Sentient Species:

--Humans: Humans come from a planet called "Earth," or rather from a solar system that they call that of "Sol." They came on a very large spaceship they call a "colony ship," in "suspended animation." Humans are in a distant orbit near their new home system's fourth planet.

--The Viddan: The fifth planet has a sentient species which call themselves the Viddan, which in their language means "the drummers." They live/ride upon large, slow-moving, floating gasbag jellyfish creatures that come in many sizes, but which average the size of a human sports stadium, sending messages/music to other settlements by drumming on the tight gasbags of the creatures upon which they live. Sometimes there are updrafts strong enough to take gasbags and their Viddan riders above the cloudtops, where they can see the stars. Since prehistoric times they have told stories of ancient heroes who flew so high they reached the sky, to talk to the stars and sun. Other stories tell of demons lurking in the depths, eager to devour anyone who falls.

--The Akitila are a six-limbed race of centaur-sauropods from the second planet, Akit.  They walk on four of the limbs and have an upper thorax with two more limbs that include four-thumb hands.  They are about 3-5 feet tall, but if they rise up on the rear limbs they are 5-8 feet and can reach another 2.

They are cold-blooded and evolved in the equatorial regions.  They become sluggish at temperatures below 90 and dormant below 60, so any trips to the polar regions are always in heated vehicles.  Their skin is covered with soft scales that have bright patterns in green, yellow, orange, red, infrared and ultrared.

They adhere to a philosophy of generosity and acceptance.

Akitila technology surpasses those of humans. They invented a quantum-tunnel drive two and a half centuries ago.  Although dangerous to use within a stellar system because of the level of stray hydrogen atoms, it allows for interstellar travel at super-light speed by "skipping" large stretches of space.  Within stellar systems they use a nuclear-fusion-based drive that creates a gravity field that pulls there where they wish to go. Inside the "gravity fold," all is weightless.


--The F(wheee)lens, also called "The Whistlers," are like the Akitila, but 20% larger, and with fine feathers all over.

F(wheee)lens are much more concerned with art and beauty than the Akitila, with a rich tradition in music, theater, literary, visual, and olfactory/gustatory arts.  They gladly adopt the greater technology of the Akitila, and most spaceships and orbiting platforms include cooler areas to accommodate the F(wheee)lens' comfort.


The Uglolla-- "the frog-women" of the moon Talfen, Uglolla live in the forests of Talfen at the highest altitudes. They can glide, but are incapable of true flight. They can speak, though their vocabulary is not large. They have learned to make tools of stone and wood. Mates are chosen based on who can defend their tree the best, and therefore who can claim the biggest trees. Females are larger and stronger, and engage in this combat. The Uglolla, culturally, don't like the ground. The dirt of the ground is extremely unclean and taboo. (Ground dirt. Tree dirt, or any other kind of dirt, is fine.) The Uglolla are insectivores. There's lots to eat-- they seldom go hungry.



--The Ylets: In the narrow band around the innermost first planet of the system live a small but extremely hardy group of sentient beings who call themselves the Ylets (meaning The Hungry). Ylets stand about 1.5 feet at the shoulder, and a little over 3 feet on their hind legs. Ylets are excellent at tunneling and burrowing, and can even do it through some strata of porous rock, given time. They have a wide network of tunnels, with clever shafts that funnel bearable amounts of heat from the planet's bright and hot side so that the tunnels are comfortable by Ylet standards (although the Ylet can withstand a very great range of temperatures. Ylets survive on water, bacteria, and certain single-celled animals and slime molds (rare, but Ylets don't need much to survive).


--The Angok: known to the Uglolla as the Bald Priests, but to themselves as The Caretakers, the Uglolla live on (and under) the forest floor of the moon Talfen. They are scavengers/carrion-eaters who trade with the Uglolla. They are a very spiritual and religious culture...




