On Origins and Species
Something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while, and something that has been mentioned a few times, is “Alien Origins” in Uncharted Worlds. The thing is, there will be very few “Alien” Origins in Far Beyond Humanity, for one simple reason: Origins are not about species. They are about society.
By-and-large, Origins are dictated by the social, cultural and economic realities of a character during their formative years. And while an alien may come from a different society with different cultural mores and values, we see a rough approximation of the careers repeated, or closely enough that we can make an equivalence.
The only time that Origin will not describe a childhood is in situations where the character in question has not had a childhood, where the character has not been exposed to a cultural reality. They have not been shaped by the slow, complicated process of learning and growing through societal exposure.
For example, one Origin that I will be including is the Robotic Origin. The character is explicitly programmed and designed a certain way by their Origin, rather than implicitly shaped by their environment during a receptive “youth” phase. Same goes for the Grown Origin; be it cloned or phytomorphic, as these characters go through an accelerated maturation, reaching “adulthood” too quickly to be affected by a societal Origin. What they lack in a lifetime of societal learning (i.e.: lacking a usual Origin skill), they make up for by having a unique design, function or abilities (species Origin skill).
So how do you make a creature of a species if you don’t have an Origin? Simply put, in 99% of cases, a xenosapien (intelligent humanoid alien) doesn’t differ enough from a human to warrant special rules. This is especially true in Space Operas, where most aliens are simply reflections, exaggerations or inversions of certain aspects of humanity, with odd skin patterns and/or exotic foreheads.
Simply state the species of the character and then choose Origin/Career/Career as normal. The minor differences in biology will make for interesting side-notes, rather than being decisive traits. Even when a particular species is characterized as being particularly strong, fast, etc, such things are not of a magnitude that would affect play, though it might affect descriptions.