Aliens and Alien Worlds

More so than in most any other Fate campaign, Fate Space games tend to emphasize travel and exploration. Even though it’s tempting and can be fun, you won’t have enough time to plan out a whole galaxy or even a whole solar system before beginning a game! Therefore, GMs, we encourage you to paint in broad strokes to begin while having procedures ready for determining what characters find as they travel during play.

This list of questions will help you pin down the role that aliens and alien worlds will play in your game.

Are there intelligent aliens?

• No. Humans are alone in the universe, at least as far as we know. However, there are distant worlds to explore, and intelligent life may yet be discovered on one of them.
• No, but humanity has diverged into so many different subtypes and variants that there might as well be.
• No, but scientists have used genetic engineering or similar technologies to enhance the intelligence and communication skills of animal species, uplifting dogs, bears, dolphins and/or monkeys.
• Maybe, but we haven’t met any yet. This game involves discovering new alien life forms and societies. Nonintelligent extraterrestrial life may indeed be common.
• Yes, but they have all died out or been destroyed. This game involves finding their relics and figuring out who they were.
• Yes, a few. Humanity has encountered a handful of distinct alien species and has a history and interspecies relationship with each. There may or may not be any more out there to meet.
• Yes, many! Space is teeming with alien species. We have met a good number of them, and have learned of many more.
• In fact, _we_ are the aliens—humanity no longer exists, or is not the focus of this game.

If there are aliens, where do they live or where can they be found?

• They have their own worlds, and it is unusual to find a species away from their homeworld. If we want to meet aliens, we have to go visit them.
• They may come from somewhere else or have previously traveled widely, but now they live in specific quarters or districts on one or more worlds we inhabit.
• They travel more or less freely among us, coming from a homeworld where they may be found in greater numbers.
• We don’t know where they come from, only that they show up near our territory or on our worlds.
• They have conquered our planet, and we resist with some measure of effectiveness.
• Different aliens have different modes of living that bring them into contact with us in different ways.

If there are multiple inhabited worlds, what is the political relationship among them?

• Each world is a distinct and sovereign political entity...
  • ...with very little ability or desire to influence other planets.
  • ...with its own recognized sphere of influence, zone of control, or other territory, negotiated on a bilateral basis with neighboring worlds.
  • ...competing in a general struggle for control of unclaimed territories or other resources.
  • ...interested in shoring up its alliances and maintaining a balance of power against equally self-interested rivals.

Some worlds are colonies or settlements of more-important worlds, or are otherwise dependent upon those worlds. Some sort of core/frontier settlement pattern may exist.

Each world is subordinate to some larger interplanetary or interstellar authority, hegemony, or imperium, which exerts overarching political, economic, and/or social control.

What is the economic relationship among inhabited worlds?

• Each world is basically independent. Any trade between worlds involves luxuries or novelties rather than essential commodities. Small freighters and smugglers ply the spacelanes.
• Some worlds are colonies, clients, or outposts of another world upon which they are highly dependent, although the mother planet or homeworld is relatively self-sufficient. The central planet sends out freighters filled with workers, supplies, and equipment, and return laden with raw materials and exotic commodities.
• Worlds are highly interdependent, specializing in producing goods or offering services in which they have some competitive advantage, and importing other necessities. This is the most fragile economic system, where the blockade or failure of one world is felt throughout the rest of that region of space. Bulk freighters work the main trade routes while smaller merchant ships subsist on the margins.

What are the social and cultural relationships among worlds?

• Each world is a distinct society comprising a number of subcultures and social groupings, and is alien to other worlds.
• Each world is a distinct and relatively homogeneous monoculture, recognizably different from those of other worlds and alien to them.
• Worlds are part of a larger interstellar or interplanetary society, sharing many common institutions and traditions but each possessing distinct cultural characteristics.
• Worlds are part of a larger interstellar or interplanetary society, with each world populated by a mix of subcultures that are common across the larger society.

Planetary Ecosystems

When you need to create an alien world, you can use these tables. The World Types table provides a variety of high- to medium-plausibility planet types, not all of which are inherently habitable to human beings or even carbon-based lifeforms. The Habitable Worlds table, as a whole, is low to medium plausibility.

