a race that has a very different mode of existence, but it would be fascinating to approach a truly alien species in a more "hard sci-fi" game, especially a race that, say, has a very different form of intelligence. If you're looking for crazy inspiration for how to make a race play in a different way, consider looking though PU9.

The Herne

They got a more positive response than I thought, with a lot of discussion around the feasibility of the seasonal traits. Based on that discussion, I don't think I'll bring the Herne into the game.

First, a sapient race on Arcadius is already iffy.  I want that world to be a bit fey-touched, so people tell stories and they may experience things, but there's little actual concrete evidence of a race, and it might be something like sapient psychic deer or something causing all the commotion. Introducing the Herne would break that.  That's not necessarily a problem, we can discard this idea of a strange world and just replace it with a strange race (and anyway, the Labyrinth is already rather like this), but when you combine it with the second, it becomes clear this is more trouble than it's worth.

The bigger problem is obviously the seasonality.  But why? It's parasitic design, and my choices for fixing it generally amount to removing it, which suggests its a bad idea.  Let me explain.

Someone pointed out that one reason you'd want to play this race is to have a shifting toolbox, which I definitely agree with and was one of the comments that made me go "Aha!"  You want, as a Herne player, to be forced between multiple different modes; like if you have a social or combat mode, and you're in social mode and partaking in a heist, then you want to try to talk your way through. If you suddenly find yourself in combat mode, you'll shift to fighting instead.  An external force controls how you interact, and this is interesting.  But it can be troublesome, and so you might want to have some measure of control, but if you can control it, it ceases to function like a shifting toolbox: if you're in social mode but would rather fight, you just change back to combat mode and fight.  Then the interesting element is removed as just a small, weird speed bump to doing what you want.  If you want to have some player agency in their mode, some ability to influence it, but you don't want them to just flip between two modes, you might give them a variety of modes and let them shift between one or two, but most of their modes are locked out a time.  That gives them the flexibility to shift a little without losing the strange, mercurial nature of the character.

But it gets a lot more complex. The player needs to know a bunch of rules, the GM needs to know a bunch of rules, I need to write a bunch of rules, and what benefit is all of this complexity? The player is constantly bugging the GM to tell him about a season on a remote world and then sighing and telling the players that he cannot do the thing because it's the wrong season.  The rest of the players have no connection to this, and the only reason the GM knows this at all is because ONE SINGLE PLAYER decided to play as the Herne.  I do believe this is that the kids these days call Parasitic Design. So the solution is either to remove it as irrelevant or make it relevant to everyone.

One of my rules at work is "if it hurts, do it more." I think this applies, in a sense, to gameplay.  If it matters at all, then everyone should have an opportunity to interface with it. It should affect everyone's gameplay. It might not affect them directly, and it might not be something they even know about, but they should be able to capitalize on knowledge of it, if they want, without a major investment.  A good example of this is the Deep Engine: it's a secret that only certain sorcerers can directly access.  That said, even if you're not a sorcerer who is in the know, it's also a great source of bad guys, monsters, dungeons, etc.  You can run across Deep Engine Sites, for example, so its existence and knowledge is useful to the GM for more than just that once sorcerer.

So what if the Herne were influenced not by the season of Arcadius, but by the galactic season? In the Great Book of Destiny, I refer to these as Hours, and they would tie into Fortune-Telling, what sort of Destinies people could get, and might be something that other people could hang sorceries or other powers on. The Herne, then, would be tied to something that's useful for the GM to know for reasons other than just the Herne.  

Of course, this also sounds more like something the Vithani should be associated with than a race on Arcadius, and I wanted the third "Master" race of the Umbral Rim to have something akin to this, as this is a great thing to hang an "occulted system" on, if certain modifiers or available spells change based on a mysterious arrangement of stars or other things and you have to learn to read those and see how they interact with other elements of the game.  This third "Master" race was also set at the fringe of the Umbral Rim, which is where the Vithani are, and so we start to see some connections.  I'm not saying the Vithani are the third master race, but they might come from the same region, and a picture starts to emerge of a particular region of the Umbral Rim and its history and relationship with the early Ranathim Tyranny. 

Such a system becomes something integrated into the rest of the game, and greater complexity is much less of a problem, because knowing that complexity is rewarding to more than just the Herne player. But it also ceases to be something I'd associate with the Herne and Arcadius.  We could change it instead to be something more a reaction to the ambient temperature of the world, which starts to borrow on ideas form World-Walking, which is your available options depend on the nature of the world you're on, which is interesting for a world-hopping campaign, but then again the Herne lose their unusual connection to an unusual world.

So either way I see it, while this mechanic might be perfectly fine, I feel like the Herne are the wrong place to put it.  So we'll park it, park the race and see if we can cannibalize the ideas for a different race or set of systems.

