Continuing from >>50016221

Continuing from Post your pictures for alien monsters, NPCs, protagonists, and villains.

Question for the thread: How should you play truly alien characters?

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youtube.com/watch?v=mQ-T5VEueW0
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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

>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.

>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?

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.

youtube.com/watch?v=mQ-T5VEueW0

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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Is anyone actually reading this?

Burgess Shale arthropods.

Caterpillar.

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.

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

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."

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

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

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

It was God's embarrasing deviantart stage.

That's a scallop, not a clam.

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

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

> Is anyone actually reading this?

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

Please continue

I'd like this in a more coherent setting than via Veeky Forums posts, but yeah, I'm reading it

You should throw together a PDF of Google doc

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I'd say it looks like a scallop

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>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.

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

>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

>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.

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.

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

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 Veeky Forums 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.

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Just about 4 1/2.

Oh fug

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.

Thanks. Back now. I'll post a little bit, then take off until about 6hrs from now.

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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.

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.

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.
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?

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.

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.

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 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?

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:
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.

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.

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.

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

As 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.

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.

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.

Anyone have some counterarguements to this?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

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

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.

Trans(insert species name)

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

Also, spectrum of the sun. Handy.

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

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.

>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.

>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 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.

>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.

>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?

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

>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.

> 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 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.

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.

>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.

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.

>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.

>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

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.

Fuck, all this catching up to do...

>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 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.

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

Sorry user, 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.

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.

>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"?

>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.

>likewise be a very strange race

Strange to you, Earth-man. :P

>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.

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

>Sorry user, 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.

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.

>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, user?

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: >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.

>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.

>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.

>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.

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.

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

>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.

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

Mother Nature is into bukakke?

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.