When I had to deal with the creation of the first alien race for our new wargame Total Extinction, I wanted them to be very different from the numerous adaptations we’ve seen a million times before.
My aim was to create the new species from a scientific point of view. This means, I tried to understand what a real alien could conceivably look like.
To start, I did not want our aliens to be humanoid, with two arms, two legs, five fingers, etc… I believe it is not very likely that evolution on another world, on the opposite side of the galaxy, would create humans once again (whether they are green, blue or purple).
Despite this, I did have to turn to something that we know, life on Earth, but I tried doing so with a different point of view: Which species could have evolved into intelligent beings that would travel through space, wiping out all possible resistance?
As I wanted to avoid the “little green men” made famous by B movies, I had to avoid aliens made in the image of primates. Overall, I thought it was even better to avoid mammals entirely.
The things that were left would be sufficiently different from humans and there are few species of animals, apart from mammals, with conceivably enough intelligence.
Of those, there is one that I like the most (I’m not the first and won’t be the last): Cephalopods. Octopi, cuttlefish, squid. They are wonderfully strangest creatures. Besides that, they do have great brains and some species are able to solve logical problems.
So cephalopods it would be.
It is not enough to think just about how these alien will look. It is equally important to not forget about their technology.
If we created our civilization on the basis of stone and metal, perhaps these beings could follow another way: the one of flesh. Our technology today is already starting to imagine the potentials of biotechnology.
These creatures could have adapted their bodies and those of other species for their own purposes. This way, they could have made living vehicles, biotechnological weapons, etc…
Thus we now have the appearance of our nice aliens and of their technology.
Still, there is one rather thorny issue remaining: The name.
Taking into account that we deal with creatures that were born in seas and evolved in water, it seemed logical that the name should evoke it. And here my wife and my 9-month-old daughter helped me a lot: if these creatures make the sound ‘gluglu’, why not the Glorlon?
This is how the Glorlon were born! These cruel enemies of humans, wishing to bring death and destruction to anybody who resists.
Salvador Uranga is the creative mind behind Sentinel Games, a company that is currently developing their first miniature wargame: Total Extinction. You can follow their progress by liking Sentinel Games on Facebook or by subscribing to Sentinel Games on YouTube.
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