The Rejects

The Blue-Skinned Arctic Monkeys saw some positive responses.  Infravision, blue skin and being naturally accustomed to colder weather is interesting enough to make someone stand out.  They're not especially interesting to play, but they're also not just a reorientation of points.  Humans aren't especially interesting to play, and this race is about that interesting. I'll think about this one. Psi-Wars doesn't have a lot of arctic content, but we can also borrow ideas from here for a "hot-blooded" race too.

The Gasping Maga-Pillars had more interest than I expected, but mostly discussions of alternate forms. I think there are some interesting ideas here, but few of them have anything to do with the actual design here and more the ideas they inspire. The Sylvan Spiral Needs Races Badly, but this one isn't it.

The Deep-Song Triton-Men got a laugh.  This one felt more like vented frustration with the challenge than a genuinely interesting race.

The Void-Dancers got more interest than I expected.  I think we can afford to have a vacuum-native race somewhere, but it feels more like a background element unless they have means by which they can interact with the rest of the part in a more face-to-face manner without always being in armor.

That said, always being in armor is actually an interesting racial concept. The Arkhaians sort of do this already, but there's room for more, something like the Breen, the Vorlon or one of the earlier conceptions of the Mandalorians.  As I commented before, I'm trying hard to get people out of their armor, but a race that is always in its armor is distinct, depending on what the armor is like.  It's not something I really touched on much, but a race native to a very different gas mixture might have something like that. I still wouldn't call it a feature, though, but a disadvantage.

The Challenge

I had fun.  It generated a lot of discussion and seemed to inspire a lot.  It also told me there's a lot of hunger for minor races, regardless of their point cost.  A proposed variation on the challenge is a race worth no more than +/- 5 points, with no more than an absolute value of 10 points in traits, advantages, disadvantages etc.  I will note that I often found features to be more sweeping than perks or 5 point traits so you'll still find it a fairly limiting challenge.

It did get me thinking about how much of my racial templates are largely cosmetic features, things like "Horns and fangs and teeth and tails." I wonder if it would be worth a sidebar discussion about removing those traits, or ignoring them, for greater simplicity. It's a rather fine-grained accounting to worry about minor levels of night vision of +1 crushing damage from a headbutt, even though these are certainly advantages.

The Zero-Template Challenge: The Rejects

 No, this isn't about a race called "the Rejects." I came up with a bunch of races that didn't make the cut because I couldn't quite make them work. I thought I'd lay them out and discuss some of the ideas that I rejected, because they might prove fruitful to you, dear reader, or they might inspire something with a looser set of restrictions than this fairly harsh challenge.

The Arctic Monkey

Features: Blue Skin [0]; Digitigrade [0]; Infravision [0]; Tail [0] Temperature Range (5° to 60°) [0]

So this was my first scratched-pad example that popped into my head.  Most of it works fine, and it even makes sense: this is a race native to a very cold environment and there are likely to be large temperature gradients, so it has learned to "see" by that temperature gradient. IR vision arguably has less problems with it than Ultravision does, so it could even prove to be a useful, if blurry, feature to have.

I have an issue with temperature range, though. A recurring theme you'll see throughout this series is that features look like disadvantages in the wrong context. It's not to say they're poorly balanced, but if you have a tightly defined set of assumptions about play, the more someone veers outside of that, the more of a problem they will have.  This race isn't too bad: they're mostly going to complain that you need to turn the heating down to the point where humans (Ranathim, Keleni, Karkadann, Mogwai...) start rubbing their arms and complaining that it's cold (Asrathi, Gaunt and Traders, in their space suits, might not mind, though). In an adventure, though, they're going to suffer a lot more in the heat. For example, in 90° requires an HT roll every 30 minutes to not lose one FP; the Arctic Monkey would need the same, but would lose 2 FP every time they failed the roll, and would start to lose fatigue at reasonable temperatures, like 70°.  This isn't so bad, not untenable, and balanced by the fact that they'd be fine when Ranathim are questioning their wardrobe choices.  But it does encourage us to ponder a question:

Who cares?

When's the last time you played Psi-Wars and made people roll HT for the heat?  I've run 4 games now, and only one was ever in an environment where characters might be concerned about heat. Much of a game is going to take place climate controlled environments, and characters have access to climate controlled armor.  And I've been fighting to get people out of armor.  If we made a race of sultry Ice Queens, or truly weird and horrifying creatures from beneath the ice, how are you going to know if they're covered up all the time?  Worse, when it does come up, nobody is going to remember, because it comes up so rarely!

