Flyover Country: Aliens

From "Creatures" by Giorgio Grecu

With my players soon to meet semi-important alien NPCs for the first time, it occurred to me that I should probably provide them with a little more info than the cursory sketches I gave them months ago. At least some of the characters know a decent amount about the common alien species—shouldn't their players? And then I thought, hey, I should just throw this up on the blog. Somebody will find it useful, probably!

Please do whatever you want with these guys. They were created with the tools in the SWN rulebook (p. 202 in the revised edition), and although they've got some SWN-specific elements to them (e.g., histories involving the Scream), as well as a very few elements specific to my campaign, they should be suitable, without much need for adaptation, to any game or setting that has psionics. They do all presuppose a setting where humans are the dominant species, though.

If you do use them in SWN, I've thrown in some not-yet-playtested origin foci for using them as PCs. That stuff would probably be a little trickier to adapt to other systems.

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BETAAL

The betaal (also known as "arbusculae," singular "arbuscula," or "arbos"/"arbo" for short) construct much of their "bodies" from inert foreign matter, which they bind together with sturdy elements of the pseudomycorrhizal network that is their main organic component. Even more than other complex macroorganisms, the betaal test human ideas of what an individual organism or being is; each betaal is composed of multiple species of tiny, mutually interdependent plant- and fungus-like organisms that, entwined with each other and a found armature, form a humanoid being with a keen distributed intelligence.

The name "betaal" comes from Bengali and, like several other human names for these beings, derives from folklore about a supernatural creature capable of animating or inhabiting dead bodies; the humans who first encountered them saw shambling, rotting-looking forms emerge from organic detritus or the earth itself and associated them with legends of the walking dead; in some cases, it seems, betaal had used human bones, even entire skeletons, to form their armatures. In isolated human communities, superstitions associating betaal with the risen dead persist, but elsewhere newer prejudices prevail: the long-lived, slow-acting aliens are often derided as lazy, stupid, or both. They do spend a great time of time seemingly torpid, photosynthesizing or drawing nutrients from soil, water, and air, but they can be energetic, industrious, and downright willful when motivated. They are inclined to quarrelsome democracy and resent impositions on their liberties, particularly their freedom of movement.

The betaal are effectively hermaphroditic, and capable of sexual or asexual reproduction. They can, given time, energy, and inclination, shape themselves into nearly any roughly human-sized form, but once fully grown, cannot radically change that form without time and great difficulty. (They can, however, redistribute some of their "muscle" fibers to trade strength for dexterity or metabolism for mental processing power.) Those who live among humans (which is probably the substantial majority in the Sector) tend to take human-like form for ease and comfort of interaction with humans and in order to make convenient use of human tools, architecture, vehicles, and so forth. Nearly all incorporate into their anatomy structures that can produce human speech, which they render with a pleasant musicality, and most use Mandate or other human languages to communicate even among themselves. There are no consistent naming conventions among the betaal; they seem equally apt to take traditional human names, call themselves by flattering adjectives (e.g., Lucky, Winsome, or Roborant), or coin entirely novel words to name themselves.

Whether all betaal are constitutionally peripatetic or the scattered population encountered in the Sector represent the descendants of a self-selecting, adventurous minority is unclear. There are no betaal colonies of note in the Sector, and little in the way of advanced technology of their own manufacture (mostly heirlooms passed down from ancestors who traveled, almost certainly before the Scream, from the betaal homeworld or homeworlds). Today, betaal in the Sector are happy using human technology and working to advance science along human lines. A few very old wrecked betaal starships have been encountered; it seems that their equivalent of spike-drive travel depended on psionic training that was lost in the Scream. It is probable that most betaal ships were largely or entirely disassembled and incorporated into the "skeletons" of their crews' and passengers' offspring; this was apparently an intended aspect of their design.

Betaal PCs: Innate Ability (this character can draw food and water directly from air and soil), Flexible Attributes (once per day, this character can spend fifteen minutes redistributing their body fibers, gaining +1 to any one attribute bonus with a base value of +1 or less and losing -1 from any one attribute modifier with a base value of -1 or greater; the effect lasts until they next use this ability), and Tough (whenever this character rolls their hit dice to determine their maximum hit points, the first die they roll automatically counts as the maximum, and further hit dice that roll a 1 are rerolled)

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CHUFYU

Unlike the other common alien species in the Sector, these reptile-like humanoids have speech organs that lend themselves readily to human languages, and their own languages are fairly easy for humans to grasp. Consequently, they alone are commonly known by an endonym: chufyu ("chafyu" in some dialects). Some Mandate speakers also call them "specks" or "palmers"; they often refer to themselves, when speaking Mandate or other human languages, as "sevomenoi" (singular "sevomenos," adjective "sevomeninos"), a Greek word, gleaned from their research into human theology and religious history, which they deem to be the best translation of "chufyu."

