Political Space Adventure [long]

[Jono]

Hello, everyone. This is practically my first post at the Forge, so go easy on me if I make a mistake, please ;-)

I was at Forge Midwest, where I met some of the regulars from this board.  But since then, I haven't posted anything, or even played very much, as I've been insanely busy doing things like building a software company and fighting off knife-wielding thugs on a dark street in Lithuania.  I still do lurk on the Forge and read things, and there is some hope on the horizon that I'll have more gaming time soon.  I was recently in Boston for a weekend of role-playing with friends there (DitV, 1001 Nights, and Shock) which got me all excited about role-playing all over again, so I really want to get a regular game group in Chicago together soon.

Earlier today I was listening to the podcasts on Theory from the Closet, and I got to the interview with Ron from Forge Midwest (linked to from this thread).  To my utter suprise and disbelief, Ron mentioned my name a few times towards the end of the interview as an example of a promising newbie.  He said, "I'd be surprised if that Jono guy doesn't show us some kind of proto-game-idea on the Forge pretty soon."

Well, gee whiz!  Actually I do have a proto-game-idea, I just haven't had much time to think about it over the past several months due to Real Life intervening.  But hearing my name come up in that interview sort of kicked me into action, so I spent a few hours writing out my vague, nebulous ideas in order to share them with the Forge, get some feedback, and hopefully get myself motivated to create something that's not computer software.

This is going to be long, so I'll put my basic description of my idea in one post, and then my list of questions in the post after that.  I hope that's OK with the moderators.

[Jono]

This idea is still very nebulous.  I wanna do a really far-out space-opera kind of game featuring no humans at all.

Game concept:  An entire alien race is on the move.  Their homeworld has been destroyed.  The survivors flee through space in a group of ragtag starships, seeking a place to establish a new civilization.  These aliens do not remotely resemble humans physically, but some of their personal motivations are ones we would find quite familiar: They want to survive; beyond that, they want their offspring to survive and prosper and their people to continue; and beyond that, they want to build a new society which is better than the old.

They are sad about their lost homeworld, of course, but they all admit it was no utopia.  They had wars, they had social and economic problems, they had environmental destruction and religious conflict.  Everyone agrees that the new homeworld, if they can ever find it, is an opportunity to start over and do better.  But everyone has a different idea of what "better" means, and so the captains and leaders of the escape fleet begin to fragment into factions.

You are an influential figure in the escape fleet.  You had a difficult history on the old world.  This has led you to have certain strong ideals about how the new world ought to be.  If you can overcome your rivals, you can make your vision of utopia a reality.  But space is vast and full of dangers, and if you don't work together with the rest of the survivors, the end may be death for all of you.

Eight Cool Things that I want to have be in this game:

1. Collaborative creation of an alien race, its biology, reproduction, technology, history, religion, culture, sense of humor, etc.  Starting out sketchy and defining it more and more through the things that are established in play.  Creating something that everybody in the group is excited about playing, and that is uniquely a creation of the group.  Stretching your role-playing abilities to imagine what it would be like to be one of these non-human creatures.  Commenting on humanity through the differences your aliens have from humanity.

2. As part of the envisioning of this race, creating issues with the old-world society.  Politically charged issues that various characters are going to be called to take some kind of stand on.  E.G. your civilization depends on the labors of a servant caste, who are genetically modified to be extra strong while losing their ability to become dissatisfied or rebel.  Is this right?  Or, say, your civilization believes that correct worship of the, I dunno, the Galactic Hive Mother, or something, is so important that it would be better for your people to die off entirely than to abandon this sacred tradition.  Perhaps there would be several of these issues, and player characters would be required to stake their positions on each one.  I'm looking for juicy disagreements between protagonists.

3. First contact scenarios.  The ships of another sentient species have come into sensor range!  Will they turn out to be friend or foe?  I would like to see some tense debate between characters favoring a tactical first strike versus characters favoring diplomacy.  I want the voice of war and the voice of peace to be played by characters who care so much about being right that they're willing to stake their reputations, their lives, and the survival of the species on the fact of the outsiders being what the character thinks they are.  I want the outsiders to want something that the players might not be willing to give.  I want communication to be difficult.  I want facts about the outsiders to be gradually revelaed that strengthen one interpretation or another interpretation of their motives.  I want this to be nail-bitingly tense.

