SWN Rules Explained: How to Design Alien Species in Stars Without Number

Rules Explained

Oct 15

This rules breakdown was released two weeks early for patrons. To skip the wait on every episode, Star Master Log, and rules breakdown, join us at https://www.patreon.com/DarkStarAdventurecast

This episode of SWN Rules Explained looks at how alien species work in Stars Without Number, from the alien design chapter starting on page 202 of the revised rulebook. Brian walks through the book's split between recognizable aliens and the stranger, harder-to-parse kind, then covers the lens tables on page 204 that shape a species' psychology and the social structure table on page 207. From there he gets into building a playable alien character, picking perks from page 209 to construct an origin focus from scratch. It's the final SWN Rules Explained of Season 1, timed with the crew's time-loop escape from Prometheon Station in Episode 33, "An Acceptable Loss."

New SWN Rules Explained episodes drop every other Thursday, breaking down the mechanics behind the adventure.

Buy us a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/darkstaradventurecast

[00:00:03] Brian: Access approved. Salutations, AdventureCast listeners, and thank you for joining me on the final Season 1 episode of Stars Without Number Rules Explained, the special segment where we peer into the void and glean the truth of the universe through the rules and systems of the Stars Without Number tabletop roleplaying game. While the main series puts the action and the story in the spotlight, this series is meant to explore how a tabletop RPG is more than just improvisation, and how the mechanics of a game system can create even more fun challenges and exciting situations. As always, I'm Brian, voice of Captain Thorndraxxus, Assistant Star Master, occasional backup Game Master, and your host on this spike drill into the rulebook of Stars Without Number. The topics for today's episode were inspired by the exciting conclusion of Season 1 of the Dark Star Adventurecast. An Acceptable Loss. The thrum of the gyroscope is reaching critical mass. Is there any way the crew can escape these time loops, or will the void consume them in the entirety of Prometheon Station? You're not going to want to miss what happens, so if you haven't already listened, you should go do that first. Who can look to the stars and imagine exploring them without questioning if we're truly alone out here? Well, not me, because today we're talking about aliens. You almost can't have a sci-fi adventure without at least hinting at them. We'll talk about all the mechanics in Stars Without Number for designing alien species and cultures, plus the rules for adding alien player characters to your game.
The chapter on aliens starts on page 202 of the revised rulebook. The book offers a lot of information and advice on when and where it makes sense to add aliens to your games, and what sorts of aliens might even exist out there in the black. I'm not going to repeat everything here, but it explains how aliens make a great motivator for adventuring groups or factions in your game. Even just by potentially existing, the promise of alien contact, technology, or knowledge can bring even the most stubborn traveler out into space. Whether they work as patrons or antagonists, aliens can be a powerful force in any space narrative, so make sure to consider ahead of time what roles aliens might play in your adventures. The Stars Without Number book separates aliens into two categories, the like, essentially aliens that have some sort of recognizable form like you might see in lots of sci-fi media, humanoid or beast-like creatures, and the others, whose forms or motives might be beyond human comprehension. Don't forget to consider the possibility that the aliens in your sector are something strange or hard to understand. But for the more standard alien creatures, there are a few tables the book offers to help you develop their biology as well as their psychology. Page 203 has a table that offers a few simple archetypes for beast-like alien species. Your classic lizard people, insect people, and so on. For each type, there's also a few words on how to develop their specific traits. These aren't going to be hard rules for specific traits, a plus one here or a minus one there. The book encourages you to think about what makes the most sense. Apply vulnerabilities and advantages as you see appropriate for your species. This is going to be a recurring theme in these rules for aliens. A lot of them are more like prompts or jumping off points than concrete rules with numbers and statistics, so you're going to need to flex those creative muscles to create your aliens. So we have bird people that can fly but have weak bones, or maybe wolf people who draw power from the moons of their planets. But what makes up an alien species is more than just their basic physical traits. The kinds of aliens we're talking about can be primitive or advanced, but they usually have some semblance of a society and a way that they view the world. Page 204 has a great table of lenses through which your aliens might view the things around them. You can roll one or two of these the same way you might roll tags when creating a planet, or just choose what you like. But they serve as great prompts for determining how your aliens think and operate. Maybe they adhere to strict traditions, or maybe they're gluttonous, greedy, or fearful. These lenses don't offer the same quantity of examples as the friends, enemies, and so on that planet tags offer, but if you use these in a similar way, you can start to see how valuable they can be. If you want to know more about planet tags, I talked about them in detail in the Rules Explained episode about sector creation.
