How alien are your aliens?

[Belabras]

This week an exploration of aliens. How do you make the alien species in your game different from humanity, and by how much? Is it just the classic "weird forehead" or are they radically strange?

[Ixal]

Imo there are too many different aliens in SF to give each of them more than just one quirk and leave the rest human.
So basically its no different than Pathfinder (a Elf should technically be as alien as a Lashunta)

[Garretmander]

And a selamid should be even more alien than either and elf or a lashunta... and there are hundreds of options, of which several aren't even humanoid. You have to take it as you go, as the players encounter aliens or if they play as aliens. Some are rubber forehead. Some are living swarms, or oozes, or starfish shaped shapeshifters, etc.

Side note: I'll be honest, the blog plug is slightly annoying as a pretense to start a discussion.

[Loreguard]

I think that as Garretmander suggests, there should be a continuum or range of alien-ness. And there are even aspects of their being alien. One alien species might be extremely physically different than humans, but as a choice (and hopefully well done) despite those differences, their culture and behavior's are very familiar to humanity.

Androids are very similar to humans physically in a appearance to view life, and even their own body, quite a bit different. The Azlanti 'are' theoretically humans but have a different and generally 'villainous' societal perspective.

We should have aliens whose physical forms are bizarre, we can meet, as well as ones who's concepts of interaction may well be far more bizarre than their forms.

Depending on your genre... sometimes it is nice in exploration stories, to have those aliens you know, to be more similar to humanity than many of the aliens you will eventually meet. But some story might want to touch on civilization has already met one of the most bizarre aliens, if not most bizarre alien species already.

There is another side of Starfinder that is a little odd, from the exploration standpoint. Starfinder is multi-planar fantasy. While they have not explored the entire galaxy, they have sort of implied that people have learned how to travel to the Boneyard where souls go when they die. So without having traveled to their homeworld, there isn't a whole lot of reason why sages wouldn't already know about any number of solitary species that live on different planets out in the vast. (potentially even species that are even now technically extinct) You wouldn't have to go to their planet to find them, and know about them, and know something about their language, culture, and faith.

That is an aspect that is completely different from typical space exploration fantasy. (although sometimes you have the mystical dream, or greater species guiding the meeting of some species through extra-normal means, which could be viewed somewhat similar to dimensional travel and information dispersal)

[lightningcat]

Loreguard wrote:

There is another side of Starfinder that is a little odd, from the exploration standpoint. Starfinder is multi-planar fantasy. While they have not explored the entire galaxy, they have sort of implied that people have learned how to travel to the Boneyard where souls go when they die. So without having traveled to their homeworld, there isn't a whole lot of reason why sages wouldn't already know about any number of solitary species that live on different planets out in the vast. (potentially even species that are even now technically extinct) You wouldn't have to go to their planet to find them, and know about them, and know something about their language, culture, and faith.

That is an aspect that is completely different from typical space exploration fantasy. (although sometimes you have the mystical dream, or greater species guiding the meeting of some species through extra-normal means, which could be viewed somewhat similar to dimensional...

There is an implied reasoning for this. While most of the other planes are infinate, or at least for all practical purposes, places where there are beings have a metaphysical weight which draws others beings there. But like attracts like, so there may be a mention of a race, but seen through a lens of whomever wrote it. So if you met a Selamids, whould you think entire race of beings, or awakened ooze experiment? The latter is a bit more likely. You might find out otherwise in a conversation, but what are the odds of either of you bothering to have it.

While the prime material may be infinate as well, the galaxy is fairly self contained, but it is still huge. There are between 100 and 400 billion stars in our galaxy, so we can assume similar numbers in Starfinder. So if you had 100,000 ships dedicated to cateloging the star systems, it would take at bare minimum 16,438 years in order to visit each system for 1 day. And maybe up to 328,767 years, depending on number of stars and how your luck with drift travel is.

[Metaphysician]

Some of my thoughts:

1. Obviously, yes, there should be a spectrum. Not every species needs to be equally alien to every other.

2. However, there is an underlying reason why so many species are actually not *that* alien to each other. Essentially, when the universe was created, the gods "cheated" and used various procedural templates. Thus, sentient or not, you see a lot of recurring motifs amongst different planets and their lifeforms. There are countless planets with similar human-like, or vesk-like, or whatever, lifeforms, the variations being mostly cosmetic.

3. That said, I generally find it more fun when different sentient species actually do come off as *different*, both in biology and culture. Thus, I try to emphasize the species distinction in different races where it exists in canon, and create it from scratch where it doesn't. For instance, I have the Lashunta as intermixing speech and telepathy, not so much out of courtesy to the non-telepathic, but because Lashunta generally feel they need both to adequately communicate their thoughts and ideas, for better ( whole species of prodigies ) and worse ( . . . and they know it ). They also have a much different risk tolerance than a lot of species, because their entire species history is on a moderately harsh death world, thus setting their cultural sense of "risk" differently.

4. Also, this applies for my fantasy games, too. Why have elves, dwarves, and orcs who are just humans with odd skin colors and random extra powers, when you can have genuine divergent species with worldviews distinct and alien from humans? Which, really, things like "thousand year lifespan", "perfect adaptation for living underground", or "extremely high reproductive cycle and optimization for war-fighting" *should* result in completely different culture and worldview, in a way that simply being "the same species living in a different spot" wouldn't.

[Goth Guru]

On the other hand, silicone based creatures like the Tholians are obsessed with symmetry for it's own sake. While this is essentially lawful neutral, the gods or god who created them or were attracted by them are appropriately alien.

The living demons on a demon planet might be sulphur based.