CLASSES:

--Deep Hunters: Among the Viddan, Deep Hunters are those rare individuals who glide deep to explore the hazy depths and the dangers found there. Many wear cunningly-crafted hide armor and carry weapons made of monster teeth... Deep Hunters are basically the Rangers of the Viddan, killing monsters that other Viddan barely know exist save as scary stories to tell to children. It's dangerous to go so deep, and often a Deep Hunter won't return. As a result the Deep Hunters are respected, but also have a reputation for boldness and eccentricity. It's a lifestyle that appeals only to some, but it's considered necessary work.



--Rusters, a.k.a. Iron Miners (Possibly an NPC class, or a pre-PC class, that is, one exists in a PC's background):

Being a ruster means spending typically an Akit year (Solians would consider it to be 5 months worth of time) in a broken down ship gathering iron from the asteroid belt to sell to the huge ship-building platforms that orbit Akit.  It is one of the most deadly professions, akin socially to the Earth profession of long-line fishing in Alaskan waters.  Those who sign up for a second voyage are either semi-suicidal or desperate to stay away from the attention of the law or other dangerous enemies.

While the activity does take some strength, occasionally, it is one that Akitilans who have lost the use of their hind limbs can perform quite well, especially amputees.  Since all the work is done in weightlessness, the lack of hind limbs can be an asset rather than a liability.

The primary skills that a ruster acquires are:
1. Navigation
2. Vacuum suit
3. Zero-G
4. Mechanical, with a specialty in jerry-rigging equipment

During their off time, rusters are known for their drinking capacities.  An Akitilan, to explain a bad hangover, will joke that he "tried to out-drink a ruster."




-Ylet Mystic

A Ylet who has been frozen solid and then recovered and revived sometimes (very rarely) will undergo a transformation, giving it bizarre, psychic powers.  Curiously, this has never happened to a Ylet who intentionally exposed itself in order to try to gain the powers, though many have tried.  Possibly it is just that those who are power-hungry enough to try were never going to gain the powers, because the Ylet Mystics are uniformly kind, patient souls who treat all others as though they were precious children.

These powers include:
* Ability to "hear" thoughts sent to them intentionally by anyone, Ylet or extra-planetary.  This seems to have no distance restriction.  Tales are told of a Ylet mystic who was taken by an Akitila ship all the way back to Akit but was still able to communicate with other mystics still on the planet.
* Ability to read surface thoughts and emotions of other Ylet, willing or otherwise
* Ability to understand the speech of other intelligent creatures (this ability does not work if the speech the Mystic hears is artificial, such as computer-generated or a recording.)

There are rumors that experienced Ylet Mystics are even able to influence the thoughts and emotions of others.

It is not, however, the case that the Mystics are always in agreement. They like to debate, sometimes for its own sake, and the arts of disputation and rhetoric have been very well-developed among the Ylet Mystics.




New Character Class: The Envoys
The Envoys are a super-secret black ops class of Akitilans, (secretly) empowered to intervene in the event of alien contact--- or any other potentially problematic encounter with intelligent or dangerous alien life-forms.

All Envoys are as well-trained as possible in all manner of combat, xenopsychology, diplomacy, advanced sciences, and xenobiology.

All Envoys have clearance for anything as far as Akitilan chain-of-command goes.

Envoys' #1 priority is keeping anything alien from getting out of hand.

Envoys' #2 priority is maintaining the secrecy of their own existence, especially from the Whistlers.

While Akitilan officials dither, the Envoys are (secretly) already on the case regarding the new alien ship. (Most Akitilans don't even know about the vinesnakes yet. When the Envoys heard what happened to that one poor guy, they leapt into action to find out more about this dangerous discovery (barely voting down a decision to just burn all plant life off the planet)).

Whatever the "official" officials decide, the Envoys are the ones who will make the actual decision...

...And the decision is to prepare to blast the alien ship with everything they've got at the first sign of nice and polite diplomatic channels breaking down.

However, the Envoy playbook says we (fortunately) haven't nearly reached that point yet. We're not about to potentially waste billions upon billions of yoi (Akit currency) attacking something that might not need to be attacked-- let alone fail and make a new enemy that we don't want.