Chufyu tend, compared to other aliens in the Sector, to be well-received in human communities; although they are often seen as busybodies and nuisances, they are also stereotyped (not incorrectly) as friendly, cheerful, and charitable. Inveterate travelers, tinkerers, and hobbyists, they produce a broad range of artwork and handicrafts, which they trade liberally or simply bestow on human friends as gifts; most chufyu consider it a terrible vice to amass goods beyond what one can comfortably travel with.

Physically, chufyu are bipeds with colubrine heads, retractable membrane frills at their necks, and an exceptional sense of smell, but—especially compared to other aliens encountered in the Sector—broadly humanoid features: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, a big toothy mouth, two arms with opposable thumbs, and only the stub of a tail. Some humans find them to have a pleasant, faintly lemony odor. They daub paint on their bodies in elaborate, albeit monochromatic, patterns (particularly prominent on their faces and arms, as these are often the only parts exposed) and on their armor, if and when they wear it. Their everyday clothing, which tends toward flowing robes, is richly patterned and brightly colored. Talented mimics, they nearly all speak, and most have also learned to read, Mandate. Many have mastered multiple human languages; old scriptural languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Sanskrit are particularly appealing to them.

Their society is organized into "families," although the members of these small communities, ranging in size from several dozen to several thousand individuals (a typical family has several hundred members), are not all biologically related. Each family has a single leader; these latter are sometimes identified by humans as "teachers" or "gurus," although chufyu invariably describe them as "catechists." Religion, or something very much like what humans understand as religion, is all-important to the chufyu, but the practice of their faith is nearly impenetrable to outsiders, an ever-shifting journey through different rituals, prayers, and theological concepts.

Interchange of ideas and even members among different communities is common, and they have shown an almost overbearing interest in human religion, particularly in its thorniest, most complex aspects. Christian theological subjects, particularly Orthodox concepts of the Trinity, are objects of fascination for many chufyu communities. Some chufyu take human names, often from Abrahamic faith traditions (e.g., Fatima, Isaiah, and Paul), but they generally go by appellations from their own languages, which tend to be reasonably easy for humans to pronounce (e.g., Aksu, Ensa, Sib, and Unwob).

Chufyu PCs: Innate Ability (this character can track a scent as well as a trained hound and can mimic most sounds passably well; give them one extra language at character creation) and Unusual Movement Mode (this character can climb sheer walls, as long as they're not unusually smooth or slick)

SHANBEI

The shanbei—also known, somewhat derogatorily, as "flatheads" among Mandate speakers ("shanbei" is from the Chinese 扇贝, "scallop," but is not considered offensive)—are a species difficult to fit into a human taxonomy of life. They could be described as an exotic hybrid of insectile, avian, and vegetal features. Lichen-like colonies of cyanobacteria and fungi analogs mottle their carapaces; these symbiotes, which give the otherwise nondimorphic shanbei pronounced male/female color differences, help them synthesize essential nutrients. Because the symbiote colonies are hydrophilic, they don't handle arid conditions well, and this includes most offworld environments; shanbei tend to stick to humid regions on planetary surfaces, or to orbital habitats specially calibrated to suit them.

Shanbei have large, dish-like heads, with eyes in a ventral line from the rim of the dish down toward their mouthparts. They have long, digitigrade legs, spindly but muscular, that sprout from the bottom rear of a small torso which also sockets two large, strong arms and two small, dexterous ones. Although they cannot come close to approximating human speech, and humans similarly find their burbling and chittering vocalizations impossible to imitate, those who live among humans achieve understanding of the latter's languages, and those humans who have made the effort to learn shanbei speech have found most dialects reasonably easy to grasp with practice; the phonology is totally alien, but the structure surprisingly akin to that of human languages.

Shanbei society, before the Scream, was monarchic (with one queen per colony and one colony per planet, as far as is known today). They were an old civilization, but not an aggressive one, spreading through space at a stately, measured pace, putting each of their worlds in perfect order before embarking on the enormous project of establishing a new colony. Each colony was a complex and highly stratified society, with slight local variations on a great number of different castes, generally including breeder–workers, warriors, scholars, priests, rulers, and stewards. Several of these castes, most crucially the stewards, were psionically active; the stewards guided the reproduction of the colony. All castes, despite being physically dramatically distinct from one another, were genetically identical; their drastically different phenotypes were epigenetic expressions triggered psionically during gestation.

The Scream wiped out the psychic castes, including the stewards, and without their intervention, no castes other than breeder–workers can be reproduced. These sophonts, genetically engineered millennia ago for an inclination to be obedient, cooperative, hardworking, and nonviolent, have felt, ever since being separated from their queens by the Scream, unprotected, exposed, and acutely at risk. Groups of them tend to seek out the protection of strong human patrons (like regional or even planetary governments) and then form insular communities fiercely loyal to those patrons. Individual shanbei, or very small groups, may attach themselves to lower-level leaders, like a village chief, a criminal boss, or a ship's captain, and assimilate more fully into human society. Their names, translated into Mandate for the convenience of their interlocutors, are usually images from nature, especially the sea, often with colors appended, e.g., Red Cloud, Snag, Yellow Blossom, Green Wave, and Boulder.

