File: IMG_0120.jpg (17 KB, 236x229)

17 KB JPG

Some thoughts I had for semi alien creatures, probably not full blown starfish aliens.

Come up with your races biology and how that would factor into day to day life, create cultures, and perhave have your character predict other characters behavior as if they were a member of its species. We tend to anthropomorphosize creatures we deem friendly. An alien may or may not do this but would make for fun roleplaying

File: X8H4Xfcq8WcD.jpg (197 KB, 500x750)

197 KB JPG

>>50063651
>How should you play truly alien characters?

It's very, very difficult to do as a player. It's slightly easier as a GM, but even then, only slightly. I'm going to do a walkthrough, starting with some design tips, and ending with an example creature built from scratch.

(This discussion isn't about bumpy-forehead aliens in Mass Efffect or other soft sci-fi settings. Those are easy enough to play by adapting Earth morals/behaviors. This is for "truly alien" characters.)

Start by thinking about your assumptions. The easiest way is to do a very rapid top-down analysis, then work your way back up.

Let's start with your alien's mind. We can work on the physical parts later.

Emotions are the first to go - love, hate, fear, joy, humour... your alien doesn't have them. Replace them with the core concepts the emotions represent and break them down further. Desire to breed, territory defense, survival instinct, social bonding. Does your creature reproduce - yes or no? Don't worry about the details yet. Does it have an individual competitive/collaborative structure (like humans) or a collective structure (like ants) or something even more strange? Try and figure out how you want this creature's species to work... but think about it like a biologist, not a sociologist.

For example, don't think about "families" - too many Earth connotations. Think about "generational social units".

So we've started to peel back the layers. Next up - thoughts. Does your alien think like we do? Is there an inner monologue? Can it experience empathy (with other members of its species, or with other species), or think ahead, or remember past events? Is its mind a collaboration or a competition or is it "conscious" at all?

This bit is very tricky, and requires some good background reading and lots of notes. Whenever you think you've got it, take a step back and look for shortcuts - human or Earth elements you added in out of habit to make things easier or more relatable.

File: vortigaunt_by_bryantheeve(...).jpg (233 KB, 509x800)

233 KB JPG

>>50063726
>Come up with your races biology and how that would factor into day to day life
What are some good examples that first come to mind?

File: jellyfish-nomura-625x477.jpg (295 KB, 625x477)

295 KB JPG

>>50063854
You're probably starting to see the problem. How the hell are you supposed to play as a creature who thinks in a way you can barely describe, let alone roleplay?

No easy answer.

But start by deciding what your alien has for needs. Nothing as specific as "oxygen" or "sunlight."

Something like a bent Maslow's hierarchy of needs works well.

Most creatures have physiological needs; start defining them in general terms. For humans, they would be something like "Resource Intake, Environmental Control, Rest Time" instead of "Food, Water, Air, Shelter, Clothing, and Sleep"

After that, what does your creature need? Is "Physical Security" a concern? is "Contact with Others?" What about "Reproduction?" How urgent is it?

Moving up, we can have things like "Control of Social Structure" or "Esoteric Creations" (music, art, hedonistic sex, things that hit a weird part of the mind that didn't evolve to /do/ much of anything).

But you can add in more "alien" concepts here too, things that don't really exist in the real world. "Resource Hoarding" could be far more vital to an alien creature than it is to a human. "Consumption of Inferior Others" is also not really done - warfare might fit under "Security", but devouring your less-weighty broodmates to fuel your own metamorphosis isn't something we really have to deal with here on Earth.

File: giant_alien_barnacle_by_x(...).jpg (58 KB, 1024x791)

58 KB JPG

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ-T5VEueW0

File: Life Timeline.png (193 KB, 452x953)

193 KB PNG

>>50063948
Now, let's work from the bottom up.

As far as we can tell, life started when a few strings of chemicals inside of a spontaneously-formed bubble figured out how to make more of themselves. For most of the time that life has existed on Earth - and it showed up almost immediately - that was it. Single bubbles just became more and more refined. Some of them figured out how to eat other bubbles. Some of them ate other bubbles but worked together.

The basic ingredients for life seem to be:
=A solvent (water, ethanol, hexane)
-at a temperature that allows chemistry to occur on a useful scale (not solid, but not hot enough to break down the solvent or the compounds in it)
-and some reactive compounds. Carbon compounds are handy. Sunlight can break them and recombine them fairly easily. Carbon is abundant in the universe and binds to other abundant elements. It can be formed into gasses or solids or liquids. It's not the only option by far, but if your life /doesn't/ use carbon somewhere in it, there had better be a reason why.
-An energy source (the sun, geothermal vents) to stir it all
-And time

And then, we assume, you get life... of a sort.

>>50064004
There are relatively few elements that life could use as structural building blocks. An element needs to be able to form a variety of bonds - just one won't do. It needs to be abundant in the universe. It can't be very stable in ionic form - the bonds need to be convalent for your creature to get any useful chemistry done. Feel free to have your alien be 30% iron by weight, but that iron has to be supported by some kind of non-metallic chemistry.*

From the top, you've got: Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Silicon, Phosphorous, and Sulphur. That's it - any other element can be present in rich abundance, but as far as spontaneously organized chemistry is concerned, the workhorses are on this list.

Boron-nitrogen pairs act like carbon in a lot of ways. Carbon is, as we've discussed, quite versatile. Silicon /can/ form bonds like carbon, but has fewer options, and bonds with silicon are generally harder to form and harder to break. In the real world, silicon chemistry involves all kinds of hideous acids and strong UV light. Phosphorous and Sulphur both form structures all on their own. Phosphorous-oxygen bonds are also useful energy storage devices here on earth - ATP is ubiquitous. There's no guarantee alien life will use anything similar (and certainly, it won't involve something as unique as adenosine, but it's still worth mentioning.)

So assuming you're not a chemist and the previous paragraphs were pretty much greek to you.. what does all this mean?

Life on your alien world will involve alien chemical pathways. Your creature's ancient cellular** might split nitrogen using focused UV radiation. They might scavenge sulphur from tectonic vents in a boiling sea of pitch-black goop.

*If you want to deal with self-replicating crystal aliens or intelligent alloys or sentient magnetic fields... we can talk about it later.
**Ditto for non-cellular life. Celluar assembly makes a lot of sense as a way to start life off - other options may exist.

File: n04_00000004.jpg (236 KB, 990x723)

236 KB JPG

>>50064150
Takeaway message: ditch everything you know about "alien DNA" and "alien protein' and "alien food we can eat" and "aliens we can cuddle".

Our chemistry might be toxic to any alien creature, and even if it's not, there might be side effects.

Take ethylene for example. It's a very, very, very simple organic molecule - just 2 carbons bonded to 2 hydrogen atoms each, and joined with a double bond. It doesn't look like a steroid molecule or like cholesterol or like an enzyme. It's closer, visually, to CO2 than something "vital".

Plants use it as a ripening hormone. Want to get your bananas to go yellow? Spray 'em with ethylene, or put them in a plastic bag and let the ethylene the banana naturally releases do the work.

This simple molecule controls fruit ripeness.

Imagine the kind of havoc human biochemistry, throwing off dead cells, urea, salts, water, hair, carbon dioxide, sulphides, methane, and a thousand other chemicals every minute... imagine the havoc that would cause to a creature that had evolved under a totally different set of chemical links.

Pick any cell on earth, at random, and chances are good your body can break down and use components from it. Life on earth evolved from the same origin, so we use fairly similar structures no matter where you look (with a few astonishing exceptions).

But a creature that uses boron-nitrogen-oxygen chains dotted with silver as cell walls is going to have a hell of a time picking through an Earth cell for useful parts without finding things that will either kill it or mess with its plans.

We only evolve to survive things we see in the environment. It's why methyl mercury and arsenic are deadly poisons - there weren't big lakes of methyl mercury around when we were becoming multicellular worms. If it's rare, our biochemistry doesn't have good coping mechanisms.

Forget sitting down to a dinner of "alien steaks" and "alien wine" or having an alien eat you for dinner. Forget shaking hands.

File: Biol_-_RLN_fig1.png (284 KB, 440x292)

284 KB PNG

>>50064235
At some point on Earth, bubbles of carbon realized that they could survive more effectively if they stuck together. This innovation took a /long/ time. By species and organism counts, multicellular life is a weird deviant side-branch. Single cells still continue to thrive.

Let's imagine a creature that consists of 3 cells in a row, all identical. Already you have lines of symmetry - a long axis and a short axis. In liquids, it's energetically easier to present less surface area, so if your creature moves, it probably moves with one cell pointed forwards.

Now, slowly, that front cell might evolve better ways of sensing its environment - chemical pores, feelers, pressure-sensitive areas of the membrane. It might also develop a groove that slides food directly into a convenient pocket. Rather than blundering into food, the creature can now pass it from cell to cell. The last cell in the chain might grow longer and flatter and act like a tail, and maybe develop a more efficient waste excretion system.

We're not talking about "planned" development here. This isn't "evolving to a higher organism". These are just adaptations that make these creatures more fit than their peers - if a creature that moved sideways through the solvent worked better, then our three-in-a-row creature might die out.

You can see where this is going though. As cells are added, we get a creature with a "head" - a front segment with sensors - and a "tail" - for moving and excreting waste.

On earth, cells tend to divide in half, so our little worm-thing will divide in half too to create a left-hand worm and a right-hand worm which will eventually regrow to their full size and do it all over again.

Boom. We have the start of bilateral symmetry.

(Cells on an alien world might work in a very different way though. Maybe they manufacture tiny spore-like versions of themselves that they send out one at a time to assemble on the back of the "worm", like ball bearings in a tube.)

File: Montastrea_cavernosa.jpg (1.23 MB, 1780x1156)

1.23 MB JPG

>>50064313
Bunch of little wormy guys join together - you get radial symmetry.

From there, start deriving upwards. On earth the "left-side, right-side, sensors at the front, poop out the back" plan caught on early and stuck around. You can bend it like cuttlefish, you can go all weird like jellyfish, or you can stick to something like coral (and end up turning into a plant-like thing as your systems adapt to an immobile environment) but that was the plan on Earth.

No matter where you look, the same plan keeps showing up. And there are some weird, weird variants out there. I'll be posting a few as I take a break.

...

Is anyone actually reading this?

File: 3fcb198f11442796e9a90631c(...).jpg (219 KB, 735x520)

219 KB JPG

>>50064354
Burgess Shale arthropods.

File: 4445946991_d3532fc8bc_o.jpg (116 KB, 680x1020)

116 KB JPG

>>50064357
Caterpillar.

File: irerzPg.jpg (192 KB, 1160x480)

192 KB JPG

>>50064365
Clam.

Like I said, not all life on earth ended up following that basic plan - plants and fungi came up with alternative arrangements. But even clams still follow the same line as an elephant or an ant. They're just curled up in a weird shape, and they put their sensors in more useful places.

>>50064357
Cambrian, the mother nature's experimental period after she figured out that vendian pancakes wouldn't do the trick.

File: butterfliesonturttle.jpg (321 KB, 1600x1200)

321 KB JPG

>>50064444
Actually, modern thoughts go "Life tends to be incredibly diverse, given the chance, but extinction events wipe out a lot of diversity and can lead to ossified niche phylums."

File: 1274778507581.jpg (1.74 MB, 1600x1600)

1.74 MB JPG

Ok, I'm off to bed, but if you want me to keep posting more notes on designing aliens, keep this thread from disappearing.

>>50064696
Do go on if you find the time, it's interesting to an evogamefag like me.

File: 1332972307901.jpg (1.2 MB, 1024x768)

1.2 MB JPG

>>50064696
>>50064934
Likewise. I'd love to read some more after work.

>>50064444
It was God's embarrasing deviantart stage.

>>50064396
That's a scallop, not a clam.

>>50068727
It's fucking angry looking, is what it is. Looks like Yogg-Saron.

>>50066667
God, primordial was what, 4 or 5 years ago?

>>50064354
> Is anyone actually reading this?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm finding it interesting. More please, anon!

>>50064354
Please continue

>>50064354
I'd like this in a more coherent setting than via 4chan posts, but yeah, I'm reading it

You should throw together a PDF of Google doc

>>50069044
I'd say it looks like a scallop

File: 1402601632629.jpg (95 KB, 702x491)

95 KB JPG

>>50063726

>>50063651
>Question for the thread: How should you play truly alien characters?
non-verbally, maybe? Communicate through hand-signals to convey the idea of a life-form that has no concept of auditory language.

Either way, what I do know is that people who talk about convergent evolution are just being lazy and unimaginative.

>>50064354
>Is anyone actually reading this?
yes. yes I am

File: 1447802729_04ecb6bb1a.jpg (60 KB, 404x443)

60 KB JPG

>>50063955
>barnacle
>the entire backside of its body is erupting out of its head
I know its supposed to be an alien but I'm still triggered

>>50071609
>Race of space squids who communicate by changing colors at each other
>All communication with the other players must be accomplished via crayon drawings
>Written communication is okay, the letters have to be sloppily.

>>50071609
I think there is some value in considering convergent evolution in a context similar to Last Tomorrows - highly advanced aliens seeding lifeforms with the same evolutionary background on planets with different conditions and considering the adaptations that would result.

File: choanoflagellate.jpg (12 KB, 400x300)

12 KB JPG

>>50064354
That was a good read, but I'm a pedant so I have to point something out.
Being multicellular is by no means a requirement for symmetry - just slap a flagellum on a cell and you've essentially given it a "front" and "back."
Also, the majority of currently accepted phylogenies for animals suggest bilateral symmetry arose from radial symmetry, not the other way around.
Pic tangentially related

>>50072371
I'm not saying it couldn't happen, possibly, but there's plenty of people who will say that convergent evolution not just could, but /should/ lead to animals with terrestrial features.

Mostly because that way they can apply what they do know to the problem, rather than just being left with a near-infinite number of possibilities and nothing particularly meaningful to say about any of them. Generally the more seriously they're trying to come up with an answer to the problem of what extraterrestrial animals would look like, the worse this gets.

That's why /tg/ is the perfect place to talk about this stuff. It never bothers us if we don't get around to an actual answer - it's the discussion that counts.

File: Grazing Glunds by Sleepy_(...).jpg (297 KB, 949x908)

297 KB JPG

>>50070332
Just about 4 1/2.

File: This used to be a fat lit(...).png (43 KB, 933x645)

43 KB PNG

>>50073392
Oh fug

File: 87599134_0f2a679120.jpg (153 KB, 500x375)

153 KB JPG

>>50072428
It's kind of a mixed hypothesis, but you're correct on both counts. I'm just trying to do a very quick "for RPG design" overview.

>>50066667
>>50070575
>>50070723
>>50070839
>>50071609
>>50064934
Thanks. Back now. I'll post a little bit, then take off until about 6hrs from now.

