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Pleltkyk, trilateral arthropod swimmers of sector 708
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Glelukun
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Joined: 29 Jan 2024
Posts: 13
Location: Birmingham, UK

PostPosted: Thu Feb 22, 2024 8:47 pm    Post subject: Pleltkyk, trilateral arthropod swimmers of sector 708 Reply with quote

PLELTKYK


Endemic to the gas giant Gythsheno in the far reaches of the outer rim, the pleltkyk are an amphibious, aquatic hard invertebrate sentient species with blue plated bodies and a rare trilaterally symmetrical body plan. They make their homes in migratory cities of natural coralite that rise above and sink down through the planet’s unusual suspended liquid stratum. Pleltkyk are boisterous, expert aquatic hunters and enthusiastic pilots of their own primitive aquaerial vehicles.

Until recently pleltkyk society was at a pre-information industrial level and highly fragmented, distributed across a vast, deep and turbulent gas giant that could easily swallow most rocky worlds a thousand times over. Efforts to unite their scattered communities have rapidly risen in scale and importance over the past standard half century. Galactic corporate interests began mining tibanna gas from their atmosphere towards the latter part of the Republican era, and later Imperial exploitation has lent a more explicitly violent character to their interactions with the wider galaxy.

Personality
Natural pack predators, most peltkyk are unafraid of rough and tumble, but more interested in finding a stable group to operate within than taking on the galaxy alone. They are generally curious, bold, spontaneous and abrupt, tending to straightforwardly seek consensus and avoid subterfuge. Many are strongly motivated by the plight of their homeworld and people, as well as a wish to be recognised as equal fellow sentients.

They enjoy moving fast, and can be prone to a degree of reckless or thrill-seeking behaviour. While they tend to be frustrated by the difficulties of moving on the flat surfaces so common away from their native world, some find worthy compensation in a galaxy wonderfully rich in machines with powerful engines. Used to living in large groups, clambering around or across each other and sleeping in piles, pleltkyk have a strong sense of communal responsibility but a very hazy one of personal space. Their tendency to constantly sway and undulate can also be distracting.

Physical description
At first glance a pleltkyk on land resembles a blue, aqua or lilac-coloured fish planted upright, moving with a waddling gait. Usually around 150cm tall, with a blunt tri-lobed upward facing beak and overlapping scale-like plates, it takes a moment for most humanoids to decode what they’re seeing. They have three gracile segmented paddle arms and three large, mobile bulb-like eyes arranged radially around a cylindrical body, with three shorter, thicker flippers that also serve as legs at the base of their torso.

They are simultaneous hermaphrodites with no secondary sexual characteristics and no nudity taboo, so on Gythsheno pleltkyk usually only wear relevant carrying pouches or tool harnesses. In the wider galaxy most individuals take their cues from what seems practical in the moment or advantages their interest in being recognised as civilised sentients.

Homeworld
The gas giant Gythsheno in the Hrapul system

Languages
All pleltkyk speak one, or usually several, dialects of pleludichora, a dense musical language that sounds something like a chorus of gossiping woodwinds — or, if they’re swearing, like three humanoids trying to settle an argument through the mouthpiece of one kloo horn. Any pleltkyk in contact with offworlders quickly picks up basic, and often a few other languages they’ve been regularly exposed to.

Example names
Fuchebukluut, Chrelowen, Vethliuloun, Telalengrevi, Glelukun

Adventurers
During the Imperial era and before there was almost no way for pleltkyk to leave their planet legitimately. Any that made their way offworld were either kidnapped for some nefarious purpose or managed to smuggle themselves aboard a tibanna freighter, be it bribing the captain of a battered black marketeer or wriggling unnoticed into the ducts of a bulk freighter. Those who left willingly might be urgently seeking the aid or resources of the wider galaxy to aid in their struggle against those exploiting their people, or they could be reckless wild-eyed explorers mesmerised by the gas miners’ stories of alien stars orbited by strange solid worlds.

