The Zygos draw on a few different SF tropes– space elves, vaguely insectoid aliens, space nobility, fantasy tropes in science fiction. I like the way that they came out, but the process by which I got there was a little complicated.

First, I wanted to consider an insectoid species. Insect-like species are, of course, a classic Science Fiction trope going back to, at the very least, H. G. Wells, but I didn’t want to go in the most common direction that insect-like species go. Wells had the Selenites, who were a eusocial species with specialized members living very much like an insect colony; that trend is frequently (but not invariably) found in other science fiction insectoids. It’s hardly universal to insects, of course, but it’s certainly easier to imagine a society of advanced ants or bees than a society of, say, fireflies.

But I didn’t want that.

PCs that are part of some kind of hive society are tricky, and I just didn’t think that it felt appropriate for my setting. It also seems to me that a eusocial individual would have such an alien mindset that it would be hard to play, or be part of an intergalactic society. So I wanted something easier for players to relate to… but I also didn’t want to, for example, be too similar to Star Frontiers and the Vrusk. I was a bio major, with a focus in zoology, and I’d studied invertebrate biology, and that actually was a hindrance in visualizing the species, as I simply couldn’t reconcile being the size of a person with all the details of insect biology. Besides, my insectoids wouldn’t be related to terrestrial insects. Why should I feel limited by them?

Instead, I decided to embrace the idea of more humanoid insect-folks. Sure, it’s less traditional, but I decided that I liked the visuals of more elf-like insects, and Space Elves are also a science fiction tradition– it’s a common descriptor of Vulcans, for example, and other versions are certainly common enough. Why not Space Dragonfly Elves?

That lead to more ideas. Why not embrace the Elf aspect even further? I made them even more of a strange fantasy race, with incomprehensibly complex noble titles, feudal traditions (but in an Army of Oz-like way, where no one was actually anything but a noble), strange medieval weapons, and then filtered it all through the space insect aesthetics.

The result was, to me, an entertaining but very alien species, with strange technology that felt almost magical. Reconciling their alien customs and weaponry coincided nicely with the alien, monster-filled Hyperspace that I was developing– what if the Zygos were refugees from that Hyperspace, fleeing a realm of horrifying monsters? That was a nice final touch, and it was easy enough for me to imagine how they’d fit into galactic society.

And thus, the Zygos, the Dragonfly Elves with their strange ways, strange technology, and beautiful life-as-art. I’m very fond of them.

So, I wanted a robot civilization.

Robots, after all, are a staple of science fiction; a staple of Asimov’s work, part of the setting of Star Wars, a classic of the genre going back centuries. Mechanical bodies, electronic intelligence– the idea has had staying power that cannot be denied. Stellar needs robots, so why not an entire robot civilization?

But this caused issues with my vision of the setting. In much SF, robots are literally slaves– treated as property with no rights, despite having free will and human or greater levels of intelligence. I’m not willing to do that in a setting– at least, not in a society that I want to present in a positive way. It also potentially creates issues of programmable minds– can personalities be created and customized?– that I didn’t want to have be part of the setting, either.

But how to resolve this? It seemed like the simplest solution was to create something with living minds in mechanical bodies. I briefly considered some kind of cyborg, but it’s hard to justify a species of full-body borgs, and I wanted to do something more purely robotic. Thus, a species of robots that were directly descended from a biological species. The mind-transfer technology was easily handwaved; a reason for it could be invented readily enough. I considered that the process might be imperfect; it was presumably an emergency that would lead to an entire species abandoning their biological bodies for mechanical forms, after all. That was convenient; I didn’t really want that kind of mind-transfer technology, and all of its implications, cluttering up my setting, so I could simply have it lost to the vagaries of the process and the chaos of the catastrophe that had rendered it necessary.

This let me create some interesting robots, at least to my way of thinking. Humanoid, with functions mimicking those of biological life-forms in many ways. (Why? Because the progenitor species knew that they’d miss having biological bodies, and wished to live a life as similar to their old one as they could manage.) I could always toss in nonsapient robots with a wide range of shapes and forms to cover those efficient-engineering urges. I also decided against the possibility of backing up or copying their minds– I wanted mortality among the machines. Otherwise, wouldn’t the Clickclick be the best at everything through sheer practice? It’s a question that’s often unanswered about fantasy Elves, for example, and I decided that I didn’t want that kind of immortality in my setting.

I still had to make their culture interesting, so I came up with the notion of their striving for individual perfection as a cultural trait– it seemed like a good concept for a machine people. And I put them into direct conflict with the Amok, to have a battle of machine vs machine, free-willed individuals vs poorly programmed menace. I put their emphasis on nuclear-fueled technology because I wanted to put it somewhere, and a people who couldn’t get cancer seemed like the logical choice.