File: 1416593566619.jpg (53 KB, 1600x1067)

53 KB JPG

>>50074502

File: elric_8_page_22_by_sdowne(...).jpg (300 KB, 600x911)

300 KB JPG

>>50074519

File: listeners_by_khesm-d8ufdus.jpg (251 KB, 1280x1022)

251 KB JPG

>>50074540

File: colored_version_2_by_hyro(...).jpg (168 KB, 1280x905)

168 KB JPG

>>50074555

File: irridalli_ro_by_abiogenis(...).jpg (194 KB, 1300x738)

194 KB JPG

>>50074578

>>50071609
Convergent evolution does make sense, but you are right in that there are lots of lazy people who use it as an excuse.

A humanoid shape is just being lazy or cheap, but convergent evolution is just the idea that the same thing will win in different places. There are a few things out there that I would propose fall into that category, especially if you want to make a sentient alien capable of creating technology.

Eyes, for one, are super useful in just about any situation, since chances are the planet will have a sun, and therefore something that can detect photons would be super useful, although "eyes" rigged to see up or down the spectrum could be possible. Same with things like bones, fingers, or legs. They could be made of different things or shaped differently, but they still are super efficient. You can't walk or use a tool with a tentacle, they are too clumsy, especially outside of a liquid medium, which would make metallurgy and writing much more difficult to develop.

File: 11TREEOFLIFE-superJumbo.jpg (310 KB, 1440x1635)

310 KB JPG

>>50064354
>>50064696
Right, where was I?

Symmetry and body plans, right.

Once a symmetry mode gets established, it's fairly tricky to get off of it. People think this has something to do with embryonic development. It might be easy to add in long limbs or extra segments or a tough skin or a /really/ good set of eyes, but suddenly going from bilateral to radial requires a shift within the first few cells. Make a change that big and whatever offspring results is not likely to survive.

So now we get into the more traditional evolution that everyone's seen a thousand times in different forms of media. It's like a lovely slideshow of "progress" - cells to fish to lizards to shrews to monkeys to your aunt Doris. Hooray. But evolution doesn't work that way. We're not marching happily towards a "goal" of sentience or nice big brains and shiny teeth.

Think of it more like a ludicrous GI-Joe Cold War arms race. The Russians have a new type of missile that can dive underwater to blow up our cities! Quick! We need to build anti-diving-missile nets! On no, the Russians attached buzz saws to the missiles! Damn them!

That's how evolution works. And by the time you've invented a net made of titanium and lasers, it's too late to go back and say "wait, maybe we should do what Norway did and just shoot down the missiles before they dive." You're stuck now. Stuck with your billion dollar nets.

File: 3035.jpg (26 KB, 400x404)

26 KB JPG

>>50074619
I'm actually about to get into this, so hang on for a second, but I disagree with some of what you're saying - at least, the "Earthy-ness" of it.
>>50074652

So let's assume that you've decided that your creatures are competitive and that they require resources from their environment. You probably need a way for them to move around.

In a fluid that's about as dense as your organism, like water, you have lots of options. You can use your entire body. You can modify your digestive tract - or another whole-organism channel - to make a jet. Or you can start developing special extrusions that help you move.

Lots of little extrusions means you have plenty of versatility - if one breaks, you've got more. They're also easy to evolve. If you have a creature with 10 body segments (2 legs per segment), and its mutant offspring has 11 body segments and moves faster, the 11-segment creature is going to do well for itself. It's an easy mutation to make at this level of development.

You might develop other useful tools, like a hard outer layer or spikes or other means of being unappetizing, and other creatures will develop better ways to eat you by peeling your shell or flipping you over or becoming bigger or smaller. You might adapt to a wider range of environments by changing your internal chemistry, or by going into stasis until conditions meet your needs again.

As your creatures get bigger though, the cubed-squared law starts to raise it's incredibly bitchy head. As your volume goes up, your surface area doesn't grow to match. Once you were used to solvent cooling your insides and moving nutrients about, but you now need to bring solvent to where it's needed. That's just an example, but there are basic chemical limits that say "at a certain point, if you want to do chemistry, you'll need to specialize". An amoeba the size of a truck might seem cool, but how to the middle amoeba-parts get what they need from the environment?

>>50074894
Personally I think the matter of "earthiness" is largely a matter of how "earthy" the planet in question is, as well as the question of what exactly is meant by "earth like" features. Earth has some weird ass shit.

I am interested in your take on that though.

File: s04_00000004.jpg (254 KB, 990x836)

254 KB JPG

>>50074652
>>50074894

And so, your specialized creatures arms-race each other. Every so often an extinction even occurs - the oceans rust, a species' waste product changes the entire atmosphere, an asteroid hits the planet, a continent gets stuck and then lurches and sends molten rock everywhere...

Right before each extinction event, you have a lot of diversity, but it's moving slowly. Everything's hit a fairly stable point. It's like the end of season ladder in Hearthstone, or a D&D edition's minmaxing before a new edition or supplement comes out.

But then there's a change. A lot of things that were viable before (living in a narrow pH range, requiring sunlight, eating a specific other creature) become non-viable. Those creatures die off quickly. Some creatures can adapt - maybe some mechanism from a previous arms race comes in handy, or maybe they're just lucky. Diversity plummets, but then starts to build back up.

But at the cellular level, things don't change much. If anything decides to start the multicellular game all over, it's out-competed from the gate by multicellular creatures that have millions of years of a headstart. New kingdoms don't seem to come along once life gets going.
What I'm trying to say is this. Once you develop a basic form of life for your aliens - or maybe one or two basic forms, like plants and animals on earth - you can invent all kinds of wild varieties provided you stick to the same sorts of plans.

Next up, we're going to talk about Phylums.

File: w35_00000001.jpg (498 KB, 990x689)

498 KB JPG

>>50075114
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylum

It's not a long list. Scanning it, you'll see a few words repeated quite a bit: "worm"... and "anus".

See post >>50064313 if you want to know why.

"None of these look familiar," you might say. And you'd be right, mostly. The things you're familiar with are in just a 3 phylums:

-Arthropoda: Insects, Crustaceans, Centipedes, Millipedes, Spiders/Scorpions. It's a short list.
-Mollusca: Orders: Heaps. From clams to octopi to snails
-Chordata: Everything macroscopic living thing you encounter on a regular basis that isn't in the first 2 phyla. This includes your goldfish, your pigeon, your steak, and your Aunt Doris.

Everything in this category had a common ancestor. While a lot of complexity might emerge within a phylum - a cuttlefish and a scallop are not exactly interchangeable body plans - that's how life works here on Earth.

If you're building an alien species, keep that in mind - what do other living things look like where it comes from? Are they part of the same "Phylum" or are there some /really/ wacky things going on?

File: Ottoia_burrowing.jpg (77 KB, 784x1119)

77 KB JPG

>>50075355
So, convergent evolution...

A lot of people read this as "if a creature is smart it needs a big brain. It will need to keep that brain safe so it will put it up in the air. Two legs are efficient for walking on land. Two arms are useful for using tools. Therefore, humanoids aliens are likely to evolve and be a lot like us. Maybe they'll even have tits."

Its a common design choice. See:
>>50063687
>>50063883

You can fiddle with the extremities, add joints, add knobs to the head, play with the proportions, mix in parts from other familiar animals... but in the end, a /lot/ of aliens are just humans in funny suits.

We like that. We like aliens we can relate to. It's comfortable to imagine a creature that might breathe methane and eat uranium, but that has two beady eyes and a head on a neck.

We are also scared by things that resemble us. The Xenomorph that speaks to our deepest evolutionary fears is far more "human" than some things that evolved with us, right here on Earth.

All "convergent evolution" means is "similar structure may evolve in unrelated creatures to deal with the same evolutionary pressures."

For instance, if you want to move vertically in a less-dense-than-you fluid (like air), you need a lot of surface area for pushing. Birds took surface structures that already existed, on the basic limb plan that their ancestors stuck them with (somewhere in Vertebrata), and started using them to get sufficient surface area to move around, evade predators, and access food.

Bats, in an unrelated way, took the /very same limbs/, but without the same covering, and used skin as the surface area. The muscle movements and joints required are quite different, but two unrelated paths got them to the same goal - big flappy high-surface-area paddles to move through less-dense-than-me fluid.

File: bIAQYMafkXSBH5y7Uf.jpg (47 KB, 900x676)

47 KB JPG

>>50075658
But you have to pick carefully. There's no guarantee the evolutionary pressures on an alien world are the same as Earth's, or that the structures that evolve to deal with them will follow the same path.

Take the eye, for example. /Lots/ of aliens people invent have recognizable eyes. It "makes sense", right?

Well, does it? Does a sphere of fluid, with a lens to allow a large amount of collected light to be focused onto a small area, and with one opening at the front, embedded into a surface make sense under a variety of conditions? Here on Earth, creatures keep evolving the eye - it's so useful! - but each time it's a little different. Even if your aliens have "eyes", their vision range won't be human at all. Birds see the world much differently than we do. Aliens might see a painting as a blank blob, or a white carpet as a mosaic of shades.

>>50075845
I was about to make this point, but I'm glad you did first.

Two arms and two legs happens to be a really good adaptation for climbing shit. Humans were arboreal in our earlier stages - remember the safe way to use ladders, kids! "Three points of contact at all times."

Climbing a tree requires the muscle strength to break gravity's pull on the body. It requires something to act as a fulcrum that isn't the tree itself (bones) and it requires some kind of fastening tool so your muscular, bony ass doesn't fall out of the tree (hands).

But you can't stop at two arms and two legs, as you point out. That's one specialization for one environment in one very limited application. Designing aliens, when you get down to it, is easier than it first appears, because you're trying to be as specific as possible in what your alien critter can do in its preferred environment.

>>50072493
The problem with convergent evolution is when it is taken to ridiculous extremes

>>50075845
As >>50074619
I'd have to say I agree with you here, and I think the prime issue at hand is what people actually mean when they say Convergent Evolution.

The eye IS useful, and it has evolved countless times on Earth, and I think chances are it would evolve on an alien world too, but just like how every iteration of it is different here, it would likely have lots of iterations on the alien world too, but the "eye", an organ used to detect photons in order to detect the environment, would still likely evolve in some way, regardless of how it functions, what spectrum it detects, or how it is structured.

I do think, however, that there are some overarching requirements for an alien, not to evolve, but to evolve a place in the setting and/or story. By this I mean that the alien needs to be similar enough to us to have a technic society which is physically capable of interacting with us in some way, even if it's a way we can't make sense of. A blanket of growing crystalline plant-things won't usually cut it. Essentially, you need aliens that have been built in a way that would favor a result that could find themselves somehow interacting with humans in a way we can comprehend and have fun making a campaign or story out of.

At the same time, unless you're making a low budget film or tv show and all you can afford are funny shaped foreheads and body paint, "humanoid" should be avoided at all costs. I actually have a list for designing aliens that mostly covers the major issues while deliberately coming to the conclusion of a technic society.

>>50076169
First, it needs to be smart to make tools. Regardless of what organ it uses to think, the process of thinking is typically evolved in response to a predatory role, so the animal will likely have a predatory past as a hunter.

It will likely be an omnivore, capable of feeding on a wide range of creatures on its planet, be it a food producer or consumer (assuming the most basic definition of plant and animal under the assumption that this planet will have a different range of life forms that fill these roles that would otherwise be undefinable by these terms.) This is because in the event of a mass extinction event, this animal would have better odds adapting. Not needed, just gives it better odds.

It will need to live on land, or at least be capable of surviving extended durations on land. This is because many technologies are far more difficult to develop in non-air mediums. Even if this alien doesn't use oxygen in any way biologically, it will still have better odds developing tech if the air both has oxygen in it and the animal lives on land. Fire leads to metallurgy and cooking, and even if cooking food has no benefit in this world, metallurgy is key to further development, and doing it in water or in an endless sky like a gas giant is either impossible or nearly so.

It will need rigid manipulators. Tentacles are no good because while they are great for gripping, they can't do much fine manipulation such as whittling, carving, weaving, or hauling heavy loads. An alien may find a way around these issues, but it's not an issue of impossibility, but an issue of stacking the odds in favor of this alien to get it to evolve its way to space. It's manipulation limbs will likely be evolved from existing limbs, such as legs, mandibles, mating organs, or other such things, and these limbs will need to have a bone-like substance either within, around, or attached to the limbs to give it the ability to serve as a fulcrum and fine manipulator.

>>50076375
It needs an organ capable of communication. Doesn't matter what it is, sound, color patterns, modulating an electrical field, scent, whatever. It just needs an organ or set of organs that can communicate ever more elaborate and complex concepts leading to the development of language.

So in the end, you have a multi-limbed creature with a predatory past that is capable of eating a wide range of substances, has rigid, structured limbs, lives on land in an atmosphere that either has oxygen or some similar fuel source and is capable of communicating complex thoughts with others.

Shape wise, there are countless body types and biological structures that could fill these limitations without ever coming anywhere close to a humanoid appearance. This is what I typically mean by convergent evolution.

>>50076375
Anyone have some counterarguements to this?

>>50076464

What about limbs that can become rigid through some chemical stimulus?

>>50076490
Before you do, I'd like to just reiterate that this list is not my idea of what all alien life will look like, it's my list of "how to make an alien that can take part in a story, campaign, or other setting without being built arround them" Essentially just my way of making aliens that are both odd and alien, and also not so alien that it takes months of study to figure out if it's alive or not.

>>50076555
That works too. So long as the limb is rigid enough to be used as a fulcrum and a fine manipulator. Does not matter one bit how it does that, so long as it does that.

>>50076490
Maybe on the fire part. Swap it with 'chemical reaction that could lead to tool-making'. Maybe their planet has Stalker-like gravity anomalies, and their tech could revolve around using these to bend metals. Maybe if that's too fantastic, how about naturally abundant liquids of varying acidity? They could dip metals to change their properties, and use them to hunt.
Maybe there's frequent lightning that strikes floating masses of biomass and causes a flying 'forest' fire that an aerial sapient could exploit.

Point is, yes, fire is useful, but there are alternatives that non-terrestial sapients could use - or, at least, ways for fire to be useful and exploitable for them. From there, entire cultures never before seen could develop.

>>50077684
What about some degree of control over the developement of zooids or some shit, perhaps an intelligent colonial organism

>>50077684
My counter argument, as much as a cop out as it may sound like, is that my rules are not hard law, but recommendations. The more checks on the list the alien has the more likely it is that it will follow a relatively similar development as us and make it to space in a way we can interact with in a way that can produce interesting plots and gameplay. No single rule on the list is needed, but every alien in the setting should at least follow one or two, with those who only have one check being considered a strange exception that proves the rule or an uplift that evolved artificially.

Such a race which evolved to use chemical pools instead of fire would likewise be a very strange race which could be characterized by other races by their use of advanced chemical sciences in their technology, because the lack of access to fire made their development of technic society more unlikely than the other races, meaning they had worse odds when they rolled the evolutionary dice. A race with all the checks has the deck stacked in their favor.

