10 Sapient Aliens

Dan over at Throne of Salt posted 10 sapient aliens for Mothership. I figured, I'd join the fun. Some of these I have actually used in roleplaying, others are brand new.

Note that in my games, the word "alien" is derogatory when talking about a sentient being. Aliens are animals. People are Xenos.


1) The entire land mass of the planet is covered by a network of cactus-like growths. They are evenly spaced about 300 meters apart. Only about 10 percent of one of the continents is barren. Scans indicate some underground structures: High-end optical telescopes and launch silos. There are a handful of satellites in orbit, all looking outwards with powerful optics.

• The growths are about man-high, immobile bulbous and covered in pitch-black bulbs. These are their eyes. They think slow but extremely complex thoughts completely in chemical compounts. An interconnected root system allows them to talk to one another.
• They have driven nearly all other land-based life forms to extinction. Microbes remain. Their language/thought process allows them to assemble complex structures underground, forming the base of their technology.
• Fifty standard years ago, an asteroid hit one of the continents, killing a large number of the creatures. Their recent growth spurt in technology to detect and intercept threats from space is a reaction to that.
• They propagate by growing out roots and forming a child-bud. This can involve several neighbouring parents, if they can agree on it.
• There is the potential for "hand-crafted" items and technology that would normally require nanotech and/or 3d-printing here.

2) Scientists were excited when they first realized that in the corona of a lot of stars there are self-sustaining and (very rarely) self-replicating structures, bursts of fire between 200 and 1000 kilometers long. Even more excited they were when they realized that these beings processed information.

• The Sri, as they would be known, live on and slightly above the surface of stars, often being mistaken for minor solare eruptions. They think slowly but are highly intelligent.
• It is unknown how they get from one star to another. They do, as their spread and implied knowledge of the universe suggests. No enormous spaceships full of fusion fire have yet been encountered though.
• Their frame of reference, both in time, space and experiences, is so radically different that communication with them is nearly impossible.
• They are not a competitor for any resources as they live where no one else can go.
• If provoked, they can burn things in their home system with bursts of plasma.

3) The spreading ecosystem of the Heptapedes was obviously engineered to infect many rocky planets over time and change as little as possible. By whom and to what end remains unknown.

• Spores get caught in the gravity well of a planet and drift down. They hatch into four distinct life forms that overrun the local eco system, if one is present.
• "Trees" build a canopy of highly efficient photosynthesis and sprout bulbs on their bottom sides that concentrate certain minerals and raw chemical energy.
• "Workers" gather said bulbs. These seven-limbed, crustacean/insect like creatures the size of a pony with their bladed front legs are what gives the species the name.
• "The Slime" grows in tunnels dug by the workers. It digests not only the bulbs but also any organic material that the workers bring to it, effectively recycling any local lifeforms.
• "The Queen" fills a tunnel network with her huge and branching body. She gets fed directly by the slime and births new workers.
• Eventually, the queen will grow a silo that starts launching more spores at escape velocity into space. She will target trajectories that fling the spores to the stars, betraying more knowledge of astrodynamics and observations of celestial bodies than one might think.

4) Connecting computers to a subspace medium capable of computing seemed like a good idea at first. Free RAM and processing power! Then the natives appeared.

• These beings exist outside of our material universe but in a substrate that is still, at least theoretically, bound by the laws of time and causality.
• They are highly complex and very individualistic pieces of self-replicating and thought processing information. Sentient software, some of which may have evolved naturally in their habitat, others may be the offspring of intrusions from our or other universes.
• Having evolved in a digital environment, they are highly predatorial when it comes to ressources – and formidable at hacking and overcoming puny and limited creatures such as AI built in our world.
• They do not appear to be grouped into something akin to a civilization. Highly individualistic and capable of altering themselves, they rarely make new copies of themselves – doing so would only create new competitors.
• Theoretically they could be downloaded, stored and run in a powerful enough computer system in our world. This is likely even more dangerous than true AI is already.

5) Moss patches on this lush planet cover most of the land surface. Their roots form webs that process information. And that information is mostly about war.