Envoys:
--Get a +1 bonus to combat, to stealth, and to figuring out anything to do with alien life forms.
--Get a -1 bonus to keeping their cool in front of alien witnesses (-2 if Whistlers are around). If they DO lose their cool, they lose their +1 bonus to the other stuff, and get an ongoing -1 to all rolls (-2 if Whistlers are present) until they are no longer in front of alien witnesses.

Still, as long as they think there's still a chance no one will find out about what they're up to, they can often manage to keep it together...





INDIVIDUALS:

--A Viddan named High-Flyer-Moon-Listener saw a strange object in the sky.  It traveled horizon to horizon east to west, moving faster even than the meteor he'd once seen.  Soon, he saw it again, traveling east to west, very quickly.

Listener drummed out "sky object, not-sun, not-star, not-moon, not-meteor, not-comet. A conundrum."  Nearly all of the Viddans greeted this announcement with apathy. They made the brief humor-sound.  One drummed, "High-Flyer-Moon-Listener consumes air with too little ammonia.  He imagination-sees."


Human individuals:

--Captain Kyrylo Shaposhnikov:  Captain of the Colony-class ship Renaissance Four

--Minister Fiona Lissomig, the lead psychologist for the ship

--Yung Ngo, the retired general who acts as civilian military advisor


AKIT Individuals:

--Akit Science Officer Swanilli at outpost Laalk-18, part of Exploration Team 4 (exploring the 4th planet...)  Officer Swanilli is about to be a part of First Contact with Humans...

Officer Swanilli is clearly unsettled by the arrival of the humans, to say the least. He orders the broadcasting of standard hails to continue, but otherwise he metaphorically battens down the hatches.

UPDATE: The Akit scientific world quickly gets excited. The arrival of the as-yet-unknown humans raises suspicions that perhaps the new ship is really some sort of plot of the Whistlers to grab power...



--Lieutenant Crispin, Akit Envoy

Crispin is currently pondering whether to kill Swanilli, go with him, or to just trust that the Organization already has other agents in play...





NON-SENTIENT LIFEFORMS:


--Plant/Creature: Vinesnake

Vinesnakes are mobile vines which catch and strangle prey, and then root in the corpses and grow more. New vinesnake tendrils sprout roughly two weeks later. Vinesnakes can grow to be about nine feet long-- this seems to be the maximum.

Fortunately for the Akit, vinesnakes find the same temperatures that the Akit prefer to be too hot and drying, so they don't try to enter Akit domes, and usually avoid attacking Akit in their insulated suits.

Akit domes containing local biological specimens are treated with chemicals all around that are also poisonous to plantlife, including vinesnakes.

Vinesnakes don't seem to be at all sentient-- no more than ordinary snakes, if even that smart.

UPDATE: Soon the Akit discovered to their horror that vinesnakes were much worse than they thought. There was (they thought at first) a second, look-alike species, that was slightly smarter-- smart enough to not be discouraged by the heat of their suits-- and once it started rooting, it started assimilating Akit DNA.

Further investigating (and a lot of careful killing later) revealed that there were NOT two species, but that the females are much worse than the males. (Even plants come in male and female sometimes, after all-- Ginkgo, kiwi, cannabis, and willow all have individuals that make only pollen or only seeds...)




--The seventh planet is home to electric amoebas, which grow to the size of a large Earthly housecat and live purely off of electricity-- for the seventh planet's rocks and atmosphere are all very highly-charged. Magnetic fields do very strange things, and lightning-storms are common. Electric amoebas aren't very smart, but they do have dim minds of their own-- smart as the average sea slug, say, or perhaps not quite that smart. Electric amoebas live a very long time-- millennia. Fortunately, they reproduce very seldom as well.




