Psi-Wars Wiki Highlight: February Progress Report

 As usual, I've neglected the blog in favor of the wiki and the discord, as I tend to get a lot of immediate feedback on the discord (plus I'm winding this blog down as I prep to move it to Wordpress, which looks to be stable so far, so I may take the plunge sooner than later).  So the lack of content here doesn't mean I've stopped producing material.  So, let's get into it.

The March of the Slaver Empire

One of the most important, and popular, Psi-Wars races are the Ranathim, and one central conceit is their dead empire. They once ruled a dark part of the Galaxy known as the Umbral Rim, but today, they have been enslaved by another. That's the premise of the Ranathim.

So what is this other race, and what empire do they run? I had tagged them as "Slavers" in my drafts, and the name has stuck around, but I often refer to them as the Temkorathim. They obviously had to rule the Umbral Rim now, right? What were they like? Probably not a major threat, but morally repugnant enough that you'd want to kick them around, even if you never got around to it, but dangerous enough that player characters would find them interesting to adventure in while rescuing Ranathim damsels from a fate worse than death and battling in the gladiatorial arenas of the Slavers. I suspected they would look something like the cinematic depiction of the third-world dictatorship/kleptocracy, like Doctor Doom's Latveria, or Vilena of the Expendables, though probably with even more inferior technology (though not so inferior that characters could steamroll through opposition).

So, in continuing the slow rollout of the Umbral Rim, I released the Oligarchy of Vech, and a Backer-Exclusive supplement that rounded out four of the Council of Seven, including their minions. These were generally well received (though not without some light edit notes). These are follow-ups to last month's Slaver Cartels and the associated backer release. Between them, you should be able to work out quite a lot of Umbral politics, at least between Slavers.

It's not enough to know what they are, but we need to know how they fight, and this section of space is unique enough that we expect a very different technological infrastructure, so I worked on that too!

This month I released Lithian Tech, with is a rolling, unfinished release. This includes weapons, armor and vehicles available in the Umbral Rim, including materiel from Redjack, Orion Arms (which has been around, but is greatly expanded now), and the new Rath Industries, unique to the Oligarchy of Vech. These aren't finished: I need to release the capital ships and ground vehicles from the Umbral Rim, but a highlight of the new vehicles available now are:

• The Flanker-Class Fighter (Orion)
• The High-Roller-Class Battle Yacht (Orion)
• The Pirhana-Class Fighter (Rath)
• The Hammerhead-Class Strike Craft (Rath)
• The Skirmisher-Class Torpedo Corvette (Rath)
• The Toad-Class Heavy Corvette (Rath; really a destroyer)
• The Kodiak-Class Light Cruiser (Redjack; not new to you, but new to the Wiki)

I still need to release ground vehicles, the Mauler, the Spire and the Fugitive, and there's some drafts floating around. I should get to them soon.

Drugs are Bad, Mmmkay?

The Umbral Rim is filled with vice, and drugs are certainly one of them. The Slavers excel at the creation of drugs to addict their victims, and they equip their soldiers with addictive, performance-enhancing drugs. This was an important part of the the Lithian tech release, and something that required some careful balance for future releases (especially since once you have performance enhancing drugs, someone is going to want to use it, and we'll need alchemy/potions at some point for our Inevitable Space Witches).

This also required expanding the Krokuta, who have a special relationship with these drugs. I have all of their unique power sets except Amberdine, which is still in a draft state.

In Memory of the Phoenix Cluster

The backer-led project of the Phoenix Cluster carries on.  The Umbral Rim dominates my attention at the moment, but I did release the last poll result regarding the first Westerly Clan of Phoenix Cluster. The trick here is that I need to write them up, and the other clans, and I'm trying to balance that with this rollout of the Umbral Rim.

Game-On

Both playtests move forward. I did not run Undercity Noir in February, as I was quite ill, but we look good for March.  The other playtest set in the Umbral Rim collapsed under the weight of conflicting schedules, so I recruited a raft of new players for the one player would could consistently make it, and rebooted the campaign.  The Wastes of Dhim now has:

• Raitha Temos, Mithanna Satemo (Ranathim Space Knight), 
• Null Entry, lost Syntech medical robot
• Rena, formerly enslaved Keleni psion afflicted with a dangerous split personality
• Milathum the Devourer, Saruthim Bounty Hunter

 They played through a much more detailed retreat of the first session with quite some success, though naturally some of them required some additional work.

Marching On

For the next month, I'll carry on releasing material. There's obvious things that simply need to make it onto the wiki, such as Krokuta power-ups associated with Amberdine and the remaining Rathian ships. I've been expanding the cultural details of the Umbral Rim and I can edit my material on gladiatorial fights. I also need to clean up what I have on Lithian technology.

