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Plain and simple Garak
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In many RPGs, the enemies are easy to figure out. In *most* horror RPGs the bad guys are the supernatural creatures. If you are playing Buffy for example then you are going to be hunting vampires. Now it is also fun to "flip the script" so in the various World of Darkness Vampire games you are the vampire. You are still the monster, but you have some more control over that evil. In "Ordinary World" in NIGHT SHIFT you can play a supernatural creature, but you are not the bad person, you are "just a person" trying to get by in a world full of mortgages, jobs, oh and neighbors that might want to kill you.
In many fantasy games there are plenty of other monsters that want to kill you. We might be getting away from orcs (thank goodness) and goblins (have not used them as "bad guys" in over a decade or two) but there are still plenty of evil dragons, beholders, and of course demons and devils.
Sci-Fi games tend to fall into the same sort of tropes. Only this time it is whatever aliens are the focus.
I want to talk about three different sorts of aliens, all considered to be enemy species, but handled in different ways.
First are the Cardassians. Introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation and really got the focus in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The Cardassians are humanoid (this is important later) and come from the world of Cardassia. They had occupied the nearby Bajor in a very clear analog to fascist Germany occupying France. The Cardassians are never painted as irredeemably evil. Yes, many of them are in fact evil, but there are some that are not. They are also depicted as highly intelligent, organized, and utterly brutal. For most of the seven seasons on DS9, they were the bad guys. Each step forward (oh look they love their kids) is reversed (oh, but they slaughter Bajoran orphans). They are richly detailed and complicated, but always a foe to stand up to. They are not an existential threat though to anyone but the Bajorans. They are not even "supernatural" threats until the very, very end when Gul Dukat (a Cardassian and our main bag guy since Season 1) is possessed by the Kosst Amojan, the literal Bajoran devil.
The other alien race is known only as
the 456, for the frequency they contact Earth on in
Torchwood: Children of Earth. The Nazi connections with the Cardassians are intended, and not designed to be subtle. These aliens are also not subtle; they steal human children and graft them into their own bodies because the chemicals the children create feels good to them. They are back because they want more kids. These creatures are never seen clearly, we never learn their name, their language, or even where they are from. Only that they want our children and they have the means to get them. They are properly scary. But. Do they make for a good "big bad?" I don't think so. They have one trick; stealing children. While that is good enough for a fairy tale witch, the witch usually gets tossed into the oven at the end. The 456 get sent back to their planet/ship or are destroyed much in the same manner when Capt. Jack Harkness feeds their communication signal back on them and killing his own grandson in the process.
The last is the Xenomorph from the Aliens franchise. Alien is a true horror film in space, right down to a monster stalking everyone to a "final girl" in Ellen Ripley. Aliens is sci-fi adventure. I have lost track of how many Traveller games I saw in the 80s that were more or less a riff on the Aliens movie. Again these guys are properly scary. One on a ship is a true horror. Hundreds on a planet can take out a bunch of Marines. The trouble with the Xenomorph is there is little to no mystery about them anymore. In the original movies they were mindless, insectlike killing machines. In future movies they...well I am still not 100% sure what Alien Covenant was about or Prometheus, though I did enjoy them. The "Shared universe" of Alien, Blade Runner, and Predator though does give me a lot to game with.
Use In BlackStar
The issue for me is not just "do these aliens make for a good scary monster?" They do. The real question is "will they work for me and my particular game?"
I mean this is no different than any other game or setting. Let's take an odd example. Orcs in Ravenloft. I originally did not want to do orcs, a classic D&D/Fantasy monster, in my Ravenloft games. When it came up that I needed an orc-like monster I went with something more akin to a Grimlock or even a Neanderthal-Troglodyte (in the classical sense of the word) creature. I made it work AND it also made me want to redo the troglodyte from D&D to make them more "devolved" human. Like the old Homo Sapiens Troglodytes. Maybe even a cross between H.S. and the Pan Troglodytes.
But what about BlackStar which happens in a Star Trek universe. Well oddly enough that rules out the Cardassians. We know what they were doing at the time in Universe, they were at war with the Federation. So I will have that going on, but in the far background. They are on the far side of the Alpha Quadrant. My action is closer to home and might even take tiny little excursions into the Beta Quadrant.
The Xenomorphs would be fun for an "Episode" (what I am calling a single adventure) but not a "Season" (a campaign). Same with the 456.
Originally I WAS thinking the 456 would be my focus as the bogeyman alien in the background. But having a couple of conversations with my oldest he was like "why not just use the Mi-Go?"
He has a point.
There are a lot of great reasons to use them not just for the Lovecraftian origin. They would have had an outpost on Yuggoth/Pluto that I absolutely LOVE. It fits in with my ideas when watching the Thing and the various horror movies on Mars.
I mean if I am going to do "Cthulhu meets Star Trek" then I kinda need to have appearances by the Mi-Go, Elder Things, Shoggoths, and Yithians. They were described as "Alien" but I think I want to use them in the "Alien" sense of both Lovecraft AND of Trek. The Mi-Go could take the place of the Borg in terms of a lifeform that can't be reasoned with and have their own, completely separate, morality.
Given that my preferred version of Trek for this is Modiphius' Star Trek Adventures this makes things pretty easy for me. I can now use ideas and stats from the new Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 system.
But system and stats are only the start of the conversation, not the end. I have to make sure these guys are scary. Mi-Go landing on the hull of The Protector while not wearing EV suits and cutting through (like the Borg did) is scary. Leaving behind dead crew with their brains surgically removed (not unlike "Spock's Brain", but less...bad) is a little more horrifying. Finding crew members whose livers have been altered to create a sort of super-acid that eats through their bodies but keeps on working is more horrifying still. The Mi-Go don't communicate. Their chitterings are unable to be translated. Since they are reported as not being able to be filmed or photographed they are largely invisible to sensors; having natural stealth abilities.
I could introduce them much in the same way we saw in "At The Mountains of Madness" only this time they are discovered on Pluto/Yuggoth. This leads to discoveries of bases on Earth, millions of years old, in the Andes, Appalachians, and Himalayas mountain ranges. How to get the crew out into deeper space to encounter them is the bridge I have not built yet.
Frankly, I am overwhelmed with the potential.
ETA: I have found some more data that puts the Mi-Go origin, or at least another base of operations, at 61 Cygni, about 11.4 light-years away. 64 hours at classical Warp 9, but only 19 hours at The Protector's Warp 13. In Star Trek, this is also the home of the Tellarites. So obviously the Mi-Go visited them as well.
I will take a completely different approach in my Star Trek: Mercy game.
The Aliens