4. Limited fleet-wide resources.  I want there to be some kind of numerical score, shared across all players, that gets gradually depleted across multiple game sessions.  If it runs out and you haven't formed a settlement on a suitable planet, then everybody dies to starvation/thirst/asphyxiation/cold/etc.  I want players to be able to draw down this pool for their own selfish purposes in various ways.  I want this pool to represent increasing desperation.  I want this pool to hilight how the players are partly in competition and partly in cooperation.

5.  Flashbacks.  I keep saying that characters should be highly motivated.  Where does this motivation come from?  I figure everybody has some pretty hefty backstories on the old world.  Rather than coming up with all these backstories up-front, I'd rather have some kind of mechanic where you can play out a flashback scene to explain why your character has some motivation.  If you play out the flashback very well, then maybe you'd even get a mechanical bonus to something you're trying to do in the present, that is related to that motivation.  In the process, you'd be fleshing out the details of the old world and its political issues.  Maybe this isn't just motivations:  Maybe if your character really needs to have some skill or item in the present that's not on your sheet, you can call for a flashback to the old world, play out a scene showing how your character got the skill or item, and then add it to your sheet and continue.

6.  Planetary exploration scenes.  The fleet has identified a planet which may be suitable.  You know that the atmosphere is basically breatheable and the gravity is not going to crush you to death.  The player characters (or some subset of them?) go ahead in fast little zippy ships to land on the planet and find out whether it has hostile natives, deadly storms, volcanos belching deadly gas, whether your food crops can grow there, etc.  Have some fun adventures on the planet dealing with these dangers.  Argue with each other about whether you should recommend this planet for settlement or hold out for a better one, knowing that no planet you find will ever be perfect and that the pool of limited fleet resources will go down by an unpredictable amount before you come to another potentially suitable planet.  I want to tie this in somehow to a character's beliefs and desires, so that the character will be tempted to be, say, less than objective in their evaluation of the planet.  Perhaps there is indigenous intelligent life, and one faction thinks that means the planet should be left alone, another faction wants to coexist, and a third faction wants to wipe them all out and take over.  Perhaps a faction knows that they are currently behind in influence, and so if they settle now their hated enemies will dominate the politics of the settlement, and so they have an incentive to present the planet as unsuitable in order to gain more time for more influence-gathering.  I want things to get so crazy that the explorers are tempted to murder each other and make it look like an accident.

7.  Other kinds of adventure scenes, like space battles and infiltration missions, ostensibly for the sake of the survival of the race, which interact with the beliefs and agendas and provide opportunities for further political maneuvering (like, say, what if glorious personal victory in a space battle results in more influence with the citizens?  Even if getting to that glorious personal victory require tactics that endanger the overall success of the space battle strategy?).

8.  Endgame: Let's say the fleet has finally found a planet suitable for settlement.  There would perhaps be one final session playing out some localized threats to the fledgeling settlement, and at the same time providing one last chance for characters to push their definition of a better society.  Some final conflict resolution based on final influence values would decide the direction that the growing society takes with regard to the various issues decided at the beginning.  Do they outlaw the practice of the genetically-engineered servant caste?  Do they abandon the worship of the Galctic Hive Mother?  Some epilogue narration for all the surviving characters, the end.

[Jono]

My questions for The Forge:

I still have only the vaguest ideas of what kind of dice mechanics, credibility distribution, and reward systems this game would have.  But in general, I'm envisioning this as an episodic kind of game where there are various set kinds of scenes.  A Planetary Exploration scene, a Flashback scene, a First Contact scene, a Space Battle scene, and so on would each have special status in the rules.  Maybe each type of scene would have certain additional game mechanics unique to that type of scene.  I want the scenearios to be pretty well defined and structured, so that when everybody gathers to play, they can say "OK, we're playing First Contact tonight", and everybody knows what that means, just as if you said you were playing a certain board game.  And I want the result of playing all those kinds of scenes over time to build up the story of these characters and the species they belong to, with more detail and variety than would perhaps be possible with just a single generic conflict resolution mechanism.  So my questions:

1. How to make these different scenes link up in a coherent way, so that you're still playing the same game even if one session you're playing a space battle and another night you're playing a political debate.  I want them to link up thematically, so there has to be some way of throwing out the types of scenes that don't address the issues you care about, or else modifying the scenes to be relevant to those issues.  Also, I'm thinking they should link up mechanically through the player characters (for instance, some kind of currency like "influence" that could go up and down throughout all types of scenes, and also through shared things like the fleet resource pool.)