Overall, I didn’t want their general capabilities to be too different from everyone else’s– it’s the downfall of many similar attempts in other systems, when available character-building resources wind up going into innate capabilities that most other characters can trivially duplicate with equipment. So I opted to create a system where the mechanical nature of the Clickclick simply wouldn’t have strong game effects, and I’m pleased with that decision. Abstraction was always a goal of the system, and I think the results work well.

The Xotoxtl started with a body design, as one might expect. I’m fond of the other-species centaur concept, and the classic Drider design was inspirational for a species that was utterly alien. I decided to lean harder into the spider-like design in some regards– coloration patterns, especially– while de-emphasizing arachnid aspects of their biology. Venom, webbing, and so on don’t work very well in my system, and the basic biology of spiders doesn’t seem like it would scale well to a large life-form.

But again, anatomy isn’t enough; the Xotoxtl needed a culture. I wanted to have a nomadic culture, one where vast generation ships crossed the galaxy, and the Xotoxtl were available for that, so I went with them. I liked the visuals of hollowed-out asteroids for the ships, so I went with that, and then I considered what they’d be like.

Even on a gigantic generation ship, people will be more crowded than they are in cities; they’re also going to, by definition, be closer to vital equipment keeping everyone alive than the average city-dweller would be. A society like this can’t tolerate reckless, violent behavior. There would need to be processes for de-escalating conflict, sharing of resources, and a highly ordered society in general.

That’s fairly informative already for what Xotoxtl culture would be like in general, and it says things about the kinds of weapons that they’d use, their way of talking, how they act in general. But I also wanted to consider: *Why* are the Xotoxtl traveling the universe in vast starships? Even if they like travel and crowded conditions, it’s extremely dangerous to do so compared to living on a planet.

The Xotoxtl, therefore, were refugees, or descended from them. In their distant past, some catastrophe befell their homeworld; lacking a FTL drive, the survivors had left on gigantic generation ships. I thought that it made sense that their old culture would be largely subsumed into the new culture that must develop to exist in their new environment, so their point of origin is tragically lost. From there, it all just seemed reasonable that they would be the origin point for galactic civilization– they were traveling between worlds, however slowly, before true FTL existed.

Their culture would be stable, calm, organized– designed for the benefit of society as a whole over individuals, rooted in survival of the species. Change would not come easily to them, but confrontation would be something to be minimized, even in attempting to enforce conformity. And so those are the Xotoxtl, the calm, polite and alien space nomads.

Robert E. Howard wrote of Serpent Men, and Lovecraft described them; many other writers and game creators have created reptilian aliens, and they are a staple of the pulps. Reptilian people have a pretty standard set of characteristics in most versions– cold-blooded, treacherous, ambitious, cruel. They’re often used as villains, either the ultimate masterminds or some sort of secondary adversary, and they’re often very predatory, seeking in some way to consume the forces of good– often in a very literal way.

But it doesn’t always work that way; E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Velantians, for example, are friendly draconic aliens, as are Becky Chambers’ Aandrisk. And I didn’t want to go that way, either– it’s too much of a cliche for me, and it has been taken to extremes. (GURPS Aliens, I’m looking at you, here.) I wanted a friendly species of snakes, ones that hospitably offer pieces of cake to dear friends they just met and who treated conversational distance as being half-wrapped around their new friend. I’ve held a lot of snakes in my life, including some very large ones; as a rule, they never struck me as particularly hostile. I wanted to include some of that.

Many details of the Shinaw are transparently inspired by other sources; their origins in an isolated nebula do resemble the Krikkitmen of Douglas Adams, but I gave the Shinaw the opposite reaction to discovering the rest of the galaxy, which seemed more likely. The psychokinetic hands were inspired by some artists online; I doubt that I could track any of the original sources down, but the idea appealed to me– a snakelike alien that didn’t need sets of arms added on to the body design. I didn’t make their physiology very snake-like, though– it seemed to fit an active, technological society better to have a warm-blooded, omnivorous metabolism, and there was no reason to make them exactly like snakes in every regard.

Beyond that, I decided to make the Shinaw not only friendly, but xenophiliac — fascinated by aliens. I already had come up with a prospector archetype for them, so I decided to expand it, giving them vast mineral wealth to better support their careers as tourists. Most of the other decisions about the Shinaw were fairly arbitrary– drone weapons for them, for example, were more or less a whim. But those are the Shinaw, the nicest snakes you’ll ever meet.

I freely confess that the Prowr are an archetype.

I mean, cat-people, right? A hallmark of science fiction, and one with a long, long history. Vegian cat-people turn up in the Lensman series, but probably had older appearances in the pulps; they’ve appeared in TV shows from Star Trek to Red Dwarf, and are probably one of the most common types of aliens out there. So I decided that I’d have cat-people in my game, too. Why not?

