#sarcesians

And. Look. I love them. With all my heart and soul. I love my spindly grey space giants so much. So I had a quick look on Archives of Nethys to see what we’re working with in 2e.

From a standing start, this paragraph from their opening description owns my heart:

Sarcesians can survive in space by suspending their respiration and shielding their bodies from the dangers of the void. They manifest a pair of butterfly-like wings made of pure energy that function as solar sails. The sight of a sarcesian in flight is magnificent, and the first dwarven and ysoki miners who met them described encounters with “void angels”.

That last sentence there is the romance of the Diaspora in a single sentence. This shattered realm of asteroids and creche worlds and magic rivers, born from the destruction of two worlds, where the native void angels greeting exploring dwarven miners and ratfolk salvagers. Bonus space pirates and robot underground railroads to be added later. Heh. I love it, my favourite part of the Pact Worlds by a wide margin.

And then we get sarcesian heritages, and we’ve already got the Asteroid Hopper sarcesian, which is immediately my first character, because if I’m playing a sarcesian I’m playing a spacer sarcesian. What’s the point of being able to breathe and fly in the vast vacuum of space if you’re not going to? I’m out here to hang around in space with my glowing void wings and wave in space station windows at people.

And. Speaking of the glowing wings. They get some feats involving the glowing wings. Including the ability to use them in atmosphere. And make them glow really brightly. And also just ignore fall damage, though that’s not directly connected to the wings themselves, and more a sarcesian’s general ability to ride solar and other energy.

Asteroid hopper sarcesians also get a later ability to just live out in vacuum permanently if needed.

I love them. I’m gonna make an asteroid hermit sarcesian. Or a long haul spacer. Just a general theme of hardy space-living asshole who tries to avoid going planetside as much as reasonably possible. It’s noisy down there. How do you all live like that? Come out here where it’s quiet!

Speaking of which. Sarcesians, unlike pretty much every other ancestry that I can see, get a native sign language for free (signed sarcesian), which makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Yes, they have the creche worlds, but they also spend a significant amount of time in vacuum. Where there is no sound. While suspending their respiration. So naturally they need a non-sound-based language for use out there. That’s a tiny little detail that somebody put some thought into, and I love it. Sarcesians explicitly get a sign language as a native tongue.

Also. Sidenote. This is just because Diaspora, I love it here. Looking at the 2e ysoki entry. They get this little sentence:

Ysoki often work as junkers, long-haul starship crew members, or mechanics squeezing through cramped station corridors, so sure of their own worth that living and working in subpar conditions is often a source of pride rather than shame.

I love it out here. Asteroid belt, long-haul spacers, tough assholes who don’t take any shit. My absolute favourite Pact World.

Sarcesians.

Supposedly descended from the inhabitants of the two planets whose destruction long ago formed the Diaspora asteroid belt, sarcesians have adapted to low-gravity and thinair environments. Standing between 10 and 15 feet tall with bulbous eyes and spindly, elongated limbs, a sarcesian is able to adapt her physiology to survive in space by suspending her respiration and growing a pair of butterfly-like wings made of pure light. The wings act as solar sails, catching currents of radiation to propel her between the handful of inhabited asteroids and space platforms within the Diaspora. Thanks to arcane engines left behind by the sarcesians’ ancestors, the race has long managed to maintain creche worlds—asteroids with enough magical atmosphere, gravity, and warmth for the inhabitants to live comfortably and raise offspring. Compared to some other planets in the Golarion system, sarcesian creche worlds are beautiful and idyllic. They contain fields, forests, hills, lakes, and bucolic towns whose populations number in the low thousands. Many of these sanctuaries are linked by the River Between, an unusual body of water that actually flows between and through the asteroids; the water is prevented from floating off into space by a tube-shaped force field crafted by unknown hands. Sarcesians who leave the asteroid belt are sometimes hired as mercenaries specializing in surveillance and marksmanship, as they are accustomed to operating at vast distances from their targets. These sarcesians hone their innate patience even further in order to lie in wait for their marks for days atop bluffs, in dilapidated apartments, or even in the vacuum of space outside docking slips. Employers tend to pay well for this degree of dedication, making sarcesian snipers a highly sought-after commodity in certain areas of the galaxy.