Given their biological need to moult in their home city, even if they managed to gain autonomy in the wider galaxy pleltkyk would be either exceptionally driven to find a reliable way to return home (even if not to stay,) or deeply fatalistic, prepared to do whatever it took to leave a mark of their choosing on the galaxy in the years they had left.



PLELTKYK
Attribute Dice: 12D

  • DEXTERITY 2D/4D+2
  • KNOWLEDGE 1D+1/3D+2
  • MECHANICAL 2D/4D+2
  • PERCEPTION 2D/4D
  • STRENGTH 2D/4D
  • TECHNICAL 1D/3D

Move: 10/12 (walking and climbing, *5/6 on level ground, see trait Mobile in a Mobile Element); 12/14 (swimming)

Traits and abilities

Aquatic: Pleltkyk can breathe both air and water and can withstand extreme pressures found in ocean depths.

Mobile in a Mobile Element: Having evolved to live out their whole lives in complex, ever-changing gaseous and aquatic environments with no even footing to be found, pleltkyk think and move three dimensionally as naturally as they breathe. They ignore the first multi-action penalty incurred on their turn for checks that involve movement in axonometric space (acrobatics, operating speeder- to starfighter-scale aerial, submarine or space vehicles, climbing and jumping, or swimming.)

However, their physiology is poorly adapted for navigating flat surfaces. Their walking movement speed is halved on level ground (very easy or easy terrain) and they must make an additional moderate dexterity (or running, if trained) check to avoid stumbling or staggering when moving above cruising speed. This check doesn’t incur a multi-action penalty, but halves their movement if failed.

Parched Environments: When in very dry environments, such as on desert planets like Jakku or Tatooine, pleltkyk respire less efficiently. They are impaired physically and psychologically by their discomfort and the stress of their surroundings. They suffer a −1D penalty to all Dexterity, Perception and Strength attribute and skill checks.

Subaquatic Environments: When fully immersed in liquid environments pleltkyk breathe and move more freely, and feel generally much more at ease. While submerged they gain a +1D bonus to all Dexterity, Perception and Strength attribute and skill checks.

Trilateral Symmetry: Thanks to their threefold body plan pleltkyk can hold three objects at once, and have 360° vision. They can see beings or events all around them, and excepting darkness or other obscuring factors any attempt to sneak up behind one automatically fails.

Vocal Syrinx: The complexity of their multi-valved breathing tracts and their own subtle polyphonic, poetic musical language means pleltkyk can invoke the tones of shyriiwook as easily as those of basic. They are adept at precisely discerning and reproducing sounds, as well as intuiting their meaning. The gamemaster should allow pleltkyk to make appropriate Languages checks involving spoken languages at a lower difficulty than other characters.

Story Factors

Ecdysis: Every 1,252 galactic standard days, four times in the 5,010 day Gythsheno orbit, all pleltkyk must return home. Not just to their planet, but to the coralite city of their first juvenile moult. In order to shed their chitinous outer covering they need to spend time in the same atmospheric and electromagnetic environment where their shell was first formed. Attempting to moult under other conditions prevents their new carapace from hardening, meaning almost certain death.

Heteromorph Species: Being an unknown species with physiology far from the galactic norm, pleltkyk in the galaxy often draw attention. While their limbs are dexterous enough to use standard tools, gear and armour will often need to be custom made or heavily modified to fit their unusual anatomy.

During the Imperial era Gythsheno is also interdicted by the Empire, and no pleltkyk should be able to leave their home planet. Perhaps on a successful Alien species check, a higher ranking Imperial official may realise something is amiss….


Notes and inspiration
Traits- and lore-wise, the pleltkyk as we statted them are pretty overstuffed, and naturally they would not be appropriate for all tables. I invented them along with my GM and group for my second ever TTRPG campaign and an significant plot arc revolved around their homeworld, so a lot of enthusiasm went into them. Possibly with a more rules lawyerly crowd or in the hands of a powergamer they might make for a pretty un-fun party experience, but for our three-strong group of aliens (verpine, wookiee and I) our mix of weird specific abilities make for some creative ways out of (and into) scrapes.