There's a few things we can do to fix this, if we really wanted to focus on it.  First, let's change how this temperature thing works.  I quite like the mechanics of Low-Pressure Lungs, as it's easier to remember bands than it is to remember specific numbers. Humans risk losing 1 fatigue every 30 minutes when t's below 35°, or above 80° (though we can simplify this latter number to 90°).  They suffer a penalty to HT to resist this loss at -10° and lose one additional fatigue for all exertions after it hits 90° and 2 additional fatigue at over 120°.  If we wanted to "shift" our arctic aliens one band colder, that would mean they would be fine likely from about -10° to 35° (45°, rather than 55°); we might say they don't start suffering HT penalties for the cost until -60°, and they suffer the increased fatigue cost from 35° to 80° (55° band rather than 30° band) and then +2 additional fatigue from 90° to 120° and they start to burn after 120°.  Is that a feature? Well, I think technically what you're looking at is a slightly reduced comfort band (a quirk) and a slightly increased "hot" band (maybe a weird variation of Temperature Tolerance as a perk?), so probably a feature, and it's easier to remember: if it's normal for a human, it's hot for an Arctic Monkey, and if it's hot for a human, it's double-hot for an arctic monkey, and it's Cold for a human, it's normal for an Arctic Monkey, et cetera, you get the idea.

Next, I'd want to make the player of the Arctic Monkey think about temperature a lot. I'd give them technology that depends on low temperatures (quantum computers? Superconductors?) or some sort of benefit from natural ambient cold, as opposed to climate-controlled cold (or at least some reason to take the armor off and be subject to natural environmental conditions), and possibly some ability to adjust temperature (Cryokinesis).

That brings us to the second problem with this design: it doesn't really do anything interesting. You're hot everywhere, and you see in IR you look funny. A funny look is already "enough" for a visual medium, but for a game, we want a funny mechanic to emphasize our alien nature.  The proposals for making temperature more important would help, though.

I think if I turned this into a final race, I'd keep the blue skin, the lowered temperature band rather than the weird temperature tolerance, the IR vision and ditch the digitigrade and tail.  Add some temperature mechanic gameplay and I think we'd be alright.  I think blue-skinned, red-eyed people with white-or-black hair would be great.  Put them in the Arkhaian and make them allies of the Empire, perhaps with one achieving great success in the Imperial Navy, I dunno.

The Gasping Maggo-Pillar

Features: Born Biter 1 [0]; Light Exoskeleton [0]; High Pressure Lungs [0]; No Legs (Slithers) [0]; Potential Form [0].

Most of my flailing about with Zero-Template races was an effort to find a truly bizarre and physiologically strange race that I could do for zero points and fit into the Sylvan Spiral.  The zero point No Legs options seemed promising, so I started with Slithers.

"Slithers" would imply something like a naga: the race would still have a head and two arms, but would have a serpentine tail.  However, that also implies a degree of flexibility, or possibly a constriction attack, etc, all of which would cost points, so that was out. Rolls would almost be better, with something like a robot that has a humanoid torso and head atop a ball-structure that it moves around on, but that's not an alien, that's a robot.  

What else could reasonably limit the flexibility of a slitherer?  Well, what if we gave it an exoskeleton? Worms are still highly flexible, but maggots might not be. Can you have a 0-point exoskeleton? Here's what Space has to say:

On small insects (a rigid exoskeleton) is not much different from skin

Hmmm. Okay. Maybe. But it also doesn't cover the costs of much.  If a light exoskeleton justified buying DR and allowed you to avoid sunburn, it's a perk, right? Plus I think most people would imagine at least a DR 1. And in any case, a man-sized maggot is going to be horrifying.  That means a disad, and we can't do that.  What sort of slithering insectoid can we have? Oh, what about a caterpillar? Why must I always go with maggots? Ugh, anyway. They don't really slither so much as have lots and lots of legs, but I think we could arguable wave the difference; it might be a slithering thing that looks like a colorful caterpillar and have nice, soft fuzzy bits that make people go "Aww, I don't feel the immediate urge to murder it."

Born Biter is more me playing with whatever features I could jam on, and High Pressure Lungs might be, I dunno, it comes from a dense jungle world rich in oxygen (explaining its large size). The X-pressure Lungs are another good example of "features that feel like disadvantages" because I've never seen a Psi-Wars game take place in an environment with high atmospheric pressure.  At least you can sort of justify Low-Pressure Lungs by claiming that an asteroid has Trace atmosphere, you can treat it as Very Thin (You'll still suffocate, but you can walk around without a space suit on), and a moon might have Very Thin atmosphere, which you can breath like Thin, so it's plausible that it will come up, but it's implausible that high pressure worlds will come up unless we went out of our way to make them, likely the world the race is from, making them a "Dryad" race that never wants to leave its "Tree."  So, it's neat, but I'd ditch it.

Finally, if we're talking a magg... caterpillar, then we're talking about a larval form. Template Toolkits 2 has an interesting feature called potential form. It means that the character can make a one-way transformation at some point.  Our maggot caterpillar can become a horrifying beautiful fly-demon butterfly.  This means we can push our complex, expensive template down the line.

But why stop at one thing it can become? One interesting concept might be a race with more than two genders. How would that work? I don't know, we could do some research.  There are options like all three need to be involved (very exotic), or you run into things that are all able to breed, but the result of their breeding creates different things (an X and a Y always result in more Xs and Ys, but a Z and an X might result in a Z or a Y, and a Z and a Y might result in a Z or an X).  I seem to remember reading about actual animals that have this sort of construction.  But we might also imagine our race a bit like an ant: after it hits maturity, it morphs into one of the "Castes" of the hive and is permanently in that state: warrior, worker, queen, etc.  So we could give the player a choice of templates to choose from once they mature.

