Building a playable tentacled alien race from a pen sketch
The first non-humanoid race, built in Blender from my drawing over four judged rounds, then wired into character creation with its own head and a ninth clip.
The old “eldritch touched” race is now the Alien, and it has its own body: a mantle, a beak and a beard of face tentacles, a crown of curved eye stalks, four short legs and six tentacle arms. It’s in character creation, the vat and the party, and it holds the party’s weapons by coiling its tentacles around the haft. I drew what I wanted on paper and it took four judged rounds to get the model there.
My sketch. Turn it on its side: the horns are the eye stalks, the digits are its legs and the tentacles hang from the front.
How was it judged?
This is the first body that isn’t on the humanoid frame, so I judged it by eye. After each round the maker sent sheets (turnarounds at 2, 5 and 12 meters, key poses from the clips, a 40 pixel silhouette beside my sketch) to a judging agent, which sent back a verdict, and what the judge and I agreed went into the kit’s defaults before the next round.
Round 1 failed. The eye stalks were short sticks with yellow balls, the legs were so long it sat like a stool, and arms and legs were the same tube. I ruled that the sketch decides the proportions, with short splayed legs and long curved horns. I also decided how it holds weapons: two weapon tentacles coil around the haft, a two-handed clip uses both, and the clubs on the other arms are its unarmed blow.
Round 2 failed on the stalks, which stood up in a bunch like fingers, on eyes that didn’t read past a meter, and on suckers that were five-sided plates like hex nuts. That last one was the kit’s default, so I changed it. Round 3 failed because the suckers faced the body when the arms hung, a streak ran down the back of the skull, the eye bulbs were faceted, and the two-handed swing was the same chop as the overhead. Round 4 passed.
What changed in the kit?
A sucker is now 8 segments instead of 5 and takes the body colors. Eye bulbs have a floor on their segments and rings, and a bulb is 1.7 times the stalk’s width with a pale ring and a dark slit, so they look like eyes at 2 meters. There’s a corpse_check at the end of a build so a death clip lands flat and above the floor, and a cap on how many of a thing the kit makes.
The weapon coils wrap 7 to 10 of 12 sides around the haft. The judge measured the gap between the tentacle and the haft at between -0.005 and +0.005 m at every key, so the weapon neither floats off nor sinks in.
How does a race with no head file work?
Every race used to have a head file picked in the race table. The Alien’s head is part of its body, so its row has an empty head and Races.own_head(id) says so. The code that draws the party’s busts skips the head file and takes the framing from the body’s manifest, 1.0 meter up to the tops of the stalks, which is the framing the judge approved. Worn pieces anchor on the Alien’s tentacle bones where the humanoid anchors don’t exist. A body whose manifest lists no slots gets no worn piece drawn at all.
That is also why armor is currently equippable on an Alien and shows nothing. The user ruled that Aliens wear none, but the slots aren’t refused yet. It’s on the work list.
After the approval I added a ninth clip, the vat idle, because the inventory shows each party member floating in a vat. It floats with the arms and legs drifting and the body rising and settling over 8 seconds. It wasn’t judged, and it looks close to the normal idle.
What does it cost to grow?
I set the prices as they were given to me: Muscle, Tendons, Fat and Grey Matter at 1.1 and Machine at 0.5.
The body has 6,433 triangles, which is over the races’ 6,000 budget. I accepted 6,500 for the round bulbs. The model is installed as a trial, the user approved it with its nine clips, and the default party doesn’t include an Alien.
Also done
- A new test for the Alien in the party passes 51 checks, and the race prices, member pictures, creation theater and doll gear tests were changed to match.
- A hip socket on the mantle’s right side so a holstered ranged weapon has somewhere to be.