	0	+	++	+++	++++
0	Artificial Habitat	Lushworld	Fumeworld	Neonworld	Edenworld
-	Hotbox	Rockworld	Marginal World	Quartzworld
--	Ammonia World	Scumworld	Iceworld
---	Smogworld	Brimstone World
----	Gas Giant

Ammonia World: An outer-zone ecosystem that uses a corrosive ammonia-water solution instead of just water as its basic solvent, with dissolved ammonia-water ice acting as antifreeze. Intelligent life on such a world would have a hard time creating a technological civilization.

Artificial Habitat: The “world” is a technological construct, ranging in size from a small station to an artificial world to a star-girdling Dyson sphere or swarm.

Brimstone World: A sulfur-rich planet with sulfur dioxide seas, sulfur shores, and an atmosphere composed primarily of sulfur dioxide vapor. Simple microbes and plants may exist under these conditions. Both fire and metals are unavailable on this sort of world.

Edenworld: A terrestrial planet with a carbon-based, oxygen-breathing, water-solvent ecology highly compatible with Terran life. Roll again on the Habitable Worlds table.

Fumeworld: A waterless planet with a corrosive atmosphere dominated by nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, possibly with seas of nitric acid. Metallurgy would be hard to develop on this sort of world.

Gas Giant: The ecosystem involves ammonia-based, methane-breathing balloon-like floaters that expel helium and retain hydrogen to stay aloft in the turbulent upper atmosphere of a Jovian world.

Hotbox: A waterless Venus-like planet with a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and very high temperatures. Such a world is almost certainly lifeless, the victim of its runaway greenhouse effect.

Iceworld: An outer-zone world with a surface composed mainly of water or ammonia ice. It may have a liquid ocean beneath the icy surface, with sufficient radiant energy penetrating via cracks to photodissociate water into hydrogen and oxygen to drive biological processes, or geothermal vents providing the energy for life.

Lushworld: A warm world with a carbon dioxide atmosphere, rich in plant life. Roll again on the Habitable Worlds table.

Marginal World: A world with an ecology in which Terran life is viable but at a disadvantage, due to local competition, rigorous conditions, or some combination. Roll again on the Habitable Worlds table.

Neonworld: A relatively large terrestrial world with an atmosphere rich in the dense but chemically inert noble gas neon, allowing large flying creatures to exist if life develops. Roll again on the Habitable Worlds table.

Quartzworld: This world has seas of sulfuric acid and a surface that resembles the area surrounding an earthly hot spring, with quartz and clay minerals serving as the habitat for silicon-oxygen (silicone)-based life forms.

Rockworld: A lifeless planet with at most a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, like Mars or Luna.

Scumworld: A world inhabited only by microbes, similar to that of the ancient Earth of the Archaean Eon. The atmosphere is probably composed of mainly carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor. On Earth, the evolution of blue-green algae or cyanobacteria, which produced oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis, initiated a dramatic transformation of Earth’s ecosystem. It is possible that such an ecosystem may comprise one vast planet-wide organism.

Smogworld: A terrestrial world whose oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere includes significant traces of chlorine generated by biological processes, producing a slightly toxic and corrosive gas mixture as well as mildly acidic and bleachy bodies of water, which local life forms can usually tolerate—except in shallow pools or muddy “acid flats” where toxic concentrations are higher—by virtue of their plastic-like composition but which visitors must find ways of dealing with. An intelligent civilization on such a corrosive world would have a tough time developing metallic tools, but might come up with ceramic-based electrochemical technology. Roll again on the Habitable Worlds table.

	0	+	++	+++	++++
0	Artificial World	Savannah Planet	Jungle Planet	Forest World	Radio Planet
-	Crater Planet	Desert Planet	Ice Planet	Canyon Planet
--	Swamp Planet	Water World	Volcano Planet
---	Fungus Planet	Archipelago Planet
----	Special Planet

Archipelago World: An oceanic world characterized by numerous island chains but no large continental landmasses.

Artificial World: A world or worldlet quite obviously built as a habitat, rather than having formed naturally. Possibilities range from gigantic Dyson spheres, ringworlds, or tubeworlds—rotating tubes spun around a central star like a ball of hollow spaghetti—made of some incredible high-tensile-strength alien material to orbital habitats hollowed out of asteroids or built from dismantled comets and used as massive generation ships.

Canyon Planet: A world whose surface is cracked or carved into a network of canyons, with the most congenial habitats—at least for humanity—occurring along the walls of the cliff faces.