An interesting space opera type of setting, in my opinion, requires a mix of aliens that check off different things on the list at different frequencies. A few super odd things here, some less odd things there, an uplift that would have never evolved sapience sprinkled in, an unusual intelligent herbivore species that evolved just out of luck, or a race of carrion eaters that developed intelligence in a contrived and unusual collection of circumstances, an aquatic uplift race, ect. The number of things on the list the aliens have only indicate about how likely they were to get to space on their own, which can be used by the writer to gauge about how often that kind of alien should be found in the setting.

File: transparentshell.jpg (90 KB, 768x756)

90 KB JPG

>>50075979
Eh, there are plenty of climbing creatures that have other adaptations. Plenty of tree-climbing snakes and insects, for instance. And geckos who don't grip!

It's more like "four limbs, in two pairs, is what this popular branch of vertebrates is stuck with. Birds, lizards, mammals - you can have vestigial limbs or you can fuse them together, but you can't have any more. So if your are under evolutionary pressure to climb trees, you need to put those limbs to good use and develop a way of gripping things."

It's not like "these are optimal in all cases for climbing!" It's just that 2 legs and 2 arms was what we were stuck with - we couldn't have used four arms and one leg, even if we wanted to. Some climbing creatures figured out how to use their spines as third limbs - seems pretty "optimal."

File: tumblr_of985oiKAZ1rrwdyco(...).jpg (304 KB, 1081x1920)

304 KB JPG

What do you call an augmented alien? Transalien? Transxenos?

File: Space Horror - Faster tha(...).png (1.38 MB, 1878x5640)

1.38 MB PNG

>>50076169
So, photons.

We've got a lovely source of photons in the sky for most of the day, and a backup reflector even when the main source is below the horizon. The photons aren't high enough wavelength to break down complex carbon-based molecules in a hurry, but they are also intense enough to keep this planet at a temperature where liquid water can form and stay stable.

If your creatures evolve in a world where their local star is the primary energy source for their world - driving life-forming chemistry - then using those photons is a very good idea. Detecting reflected photons from objects is a good idea - it gives you a /ton/ of useful info if you can find a way of processing it.

There's also a theoretical limit on the spectrum a creature can "see". Once you get into the far IR region, the energy of the incoming photons just isn't enough to break a chemical bond or even excite an electron sufficiently. You /can/ still come up with chemical systems that detect far IR, but the systems also have to be hit by much more energetic light and survive. Not easy.

The UV regions start to get tricky too. You can go a loooong way into UV before you start losing the ability to build chemical systems. Low-energy photons won't damage the detector.

X-rays start to become trickier. It's now a matter of absorbing them and also gaining some energy out of it. It's also very, very tricky to focus x-rays. The "bugs" in the attached screenshot used x-ray glancing angle mirrors to get some slight degree of focusing, but they were... fairly advance. Or just don't bother with focusing at all. After all, most Earth IR detection (skin heat sensors) relies on movement of the creature to get a "fix" on the source of the IR.

>>50078682
Trans(insert species name)

That or just a good ol' Cyxeno, if it's not as ideological a reason behind the augmentations.

File: spectrum-of-sun.jpg (46 KB, 471x400)

46 KB JPG

>>50078774
Also, spectrum of the sun. Handy.

File: 8589193-lg.jpg (260 KB, 1200x800)

260 KB JPG

>>50076169
>, but to evolve a place in the setting and/or story.

That /really/ depends on what you want to do with your aliens. If you want to shoehorn them into a "these things are easy for the PCs to interact with" or even "I /get/ these things right away" then yes, by all means, make them similar to Earth creatures or people. You're melting the hardness of the sci-fi to make it fit the mould that's in your mind, the well-worn narrative grooves of how stories /ought/ to go. Again, fine... but be aware you're doing it.

I don't think that's a requirement at all, though.

> By this I mean that the alien needs to be similar enough to us to have a technic society which is physically capable of interacting with us in some way, even if it's a way we can't make sense of.

The last bit of your sentence is the crux of it. Why does an alien creature need to be similar to us at all, if you're ok with not understanding it?

Also, I strongly disagree with a "technic society" as a requirement - both things are /handy/ but not entirely required, either in the real world or in a story.

>A blanket of growing crystalline plant-things won't usually cut it.

I suppose that depends on what you want to do with it, story-wise.

And no offense, we can talk shop on building compelling stories later. This is for building feasible, "truly alien" creatures.

>you need aliens that have been built in a way that would favor a result that could find themselves somehow interacting with humans in a way we can comprehend and have fun making a campaign or story out of.

I really don't agree entirely, but it might be a requirement for the kind of games you want to run.

See: >>50078774
Or the story below for aliens that /don't/ follow "the rules" of interaction. Stories nevertheless occur.
http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Ambassador.pdf

>>50078774
I'm not sure but I think we agree using different terms here. I think it is, however, a rather safe bet to say that any planet that evolves intelligent, or even macro-scaled multi-cellular life, will have a sun of some kind or another. Any exception to this would be something truly extraordinary. Likewise, since you have a giant, reliably repeating ball of radiation, I think the development of eyes that can detect whatever that star's main wavelength is would be rather common to occur. Even still, that leaves us with "eyes" convergently evolving in a wide range of situations that are each radically different in design and capability to detect a range of radiation frequencies.

As for your X-ray situation, the lack of focusing would likely lead to much more strange things evolving. Without the need to focus the image, you don't need a lens, so it could be that other organs would evolve to fill the role without becoming its own thing, but simply become sensitive to varying amounts of radiation. Possibly a creature could have a protective shell coated in cells reactive to X-rays, allowing its body to serve as single giant eye, or a collection of feelers around the creature's mouth that over time gain the trait of detecting not only touch, but also X-rays.

>>50078984
>by all means, make them similar to Earth creatures or people.

That is actually something to be avoided. It should make sense according to is homeworld's biosphere and geography, but otherwise, just lifting things from earth should be avoided as much as possible. If your aliens come from a very earth like planet (which, just as an example, I may decide to do to make it a plot point of human colonists landing a seed ship there by accident, or the two races fighting over the same nice new planet they both found, ect) then you may have some excuse but should still try to keep an open mind and try to come up with new ways to solve evolutionary problems.

>Why does an alien creature need to be similar to us at all, if you're ok with not understanding it?
Because unless the point of the story/campaign is about this crazy alien and learning how to interact with it, it will sorta bog things down. If my players need to go through a battery of tests to determine if something is a rock, a new kind of native life, or a citizen of an alien empire, my campaign is going to fall apart rather quickly. Also, to cause conflict. The aliens should be just similar enough to humans for both sides to disagree over something. If the two are so dissimilar that they don't even interact, nothing happens. There is no conflict, no plot arc to move through. They just stay in their empires and do their things by themselves and never bother each other.

Now if you just make them slightly similar, they can still be almost incomprehensibly alien, but there is something about them that is similar enough to find bad, not just weird. They don't like something about us, or us about them, and now we have a conflict to resolve, a mystery of alien psychology to unravel, and consequences for not doing so.

File: iosurface.jpg (791 KB, 960x540)

791 KB JPG

>>50076375
>First, it needs to be smart to make tools.

I'd disagree with the phrasing here ("smart" implies "smart like us" when clearly that's not a requirement at all), but in generally, I agree. Why not just say "make tools"?

There are /options/ for a species to become spacefaring without tool use as we know it, but they aren't easy ones. Tool use is such a massive boost in an organism's evolutionary edge. It's like suddenly developing the laser-guided missile in the 14th century - your enemies have to evolve like /mad/ to survive, or die, or become tools themselves.

>the process of thinking is typically evolved in response to a predatory role, so the animal will likely have a predatory past as a hunter.

This is... not correct. And it makes a lot of assumptions about the alien world. Is predation viable, or are there other strategies - like grazing on krill or grass or sunlight or uranium - that make it a non-issue?

We don't know why we evolved intelligence, but if I were to write "the process of thinking is typically evolved in response to a prey role, as the animal has to evade multiple sophisticated and deadly threats," I'm using the same reasoning as you... and coming to a wildly different conclusion. Also, chimpanzees use plenty of tools.. but eat mostly fruit and insects. They will eat meat when they can get it, but they aren't predatory, exactly. Smart as heck but not predatory... and there's not much in their evolutionary lineage that says "straight-up predator".

>It will likely be an omnivore, capable of feeding on a wide range of creatures on its planet, be it a food producer or consumer

This is exactly the high-school level bullshit I told people to kill in >>50063854

Yes, consumption of other creatures and integrating their components into yourself is a good strategy. Let them do the work and reap the rewards. But "producer" and "consumer" are... not really technical terms. They are very Earth specific. Kill your darlings.

>>50079131
>Also, I strongly disagree with a "technic society" as a requirement - both things are /handy/ but not entirely required, either in the real world or in a story.

Depends on your definition of technic. My point is that the two species should be close enough in their technological advancement so as to not have one side just wave an appendage and have the other side explode in Gridfire. Vorlon or Shadow level tech would be the limit of what I would put into a setting where my players had access to your typical space opera tech level. Anything more than that I'd save for a narrative story focusing on that tech difference and how to overcome it, but mostly because my players wouldn't be too into that, otherwise I'd like to try it out on them.

Likewise, I don't trust my players with a pre-historic alien race and not expect them to instantly go full Cortez. Again, that's just a limit to my players, otherwise I think it would be a really interesting narrative to have a story from the perspective of a vastly technologically superior human race discovering native life, and how they interact. Too many stories just use the concept to re-tell Pocahontas in space.

And no offense, we can talk shop on building compelling stories later. This is for building feasible, "truly alien" creatures.

None taken. I just think that unless you go to great lengths ahead of time, such aliens will likely be little more than window dressing if used in a setting. Otherwise I love them.

>I really don't agree entirely, but it might be a requirement for the kind of games you want to run.

I would agree with this, actually. My players are not typically into the kind of super heavy narrative type of campaign. They are more the Traveller kind of people. While I would love to run the game in your linked pic for them, they would prefer to just save the earth from an invasion of aliens with giant robots. Trying to learn how to talk with something isn't something they'd spend game night on.

File: tumblr_o3um2y4W551v88270o(...).jpg (152 KB, 1042x1400)

152 KB JPG

>>50076375
>>50079168
>ssuming the most basic definition of plant and animal under the assumption that this planet will have a different range of life forms that fill these roles that would otherwise be undefinable by these terms

Like I said, kill your darlings. Start from the ground up. Ask "how" - not just "what are plants like here" but "how do these creatures get energy?"

>This is because in the event of a mass extinction event, this animal would have better odds adapting. Not needed, just gives it better odds.

We're pretty sure extinction event survival is more or less random. It's not "survival of the fittest up to this point". It's "survival of the fittest under a random rules set."

Imagine you're told to build a vehicle for a weird race. The only rule is that you have to drive backwards - no looking ahead, even with mirrors. You build a rugged dune buggy. Your friends build a tank and a school bus and a bunch of other things. You start a race, and you're winning - the ground is sandy. But suddenly it drops away. There's a big fuck-off canyon. You go over the edge. So do all your friends. You die, painfully.

But Pete, who build a biplane, sails along just fine. Pete's biplane isn't "better" than your buggy. It was nearly at the back of the pack during the race and he's almost crashed a few times. But for some random reason, he made it when your vehicle - which /was/ winning, didn't.

That's mass extinction for you.

>It will need to live on land, or at least be capable of surviving extended durations on land.

Define "land". Does it need to be "the solid mineral bits that are not immersed in the local solvent" or could it be "mats of floating creatures" or "condensed foam" or "the solidified solvent crust"?

If there is life on Europa, it sure as hell won't be able to "live on land". Does that mean it could /never/ be advanced?

>>50079208
I think advanced aliens, a few thousand years of the players can work, but not necessarily as characters, more like forces of nature or Gods who may give you a bone every once in a while

>>50079168
>Why not just say "make tools"?

It still needs to be smart in some way. Mathematical logic is going to be the same everywhere. I don't care about its psycology, but it will still need to be able to figure out the lever, measure its world, tell time, ect. There are countless ways for it to do these things without having a psychology anything like a human, but it still needs to be smart enough to do those things.

>Tool use is such a massive boost in an organism's evolutionary edge.

And that is one reason why I propose it should be considered such a common trait that it is considered a prerequisite for space flight.

Is predation viable, or are there other strategies - like grazing on krill or grass or sunlight or uranium - that make it a non-issue?

All of those viable alternatives do not put the pressure of outsmarting other creatures or starving to death onto the alien, and thus the likelyhood of them developing any level of intelligence is somewhat low. Like everything in the list I gave, there are exceptions (whales, for one, as are elephants, although they ran into other issues on the list that have prevented their leap to tool use)

A prey animal does not need to outsmart the predator. It needs to out run its fellows. Again, there are exceptions, but those exceptions are rare. Predators, on the other hand, tend to need to outsmart their prey. Even here there are exceptions, but on average predators tend to develop more social traits and more complex strategic thinking.

>This is exactly the high-school level bullshit I told people to kill

Unless you are telling me that this world has nothing that produces its own food, I'd say it is a valid thing. Being able to eat multiple things from multiple domains and kingdoms across your homeworld is a very large advantage over other more specialized eaters. The most apt term would be omnivore, but we can use an even more vague term like "not-picky-eater" if you want.

File: jVDRWZo.jpg (518 KB, 900x1200)

518 KB JPG

>>50079253
>>50076375
> This is because many technologies are far more difficult to develop in non-air mediums.


Pure Earth-ism. We live in an environment full of moisture and oxygen - these things are very, very bad for certain types of chemistry. We have to go out of our way to deal with rust, or build gloveboxes, or purify solvents. Surely that would "limit our technological development", right?

Sure, there are some environments where doing metallurgy is going to be difficult, and some that make it impossible. But that doesn't mean "land" and "air" are needed to make tools. Not at all.

>Even if this alien doesn't use oxygen in any way biologically, it will still have better odds developing tech if the air both has oxygen in it and the animal lives on land.

Like I said, I strongly disagree. Your Earth bias is showing.

On Earth, by the way, oxygen is a fluke. Most people don't know this.

Basically, cyanobacteria evolved a photosynthetic pathway that took in CO2 (which was naturally abundant since the formation of our atmosphere) and excreted O2. A lot of O2. Enough that all the naturally occurring sinks - iron, reactive carbon compounds in the oceans, the water itself - were saturated. So with nowhere else to go, the O2 started contaminating the atmosphere.

This killed off damn near every other kind of organism that existed at the time. Oxygen had never been around, you see. Check out post >>50064235

Things that survived either ignored oxygen completely, lived where oxygen couldn't reach, or developed chemistries that used it - and, in time, relied on it. Our "oxygen/nitrogen" atmosphere is fluke.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event

>Fire leads to metallurgy and cooking

You can make fire without oxygen. It's often very useful to do so. And why should an alien world have fuel that burns? Try burning a dead dog to heat your house, see how well that goes. Natural combustible fuels on Earth are all products of our unique development.

