Sentient Aliens - Lots, some, or none
- Thread starter Willie Dewitt
- Start date
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
The Major Races are all from CT, and began appearing in detail fairly early. Quite a list of the Minor races (Githiaskio, Ayl Yael, Darrians, Llellewyloly, Crawni, Girugh'kagh, Newts, Vegans, and Virushi, as well as a few others) are also CT in origin. The newest additions to the Marches, the Amindii, are pictured anonymously in JTAS art during CT.
While MT, with its widely encouraged fan writing phenomenon, led to far more aliens in locales not previously visited, the universe of CT was hardly Human only.
Willie Dewitt
SOC-11
Alternate world and heroics are D&D buzzwords, and I'm avoiding being D&D with my CT. I told my usual D&D group, with no Trav experience, and told them they'll be more like the middle-aged working stiffs of The Nostromo than the young "Everybody is Han Solo" Sci Fi archetypes of The Serenity. They took to that pretty good. For them the heroics have been things like making a good profit on a load of corn, or very occasionally the likes of surviving armed mobsters holding guns on them in a cramped lake house living room. Nobody has been chomping at the bit to be aliens yet.
Body mod fetishes and environmentally created human mutation has filled that gap, in the way it did in The Dune universe.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Right, and also partially wrong.
There are no alien races in the CT core rule books (LBB1-5), nor is there much indication that there may be non-human sentient life aprt from the mention of xeno-medicine and this bit from the ref's final word:
If you wanted aliens back in LBB1-3 days you had to make up your own.
The alien races introduced by GDW are all for the Third Imperium Setting, not the basic 'generic' game.
And I too prefer what they did with T2300 aliens - my biggest gripe with 3I aliens is that the 'major' races are too far apart; K'kree, Hivers (and Ithklur) are very unlikely to be encountered in the Spinward Marches.
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mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
That's I how I tend to do it too, genetically altered human sub-races, bio-mechanical augmentation and cyber enhancement produce the 'aliens'.
Its an old paradox - without an 'ancient precursor' race to seed space with life (and possibly oversee it) that all reaches the same level of technological development within a few thousand years of each other then alien races should be either very primitive or super-advanced compared to the baseline.
While technically true, at the time, the concept of non-humans in other games were fairly easily ported over to Traveller.
Bringing in D&D races was a matter of renaming the races... at the time, they didn't carry attribute modifiers, even. More than one old-timer has mentioned doing so, and several modifer-only articles exist both from JTAS and Dragon.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
"Proto-Traveller" is a subset of CT, which was a decade-long effort. The setting's launch with Supplement 3 in '79 included mentions of the Vargr and Zhodani, though details were still another year away. Claiming that the aliens were not present in CT is like claiming that the Barbarian doesn't go back to AD&D 1st edition, or that Classic Star Trek doesn't include Klingons.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
It's the old is CT the rules or the setting argument. The CT rules - the setting neutral ones LBB1-5 - do not mention aliens (other than where I cited) while the 3I CT setting does.
Compare that with T2300 where the alien races are mentioned in the core rules.
I am well aware of proto-Traveller, or rather the proto-3I setting, and once upon a time it was all that we had. The setting actually launched with Adventure 1 Kinunir - the library data from which is what I based my proto-Traveller on.
That's why I said right but partially wrong.
Show me in LBB1-5 where aliens are mentioned apart from where I have cited?
The alien races presented in CT are all specific to the 3I setting, not generic aliens to be included in any setting.
Like Aramis I imported D&D monsters into Traveller, I also included aliens from various books, Star Wars, comics (2000AD and StarLord, Marvel universe), and even Star Frontiers (this came later). Call of Cthulhu was to provide some useful alien races too.
Compare that with T2300 where the alien races are mentioned in the core rules.
I am well aware of proto-Traveller, or rather the proto-3I setting, and once upon a time it was all that we had. The setting actually launched with Adventure 1 Kinunir - the library data from which is what I based my proto-Traveller on.
That's why I said right but partially wrong.
Show me in LBB1-5 where aliens are mentioned apart from where I have cited?
The alien races presented in CT are all specific to the 3I setting, not generic aliens to be included in any setting.
Like Aramis I imported D&D monsters into Traveller, I also included aliens from various books, Star Wars, comics (2000AD and StarLord, Marvel universe), and even Star Frontiers (this came later). Call of Cthulhu was to provide some useful alien races too.
Not the implied default. No treatment of aliens was a consequence of doing a very simple, setting-light core rule set. Aliens were described first in JTAS issues - typically one per issue once they got their Imperium thing underway.
And note that, once they started the Contact! Series, they almost always had one new alien per issue.
Presumably, if JTAS had a continuous quarterly run through the 1980s and 1990s, they'd have detailed 80 alien races by the turn of the millennium.
The Aslan may as well be generic... Samurai Cats is a common enough trope.
See also Kzinti, Lyran, Cateni, Kirathi... Honor-bound psychotic felinoids. I've read that the Hani fill the same role.