I've got some work on Tyrannic space craft which would be nice to get out as a backer release, but it's very much in a draft state (as it involves a lot of new technological design and a rather unique sort of write-up).

I'd also like to do a poll on one new Slaver Cartel for the backers to explore, so you can get a sense of how to build your own.

And finally, I need to write up the five Westerly clans of the Phoenix Cluster, which also involves settling on how I want to write them out.

All of this is tentative, of course, and depends on how much time I have, but we'll see how far we get.

Organizing the Psi-Wars Organizations

 So, I paused my grand Umbral Rim rollout to write up some basic corporations, because I've noticed people sometimes ask questions about them and I have those answers and it would be nice if they were on the wiki.  Also notice that despite my best efforts to keep Psi-Wars from devolving into Cyberpunk, it's definitely taking on some elements of that, and that means giant megacorps.  I suspect this is because I "let GURPS be GURPS" and Ultra-Tech + Action skews heavily towards Cyberpunk, and even Star Wars does, once you ditch the movies and go to the EU (which even introduced hackers slicers).

Then I found myself staring at the Patron cost for a Corporation and the rank levels.  And this has been bugging me for awhile.  Way, way back in the day, I argued that Psi-Wars should aim at the 15-point Patron and the 8 Rank structure.  Why? Because this is how Action worked: the Pulling Rank request numbers line up at the 15 point patron level, and GURPS typically settles on an 8 Rank structure by default.  But does this actually make sense?

One of the things I learned from discussing Psi-Wars melee with my community is they tend to like Psi-Wars as full on GURPS Ultra-Tech space opera, where all the numbers are big. People don't wield swords because of a handwave about how it looks on screen, but because they have some sort of crazy, over the top technology that will absolutely destroy you from up close.  They want the aesthetic of space opera, but they want some sort of excuse for it so it has the veneer of plausibility, preferrably in a way that sounds comic-book-awesome.

So ages ago, I whipped up a Patreon special on the scale of the Empire where I muddled through how large the Empire would be. I tend to downplay things from literally millions of stars with trillions of people per star to "just" thousands of stars with millions of people, but you still end up with crazy numbers like multiple fleets of 5-25 multi-billion dollar dreadnoughts, and when I say that, the response is not "Wow, that's unwieldy" but "COOL!"

The question then becomes can Psi-Wars handle more extensive organizations, and should it handle more extensive organizations?

Ugh; Social Traits are the worst when it comes to world building!

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Carnivorous Plant

The carnivorous plant litters the bestiaries of fantasy and space opera gaming, likely due to its association with early 20^th century adventure fiction, from which nearly all RPGs eventually draw their core inspiration from. The carnivorous plant typically shows up in jungles, where it signals that the jungle is so hostile and so predatory, that even the plants try to eat you. They also signal a truly alien landscape, because while carnivorous plants exist, they absolutely do not do so on a scale that could threaten a jungle hero.

Functionally, they typically behave like traps rather than monsters, though some will simply act like immobile monsters that lash out and grab people and try to drag them to its sap-dripping maw. Of course, some just haul themselves out of the ground and go rampaging after their prey, but that’s not what interests in this particular post, because what I’m looking for, a the end of the day, is a sessile predator, because, in part, I want to explore the idea of space monster as trap.

How realistic is a sessile predator? Well, of course, carnivorous plants exist, but they tend to rely on natural geometry and stickiness to trap something no more intelligent than a mayfly and slowly dissolve it. Heroes tend not to be that stupid, and so we need things like grabby tentacles and chomping mouths to actually make this work. Do those exist in biology? Sure! There are, for example, carnivorous sponges, but the best example are probably sea anemones. So all we need to do is extrapolate some sort of larger version of these. This means that what I’m talking about probably isn’t a “plant” at all, but “Land Anemone” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

Wiki Highlight: Slaver Cartels

 I've been hard at work on the Umbral Rim and the organizations, technology and monsters native there. I've finally worked out detail on the Slaver Empire and the sort of organizations the Slavers, aka the Temkorathim, naturally form, which I call "Slaver Cartels."  I've described them in detail on the wiki.

For Backers, I've offered up additional details for four sample Cartels, the ones described in the wiki entry itself.  I may eventually release these to the wiki as well, but I feel like the wiki has enough of an information overload and I'm not sure how necessary this level of detail is. But in any case, as a thank you to all $3+ Backers (Fellow Travelers) I have uploaded the Book of Hunger

• The Book of Hunger -- Subscribestar
• The Book of Hunger -- Patreon
  

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: the Parasite

 

Generic Space Parasite

I’ve done most of this series based on real world creatures and while this one is no exception, this was more driven by my curiosity for the sorts of creatures I don’t often explore or often see explored. Bestiaries brim with the equivalent of lions, tigers and bears, but mosquitos, blow flies and leeches are pretty rare, and Space contains some modifiers and options for parasites. So what does a “generic” GURPS Space Parasite look like?

