Jet Black wrote:

Have you ever introduced new alien species in your EP campaigns, either homemade creations, or stuff from games or novels? I love the factors because they're really "alien" aliens, but this also makes it difficult to do them justice. For our current campaign, I'm working on converting the pentapods from [b]Traveller 2300AD[/b] to EP. I'm hinting at a connection / rivalry between them and the factors, and they work pretty much as written - they even have their own versions of forking and resleeving technologies! So far, I came up with stats for bishops (pentapod combat constructs). I guess the aborigines from [b]Blue Planet[/b] would also fit the bill.

Uhm Well you have the black cloud theory, to create an original alien even more intelligent than the TITANs. If I would make an interesting alien species, would be a silicate based one. It could be so old, that their original system was destroyed and their planet became loneless in space, they only survived because their primitive ancestors came back to inner caves and adapted to new conditions without any kind of sun or stability such conditions of sscarcity and weaknesses pussed them onto developing a bigger brain to form social structures and comunication. On the long run, the caves became their home surviving with the heat of the radioactive materials inside the planet and absorbing another species adapted onto extracting energy from the heat and the radiation. The ecology completly rearranged under such conditions, that were so harsh that competition also became harder. Groups of primitives fighted for the small zones of resources, and natural selection impossed a bigger and more developed brain since they started to need a bigger nervous system to adapt to the axis of the planet moving in lots of directions and enforcing more complex tactics for survival. That modeled the aliens to start using tools and becoming more organized, but by their same nature of their evolution they were isolationist and agresive, so they started to be selectively breeding since in such conditions more processing capacity is important that character was selected between all others and in the end they could understand genetics to begin an small civilization of different clans. Such a high competitive world, means that these aliens are zealots in their clans efectively using all their time onto improving their tools and techniques exponentially increasing their development but limited by their own environment they could only get onto an "modern" era all under a big natural selection of clans over others. And at some point, that lonely planet will found another solar system to crash in about 303 years. But such solar system has a pandora portal and an exocolony of humans. Thats one of the ideas I had, its not really developed(how can these aliens deal with radioactivity messing around with whatever molecule they use for information transcription? How they are their bodyes? How their bodyes work?) thats because, the tipical humanoid of 2 legs and 2 arms seems too anthropocentric to me, but Im limited by the same nature of imagination( I can only take concepts that I already Know and twist them). The problem with the factors is that they're not truuuully original or realistic. The only realistic alien I have ever seen is in 2001 of Stanley Kubrick and just because there was none on it. So they're too much associative, too much vulnerable to any species that want to compete against them, and that doesnt trully reflect on the game or how can they understand humans? Concepts as individualism or competency shouldnt even exists ir their "minds" so at it should be trade or authoritarism. And of course, any intelligent alien species can only be a god or a monkey. The factors are just a rarity or they just cant develop anymore in the kardashev scale.