>>50079253
>Ask "how" - not just "what are plants like here"

Yes, and I am using the term plant here in a rather broad way to describe whatever thing lives on this world that produces food from collected energy, assuming that at some point a local star serves as the source of that power, it makes sense that there is going to be something that collects energy from that star somehow. Maybe it is photosynthesis, or maybe it is a convoluted process of using spinning appendages like a windmill to power an organic generator type organ, or a thermal engine that feeds on heat, or anything else that gets the job done. For our alien, it is still the thing that grows all over the place and can be eaten for food. If we ever met this thing and learned its language, its word for the stuff would probably translate to plant.

>We're pretty sure extinction event survival is more or less random.

But when the single thing you eat all of a sudden dies, you're fucked. If the thing you liked to eat dies off, but you can still eat other stuff, you're fine. If you have a wide range of edible things you can survive a much wider range of environmental catastrophes. You still need to roll the evolutionary dice, but you don't need to roll quite as high to survive.

>Define "land".

A solid surface holding chemicals capable of serving as nutrients for local life and minerals and metals with which further technological advancement can be made. You can't have your aliens live in a gas giant, because there is nothing to write on with which to develop written language, or materials with which to build. You can have them be aquatic in a dense medium, but it would make metallurgy much more difficult and unlikely.

>If there is life on Europa, it sure as hell won't be able to "live on land". Does that mean it could /never/ be advanced?

No, because it's going to need heat enough for liquid water, and has no way of harnessing fire or developing metallurgy.

>>50079378
Oxygen makes it easy, but the point is that you just need some kind of fuel source available. My guess is that it will likely be whatever your alien happens to breath as well, but it doesn't need to be. Oxygen is just a good example.

File: Da6HlU6.jpg (532 KB, 2048x1347)

532 KB JPG

>>50076375
>>50079378
>cooking food has no benefit in this world
Why not say "developing a way to more efficiently intake resources, through tool use, is very useful to a species"?

>doing it in water or in an endless sky like a gas giant is either impossible or nearly so.

There are other options available here, most of them involving accretion and mediated catalysis. Metallurgy on earth is like heating your cells with a bonfire. Just as it's possible to heat cells using very subtle chemical processes, it's possible move metals around in fantastic ways without fire.

But if you have no choice, underwater or in-solvent smelting /is/ possible. It's a pain in the energy requirements, but you /can/ do it. After all on Earth we do metallurgy in a fluid. Our fluid is just bad at conducting heat.

>It will need rigid manipulators.
Why not say "it will need a way of interacting with its environment"?

Tentacles are /fantastic/ at the things you've listed.

Really, this comes down to "why did the limb evolve?" Our limbs are good at carrying our weight and manipulating tools, but we can't regrow them, hide them, or naturally work stone with them.

Once you have tools, you tend to build tools that overcome physical shortcomings. Ladders, ramps, cranes, the electric light, and the pulley all overcome limits of our bodies. Why should that require rigid limbs with bones?

It's just a comfortable assumption.

>>50076464
>It needs an organ capable of communication.

Assuming it needs to communicate (again, pretty likely, but not required) then yes, having a way to do so is a good idea. Not nessesarily an organ - our "speaking organs" are all re-purposed and multi-use, aside from a few stray strands of cartilage in the throat. We had ears long before we had any conversations to listen to.

>sound, color patterns, modulating an electrical field, scent,

Break it down. "Vibrations in the local medium, reflected photon patterns, electric fields, released chemicals".

Hmmmm

i'm gay

>>50078984
How does the narrator expect to not just have the relevant information forcefully extracted from it's mind as it's physical body is destroyed? Or does a read only archive that gets dumped into mindfuck/torture simulations as needed count as "Survival."

A smart human would have just self destructed and made sure any information archives (including grey matter) were suitable atomized.

File: islands_terra_big.jpg (931 KB, 2701x2701)

931 KB JPG

Fuck, all this catching up to do...

>>50076464
>>50079532
>Language

And here we go.

Language is not a requirement. Language is not even communication.There are ways to skip entirely past the "language" step for communication.

What you really mean here is "The organism must have a way of transmitting and receiving information from other organisms."

>So in the end, you have a multi-limbed creature with a predatory past that is capable of eating a wide range of substances, has rigid, structured limbs, lives on land in an atmosphere that either has oxygen or some similar fuel source and is capable of communicating complex thoughts with others.

And hopefully, it has tits.

See, you've done the thing I warned you about in >>50075658

In fact, you've really precisely followed the generally structure of my example.

You've taken what you know - humans - and reasoned that since we are successful, anything that is also successful must be quite a bit like us. It's a comfortable and comforting chain of reasoning.

But it's not true.

>>50076490
I think I've posted a few....

Sorry anon, I'm not trying to attack you personally. You just set up a very handy straw-alien to demolish. Even if I disagree with your reasoning you are at least making an /attempt/. You just need to see where the seams are, peel them back, and find the layer below.

>>50079532
Your issue with metallurgy in water is a bit of a non-issue, since you argue it is difficult but possible. I said it was difficult but possible, an because it is difficult it will be less likely that a space fairing alien race will be aquatic in nature. I don't see how we conflict here.

>Tentacles are /fantastic/ at the things you've listed.

They are good at crushing things. They are terrible at careful fine manipulation. They can't carry or lift heavy loads or support large amounts of weight. They are good for grabbing something and not letting go, and that is about it. The limb will need to have some kind of fulcrum, otherwise your alien is just going to be slapping things all day. It may slap its way to space flight, but it would be quite the accomplishment and I wouldn't bet on it.

A limb doesn't first develop to use tools. You need the limb to be there first, then it can evolve to be better at tool use. In the case of us, as we started walking more upright, we used our arms less for walking, and with our new free hands started carrying things around more. Maybe the alien started off with a big, flappy thing that it used to attract mates, which over time became a manipulator limb. There are countless possibilities.

>Assuming it needs to communicate (again, pretty likely, but not required) then yes, having a way to do so is a good idea.

No, this one I'm calling an actual necessity. You don't need a dedicated organ, but you need to have an organ that is capable of communication. What that organ is, be it dedicated or a repurposed organ with another primary use, or some other feature even more alien is up to you, but it must have some way of conveying thought and intent to others.

>Language is not a requirement.

Yes it is. It must have some kind of pattern it uses to convey thoughts and intentions, and to record them. The extend of how this is done is up to the imagination, but otherwise it's not developing shit.

File: venus4_magellan_big.jpg (108 KB, 954x752)

108 KB JPG

>>50076594
>>50079679
>this list is not my idea of what all alien life will look like, it's my list of "how to make an alien that can take part in a story, campaign, or other setting without being built around them"

Ah, see, I should've read this bit first...

Under those constraints, your alien list is as good as anything else, in that it will generate "safe" results.

But why play it "safe"? The topic of this thread is the "truly alien". Why lock yourself on a path that leads to the "mostly human"?

>>50077684
>Stalker-like gravity anomalies

As an aside, this is cheap sci-fi technobabble. It's fantastic because it's fantasy. Again, that's totally fine for most games, but not if you're trying to build a "truly alien" world using real-world rules.

>how about naturally abundant liquids of varying acidity?

Much better. "Acidity" still seems a bit human - implies a pH scale and all that. But an abundance of reactive chemicals - perhaps secreted as waste or as a defense by other organisms - would give metallurgy a nice boost. Drop your ore into a pool, drain it, then add / this/ liquid to get a powder, then pour the powder into moulds. Add /this/ liquid and run like hell, but when you get back, you've got a nice iron rod.

Funny story - the only reason we have copper and brozne on earth as "early" metals is because of water. Water helped collect copper nodules. Without nuggets of pure copper lying in rivers, we may not have ever developed metallurgy.

>>50078023
>likewise be a very strange race

Strange to you, Earth-man. :P

>>50079679
>And hopefully, it has tits.

You're talking bullshit and you know it. At this point it just looks like you're deliberately twisting everything into your perfect strawman to debunk.

>>50076490
>I think I've posted a few....

>Sorry anon, I'm not trying to attack you personally. You just set up a very handy straw-alien to demolish.

That wasn't me, but at this point you could have fooled me with that last post. Any strawman you find is one you made yourself.

>>50079781
I would hardly call them constraints. They just prevent the creation of shapeless blobs talking goo or sentient shades of blue and other such things that make no physical sense. Just like it's bad to make lazy human lookalikes, it's also bad to just make some outlandishly contrived pile of nonsense. It's an alien evolutionary path, but it still follows the same laws of physics.

File: Sully-Vent-Main-Endeavour(...).jpg (4.05 MB, 2560x1920)

4.05 MB JPG

>>50078993
>nk it is, however, a rather safe bet to say that any planet that evolves intelligent, or even macro-scaled multi-cellular life, will have a sun of some kind or another.

Chemosynthesis is a perfectly valid alternative. Why do you hate penis worms, anon?

In an environment where photons are rare (deep sea, opaque solvent) or dangerous to chemistry (energetic star, obscure chemical pathways potentially involving solid/liquid crystallization at the cellular level), light might just not be useful enough to deal with.

If there's light around, something /like/ eyes will probably occur. If not, life goes on.

>Because unless the point of the story/campaign is about this crazy alien and learning how to interact with it, it will sorta bog things down.

I disagree. That sort of thing, provided it's presented as a challenge and not "guess the password the GM is thinking of", is an /enormous/ amount of fun. See the image in: >>50078774

>If my players need to go through a battery of tests to determine if something is a rock, a new kind of native life, or a citizen of an alien empire, my campaign is going to fall apart rather quickly.
>Also, to cause conflict.

Again, this is more of a storytelling problem than an alien design problem (no offense). I'm not saying it's a trivial problem, because it's definitely a hard one, but you don't need to design around it at this stage.

>>50079208
>y point is that the two species should be close enough in their technological advancement so as to not have one side just wave an appendage

Yeah, for storytelling purposes, you need to have some feasible tech parity. But this is for hard- or al-dente sci-fi. Building aliens for space opera is a /totally/ different set of rules that falls under narrative, not physical, rules.

>Likewise, I don't trust my players with a pre-historic alien race and not expect them to instantly go full Cortez.
You know 'em better than we do.

>>50079731
>on tentacles
Again, we're still stuck at Earth analogues. Tentacles on Earth are like what you said, good for grabbing and not letting go. But, what if the alien's appendage, which looked to us humans like tentacles, are structurally different enough to use tools? Like, say, it has specialized structure cells that could harden and become a fulcrum. It could have muscles so dense and hardy that they could become fulcrums and lift heavy loads. It could be numerous and thin enough for fine manipulation, or maybe it has branching tips that it could use.

>>50079950
>it has specialized structure cells that could harden and become a fulcrum.

Alright, so it checks the box on the list and has rigid manipulators. As I said, it doesn't matter how it does it. It just needs to do it.

>>50079944
So this sunless planet. How did it form? Is it just floating out in empty space? Does it orbit a black hole? How did it get into a table orbit around a black hole?

If this planet doesn't have a sun, I am going to need more than a biological explanation. I'll need an astronomical explanation here. Is it just really far away from a dim star? In that case it likely won't have much in the way of heavy metals and any atmosphere will be frozen so you're looking at trace amounts at most of a medium on the surface and it's going to need some serious luck to get a planet large enough to have a molten core that stays molten long enough for life to evolve using that available heat.

Your other points I agree with, aliens designed for fun and aliens designed for a playable setting will typically need different rules, and I with my players were less trigger happy but eh, they're still fun to run games for.

>>50072428
>Yo, I have a great idea!
>Instead of evolving a real body, let's just evolve into giant sperm hydras!

File: 1280px-Proboscis_worm.jpg (305 KB, 1280x960)

305 KB JPG

>>50079524
>Oxygen makes it easy, my point is that you just need some kind of fuel source available.

If you want to have the atmosphere of a world be involved in your creature's biology, you have a /lot/ of options.

Basically any gas with to or more atoms /can/ be used. Off the top of my head, I could see chemical pathways that use acetylene, ethylene, bromine, chlorine, methane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulphide, sulphur dioxide, or even nitrogen (if you've got the energy) as reaction agents in the same way some life on Earth uses oxygen.

Also:
>breathe

Really? Why not generalize? Breathing is awfully specific.

>>50079629
Not sure - didn't write the story. But those are valid points.

>>50080020
Mother Nature is into bukakke?

>>50080045
Yes breath, as in, use the fuel source in the atmosphere by taking it into its body in the most biologically efficient manner available. You know damn well what I mean, you're just trying to be pedantic at this point.

File: orbital_horror_by_thomasw(...).jpg (115 KB, 1280x620)

115 KB JPG

>>50079731
> I don't see how we conflict here.
I just wanted to leave the design space open.

>They are terrible at careful fine manipulation.
Not really, no. Check out some related videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rmkO3zSCaE

There are videos of octopi disassembling lego blocks.

I'm sure, if they had a reason to, they could adapt over a few thousand generations to play the piano or carve stone as well as any human. Plus, octopi are kind of a bad example of intelligent life with tentacles - they're smart as heck, but all their brains are in their arms. Not a lot of cross-linking there.

>No, this one I'm calling an actual necessity.
Ok, how about this for an idea? What about a creature that is solitary? It's like... a coral reef, but in a shell. It has smaller organisms inside it that live and die and carry out functions, just like cells in our body, but the entire thing has grown to be a fairly sophisticated intelligence.

But it never needs to communicate with anyone or anything else. It could happily advance into space without ever conveying meaning to another organism.

>Yes [language] is.
We'll have to agree to disagree on what "language" means then.

But there are ways of recording the past and conveying not-in-person meaning that don't involve language, or even an extrabiological structure. Maybe when Creature A wants to talk to Creature B, it births a little sack of structured neuron-analogue cells and tentacles. This sack ambles over to its destination and crawls directly into a brain-pouch. The neurons then integrate and hey, presto, communication over distance and time with no language at all. Store those neurons-sacks in the cold methane snow and you can even have a recorded history... with no actual record.

>>50080045
I keep running into things like that reading Peter Watts stories. Like the Orcas eating humans in the one posted in the other thread.

Is blindsight better than this?

File: photo1.jpg (2 MB, 1876x1250)

2 MB JPG

>>50080157
Yes and no. There are bits of Blindsight that are silly - ATP makes an unwelcome appearance, as do [spoilers]vampires. No, really. I mean the "vampires" are in the book to make a ton of thematic points about consciousness, trickery, evolution, progress, biological control, and the nature of intelligence... but it still made me go "wut" when I read it.[/spoiler] It's just the nature of writing I suppose. You might not agree with the author's conclusions and that's just fine.

Worth it though? Yes. Very much yes.

>>50080148

But it never needs to communicate with anyone or anything else. It could happily advance into space without ever conveying meaning to another organism.

How?
It's going to sit there and be a reef-thing until it dies, and then its spawn, however it reproduces, will repeat that process and be a reef all over again, having lost any meager wisdom the last generation may have had.

