"No Stars in Sight. What aliens do you get?" Topic

Figured I'd share this with you lot.

Rather than super specific army lists, what you get is a set of "archetypes". I basically went through popular scifi and looked at what general types are common, and then provided rules for those.

For each, you get battlefield and psychological traits as well as how their leaders function.

Warriors – Races with a warrior culture, possibly caste based.
Depending on outlook, these could be Orcs (40K), Klingons (Trek), Turian (Mass Effect), Aslan (Traveller) or similar.

Converted – Humanoids (humans typically) that have been absorbed into a hivemind and been "upgraded" with cybernetics. Borg (trek), Husks (Mass Effect) and the Strogg (Quake 2/4)

Swift – Small winged humanoids. They move fast and go squish. This is pretty much the Droyne from Traveller but if you figure they are running fast instead of flapping wings, it could work for other squishy, fast races.

Precursor – Old, refined aliens with slight psychic abilities. Eldar (40K), Asari (Mass Effect) or Vau (Fading Suns)

Soulless – Robotic hordes. You know what this is, without me explaining it :). Geth (Mass Effect), Terminators (the movies) and similar.

Engineers – Physically weak aliens with a knack for technology and hacking. Quarian (Mass Effect) was the main inspiration here.

Slavers – These are basically Grey's (and their derivatives like XCOM sectoids)

Feral – Strong, aggressive beast-aliens. Any number of angry, cat-people in science fiction. Also Krogan (Mass Effect)

Manipulators – Tentacle aliens that manipulate events around them, masters of intrigue. The archetype here is pretty much the Hivers from Traveller.

The Many – identical, hiveminded clone species. Inspiration was the aliens (and end-stage of humanity) in Forever War.

Horde – Mutated hordes with terror-weapons. An option for people with old zombie-types from Warzone or whatnot.

Swarm – Bugs, Xenomorphs. You know the drill.

edit: You also get a handful of alien traits to build your own or modify the ones above.

Are you selling more detailed lists for these generic racial types? Don't understand the reason for this post.

He's just explaining what types of aliens are covered by his rules. An FYI for those that are interested.

What would the Gorn from Trek qualify as? Soulless?

I'd go with Feral.

I'd probably lean towards Feral or Warrior. Does anyone make "rubber suit" lizard men ? :)

I'm looking for a trait for my Garn models. They are eight foot tall, superstrong, fairly slow, fearless soldiers who wear personal force fields.

At first blush feral would make sense but that suggests very agile and speedy. Also I think my subject race, the Felids, are more the Feral type?

Warrior just makes them human, I assume.

What is this rubber suit of which you speak? Many of the top scientists today actually think that if we ever do run into an alien civilisation they will be a lot like us, including physically.

Rules wise, Ferals get bonuses up close, they get ed off when they get shot (casualties make them less likely to withdraw) and they get movement bonuses when charging. (slow to get going, but once they're running, hard to stop them)

Maybe we need another archetype for "ponderous, wall of hurt" aliens?

With the felid, I really get Aslan and Kilrathi vibes out of them (which I'm sure is not coincidental :) ). Warriors for me.

Will Soulless do though? In many ways they act like the early terminator (not the liquid variety) and are super tough.

By the way I assume they either have high points value or minuses to balance out the pluses?

There's drawbacks to each but for some, I adjusted points values as well, since not every flaw is "equal" to the benefits.