I decided early on that the Interstellar Profiteer universe would have No Intelligent Alien Races.
- No warlike yet honorable empire of humanoids constantly on the edge of invading the peaceful humans
- No enigmatic mysterious ancient race that occasionally divulges some mystery of the universe yet is beguiled by our human spirit.
- No all-consuming insectoid race driven by a hivemind for us to overcome with our individually.
- And above all else, no fucking space-elves.
Why? Not only am I bored to tears with the existing alien-race tropes, I'm perpetually underwhelmed by the lack of 'alien-ness' (for lack of a better word) of the stuff that's out there. Klingons, Narn? Based on the Japanese. Warlike, honor-based society? Sounds suspiciously like imperial Japan of the WWII era. Vulcans, Eldar, Protoss, Silfen, Minbari? Yep, all of 'em are basically Space-Elves.
Another reason is to stay in-sync with the Fermi Paradox - given that in the present-day real world we haven't been contacted, there's little reason to believe there's aliens in the local stellar neighborhood.
Either way, I'm taking another page out of Joss Whedon's book and putting a hard-line on No Aliens. Alien life is a definite - I'm going for a panspermia vibe, where we find single-celled life (or the remnants of it) on a handful of likely planets. But it is of little consequence to most of the game.
Perhaps if I extended the timeline out a hundred years or so and we explored the whole Milky Way there might be a couple intelligent races out there (many Drake Equation estimates put the number of intelligent races at a dozen or so in our galaxy) or maybe some interesting artifacts of a long-dead race.