Shanbei PCs: Environmental Native (this character is able to survive underwater), Natural Defenses (this character has a base Armor Class of 15 plus half their character level, rounded up), and Useful Immunity (this character is immune to atmospheric toxins/contaminants)

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SHIFAR

The builders of the enigmatic ruins on Oriflamme, Barham, and Neith, still present throughout the Sector in small numbers, are most widely known as the shifar (an exonym probably derived from the Arabic "shafr," "shifr," or "shfar"—"blade," "cipher," or "steal")—singular "shifari" or "shifri." They are also called, in Mandate, "shivs" or "shivers." They belong to an intricately stratified oligarchic society whose inner workings are opaque to non-shifar; no living human has seen an active, inhabited shifari community, and few have even been aboard a shifari starship or station.

A labyrinth of social strictures governs shifari interactions with superiors, subordinates, peers, outsiders, and so forth; even their language takes remarkably different forms in different settings. It is complex to the point of being incomprehensible to humans, and its phonology impossible for humans to imitate besides; shifar vocalize not with their mouth-parts but by rubbing speech organs together, like certain Earth-origin insects. By contrast, shifar can reproduce human vocalizations well enough to make themselves understood by native speakers. In their limited dealings with humans, the shifar usually identify themselves with Mandate monikers that seem to be literal translations of shifari names or honorifics, e.g., Braves-the-Flame, Lambent Spear, Sword of Wisdom, and Guards-the-Hearth.

Maneuvers for social standing among the shifar are long, careful, and subtle; they quietly catalog innumerable minute dishonors, breaches of trust, and faux pas committed by their rivals and then compile them into cases brought before a court of honor. Such cases are usually (but not always) settled by a duel, usually (but not always) between the principals, with the defendant hobbled by some set of handicaps or impediments decided upon by the arbiters of the case.

Shifari bodies are very roughly human-shaped, but trilateral: three legs rooted at the base of the torso and three long arms (120 degrees apart) socketed in a rounded but roughly hexagonal clavicle-like bone below the head. The head is somewhat insectoid, and does not feature trilateral symmetry; instead, all three eyes (one very large and central, two about half its size to the sides) are contiguous, define the alien's face, and give it the excellent vision of an apex predator, with substantial peripheral awareness to boot. Shifar can turn their heads more than 180 degrees, but they do not rotate entirely freely; this and several other subtle anatomical features (the forearm, for instance, is slightly shorter than the rear ones) indicate a front side. Most of their exposed parts are composed of dark-green (or gray-green, or greenish-brown) chitin; more vulnerable areas, and their innards, are very pale. Their blood is bright yellow. Their eyes are luminous and iridescent, shimmering with a range of blues, violets, and pinks.

The shifar are rarely seen without weapons, and tend to carry two at a time, frequently a halberd-like blade with two hands and a pistol-like ranged weapon with the third, or a rifle-like weapon with two and a short sword with the third. They usually use their forearm for fine manipulation. Tools and weapons are, to a degree, interchangeable between humans and shifar, although the latter, with their more flexible arms, tend to have an easier time of it.

The shifar commonly encountered in the Sector have access to technology commensurate with that of the most advanced human organizations, but there is evidence that the "higher" shifar have even more advanced technology. Their typical armor is dark and form-fitting, with a bulbous, translucent helmet onto the interior surface of which a HUD is projected. Broad-"shouldered" tunic-like garments with structural ribbing and intricate draping are their typical clothing, at least among starship crews. High-ranking officers wear a rigid headpiece that creates a halo-like effect when seen from the front.

Shifari architecture, encountered only as centuries-old ruins by humans, features helical towers and pillars, triangular buttresses joined by arched concavities, elaborate wall carvings, and enclosed courtyards; these structures make extensive use of stone, chitin, and coral-like bone. Elements grouped into threes or nines are common; tessellating triangular tiles are ubiquitous floor features, and many buildings feature a nonagonal nave where an 80-degree entrance hall meets three 40-degree transepts.

Shifari PCs: Origin Skill (this character receives their choice of Shoot or Stab as a bonus skill) and Strong Attribute (this character gains a +1 bonus to their Dexterity modifier, up to a maximum of +3)

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VRONS

The vrons ("vrone" or "vrona" to linguistic purists—the name is derived from a Slavic language, probably Russian—but "vrons," singular "vron," to most Mandate speakers) are an ancient species of psychically sensitive cyborgs. They prize the life of the mind, the pursuit of knowledge, and intellectual self-improvement, but fear and loathe, with an intensity hard for most humans to fathom, the violation of the mind's autonomy. Nothing, to a vron, is more repulsive, dangerous, or loathsome than a telepath, and many vrons take a dim (bordering on murderous) view of all psychics.