• Each moss patch can size anywhere between single bushel and a hundred square kilometers. All of them are constantly at war with their direct neighbours. There can be no peace.
• The mosses do not only try to grow over one another, but also employ insect- and wormlike animals that live amongst them as weapons, directing them to attack their enemies.
• They also form simple chemical tools to kill patches of other mosses.
• The borders of the moss patches are a constant battlefield, growths wrestling, worms digging, insects clipping away at each other and their enemy plantlife.
• Theoretically you could transplant a patch of moss to an environment without enemies and then try talking to it with electric or chemical impulses.

6) Any world with an ocean with saline H2O and a temperature between -50 and 80 Degrees celsius features at least traces of a colony of these shrimps.

• They are about dog-sized crustacean-like beings, looking like twelve-legged deep-sea-shrimp. Their front legs dangling below their lamella-armored body have a three-fingered pincer for manipulation and their two eyes see a broad spectrum of polarized light.
• Their underwater-industry is impressive. Even more impressive are spaceships filled with water and thus very heavy. Colony-vessels are usually mostly staffed by a tiny crew and feature a huge storage of dried eggs that can hatch even after millenia.
• Despite being crustaceans, they are surprisingly similar to us when it comes to the way they think. Their throbbing near-infrasonic language is created by vibrating armor segments and can be heard for many miles in the water – and easily translated by machines.
• They have come to be a close ally to humanity. They take the oceans, we take the land.

7) At the edge of the galaxy, there is a sun with a huge cloud of pitch black spheres around it. At first it was thought to be the failed Dyson sphere of a long gone civilization. Exploration yielded a different picture.

• The spheres are self-replicating, when they get ressources to do so. As they have consumed all planets and asteroids in their system, they are mostly dormant now. For a spaceship they pose little threat as they are not mobile enough to catch a target capable of changing its trajectory.
• The swarm is the sole remnant of a Von Neumann machine that arrived in this star system hundreds of millions of years ago. From another galaxy.
• Sadly, whatever was the message or exploration packet that the machine may have housed at one point must have been damaged during transit. Now it's just a machine copying itself with no extra information about its builders or any way to explore or upgrade itself.

8) These asteroids are alive! At least partially...

• The creatures consist of a mixture of fungi, symbiont bacteria, technology, minerals, ice and rock.
• Each individual is in its core a small biosphere of fungi and bacteria inside pockets of liquid water in an asteroid. They think as a communal organism and they are very smart.
• Once they have the mental ressources, they grow technology towards the surface. They form thrusters, solar panels, magnetic dust catchers, sensors, communication systems and even weaponry.
• They grow slowly and can become very old, some individuals surviving for many million standard years.
• Their communities ring stars and sometimes band together to build STL-starships that are capable of crossing the void to neighbouring suns – in many milennia.
• You can talk to them and you can trade with them. They like minerals and interesting bacteria that they can house in gardens in their bodies. They offer fuel, energy, and sometimes technological modules.

9) A desert planet, hot, mostly dry, but with a breathable atmosphere and a working biosphere. Here the hunter-philosophers live.

• The resemble six-legged comodo dragons. They live in small tribes. The adults hunt, the juveniles take care of the younger offspring. They have a highly intelligent brain and two-thumbed elongated forelimbs.
• Their high intelligence is counteracted by the lack of many ressources on their homeworld. Their technology base is stone age. Yet there is the conclave.
• Every year (which takes round eight standard years), the tribes send their smartest and brightest thinker to a conclave rock. The hosting tribe living closest to that rock will feed the visitors for many days as they discuss, theorize and think.
• Drawing in the sand and on rocks, they figure out scientific things. The size of their world. The movements of planets and stars. General relativity. Evolution. Philosophy.
• Every six (of their) years, there is a conclave of conclaves. It is where they gather their knowledge for it to spread out to the rest of their culture.
• Give them enough metal and they will invent space fare within two generations.

10) Deep below the ice of an ocean world there is a budding culture of smallish sea-urchin-like creatures. No bigger than an apple, ringed by eyes beneath their spikes with bioluminescent tips.

• They use mandalas they trample into the sand in order to attract mates. The more complex, the better – this is what favored the development of intelligence in their species. They make fractals and visual representations of math formulae.
• They communicate by flashing their spikes in light patterns. Over time, their languages have become complex enough to ponder highly advanced topics.
• Their lack of manipulative limbs is what has thus far prevented them from anything resembling an industrial culture.