Weird Revisited: A Few of My Favorite Aliens

The original version of this post appeared in 2012...

Aliens species in most science fiction rpgs are of the of the human-body, animal-head variety or just human’s with odd skin color--which might be cool if they gave them so interesting personality.  There are some pretty interesting aliens in games.  Here are a few of my favorites:

Vrusk
From: Star Frontiers
All the species in basic Star Frontiers are pretty cool (Zebulon’s Guide has some clunkers, though) but the corporatist, insect-appearing (though not actually intervebrate) Vrusk are good ones.  They avoided the cliches of evil insectoids and (mostly) hive culture.

Kronin
From: GURPS Aliens
At first blush these guys are a “warrior race” cliche (okay, not just at first blush), but two me there are a couple of interesting things about them.  One is that their societal structure is based around cadres and avoids the usual “Klingon Empire” thing.  Two, their noseless humanoid appearance reminds me of the Acroyear in the Micronauts comics, who are one of the coolest warrior races ever.

K’kree
From: GURPS Traveller: Alien Races 2
Horse-like herbivorous sophonts on a holy crusade to cleanse the universe of meat-eaters. Not only due the K’Kree break with typical humanoid alien design, they turn “peaceful herd animal” expectations on their ear.

Arilou
From: Star Control
These guys are from a series of computer games and are just green-skinned humanoids.  What’s interesting about them is they reference the classic little green men from flying saucers motif.  Their ships are inertialess too, making them unique among the sentient races--and mysterious. The fraal from Alternity's Star*Drive setting are a somewhat similar idea, perhaps better done, but without the cool saucers.

Pentapod
From: Traveller: 2300AD
2300AD had several well done species, but the biotech-using pentapods are my favorite. Interestingly, the pentapods themselves are biotechnology--constructs made by deep sea intelligences on their homeworld.  It’s a set-up that could be easily used for horror, but the pentapods are one of the closest allies of humans.

Inspirations for A Revised Spelljammer, Annotated

Sailing ships in space. Like Disney's Treasure Planet or the Pandarve cycle of Don Lawrence's Storm.

An Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon sartorial base...

Julio Ribera

...garnished with 70s bande dessinée artists' science fantasy eclecticism.

Don Lawrence

Weird worlds and numerous micro-worlds. The Little Prince's B 612 would fit right in.

Wednesday Comics: Prism Stalker

Image Comics has really been putting out some solid science fiction series. So many, in fact, that its hard to keep up with them all. I was clued in to Prism Stalker by Anne over at DIY&Dragons.

The ad copy compares it to the work of Octavia Butler (which I can see) and David Cronenberg (which is a bit iffier, so far). It tells the story of a young woman from a less technological advanced world, devastated by a plague whose people are refugees and indentured servants in wider galactic society. She impresses a visiting recruiter enough that she's taken for training in a special unit being taught to harness the reality-warping power of an alien world where the mysterious native species is "resisting" the civilizing forces of galactic hegemony.

The art is great and the story would make a good film, I think.

Star Trek: Ranger

Player Characters:
The Crew of the USS Ranger, Federation scout ship:
Aaron as Lt., j.g. Cayson Randolph, Operations Officer
Andrea as Capt. Ada Greer
Anne as Cmdr. Zephyr Westerly, Science Officer
Billy as Lt. Cmdt. Sobek, Ship's Counselor
Dennis as Lt. Osvaldo Marquez, Medical Officer
Paul as Cmdr. D.K. Mohan, Chief Helmsman

Synposis: The Ranger is sent to locate a missing ship, the Burnell, which had disappeared while investigating an alien signal within a dangerous nebula.

Commentary: We played our first session of Star Trek Adventures by stating a slightly modified person of the adventure "Signals" from the Quickstart rules, tailored for the Original Series era. We still have a ways to go before with have the system down. The basic mechanics are simple but their are a lot of points of interaction and a definite strategy to best use of the Momentum economy. Still, I think it's a good system with a the capacity to play very cinematically.

FASA's Star Trek game supplied some of the details to help convert this adventure from TNG era to TOS. The missing runabout of the text became a Pulsar class warp shuttle. A crashed Romulan warp shuttle was of the Praetor class.

The Ranger Class Scout ship used by the characters is likewise a FASA invention.

Wild Wild West Wednesday

My friend Jim and I have embarked on a review of the tv series Wild Wild West to be published on Jim's blog Flashback Universe. Head over there to check out the first installment.

Pruning the Weed of Evil

Our Land of Azurth 5e game continued last night. The party had found what they were pretty certain was the gem containing the soul of Slekht Zaad, but like the good adventurers they are, they decided to loot the rest of the Shrine of the Black Lotus to make sure they didn't leave anything valuable behind.

They fought a mummy and some carrion crawlers for their trouble, but gained some gems and gold--and a few magic items including the mysterious Boots of Elvis-Kind.

Returning to Dhoon, Eric Goodbeard, priest of Azulina, told them the gem would like need to be in the vicinity of Zaad to make him vulnerable. He suggested they parley and offer an exchange for the the cure to the curse infecting the local Duke and the fay-flowers of Shkizz. The party sent Zaad a message offering a meeting on the outskirts of town, but what they intended was an ambush.

Slekht Zaad, protected by his invulnerability, showed alone. He hadn't reckoned on Waylon and Erekose being present and invisible. Zaad kept his distance, but when he moved to pick up the gem from where Kully had left it, Waylon swooped in to pick it up. A fight broke out, with Zaad slinging some powerful spells and the party being unable to damage him, until Waylon got into melee range with the gem.

Suddenly, the gem's glow faded, and Erekose's next blow bit deep into Zaad's flesh. The party hit him hard. He was a powerful foe, but he was no match for all of them ganging up on him. Kairon delivered the coup de grace with firebolts.

Now, there was the matter of the trecherous Draco Battles and the lifting of the curses.

Weird Revisited: Ways & Sigils

The original version of this post appeared in 2015...

When humanity discovered there was a way to cheat relativity, we found, to our surprise, that it was a lot like magic. The paths that shortcut distance and connected many universes were built by ancients no species remembered--though everyone had stories. A popular one was that the precursor culture came from outside the ordered universes, from a manifold or bulk whose physical laws would have been more familiar to Jung or Frazer than Einstein or Hawking. We called it "hyperspace." It sounded more scientific than "the astral plane."

Computers, even the most advanced AI, were mostly confused by the Ways. They could tell you a lot about the apertures, but they couldn't decipher the symbols that needed to be inscribed on the hulls of craft in order to make the apertures open or to arrive safely at a desired destination. And so the casters arose; they were people with the mental aptitude to understand the ways and create the symbols needed to traverse them successfully. With a good caster, a vessel can get almost anywhere.

Sometimes, though, ships wind up someplace other than their intended destination or just disappear entirely. At times the casting is probably to blame; encoding multidimensional state vectors into a compressed, symbolic representation has always been more intuition than science, and the internal state of the caster has always been a variable. Sometimes there's just a glitch--an act of God, you might say. Who knows what might distract the hypersophont entities or idiot gods in the machinery of the multiverse that "read" the sigils and guide ships to their destinations?

So the lucky and lost just wind up making an extra stop or two before their final destination. The unlucky truly lost disappear entirely. But there are a few, the stories say, that turn after a long absence with strange stories. There's a city at the center of the multiverse, these haunted-eyed travelers will tell you. A city where castaway alien vessels from infinite universes wind up. A city so vast, so old, so integral, that it doesn't have a name, just a single location sigil-- the Sigil. That's what they call it.