Page 207 has a table for your alien's social structure, that is to say, the general sort of society that they run, whether it be tribal, democratic, or otherwise. There isn't too much to digest here, but the important thing to remember is your alien's lenses. As the book states, regardless of your alien's societies, by default you should assume they have the same or similar sorts of people and jobs and lives as we do, just potentially viewed through a different lens. A group will likely view their law enforcers differently through a lens of fear than one of honor. This is also where you would consider the goals of your species' leadership and how they interact with humans. Remember that these relationships can also be one-sided, and if your aliens aren't the more recognizable or comprehensible type, the humans may not even truly understand what the aliens think of them or why they do the things that they do. Put these few simple things all together and you have yourself your own unique group of aliens.
Hopefully through this exercise, you also have a good idea of how your stories might involve aliens and how your players will want to interact with them. But if there are aliens in your sector, then it's inevitable that one of them may one day end up chief of security on the player's ship. And if you find yourself in a situation where you want to give players access to alien player characters, then it's a fairly simple task. First of all, you probably already know how these aliens operate because you've designed their biology and psychology in the previous steps. All you have to do is translate those concepts into mechanical effects. Similar to how a player might create a VI player character, creating an alien PC means replacing your original level 1 focus with the origin focus for the alien species that you want. If you want to know more about creating VI characters, I covered that in the Xenobestiary Rules Explained episode. Every alien PC has that species' origin focus, but unlike robots and VIs, what that focus does mechanically needs to be determined ahead of time by the game master. Page 209 of the revised rulebook has about a dozen or so perks that the game master can use to craft their own alien-specific focus. Generally, the book suggests to choose two perks from the list to make up your focus, or three of them if two of them are fairly minor. The text usually says whether something is minor, but exactly how impactful it will be will really depend on your game and your setting. There's a bit of weight on the game master here to try and balance these bonuses against the other foci that human characters would have. So if something feels overly centralizing, you can also include some kind of small flaw or disadvantage into the focus as well, such as light or sound sensitivity or vulnerability to certain effects, whatever makes sense for the species. This part of the rules is very freeform. There are not a lot of specifics about what it means when you say your bird aliens can fly, or that your ooze people can shapeshift. You'll need to arbitrate those things yourselves, and set clear, reasonable boundaries as a group ahead of time. There will always be unprecedented situations, so don't be afraid to make adjustments in between game sessions if something isn't working. Make sure to give grace to your players and be a fan of their characters, but if an effect or combination of effects are taking the fun or drama out of your games for some reason, it might be worth making some changes. Other perks are a lot more straightforward, but don't be afraid to be creative and think about your aliens' lenses as well as their biology when designing your focus. Having limitations can sometimes make things more interesting than just having more options.
Well, that about does it for the final Stars Without Number Rules Explained episode of Season 1. I hope you learned something interesting or useful in this episode, and if you want to know more, I hope I inspired you to pick up the rulebook yourself and start reading. It's been a lot of fun making these rules segments, and I really appreciate all the support and feedback I've gotten on them. It really means a lot, and I'm happy to hear it if these segments help even a single person. This isn't the end of our signal, though. Coming up next on the AdventureCast, the final Star Master log of Season 1. A special panel interview with Jeff and the full cast. We had some fun and asked each other the hard questions about what it was like recording and producing 33 episodes of Adventure to share with all of you. After that, more adventures are on the horizon, and Season 2 will be here before you know it. So until then, please accept a heartfelt thank you from me and the whole DSA team, and remember, keep following that signal.