This is neat, but I'm not sure how nice this is when it comes to gameplay. In practice, you're just delaying your choice of alien race, and then choosing one later on. If you knew up front that you wanted to play a maggo-pillar queen why not, just, play a maggo-pillar queen right off the bat?  There's some narrative tension to be gained from the change, especially if the player has no control ("Let's roll to see what you become") but whatever benefits you get are lost once the change has happened (and a random change has, uh, some potential downsides as far as player experience is concerned).

I think a more interesting mechanic might be a race that can change its form at will.  Perhaps they cocoon for a day, and when they come out, they're in an upgraded form that can only last for so long before they tire, sleep and revert to their original form. This becomes like an intense, physical form of spell-preparation, where you know what you want, what you plan, and you build for it, but once you're set, you're committed.  But only for awhile, and then you can play with something else.

This concept arguably encroaches on the schticks of the Vikuthim or the Ithin-Kor, but I think there's enough room for multiple shape-changing bug-things, given different bug forms.

Incidentally, one concept I toyed with and discarded was this, from Template Toolkits 2:

If a race has a mouth, as most biological races do, and its parts offer more extensibility, flexibility, and opposability than do human mouthparts (e.g., a parrot’s beak and tongue), this can be pressed into service as an arm, usually Short and with No Physical Attack

"Is that maggo-pillar holding a blaster in its mouth? Can it shoot like that? Oh he just threw the safety with his side mandible. He's... gargling something threatening around the gun, I think we better listen to... whatever it is he's saying."

If I had points, I'd be so tempted to have an armless maggo-pillar with a crazy flexible mouth that has the sort of precision and dexterity to pick locks, fire blasters, type on a computer (leaving wet, sticky keys), etc.

The Deep-Song Walrus-Man

Features: Doesn't Breath (Gills) [0]; Semi-Aquatic [0]; Subsonic Speech [0]

Did you know a Tritonoid morphology is a feature? You can be a fish with a man's body for zero points.  Of course, this is useless in most Psi-Wars games, because the action generally doesn't take place in the water.  Doesn't Breath (Gills) isn't such a problem: we can give the character some sort of water-breathing apparatus to walk around in the air. But being unable to walk on land is a problem.  Semi-Aquatic allows it, though.  The character would have a lower half of not a fish, but a seal: walking its four flipper-legs.  Well, waddling.  It would average a ground-move of 1. But hey, water-move of 5!  Finally, subsonic speech is a feature if it's the only thing you can do. Does that give you Subsonic hearing [5] or [0] for free? I don't know. I hope not the latter.

The problem? Nobody would play this thing. This is the prime example of "feature as free disadvantage." You swap water for air, but air comes up a lot more than water.  You swap sea for land, but land comes up more than sea.  You swap the subsonic for the sonic, but that just means you can talk to the Menhiri and nobody else.  Good job! It's possible you can't even hear humans!

There's some interesting ideas in a race that breaths a different medium than humans do. It's not the end of the world to give them a breathing apparatus, like the Kel Dor from Star Wars, and it just becomes part of their aesthetic. But this does mean that they have a vulnerability nobody else does (their gas mask) and how often will this be reversed, so that they'll be in an environment where they can breath, but nobody else can? We could introduce such environments, but then we're introducing such environments and it's another thing to track. It's also another reason for everyone to be in armor all the time.  I'd also want the character to get something out of their unique atmosphere. Water, thus, is a more plausible option.

But I can't see the rest working.  There's no hook to intrigue a player other than "Water!" and it's more hassle than it's worth.

The Void Dancer

Secondary Characteristics: SM +1 [0]; 

Features: Doesn't Breath (Anaerobic) [0]; Native Gravity 0g [0]; Native Pressure 0 atm [0]; Signals (Vague) [0]

So it seems possible to have "Doesn't breath" without needing any air at all (again, Template Toolkit 2), and you seem to be able to define your own native pressure and gravity. Zero-G natives are certainly acceptable. Is 0 atm permissible? Can you be "native" to vacuum?  That might seem like "vacuum support" for free, but we can suggest that the race would really struggle in atmosphere: if we treated as "Trace Pressure Lungs" then they would treat Very Thin as Dense (breathable, but with difficulty), Thin as Very Dense (It could potentially visit a Vithani girlfriend, but it would need a resperator) and Normal atmosphere as crushingly heavy Super Dense. That seems plausible.

Signals (Vague) is from Template Toolkits 2: the race is able to flash a light or change color in a way to communicate with others of its kind, but it does so in a way that's not as good as proper speech.  This makes it a feature, and explains how they can "talk" in space.  

