A sci-fi game I'm working on (ideas, advice, etc are welcome)

[EndersLegend]

I've been working on a concept for a while where the players will be refugees stranded on to a world they got offloaded onto after a big war between humans and some alien race, that I have yet to create.  The whole idea is that they are a group of nobodies, stuck on an unfamiliar world where they have to band together to survive and thrive.

The world where this will take place is going to be a city that covers the entire planet (think Coruscant or Nar Shadaa). The rich citizens live up top, and all the poor, criminals, and other undesirables live many levels lower.  One big theme is that they are complete outsiders. They have no citizenship on the planet so they can't get upper level housing, most reputable merchants wont sell to them, and they can't get honest work that doesn't involve heavy labor and low pay.  Further more, even the criminal element has little respect or care for them. After all, they just got here and are just easy prey in their eyes.

The group will be given an area and some resources to work with. I think this game will give my players that don't like combat heavy characters a chance to shine. Technology and Medical skills will be very valuable here and, those that still want some combat, wont have to try hard to find it.

I've wanted to do it for a while but, I've had a hard time deciding which system would be good for it. I liked Traveller but the way character creation was set up, even the alternate ways, didn't seem to fit my concept. Finally, I downloaded the D6 Space pdf from DrivethruRPG and remembered I liked it when I used to play Star Wars D6.  It's a decent system and easy enough to learn, plus I have experience with it.  If anyone wants to suggest another one I might look into, go for it.

So does anyone like it so far? Any critiques or suggestions yet? Any questions?

One thing I would like help for is a few concepts for aliens. There wont be too many, and only a few of those might even be playable but, I feel like it adds a little bit more life to a sci-fi setting.  I'm trying to avoid the things I find somewhat lazy from settings like take earth animal and turn it into a bipedal humanoid or here is super psychic race.

Mostly I'm just looking for concept ideas and maybe some background in a sentence or two. No help with stats needed.

Any other help is always welcome.

[Teuthic]

Part 1: Setting
Right now, it sounds kind of cliché; city-planet, alien war, fish out of water motifs and disenfranchisement. These are all kind of overdone in sci-fi, so you really have to hone down and make some choices to give your setting more life;
- If the PCs are going to be taking part as ciphers in the underclass area, what makes it unique?
- Is it overcrowded (yawn)? Or is it eerily empty, like a future Detroit?
- Will it be easier for the players to make a foothold via scavenging, or starting a trade, or trying to woo more powerful people? You don't have to discount the other options, but different cultures make different social dynamics easier.
- What's the technology level like? If the setting is post-scarcity, what economic and social factors make a person poor? As usual, look to Eclipse Phase for a well-thought out system.

Also consider the underlying philosophy of your setting; this is really where the GM has the most sway. Unlike the real world, philosophy actively affects the nature of a game's reality; certain actions are more likely to succeed than others simply because the GM can't help but have preferred methods. The point of the game is for the group to band together to survive, but the meaning of the game can strongly affect gameplay. Maybe their banding together can only minimally affect the world around them because they just don't have the options afforded to other people; the theme could morph then into "make do with what you have, because that's life" or "it's impossible to succeed if the system is corrupt, so smash the state!" Maybe the group can excel when they band together; then the tone can convey "anything's possible through the power of friendship!" (Or more likely that only the truly great can rise above their station; these are PCs after all) If you're more cynical, it can mean "if you're smart and you stick together, you can exploit everyone else in the system."

In summation: you have the beginning of a concept, but that's only the first step before you go on to building the NPCs. Figure out what you want to explore (outsiders in a strange place, the nature of a journey, etc.), through what filter you want to explore it (the philosophy), and the methods of exploration (what social dynamics are more effective).

[Teuthic]

Part II: the Aliens

As for aliens; this is a particular interesting topic to me, as my area of focus is evolutionary biology, and I have an active imagination. Xenobiology is an awesome field where nothing can be discovered yet, and conjecture can sound feverish and crazed as if every expert in the field is trying to be the blind prophet Tiresias. And they're not even talking about intelligent life most of the time.

What's most important here isn't shape, but thought, truly alien thought. A lot of sci-fi makes the mistake of assuming aliens act like humans, but different; a species of intelligent carnivores will be like humans, just more violent, while herbivores will be more peaceful and careful. Different species are just like a different culture of humans, except instead of tradition defining their social norms, it's biology.
Fuck.
That.
Noise.
Evolutionary pressures don't affect your mind so fucking uniformly; antelopes run when scared, wildebeest will be wary and avoid acting if you don't bother them, and hippos just wreck your shit whenever they want to. For similar-looking animals with nearly identical evolutionary pressures, wolves are fairly gentle when not hunting, thylacines preferred to be alone, and dingoes are malicious little fucks. And these are for fairly dumb animals working from an evolutionary model we understand; for an intelligent species, multiply that variation by several magnitudes, apply it to every individual (or collective or hive mind), and add a heaping helping of shit we don't understand. How can we define a mind's function if we don't even know its form? Maybe a single intelligent being is actually a gestalt of several discrete species, each link being necessary to survival; how can you figure out what they're thinking if they all evolved in a different manner, but none have that individual spark?

In summation: Aliens is weird, mang. Make sure they act that way.

[crash2455]

I believe Sci Fi divides aliens into two categories depending on what kind of ideas the series is exploring. Star Trek was based around rubber forehead aliens because the show was about intrigue and diplomacy between humans but not really any humans we know. It was less an exploration of xenobiology and more "what if you met a race that decided to kill everyone over 30 to control population?"

That isn't to say that you can't do that with radically diverse and unknowable aliens, but they have to be relatable in some aspect. The factors from EP are like this. They are globs that communicate by spewing DNA at each other and yet are able to learn how to speak with us on a basic level and have some of our problems (or so we think, they're cagey).

I will add that you should not define all members of an alien race to have the same culture and beliefs (unless that's part of their development). Consider humanity: we have hundreds of different cultural axes from religion to race to location to whether or not you like meat.  150+ countries each possessing dozens upon dozens of different cultures and ideas. I'm not saying you should take it to that extent but consider those ideas as well.