Been dying to run this, but I have a couple of players who flat out refuse to play human characters. For reasons :rolleyes:
So until now, I’ve been working out how non-human characters would work in UW. Tonight, I had a mini-revelation. A character’s species doesn’t matter. Thinking back on some of the biggest names in Space Opera (Star Trek, Babylon 5), the biological differences between humans and aliens rarely if ever are important to the story. We all know Vulcan’s are stronger than humans. But how often does that come up? Narns can’t be telepaths. But does that need to be mechanised?
What usually comes up is cultural and societal differences. That’s pretty much already handled by the current character creation system. The only thing that it doesn’t handle (possibly) are species that have special abilities like flight, telepathy, or completely alien (or artificial) physiology. But those sort of characters are quite rare. Beyond Human will sort that out.
But for the majority of alien species in space opera, the current character system works fine. Create the character as normal and just call it a Klingon, or a Centauri, or a Wookie, or a Turian. For the most part, it won’t matter.
Won’t work for everyone. And it won’t work for my two players who need to play special snowflakes with kewl powerz. But for most space opera, it works.
Yeeeeeep! You got it. Heck, you almost wrote out what I already have written (rough draft) for the opening of the Species chapter of FBH. Species of all colors, textures, skin patterns and foreheads are available right out of the box in UW.
Yep. Every once in a while, a character has one attribute that’s way out of the human range (wookiee arm-ripping), but since we usually only have a small number (often one) of examples of those species, they might as well be individual character traits rather than species traits.
Look up the conversation on here about Psychic powers that happened recently, and find my post about how psychic powers are just fictional positioning — the same thing goes for aliens whose biologies do matter. My advice there, applies equally here.