How the void thinks
Imagine for a moment a species of space-faring clouds of dust and gas. Also imagine they’re intelligent – at least as intelligent as humans.
How do they think?
I don’t mean what is their version of a brain, though feel free to answer that too. What’s their psychological profile? How do they see the universe?
Based on that description, it’s hard to answer. It depends on how they eat, how they reproduce, what they hunt, what hunts them, why they evolved intelligence in the first place…
But we can still speculate on a few things.
Consider their environment. In deep space, they have an extra axis of movement. Humans can walk forward or back, or left or right. If we want to walk up or down, it takes a lot more effort. For the void clouds, that’s not an issue.
Also consider how empty their environment is. There are no valleys to hide in or mountains to obscure the view. Assuming they travel in packs, they’ll be able to see most of their kin, most of the time.
They’d probably communicate using line of sight – radio or microwave bursts, for example. Sound doesn’t make sense in space and neither does scent. Could they communicate by touch? Probably, but evolution isn’t clumsy enough to ignore a simple, fast, directional and long-range communication method.
Now tell me how they think.
As a cloud of dust, they have no firm boundaries on their bodies. As creatures who are always in contact with their tribemates, they’d have no firm boundaries on their sense of self.
All that flows logically and inevitably from the starting axioms. Yes, you could change any of the assumptions. Maybe they have membranes, giving them each a “skin” of sorts. Maybe they hunt alone. You could decide they can only communicate simple concepts (danger! Food!) through electromagnetism, relying on touch for more advanced concepts.
It doesn’t matter. Give your audience – whether they’re players or readers – a few rules and they should be able to deduce some of the details about how they work.
(A good writer/GM will keep a few twists in reserve, of course, but the audience should be at least directionally correct.)
You know what would suck?
If it turned out these void clouds had elections, commercials and love triangles.
Why would they?
How would they?
The only reason you might think they would is because, hey, that’s what humans do, humans are smart, these void clouds are smart, so that’s what they do too.
Bah. That reasoning would embarrass a child.
If you want your non-human characters to be, you know, non-human, then you need to stop using humans as a baseline. Like all creatures, humans are products of our environments and history. Different creatures should come with meaningful differences.
Not like how Star Trek does it. If I say Vulcans are too human, I don’t mean physically. Their exotic ears are far stranger than their all-too-familiar society.
If your orcs, aliens and AI are too human for no reason, you need to read Call of the Gods. It’ll cure of that right up.
Here it is: