Vassal Species Guidelines

The universe of Orion Sphere is vast and filled with a tremendous variety of species, giving a lot of freedom to players who want to create their own Vassal Species. This page contains guidelines for the type of submission that is most helpful to us when you are creating a new Vassal Species, as well as a few restrictions and themes we would rather players avoid.

While there is a lot of freedom to create new vassal species, there are a few themes and topics that players should avoid, as they will make it extremely difficult for their species concept to be approved. These topics include the following;

• Cybernetics - In the Orion Sphere LRP setting, cybernetics and technology directly integrated with living bodies is rare. The Corporeal Perfection Syndicate is the only source of truly effective cybernetics. While other factions and groups have developed cybernetics to a greater or lesser extent, these tend to be poor quality and plagued with issues - requiring frequent maintenance, special substances to work, or having a poor neural interface with the host. Although characters may roleplay having these lesser cybernetics as part of their character concept, they are minor aspects of individual characters - the future equivalent of “old war wounds” or similar. True, useful cybernetics must be purchased and installed in-game by the Corporeal Perfection Syndicate's agents, and come with dedicated rules.
• Ancient Species or Precursors - In the Orion Sphere LRP setting, there are numerous examples of ancient civilisations that spanned large areas of the galaxy, but none of their people survive to the present. Every current space-faring species developed their civilisation at roughly the same time, give or take a few thousand years. Absolutely no civilisation that developed faster-than-light travel is older than 10,000 years, and the ones that took to the starts prior to humans never did so to the extent of building a large star empire equivalent to any of the Factions. Discovering more about the cultures of the Precursors, and what actually happened to them all, is one of the major mysteries of the setting. As such, while vassal species can exist among the ruins of poorly understood Precursor technology (such as the Etherna), they cannot retain any knowledge of the Precursors handed down to the current time in any kind of useful form.
• Artificial Intelligence * - AI is limited in the Orion Sphere LRP setting. While powerful computational devices exist (on the level of the ship computers in Star Trek), truly intelligent AI - Artificial General Intelligence - has proven to be very hard to create. The most advanced known General AI's developed by the Factions have the equivalent intelligence of a 5 year-old human child, and that is with millions of pre-programmed cues and processes to give it a basic mental structure to build from. The Factions represent the most technologically advanced beings in known space, so no species in the recent (10,000-years) timeframe of the game developed more powerful AI. Anything prior to this point hits the “no Ancient Species” guidance. Submitted Vassal Species cannot be AI's or purely artificial beings. However, the characteristics and tropes of AIs in media can be arrived at in other ways - servility, a preference for logic, metal bodies, uniform appearance - these are all aspects that can be applied to a vassal species in other ways. Evidence of more powerful Artificial General Intelligence may be introduced to the game via plotlines or through player action and invention.