GURPS Traveller: Alien Races 2
The book is a standatd GURPS 8.5" x 11" volume, with colour covers and black and white throughout. It is well illustrated in the style of GURPS and Traveller both with clear realistic illustrations.
This book details two of the core alien races for the original Classic Traveller setting, detailed for the GURPS Traveller version of that setting. It also includes two minor races that I haven't heard of before and which may well be original to the GURPS version of Traveller. The aliens are the Aslan, K'Kree, Devi Intelligence and the Inyx.
The Aslan, a humanoid lion hybrid species, are detailed in 63 densely filled pages, covering physiology, psychology, society, government, laws, the Aslan Hierate, worlds, culture, language, economics, character generation, equipment and ship designs and floorplans. The Aslan are somewhat of a cliche in SF, and they are what you'd expect, territorial, fierce, somewhat bushido-like, with powerful female roles as well as male. The detail here takes everything I've seen published on the Aslan before in GDW or Digest Group publications and squeezes into a concentrate everythinhg you could ever need for this enjoyable and versatile alien race. I have always enjoyed the language craetion parts of the Traveller aliens, that's here, I like the sections on culture, traditions and martial arts. If you play another system which has feline humanoids, or you want such a race in your game, then buy this book for this section alone. So little of the text is GURPS specific that it is the perfect source.
Which leads me to the K'Kree. The K'Kree are one of the nicest alien types in Traveller in that they nicely combine a paradox for a Terran. The K'Kree are hexapedal herbivores who evolved into inteligence as a response to carnivorous hunters and the need to defend their herds. They are also the nastiness mothers you will ever meet. They can smell flesh on a carnivore, and they get angry. The herbivores have turned and in the K'Kree we see a herd based herbivorous society where they have weapons, spaceships, spatial territory and a grudge against those meat eaters. Indeed reading of what living in the Two Thousand Worlds is like makes one realise that the K'Kree are the closest to truly genocidal nazis as you will find in the Traveller universe. Or maybe not..
Rather than repeat what I said for the Aslan, let it be said that the detail on the K'Kree is as deep and wide as on the Aslan. It covers details down to K'Kree mathetmatical notation whilst not excluding theology, guns, economics, trade, the language and floor plans. Again, for any Traveller fan this section alone would be worth buying the book for.
Indeed let's stop there for a minute. We have 126 pages of two of the the most developed alien races for a SF game ever, interesting, alien and yet playable as PCs and NPCs with no great effort. If you play SF using GURPS (Traveller or otherwise) this is a good buy. If you play another SF and like these alien types then 90% of this material is instantly useable. If you're an old hand at Traveller this expands greatly on the old Aliens books that GDW published, and whilst you can continue to use the older volumes if you own them, this is a nice expansion.
Now for the final aliens. The Devi Intelligence is a collective fungi intelligence contacted by the K'Kree. This rather 'Star Trek' species have a sedentary intellectual form and a mobile spore form, the 'Shiverbats'. What they were, and whether they classified as g'naak (the K'Kree definition of a hunting carnivorous society) puzzled the K'Kree for a while before admitting them to the Two Thousand Worlds as a subject race.
Compared to the two major races the detail is small, compared to most aliens in most SF games the detail is great. 10 pages, and 10 pages of a new idea that will run well in a Trav game or another SF setting (I used them in a Star Wars game).
Last, and still not least, are the Inyx, a race of underwater ergovores. Yup, ergovores. They feed on energy. They look like bathospheres with a halo of tentacles and they're TL 11. They have slower than light starships and they're well detailed. Why am I being short with them, because I think they look silly, but in the hands of a sympathetic referee they could be eevrything from Lovecraftian monsters to uber friendly sea friends. Again the detail only looks small compared to the major races.
To summarise.
- Hugely useful block of everything on the Aslan, a key Traveller species. Transferrable to any SF game, as long as you're okay with obvious human-lion hybrids/uplifts.
- The K'Kree in massively useable detail. One of the most interesting and morally challenging aliens from the Traveller setting. Possibly of more interest as a challenge than the Aslan, and definitely challenging as a PC choice.
- The puzzling and perhaps 'one-shot' Devi Intelligence.
- The deep sea and different Inyx, quite possibly a long standing part of a SF game.
All in smart and well presented SJ style, this book just has so much useable content and enough chrome that it is a great buy for all SF fans.
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