Unless it lives forever, which it could, sure, and that is a very boring eternity for sure.

If it's going to get to space, it needs to be able to share information, record discoveries, and teach things to its next generation if applicable.

As for the tentacles, yes, they are amazing things for sure, but they still can't lift or push or offer any real leverage, making them a bit of a disadvantage. As I said, such a creature COULD potentially slap its way to space, but it would be a hell of a lot more difficult, so you should avoid just slapping tentacles on an alien just because. There are a lot of people who do this. "Non-humanoid aliens, I can do that, just slap some tentacles all over that bitch! Done!"

That should be avoided as much as making green humans. Figure out what kind of purpose the limb serves for the animal, and then let it evolve to be more dexterous over time, maybe becoming thinner, or with stronger musculature as generation after generation selects for better tool use. Chances are this will make them worse at whatever they were used for at first, if they still use them for that purpose at all (unless they started as part of a mating dance, in which case mimes are super popular)

>presto, communication over distance and time with no language at all.

Not really, it just speaks with neuron packets. Either way, you need the alien to be able to communicate with others of its kind in some way.

>>50080157
I personally don't like it, but I'd still recommend it. It's one of those things where I like the parts more than the resulting whole, but still worth a look.

File: Archer-2009-Season-2-Epis(...).jpg (30 KB, 624x352)

30 KB JPG

>>50074540
vag

File: 1268683946991.jpg (412 KB, 1418x1001)

412 KB JPG

>>50079842
Under the constraint of "this list is good for designing aliens for my playgroup" then yes, it's a perfectly fine conclusion.

For designing truly "alien" aliens, it's not good, for the reasons I've listed.

>>50079842
>shapeless blobs talking goo or sentient shades of blue
Right, so actually follow the laws of physics to the end and see where they go. "Needlessly contrived" just sounds like "uncomfortably alien and difficult to use" to me.

Again, that's totally fine - your rules do what they're designed to do.

>>50080068
>You know damn well what I mean, you're just trying to be pedantic at this point.

I'm not being pedantic to prove you wrong, anon. I'm being pedantic to make you think.

The entire point of this exercise in designing "alien" aliens is to find things you're comfortable with - shortcuts and shorthand - and disassemble them.

So let's see:
>use the fuel source in the atmosphere by taking it into its body in the most biologically efficient manner available.

We're getting close.

The most efficient manner available is diffusion, but as we've shown >>50074894, the damned cube-squared law makes that annoying.

But "breathing", as in "taking in a gas, holding it internally, and then expelling it" is by no means the most efficient way of taking in a gaseous resource from the environment.

It's a comfortable one. Your cat breathes, you breathe, the pigeons you see on the way home breathe. Your fish... kind of breathes. The flies... do they breathe? What about plants?

Oh dear. Suddenly "breathing" is less of a given and more of a very specific term for something a few vertebrae do.

Could you imagine an alien that swallows air and passes it through a tube, one way, before excreting it and a few waste products as well?

What about an alien that has a bubble-like inflatable sack that traps air, allows diffusion to occur, then releases it?

What about an alien that uses air only for cooling, and not for any chemistry at all?

File: ReqdR1D.jpg (83 KB, 1920x1080)

83 KB JPG

>>50080280
cont'd

I see so many decent hard sci-fi alien designs that fall apart the designers go "it's blood uses cobalt instead of iron" or "it has three-stranded DNA" or "it has teeth made of steel".

Sure, have a creature with circulating nutrient-carrying fluid... but don't take the shortcut of "blood" unless you are fully aware of what that shortcut will evoke and involve.

DNA is one of the most specialized molecules we have on Earth. It's not some universal code. Your aliens might store cellular information in folded chains of atoms - it's a damn good idea - but that won't be DNA. Finding "alien DNA" would be like finding a world with Coca-cola fountains and gumdrop streets.

And "teeth" are a pretty specific adaptation - most life on Earth gets along just fine with no teeth at all. If you consume nutrients from the environment, you'll want a way to break them down and get them inside you, but that doesn't mean "teeth" need to be involved.

For space opera (or variants), by all means, go nuts.

>>50080261
>It's going to sit there and be a reef-thing until it dies.

Why does it need to /die/? If the internal parts are capable of adaptation, and there are sufficient pressures on the entire "reef", why would it ever need to expire biologically. Barring accident, disease, or cancer and related malfunctions, you'll go on living until your cells stop being able to reproduce. Then bits of you will slowly fail until the entire thing shuts down.

But our reef-alien doesn't follow those rules. The individual bits might come and go, but the reef endures and grows.

>Unless it lives forever, which it could, sure, and that is a very boring eternity for sure.

Until the PCs turn up and start poking around.

>If it's going to get to space, it needs to be able to share information, record discoveries, and teach things to its next generation if applicable.

Like I said, this isn't a "generational" thing. It's the only one of "it's kind".

File: 1257113803647.jpg (132 KB, 516x642)

132 KB JPG

>>50080334
Legs are another pet peeve. So many alien designs have interesting parts attached to very Earth-y legs, with the same number of joints, at the same distances, as humans or other mammals.

File: water17_1539280i.jpg (38 KB, 620x400)

38 KB JPG

Right...
>>50075845

Back to the plan.

So a lot just got covered that I would have preferred to bring up in a different order, but so it goes. It was a pretty neat discussion.

It's about time I put my money where my mouth is and started designing a creature according to the principles I just set out. After all, it's no good whining about the way other people do things if you're not prepared to do it yourself.

Again, for squishy sci-fi games (with certain group styles), anon's list here >>50076375
does just fine, as is, no editing needed.

But for "alien" aliens you have to go a little deeper, as I've said.

>The flies... do they breathe? What about plants?
Not the dude your talking to, but yes. Both flies and plants breathe. Breathing is essentially just the layman's term for respiration systems where gases are taken in in some form and converted gases are expelled.

Youd know this if your werent a pedantic asshole.

Also you seriously need to walk us through how this colony creature makes it to space without relying on you making the individual creatures within the colony the intelligence. How does it gather the knowledge for space faring, how does it perform metallurgy to form space ships, how does it accumulate the various things it needs to perform this feat of intelligence when its rooted to one spot?

>>50080280
Yes, the fly breaths, it just does it differently, as are the aliens you described.

Of course an alien won't have real teeth, but it could easily have stuff we could call teeth for a lack of a better common term because they may look similar and serve a similar function. Or maybe it has a grinder gut filled with stones it swallows to break down its food, or maybe it vomits up acid to break down food and then slurps it up. These things are irrelevant, so long as it can eat. You are just trying to use these terms in the most specific way possible at this point, which, honestly, just makes talking about it inconvenient and annoying if anything.

If the alien has hard bits inside it that it uses to help move against gravity, we can call them bones for the sake of discussion even though they are made of something other than actual bone. If it has things it uses to grind up food in its mouth, we can just call them teeth. If it has a limb equipped with a natural weapon capable of being used for hunting, we can just call it a claw, no need to be all autistic about it, we know it isn't made of the same carbon based cells and DNA strands, but it still claws shit so we can just call it a claw.

It's a way to talk about stuff without describing it every time we talk about it. The alien breaths. By saying this all we do is avoid saying "the alien absorbs a gas in the air to use in its biochemistry in some manner" every time we talk about it. It makes no mention of how it's doing it, it just lets us talk about it without it being a pain in the ass because a lot of these things will likely not have a technician name, since earth has nothing like it.

Once I have a setting actually fleshed out, I may actually start giving these things names of their own, so the "bone-like" substance that some alien has in its body can have its own medical term independent of bone entirely, since it's not even made of calcium. Your average joe will still call it a bone though.

>>50080334
>Until the PCs turn up and start poking around.

And the reef alien has no language or way to communicate, so it is either ignored, or the players assume it is an animal.

And so they leave the planet, maybe not even ever noticing it, or maybe after killing a few of its component cell creatures after they found them crawling in the cargo hold.

Now, we can give it a way to communicate. Let's say it has that brain sac idea you gave before. Now the one that first sees the players sends off sacs to its neighbors, and suddenly they are discussing how to deal with this new creature from the sky. Maybe they try to send a sac to the players, and suddenly you have meaningful interaction.

As well, with these sacs, you can get long term development. They can learn from trial and error, talk, debate, spread new ideas and learn and conflict with each other. They can start building their own infrastructure, maybe using these sacs to drag a kind of nerve cable between them for faster communication, learning and spreading new ways to better control their host cell animals.

Suddenly the players are interacting with a society instead of just bumbling through the yard of something that cannot express any care it may have for them, and things are more interesting story wise, and these things are capable of more interesting things evolutionary wise.

File: HadeanEarth_swri_1500.jpg (223 KB, 1500x1480)

223 KB JPG

>>50080413
Let's establish our world first. We'll call it "Hera", and we'll start from the very beginning of the planet's history.

Dust collects. A glowing world slowly forms, grows, reaches a size not unlike ours. Before the surface has cooled there is a collission. A smaller world, ejected from the deeper system, strikes Hera and breaks it. Two worlds now form - Hera is larger, and a moon begins to form.

The impact that created the Moon left Earth metals-rich and the Moon metals-poor, but this impact didn't disturb the balance of metals much. It also doesn't create a permanent satellite. The newly formed moon eventually drifts free and, after another chance encounter, is flung far away, never to be seen again.

Hera cools. Huge volcanic chains create an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and sulphur dioxide.

Water begins to form on the surface, as does methane. Hera is further from the sun than Earth, and doesn't experience the wild greenhouse swings that mantle formation caused on Earth. It's still plenty hot though > 200 degrees Celsius, but with enough pressure to keep water and even methane liquid at least some of the time. Active plate subduction slowly lowers atmospheric pressure, trapping CO2 in particular.

The atmospheric pressure stabilizes eventually. It's still hot, but it rains water mixed with methane. The volcanoes are finally calming down. Surprisingly, the oceans aren't hideously acidic - all that sulphur needs oxygen to release it, and most of the oxygen is trapped in CO2 form. The silicate rocks, where they peek above the water, have yellow-red streaks of the stuff.

And then, in this mess, life emerges.

>>50080435
"It just does, through means we cannot comprehend, because it's alien."

This is what I mean when I talk about something being contrived, and it's why I use my list. The list is to explain how the alien got to where it is now using known physical laws. It places no limitations on psychology, biochemistry, or physiology, it just demands that any odd bits be explained sufficiently without either making green humans, or dismissing the questions of how it does anything by saying it's just alien that way.

I have a feeling the anon here will end up making something that fits decently well into my own list, although his attention to the chemicals and cellular side of things is interesting in its own right. My list is mostly designed to help skip those details so I can make something quickly, but I do like delving into the details now and then.

File: marshole2_hirise_2560.jpg (2.31 MB, 2560x1920)

2.31 MB JPG

>>50080435
I'm sorry, but flies don't breathe. The movement of air through the tracheal system of most insects relies solely on diffusion. They have hollow tubes inside them that allow air in. There's no "breaths" involved.

And plants don't breathe either no matter how you slice it.

Again, I'm not being pedantic out of spite. I'm trying to get you to deconstruct the "easy" notions and use terms that actually apply.

>Breathing is essentially just the layman's term for respiration systems where gases are taken in in some form and converted gases are expelled.

In a /cyclical/ manner, you forgot to add. And the whole point is to avoid layman's terms and lazy shorthand if possible, or risk getting stuck in thought-traps.

>Also you seriously need to walk us through how this colony creature makes it to space without relying on you making the individual creatures within the colony the intelligence

I'm not saying this thing's the pinnacle of creature design. It was more or less a one-off to give an example of a way something could /potentially/ exist without the need to communicate.

But as one-off, sure, maybe the evolutionary pressure to go into space comes about because of increasing competition - from non-reef organisms - on the surface. Maybe it finds a meteor full of delicious iron and some obscure process decides to go where there's more iron - even if that requires a bit of re configuring.

>How does it gather the knowledge for space faring?

Maybe it has an intuitive grasp of how orbits work just by existing in a world with gravity, the same way we know how to catch a ball? Maybe it can slowly reconfirgure itself, or evolve little chemical-powered probe-creature-cells over the millennia and fire them upwards? I'm not sure why the coral creature here would have the ability to consider these kinds of problems, but again, it was a back-of-a-napkin example to prove one specific point about communication.

>>50080640

>I'm not saying this thing's the pinnacle of creature design. It was more or less a one-off to give an example of a way something could /potentially/ exist without the need to communicate.

And while doing so, you prove the idea you were trying to debunk. Yes, an animal can live without communicating with others of its kind, but it's not ever going to make anything of itself. Hell, there are plenty of things that CAN communicate that still never made anything of themselves.

>Maybe it has an intuitive grasp of how orbits work just by existing in a world with gravity, the same way we know how to catch a ball?

That's not how evolution works.

>or evolve little chemical-powered probe-creature-cells over the millennia and fire them upwards?

That's not how evolution works at all.

File: From a retired biology te(...).png (336 KB, 1561x933)

336 KB PNG

>>50080640
You are so goddamned pedantic in a way thats super fucking annoying. You are also incredibly fucking ignorant of how evolution works and the necessary restriction it places on what a creature is capable of. Your shitty colony creature is a perfect example of something that violates, on multiple levels, how evolution works.

Maybe you should stick to making silly fantastic aliens, which you excel at, and staying away from people trying to do this the hard way by following evolution, chemistry, and physics.

File: alien_skeleton__render1_b(...).jpg (139 KB, 1680x1050)

139 KB JPG

>>50080502
>Yes, the fly breaths
No it doesn't! It relies on diffusion, passively! No breaths are involved!

If you're trying to describe an alien creature you /need/ to not take shortcuts like this. Otherwise, you'll envision something with lungs like us, gasping like us, and you'll be stuck in a thought-trap.

>but it could easily have stuff we could call teeth for a lack of a better common term because they may look similar and serve a similar function

Right, good! Completely correct. But be /careful/ when describing or designing them.

>You are just trying to use these terms in the most specific way possible at this point

Exactly. Not out of dickishness, I promise, but because every step you take away from Earth-creature shortcuts gets you closer to "alien" alien design. That means examining and breaking down your terms.

>If the alien has hard bits inside it that it uses to help move against gravity, we can call them bones for the sake of discussion [...]. If it has things it uses to grind up food in its mouth, we can just call them teeth. If it has a limb equipped with a natural weapon capable of being used for hunting, we can just call it a claw, [...]

You /can/ do that, but here's the problem.

Your system imagines a creature that already exists, fully formed, and /then/ describes it. In that case, shortcuts are OK. If you call a pressure-filled fluid casket a "bone" or a secondary mouth a "claw" in your description it doesn't matter - the "real" creature exists somewhere.

But if you're inventing a new creature, you need to be much more cautious. You no longer have a reference point. The description /is/ the creature, in every way, and it pays to be precise... and pedantic.

So when designing your creature, if you say it has bones... how did it get them? What were the ancestral roots? Are the bones completely covered? How are they joined? What are they made of? When a creature dies, what happens to the bones? Can they be repaired? How?