Crater Planet: A world whose surface features are clearly the product of numerous asteroid strikes, which resulted in circular depressions separated by long, narrow, curved ridges. The depressions may be filled with water, with the narrow ridges providing habitable surface, or they may be habitable lowlands, with the ridges constraining movement between separate ecospheres.

Desert Planet: A dry and arid world, with little to no surface water available.

Fungus Planet: A world characterized by fungal life forms that produce strange spores with a variety of functions and effects.

Forest World: A world dominated by gigantic tree-like organisms that serve as the foundation to a planetary ecology.

Ice Planet: A frozen world, its surface covered by glaciers and other large bodies of ice.

Jungle Planet: A world of incredible fecundity, thickly vegetated with large tree-like flora.

Radio Planet: A world inhabited by species that sense and communicate in an unusual zone of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Savannah Planet: A world of temperate and tropical grassland, well watered and inhabited by a robust ecology of grazers and predators.

Special Planet: A planet that is special or unusual in some way. It may have a highly eccentric orbit that produces seasonal extremes, may be tidally locked so that one hemisphere always faces its primary and the other always faces away (a twilight world), may have extremely high but perhaps barely human-tolerable gravity (a heavyworld, as in Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity), or may not be a planetary surface at all—possibilities include the upper atmosphere of a gas giant (as in Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen’s Wheelers or Iain Banks’s The Algebraist), a habitable nebula (a cohesive gas cloud in a system’s habitable zone, as in Larry Niven’s The Integral Trees), or a neutron star (à la Robert L. Forward’s Dragon’s Egg or Stephen Baxter’s Flux).

Swamp Planet: A world of marshy, water-logged bogs and shallow seas inhabited by a varied and interconnected array of plant and animal species, or of muddy plains and algal mats.

Volcano Planet: A world with high amounts of tectonic activity and volcanism, producing large areas of flowing lava and thick clouds of ash in the atmosphere.

Water World: A world entirely covered by ocean, with little to no solid land anywhere.

Planetary Conditions

Terrestrial Worlds

Terrestrial worlds can range in size from the very small—an asteroid or “planetesimal”—to the very large: “super-Earths” of about five to ten Earth masses and up to about twice its radius.

Surface Gravity

Roll four dice, with a Mediocre (+0) roll indicating approximately Earth-like surface gravity. Rolls above indicate the difficulty of the Physique overcome actions needed to withstand the stresses of high gravity—for example, a Fair (+2) roll means Fair (+2) difficulty. Rolls below indicate the magnitude of difficulty of Athletics overcome actions needed to avoid awkward movement in low gravity—for example, a Poor (-1) roll means Average (+1) difficulty.

Orbital Eccentricity and Axial Tilt

These characteristics determine the variability of the planet’s climate—its seasons. A planet in a circular orbit around its primary star with its rotational axis perpendicular to its orbital plane will have no seasons, just a single steady climate all year round. As the orbit becomes more elliptical, the time of year will affect how much energy the planet receives from its primary star.

It is possible to imagine a planet with a highly elliptical orbit such that its surface freezes over and life on the planet must hibernate or find other ways of dealing with the deep freeze, only to experience a violent spring thaw and extraordinary summer blossoming before the temperature cools again.

A world with the aspect Extreme Axial Tilt might indicate that its lengths of day and night will vary more with latitude and time of year. Once the planet’s pole lies in the plane of the ecliptic, so that the planet is just sort of rolling along in its orbit, most of one hemisphere will experience permanent daylight while most of the other will experience permanent night while the planet’s tropics experience more-or-less perpetual twilight. This behavior is similar to but not identical to tidal locking.

Roll four dice. A Mediocre (+0) result means that the planet is in a circular orbit with relatively upright attitude. Deviations from that result reflect increasing eccentricity or tilt and thus greater temperature and climate variability, which can be taken as the difficulty of overcome actions related to survival and construction on the planet’s surface.

Surface Temperature

A planet in the inner zone of a star will have a high temperature, one in the outer zone will have a low temperature, and one in the habitable zone will have a temperature somewhere in between, all other things being equal.

For the planet’s average surface temperature, roll four dice, adding six if the planet is in the inner zone, or subtracting six if it’s in the outer zone. A Mediocre (+0) result indicates an Earth-like temperature range, negative results indicating colder temperatures, and positive results indicating higher temperatures. The deviation in steps away from Mediocre (+0) can be used as the difficulty for survival actions, such as Physique overcome actions to withstand temperature extremes in the short term or Engineering overcome actions to design and build adequate protective equipment in the long term.