What it in effect means is that our gangly, strange void-walker would need to be in a space suit to be in a normal environment, but could skitter about free outside of the ship.  That's... not the worst mechanic.  Vacuum happens, so its traits don't completely isolate it from the game.  However, I don't really see a sufficient upside to make it an intriguing character, and most void-based characters or races aren't built like this.  We might expect instead a race that had Doesn't Breath of either the Oxygen Storage variety or it just straight-up doesn't need to breath, and Vacuum support, so it can enter a spaceship just fine without a suit.  We might also expect some form of space-based propulsion, so it can maneuver around in space too.

The idea of a space-based race seems fine to me, it's just not something I'd do with features.

The Zero-Template Challenge: The Herne, the Forest-Walkers

Rumors and whispers had long swirled through the colonist population of Arcadius that the world was inhabited. Finally, when Sovereign fell, the Herne revealed themselves and spoke in flawless Galactic Common: "Our season has come." They sought and gained a seat on the Alliance Senate and the recognition of the Viscontess of Arcadius.  Now, their hunters serve as rangers and footman in her forces, and they've even begun to travel the stars.

The Herne tower over most humans at 7' to 9', but with no more mass, giving them a long, stretched-out appearance.  Their long arms end with three-fingered hands, and their lean, digitigrade legs end in slender hooves. A long, thin tail sways sinuously behind them.  They have long faces with flat nose that ends in a triangular, moist rhinarium and have narrow mouths which, combined, give them the appearance of a very flat muzzle.  Their large eyes take in everything with a patient gaze, and their ears are long and end in square tips. The Herne, like humans, are mostly covered in skin, but all Herne have a tuft of fur on the tip of their tail, and many males have shaggy hair on the bottom of their legs and their forearms and a thick ruff over their head and completely covering their neck, like a great mane. Females have less hair, with just enough atop their head to resemble a short, cute "pixie" cut of hair.

Herne coloration varies with the seasons.  In summer, their hair takes on a rich, golden hue similar to the color of Arcadian foliage, and their skin deepens to a rich and dappled mohagony. A Herne in the grip of its summer colors is sometimes called a Goldback Herne.  By winter, as the snows begin to fall, their hair turns silver and their skin fades to a dappled ivory. A Herne in the grip of its summer colors is sometimes called a Silverback Herne. The specifics vary from Herne to Herne: some grow darker in summer or lighter in winter, and the nature of their dappling and patterns vary, but the seasonal nature remains a constant, and their seasonality is deeply tied to the conditions on Arcadius.

The seasons of Arcadius change more than just the coloration of the Herne.  Their personalities change with it.  By summer, they grow congenial and gather together in great groups.  For them, summer is a time of merriment and holiday, and the celebrate the abundance of Arcadius.  As cold of winter chills their world, though, they grow taciturn, territorial and isolationist, scattering out over their world.  Many Herne are naturally psychic as well, and this seasonality affects their powers.  By summer, their powers benefit one another, while by winter, they become nightmarish warriors and dangerous hunters.

The Herne have become an unremarkable sight on Arcadius, but they remain novel in the Alliance.  The arrival of the Arcadian Viscontess with her lanky, alien bodyguard causes quite a stir every year at Atrium still. But their hunters have begun to spread and participate in the wars of the Alliance.  The first Herne recently fell in battle against the Empire.  Exactly why they chose this time to reveal themselves is unknown, but the truth likely lies in their religion and its connections to Arcadius.

The Zero-Template Challenge: The Vithani, the Star-Children of the Umbral Fringe

 

Few humans have even heard of the Vithani, and fewer still have laid eyes upon a Vithani slave, much less enjoyed their company. The brutal slavers of the Umbral Rim covet them, but since the Dark Cataclysm cut their world off from the rest of the galaxy, they've had to make do with the population of the Vithani that remain in the galaxy, and their fragile biology paired with their fraught personal lives means they tend to meet untimely ends, and their number slowly, but steadily, dwindles.

The Vithani share the same humanoid body-plan that most humanoids of the galaxy, but with a slighter build and more gracile features. They have remarkable coloration, however, with inky black skin, freckled with patterns of small diamond or square "spots" of white, white lips and long, white hair.  Some have different colors, and they may have a deep violet and very dark blue skin, or they might have a bright magenta coloration to their hair, spots and lips, or a vivid, neon-blue or brilliant crimson hue.  These spots sometimes chart out recognizable patterns, like stars in the night sky, hence their nickname of Star-Children.

The Vithani come from a star within the globular cluster just beyond the Umbral Rim.  Their world has very thin air and retains little light even by day, when their star appears to be but the brightest of a great collection of vivid, beautiful stars. They have evolved to see by this starlight, and stripped of starlight or sunlight, they are blind, and the full sunlight of more daylight worlds can blind them.  They have evolved to breath the refined, celestial air of their world, and they labor under the thicker air that blankets most worlds.

