So, I recently picked up the Interstellar Species book and after reading through it, a thought popped into my head. What would a Sepulchral niche Evolutionist Quarlu look like? Quarlu got some lovely new art in this book and, judging by the description they probably don't have bones in their limbs, at least not in the traditional sense. They're also a silicone based lifeform which further muddles things.
One idea is that they're replacing parts of them with parts of corpses, becoming like something of a flesh golem, rather than their own body slowly decaying in the process, so they might swap out the large rock that is their back/body for an enormous skull or swap out their legs for skeletal carbon based legs.
Another is that perhaps they have a fluidity to their bones where they can move them around with ease, maybe hardening or softening them as they please, which is what allows them to create fingers and toes for their hands and feet, and maybe that, as they become more engrossed in Necrografts is what starts to shine through their body?
We could also take full advantage of the strangeness of the Evolutionist and have the Quarlu's body slowly morph into skeletal like structures while maintaining its silicone basing?
What do you guys think? I find thinking of these sorts of things to be a lot of fun and I love hearing other people's opinions.
Are rock bones weird? Aren't dinosaurs made out of them?
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Interesting idea you have here. If you had never seen a Quarlu before, the first time you did see one it was undead could you even tell it was undead? Maybe its coloration looks fossilized and is weather or cracked.
To be flexible a living Quarlu's skin or surface might look like or have a texture of thick mud or wet cement.
I'm building a Shobhad Sepulchral niche Evolutionist not nearly as hard to imagine. There are a lot of species in Starfinder that are hard to envision as topical undead. I'm sure most of the answers to that can be found on Eox
Could a normal vampire even feed on a living Quarlu?
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One of the things we fleshy carbon-based things associate with undeath is the loss or damage of our soft flesh, due to either rot, physical trauma, natural decomposition, or whatever. A lot of those processes occur because of microbial rot, though, right? Bacteria, funguses, whatever other microscopic life able to pick a body apart, one tiny bite at a time, because the flesh no longer defends itself.
Now of course the microbial life that causes decomposition in carbon-based life wouldn't do much with a silicon-based body, but - I assume that quorlus don't live in a vaccum, right? Presumably they have their own entire ecosystem and tree of life based on silicon, with its own attendant decomposition-causing analogues. I don't think it's impossible to assume that dead/undead quorlu would be subject to rot and decomposition - it's just not caused by the same microbes that do it for carbon.
Art we've seen on quorlus shows they still have a lot of 'fleshy bits,' in addition to the rocky shell - the body under the shell, the eye stalks, the arm-thingies, and the leggy-bois. I think you could assume those fleshy bits get pitted, torn, change colour, and damaged for an undead quorlu. For the shell, though - maybe it would slowly be eaten, starting with the thinner connective bits? Maybe an undead quorlu's shell would eventually look partially dissolved, with the internal support network and ribbing still visible (and necromantically strong) but a lot of the 'filler' connective bits gone? I'm imagining a lattice-like shell kind of thing - like a leaf that's decomposed. The overall shape is still there, but there's a lot of 'negative space' between the structural bits? I dunno, just thinking out loud here.