2. What's a good way to decide what scenes will be coming up next, and how many scenes to go through before getting to the endgame?  If there's a single constant GM than he or she can just decide this, but I'm thinking it might be more interesting to have a structured mechanic for deciding who gets to set up the next scenario.

3. Who's in control of the setting details during each scenario.  For instance, if we're investigating a planet, who comes up with the challenges on that planet?  I'm imagining perhaps the person who called the planetary exploration scene gets to be temporary GM for that scene: his or her character sits out, and that player plays the planet and its inhabitants.  Then next session, you could do First Contact and have another player being temporary GM for the alien outsiders.  On the other hand, maybe it would be more interesting to have no GM and a structured way for all players to introduce setting facts.

4. Would this work better with a single character per player (providing continuity between all scene types), or with some kind of ensemble cast / troupe play, or even with players representing factions rather than individuals?  (so that the player could choose the most appropriate character to act in each scene?)

5. For the kind of political conflict that I want to happen, ther political issues built into the setting would have to be things that players really cared about, and they issues would have to be woven throughout all the scenes.  How to pick good issues for this?  (that is, the players are picking the issues, not me, but how to guide them?)  I'm being inspired a bit by "Shock" in this part of the game idea, but the kind of issues I'm imagining are much more specific than Shock's -- they're things about the culture that will either change or remain the same in the new world, and those are the big things that are at stake.  Is this too abstract an idea to get people to care about?  Is it too restrictive for the kinds of beliefs characters should have?

6. I want the game mechanics and reward system to push players towards fighting viciously for their characters' political stances, but at the same time have a constant danger of a "total party kill" if there is not enough cooperation.  So I guess my next question is, what sort of direction should I be looking in for reward systems that can do this?

7. For the idea to be workable, it seems that the various kinds of scenes I want to do (space battle, first contact, flashback, planet exploration, infiltration mission, debate in the high council, etc) each need to have some kind of knob on them so that you can turn the knob to point to the political issues and beliefs that are at the core of the game.  For some of these types of scenes, it's easy to see how to do this.  For others, not so easy.  Do you think this will be workable, or do I actually have two incompatible game ideas here that I should develop separately?



Thanks in advance for taking the time to read all this and for your comments and criticism, which I'm sure will be helpful.

[BlackTerror]

Ooh, this looks like an excellent proposal for a new game, and it's presented in a very easy to understand, coherent way. Good, clear writing.

A lot of these design decisions will affect the tone of the game; a game where players each play single characters will play, and feel, very different from a game where each controls fleets and entire factions, for instance. No one can tell you which of those is better for your game except yourself. There's no objective standard for comparison because it's entirely subjective.

1. How to make these different scenes link up in a coherent way, so that you're still playing the same game even if one session you're playing a space battle and another night you're playing a political debate.  I want them to link up thematically, so there has to be some way of throwing out the types of scenes that don't address the issues you care about, or else modifying the scenes to be relevant to those issues.  Also, I'm thinking they should link up mechanically through the player characters (for instance, some kind of currency like "influence" that could go up and down throughout all types of scenes, and also through shared things like the fleet resource pool.)

One way would be to allow the players to choose which type of scene to play next, so they can choose the most relevant scene for themselves. I'm starting to picture something like multiple lists of scene types: maybe one for the early game/scouting phase, one for mid game/examining specific planets phase, one for endgame/fleet landing and settlement phase. Each list would have a different assortment of scene types, undoubtably with some overlap between them (battles could happen any time, for instance) that make sense in the current phase. Players could choose a type of scene from the current phase list, possibly with a restriction against two of the same scene type in a row.

2. What's a good way to decide what scenes will be coming up next, and how many scenes to go through before getting to the endgame?  If there's a single constant GM than he or she can just decide this, but I'm thinking it might be more interesting to have a structured mechanic for deciding who gets to set up the next scenario.

If you went with the phase structure, each phase could have some sort of requirement to advance to the next one, or possibly just a requisite number of scenes. Otherwise, players could choose from a range of number of scenes depending on if they want a long or short game: 5+ the number of players or 3+ twice the number of players, for instance.

Choosing which type of scene is next could bid over by players in an auction system spending some sort of points, or the next scene could be created by whoever has the best proposal, decided by a vote of the players. Or that power could just rotate around the players. What you choose depends what you're looking to get out of the scene selection process.

