This is RPG-ology #87: The Alien, for February 2025.
Our thanks to Regis Pannier and the team at the Places to Go, People to Be French edition for locating a copy of this and a number of other lost Game Ideas Unlimited articles. This was originally Game Ideas Unlimited: The Alien, and is reposted here with minor editing [bracketed].
I have had this idea rattling around in my mind, sitting simmering on the back burner of the brain, probably since before this series began; and as next week is the last column of the year (that is, it will be the fifty-second [weekly Game Ideas Unlimited] column), it seems appropriate that I squeeze this thought into this year before it passes. But it’s not an easy idea to convey, so bear with me.
As Multiverser was developing from a raw set of ideas to a real role playing game, worlds were being created to run with it. Dreams were spun of world books being published and snatched up by eager fans as fast as we could produce them; of renting office space in which we would spend our days playtesting new game worlds; of relaxing on our substantial incomes. Obviously we knew nothing of the realities of the small game company–but our imaginations were running wild, and we were creating many game worlds.
One of those worlds was Bah Ke’gehn. It indeed has been published, in Multiverser: The Second Book of Worlds. My idea was to present a world which to all appearances was hell, but which was actually as far from being hell as it was from being earth. The player whose character arrived here would look out over an unending landscape of flame, dotted by groups of giant worm-like creatures writhing in the fires, tormented by devil-like torturers who were periodically visited by flying demon-like creatures who appeared and vanished in the black sky above. The verser’s precious technology (nearly all versers rely heavily on technology–we start knowing quite a bit of it, and so we tend to trust it) malfunctions more than it works, and if he does meet other humans, they will probably assert what he already suspects. He has come to the place of eternal torment.
Yet that is not the reality of Bah Ke’gehn; it is the appearance. It is actually a relatively peaceful world of loving, mutually supportive creatures who are as different from humans as anything you could imagine, and yet somehow familiar. E. R. Jones, in reading the earliest drafts, declared them the most alien creatures he had ever encountered. That causes me to consider how it is that I succeeded in creating something so alien, and yet making it possible for referees to realistically play them in the game. To see how it was done, I’m going to recreate them for you here. These are the Bah of Bah Ke’gehn.
The first thing I did was eliminate every form of reproductive process with which I was familiar, and replace them with something entirely magical. The flame that covers the world is in effect that world’s grass; it springs, non-corporeal, from the rock. It is alive. It is the foundation of all life in several ways. The worms which you see eat it; yet more than that, the worms that you see spring from it. In patches, the grass grows tall and intricate into bushes–the worms seem instinctively to know where this will happen, and graze around it–and the bushes develop flaming structures, until suddenly they morph from flame to form, becoming worms themselves. The worms grow and learn, and then like caterpillars some of them again morph to become the bipedal creatures which herd and tend them. The bipedal creatures in turn develop wings–not all of them, but many–to become the smaller flying creatures; and the chain of growth progresses beyond that through several stages of scholars, leaders, priests. Every creature in this world sprang from the grass, and went through each stage along the way. Their are no family relationships, for they have no families–they are individually created.
I then examined their feeding cycle. Thus far I had a world in which everything that was alive was ultimately the same creature in different forms. But the grass was not like the creatures; it was more like the stuff from which creatures were made. Thus it made sense for the worms to consume the grass–not to devour it leaving bare spots on the ground, but to absorb the energy from it, shifting it to a cooler color of flame and moving on to the warm spots. Thus the worms had food. The worms then became the key to the cycle. They grew fur all over their bodies; the herders scraped the fur from their bodies and ate it. It also was carried to feed all those other Bah unseen. There was a higher form also, called a feeder, which consumed large quantities of fur and processed it, returning a tofu-like high-nutrition substance; but the fur was necessary. Thus all life was dependent on the worms, and all of the great and intelligent creatures had as a main priority the protection of the weak and barely sentient infants.
I had also created a world in which technology did not work but magic flourished; and I realized that this meant I had a world with precious few material things–and particularly since there were no other life forms which could be treasured as things. If a Bah scholar needed a book, he conjured it; since anyone could conjure a book who would ever need it, the book had no value but for the information it contained–and even that was something any scholar could acquire by similar magic. There was no money, no barter, no real economy. The food was collected and distributed because everyone needed to eat; those who had grown into their jobs did them because this was what they did. Those who had morphed to become scholars had an insatiable appetite to learn and to teach; those who had morphed to be priests desired to seek the knowledge of their creator; those who had morphed to be leaders accepted that they had been chosen to solve the problems of others and to enlist the aid of others in doing so. You couldn’t pay these people to do anything, because they lacked the concept of owning anything. They lived in a mutually supportive community, and understood nothing else.
By changing a few aspects about who these creatures were and how their world was constituted, I was able to devise an alien race that truly seems alien to those who encounter them; yet if you understand who they are and where they live, you discover that you can be them, play them adequately in the game. You realize why they fear technology and accept magic, why they think humans are evil demons, why their heaven is down and their hell is up–everything flows logically from a few basic assumptions.
And that approach of altering the basic realities which these creatures have known reliably gave creatures who seemed and who were totally alien, and yet acted in ways we could understand once we knew their background. That is the approach I recommend to any effort at devising the alien. Don’t start with pointed ears or strange hair color. Begin by altering the world as they know it, and follow that through to who they have become from that.
I should mention in passing that their world is not an entirely idyllic paradise. Periodically one of the morphs mutates; a small handful reject their world and seek another way to survive. It has problems and wonderful adventure seeds even after you realize that it’s not where you thought. But even in the aberrations the thread of consistency of the alien is present, because it was built in from the foundation and not pasted on the surface.
[Next week, something different.]
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Next article: Celebrations.