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.

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.

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.

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? 

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Deer

 

Deer seem to be the generic “hunting prey.” If a story depicts a character hunting an animal that animal is probably a deer, especially if we expand our understanding of deer to include any swift, horned herbivores that tends to gather in groups (though not necessarily large herds). This might include gazelle or antelope, but it should be noted that these are a variation of goats with no real relationship to deer.

Pizard, thank god, has stats on all of these! I’ll be mostly using the mule deer, which is the deer in Disney’s Bambi, and thus what I think of when I think “deer” though it should be noted that Bambi was a roe deer.

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Cows

 

I think few animals better exemplify the countryside than the cow. That may well be because the culture from which westerners descend, Indo-European culture, was heavily integrated with the cow. But it’s not hard to see why: cows provide meat, milk and leather, and excel at moving in vast herds across the plains, allowing a herdsman to migrate with them. They’re useful to a growing culture in many ways, and so we might expect parallels in other cultures: large, migratory herbivores that tend to naturally gather in great herds (allowing for rapid reproduction) and who produce culinary byproducts that the culture can consume, leaving the original animal untouched.

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Pigs

 

Generic Alien Pig

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

Lisa: No.

Homer: Ham?

Lisa: No.

Homer: Pork chops?

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

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

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

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

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Crabs!

 

Have you heard of “Carcinization?” The tendency of nature to evolve things into crabs” – XKCD

Of course, carcinization is more than just a meme designed to give us memes of crabs rocking out to sweet techno: it represents a very real trend in nature, and if it happens on earth, it’s highly plausible that we’ll find crabs in space too, but sheer Darwinian pressure. 

This isn't the sort of thing that I imagine players will really want to see as background elements, nor are they an especially visible part of our food chain (though we totally eat crabs). Players may well expect to fight crab-monsters.  I will note that when hunting for some pic to steal and toss up on the side of this post, I ran into the problem that crabs already look pretty alien, so it's hard to explain to players why a particular crab species is totally from another world (Green and purple, I guess), but I'm pretty sure if you describe a literal japanese spider crab trundling down the beach, they'd already think they were on another world.  So I'm mostly writing this one for the memes.

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Snek!

 

“Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?” – Indiana Jones

Alright, let’s do something a little bit different. See, I love snakes. I think they’re great enemies to throw at people and rich with mythological symbolism. I also think they drive a lot of core fears of the wilderness, because one fears being bitten by a snake.

But I don’t just want to explore vipers. Constrictors also deeply interest me, mostly because I imagine Ranathim dancing with them. The hint of peril by having the sinuous coils of a serpent slither around the dancer offers intriguing imagery that a viper can’t quite match (though, it should be noted that vipers have traditionally found a place in religious gatherings as well). GURPS seems to agree, as we have both the viper and the anaconda as potential DF allies.

So this entry will be about that which slithers for the most part, as it turns out that there are quite a few critters that do so. It’ll also be directly pertinent to me, as I’ve been trying to figure out how to make a constrictor for the umbral rim that isn’t, you know, directly a boa or a python, though as far as I can tell, snakes are extremely well-evolved and I’m not sure you can create a more plausible snake. But let’s find out!

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Dog

 

"It's not an animated movie without a thing that's not a dog acting like a dog." – Producer, Onward Pitch Meeting, via TV Tropes

Dogs are probably the most singularly defining “animal” for most people. They are close enough that we see them often, but alien enough that we understand how their bestial psychology differs from ours. It’s probable that many generic space animals will behave like dogs, simply because a GM and a group will assume it so, because it’s easy to assume that. If a slobbering horror charges you, show it a stick and then throw it to distract it, just try not to be around when it inevitably returns with it. This isn’t realistic, of course, but it’s easy, and that’s a lot of the point of this minimal-effort bestiary, so “the dog” needs some serious discussion.

"Easy. Nice monster dog." John Carter, John Carter of Mars

The point of this bestiary is also to think about useful animals for a space bestiary. A lot of these critters will be relegated to background color or space monsters, but some animal companions would be nice, and no animal is more likely to end up as a companion more often than something that resembles a dog.

The defining feature of the dog is, of course, that they are gregarious, pack-based, SM +0 chasing carnivores. They’re often defined by their great senses, solid endurance and strong bite. Dogs are probably up there with horses for “animal that we’ll need a million variations of” so we’ll definitely need to see how far we can push this one. 

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Cats

 The circles I move in, I noticed, trend more and more towards “cat people” than “dog people.” There would be a lot of reasons of this (I suspect its that cats are easier to keep in urban environments, especially apartments, when compared to dogs), but it must be said that we love cats, and thus we might wonder what a cat might be like out in space.

Their nature as favored domestic pet tends to make us more acutely aware of their role in the food chain, and since we’ve already created rats, birds and fish, it also seems natural to explore what predator we’re most familiar with hunting these creatures. A cat is a pouncing carnivore of course. They’re also small, clocking in -3 SM in all instances I could find. They tend to prey on “rats” and “birds” and fish, if they can get them. They also tend to be excellent climbers. They’re also very cute and appealing as pets.

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: School Fish

 

We don’t put much thought into aquatic animals in RPGs, in my experience, and that makes sense, because unless we’re playing Atlanteans, they mostly don’t matter. We’ll fight a wolf and we’ll ride a horse, but what will a fish matter to us? Well, if we’re doing songbirds and rats, we might as well at least look at fish, especially the sort of fish people might eat. And the sort of fish people might see if they’re out on an ocean. It’s also worth noting that a lot of space opera does dive into deep sea adventures, or have aquatic aliens (Psi-Wars has the Keleni, and I’d like at least one more aquatic species, so we can have some underwater adventures!).

In this case, I wanted to look at fish that form schools or shoals. That is, the sort of fish that form these huge swarms that you fishermen haul onto the ship in great netfuls. These fish form the basis (well, a basis) of the food chain, and are one of the most common interactions the ordinary man has with the sea.

Generic Space Opera Bestiary: Space Song Birds

 

We’re surrounded by birds. We might be surrounded by vermin, but they hide beneath our feet. Birds we see, or here

. These flitting bits of color decorate the branches of trees and their bird song fills the air. One might imagine the branches of an alien forest filled with similar color and bird song, only from a very different sort of creature.

These creatures would be defined by their small size, their charm and beauty, and their relative ubiquity as a bit of color in the background. They’re non-threatening, bottom-of-the-food-chain prey animals that often die at the hands of space cats or space hawks (or alien children with slingshots). Thus we might define them as Small, Winged Fliers who act as Herbivores and likely involve a meditation on communication methods.