3. Who's in control of the setting details during each scenario.  For instance, if we're investigating a planet, who comes up with the challenges on that planet?  I'm imagining perhaps the person who called the planetary exploration scene gets to be temporary GM for that scene: his or her character sits out, and that player plays the planet and its inhabitants.  Then next session, you could do First Contact and have another player being temporary GM for the alien outsiders.  On the other hand, maybe it would be more interesting to have no GM and a structured way for all players to introduce setting facts.

I could see either method being very functional. Again, this seems more like a decision that must be informed by the style and mood you're going for.

Same for #4 -- the scope and subject of the game probably has the strongest effect on the game feel..

5. For the kind of political conflict that I want to happen, ther political issues built into the setting would have to be things that players really cared about, and they issues would have to be woven throughout all the scenes.  How to pick good issues for this?  (that is, the players are picking the issues, not me, but how to guide them?)  I'm being inspired a bit by "Shock" in this part of the game idea, but the kind of issues I'm imagining are much more specific than Shock's -- they're things about the culture that will either change or remain the same in the new world, and those are the big things that are at stake.  Is this too abstract an idea to get people to care about?  Is it too restrictive for the kinds of beliefs characters should have?

As long as they are divisive issues with two (or more) sides with clear, justifiable reasons to support them -- not obviously good and evil -- then these issues should make for strong, meaty conflict between the factions. You know, I just realized this game is starting to sound like Alpha Centauri...

Obviously, a perfect, harmonious society would make for a pretty boring game!

6. I want the game mechanics and reward system to push players towards fighting viciously for their characters' political stances, but at the same time have a constant danger of a "total party kill" if there is not enough cooperation.  So I guess my next question is, what sort of direction should I be looking in for reward systems that can do this?

Sounds like you want these two goals to be in opposition: working selfishly gets you personal power and benefits your issue at the cost of the shared life resource, while cooperating reduces your issue but helps conserve resources. That's almost similar to the classic Prisoner's Dilemma. Or, succeeding at selfish acts could increase your power/issue and decrease resources, while failing it decreases life resources even worse; Succeeding at cooperation would slightly diminish life resources and help resolve... what? What does cooperation accomplish, mechanically, in game terms? That's a good question to answer. Failing at cooperation would cause your personal power/issue to take a big hit.

That's just one idea of how to implement such a system.

7. For the idea to be workable, it seems that the various kinds of scenes I want to do (space battle, first contact, flashback, planet exploration, infiltration mission, debate in the high council, etc) each need to have some kind of knob on them so that you can turn the knob to point to the political issues and beliefs that are at the core of the game.  For some of these types of scenes, it's easy to see how to do this.  For others, not so easy.  Do you think this will be workable, or do I actually have two incompatible game ideas here that I should develop separately?

I think it should be possible; a theme can be associated with just about anything, especially vague and generally-defined scenes like "first contact" and "planetary exploration". Picking widely applicable issues in the beginning would obviously help in this area.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to read all this and for your comments and criticism, which I'm sure will be helpful.

Thanks for posting it. If you make a game like this, I'd definitely be interested in playing it.

[Jono]

Thanks for your feedback, Chris. There's some excellent suggestions in there.  And you're right, there is a certain similarity to Alpha Centauri (one of my favorite computer games ever).

As for the design questions, I guess I'm going to have to make some decisions, write up some basic rules, and talk some people into a playtest so I can see how a few of these scenes play out in practice.

A question for people who are more experienced with game design:  About how much concrete design work do you feel is the minimum before you can start playtesting usefully?  Do you like to have everything statted out ahead of time for a demo scenario, or do you ever find it useful to start playing (with understanding friends) earlier than that and make up the missing rules as you go along?  Do you find it useful to playtest subsystems in isolation?

Speaking of subsystems, one of the major ones for this game will have to be "species creation", I think.  I had an interesting chat last night with a friend who was interested in the other parts of the game but really didn't like the "we are all aliens" angle and would rather just use a human crew.  My half-joking response was "There are already enough games about humans".  But he's got a good point in that the way space aliens are typically portrayed in most fiction would be no fun to role-play.  Especially in movie SF, aliens are usually monsters(Alien) or innocents (ET) or a symbol of transcendence (2001), and even in the rare cases where you have alien protagonists, they're usually humans-with-funny-makeup playing the part of a heavily stereotyped human cultural variation (the wise, ancient, dying race, or the fierce-but-honorable warrior race).  Yawn!