Their relationship with the stars does not end with their appearance and their ability to see so well by starlight: it shapes their very lives! The Vithani have an intensely strong relationship with fate and fortune, and it is written in the stars, and in their stars. Almost all Vithani have a Destiny of some kind, and when it affects them, it affects them much more keenly than it affects other races. They mastered astrology to better understand how the shape of the stars affected their lives. This can make them powerful if their astrologies point to fortunate destinies, but it spells their doom when the stars are misaligned.

Finally, while many describe the Vithani as "magical" or "naturally psychic," this isn't exactly true. Instead, the have a unique relationship with psionic abilities: all Vithani that are strong-willed and beautiful are also naturally powerful with psychic abilities; Vithani that are weak-willed and ugly have little facility with psychic power. Those who have studied them are not sure why these things correlate, and have only noted that they do.

The explorers of the First Tyranny found a navigable hyperspatial route to the Vithani cluster and discovered their world.  The Vithani themselves had not yet discovered star travel, but were technological enough to forestall any Ranathim invasion and held off the Tyranny, who turned to a strategy of trade and espionage until they unlocked the secret of Vithani astrology.  With that stolen secret, they learned the fates of the Vithani and struck at the darkest hour of the race, easily conquering them.  The rarified princes and princess of the Star-Children became the slaves of the Ranathim, and so it remained until the Dark Cataclysm rewrote the hyperspatial map of the Umbral Rim, and cut off all contact with the Vithani cluster.  The Vithani slaves left in the Umbral Rim like to think the natives isolated in their cluster have long since thrown off their masters and live free lives.

Today, the Vithani can mostly be found as rare treasures held in the collections of wealthy slavers.  Free Vithani do roam the galaxy, either having liberated themselves, or descended from those slaves who escaped and set up small, isolated colonies on remote moons with thin, gauzy atmospheres. When they travel, they often pass themselves off as rare cousins of the Keleni, to whom they bear a passing resemblance, when they bother to explain themselves at all.  Generally, like all Vithani, they are compelled to follow their fate and lead interesting lives of danger and adventure.

The Zero-Template Challenge: The Karkadann, the Withering Satraps of the Arkhaian

 

The Karkadann are among the oldest aliens known among the Arkhaian reaches, and for a time, were considered by archaeologists to be a candidate for the progenitor of the lost "Monolith" civilization that dominated the galactic core millennia before the Alexian crusades, but it has since been proven they were but a client race of that elder race, and one of the heirs to that culture.

The Karakadann evolved on a hellish world, the Eclipse World of Dann deep in the Arkahaian Spiral. A red star rages and roils at the center of their star system, bathing their world in burning, cleansing radiation that would make it impossible for life to take hold were it not for an odd orbital coincidence: their world is close enough to its star to be tidally locked, and a large moon rests between Dann and its star, fixed at a lagrange point. This moon casts a considerable, permanent "shadow" on the world, a narrow one that's completely radiation free, and then a fainter "shadow" from which life is partially shielded from radiation.  Life took hold in those shadows, evolving to survive that harsh radiation and push farther out into the insidious glare of their hateful parent star. Their world is filled with live evolved to survive the intense radiation, such as the white kudzu of Dann.  

The Karkadann resemble humanity, with a body plan unremarkable among humanoids of the galaxy.  They are hairless and have flat faces with slits in place of a nose and holes where their ears would be, though this does not seem to have negatively impacted either sense. They have rugose skin, typically white, grey or deep brown in color, marked with naturally occurring striping or geometric patterns in red, black or white, including a characteristic stripe running over the top of their head present in all members of the race. A secondary lens covers their eyes, obscuring their irises and pupils with a film of milky white or, less common, black or red.

The Karkadann, like all life on Dann, have unique adaptions to the hostile, irradiated environment. Under the constant assualt of radiation, their genomes evolved to rapidly reconstitute themselves, but the sheer bulk of reconstitution results in genetic errors: mutation.  When these mutations are benign or even beneficial, their immune system leaves them, but when they become cancerous, their immune system  isolates and destroys the cells and all nearby cells, just be sure.  Aggressive errors can result in a runaway biological war raging within the Karkadann body that destroys the cancerous body part.  This results in the Withering, where a part of the Karkadann's body goes through intense pain and then suddenly loses all feeling and withers away, like a dead leaf on a branch, and then falls away.  Fortunately, Karkadann physiology is very tolerant of cybernetic implants, allowing them to replace lost body parts this way.  A side-effect of the Withering is that the Karkadann do not age the way other humanoids do: if they can keep replacing their body parts, they can potentially live forever, though in practice after a few hundred years, the Withering takes their brains and they finally die.

The Karkadann genome poses another, societal problem.  Even if they do not experience the Withering, they may experience mutation.  Unfortunate Karkadann exposed to radiation may begin to develop strange features, such as claws or additional limbs, additional eyes, bony spurs, or even psychic powers. These mutations come with personality changes and slow, inevitable devolution.  In some ways, the Withering is kinder, as it lets the Karkadann die, while mutation slowly turns it into a monster. The far reaches of the Arkhaian Spiral is haunted by Karkadann marauders, mutated into gibbering cannibals and running ships with open fission drives to further power their mutations.