But it’s not enough to say “Cat people” and stop there; it’s not actually a description of a culture, a psychology, a species. And there are many cliches to deal with. For some reason, cat-folk get regarded as in some way primitive or savage a great deal; many versions of them are a violent species of warriors, such as the Kzinti, the Chanur, or, from video games, the Kilrathi or the Mrrshan. I’m not keen on the concept of a “warrior race” for various reasons, and wanted to avoid that cliche. It’s easy to fall into, though, especially if one models one’s cat-folk on real-world large cats– leopards, tigers, and, for that social cat model, lions.

But that’s the most popular version, so it’s the one that I’m not going to go with. Still, I considered social cats in general, ones who have something resembling a social culture and exhibit learning and intelligence, and I wound up at Felis catus rather than some larger breed. I wasn’t going to be tightly bound by this, of course, but I wanted to take that as a starting point. Why not? This required a little bit of study, of course, but that was no problem.

F. catus is actually a social animal, but an individual hunter. They like each other, and form colonies in feral or wild populations. That, and other habits of cats, gave me some ideas for behavior tags for the Prowr– a love of comfort and luxury, for example. Great pride in individual accomplishment. Pride in one’s friends, and a desire to be close to those in one’s inner circle. I couldn’t resist making their weapons lasers, for that matter. That was a good starting point, but I needed more. What to do with it?

From there, I decided that the Prowr needed to be financially powerful– otherwise, where would all this comfort and luxury come from? A human-centered cosmos was an idea I’d rejected, so I decided that the Prowr would serve that role instead. This had a lot of implications that I liked playing with, like Prowr dominating the entertainment industry.

I also wanted to have the Prowr have some cultural variety, where not all Prowr valued the same things as others. That gave me the Freerunners, who wanted to live like their wild-and-free ancestors, and insight into declawed Prowr… who were an invention that came entirely out of game mechanics, and exploring what they would mean.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the Prowr. There are a few in-jokes in their society, but I think that they hold up well as a proud, interesting culture that isn’t like every other kind of cat-people out there. What else could I want, really?

Making alien species and cultures is a special challenge, and it’s very different for a role-playing game than it is for, say, fiction. In general, there is the broad question of how alien a culture or a psychology can or should be used? It’s a famous pitfall of science fiction to imagine aliens as being exactly like humans– humans of the writer’s culture and era, at that– but it’s tempting, as it saves figuring how to write an inhuman character.

But one can take the alternative to an extreme that’s equally bad. One can assign random behavior, or incomprehensible values and patterns of action, to a given species with the justification “because they’re alien,” but it can ring false if that behavior doesn’t make any sense. It’s not enough to have random behavior– a sapient species, however alien, has reasons to behave in whatever way it does; species-wide behavior in a sapient species is going to react in ways that tends to benefit members of that species, even if only in the short term. (Human behavior is rife with long-term destructive behavior with short-term rewards, of course.) The more alien the behavior you wish to emulate, the more thought must go into the whys and wherefores of it.

It’s good to think about the origins of a species and a culture, and how this affects their current society, but, again, this can be taken to an extreme. We find fascinating parallels in the behavior of primates and humans, but we certainly don’t exactly duplicate all of it. Some SF authors, however, reduce the majority of alien behaviors to solely instinctive, animalistic behavior, and this can feel like it’s overdone. One who thinks, for example, that a herbivorous, herd-dwelling species must always be cowardly might be very surprised at the behavior of cape buffalo or elephants. One can consider such things, but evolutionary heritage isn’t a set of shackles; behaviors will surely develop along with intelligence over the course of time.

More challenging than creating nonhuman sapient beings for a setting, though, is creating them for a role-playing game. An author, for example, must only consider the constraints of a story, and has more freedom to construct a scenario that allows them freedom to use a really alien race however they wish, making utterly alien mentality, unusual sizes, strange life-cycles or difficult life-support requirements an interesting story point. For a role-playing game, these requirements become very different. Are players really going to want to play a character whose behavior is too alien to allow normal communication, or that can’t socialize with the rest of the party because of a need to live inside a vast tank maintaining a gas giant atmosphere? Is it fair to allow a player to play a species whose inborn capabilities make them vastly more or less capable than other players? How would a sapient planet be included in a party in the first place? Different game settings and systems have chosen different answers to these questions.

For ease of play, in Stellar, it’s assumed that all species have relatively similar physical capabilities for ease of play. While in some game systems, it would be reasonable to assume that, for example, the larger bodies of Xotoxtl or the robotic ones of Clickclick would have more physical power, in Stellar, most numbers are simply too abstract to be concerned with such things. This is useful, because it allows players to pick any species without needing to be concerned about game balance. Natural features (such as claws or wings) are incorporated into the abstractions of the system, and all the species are designed on the assumption that their life support and food requirements are compatible enough to allow coexistence.

I suppose that I’m a naughty SF creator at times like this; I’m not working out the specific levels of gravity, atmospheric pressure or temperature that each planet that each species occupies has. I’m also, I freely admit, using numbers of inhabitable planets in my setting that are not even remotely realistic. But what of it? This is a game, in the end. I want a fun setting that lets players jump in easily; the rest doesn’t matter.