For the concept of role-playing aliens to work, I would need to work on a set of species-creation guidelines that would lead to creatures that are human enough --in personality if not in shape-- that players could identify with them. They would have to be sympathetic, understandable, and have room for all the variation in individual personalities that humans have.  At the same time, I wouldn't want them to be so similar to us that there's no point in having them be aliens at all.  I want to aim for something that, however radically different from human they are physically, are mentally human with one or two signficant psychological or cultural twists.  Early influential SF magazine editor John Campbell said to story submitters, "Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man".  To me that sounds like a cool role-playing challenge.

Examples of the kind of species I'd want to encourage:  Ursula LeGuin's hermaphrodites from "The Left Hand of Darkness".  The "moties" from "The Mote in God's Eye" by Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle.  The tri-gendered gas-clouds in "The Gods Themselves" by Isaac Asimov.  The evolved dogs in Clifford D Simak's "City".  The pack-intelligences in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep".  The various muppet-aliens in Farscape.  For that matter, the various creatures in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, who can be thought of as parodies on various human foibles.  Playing this as a humorous game would be entirely appropriate, I think.

So, my question for readers: What would you find appealing or unappealing about the idea of creating and role-playing an alien species along these lines?  Can anyone recommend any games (or other media) featuring interesting, sympathetic aliens that would make good inspiration?

[Jason Morningstar]

This is a really great idea!  I may get around to making suggestions for each of your questions, but one at a time...

6. I want the game mechanics and reward system to push players towards fighting viciously for their characters' political stances, but at the same time have a constant danger of a "total party kill" if there is not enough cooperation.  So I guess my next question is, what sort of direction should I be looking in for reward systems that can do this?

One suggestion would be to divorce the player from the discrete character.  There are factions; let the players handle those.  If you have a reward economy that explicitly ties faction behavior to the fleet's resources, I think you'll get this tension if it's tweaked just right.  There's nothing wrong with a mechanic that says "if this particular thing is not done by someone every turn, everybody dies."  You can also use a prisoners-dilemma-like reward system where the reward for betrayal is carefully balanced against the (smaller) reward for cooperation. 

[Jason Morningstar]

What would you find appealing or unappealing about the idea of creating and role-playing an alien species along these lines? 

I love all the books you cited.  Here's the thing, though - I think you're talking about two different things.  This "escape fleet" thing isn't really tied thematically with the "we're aliens, now what?" thing in my mind.  That's something to consider.

Also, if you want serious, truly alien aliens that players play, that's a tall order.  I'm not sure how you go about making that happen and avoiding guys in rubber suits or whatever, humans in disguise.  Emily Care Boss' game Sign In Stranger addresses this in a humorous way, through the lens of humans, though.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there Jono!

Regarding alien-species creation, I suggest going one of two ways:

1) Providing, or providing rules for making, a fixed set of alien species. I'm thinking of Larry Niven's Known Space, in which the Pak, the Kzinti, the Puppeteers, and a couple others are all "set" in such a way that human interactions with them yield powerful outcomes. (And even if your game has no humans, that's still possible.) I recommend the earlier books, rather than his make-a-buck add-ons after the mid-80s: World of Ptavvs, Protector, Neutron Star, and Ringworld.

2) Providing rules for making up a wild plethora of who-knows-what with God-knows-what limbs and eyeballs on stalks and what-have-you.

In either case, I recommend taking a Primetime Adventures approach - an "alien" is actually a walking issue. The term "alien" permits the issue to be addressed or highlighted to an extreme or enlightening extent; focusing it into a character who can make protagonist-level decisions means that nuances of or reflections upon that issue are possible through play, rather than simply being a billboard for a message.

Have you considered having actual humans in the setting, with the strict proviso that they are, and will only ever be, NPCs?

Best, Ron

[Jake Richmond]

This is going to sound stupid, but maybe a "random alien generator" would be the best way to go. Something that allows the players to create their race by rolling on random tables (or whatever) to determine every important thing about the aliens.

Why? Well.... Over the last few months I've participated in playtesting 3 different games that required the players to create one or more alien races/species. In each case the creation process was marred by one player dominating all the choices. Each time a choice was to be made this player (a different person in each case) either refused to accept something that everyone else wanted or insisted that the choice they presented was the one that the group must use. If this players ideas were used (and in each case they were) the player would exert an uncomfortable amount of ownership over them.