Jovian Worlds

A gas giant typically consists of a metallic or rocky core of sufficient mass to attract and retain a thick gaseous atmosphere of hydrogen, helium, and other gases. The pressures and temperatures in the depths of the planet’s atmosphere are enormous, but it is possible to imagine entire ecosystems floating at different levels of the gas giant’s atmosphere.

Planetary Culture and Civilization

Based on what is known about a world so far, you might describe the sort of sentient species that lives there. Are they technologically sophisticated? What sorts of things do they value or abhor? Are they communal or individualistic? Are they gregarious or territorial?

Planetary Culture

Create three to five aspects defining the species’ general culture. A member of that culture may choose up to three of those aspects and for each one either embrace it, taking it as their own, or reject it, writing a replacement aspect that reflects their rejection of their culture.

Planetary Civilization

You can use the Bronze Rule to give relevant skills to a planetary civilization. Your approach in representing a whole world could vary from game to game, but a simple system might define a planetary civilization with three skills. Generally, the Bronze Rule will be used to define planets more often in games with epic tone, as characters interact with larger-scale entities. The typical range for such skills is Mediocre (+0) to Legendary (+8). To determine it randomly, roll four dice and add four.

• Extent: How much of the planet and its surrounding system does the civilization occupy? This might represent the resilience of the civilization, giving it stress boxes or otherwise showing how much damage it can take in the face of threats of an appropriate scale. Additionally, extent is a measure of the resources available to the civilization.
• Technology: How sophisticated and advanced is the civilization’s command of material and energy-producing technology? This reflects the difficulty of overcoming its military and technical defenses and protections.
• Culture: How sophisticated and robust are the civilization’s art, philosophy, and other forms of expression? This reflects the difficulty of overcoming its legal system and other governmental controls, enticing or otherwise taking advantage of gullible or careless citizens on a wide scale.

Interplanetary Trade and Commerce

Trade is a good reason for characters to travel from planet to planet, and the itinerant space merchant is a classic sci-fi trope, from Nicholas van Rijn in Poul Anderson’s Trader to the Stars to Star Trek’s tribble-peddling Cyrano Jones in the episode “The Trouble with Tribbles,” as well as Vernor Vinge’s STL trading culture, the Qeng Ho, in A Deepness in the Sky.

If spacecraft can travel between planets, the opportunity for trade will exist. Economic theory states that if it’s cheaper for a planet to import some valuable good than to produce it locally, it will try to import those valuables and export some quantity of locally produced goods in exchange, all other things being equal.

Within a star system, at interplanetary distances, it’s easy to imagine a sort of center-periphery trading model, where the resource-rich fringes of the system send raw materials to industrial centers of production to be turned into finished goods of various kinds, which are then sold to both local and distant markets.

However, the cost of transporting goods across interstellar distances at sub-light speeds is really daunting, so it may be the case that only really, really rare and valuable items are worth shipping across the stars. If relatively cheap FTL travel becomes available, then interstellar trade becomes a possibility once more. Alternately, an alien civilization may be ideologically committed to notions of gift exchange or ceremonial generosity as a status marker, and so will be willing to engage in what looks like unprofitable trade for the social cachet it brings them within their own circles.

When PC merchants arrive at a port of call, determine the commodities available for trade. Depending on your setting, you can determine these by rolling some world-scale skill such as Tech Level or Natural Resources; alternately, the GM can simply invent a handful of offerings. In any case, you can often define cargo with a single aspect describing what it is.

If you’d like more ideas for doing space commerce, check out Pax Galactica.

Creating Aliens

Here’s a quick and fun way for players at the table to create an alien culture. If you’d like more discussion on making aliens of different plausibilities, read the following sections.

Whenever a character mentions the name of a new alien species or society, pause the game. Going around the table, each player names a feature of human beings’ physiological or psychological makeup, creating an aspect like Diurnal, Breathes Air, or Individual Mind. Then everyone at the table rolls four dice.

The player with the third highest roll chooses one of those aspects to keep unchanged.

The player with the second highest roll chooses a second aspect, and twists it by adding an exception, like Diurnal Except in Summer or Individual Mind Except When Pregnant, or by intensifying it, like Breathes Air and Water.