The initial seed for this species was thinking about the affordances of a TTRPG group to showcase kinds of characters who couldn’t be central to a live action film, for simple budgetary or other practical reasons. Scenes like those in the Mos Eisley cantina and Jabba’s palace are still some of the most thrilling to me when rewatching the original trilogy, simply because of the way they showcase the huge variety of people to be found, even in a single backwater dive. I felt the more ‘like an alien’ an alien character could seem, the more they would help provide a story we’ll likely never quite see on screen, and the more they could act as a signifier for the variety of viewpoints, beliefs, ways of being the spotlight of narrative can shine on.

We know that non-humans are persecuted by the Empire, and that many bothans sacrificed themselves for the rebel cause, so there must be other alien rebel stories playing out in far-flung sectors all across the galaxy. Through fan production we have the opportunity to expand on all those implications of other lives with vastly different umwelten co-existing and sharing the struggle for freedom in the same galaxy.

One of the seeds for the look and identity for the pleltkyk was discovering the extinct Trilobozoa phylum, and wondering about the ‘could-have-beens‘ of evolution. They’re also influenced by coral ecosystems, including the eusocial sponge guardian shrimp Synalpheus regalis.

The specific key visual direction I settled on is basically an aquatic arthropod that can walk upright, swim, climb and use tools, or ‘what if a penguin had fingers and was a shrimp.’ Then I made that trilateral. My other main visual inspirations were Alex Ries’ birrin design and Subnautica concept art, as well as the bug-ferrets and scuds from Jay Eaton’s Runaway to the Stars setting.

The peltkyk are also designed broadly to look like they could be manufactured as ornate, Jim Henson Workshop-style puppets. Their segmented limbs can flop and flap about and their heads could be manipulated in a classic craned-hand muppeteer manner, possibly threaded up through one of the three legs.
_________________
"Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. [...] Remember this. Try."
The Trail of Political Consciousness, Karis Nemik
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Glelukun
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Joined: 29 Jan 2024
Posts: 13
Location: Birmingham, UK

PostPosted: Thu Feb 22, 2024 9:27 pm    Post subject: Excerpts from a Senatorial Sentience Commission Report Reply with quote

a Galactic Republican Senatorial Sentience Commission publication wrote:
Compressed Précis for the GRSSC Expeditionary Survey Report on the Hrapul System, Sector 708, 7946 CRC [31 BBY]

A species of chief concern to this report are the pleltkyk, amphibious, trilaterally symmetrical beings indigenous and endemic to the gas giant Hrapul-6, also called Gythsheno.

Anatomical sketch, in brief
at rest on land, a pleltkyk resembles a torpedo or blunt cone standing about 150 cm high, covered in large chitinous scales generally of pale blue, aqua or lilac colour. Three large bulb-like mineral lens eyes are positioned in radial symmetry around a tri-lobed upward-facing beak. These can be extended or pulled flat into divots in the beak. They will often crane their flexible torso to point their beak towards an interlocutor. An inner pharyngeal tri-lobed beak is used to capture and disassemble food items, and can be extended about 30 cm beyond the primary beak with significant speed and force. They have two sets of three segmented limbs with five digits each. The stockier and broader propulsive set is at the base of the torso, while the other is more gracile and ribbon-like with fingers capable of tool-use, radially offset by 120 degrees about one third of the bodylength down from the tip of the beak.

They breathe oxygen, filtering it with average efficiency from gaseous or aqueous environments. Standard biological sampling protocols — in-depth results {attached} — show their blood is thick and faintly iridescent, deep purplish brown in colour due to containing both haemocyanin- and haemoglobin-like cells, along with other compounds similar to those in mon calamari and quarren blood that allow them to maintain bodily functions across a broad range of oxygen concentrations, temperatures and atmospheric pressures. Interviews with tibanna mining platform workers suggest that excessive dryness may inhibit their ability to respire efficiently.

