Subject: Species Rundown Part Two
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Posted on: 2013-06-11 17:23:00 UTC

Well, now I know Board posts have a wordcount limit. Continuing on.

Geodar: There's potential here, partially because having rock-creatures be both sapient and a spacefaring species in their own right is a concept I've not seen done often, and I'd like to see what it turns out like. I'd go against just having stone skin, though, since that would make them very vulnerable to anything that can break through rock. I'd recommend going the whole route, with silica blood and stone all the way down, since it seems both more evolutionarily plausible and would make them generally more effective at being big and menacing. Perhaps you could include organic or semi-organic materials at their core, but just having stone skin would pose more problems than it solves.

Celphid: Again, not a lot of details here, so I don't have a lot to say, but if they spend most of their time in special baths, does this affect their spacefaring? It seems to me it would. I'd imagine they strike up a quick trade agreement with the Phylum to get access to their environmental suit technology, so that they'd be able to actually move about unhindered. Plus, a big squid in a robot suit is almost as fun as a jellyfish in a robot suit.

Necroix: No. Just... sigh. The rest are either okay or at least decent as they are, salvageable, or I can see why you thought they would be a good idea. These guys... this is a half-dozen sterotypes given form. The embodiment of "Und you must be ze villain!". They are evil skeletons that are from the "sci-fi mysterious" shorthand "the far reaches of the galaxy", and hate everyone and everything just because. That is a problem.
Genetically engineering super-soldiers could work for some other species, but when it's coupled with all of the ultra-overused villain ideas of the Necroix, it gets buried and looks like another messy detail. Villains do not have to be designated. It's more interesting when they aren't. Yes, there will be villainous factions or even villainous species, but when your first reaction to a new species is "Oh, so these are the bad guys", and they turn out to actually be the bad guys, that's not good.
Now I have an interesting idea for a race of scary Halloween-monster-style aliens that turn out to be the only nice guys in their sector. I'm sure it's been done before, but I'm writing it down next to "political exile cicada space pirates" in the list of ideas I might consider using somewhere.

Mortu: I went over the Mortu a bit in my looking-over of the Roon, but I think they could be salvageable independent of the Necroix. A species that has been forced for generations to think of every species, including themselves, as inferior to the race that breeds them and controls them, could create interesting story possibilities, such as if a few ever broke away and began to sympathize with the races that they were always told were not worth scraping their masters' space-boots.

Andromedian: The "ancient energy being" thing is another cliché, but it's not so stale you can't use it if you make it interesting. Their interaction with other races will be the big deciding factor for whether they're a good idea, so I can't really critique a lot of this.

Wow, that was is a lot of species. I may have made a poor decision critiquing them all at once, and my reviews may have varied in quality and been saturated with my own ideas for what to do with them, but what do you think? What expansions are there? What's the history? How does this universe work? I'd be interested on having details for a few more of these species, if nothing else.

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