So what non-license system has the coolest, intelligent space opera alien races?

PS Or at least not the usual cat people, lizard people, dog people, squat men from high gravity planets that act like dwarves and tall people from low gravity planets that act like elves.

All hail the jerkian elite!

Star Frontiers has the four coolest alien races I have thus encountered:

Vrusk, Dralasites, Sathar and Eorna.

Thousand Suns has belligerent cephalopods, philosophically inclined palm trees and schizoid crustaceans. Very trippish and hard SF(ish) at the time. I like it.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;467895Star Frontiers has the four coolest alien races I have thus encountered:

Vrusk, Dralasites, Sathar and Eorna.

I loved the Vrusk, Dralasites, Sathar, and Yazarians. Eorna were in later works.

I'm also rather fond of Traveller's Aslan, and Hivers

Kleibor, from Star Ace.

One of the first homebrew games I wrote, when I was 12 or 13 had a bunch of interesting aliens.
G13X8 was a planet that had been collonised by clones. You all had the same stats but you used points to buy advantages.
Terrans were really tough, as Earth had been through a nuclear apocolypse and they had mutations , randomly rolled.
Earth Collonists were the humans that had already collonised space and were marginally uplifted so they could dump their lowest stats and had extra skill points and could learn stuff faster.
Earth Collonists had already uplifted some anmimal speices so you could play a Proto- and you bought how many dice you wanted in each stat from a pool of dice that was a bit lower than everyone else. Any animal type was fair game but in play Human collonists, the dominant race treated all uplifts as 'untouchables'

Now you will notice that none of them were actually aliens but all terran originated races.

The Alien races were not available to PCs and were really alien, like floating gas spores, or hive minds, or sentient methane lakes. I had an idea for some uber 'psychic' race that might be fed in in time but they kept on ending up like some corney Star trek villain so I kind of dropped it.

So typical 12 year old sci-fi stuff with a set of rules that were a mish mash of D&D style stats, an extensive skill list devided into skill trees and traveller style equipment and ships (though with more efficient antimatter drives).

Was fun making up uplifted Snakes, elephants and the like though and the Clone race was great.

Alternity, forever.

Quote from: Cranewings;467914Alternity, forever.

I love Alternity, but disliked most of their aliens. I think the Sesheyen (SIC) were one of the better ones. The rest were kinda meh.

Quote from: Silverlion;467906I loved the Vrusk, Dralasites, Sathar, and Yazarians. Eorna were in later works.

Let us discuss this over a mug of thick Yazirian ale.  While you couldn't play Eorna, they were in the SF0 module that came with the boxed set.

I was not so crazy about the Yazirians; they were sort of the elves of SF (everybody wanted to play a chewbacca-like dude who could fly...!  Course they immediately nerfed the flying in Crash on Volturnus )

Shameless self-promotion:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/502760470/conquest-of-the-universe-rpg/posts

I've only posted previews of therions (shaggy bestial humanoids), ramgostans (aquatics), and zigundrians (human offshoots who wear winged harnesses). I love space opera and I think coming up with wild, almost-familiar space opera species is a lot of fun.

Star Frontiers was interesting, but never actually played it.

I don't know about "non-licensed" but GURPS Lensmen had a few aliens that I found interesting, if only because they were very weirdly shaped, which interacted oddly with GURPS minis rules - so you had things that were 5 hexes long and had arms coming out in hexes 1 and 3, for instance (humans of course just fill 1 hex).

If I get beaten repeatedly with a shovel for saying this that's probably fair enough, but TSR's Galactos Barrier (for Amazing Engine) had a couple of races I liked - shapechanging slug guys (slathorp) and a 4-armed lizardman race (G'rax), as well as the usual dogmen and snakemen and birdmen. The setting in general is a bit too...campy?...though (Planets being destroyed through the power of song, courtesy of the guy that wrote The Complete Elves Handbook).

I seem to recall that the Manhunter RPG (also available as a RIFTS sourcebook) had some pretty good alien races.  Of course, some of the RIFTS races should also be mentioned: the Splugorth, the Naruni, etc.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;468050I seem to recall that the Manhunter RPG (also available as a RIFTS sourcebook) had some pretty good alien races.

I was just about to say the same thing.

Quote from: RPGPundit;468050Of course, some of the RIFTS races should also be mentioned: the Splugorth, the Naruni, etc.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;468050I seem to recall that the Manhunter RPG (also available as a RIFTS sourcebook) had some pretty good alien races.  Of course, some of the RIFTS races should also be mentioned: the Splugorth, the Naruni, etc.

RPGPundit

On the other hand, Aliens Unlimited is pretty much cat people, dog people, lizard people, more cat people, etc.