Physically they are fairly robust, having to deal with significant fluctuations in pressure and temperature, but noticably slow-moving and clumsy when locomoting with their three basal limbs on flat even surfaces, preferring to swim or clamber through tangled meshes of coralite. On this account mining platform workers refer to them as ‘tripeds’, or ‘trippies.’ When observed on commercial installations they tend to constantly sway, shuffle and twist, possibly to compensate for some mildly unpleasant effect standing on smooth stationary planes has on their autonomic nervous system. Their sex and gender configurations are currently unobserved.

Evidence gathering
The commission cannot report with confidence on pleltkyk linguistic development, since there are not currently funds available to attach advanced protocol droids to our expeditionary survey teams, nor sufficient allotted survey time to manually produce a translation codex. While direct evidence cannot be presented due to these constraints, which have weighed heavily on many recent GRSSC surveys, the commissioners find it highly probable that the pleltkyk have a native grammar and a sophisticated ability to communicate.

Likely thanks to a complex multi-chambered breathing tract pleltkyk have a broad vocal range, encompassing infrasonic and subsonic registers. Commissioners encountered several individuals who could not only mimic words and sounds of galactic basic, but string them together in attempts to form novel phrases, although the effect was at times slightly uncanny and discontinuous due to different phonemes often emerging from separate spiracles.

One of the commissioners bought passage on a repulsorcraft tour which included a stop at a pleltkyk coralite city. These large, jumbled geodesic colonies of Gythsheno coralite are naturally occurring, and earlier reports have stated that pleltkyk simply inhabit them, following their vertical migrations through the gaseous and liquid strata of the planet. However, our research shows that there is significant evidence of both tool use and specific technological development. {Attached} to this report the reader will find holographic records of small artisan-made propellor driven aquaerial skiffs, sails, docks and other accoutrements fitted to the coralite structure, as well as equipment seemingly designed to slowly sculpt and deform coralite with finely modulated sonic and electromagnetic signals.

The commissioner was among an audience treated to what a quarren tour guide referred to as a traditional pleltkyk choral performance. Polyphonic music seems to be a significant cultural expression of the pleltkyk, and the pipe organ-like effect of their massed multitoned voices resonating through the coralite seemed both purposeful and impressive. Later interviews with a mon calamari engineer and an aqualish tourist suggested that these efforts are even more dramatic, and even moving, underwater. The engineer, whose identity we have redacted for privacy reasons, has allowed their full testimony to be {attached.} Notably, they cautioned the commission that some corporate tibanna mining interests may have deceived or otherwise detained pleltkyk as indentured labourers hauling carbon-freezing equipment components through mazes of pipes and cables. The commission makes no further comment on rumours and remains grateful for the support of good corporate citizens across the Hrapul system.

There seems to be almost no united or contiguous large-scale communal association among the pleltkyk, with the extended clan formation of the coralite city being their primary organising unit. The commission gathered scattered impressions that suggest an expeditionary or postal service of some kind may convey news of distant events between cities. Perhaps this is to be expected on a gas giant, where the vast habitable area and complex spacial and electromagnetic geography make broad social organisation especially complex for primitive societies.

Summary of recommendations
Based on evidence gathered, the Senatorial Sentience Commission urges the senate to make time for a positive vote on pleltkyk sentience, with the aim of officially recategorising them from semi-sentient to protected primitive sentient status. At that time they would be assigned a caretaker senator while a pathway to full Galactic Republican citizen status is established.
Further, although the commission recognises the premium on senatorial attention grows ever higher, our belief is that it would be procedurally appropriate to bring forward a measure granting a preliminary collective indigenous habitation deed to the biosphere of Hrapul-6, called Gythsheno, on behalf of the peltkyk. We invite any interested senators to contact the GRSSC in order to establish sponsorship for these draft measures at their earliest convenience.

THIS FILE MARKED COUNTERFEIT ALL COPIES TO BE PURGED — MINISTER OF INFORMATION POLLUX HAX:IMPERIAL AUTHORITY CODE 7208F3

_________________
"Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. [...] Remember this. Try."
The Trail of Political Consciousness, Karis Nemik
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