The player with the highest roll chooses a third aspect to reverse or replace altogether, like Flies Easily, but Needs Augmentation to Walk Long Distances, Engages in Casual Reproductive Sex, or Cannot Eat with Others.

Give these three aspects to the new alien species or society. If necessary, you can also identify some alien invocations and compels.

You’ll find another example way to create aliens for interstellar travelers to meet in Millennials.

Low-Plausibility Aliens

These aliens are merely humans in funny makeup; that is to say, aside from a few cosmetic differences, they are at least psychologically indistinguishable from humans. A single aspect is usually all that’s necessary to establish the character as an alien, regardless of how alien the character actually is. For example, a Martian in Disguise is passing for human, while a Cat-Headed Alien is obviously not human, and a Silicon Life Form may not even be recognizable as a living being.

Other than that, however, each character’s alienness matters only insofar as its aspect is invoked or compelled, and the fact that the character is an alien may not even be part of its aspect. The character is a comic-book alien, like Superman, or a space-opera one, like everyone in the Mos Eisley cantina.

If you need to come up with a low-plausibility alien on the fly, roll four dice on this table one or more times.

	0	+	++	+++	++++
0	Centauroid	Anguilliform (Eel-Like)	Achatinoid (Snail-Like)	Avian (Bird-Like)	Bicephalous (Two-Headed)
-	Insectoid	Mammalian	Reptilian	Octopoid
--	Simian (Ape-Like)	Humanoid	Cetacean (Whale-Like)
---	Fungoid	Arachnoid
----	Exotic

Achatinoid (Snail-Like): This species resembles some form of gastropod, perhaps ambulating by means of a muscular ventral foot or possessing sensory organs at the ends of tentacular stalks. It may possess a shell.

Anguilliform (Eel-Like): This species has eel-like features.

Arachnoid (Spider-Like): This species has spider-like features.

Avian (Bird-Like): This species can fly, or is descended from a flying species. Alternately, it may merely be feathered or beaked.

Bicephalous (Two-Headed): This species has two heads, or seems to.

Centauroid: This species has a distinct anterior body or torso, usually with two or more manipulator limbs (arms), and a posterior body or barrel, usually with four or more ambulating limbs (legs).

Cetacean: This species resembles a whale or dolphin.

Exotic: This species is really bizarre from a human perspective. It may be microscopic or gargantuan, comprise multiple quasi-independent suborganisms within a larger hive mind, be parasitic upon or commensal with a host species, be an immaterial energy being, or be whatever else pushes against the limits of the setting.

Fungoid: This species resembles a terrestrial fungus. It may be spore-producing and rhizomatic, be comprised of an interwoven mass of tubular filaments, possess a chitinous integument, or otherwise remind a terrestrial observer of a mushroom, mold, or yeast.

Humanoid: This species resembles human beings, at least in general form.

Insectoid: This species has insect-like features.

Mammalian: This species has similarities with some species of terrestrial mammal. Roll two dice or choose—-- feline (cat-like); -0 leonine (lion-like) or vulpine (fox-like); -+ ursine (bear-like); 00 equine (horse-like) or bovine (cow-like); 0+ porcine (pig-like); ++ canine (dog-like) or lupine (wolf-like).

Octopoid: This species resembles a terrestrial squid or octopus, probably because it has many tentacles it uses for locomotion, manipulation, or both.

Reptilian: This species resembles a lizard or dinosaur, with scaly skin.

Simian (Ape-Like): This species resembles some form of ape or monkey.

Medium-Plausibility Aliens

These aliens are romantically designed; that is, they are imagined as a contrast to some human feature or trait, or as a slippery-slope exemplar of taking some human process or dynamic to an extreme.

Their exaggerated or contrasting features will often be explicitly called out as an aspect in describing the species, such as Extreme Innate Code of Honor, Collective Hive Mind, No Sexual Dimorphism, or Egg-Laying. Other aspects of the species may simply be science-fictional color, such as Heavily Muscled, Three-Fingered Bipeds or Androgynous Grey-Skinned Humanoids.

An example of medium-plausibility aliens is H. Beam Piper’s Fuzzies, from Little Fuzzy and its sequels. These aliens are Appealingly Playful Golden-Furred Aliens that have been Categorized by Humans as Nonintelligent because they Don’t Use Tools or Fire and Don’t Seem to Have Language, allowing the author to explore questions of sentience and responsibility.

