How would you write Thermians into a campaign?
Maybe they intercepted a television signal from a universe where your PC's are actor's on a TV show?
Or maybe they have found an offworld comic that bears an eerie resemblance.
Low-hanging fruit, but how would you do it?
Is it only possible (or at least compelling) from the TV Show angle?
>Is it only possible (or at least compelling) from the TV Show angle?
I think it's kind of essential to who and what they are supposed to be. Though that being said you could probably get a kick out of the Thermians showing up over some stereotypical D&D-like world and treating it like an episode of TOS Star Trek, but with the Thermians being...well, themselves.
It's set in space, so it would make too much thematic sense to be a gag.
Maybe i'm a moron, but I just really find their mannerisms and innocence endearing.
I really want my space crew to be their "only hope" or something. I am running an irl six-player campaign with a big table and TaleSpire and stuff I never thought I could have rigged up for my friends. So I really want it to feel BIG you know? I think i'm just getting neurotic and overexcited.
Introduce them in gross alien form in one adventure, it can't speak and it's in a big hurry to escape but does clever non-verbal things to tell the PCs that it is harmless and that they should escape.
Then you try to copy the meet-and-greet scene from the beginning of the movie, where all these humanoid weirdoes just show up and start kissing your ass and you don't know why, and you don't even get a clue as to what they are until the adventure is over.
If it were me I'd have an adventure local with a hologrammed thermian and a non-hologrammed thermian running around in differnet parts of it, and neither would have a chance to fully stop and explain themselves, so the PCs would have time to connect the dots on their own and figure out that they're the same species.
Omg! That's awesome!
Thank you so much dude!
Is that the guy from Just Shoot Me?
Yeah! It has a skinny Dwight in it as well.
Ask /stg/, they'd like it.
The really great thing about this movie was the idea that these aliens don't play pretend. They don't have fiction. So if they knew our stories were false they would conclude that we were evil or insane, but they don't know that yet, and that can end up giving us leverage when they encounter some random piece of fiction and they assume it's something we actually did. That's damn funny, and I'd want to write a totally different story around the same basic premise. Who knows, maybe they're perspective is the normal alien perspective, maybe we're The Story People.
>The Story People.
By which I mean the Lying for Pleasure Even When it Doesn't Trick Anyone People.
>the Lying for Pleasure Even When it Doesn't Trick Anyone People
This is a terrific way to view humans from Thermian perspective.
Big brain shit anon, I like that.
Maybe if I give you a rundown of the crew it would help:
>Andy Warhol level pretentious art-engineer who uses sound instead of math
>A Groucho Marx, cigar smoking, firm-handshake galactic businessman that bribes his way out of things
>An escapee from a human zoo with telekinetic abilities
>A famous traffic reporter that has been replaced by an automated topical monologue/sound-effects droid
>An ace pilot that has had their body taken over by a brain parasite that is a famous Tom Cruise equivalent actor for his people.
Was thinking maybe that last A-list actor could be a good fulcrum point?
>Who knows, maybe they're perspective is the normal alien perspective, maybe we're The Story People.
In the scifi setting I dreamt up for a book I never wrote and later repurposed for a game about government agents in space, every alien race does some things not found in any other evolutionary path. The Y'tug breed asexually via eggs that live in their intestines and hatch when they die, eating their 'mother' from within as their first meal. Etc.
The two defining features of humans are these: The first is that humans, and other life on Earth, sleeps on a daily cycle. No one else does this. For life from worlds other than Earth, there are periods of seasonal hibernation, and there is falling unconscious due to injury or illness, but no such thing as just 'going to sleep'. As a result, humans are the only species to experience dreams.
The aliens blame the above for what they term 'the human madness'. Humans can't stop personifying things. We do it casually, without thinking, but to everyone else it makes us seem cuckoo bananas. The phrases 'the dice hate me' or 'the sea is a harsh mistress' are both totally insane to aliens, they don't project agency onto things like that. They directly blame this 'human madness' for both human religion and human fiction, which they consider to be interchangable and equally difficult to understand.
Only one other alien race grasped the idea of fiction for pleasure after we exposed them to it, and they are currently undergoing a cultural revolution as a result. They are even writing their own stories now, though they are very bad at it because they don't have a lot of practice so they are just stealing whole works from Earth culture and replacing some of the details without realizing how that breaks the flow of the story.
And they are the ones that 'get' it. To everyone else it is confusing as shit.
Notably, the lack of FICTION in alien cultures does not mean they do not have LYING.
That's cool, has anyone heard of this take in books or other media? I don't remember seeing it, but it has to be somewhat common at this point, this being 24 years after Galaxy Quest.
I can imagine aliens who are comfortable with theoretical models, and who even encourage their children to play with theoretical models, they would have words for "protagonist" and "plot hole" and "narrator" but even those guys would think we were psychos.
Imagine such a dialogue.
>teacher: "Alice has 2 apples. Bob has 3 apples. Alice gives her apples to Bob. How many apples does Bob now have?"
