Star Trek

Very nice.

I envy the groups that you all work with here. Whenever I get into gaming groups, let's say that it isn't as inspired. You all are great at what you do in the gaming community.

Wow!
That episode was the most stupid fight i ever saw ;D ;D

Anyway, your minis are great. Thanks for sharing them.

Congratulations on these minis! Stargate fan and I thank you for making this series refer to in your minis. Do you plan to do more minis related to Stargate?

How I can do to put them in a base? Since it has no support to paste on base.

Thanks.

Ya conocía el enlace. Pero son demasiado estáticos con pocas posturas. Gracias

Blimey! I swore that I'd posted these in Okum's thread but apparently not! My memory is getting shocking!
So, here they are, the Caitians and Edoans in a sort of Okum style to go with his Trek minis.

Crow

Just played WNMHGB last night. Nice to break out the old Federation minis. I haven't used my Romulans yet. I have a hard time coming up with good STOS episodes featuring Romulans.

It looks like I might have to try this game. Thanks!

How on Earth (or any other of the Federated planets) did I miss these? Thanks so much for these new Kilingons!

Awesome work!

I'll do better than that, and offer up my first submission to the board.

The Gorn Priestess.

Gods of fire. Gods of flame. Hear my prayer. Gods of fire. Gods of flame. Life givers. Hear my prayer. I thank and praise you for the omens I have followed. I thank and praise you for the signs and portents you have blessed my eyes with. I thank and praise you for the world you have led me to.
Gods of fire. Gods of flame. Let the world you have shown me be a new home for our race.
Gods of fire. Gods of flame. Let our clutches grow large again.
Gods of fire. Gods of flame. Let our hatchlings grow strong again.
I speak now to the Metrons. Gods unknown to me. I will kill the mammal Kirk. I will take his life as you demand. For my race. I pledge this.
Gods of fire. Gods of flame. I offer you the flesh and blood of the mammal Kirk. I will commit his body to the flames. Accept this offering and bless your servants.

Go for it.
And thanks for the compliment.
As far as the pose, all I did was trace your 'Gorn w/blaster' pose in illustrator, replaced the Space 1999 blaster with the Stargate staff, and made 'him' a 'her'.

Okay you got me.
Yes, Scarecrow did the original, and Gorn women shouldn't have breasts...
but this is TOS. If she didn't have a set of knockers, and long luscious eyelashes, how would Kirk know to hit on her?
All that soft-focus camera work?

I thought of giving her a "mane" of feathers... That could distinguish them.

What was the movie where a human was stranded on a planet with a lizard alien that was played by a male actor and then all of a sudden gave birth or laid an egg and the kid was rased by a human guy?

Anyway, Alligators and Crocodiles the Males are much larger than females. You could go with some special kind of jewelery. Or we could make the femals figs all blurry so they always look like they are in soft focus.

One thing I notice people have a tendency to either forget or gloss over is something I call the Coffeepot Rule. If you want the viewer to quickly recognize a device as a coffeepot without interrupting the narrative with tedious exposition, you make the thing look enough like a coffeepot that people go "Aha, that's a space coffeepot" and move on with the story. That rule applies to a lot of things besides coffeepots.

Okay, females--the more you want human viewers to relate to a non-human female, the more human characteristics are added to it. If you wanted Kirk to seduce her or you just want the viewer to think "this is a hot female from planet Blork", you cast a hot actress in the role and use the makeup to accentuate the hot bits, or even just use minimal makeup. (Seven of Nine, B'Elanna Torres, Orion slave girls, etc)

On the other hand, if you don't want to be that cheesy about it and you just want to indicate "this is a female alien thing, and her pants will remain forever unexplored territory for Captain Kirk", you'd usually first display it in a context that makes it obvious. For example, you meet the alien queen in Aliens the first time when she's...laying eggs. To reinforce her feminity, she gets decidedly maternal when Ripley starts threatening the eggs. Like, you get the point almost straightaway because of context. Plus, once you see her moving around, you might notice that she does have somewhat feminine proportions.

Where context fails and being attractive to humans doesn't matter, but for whatever reason, showing that a certain alien is female without resorting to exposition? Stick bobb on it. Doesn't have to be 2, you can do 3 across or even rows of them just for the "Dude, what?" factor. It works, it makes people go "Ah, that's a female Gleep", and you can simply pan across and keep the script moving.

So, bobb and curves are just a really fast way to get the point across when you don't want to interrupt the narrative to deliver a boring lecture on how a male Blerg differs from a female Blerg, and they help a lot when you want human viewers to relate positively to a female Blerg. Especially if the main character of the show is supposed to seduce her in the middle of the episode--otherwise, the squick factor of Kirk boning a 12-eyed squirming mass of tentacley jelly-filled rubber that communicates in flatulent noises is just going to kill the mood.

Some of you might take from that that I think exposition isn't important--no, I agree exposition is important, but there's an ideal time and a place for it, and when you're trying to tell a story, sometimes it gets in the way of pacing or drama. In those situations, the coffeepot rule kicks in for things that aren't of absolutely central importance to the plot.

Me too! That's another one of those "right time and place" kind of element, though, and is used to the fullest effect when there is a very pressing story need to make a certain alien species inscrutable and difficult to identify with.

For example, some sort of almost godlike advanced species where gender doesn't really matter and their native form isn't humanoid, or some sort of completely inscrutable and unknowable species where their whole gimmick is being completely alien. For example, the Medusans from the novel "On Basilisk Station" come to mind, being trilaterally symmetrical quasi-insectoids. Or in the case of enemy species, this is done to wholly dehumanize them in order to tap into human fears (the bugs from Starship Troopers, for example).

Bottom line, if it's something the viewer is expected to empathize or identify with, it will generally incorporate features that are pleasing to human viewers. These don't necessarily have to be human features, they can be anything humans find pleasing. For example, in Gulliver's Travels, there's a noble race of creatures that are pretty much just sentient horses, and then on the cute end of the spectrum, there are things like Ewoks and other teddy bear style aliens.

If it's supposed to be inscrutable, it'll be characterized by the absence of elements that allow human viewers to relate to it. Things like hyperintelligent shades of the color blue from the Hitchhiker's Guide, energy beings in Star Trek and the Horta from the original series.

If it's supposed to scare the pants off human viewers, it'll be characterized by features or elements that draw upon things that either scare human viewers or repulse them. The poop elemental from Dogma, any sort of alien space bug, lizard/dinosaur people with fangs and whatnot--those all tap into primal human fears and revulsions.

Sometimes you can play off a combination of the above elements for shock value, comedic value, or dramatic value--for example, the minor miners in Galaxy Quest. They initially start out pushing all the right buttons for cuteness and sympathy (childlike features and proportions), then they do a total 180 and peg the viewer's spook-o-meter hard when they suddenly turn ugly and start attacking the injured guy like wolves or sharks. Or revisiting the Horta from ST: TOS, you've got this gross sluglike alien space blob that's killing human miners, and this is inverted near the end when people find out it's just trying to protect its eggs and it's not some kind of mindless murderbeast.

One of my favorite examples of combining and playing with those elements outside of science fiction is Bruce the shark from Finding Nemo. The very first time you see him is a rather memorable moment of horror, which is shortly subverted by the whole "fish are friends" 12 step gag, and then terrifyingly inverted to maximum effect when he hulks out like a hardcore junkie over the scent of fish blood.

In the end, that's really what aliens let storytellers do, manipulate the viewer's perspective by tapping into human expectations, fears, likes, and dislikes when you want to go above and beyond the limits of what you can do with human characters. They don't usually exist just for the sake of existing except in really bad fiction.