I was looking at Ed Ortiz’s post, To Vesper Skies: Prologue, where he talks about aliens:
“The crazier, the better. So I want my game to have a decent amount of playable alien races from the get go. Of course, you have to wonder, where humans fit in all this. With exotic races with some weird abilities, how do you make the baseline humans more interesting?”
And I’m reminded of two things:
1. “In essence, we’d be Space Orcs.” You can follow the thread up and down on Tumblr to find variations on that theme.
2. “But if you’re hurt, if you’re trapped, if you need someone to fetch help? You *really* want a human.” Such a lovely thing.
All the aliens would be smaller, weaker, brittle, lonely, vulnerable, inflexible. Perhaps richer, perhaps more cunning, perhaps more powerful, but *we are mammals.*
#RPG
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SF as a genre is – for me! – about extrapolating some technological advance and writing a story about society and how it adapted or changed. As such, the campaign prep for a similar game would have to involve the DM thinking of a similar thought experiment. But how would players contribute? Perhaps *Shock* gets it but all the others end up feeling like “D&D in space” or Space Opera, or Cyberpunk, I think. Take *A Fire Upon the Deep* by Vernor Vinge. You can play in the same setting, but you can’t retell the story of the Slowness rising and the AI going supercritical because that story has been told in the book. You are left with the morsels and superficial trappings of ships and networks and culture and none of what formed the core of the story.
(From a post on Google+)
– AlexSchroeder 2016-10-05 18:56 UTC