So I'm worldbuilding for a space-opera type sci-fi setting,

>>44159283
Alien races are the easiest kind to make. Do you have no creativity?

>>44159283
Just watch Space Dandy

>>44159283
A species native to gas giants made out of metallic hydrogen and transition metals. When leaving their preferred environment they have to wear heavy pressure suits to keep themselves from explosively decompressing.

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>>44159283
the Great Race of Yith from H.P. Lovecraft.

>>44160111

Do they also have the "Not as great but still kind of noteworthy" Race of Yith?

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Just use one of the many random-alien design rulesets from any major sci-fi RPG.

>>44159283
I'm assuming that you want some cultures and histories to go along with the alien species yeah?

I'll share some from a setting my DM uses when we need a break from ye olde fantasy.

>Valstins
An insectoid race with a genetics based caste system similar to real world ant colonies. Tiny, short lived workers gather supplies for the colony, which may range in size from 20 individuals, up to several hundred. Soldiers who are much larger, and longer lived escort groups of workers. Drones, the only males of the species, wander from colony to colony fertilizing eggs, and are much larger than Soldiers seeing as they live mostly solitary lives. Finally there are very long-lived queens who grow from slightly smaller than a human, to blue-whale tier over the course of a 1,000 year long lifespan. In general, the workers and soldiers are instinctual and don't function much above the insects we are familiar with. Old queens however, can be highly intelligent. It is noteworthy that certain human hormones found in sweat have a narcotic effect on Valstins. This leads to blackmarkets and slaving rings centered around catering to Valstin queens.

>Algans:
Amporphous groupings of large single-celled organisims with unique DNA working together to form a conscious entity. Individually, each ameoba-like "cell" has all the intelligence of a bacteria. However, as colonies of the same genera merge, an intelligence emerges. When the colonies grow to approximate human size, they show intelligence equal or superior to humans. They were once enslaved by an ancient race and used to form city-sized "neural hubs", effectively massive biological supper computers. Being single-celled conglomerates, they are incredibly vulnerable to disease. Due to this, they avoid humans at all costs, even when in sterile containment suits. They consider humans walking plague sacks.

Cont.

>>44161706
Cont.

>Courari
An aquatic species similar to lobsters, and able to live on land for brief periods of time. They are one of humanity's closest allies. They were granted a colony in Earth's deep oceans in exchange for allowing a human colony to establish on Bense, the Courari homeworld. Physically they are four armed lobsters with three distinct body segments, ornate shells, and four clawed appendages used to manipulate objects. Their filter-feeding operations help stabilize Earth's oceans.

>Stemos
A singular AI with billions of unique copies of itself running around on trillions of physical platforms. Not nearly as singularly cohesive as it might seem. Each individual occurrence encounters minor changes that, if not synchronized with the remaining whole, results in a slightly different version. Over the course of millions of years, this has led to countless "Civil Wars" within Stemos. It is not uncommon for Stemos to hire mercenaries to "delete" "corrupted" Stemos factions.

>Broqu
Sapient stones. Originally trapped on their home planet, enterprising individuals freed/kidnapped Broqu's shuttling them around/slave trading them throughout the universe. It isn't quite clear how they became sapient, nor how someone learned to translate their minor electrical impulses into cohesive speech, but they really don't like being referred to as "pet rocks".

>Soganians
Mobile sentient plants, some of which are sapient. The term is a bit ambiguous, as there are several hundred sapient geniuses from Sogan, each with several species and subspecies as well. Trying to generalize their histories, cultures, even life cycles, would paint an entirely erroneous record for at leas a quarter of the planet. It basically takes a masters degree in Xeno biology and Xeno anthropology to understand each nuance within the Sogan.

>>44159283
>not using the Gurps Alien maker and seeing what happens

>>44159283
A mechanical race whose natural habitat is space. They were originally von Neumann probes designed by a race that later went extinct. As their self-replication isn't entirely perfect, "mutations" occur with each generation. Through this and natural selection, they ended up gained sentience with some vestigial impulses left over from their original programming.

As a desire to self-replicate is evidently something that would be naturally selected for (since ones motivated by that would replicate more, thereby proliferating their "variants"), they ended up developing what amounts to a sex-drive. Which resulted in recreational sex. And then orgies. Which, pretty much amounts to randomly strip-mining uninhabited planets for no real reason.

So basically, it's a bunch of sentient, hedonistic space probes. Whose hedonism is probably encouraged by other races, provided they get the harvested materials or the random pieces of technology they manufacture from said materials.