All Thumbs
Making an alien is more than just adding prosthetics, we wanted to give biological reasoning behind what makes them unique.
In a universe where “Earth” is “now” and humans are all but a rarity on a galactic scale, there becomes a need to design alien species that are a) recognizable to human readers, b) make sense for never having come in contact with humans, and c) are more than just human/animal blends.
To a certain extent, we’ve already dove head first into the human/animal blend, and all of our species are bipedal with human-adjacent or human-analgous appendages. I’ve considered giving them a ‘shared-progenitor’ origin (as in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Season 6, Episode 20).
Defining what makes an Alien
As Rob has been working on turning my descriptions into illustrations, we have been going after lore reasons for these non-human extensions. One of the more recent developments was my desire to add a second thumb to the Declanians.
Rob and I do a lot of brainstorming in small bits during the day. We attended college together and were roommates. We perfected the; wild-idea-comes-to-my-head-and-Rob-refines-it. Now with our families on opposite sides of the United States (vertically; Illinois and Texas), we follow that same pattern but via phone calls and text messages.
Which inevitably leads us into deeper lore discussions. Building reasons and explanation for the unique design.
Onto the Wiki articles
Once we feel like we’ve given enough lore reasoning, it’s time to move onto biological reasoning. This is where our wiki comes into play, and we spend time trying to develop an explanation for our creative misadventures.
I grew up in the age of prime Star Trek technobabble (Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager), so I can appreciate the application of technobabble to progress a story, so I want to use ‘biologybabble’ to explain our monsters.
I am by no means anything more than a hobbyist biologist (although I did take extra astronomy and biology electives in college). These tools give me a fleeting understanding of terminology and “where” to look for good sounding biological explanations.
Using medical terminology and following typical Wikipedia (which I am also an editor and supporter of) styles, we give our articles and air of authenticity and help define the lore.
A coherent character
Having a wikis is like having a series bible for a TV show that is on steroids.
Narrative tales (like this Substack), or card games, where we want to utilize the lore we’ve created are made easier as we can easily reference back to the wiki. Not just for ourselves, but our readers/fans as well.
Having the wiki articles is important to us as we assemble this lore. First of all, none of us can remember everything (even when we’re the ones designing it), and additionally, we’re trying to build unique science fiction.