Proper, civilized Karkadann rule the Technocracy of Dann, a minor empire found between the Refugee Empire of the Telas Constellation and the Cybernetic Union of the Borean Stars. It has endured since before the Alexian Crusades: during this ancient time it ruled a vast swathe of the Arkhaian, purchased cybernetics from the Traders and the Shinjurai merchant princes, and wielded what Eldothic technology their masters had left them with.  They remained unconquered throughout the Alexian Dynasty and had cordial, if distant, relations with the Galactic Federation.  The Scourge greatly diminished it, though, and scattered entire fleets far from where regular medical intervention could prevent the spread of mutation. Today, a much smaller Technocracy remains ostensibly independent and allows representatives from the Cybernetic Union and the Alliance both in its court, but it sides most often with the Cybernetic Union.  Roving remnant fleets filled with mutated Karkadann haunt the Telas Constellation and the Akrhaian Gap, spreading fear wherever they go.

The Zero Template Race Challenge

...(A race) which has culture and “common advantages/disadvantages” and maybe unique technology…but without having a template at all. That would also solve the weird situation with humans being the only “normal” race, without a template, when all races in the setting are different, but not all have enough biological difference to require different templates... The point is that a race can have no template and not be just humans-with-a-different-paint-job, but be meaningfully different. -- Lord Buss

I've had to butcher and stitch together the quote a bit, as it was scattered across a conversation and in a specific, Psi-Wars context, so my apologies if some of the meaning is lost, but it inspired me, and I wanted to share my thoughts on it.  First, I want to talk about what I think Lord Buss is asking for and where there are problems with it, but after establishing those constraints, I want to attempt to explore the surprisingly interesting puzzle that his request poses.

First, let's narrow down the request itself, and the intent of the request.  First, the core idea here is to have an alien race that is alien but has no defined template, as none is needed. I don't believe the idea is to just ignore the requirements of a template.  The idea here is to create a race that doesn't need a template, despite obviously being alien.  He proposes to get around this constraint by offering up associated elements that aren't part of the template itself. For example, a faerie race might all have Magery, but some might have the option of buying Wild Mana Generator.  Similarly, a race might have access to language and culture and technology that the rest of the galaxy doesn't (or, at least, doesn't commonly use).  Finally, you could associate them with "mechanically irrelevant features" such as wildly coloration, hairlessness, three genders, etc.

This request is not for a zero-point template.  A zero-point template might allow for, for example, DX+4 and IQ-4, which certainly a violation of the spirit of the request.  Zero-point templates can be quite complex!  It's not asking for low complexity, or low absolute cost zero-point templates: a race that all has a perk and a quirk would violate the request too.  Finally, they can't even have features. Features require a template too, they're just the most extreme example of "low absolute cost zero-point templates." The request is for a race that has no template, but is clearly alien.

The intent of the request seems aimed at normalizing humanity.  The point is that the races of Psi-Wars tend to be positive in cost, often quite expensive, and humans are not.  This creates a weird situation where the galactic average ST or IQ or HT is higher than the human norm. By having at least a few races that are mechanically identical to humans out of the gate, you bring that average back closer to humanity. It might also be about reducing mechanical complexity. After all, what Lord Buss describes isn't really that far from a zabrak or a twi'lek: the humanoid races of Star Wars mostly amount to "person-with-a-paint-job." There's no reason to make every race a deep investment in system mechanics.  Finally, it would also simplify the race creation process, making the race design a lot cheaper for the GM, which would allow a proliferation of races.

So, can it be done?

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Elephant

 

 

Elephants are inevitable. Space Opera is all about fighting giant space monsters, so naturally we’re fascinated by the largest land animal currently alive: The elephant. Of course, by space opera standards, the elephant is chump change. If we’re talking giant space monsters, they’ll tower over buildings, not merely knock over mud hut with an angry charge. Even so, I can’t help but notice space elephants everywhere, not as space monsters, but as large mounts. Two examples that leap to mind are the bantha of Star Wars or the Yeddim of Exalted before getting into more obscure examples. I think we’re enamored of the idea of the largest beast of burden which act like living tanks or living semi-trucks. The image of an alien queen on the back of a giant tortoise, or a caravan packed onto the sides of a mammoth, ready to deploy as an impromptu marketplace are the sorts of images that tell us we’re in space opera!

So the key features, to my mind, for a space elephant is its massive size, is herbivorous nature and general placidity paired with its potential for extreme danger, thanks in the very least to its large size.