>student: "THIS IS A LIE! ALICE AND BOB ARE MADE UP, THEY NEVER EXISTED! THESE APPLES ARE NOT REAL! WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!"
Fiction is just long-winded and entertaining hypotheticals, and it is very difficult to imagine a human-level-scientific-advancement-or-greater alien race that was never able to propose hypotheticals. They couldn't even propose goals to more towards, in science and elsewhere.
You sound like an exceptionally boring person, someone who would screech the moment an author introduces that alien that is not literally just a human being in mind and body, indistinguishable from homosexual sapiens side by side.
It would be more like "Where is Bob?" and "What are we to do with his apples?". They would parse hypotheticals as incomplete instructions. "THIS IS A LIE" would come much later after they figured out what was going on, because it would be hard for them. To them, a human culture is a wheel of chaos, pointing in every direction at once.
moron.
sex with Laliari, the rest die because they don't realize how dangerous the world is
I used to do the Vilani in Traveller as basically Thermains. No imagination or ability to fantasise, so explained why they had jump drive and a star spanning galactic empire since our Roman times, then got their shit pushed in by us earthling once we got into space and met them. I mean can you imagine what some of our nation leaders or corporate CEOs would do to their civilisation when we met them? Those green spikey dudes they were fighting in the film would have nothing on what we would do to exploit or push aside the poor frickers.
Seems too obnoxious for players to deal with, especially if the Thermian analogues do not understand fiction and refuse to.
Players can and should be able to walk away from people they don't want to deal with, Galaxy Quest works because they have no way out.
The players seemed to quite enjoy dealing with the aliens that were copying human stories, they were endearing humaboos.
For the other aliens they ran into the fact that they didn't get fiction was the least of their problems. Humanity is the new kid on the block, only protected from being squashed by vastly older space empires because we happen to have evolved within the sphere of influence of a larger protectorate. We can't afford to rock the boat too much or piss anyone off too badly, because if we end up in a shooting war with anyone of note we *will* lose.
That said, there was one bit where the fact that aliens don't have fiction was extremely important. Long story short, a reclusive alien race that is extremely isolationist was forced to make contact with its neighbors, including us, due to the evolving larger plot. After dealing with them for a bit, it was increasingly clear that something was up with them. Sure enough, they were using what was effectively mind control to insert agents and officers loyal to them in the ranks of anyone who was dealing with them for any length of time.
After the players recognize this, humanity called bullshit on them and proved what they were doing in record time. They were totally shocked, because they had developed this technology in absolute secret and this was the first time we have ever seen it. They hadn't had reason to use this tech in ages, and no one had ever caught them doing it before. How did we figure out they were using mind control?
"Uhhh... because you are obviously using mind control? Its plain as day."
Basically no one else had caught them doing it before because no one else knew what mind control *was*, there was no precedent for it in their cultures. But despite not being real, Humanity was familiar enough with the concept that we spotted it immediately.
In my setting the party is relatively famous, and has the occasional play made about their exploits. These plays, of course, vary wildly in their accuracy, in part helped along by the party.
Interesting! So if they are ragtag atm it would be better to introduce this once they gain notereity.
>How would you write Thermians into a campaign?
They would be gullible to stories from visual medias from other species because they have the technology or powers to attain what's depicted in those. But when confronted with reality they would react heartbroken, like the kids of today who grow up and have to stop liking underage characters or be pedophiles by their dumb morals.
I kind of want to riff on them in a Transformers game. Junkions learned to speak via TV signals and have come to idolize the fictional version of humans. They never were able to determine the source of the broadcasts for whatever reason and just believed that the fictional TV world exists somewhere "out there". Even after they actually make contact and meet humans, they don't really change their beliefs and still cling to the idea that TV-Earth is a seperate place from Real-Earth.
what exactly is their native tech level anyway? If they are capable of building things that perfectly imitate the bullshit of a Trek writer's imagination to the letter, what can they do if they are not perfectly adhering to a tv show?
This is a great question
In the movie, the Thermians began intercepting television and radio signals from Earth (which they mistook for historical records) and based their technological development on what they saw. So, imagine a species single-mindedly pursuing technology to recreate 1970s science fiction and getting most of it right.
I had a dumb thought. Its been a while since I last watched Galaxy Quest, but the Thermians on the Protector are the last Thermians alive, right? Sarris and his people killed all of the rest, and they are mostly just bargaining with the last of them now because they want the Omega 13?
This seems like it doesn't make sense. There is no reason to exterminate the Thermians, they are an ideal vassal race: extremely intelligent and capable of making advanced technology, but poorly suited to war (rebellion is unlikely, successful rebellion even less so) and easily controlled because they are so naive.
Which raises an interesting possibility... what if in the same way that the Thermian have no concept of fiction, Sarris's people have no concept of *tribute*? Every war they fight is one of extermination, because thats just what war is to them. It has simply never occurred to them that it could be otherwise.