File: tumblr_o72xdf9Y7E1r3kmkso2_500.gif (1.55 MB, 500x600)

1.55 MB GIF

>>50080673
>but it's not ever going to make anything of itself.

To nisquote Soliaris, why does it have to /be/ anything?

It's not like there's a goal to evolution, or a prize at the end.

>That's not how evolution works.
I know, brought it up in the next sentence. Just trying to come up with some way this thing would be interested in space, but I can't find one.

>>50080704
I'm sorry you're annoyed, but like I said, I'm doing it for a reason. Nobody's making you stay.

Also, no offense, but despite all your rage I don't see you producing a lot of content. You're still more than welcome to criticize my ideas, especially the one-off examples in this post>>50080148, invented on the spot to show an example. They weren't designed. They were just... invented, and are therefore fairly shit.


Creature design like this /is/ annoying. That's almost the point. The annoyance comes from examining assumptions, especially convenient assumptions, and breaking them down. It's like trying to write a recipe for cake... with the instructions beginning "Plant seeds..."

Some people just want their goddamn cake. If so, see the ideas in posts:
>>50076169
>>50076375
>>50076464

Some people want to see how it all fits together.

>>50080727
>Otherwise, you'll envision something with lungs like us, gasping like us, and you'll be stuck in a thought-trap.

The only person making that assumption here is you. Everyone else seems to understand that you can breath without using lungs.

>Exactly. Not out of dickishness, I promise, but because every step you take away from Earth-creature shortcuts gets you closer to "alien" alien design.

So at this point, you're just saying you think everyone here is an idiot. We're all capable of understanding that the thing we call a tooth isn't made out of actual tooth stuff, but is an alien substance that just serves the same or similar function of teeth, so we call it that. Again, you are the only one here that seems to not get that memo, and since it's clear you understand the concept, it seems that you think we don't, which is just insulting to everyone here.

>So when designing your creature, if you say it has bones... how did it get them? What were the ancestral roots? Are the bones completely covered? How are they joined? What are they made of? When a creature dies, what happens to the bones? Can they be repaired? How?

All good things to work out for your alien.
It is still called a fucking bone, because it does the same thing. I actually have made up terms for these things for some of my aliens, specifically, a kind of structural substance with a more flexible nature than earth-evolved bone that, to an observer, seems somewhere between cartilage and bone. It's called chondrhist by humans, since the alien in question talks by making whistling sounds through a proboscis of hardened, dead chondrhist cells similar in texture and hardness to a thick finger nail that grows constantly and requires filing periodically. The chondrhist itself breaks much more easily than bone, but heals far, far more quickly, usually in a few days, and a broken bone is seen more like a bruise.

People in the setting and out still call them bones.

>>50080793
To nisquote Soliaris, why does it have to /be/ anything?

It doesn't, but you brought up that animal as an example to counter my point that an alien needs a way to communicate to BECOME A SPACE FARING SPECIES. Then when we all tell you that your weird reef thing just can't make it to space, you answer with "well why does it need to?"

Because that was what we were fucking debating, that's why.

>It's like trying to write a recipe for cake... with the instructions beginning "Plant seeds..."

That's fine, but in this case, you are starting off with your cake making, and ending up getting a fruit basket.

File: New hoppas.png (396 KB, 1800x800)

396 KB PNG

>>50066667
Hoppas were the best.

File: New hoppas 2.png (267 KB, 1800x800)

267 KB PNG

>>50082482

File: 1380009134952.jpg (240 KB, 1024x768)

240 KB JPG

>>50082482
>>50082492
With this current topic of evolution, we shouldn't forget the most recent common ancestor.

File: Sieppaa.png (2.03 MB, 1360x766)

2.03 MB PNG

>>50082598
I actually doodled some hoppas today.

>>50082482
>>50082492
What are Hoppas?

>no birrins
Step it up, holmes.

>>50085756
We had plenty of Birrin last thread.

File: Birrin Riots.jpg (562 KB, 950x628)

562 KB JPG

>>50085756

>>50085756
There were tons of birrin in the last thread, homeskillet.

File: 1309718790153.png (2.89 MB, 1024x1024)

2.89 MB PNG

I had an idea for a race of sentient space coral.

They evolved on a planet covered in shallow oceans, individually microscopic and non sapient, they formed a network, and entire colonies were capable of forming a group intelligence that could live for thousands of years and was able to exercise selective breeding over the individual polyps that made up the colonies. In this manner they developed something akin to technological civilization.

Like humans, one of the main driving factors for their development as a "civilization" was warfare. The colonies became quite large and competed for territory. This warfare was mostly chemical in nature, the corals would attempt to poison each other, and become resistant to their own poisons. Just like how human technology could be summarized as endless variations on the concept of a sharp rock, coral technology was the domain of bio and chemical weapons, and reached heights that would be unimaginable to the human mind. Ultimately even sustaining organic nuclear reactions.

As the wars intensified, colonies became integrated into meta-colonies akin to nation states or corporations. While individual colonies were immobile, ballistic colonies were developed, which took the form of rocket propelled spines capable of delivering chemical or nuclear payloads. Wars involving ballistic colonies rendered the home planet uninhabitable, however it also provided an opportunity for them to escape into space. Life exposed to constant chemical and nuclear warfare allowed them to adapt to the harsh conditions of space, and a new era of history opened for them.

The surviving colonies renounced violence and began to inhabit comets, turning them into giant organic spacecraft. Not much happened for a few million years as they spread to nearby star systems at slower than light velocities. This continued until they encountered another spacefairing civilization which had discovered FTL travel.

File: Gand.jpg (266 KB, 1030x1280)

266 KB JPG

Star Wars still has some interesting aliens, not all of them have rubber-foreheads.

File: Gran.jpg (29 KB, 263x423)

29 KB JPG

>>50086538

File: Talz.jpg (21 KB, 228x423)

21 KB JPG

>>50086556

File: Vong-rpg.jpg (65 KB, 400x600)

65 KB JPG

>>50086566

File: Elom-Elomin_NEGAS.jpg (222 KB, 775x1280)

222 KB JPG

>>50086579

File: Ishi Tib.jpg (206 KB, 840x1280)

206 KB JPG

>>50086597

File: Ithorian_NEGAS.jpg (316 KB, 1000x1280)

316 KB JPG

>>50086610

>>50083777
Creatures /tg/ came up with in the primordial evo game that ran here some years ago.

File: thype-1981-copy-2.jpg (654 KB, 966x1442)

654 KB JPG

Thanks to the anons who posted about rethinking the basic structures of life
>>50073441
Blung are still freaky as hell to me

>>50086885
Their evolution was certainly a bizarre ride.

>>50074619
>tentacles
>clumsy

Not really. Octopuses can be really dexterous with them, and so are elephants with their trunks, which are essentially tentacles.

File: Lufae mech.png (34 KB, 600x820)

34 KB PNG

>>50087038
On one hand,I think its cheap that a lot of evolution in Primordial could be potentially explained as "Nanites/Space-Slime/Mysterious Gasses did it." On the other hand, the sheer diversity of weird shit going on makes the setting capable of handling lots of different stories, all in the exact same time period. You have industrialized super-states fighting total wars against robots, a vast mountain range that is the grave of dozens of ancient empires and the foundation for a new one, immoral blind bio-scientists making almost literal demons in caves, super-cultists freaking the fuck out over cyborg giants, and a world spanning collection of trade cartels run by land-squids.

And that's all just in the civilization phase. I doubt that anyone who didn't help make Primordial can find it easy to understand or keep track of how everything fits together, but it was fun to try and make it. This thread only makes me wish things had been more experimental. Lacorra fields were underutilized

Also, I blame the lem'uy and bords for literally everything

>>50087062
I feel like, having manipulators that are too good might end up being a determent to tool use in the long run.

Why develop tools when you can already do everything with tentacles?

File: Vyrii infection.png (112 KB, 1400x600)

112 KB PNG

>>50087206
Yeah, primordial was pretty crazy. Though, it never really pretended to be that realistic, and a lot of time, people went more with the rule of cool, which imo, was one of the reasons it ended up having so many pretty awesome things.
Like the vyrii for example.

>>50087312
Indeed. It was more of an attempt to make something fun, since no one really had the time or patience to try and make things perfect.

Also, F that poor soldier of the Army of the Black Ramel. He just wanted some land in the Crestlands

>>50087208
I disagree. Tentacles are not some omnipotent manipulator arms. In many ways, they are inferior to our style of arms, (can't lift stuff as efficiently for example), also, just like our arms, tentacles cannot cut stuff, basically at all, without the use of sharp tools.

File: Ifal Fa info picture.png (940 KB, 1720x1984)

940 KB PNG

>>50087350
Yeah, in the end, I think that it was good that people weren't that anal about being "realistic" with the game, as with that approach, many of the cool ideas that came up in it wouldn't have been able to flourish.

There of course came up some dumb stuff in it as well, but imo, the cool stuff was worth the dumb stuff.

>>50086538
>not all of them have rubber forheads
>posts 7 bipedal creatures with relatively human-like proportions

>Humanity starts to explore space
>Finds that the universe is divided in a war between two alien factions
>One side is super compassionate aliens that want to exterminate all life in order to end suffering,
>Other side is sadistic aliens that want the universe to be full of life so they can continue watching people suffer.
>Space Schopenhauer vs space Nietzsche
>Humanity ends up siding with the "Evil" aliens because the alternative is voluntary extinction.
>Some of the evil aliens aren't that bad, because they are advanced enough to know about sustainability and predator-prey ratios.
>Evil aliens will even give humans free technology and allow us to colonize planets as long as we recognize their authority and promise to continue perpetuating life/suffering.

Would this make a good sci-fi story?

>>50088045
If you enjoy grimdark, sure. Humanity better have plans to stab these assholes in the back, however.

>>50088111
I was actually imagining it would be a parody of grimdark sci-fi. Life for the average human under the space Nietzscheans is actually slightly better than our life today. The only difference is that the net suffering has increased because there are more humans out there.

They actually expect a portion of humanity to rebel against them, because that's how they get more "prey" just like how lions single out the sick and wounded of the pack.

The space Schopenhauerans on the other hand regularly sterilize entire civilizations out of "Compassion" and are actively trying to figure out how to destroy the universe.

>>50088045
Well, if the choice is between euthanasia and voluntary slavery, the first thing I'd do is round up a good team of engineers to send both of these clowns a well-made hegemonizing swarm.
Maybe send each faction 9 different swarms based on different designs, seeded on various locations.

>>50088361
Both civilizations are advanced enough that it wouldn't work. Their weapons are already self replicating autonomous killbots. The only difference is one will offer you the chance to surrender, while the other will offer you voluntary euthanasia.

The only chance humanity would have would be to surrender to the Nietzscheans, and then tech up until they are strong enough to overthrow their masters. At which point they might as well just take their place as the universes' apex predator.

Hrm, now that I think about it, that might be a good twist at the end. Neither faction started the war. The Nietzscheans used to be a slave race which overthrew it's previous masters and took their place.

The Schopenhauerans on the other hand, started their euthanasia crusade after discovering the ruins of another civilization that had committed collective suicide. They came to the conclusion that they were a recurrence of the first civilization, and decided that it wasn't enough to just kill yourself. The only way to truly be free from the suffering of existence is to make sure nobody else can take your place.

The Nietzscheans would love it if humanity became strong enough to overcome them. The Schopenhauerans are horrified by that idea.

>>50088045

No, it's dumb and edgy.

File: tree houyi.png (7 KB, 338x285)

7 KB PNG

>>50088860
I like it.

>>50080283
Man I was so frustrated my little versions of the leviathan from Atlantis got extinct'd. I'm still very happy with the Swol Bzol though.

File: tumblr_ngpq8kU2Gq1t5fphqo1_500.gif (1.09 MB, 500x300)

1.09 MB GIF

>>50080832
>The only person making that assumption here is you.

Nah, I've actually seen it a lot in real life. I've legitimately lead workshops on creature design. I also see it a lot in writing and in deviantart pictures (of all things).

If you're doing creature design, there's always this temptation to go with the easy, the comfortable, what "makes sense" without checking to see /why/ it makes sense.

For a lot of tabletop game aliens, especially for space opera aliens, that's totally fine - that's not the point of their design. But for truly "alien" aliens, you have to avoid these shortcuts.

>So at this point, you're just saying you think everyone here is an idiot.

Well, this is /tg/. If we weren't idiots, we wouldn't be here.

Seriously though, I don't. Your list of alien design is does a good job for what it's designed to do, and my objections are mostly "good idea, but not mandatory" or "good idea, but a bit Earth-specific. Could be broader." You're making clear, coherent counterarguments - I might disagree with your points, but not the way you're making them or arriving at them. For all the arguing, this isn't exactly /pol/.

>It is still called a fucking bone, because it does the same thing.

I think this is just a disagreement of how and when to use specific terminology vs. Earth terminology, and it's probably just a personal difference.

Also, good design work on the chondrhist. What do other creatures in the same "phylum" do with it?

>>50080858
> Then when we all tell you that your weird reef thing just can't make it to space, you answer with "well why does it need to?"

Fair point - it's really not a very good example. There are other issues that I've noticed too - exploration drive, for instance, or abstract tracking of non-local objects.

>Our cake making, and ending up getting a fruit basket.

Or bread, or wine. Seeds can do a lot of things, to stretch the metaphor.

File: Triops_numidicus.jpg (76 KB, 986x481)

76 KB JPG

>>50064357
Triops and horseshoe crabs would like to have a word with you motherfucker.

>>50090221
Then what's your suggestion for a good sci-fi story about ayys?

File: BAPWEK2.jpg.gif (974 KB, 334x327)

974 KB GIF

Right, back to the plan...

But first, a cool video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzcTgrxMzZk
>>50080559
So life on Hera needs to meet be suited to these initial conditions.

First, what's around that can spontaneously self-assemble into a bubble that was on the list in:>>50064150?

Well, carbon, nitrogen, and sulphur are abudant. There's also silicon, but the conditions that make silicate chemistry easy - low water content, high UV - are not present here at this stage.

Bilayers and stacked bilayers form all the time in chemistry - sometimes, in annoying ways. It's not just a trick of Earth evolution - it occurs without life being involved.

So maybe something like SO4-[CH2]n as a basic membrane component? I'd be a little concerned about this breaking down at high temperature, so maybe some -[C=O]- groups to add some stability?

Doesn't really matter though - the takeaway message is that the creatures start off with plenty of sulphur in their cell walls.

For information storage we can pretty much invent whatever we like - nobody's sure the entire DNA-RNA-transcription-assmbly system evolved so we can't really start from first principles.

Hera's first cells encode information on long chains of organosulphides that are stuck on cell's inner walls, like stitching on an inside-out baseball. Unlike DNA, there's no "mirrored" half. Want to create a new strand of "HeraNA?" (this is a terrible, terrible name for so many reasons).

