Racial Theory

There are two main schools of thought on the matter of alien races. The first is that the humanoid form and earth-like biology are optimal, and that any evolutionary path is going to follow a similar trend as we’ve seen on earth. Food will be compatible, psychologies similar (or at least recognizable), and forms familiar. Most science fiction falls into this category, for convenience.

The second school of thought is that our form, our thoughts and our biologies are one of a myriad of possibilities. If two alien races met, they would have no common frame of reference. They would have no idea where to look at the other creature, as neither would have any recognizable face. They would have no way of communicating with each other as they would have no recognizable language (or even the concept of language). They would not be able to eat each other’s food, because they would not have similar biologies (if they even had biologies, as we know them). They would probably require a lot of examination to even determine that the thing in front of them were intelligent, assuming that they could determine that the thing in front of them was even life.

I am firmly in the second camp.

In all fairness, this is more of a spectrum of thought, with myself on one end with many other like thinkers and a group of others at the far extreme. Meanwhile, the majority of people fall somewhere in between.

Everyone would like to think that their view of the universe is the way it really is, but this is not the forum for that debate. The problem is that if this humble author’s view is the hard science approach, then how do you approach writing a science fiction universe?

You see, it’s all fine and dandy to think you’re on the scientific high ground and produce truly alien races, but the more alien a race is, the more unplayable they are. It’s not acceptable to put a race in the game, then give them a psychology that requires a lunatic or a cutting edge psychological theorist to play.

This leaves us with three possibilities.

No aliens at all. Humanity is alone in the universe, or has yet to discover any other beings.

Enemy aliens. Place one race of aliens in the games, then pit them against humanity. Allow only the GM to run them. This does require the GM to take the burden of getting inside their alien thoughts.

Create an artifice. If playable aliens are contrived, create a contrivance. Create some artificial mechanism which forced all the races to be similar enough to play.

Players seem to gravitate to games play other races. This is not a solid rule, as Legend of the Five Rings has proven, but give players various races and they’ll stretch themselves into the role. I did not want to deprive the players of Spacemaster that experience.

Thus the Architects were born.

Once you’ve invented a contrivance to make all races human-like, you can either make humans the cause of it all (via genetic engineering) or you can make humans themselves a blatantly artificial race.

The Architects were created as the fathers of all races. They created an ecosphere of animals, then chose seven to raise to sapience, on different worlds across the universe.

And that brings us to the Spacemaster universe.

This page was last updated on 01/14/02.