Physically, no two adult vrons are much alike—their biomechanical self-modification is expressed in highly individualized ways—but all share some general characteristics. They are bipeds slightly taller than humans, on average, with broad shoulders and strong necks supporting large Y-shaped heads that jut forward somewhat from their torsos (the upper lobes' backward tilt keeps the head's overall center of gravity above the body's middle point). A vron's organic body features two arms and the vestigial stump of a tail; most maintain these features, although some add extra limbs and some remove the stump, redistributing weight elsewhere. All are born in vitro.

Vrons in the Sector tend to speak a wide variety of human languages, prizing linguistic mastery as a worthy intellectual pursuit (and being aided by synthetic memory and translation aids). The vocalizers they employ can mimic nearly any accent flawlessly, but by a quirk of history and vron psychology, many older vrons (the vast majority of their kind) find that a light Slavic accent sounds most authentically "like them"; the first human languages they encountered and mastered were Slavic, and the habit has stuck. Even some younger vrons have picked up on this peculiarity, especially in their pronunciation of Mandate.

Although the typical vron, even "naked," has few exposed organic elements, many of their mechanical components are fragile or otherwise vulnerable to damage; exposed wires, tubes, and valves are not uncommon. For this reason, and as a matter of custom, vrons strongly prefer outerwear that protects all, or almost all, of their body. Those who cannot secure a deflector array or FEP often favor elaborate powered exoskeletons that can interface with their mechanical components; these can be noisy and energy-hungry, and are almost always bulky, complicating the vron's ability to move discreetly or even maneuver in enclosed spaces. The ornamentation vrons favor looks subtle to the point of dullness to most human eyes; their armor is usually matte metal with faint but intricate patterns etched into it, and their garments thick, dark, heavy robes with minute but tremendously complex patterns woven into the fabric.

No vron is psychic or even partially psychic in human terms, but all have what might be considered a wild metapsionic talent—they can instinctively, like a trained human metapsion, visually and audibly detect the use of psychic powers in their vicinity, and can often recognize the source. They are also naturally resistant, themselves, to psychic powers, a talent which some vrons have managed to refine or augment to a significant extent, particularly in defense against telepathy.

The vron yen for intellectual achievement takes a psychological toll; those who fail to live up to their own standards of sagacity fall into terminal depression, and even those who have some modest accomplishments to speak of are often eccentric and troubled. In point of fact, though, the vast majority of vrons do wield unusually keen intellects, even if they can bring them to bear only in some narrow niche. Many are experts in engineering or applied sciences; the stereotype of the vron as a mad-genius cyberneticist has its roots in fact.

Vrons will readily accept the authority of their fellows (and even humans or other aliens) if they recognize them as intellectual superiors, and will work cooperatively with those they consider to be their peers. Those they see as inferiors, however, they usually regard imperiously, expecting unthinking obedience and often raging at what they see as recalcitrance or insubordination. Their criteria for these categories—superior, peer, and inferior—can be inscrutable to outsiders. Although some especially flexible corporate and military organizations manage to make use of vrons' talents, most find them difficult to fit into any hierarchy other than an intellectual one of their own devising.

Vrons left biological sex behind many centuries ago; they are decanted as sexless individuals and construct much of their own physiology themselves as they grow up. Their ancestors, however, exhibited moderate sexual dimorphism, with females generally larger and stronger and males more colorful. Contemporary vron attitudes toward gender can be divided into three camps of roughly equal and size and influence: those who identify as female, those who identify as non-binary but recognize gender among others, and those entirely indifferent to gender not only among vrons but among all species. Many of the former two groups, particularly the first, regard the male gender in other species as an embarrassing atavism.

Almost no vron, perhaps none at all, identify as male, but they do confound humans by frequently choosing names and synthetic voices that read as male to human acquaintances. Whatever names vrons have among their own kind, they typically identify themselves to humans with aspirational names drawn from human history or mythology. Russian tsars; famous generals, philosophers, and scientists; figures from Slavic folklore; and Greco-Roman deities are all popular choices, e.g., Ivan, Napoleon, Plato, Volta, Koschei, and Hyperion.

Vron PCs: Origin Skill (this character receives their choice of Fix, Know, or Program as a bonus skill) and Wild Talent (this character has an ability equivalent to the level-0 core metapsionic technique, Psychic Refinement: they can visually and audibly detect the use of psychic powers; if both the source and target are visible to them, they can tell who’s using the power, even if it’s normally imperceptible; and they gain a +2 bonus on any saving throw versus a psionic power)