New Project (Savage Worlds?) Brainstorming
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Peeking at the wiki really reminds me of Alternity.
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Hah, never heard of that before.
... is the similarity a good thing or a bad thing?
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@NotaNumber said:
Hah, never heard of that before.
... is the similarity a good thing or a bad thing?
Truth be told, I never actually got to play Alternity. But I really dug the books and the backstories and whatnot when I read them back in high school.
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I think maybe my one critique (so far) is that the Imperials don't feel like an alien species. You say they look human and refer to them as a race/species, but it's continually referring to them as "the Imperials", which to me doesn't really elicit the same imagery as the others, who are described as alien, given their own alien species name, etc.
I would suggest givine them a name that they call themselves beyond "the Imperials", etc. Especially if you're allowing them as PCs.
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The Imperials aren't meant to feel terribly alien physically - they are more alien in culture and capability than in looks. Personally I quite like the idea that they refer to themselves in that way but if the consensus is that it doesn't work I can definitely go back and have another look.
The idea is that, despite their arrogance and certainty about their own superiority... they don't actually know a lot about their own origins. They don't know where they came from, how their technology developed or what their history is - they have a myth, but that just raises more questions than it answers. I may make that more explicit in the writeup. (I have some vague ideas for a metaplot around answering some of those questions, but it'd rely on having a decent amount of Imperial players who, you know... would care
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@NotaNumber said:
The Imperials aren't meant to feel terribly alien physically - they are more alien in culture and capability than in looks. Personally I quite like the idea that they refer to themselves in that way but if the consensus is that it doesn't work I can definitely go back and have another look.
The idea is that, despite their arrogance and certainty about their own superiority... they don't actually know a lot about their own origins. They don't know where they came from, how their technology developed or what their history is - they have a myth, but that just raises more questions than it answers. I may make that more explicit in the writeup. (I have some vague ideas for a metaplot around answering some of those questions, but it'd rely on having a decent amount of Imperial players who, you know... would care
)I get it. i still think a name for their species would be ideal, but it's not a big deal.
I can totally see a Spec Ops team of Imperials with complementary psychic powers. That would be neat.
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This is looking awesome. It totally reminds me of Interstellar Wars and some of the older Traveller stuff when they still had lots of different aliens.
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kind of wish this was Trinity so we could teleport across solar systems. AWYISS.
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The thematic stuff looks really promising. I do kind of agree with @Coin about the name of the Imperials. Maybe (like a lot of Native American tribes now) that's just the name the dumb Earthers call them because their actual name doesn't translate/has been linguistically lost to the mists of time.
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Maybe they could have, like, a weird psychic language. Maybe they have a very latent telepathy (those with actual Telepathy have to take the power) but they general communicate telepathically with each other and only use spoken language when dealing with "lesser" races. That would set them apart in my eyes a lot more than "bulging eyes". It would be interesting.
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Yeah, the idea was that their 'real' name has been lost - or more likely deliberately erased. I think I'll take a crack at rewriting the race entry to make that more obvious...
I like the 'native language is partly-psionic' idea too - I'm totally going to steal that. I may incorporate it into the origin of Human psionics as well - Imperials probably didn't feel the need to encode their communications since psionics are so rare anyway, and so humanity developed a souped-up psionics programme to crack them in the war... like the enigma machine, but with human lives and captured aliens!
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@NotaNumber said:
Yeah, the idea was that their 'real' name has been lost - or more likely deliberately erased. I think I'll take a crack at rewriting the race entry to make that more obvious...
I like the 'native language is partly-psionic' idea too - I'm totally going to steal that. I may incorporate it into the origin of Human psionics as well - Imperials probably didn't feel the need to encode their communications since psionics are so rare anyway, and so humanity developed a souped-up psionics programme to crack them in the war... like the enigma machine, but with human lives and captured aliens!
Happy to be of service. I love, love, love world-building, so if you want to chat and bounce ideas, ping me.
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Okay, updated the race page and added a new 'State of the Galaxy' entry.
I may well take you up on that offer, Coin - it is always great to know what people like and what they don't. I'm trying to cast my net as wide as I can here without becoming overly generic.
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I haven't played on an SF game in a very long time. I'd definitely try it out so you've got one more potential player if you do open.