One organosulphide structure slides along a HeraNA strand, as raw materials accumulate. A tightly coiled (like a spring) strand of identical HeraNA emerges.

Cells divide in half, like cells on Earth. If insufficient HeraNA strands are present, coiled strands assembled during cell division unroll to bring the count up to the "correct" number.

>>50088045
Sounds like a reasonable thing. Suffering isint evil, its how existence carries out, and how we as humans learn the hardest lessons. If the aliens are more of the mindset that they are a natural disaster that clears the way for the pain and regrowth, well thats cool.

If they are basically "here is my murder rape torture palace. enjoy your stay." its a bit clice and disappointing. Might as well be an episode of Lexx.

>>50094200
Well I'm torn between them being surprisingly reasonable, and having them be ironic mustache twirlers who enjoy making people uncomfortable. I suppose it would be a very fine line to tread.

Part of me wants them to be sort of like British colonial types."Jolly good show, I do love a good hunt!" Patronizing sociopaths, but overall, no more or less evil than your housecat.

>>50093692
>What do other creatures in the same "phylum" do with it?

It's mostly just that planet's answer to the problem of how to stand up on land. When the cell dies it turns into a hardened carapace or nail kind of substance, which some animals use for horns, claws, teeth, or carapace analogs. As for the alien in question it grows on what people consider to be the face in a series of layered plates, which are used for emotional display by flexing and sliding them about as well as its proboscis which is used to speak in whistles, and feeds by injecting acid into its food and then drinking up the liquefied slurry. The planet has a slightly lower gravity than earth, so a less dense and more flexible substance is capable of supporting good sized creatures well enough. I wanted humans to interact with the aliens often enough, so I gave their gravity and atmosphere enough similarities so they could be in the same room without one of them instantly dying, however, they are much less tolerant to temperature variations and overheat easily.

>Or bread, or wine. Seeds can do a lot of things, to stretch the metaphor.

That's sorta my point. If we start off just not knowing what we are going to get, that's fine and fun in its own right, but when we start off with the goal of making proper intelligence, there are a few simple limitations that are needed to avoid evolutionary dead ends.

>>50094111

So Humanity makes first contact at some point, figures out that the galaxy has plenty of intelligent races, most of them are either sufficiently advanced godlike forces or extremely primitive, a few however are near us in terms of technological developement. An organization I am thinking of calling Atlas has brought species together, they trade information. Within the "Atlas" civilization many organizations exist, some seek to explore the galaxy, others seek to make a profit. Players would be agents of Atlas or one of its Sub-Organizations/Organizations that associate with it, exploring the galaxy and shit.

File: cell.png (50 KB, 2420x472)

50 KB PNG

How badly and I misunderstanding?

>>50094793
Meant as a reply to >>50094113

File: tethystitan_cassini_big.jpg (74 KB, 2346x1220)

74 KB JPG

>>50094113
Figuring out all the internal components isn't too useful, but we need to figure out a few things at this very early stage.

-What does the cell require from the environment?
-What does the cell excrete?
-What adaptations evolve easily, based on the cell's structure and evolutionary pressures?

"Food" at this stage is pretty basic - naturally-formed organic organosulphides created by volcanic activity and other cells.

What atmospheric gasses can this creature utilize? Carbon dioxide is the most handy one, as it was on earth.

I'm going to take a weird tack here and say that our life chose, for whatever reason, a stony path.* Hera's primitive cells intake CO2 and N2 gas and output NO2 gas. Early integration of metals into internal structures, aided by the warmer seas and plenty of helpful counterions.

*This is not the most energetically efficient path, but it's not /impossible/ in the warm and compressed seas.

Life putters on for a few billion years, most likely.

The atmosphere browns. I'm /pretty/ sure that at this temperature/pressure, nitrogen dioxide stays in this form, at least for a while.

But NO2 becomes nitric acid in the presence of water. The seas acidify, and life is forced to adapt. Minerals start pouring out of the rocks.

With less CO2 around, Hera cools slightly.

Can life use photons on Hera? At this stage, probably not. The atmosphere is full of white-brown clouds, plus volcanic ash. Light hitting the surface is probably low. If a passing Earth spaceship saw Hera at this stage, it'd pass on by without wanting to get close - nobody likes nitric acid rain.

File: Yc1mzJi.png.jpg (30 KB, 500x407)

30 KB JPG

>>50094793
>>50094808

Actually, that's pretty darn good! I'm extremely flattered.

>>50095453
It's a toss up as to whether the atmosphere settles down before multicelluar life evolves. I'm going to go with multicellular life first.

As per post: >>50064313, multicellular worm things are an easy start. Worms crawl all over the rocks, performing chemosynthesis and multiplying.

Adaptations that are made easier by the structure of these creatures and the world of Hera include:

-Armour: probably starts as fused little plates of sulphur on the cell membranes. It's hard to turn phospholipids into plates, but "sulpholipids" offer more options. High concentrations of soluble metals, iron in particular, are likely to be integrated into most cells.
-Unhappy pockets: It's possible to synthesize hydroxide or other strong bases in this environment, inside a cell. If you pop a basic cell, the heat of neutralization and gas might throw off an attacking cell.
-Sophisticated chemosynthesis: This environment offers a lot of options for gaining energy from compounds deposited by vulcanism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ
Bump

>>50095959
I hate to break the fluidity and deep discussion in this thread. But out of everything I've seen so far I need to speak out.

That looked like the ass of a girl with tattoos

>>50096704
I didn't want to say anything, but yea, now that you mention it I can't tell if that's a picture of the Sahara or a tattooed ass with stretch marks and chronic dry skin.

I am reading, saving and enjoying this
Thank you very much man, this is fascinating

Please archive this thread

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/vote.html

>>50095959
>>50096704
It does sort of.

Looking forward to more examples from Hera.

File: 1268886251271.jpg (692 KB, 1920x1080)

692 KB JPG

>>50096704
>>50096743
Heh.

>>50098557
Thanks, I'll try and write some more ~8hrs from now, if this thread is still up.

>>50074490

Mother Above, what are these? Google tells me nothing and I really need to know.

They're FUCKING ADORABLE!

File: 1421536103144.jpg (101 KB, 1024x692)

101 KB JPG

>>50097158
Thread not found.

>>50099281
maybe a slipper lobster?

File: 1d25cb56c2b64bb2146108bde(...).jpg (90 KB, 980x816)

90 KB JPG

>>50085756
>implying birrin are shit compared to galkgrokst master race

File: tychoCentralPeaks_lro.jpg (951 KB, 2147x986)

951 KB JPG

Hooray, we're still here!
>>50095604
>>50099216

If you were to watch a time lapse of life on Earth, it would go something like:

Nothing... Water...Ooh, single celled life... now it's using the sun... still using the sun... oh, that's a lot of oxygen... now there are more types of cells... some of them joined together... ok, that's a lot of creatures now they're on land now there are trees and grasses and reptiles mammals done.

There's just a sort of "blat" of multicellular diversity right at the end, almost like we were moving on a log scale or something.

Anyway, if we want life on Hera to be interesting in an RPG setting (other than as a place to maroon PCs), we need to keep on moving.

One note though - energy storage.
http://www.wiredchemist.com/chemistry/data/bond_energies_lengths.html

The major energy currency of multicellular life on earth is, as most people know, ATP.

ATP stores energy in bonds between phosphate atoms. If you feel like taking a course in molecular orbital theory, buying a very powerful computer, and calculating exact energy levels, go right ahead. But for RPG purposes, the table linked to above will work juuust fine.

So P-O bonds are listed as 335 kg/mol. You can't just break bonds willy-nily though - you have to spend energy to reform new bonds, and there are other factors like metals and counterions to factor in. So overall, breaking one P-O bond in ATP nets 30.5kJ of energy (under Standard conditions, which aren't very standard for human cells at all).

Point is - anything that has a bond energy /close/ to 335 on that table (I'd say 300 - 400) is a /potential/ candidate for a "battery bond" - one that a cell could use to store energy.

Now on Hera, the temperature is about 100 degrees higher than on Earth, so bonds will be easier to break. A P-O bond might not contain enough energy to do useful chemistry - it might even break down accidentally under hot acidic cellular conditions.

>>50106006
>OH SHIT, A GLOWING BALL!
>SCOOOORE!

File: 93hOf.png (75 KB, 800x600)

75 KB PNG

>>50099216
Hey. This thread is still up.

>>50083777
I feel like sharing some general info beyond their setting of origin that >>50086841 said.
They're a group of animals named after how the earliest species would hop around to move.

Hoppas are hermaphroditic, able to both bear and sire offspring. They give live birth. In the majority of species, their young have enlarged flotation sack in their abdomens. Hoppas are descended from flying squid-like creatures. They spend the beginnings of their lives floating through the air just out of the reach of most predators. Once they grow into their float sacks and are land-bound, the young hoppas follow pheromone trails carried on the winds to reunite with others of their species. Tuft Hoppas Blue species in this pic >>50066667 often gather in large herds. Flash Hoppas the green predators gather up into small packs. There are a few species that don't do this, but aside from the sapient hoppa, referred to as Aluns, I'm not sure which ones.

All but one or two species lack an equivalent to vocal cords. Instead, hoppas communicate via a mix of gesture, luminescence, and pheromones. In a prominent Alun culture, the hint of pheromone signals from the various species is held in reverence. Tribal leaders were trained in interpreting the messages the winds carried.

There are four broad categories of Hoppas. Gassbacks, which are large and have expanded float sacks to help support their weight. Tongued, which have four barbed, tentacle-like tongues. Flashers, which are predators that use their luminescence to disorientate prey. The last are just those which resemple the most primitive hoppas.

>>50106340
100 degrees higher in Celsius or Fahrenheit? I'm guessing Fahrenheit so all the water doesn't just boil off.

>>50105123
How do they manipulate

File: galkgrokst_head_study_by_(...).jpg (242 KB, 900x745)

242 KB JPG

>>50108098

Face tentacles.

File: component_5_10__gcs_84_by(...).jpg (84 KB, 1024x650)

84 KB JPG

Tacticool snek.

File: Where did I put Chemdraw.png (11 KB, 921x382)

11 KB PNG

>>50106988
Celcius. I mean, I could switch to Kelvin, but there's honestly not a lot we'll be discussing that requires a zero-start scale.

Most numbers I'm using are very, very approximate. I'm using a version of the Fermi approximation a fair bit when doing any quick calculations. https://what-if.xkcd.com/84/

>>50106340
Since our creatures produced NO2 as a waste, we probably can't use N-O as a battery bond (not that we'd want to). Double and triple bonds are right out - they don't break "cleanly".

Something like the attached (awful, awful) image might work - a borole. At STP, a C-B bond has 356 kg/mol - just a little more than P-O, but enough, especially if those "organic chains" have secondary hydrogen bonding sites.

Interestingly enough, there are a few bromine/iron pathways to /spontaneously/ produce boroles under acidic conditions. Neat.

Anyway, I'm getting off topic again.

File: water_phase_diagram_2.gif (57 KB, 750x512)

57 KB GIF

>>50106988
Also, sorry, missed the last bit of your comment. Water boils at 100 degrees at one atmosphere of pressure. Drop the pressure low enough and water will boil at room temperature. Crank the pressure up and water stays liquid.

File: 1298340326804.jpg (3.32 MB, 2067x2923)

3.32 MB JPG

>>50109351
So anyway, multicellular life. The part we're actually talking about, not random side discussions on cellular chemistry.

Our chemosynthetic worms are joined by another organism, one that has a slightly different background. These organisms form colonies, layering their iron shells together. Reefs like vast iron scouring pads start to appear in shallow portions of the seas, growing near volanoes to access minerals first. The air is still far harsher than the acidified sea. Life has yet to properly colonize the rocky surface of Hera.

The iron reefs can only grow in shallow waters, so there are 2 evolutionary opportunities that are immediately open: use light, and start floating. The skies are still dark, but the surface of the water is much richer in CO2 N2. If you can adapt to water that's less metals-rich, the entire ocean is open to you. With high acidity, the ocean is never as barren to chemosynthetic creatures as ours.

So photosynthesis occurs, or, more likely, photocatalysis. Some of the reef creatures incorporate light into their chemical reactions deliberately.

On Earth, chlorophyll is so ubiquitous that most people, even most scientists, don't spend much time thinking about it. But it's an astonishing molecule. To make a very long story short, it has 2 useful excited states, one for red light, one for blue, and a ton of other handy features. The section of visible light >>50078785 that's not absorbed is green.

I'm not nearly good enough to design a custom photoreactive molecule for Hera. But light on Hera is likely to be biased towards the low-energy end of the spectrum due to the NO2 in the atmosphere (which absorbs other wavelengths), so photo-assisted creatures might a) become very, very good at absorbing the limited high-energy light available and use that for direct chemistry or b) use the low-energy light to assist in reactions but not break bonds.

(Throughout, I'm using human colours as shorthand for wavelengths.)

File: LightningFields119_2009-5(...).jpg (49 KB, 574x716)

49 KB JPG

>>50109811
The photo-assisted "floaters" have a huge advantage. They have the hard iron shells of the reef-builders, but they have all the surface area of the oceans to grow in. They're also pressured to do more with less - their internal chemistry is under huge pressure to optimize, meaning that when resources /are/ available, they outcompete other organisms.

Pretty soon, most of Hera's oceans have blankets of floaters on them. As the floaters die, their iron shells break open and sink. The bottom of the ocean gets bands of nearly solid iron, which plate tectonics will eventually extrude as huge sheets on future continents.

But the floaters have a few other effects. They effectively pull iron out of the water by trapping it in less soluble forms deep in the cold depths. They also block light - anything that wanted to try to

An iron-free floater evolves that can grow on the outside of floaters, living on the surface of the vast mats, mostly exposed to air and acid rain. Within a few million years, the floaters are simply out-competed by their less-metallic offspring, and the low-iron floaters have colonized the land as well as the sea.

Kingdom: Iron-Coated Cells (iron coating, phto-assisted)
Phylum: Floaters (photo-assisted, open ocean and later land)
Phylum: Reef-builders

Kingdom: Worms (chemosynthetic, mobile, bilateral symmetry)

Kingdom(s): Single-Celled Creatures (innumerable)

File: main-qimg-e297fdee0f3e45c(...).jpg (34 KB, 572x429)

34 KB JPG

>>50109811
Something to think of there is the depth at which these photosynthetic/photocatalytic organisms dwell. If I understand your description correctly, visible light toward red's end of the spectrum will be the most available. It's possible that even infrared could be utilized.
The colors that leaves show in the fall are sometimes secondary photosynthetic pigments, allowing for the use of another small sliver of the spectrum. For the sake of simplicity, we can probably just pick a color that would look interesting for our hypothetical pigment.

File: NO2 absorbance spectrum.png (583 KB, 1148x1100)

583 KB PNG

>>50110257
I think that the atmosphere would be the bigger inhibitor here, rather than ocean depth. But yes, you do understand me correctly. Low energy light will pass through the clouds more easily.