Now, I know that this isn't going to be a problem for every group. Even if it is, many will find easy ways to work around it. But this is still a problem. A random list largely eleminates this problem by forcing the players to take what they get. It doesn't eliminate the problem because the players still have to build something out of the pieces, but it at least puts everyone on the same page.


Jake

[contracycle]

So, my question for readers: What would you find appealing or unappealing about the idea of creating and role-playing an alien species along these lines?  Can anyone recommend any games (or other media) featuring interesting, sympathetic aliens that would make good inspiration?

I strongly strongly favour fixed aliens rather than made up aliens, and this goes hand in hand with my hostility to comedy games.  It think it could be really interesting to do Ron's number 1 and have aliens that are in a sense set up for certain revelations.  And furthermore, it allows you to sell books of aliens, right?

Now, single best alien in RPG I have yet to come across is the Kafer from 2300 AD.  The issue with the Kafer is that their equivalent of our adrenaline response doesn't make them faster or twitchier, it makes them smarter.  So their history, and approach to interactions with each other and with us, is totally different to what humans expect.  In kafer world, if you want an intelligent answer to a question, you first beat the stuffing out out of the person you are asking.  This makes first contact with humans a bit fraught.

Also I have another proposition.  You could produce colour plates of really really cool, good LOOKING aliens, and say,ok, lets make THIS alien, why is the skin this colour, what is that object its holding.  The images would be constant but the attachments would be local.

[contracycle]

Also you may be interested in Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials, Wayne Barlowe 1979, which is a set of visualisations of aliens from novels.

[Thenomain]

I see the "create your race" similar to (or even doable in) Shock:, and I completely support continuing this idea.  The alien isn't just a walking issue, but each race is has its own, potentially conflicting, problems that will be faced.  This may also help keep the "humans in rubber suits" issue down, but if that's what people want it's certainly what people could have.

The Barlowe's comment, plus contracycle's basic dislike of Made-Up Things, wouldn't be a bad way to introduce the system.  Take the War of the World aliens and convert them to this.  Or any non-Earth races posited in the Cosmos series and book (which has beautiful art) if you want to start that way.

Yeah, I could get excited about this part of the game.

[Jason Morningstar]

A question for people who are more experienced with game design:  About how much concrete design work do you feel is the minimum before you can start playtesting usefully?  Do you like to have everything statted out ahead of time for a demo scenario, or do you ever find it useful to start playing (with understanding friends) earlier than that and make up the missing rules as you go along?  Do you find it useful to playtest subsystems in isolation?

I'd find your own methods, because everybody works differently.  I know people who take a game they know and love and try to play their idea in that system until it breaks - that's the point of divergence and the real start of the process of design for them.  Other people prepare a lot and then throw stuff away as it fails.  I tend to mess with discrete chunks and then combine them after they sort of work. Do what makes sense for you.

[contracycle]

I had an idea that would contribute to making up aliens systematically, regardless of whether it was done by an external author or the local group.

We have lots of information about species from the fossil record that goes back a lot further than their current incarnation.  When looking at the evolution of species, we also take the surrounding environment into account.  This sort of thing is often implicitly included in the construction of an alien species, but especially where the alien is meant to be some exaggeration of human traits, is nominal or technobabble.   So maybe just doing it systematically would help.

2300AD had this other thing for which I never really found a use, except as an expository device.  It was a triangular portrayal of an abstracted eco-system, with the top predator in the peakmost segment, down through smaller animals, down to vegetation at the base etc.  So this you could as something akin to a wandering monster table, to describe landscapes and the fauna and flora therein.

Now it seems to me you could sketch out an evolutionary history for a spacefaring species by means of a sequence of such triangular ecosystems.  You could even have a prepared form or worksheet in which in which a triangle represents a climatological epoch, and indicate in which segment the species currently has its niche.  Then, working from the earliest to the latest epoch, you could portray a process of the species rise to top predator (that is, the final triangle always has the species in question in the top segment, which I think is a requirement for an independently spacefaring culture to arise).

Probably only the last triangle needs any real fleshing out, to help determine things like what sort of plants the aliens carry about in their hydroponics labs and whatever is their equivalent of a ships cat.  But in the process of thinking about climatological epochs and the niches, in the same way that we can trace some of our systems back to archaic shrews and the like, should help solidify the aliens, help illuminate their biochemistries and internal processes, make them an artifact of process rather than ex nihilo creation.