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Vulture

 

 

I haven’t touched on birds for awhile, and doubtless, some people might wonder why not falcons? Or why not parrots, etc. Why vultures? Well, as noted previously, what I’m looking for are mostly the creatures a GM will seek to include in a typical space opera game, but mostly as background animals. Sure, I’ve done tigers and bears, but for the most part, these are meant to represent the sort of critters one would commonly see. And I would argue that vultures or, more specifically, vultures are classic creatures that characters will see. The image of the vulture floating serenely over a dying man while it waits for him to die in a desert before feasting on their remains is a classic one. It’s a psychopomp, a visual reminder of impending death, or a marker of a battlefield. A crow would work too and, frankly, has more mythical resonance with the average westerner, but the vulture is vastly easier to spot over large distances because of its large size and its ability to soar and high altitudes, making the impending death of a target visible for miles.

I may sometimes refer to it as a buzzard. This is because it’s a colloquial North American term for the turkey vulture, which is what I typically think of when it comes to vultures. It has no relation to the actual, common buzzard, though. It’s also sometimes called a carrion crow.

At the core, we’re talking about a relatively large, flying scavenger. The point of this particular animal is to be big, to be high up, and to be concerned about letting critters die before feasting on them. That’s the “guild” we’re looking for. The point is to have something circling the dying from high above.

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Shark

 

Most of my focus has been on creatures of the land for a few reasons. People deal with land creatures on a regular basis, and the sea is “alien” to them, so while it makes great inspiration for alternate biologies, most people aren’t passingly familiar with the differences between, for example, cod and tuna, or all the varieties of sea cucumber. But there are a few sea creatures that really stand out and that we might definitely expect to see depicted reskinned for space, and the shark probably tops that list. It’s an apex predator of the sea and whenever people are cast overboard they end up fighting with sharks. We see them all the time in adventure fiction as the wolves and tigers of the sea, so we might expect to see something similar in a similar story set on an alien planet.

The classic view describes a solitary hunter, ranging the oceans in search of food. However, this applies to only a few species. Most live far more social, sedentary, benthic lives, and appear likely to have their own distinct personalities. – Sharks, Wikipedia

Of course, this post will get me in trouble because I don’t even shark week. Sharks are quite popular and people know all sorts of things about them and I don’t know the deep lore of the deep, so I will inevitably miss things. Worse, I’m going to aim pretty explicitly at the cinematic depictions of sharks, because the generic space opera player expects alien sharks to behave more like Jaws, and would be confused if the alien shark he just met was a highly social filter feeder, despite basking sharks being a real thing. So this post will be more about “sharks” than sharks, but I’ll try to point to a few things I find a long the way, because cartilaginous fish are some of the most successful creatures of the sea, and it’s a little unfair to dump that entire category into “I did a little research on Jaws.”

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: the Space Tiger

We’ve already covered the cat, and what is a tiger but a scaled-up cat? Well, the biggest difference is that, unless you’re a mouse, a cat isn’t terrifying. The tiger is the posterchild for apex predator in the sense that we, as humans, have a primal fear of them. In many ways, the tiger is the template from which many space monsters are drawn: they are stealthy and fade into the shadows to watch with glittering eyes. Their growls reverberate through the area, spooking its target without giving away its location. When it strikes, it does so suddenly, with a roar that freezes the target in place out of sheer terror. It strikes with claws and fangs, ripping and tearing. And it’s done in an instant, after which it drags the target away to its den, to devour it and leave its bones behind. If the bear is the “ogre” then the tiger is the “xenomorph.”

This gives us an excellent reason to revisit the feline template on a larger scale, to get a better sense of what these space monsters can and cannot do, and where they might come from.

Generic Space Opera: Space Bear

 

The bear tends to feature strongly in the mythology of any culture that experiences them. This seems, in part, to extend from their enormous size paired with their ability to stand on hind legs and thus to tower over others, which surprises me some given my research suggests they’re not actually that large compared to many fantasy creatures. Though this dread is not without good reason, as bears are lethal. While they may not be that large compared to dragons or giants, compared to men with stone-tipped spears, they’re more than capable of killing a lot of people, and up to the 20^th century, we can still find horror stories of bears that invaded small settlements, slaughtering women and children while those armed with rifles were sleeping or away.

But bears seem to resonate culturally for another reason: hibernation. The Bear Cult seems to focus on their ability to descend into the “underworld” of their cave and “die” in hibernation, and then stir and “return to the world of the living” in spring. We have plenty of anthropological evidence that ties them to medicine and healing, and there’s some evidence of bear worship in the past, including special bear burials in caves by prehistoric humans.

So, a bear is more than just a large omnivore: it’s a sacred space monster, a creature know for its size, ferocity, tenacity, and it’s ability to survive and to restore itself to life.

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Horse

 

I think the only animal remotely competitive with a dog or cat for popular, intuitive understanding is the horse. Most people have been near one at at least one point in their life, and many have ridden them, or would like to. Riding, of course, is their key feature, as is work. We have eaten horses in the past, but most people see them as companions, something to be ridden, or helpers. They feature in our mythology and our history. Barbarian hordes ride on the back of horses, as do knights. So if we delve into the history of alien races, should we not expect to find alien knights or alien barbarian hordes riding upon alien horses? And if so, do they still ride on them today? What do human ranchers on alien worlds ride?