Of the Sci-Fi cat-races that don't fit the honor driven nutcases, I've only encountered 2: Caitians and MekPurr. (MekPurr: Feline Scots from Space Opera.)
The Vargr are likewise not far enough from Generic, either, but don't have the same extenisve sci-fi presence to back it up. Some, tho'... Coalition Dog Boys (RIFTS), and a handful of anthropomorphic races.
And many of the Traveller races in JTAS are interesting. The Newts, Virushi, and Ael Yael seem to be pretty well thought out, capsule presentations. And can easily be ported right out of the 3I into one's home settings easily.
Dolphins are pretty much generic - even tho' they post-date Bk 5 - and can easily be ported to other settings without a hiccup. As presented, they seem to owe a bunch to Anne McCaffrey and/or David Brin...
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
Looking back at my earlier posts, I guess you could say that I prefer my sentient aliens, for the most part, to be extinct and long ago. I do keep thinking about the Bald Space Rovers setting up a small colony of Egyptians on a primarily Desert Planet though.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
That doesn't introduce aliens into the setting though.
Traveller has never explained how the 3I setting resolves the Fermi Paradox - although you could point towards MegaTraveller's first starfarers sidebar or the Ancients themselves. There are hints in T5 that there may be another explanation...
T2300 has several races of a similar TL encountering each other at just the right time - imagine if Earth were a thousand more years advanced and encountered a lower TL Kafer empire, or worse, what if it were the other way around?
AGRA intelligence meddling perhaps - or something else (Nyotekundo alien artifact linked perhaps).
Traveller has never explained how the 3I setting resolves the Fermi Paradox - although you could point towards MegaTraveller's first starfarers sidebar or the Ancients themselves. There are hints in T5 that there may be another explanation...
T2300 has several races of a similar TL encountering each other at just the right time - imagine if Earth were a thousand more years advanced and encountered a lower TL Kafer empire, or worse, what if it were the other way around?
AGRA intelligence meddling perhaps - or something else (Nyotekundo alien artifact linked perhaps).
Willie Dewitt
SOC-11
I should have been more clear, I only have and am using CT books 1-3, though the other day I did get a pdf of 4. I don't really intend to tap into other books, so having no known sentient life works for me. That does not rule out me having them find some in game. It'd probably be remote and hostile though :frankie:
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
Essentially Proto-Traveller, then. It is both a challenging and rewarding way to approach the game. I dabbled in that mode when those books were all that existed, and the work involved, still years from useful software support, led me to embrace the Imperium as it took form.
As for being more clear, that is a separate challenge, and one the Traveller community has struggled with for decades. We have a lot of definitions to choose from...
Willie Dewitt
SOC-11
My last Traveller experience until recent months was when I was a kid in the early 80's playing at the local game shop. I really forget the extent of what had been published, I just owned the basic original set. But they loved Traveller there and probably were using everything up to that point of around 1982. And Paul Crabaough hung out there, and he wrote a lot of articles on Traveller in various major game publications.
I don't have any real info on The Imperium setting. Having read some Dumarest back in the day, I'm going with a remote feel with the major seat of power being very far away, with it's only show of presence being the various military. It's sort of either pre or post Imperium I guess. A time sort of in-between empires, though there is of course power held at core worlds by various wealthy families (left over from the old empire?) and CEO's of major corps that form a loose power base through yearly committe (or something like that). I've been calling it "The Continuum" mostly because I like the way it sounds
Having things happen along the frontier sections of the galaxy makes it easy to just not have to get into it much, though I've had to touch on it a bit for the sake of the character from nobility.Hmm...I mentioned Dumarest. I only read maybe three of the books, but there wasn't much in the way of sentient aliens races in that setting, was there? That may in part be inspiring my lack of wanting aliens races. Though again It's mostly because I want to set things apart from heavy-alien sci fi that my players are used to. And in large part I think a lack of space-faring non-humans adds to the lonely feel of huge space with little in it other than spectacular vistas and whatever mankind brings along with them. Funnily enough, when it was time to make characters, not a single one of them asked if they had to be human.
ShapeShifter
SOC-13
I'm up to book 15
but, IIRC, the only aliens are "animal aliens" -- not sentient, really. If you can read beyond Bk. 3, by all means do! They are rich with ideas to incorporate into one's campaign. That's what I've been doing for several years, and I don't regret it one bit. Willie Dewitt
SOC-11
I'm up to book 15
Oh certainly alien planet beasties are on the table. I had the players in one game go camping with a Yuppie on a wild dog hunt to protect him from the "Alpha" dogs who were bigger, deadlier, and aggressive. I based them on the nasty dog creatures in the borderland's games. Animal-wise what I'm really working on is a stowaway nasty creature like The Xenomorph being dealt with. I'm thinking spider-like or insect, but also don't want to totally rip off Alien. But these will be the "alien" species encountered. Perhaps more intelligent than animals, but nothing that uses technology.
Much like settings like Dune, I also like to have versions of Terran animals that went to the stars with mankind and populated worlds. Horses, tigers, hawks, cats, dogs, etc (sometimes on a planet long enough to evolve in one direction or another) along with the weirdo native beasts.