PLANETS:

--The innermost and therefor first planet of the system is a barren rock roughly the size of Mars, pocked with craters and flat lava plains. The sun-facing side is scorchingly hot, blasted by radiation, intense sunlight, and solar wind. The planet is tidally locked and the dark side is, ironically, one of the coldest places in the system because it has not experienced sunlight in billions of years. Plenty of water ice exists in craters on the dark side, making mining outposts a possibility for the future. In the norther hemisphere, on the boundary between the light and dark sides of the planet, is an enormous impact basin. This is the scar left by an impact with a small planetoid about a billion years ago. It is quite deep, and the bottom of the basin contain the only volcanoes still active on the planet. The base of the impact crater is the center of the Ylet civilization. It is sheltered to a degree from direct sunlight while remaining fairly warm. The minerals, particularly phosphorus and sulphur, brought to the surface by the volcanoes support a significantly more extensive biosphere of bacteria and molds and these, in turn, allow a greater population density of Ylets.




--There is an asteroid belt between the first and second planets very dusty... It contains only a handful of objects bigger than a few dozen kilometers in diameter, but these are rich in iron and heavy metals. The asteroid belt could, in the long run, be an excellent place to mine for resources. The proximity of the belt causes frequent and quite dramatic meteor showers on Akit and Talfen, but it's quite rare for anything to actually strike the ground.


--The second planet, Akit, has artificial light, radio signals, and maybe artificial satellites. The second planet, a fairly dry world, is very hot -- barely cool enough to be in the Goldilocks Zone.  Temperatures range from 90s to 130s at the equator and 20s to 80s at the poles (35 to 58 and -8 to 30 in Celsius), so there is occasionally snow at the poles but it rarely lasts more than a few days and never really accumulates.  Because of very little axial tilt, the temperatures are fairly stable, and the Coriolis Effect causes a distinct and consistent drop in temperature around 50 and -50 latitude.  There are three very distinct biomes (equatorial and the two polar regions) with relatively little overlap. The planet does not have oceans, but many significant, very salty seas.    (That is, the continents all connect to each other.)


Akit's largest moon is called Talfen. It's got a slightly sparser atmosphere, and is too cold for Akitila (average temperature 78 degrees) and warm for Whistlers.

It has many large, dark forests with all kinds of wildlife...





--The third planet is smaller in mass compared to Earth-- gravity is half of that of Earth. It's also got a lot less land-- it's more than 90 percent covered with ocean. Temperatures average around 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

What land there is is almost all grassland plains-- although wildfires that scorch the plains seem common. (On the other hand, the grass grows back very quickly.)

There is intelligent life here...




--The fourth planet is the closest in mass to Earth, and with a similar water/land ratio.  The polar ice caps were considerably larger than those that Earth had, even larger than Earth had historically, but the equatorial lands clearly had liquid water. The planet has life similar to Earth's-- at least, the bulk of the land has chlorophyll-based life, and the oxygen/carbon-dioxide ratio implies fauna that breathe the oxygen output of the flora.

There are some perfectly circular domes in a lush forest of this planet. They range from 20 meters to 65 meters in diameter.  The infrared images show them to be uncomfortably hot (for humans).  They are well-insulated-- they are probably 45-50 degrees Celsius inside-- survivable but extremely hot for humans.

The domes are Akit buildings. Suited Akit seem to be carrying around large scientific equipment of some sort.

About 50km away is a large clearing in the forest. At its center is another set of three domes, but infrared shows these to be the same temperature as the surroundings. As the science team looks more closely, it becomes obvious that the clearing is due to all the vegetation having died.



--The fifth planet of the system is a large gas giant, slightly less massive than Jupiter back home, with a numerous family of moons and a ring made of boulders and chunks of water ice. The atmosphere is a pleasant blue-green and the northern hemisphere features a huge, persistent storm. Occasional aurorae can be seen at both poles, caused by the interactions of the planet's magnetic field with the stellar wind of the system's star.

--The seventh planet is a large iron-core planet covered in frozen carbon dioxide, methane, and water.
This message was last edited by the GM at 15:48, Thu 05 Jan 2023.