--- Starfinder Alien Archive (2017)

The Diaspora is far and away my favourite of the Pact Worlds system. (Asteroid belt! Asteroid miners! Space pirates! Robot underground railroad! Space dwarves! Space rats with salvaged warships-turned-truck-stops! Cults of Nyarlathotep! Mysterious rivers contained by force fields flowing through space! Ships graveyards!) Like. There is truly nothing about the asteroid belt that I don’t fervently love. Absolutely fantastic setting, ten million out of ten, no notes. And the native species of the Diaspora is the sarcesians. And I absolutely love them.

They’re incredibly tall, spindly, lanky, grey-faced space giants from two shattered worlds who adapted to suddenly inhabiting vacuum with spectacular adroitness. They got a superweapon surprise from friendly neighbouring Eox, coughed a bit, walked it off, and are now chilling on idyllic asteroid creche worlds and hiring themselves out as fucking long range space snipers because they’re both used to operating in the vast distances of the vacuum of space, and also incredibly patient, which is my absolute favourite threatening trait to give a culture.

And I just … the wings. They can sprout solar sails while in the void to fly themselves to safety. They can suspend respiration and survive temporarily unprotected in vacuum. I don’t know what it is about space that makes me so paranoid, but there won’t be no explosive decompression for this space sniper! No sir! If your ship takes a direct hit to crew quarters while you were napping, provided the explosion itself doesn’t kill you, you can just fly yourself out of there and look for an intact section of ship to hook back into. It’s such an excellent insurance policy, and also so pretty. Golden solar sails to fly you to safety. So gorgeous.

Also it’s just … such an image, you know? That bit about the sarcesian sniper hanging in vacuum outside a space docking slip waiting for their target. The grey, silent figure hanging serene and deadly against the vast backdrop of space. They’re terrifying, and spectacular, and they make me want to play a sarcesian operative on a fucking space heist crew. The insurance policy sitting on the exterior of the space station waiting patiently for their cue. Heh.

I love them. I just really really love them. Sarcesians are unquestionably one of the coolest species in a setting that has no shortage of really cool species.

While I’m reading through my new books (most notable the Core Rulebook and the Alien Archives 1 & 2):

Skittermanders

These adorable little six-armed, purple-furred humanoids have some of the best backstory I’ve come across. To wit, they’re incredibly and instinctively helpful, but also not particularly inclined to either understand or acknowledge (there’s debate as to which) continuous authority as a concept. So when the vesk invaded them, they thought they’d help the invaders out by being where the invaders weren’t and therefore let them get on with whatever they were there to do. Since the vesk were there to conquer them, which ideally involves battle and then surrender and, you know, the skittermanders holding still and fighting, and vesk honour wouldn’t let them shoot fleeing noncombatants in the back, this was … frustrating for them. The skittermanders just cheerfully tried to help them out as much as possible, until an incredibly tired and frustrated vesk commander just grabbed a group and told them ‘we’ve conquered your world, it belongs to us now’. To which the skittermanders replied basically ‘okay, sure, whatever you say boss’, and then kept on merrily doing whatever a skittermander wants to do.

So, they’ll do what their overlords tell them to do, when they’re told to do something, but only to be helpful, not because being conquered is actually a thing that they really acknowledge has happened, and chances are once the job’s done, they’ll cheerfully bugger off to do something else, without necessarily reporting back to, you know, say that the job’s done. They’ve basically widespread infiltrated their conquering empire, often in bureaucratic positions, in an effort to be as helpful as possible, and cheerfully ignore any and all vesk efforts to actually control them.

They’re either the epitome of ‘cheerful obliviousness’ OR … not malicious compliance, necessarily, but definitely calculated compliance, depending on whether they actually don’t understand what’s happened, or they’re deliberately ignoring it. And I love that for them.