As has been the case in many of these posts, I’ve learned that Space doesn’t actually support me all that much, offering just a few paragraphs and a scattered handful of modifiers, so we’re left largely in the dark. So I had to my own research on some elements and narrow down exactly what I wanted and what I meant. And what I want, of course, is gameable, a “monster” that players can fight back against with more than “Roll HT to not get worms.”

And in this research and exploration, what I discovered is… there’s no other word for it, I suppose, but “horrifying.” I won’t share some of the stuff I found, or some of the images I found, other than to say that some people should consider seeking counciling… or an exorcist. I also won’t share some of the images I found. There will be no images in this post. What didn’t really occur to me while I conceived of this post is that parasites are essentially the core of all body horror. Parasites are the thing of nightmares.

This post is not for the squeamish. Turn back now if you’re bothered by anything remotely related to body horror. I’m not going out of my way to make this topic horrific, it is just, by its nature, a horrific topic.

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: the Space Dragon

 

So, we have our space megapredators, but they don’t seem exactly like dragons, do they? They’re massive and they’re terrifying, but are they dragons? We could be more explicit with our dragons, couldn’t we? We could take actual dragon stats and apply them to space, right?

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Mega Predator

 

 We like big space monsters, and we cannot lie. The Tyrannosaurus Rex fills the minds of children with a terrified glee because monsters are real, and we never really lose that. I suspect few Psi-Wars players wouldn’t love to trigger their force sword and charge at the largest (reasonable) space monster possible. What is a space knight without a space dragon?

Of course, then we run into some problems with our space dragons because they’re not especially likely. While the Tyrannosaurus Rex is a real, genuine creature that roamed the Earth, there wasn’t really a creature much like it before the era of the dinosaurs, nor one like it since, though some of the ice age megafauna get close. Indeed, most giant animals are herbivores rather than carnivores. Furthermore, a giant predator doesn’t necessarily have the physical might to bash through the sort of extreme, collapsitronium hyperarmor that most ultra-tech characters wear, nor the sort of armor necessary to stand up to their smart-tracking assault death beams.

So while the results of this will likely disappoint excited space knights in diamondoid armor hoping for a good fight, pondering what a giant predator might look like acts as a starting point for some genuine space monsters. After all, we can take such a monster and make it a psychic mega predator, or a cybernetic mega predator, or a mutant mega predator.

Five Years of Psi-Wars

 It's a new year, so time for a new retrospective!

Oh, and yes, I did get my Wordpress Blog unsuspended.  I'm debating whether it's worth leaving it there.  On the one hand, it's all already there.  On the other hand, eventually I'd want to pay for that.  And do I want to pay for it given the hiccups I've already seen? I'll keep my eye on it. As a friend suggested: given the various stresses in my life, it might be better to worry about what relaxes me (writing posts) and maintain my energy for what needs my attention most (my family, my work) and once that eases up, then I can focus on the proper migration. 

GURPS Action: How Balanced are BAD Guys?

 At the GM’s option, henchmen without character sheets have an effective skill of 10 + absolute value of BAD: 11 at -1, 12 at -2, and so on. As with all BAD things, this is abstract. Actual skill, equipment quality, extra time, and anything else that might matter is all rolled into one handy number. -- GURPS Action 2, page 5

Last time, I looked at BAD.  I meant to look at Mooks too, as that's the real point of this exercise for me, but I took so much wordcount just looking at BAD itself. With that out of the way, let's look at Mooks themselves.

I will note, as I noted last time, that Mooks in Action, don't actually have (Absolute BAD)+10 skill; per page 45-46 of Action 2, they have skill 10-15, which might be completely unrelated to the BAD.  Skill seems to be all that matters: they have a static Dodge of 8, Parry of 8, and ST of 10.  The game largely takes damage out of the equation, and that makes sense: with guns available, characters who get hit tend to get removed from the fight pretty quickly, so we'll largely dispense with weapon other than to note melee vs ranged and focus on chances to hit.  

We'll focus almost entirely on combat capabilities (Action even suggests not using BAD for combat), as that's the point of balance I'm most interested in.  When it comes to things like "I try to Fast-Talk the guards" I'm fine with just applying a BAD penalty.

GURPS Action: How Balanced is BAD?

As an alternative to detailed modifiers, the GM can set a sin- gle difficulty – the Basic Abstract Difficulty (BAD) – that covers all aspects of a particular phase of the adventure. This is simply a penalty from 0 to -10 that replaces detailed situational modifiers. The only other modifiers that apply are those that the PCs bring into the picture: bonuses for equipment, penal- ties for disadvantages, etc. -- GURPS Action 2, page 4

At the GM’s option, henchmen without character sheets have an effective skill of 10 + absolute value of BAD: 11 at -1, 12 at -2, and so on. As with all BAD things, this is abstract. Actual skill, equipment quality, extra time, and anything else that might matter is all rolled into one handy number. -- GURPS Action 2, page 5

I have long taken these words as gospel and applied them to Psi-Wars verbatim.  Should I?  That might seem like an odd question, because the value of BAD, it's simplicity, seems obvious on its face.  You have a single difficulty and you apply to (almost) everything.  What's wrong with it?

Well, nothing specific, but I often find that what I think of as a reasonable bad per what GURPS Action tells me, the PCs will absolutely blow through.  That's not necessarily a problem.  Sometimes, the heroes really do blast past the issues they face like they're nothing. Action heroes are, after all, larger than life.  Even so, knowing you'll pass every check makes the game somewhat tedious and drains all the fun out of a scenario, especially if it happens unintentionally.  Sometimes I find it useful to meditate on these values and what they mean.

This goes double for mooks.  Should we just give mooks absolute BAD +10 for their stats? I will note that if you go to the back of Action 2 and look at the actual stats for Mooks, they don't explicitly follow this. What's a good, base value for a mook? And what sort of challenge levels are we looking for.

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Whale

 

You thought I was done! But no, I had a few more I wanted to do. I’ve just been distracted by yet more aliens, and these take longer to write than I expected (most of it in the variations).

One I’ve wanted to do for a long time is the majestic whale. Of course, when we think of whale, we’re probably thinking the shape of the humpback whale, the size of the blue whale, and the ferocity of the sperm whale, but I’m leaning mostly towards the blue whale and other baleen whales. These gentle giants of the deep spark our imagination with their fantastic size and their eerie song. So much so that I think they’re the only sea creatures Paizard has tackled thus far! So I wanted to also take my shot at looking at some generic space whales for Keleni to commune with or for Westerly sailors to hunt.

The Guns of Psi-Wars

I'm pretty sure I've banged on about this before, but I've made an effort to include more alien races in Psi-Wars (there will be a post on that soon) and I've been exploring the alternate tech of alien groups like the Ranathim Tyranny and the Mug Atheocracy, which has emphasized the need to explore guns, and my own research has begun to finally bear some fruit.  As a result I've found myself confronted with the core issues with the Guns of Psi-Wars. I'm sure I've discussed this before, but there's new material before, so I apologize if this comes across as repetitive.

So, let's start with does Psi-Wars need guns? I think it does, and it needs them in the same way that settings it draws inspiration from all have guns too, despite having access to other, better weapon.  Star Wars has projectile rifles despite having blasters; 40k has slug throwers despite having micromissile "bolt" guns; Dune has Maula pistols despite having lasguns. These weapons tend to be either niche weapons meant to get around a particular problem, or they're primitive weapons used by factions that lack access to better weapons.  I particularly want to explore the latter, because the world of clean blasters and elegant, carbide armor is the Valorian Empire and the Galactic Alliance, not the world of post-apocalyptic techno-savages or primitive aliens.  Guns also allow us to deliver warheads down range.  Psi-Wars definitely has guns in a strictly literal sense in the form of grenade launchers, and weapons that fire poison darts certainly fits some factions well.

So, if we have a need for guns, how do we design them, and how do we make them fit? These two questions have plagued me, but I think I finally have some answers.

On the Importance of Factions

 

I've recently dropped a poll for the first of the Westerly Clan (and it might be a mistake, as I seem to have triggered analysis paralysis among my backers, but if you're a backer, go check it out. In the very least, it should offer a lot of ideas for the design of a clan or faction!), and as I worked on this, I found myself reflecting on the importance of factions.

I noticed it in a different context too. I have a problem with Warhammer 40k at the moment. In part, it's because I don't agree with some of the direction Games Workshop has been taking lately, but a lot of it is a drive to explore lesser known works, both to cultivate variety and to support the efforts of less famous creators.  But I've noticed that I keep being drawn back into the gravity of 40k.  I keep thinking of armies I'd like to try, or concepts I'd like to explore.  In particular, I've thought about building a Xenos army from one of the less well-known races (Rak'Gols or Khrave and man, that second name is great) because I think it would be fun to let someone's Space Marine army beat up on one of these groups out of legend and lore.  I noticed that I was trying to fall back into 40k, and reoriented towards one of my newer games: Rogue Stars.  Rogue Stars is a generic minis wargame that will let you design anything, so of course I could design an alien army of any type I wanted. But who cares? It lacks that particular context that gives it its verge and zing.  I would have to create and invent that context and get the other player invested in it before they would enjoy it.

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.

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.