And while it's /possible/ to use IR, I discuss (indirectly) why IR radiation isn't as useful to an organism here:>>50078774

The image attached is quick-and-dirty example of how NO2 absorbs photons. I'm also trying (and failing sometimes, I admit) to remove all references to colours or human shades at this stage. I want to do a "here's what a human would see" bit at the very end, but in the meantime, I'm just leaving enough notes that I can later construct that picture.

Basically, any colour that has a big peak under it => light of that colour is not around to be absorbed => you could safely choose a photoreactive chemical that does /not/ absorb that colour => the floaters might use purple/blue pigments.

>>50110133
I don't mean to suggest that life doesn't speciate or specialize in this era - it definitely does, and if we had more time to plot the entire history of Hera, we could fill in detailed trees at every stage of development. But we don't have that time, so we're sticking to big broad categories.

So what have our worms been up to?

Some of them have migrated downwards, finding special niches in the deep sea vents. Unlike on Earth, where (we think) life had a tough time adapting to chemosynthesis, life on Hera started with it. The only limiting factor is CO2, but it's a big one - the rift worms have far less gas access than the floaters.

Some are still eating sulphur-rich rocks in the sea, doing what their ancestors did. Some have become quite large, with specialized mobility structures - fins that travel down either side of the worm, like ribbons.

In the shallow seas, iron-cracking worms have started to live on and around the reefs. These worms use concentrated nitric acid to melt iron reefs or floaters, then eat the delicious (and conveniently nitrated!) hydrocarbons inside. The iron-eaters are definitely a major contender for complex life.

So let's run an asteroid into Hera, because fuck it. It happens all the time on Earth.

File: Structures.png (12 KB, 1518x446)

12 KB PNG

>>50110540
So, what does the asteroid do?

-Increases dust in the atmosphere, lowering light levels further. This is a tough time for anything that uses the sun.
-Finely powered reactive elements begin to remove atmospheric NO2
-Tectonic activity everywhere
-Atmospheric dust begins to cool Hera

So who does this affect most?
-Most varieties of floaters die, but some come through by chance. Land-based floaters, already hardened to an unforgiving environment, do better.
-The reef builders are more or less fucked. They're in shallow seas (tsunamis, earthquakes, landslides, continental shelf collapses) and they use light
-With the reef builders dying, the iron eating worms go extinct. Their methods will be re-evolved by other creatures on Hera time and time again, but this initial phylum didn't make it.
-The rift worms don't notice.

Once the atmosphere has calmed down, life /explodes/.

File: 186_EclipsebyGasGiant.jpg (38 KB, 334x503)

38 KB JPG

>>50110257
Is there a way to me to estimate something similar based on absorption spectrums for other fluids?

I ask because I'm curious about what a lake of methane would look like both from the surface or below. If I end up setting something on a cold planet.

Likewise, I'd like to be able to estimate what color a sky would look like based on the makeup of the atmosphere.

File: BelizeTigerGrasshopper.jpg (70 KB, 784x650)

70 KB JPG

Ok, let's play "count the Earth legs"

For this purpose, "Earth legs" means "has a hip, a knee, an ankle, and a foot." The knee can face backwards, forwards, etc. The foot can be a hoof or a spike.

Once you see it, you can't un-see it. I see all kinds of cool alien designs, but they look like they were dropped on a human (or antelope) pelvis.

Yes, a long stick with one or more joints in it is a good sound idea if you want to move around. Grasshopper legs and human legs look /superficially/ similar, after all. And on earth, we only have >>50075355 Arthropodia, Chordata, Tardigrada, and the equally obscure Onychophora that even /have/ legs, so our options are limited. Tardigrada and Onychophora ar certainly worth examining for alternative plans", as are all the lovely ways the Mollusca have invented to move around.

Even if you decide, "no, the alien I've invented has jointed legs with approximately earth-like joint spacing", it's a shortcut worth thinking about.

>>50063687
>>50063883
>>50070865
>>50073247
>>50080349
>>50082598
>>50084947
>>50085494
>>50085619
>>50086556
>>50086566
>>50086579
>>50086624
>>50087312
>>50089726
>>50101532
>>50104800
>>50105253
>>50110744
>>50110750

Ambiguous cases:
>>50070874
>>50063955
>>50082482
>>50082492
>>50086538
>>50087206
>>50106593
>>50108703

(The Primordial creatures have "Mammal legs with one extra segment", so they're /trying/, but it was never really designed as rock-hard sci-fi.)

File: martian.png (323 KB, 508x498)

323 KB PNG

>>50110892
Then what are some of the good examples of alien legs done right?

File: Ruby Example.png (928 KB, 2064x2289)

928 KB PNG

>>50110799
Easiest way is to google "absorption spectra" of the compound you're interested in. That will give you a chart like the lower half of >>50110367

Then overlay a spectrum of light, lining up the nanometer scale so they overlap properly.

Anywhere you see a peak indicates light /won't/ pass through. A red ruby would have an absorption spectrum that has peaks almost everywhere in the visible range but red (example attached).

There's also the intensity to worry about, but I'll let you do your own reading on optical density. Just because a compound absorbs light doesn't mean that it absorbs a /lot/ of light.

Absorption spectra of some molecules might change at different temperatures, so see if you can find a few for comparison. Scientists do like running them at very cold temperatures for fun.

>>50110943
I'm not saying that these are /wrong/, just that it's a prevalent default trend in design, and one of the unconscious biases like "I'll give my creature 2 equally spaced eye-objects above one mouth-object" that designers tend to default to. I'm not saying "tentacles or bust!" Just to be aware, if you're doing design, that there are other options.

Some /different/ legs include:
>>50063651
>>50063726
>>50063854
>>50064365
>>50064357
>>50072231
>>50073264
>>50075845
>>50080280
>>50091966
>>50093943
>>50095604
>>50102291
>>50105123
>>50105457
>>50105901
>>50109042
>>50109225

With a special mention to
>>50105273
For being inventive as hell. Not sure if it's practical, exactly, but it's not a design I've ever seen before.

File: eels.jpg (691 KB, 3500x2333)

691 KB JPG

>>50110736
The atmosphere is now less NO2 rich. It's still acidic as heck, and so is the ocean, but it's not quite as brown. The floaters start relying more and more on the new light, as it lets them spread.

In the oceans, niches that were formerly occupied by iron-eating worms are taken over by the sulphur worms, who have their heyday in this era. They develop better swimming fins. The first "jaws" appear, but they open rapidly to snap rocks apart and close weakly... at first.

Classes at this point are the Jawed Sulphur Worms, the Wide-Tailed Sulphur Worms, and the extremely large Slow Digestion Worms. Most of the specialized "worms" here are starting to resemble eyeless, headless eels with body-length fins running along each side, rather than dorsal/ventral fins. The largest is just under 10 inches long.

In the deep oceanic vents, some vent worms have adapted to allow sulphur-reducing single celled creatures to grow on their surfaces. The have become wrinkled things, with high surface area for temperature control. They are covered in a thick single-celled organism sheen, inside and out.

The last of the iron eating worms live near the last few reefs, but they are on the way out.

File: Structures 2.png (19 KB, 1518x446)

19 KB PNG

>>50111127
So, that's it for me tonight. See you in about 8hrs.

Any proper organic chemists are welcome to poke holes in my back-of-a-napkin chemistry. I'm sure I've missed something obvious somewhere.

>>50108669

>brain is a doughnut around their throat

Do you think they go a bit fuzzy if they swallow something too big?

>>50112178
Don't the octopi here on earth have a similar setup?

>>50112627

Maybe, but they don't have bones. Everything just slides out of the way.

>>50063651
I don't have an image for the aliens my players in a Traveller-esque setting have encountered. They've made no visual contact yet, but their structures and ships look odd. Bulbous, asymmetrical things that look like they might have been grown out of a couple of asteroids, connected by tube-like bridges supported by membranes of a material that resembles a solar sail, with more of these fanning out along the craft. The only reason you can imagine these ships even have a definite front and back is because the larger sails run the same way along the ship's body and at the back are some pretty big pods which act as its main engines, opening and closing like some sort of barnacle-like orifice as they change speed and direction. I'm toying with the idea that the reason they don't seem to show themselves to xenos is because "they" are just a latticework of the ship's ganglia, like the nodes and bridges of nervous system in an insect, and that each node just happens to be the adult stage of a spore or nymph that took part in creating a composite body in the form of the ship, using ever-advanced forms of shell growth as their cultures interacted, learned, and adapted through spreading ideas generationally through each blob composite reproducing.

Essentially a hiveminded reef made out of resource-refining blorpts that eventually figured out their bodies could refine more complex materials, make internal processes that could do an even better job of it, et cetera until they learned how to build spaceships out of themselves.

Any thoughts on how to expand on this?

>>50112846
What if they don't see themselves as spaceships at all and naturally evolved in space, using asteroids and meteors as building materials (an idea that just came to me is of a shattered planet, with life from it evolving to the new conditions and the planet providing plenty said building material). They'd then see your players as really being ships as well, which could muddy understanding each other, or strain relations when one of the reefs tries to mate with their ship.

File: 1455780764159.jpg (272 KB, 1062x1410)

272 KB JPG

>>50063651

In my Space Western Opera project I am trying to keep the number of sentient lifeforms to a minimum, so far having 2.5 planned (not including humans). In spite of this, I thought I could make up for the lack of crazy aliens flying ships by having really rich bio diversity on the planets and moons.

So my question is: Would fauna/flora satisfy alien enthusiasts, or should I add in more starfaring races?


Reason I wanted to keep the number low was to promote isolation and the vastness of space. Finding tenteen races all huddled around the same solar mass seems to make things too crowded, I believe.

File: Arcologists.jpg (210 KB, 562x1070)

210 KB JPG

>>50114542
Having a smaller number of more fleshed out races would be fine, especially if there's a number of different sub-species, breeds, etc within each them to make them feel more realistic.

>>50115245
>sub race

YES that's exactly what I plan to do. It always bothers me that you get one alien representing the entire race, sans diversity. It's entirely possible for two species that shared a common ancestry to have divergent paths and yet still make it to the celestial stage.

I have one alien race that basically split in half as brutes and gentles. The wily pacifists end up befriending their aggressive counterparts, absorbing them into their tribe. In effect one hunts and one gathers, but I take this concept much further than that.

File: tumblr_ngpq8kU2Gq1t5fphqo5_500.gif (1.88 MB, 500x300)

1.88 MB GIF

Right, back to Hera...
>>50111210

On Earth, some eras have "dominant" macroscopic creatures drawn from a single ancestor. The "era" of the Dinosaurs, or the Trilobites or Trees are fuzzy ways of thinking about life, but they're OK.

On Hera, this is the era of the Wide-Tailed Sulphur Worms. They start to get fancy. The ocean-going branch develops a second body-length channel used for cooling and for chemical sensing and, in some branches, electrical sensing as well.

Anything in the Worms kingdom uses communicator cells - the Hera analogue to Earth neurons. They work in a similar manner (flipping ion gradients) but the abundance of metals means that they can also form semi-permanent lattice structures for electrical transmission over short distances. These transmissions cells cluster around each sensing device, mostly at the front of the creature.

The Iron Coated Cells communicate by releasing signal chemicals into the environment, hoping nearby cells or creatures pick it up.

At this point, Reef Builders and Sulphur Worms are still using non-combination reproduction - they split off copies of themselves. Thanks to the transmission/encoding process here: >>50094113
>>50094793
mutations still occur.

But the Rift Worms have found a different method. Two Rift Worms come together and excrete a small nodule of special cells, surrounded by a nutrient sack. The cell nodules fuse, and template information is mixed. A metallic coating is then grown over the surface of the nutrient sack as the creature develops.

This leaves the Rift Worms free to move around while reproducing - their system is more of a "fire and forget" method, though some variants defend their "eggs". The Sulphur Worms are temporarily immobilized while splitting off a smaller (almost larval) copy.

But a variant of the tiny Rift Worms is about to discover a game changing adaptation - segmentation.

File: Mt_Vesuvius_IT_GE1_19FEB20131.jpg (1.88 MB, 2000x2000)

1.88 MB JPG

>>50114542
You can work from the bottom up, like I'm doing with Hera.

Or you can work from the top down, deriving potential ancestors and paralell branches. I mean, look at humans: we have cats as pets, we eat cows, we keep birds - they're all following the same body plan.

But then we go to a seafood restaurant and several new body plans are on display. Just a quick skim of Wikipedia articles on different Earth phylums should show that.

I would try and avoid the whole "flora/fauna" distinction, but for Space Opera it's totally fine.

Aww hell, we're in autosage. See you in the next thread, folks!

File: fav_races_by_moni158-d77xmeb.png (884 KB, 1600x460)

884 KB PNG

Was a good thread.

File: lycon___exosuit_by_benmau(...).jpg (122 KB, 1024x886)

122 KB JPG

And image limit.

Good thread, lets make another.

what should the theme of the next one be?

>>50121685
Bizarre alien technology
Realistic diversity in species
Hot space babes
How to set up alien governments

>>50121871
Hrmm how about "Space Faring Alien civilizations"

>>50121899
Sounds good to me.

>>50121871
Alien plants, possible lack of, or blurring of lines.
Different ethnicities of an alien species.
Life before space.
Ayy lmao.

>>50121899
Oh, going off of that, the matter of FTL travel. Possible in your setting? Technobabble explanations? Workarounds for if it's not possible or just not yet discovered?

>>50122059
In my setting, with the whole atlas thing and such, most common methods of FTL are Alcubierre drive and Wormholes. Its kinda space opera, so I let FTL slide.

I was thinking of starting a new thread, but it seems that the only alien pictures that I have outside of my evogame folder are one of a Turian and one of Xeno.

>>50079679
>And hopefully, it has tits.
Jesus could you make you're strawmanning even more obvious?

>>50123836
>>50123836
>>50123836

New thread up yo

>>50094614
>An organization I am thinking of calling Atlas has brought species together
Nope.

>Within the "Atlas" civilization many organizations exist, some seek to explore the galaxy, others seek to make a profit.

>others seek to make a profit.

Stop.

> Players would be agents of Atlas or one of its Sub-Organizations/Organizations that associate with it, exploring the galaxy and shit.

> Players would be agents of Atlas
>agents

>its Sub-Organizations/Organizations that associate with it, exploring the galaxy and shit.

>Sub-Organizations/Organizations

Unless this organization is made up of capitalist humans, you need to chill. The overwhelming majority of life on Earth cannot understand, nor emulate, human speech. If you think the same wouldn't be the case everywhere else in the Universe, you're wrong. The same would be true in reverse for both Humans and every other species.

>>50070865
Where are their cocks? Or do they have a navi-style thing goin' on with the tentacles?

>>50123615
See, every time I post something like that, I go "maybe I should give people more credit."

Then posts like
>>50125871

Turn up.

Yeah, no. No credit given.