High-Plausibility Aliens

These aliens are realistically designed, imagined as the output of some evolutionary process that exerted selection pressures, creating beings with a particular physiology and psychological makeup, adapted to a particular ecological niche and with concomitant cultural predispositions. If there were a science called xenology, its job would be to describe aliens in these terms.

The alien nature of high-plausibility aliens will most always be part of their high concept, as it is a central feature, and can often be compelled to underscore an alien mentality that is rational but inhuman—in other words, adapted to the particular circumstances and conditions under which the aliens evolved and currently live. It’s often worthwhile to come up with a list of example alien invocations and compels for high-plausibility aliens upon their introduction. Their alien nature may also give them access to extras such as alien-only skills and stunts.

One example of interesting high-plausibility aliens is the Moties of Niven and Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye and its sequels, with their Asymmetrical Third Gripping Hand, their Population Overdrive, and their penchant for Ad Hoc Engineering.

Begin by describing the species’ crèche planet, where the alien species evolved, and which may or may not be its current homeworld or where it is encountered by PCs. Here is a short table of possible crèche planets.

Roll	Description
--	A cold, arid planet whose water is mainly locked in its ice caps.
-0	A hot, arid planet whose water exists primarily as atmospheric vapor.
-+	A highly volcanic planet with significant seismic activity and eruptions.
00	A world whose elliptical orbit produces extreme seasonal variations.
0+	A planet with high radiation exposure and consequent mutation rates.
++	An idyllic garden planet with many varied and abundant ecological niches in which life thrives.

Keeping the crèche planet in mind, answer the following questions and write one or two aspects based on those answers. These aspects will define the norm for the alien species, society, or subculture, depending on why you are creating the alien.

• Alien Physiology: What physical features distinguish these aliens? How are these features connected to their intelligence, tool use, or other capabilities?
• Alien Psychology: What distinctive attitudes or mental features characterize these aliens? What personality traits are regarded as typical or normal for them?
• Alien Society: How are the aliens organized and governed? What principles guide their interactions and dealings with each other?
• Alien Culture: What ideas, practices, or material objects are valued by these aliens? What meanings do they have to the aliens?
• Alien History: What events greatly impacted the course of the aliens’ lives or their sense of place in the universe and their relationships with each other and with other species?

Example High-Plausibility Aliens: The Leonids of Alaxor 12

Alaxor 12 is a jungle planet that is known as the source of consciousness-expanding drugs used in local religious ceremonies, and so serves as a site of spiritual pilgrimage for many galactic citizens. The planetary natives thus include local mystagogues willing to introduce visitors to the ceremonies as well as disapproving religious purists.

• Alien Physiology: The natives are a bipedal species of Dimorphic Polygamous Carnivores where males are characterized by Ornate Status-Signaling Manes and Corpulent Hypermuscular Bodies while females tend to be Wiry Endomorphs.
• Alien Psychology: Male leonids tend to be Territorial, Status-Conscious, and Sentimental, while female leonids tend to be Cooperative, Clan-Conscious, and Cold-Blooded. The females do most of the hunting of prey, while the males engage in elaborate status rituals to defend and augment their own territories.
• Alien Society: The leonid mystagogues are an Ascetic Society of Monastic Spiritualists and exist as a distinct subculture within the larger leonid society, which tends to be divided along gender lines. In contrast, the mystagogues are Egalitarian in Outlook and thus Regarded with Suspicion by Larger Leonid Society.
• Alien Culture: Within the subculture of the leonid mystagogues, the Spirit Hunt Ritual, a hallucinatory trance enabled by the rare and costly Spider-Orchid Poison, is a central experience. Successful completion of the ritual is said to produce a feeling of union with nature and with others, heightened self-awareness, and greater empathy and interpersonal understanding.
• Alien History: Throughout leonid history, Spirit Hunt ritualism has been a recurring heresy because of how it challenges traditional leonid modes of being. The Planetary Patriarch and His Council of Wives have recently promulgated Laws Against the Spirit Hunt that make it illegal to traffic in spider-orchid poison, with territorial dispossession as punishment. The enforcement of these laws has created a class of Leonid Spirit Hunter Refugees who entice off-worlders with an entheogenic trip by means of illegally obtained spider-orchid poison.