Your moral quandary for the day: what are the ethics of explaining something like the Roman Empire to alien conquerors with the intention of making them *better conquerors* if the goal is to have them take other races as vassals and slaves rather than commit senseless genocide after genocide as their default option? On the one hand, you are helping the bad guys, but on the other hand you are potentially saving countless lives and multiple species from extermination.
That's honestly a better idea for a series than Star Trek: Picard with it's not!Reapers.
That's a low bar, anon.
Saris being too damn cartoonishly evil led him to make stupid decisions and not educated long term ones. He would rather rape and pillage until everyone was dead than make a slave caste that could elevate him to ruler of everything.
Do we know that Saris wishes to rule things?
REAL QUESTION: How do you make the thermians villains/the BBEG?
Thermians discover the concept of "fiction" and use it, and their holographic technology, to become exceedingly dangerous spies, assassins, and saboteurs. Coupling this with their already prodigious technology, they quickly carve out a chunk of galaxy to call their territory.
>WW2 levels of cultural spy detecting where instead of asking baseball questions you have to ask slightly misleading movie trivia, like "who played roger rabbit?"
what would their prerogative be? to wipe out fiction itself?
They discover a formula that can prove absolute and objective truth and annihilate anything that does not adhere to it.
Easily. Human fiction is full of conflict, war in particular. Even a species that understood fiction would likely conclude from our entertainment that we are violent, dangerous psychopaths that literally can't stop killing each other and everyone else we come into contact with.
For the Thermians, who believe everything they see, its not hard to imagine them getting a sampling of human entertainment that portrays us in an EXTREMELY negative light. Imagine if they get a bunch of our scifi, a bunch of our modern day stuff, and a bunch of our fantasy and conclude that the fantasy stuff was our real past, we eventually killed off all of the fantasy races or drove them into hiding, we fought amongst ourselves for centuries, have destroyed multiple alien civilizations, and we keep somehow bombing ourselves back into a "post-apocalyptic" state and building it all again.
It would be easy to conclude for an outside observer that we are too dangerous to be left alone, see us in one of our 'low tech' points of our self destructive cycle, and try to take advantage of the opportunity to wipe us out for good from a safe distance.
Isn't that just Zentradi?
They absorb the message from 60s and 70s television that everyone in space must be a conqueror and invade Earth. Since in most scifi shows the evil space men are hell bent on invading Earth and destroying humanity. They base their morality on the example that a space faring faction must be an expanding empire that conquers all.
They technology is mix of War of the worlds tripods, flying saucers, tie fighters, and doomsday weapons.
reverse it and make aliens who belive that everything they encounter that doesn't fit their wievs of reality/culture is an elaborate reality show
That's just humans from the near future. You can see it starting now.
what?
He means Information bubbles. People who listen primarily to conservative news sources and people who listen to liberal news functionally live in different realities, both sides poised to view the other as being 'deluded idiots' and any source of information that does not agree with their existing worldview as 'fake news'. Algorithms that suggest news articles to you on google or facebook naturally reinforce this. The same way that you look up a question about babies and your ads all suggest diapers to your for the next six weeks, you get linked to a single conservative article and your news feed will be flooded with more of the same. Making it very easy to end up down a rabbit hole where through no fault of your own every source of news suggested to you says the same thing, even if that same thing has no basis in reality. How can you be faulted for believing what a dozen different sources all told you was true? You did your research!
This anon isn't wrong, but especially that whole deal where people just refuse to believe in the reality or sincerity of another person's opinion, "You're trolling", "you playin", "you're one of those raiders that is raiding my website", "this is all part of a liberal/conservative/antiskub global psy-op to make me mad", I also think people are becoming desensitized to genuine moral outrage and averse to genuine moral conflict to the point where they'd rather just play it off as a joke (less likely to say "You're a troll" and more likely to say "ha ha good one").
Part of that is just an extension of existing coping mechanisms online. Even outside of Ganker, its become extremely common for everyone to be hiding behind 16 layers of irony and cynicism, even when it is clearly fake, because the thought of expressing a genuine opinion on a topic that you care about makes you *vulnerable* to attack. It forces everyone to do this awkward dance of pretending not to care or saying things they didn't really mean out of fear of bad actors who will attack them for liking something thats 'cringe' or calling them an idiot for being wrong about something (or even just having a different opinion), and having that shield of irony between you and the conversation makes it easy to deflect.
Since everyone is performing the dance to some degree or another, its easy to just undercut the other person in a conversation by claiming "I know nothing you don't mean anything you say, there is no argument or opinion you can possibly voice that means anything because I *know* you don't really hold those views." Which both forces them to be genuine (which makes them vulnerable) and sets up to be extremely hurtful by just claiming continuing to refuse to believe them.
As with everything online, buttholes poison the well of discussion to such a degree that the only response is for everyone to assume that everyone else is an butthole by default.
Does anyone have a screengrab or pic of that giant barracks they had on their starship?
We are playing Hollow Earth Expedition. The only TV signal they had to intercept was Hitler's opening of the '36 Olympics
DO IT.