[TML] Fictional Mileaux [SEC=UNOFFICIAL]

[Richard Aiken]

On 9/5/07, Jerry W Barrington <jursamaj at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I'd rather keep *some* major aliens.  Maybe not many, but a few.  In fact,
> some of the weirdest planets would be where the population has a lot of 2
> or
> more races.


I've decided to keep the Vargr and Aslan.  The Vargr remain essentially
unchanged, except with the background adjustment that the Ancients mixed
canine and human DNA (rather than just tinkering with canine DNA).  For the
Aslan, I'm taking John Snead's suggestion of making them an artificial race
which Rule of Man scientists created as heavy infantry that then rebelled.

Ever read S. Andrew Swann's stories starring the tiger/human Nohar
Rahjastan? <not sure of the spelling of 'Rahjastan'>  That's what I'm using
for the background of my Aslan.  In Swann's stories, there were initially a
whole bunch of different models - including some rabbit/humans (because
these naturally breed/matured very quickly) - but after they left earth the
less stable genomes died out until only a handful of models remained by the
time of stories set a century or two later.  This fits in well with my
shortened Imperial timeline (everything - except the length of wars -
divided by five).

Not that the Solomani scientists involved really learned anything, IMTU.
After the Aslan proved "unreliable" they decided it was because there was
too much of the human genome in them.  So they next uplifted some of the
smarter animals, dreaming of gorillas carrying M2HB MGs into battle as
personal weapons.  Alas, this didn't work either.  For the same reasons,
which had less to do with genes and more to do with intelligence.  Make
something intelligent, train it to kill . . . then tell it it's an
expendable slave soldier.  And you're surprised if it successfully rebels?

The rest of the aliens IMTU are going to be variant human races produced -
on purpose or by accident - by the Ancients.  That is, there will be humans
with the psychology - and some of the physiology - of the remaining canon
major aliens.  For instance, my Hivers are communally-living hermaphrodite
humans who use artificial wombs instead of barbaric pregnancies, while my
Droyne will be humans whose weird hormonal systems only allow individuals to
fully mature in response to stimuli received during the coyn ceremony.

At least, as it now stands.  But I recently re-read parts of First In, while
looking for ways to further detail societies in my campaign area.  In doing
so, I saw afresh the sidebars about the Aion.  Now I'm think that if I run
the PCs through an MTU version of Leviathan, I'll let them be part of
discovering the Aion (over the course of several game years).

-- 
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident."  Robert A. Heinlein