Sarcesians

I’m going to admit straight up that the thing that fascinates me most about these guys are the void wings. They’re a race of people descended from the inhabitants of the pair of destroyed worlds that are now the Diaspora asteroid belt, and they adapted to living in space amidst the shattered remains of worlds. They’re thin, spindly, stupidly tall grey beings who can temporarily suspend the need to breath, don’t suffer the environmental and physical effects of vacuum, and instinctively gain energy wings while in vacuum that act as solar sails and enable them to fly through (and only through) the void of space. I’m absolutely enchanted by this idea. They have worlds, they’ve magically terraformed various asteroids to be incredibly idyllic mini-worlds to live and raise children on within the Diaspora, but they can also just fly across the void between asteroids and stations and ships within the asteroid field.

(It does slightly annoy me that PC sarcesians can’t do so for the lengths of time their NPC relatives can, since they only get an hour without breath, while NPC sarcesians can spend resolve points to extend the duration, but it’s still amazing)

In a space game, I just really enjoy the idea of a player character who can be tossed naked into the void of space, ejected out the airlock, what have you, and be perfectly fine for at least a certain amount of time. If you want to do things like explore abandoned space hulks and investigate dead stations and volunteer to do external maintenance on your ship, a sarcesian is a very cool, very handy sort of person to be.

Dwarves

Why am I going with an old fantasy classic when there’s all these cool new alien races? Because space dwarves. Anyone who’s read some of my spelljammer musings for 5e know that I fucking love dwarves in space. Or Pathfinder musings about wanting Sky Citadels to have been flying cities. And Starfinder dwarves have Star Citadels. City-sized Drift-capable space stations from which some of them continue the Quest for the Sky by exploring ever outwards into space.

Ironstar: The largest of the dwarven Star Citadels, the Ironstar is a massive space station equipped with a Drift engine and ruled by a council drawn from the leaders of its major churches, clans, and guilds. It travels through the Vast on a centuries-long Second Quest for Sky, seeking a mythological promised land for its dwarven inhabitants.

I’m probably not going to manage to be more intelligible than this, but. Space dwarves. In flying star cities. Hyperspace-capable flying star cities. The concept makes me so happy I want to eat it. You could have a lost dwarven star citadel fighting eldritch beasties in the Drift. There are canon Star Citadels in the Diaspora asteroid belt, mining and trading with the other inhabitants. The cities can move. You could park a Star Citadel anywhere one could reasonably survive. Or find the haunted remnants of ones that drifted where they couldn’t reasonably survive. You could have a player character who’s the last haunted survivor of a fallen Star Citadel, or one looking for their home Citadel that went missing while they were crewing a trade ship, or just a gruff dwarven asteroid miner who goes home to a Diasporan Citadel when they can to say hello to the family.

Space dwarves are apparently a whole thing for me. I’m vibrating ever-so-gently over here.

Those are my top three, the ones I immediately want to play as. I will also give honourable mentions to the following:

Shirren: psychic four-armed insectoids who broke away from a swarm hivemind and are dizzily and happily obsessed with individuality. They’re tough little buggers and I love them.

Urog: blunt crystalline psychic hoversnails that can break things down at the atomic level to eat only the bits they need, and who are, again, blunt as the face of a hammer. I enjoy a good non-nonsense psychic hoversnail, who doesn’t?

Ysoki: Another returning species from Pathfinder, but the scrappy little rat people still make me happy. Them and skittermander (and goblins) are the squishiest little dudes, but that’s not going to stop either of them.

Space games make me happy. There’s also a bunch of really cool space monster and settlements and planets that are also making me really happy.

(I’m trying not to make a comment about 5e’s spelljammer books, because Starfinder is its own whole game and spelljammer was just a setting book, but ... goddammit, this is what I meant. Put some setting in your setting! Give me throw-away mentions of the dwarven star citadel off voyaging into the Vast, of mysterious bubble cities floating up to the surface of the sun, give me terrifying monsters lurking in hyperspace, give me purple six-armed very helpful people who passively resist colonisation in the most cheerfully obnoxious way possible. Some worldbuilding to work with is very nice, please and thanks.