Rules Stuff

Amazons are persuasive and perceptive. As a result, any Social conflict with an amazon takes a penalty on the initial roll.

Physical Description

Starfish-turtles who communicate telepathically. The amazons evolved on the coasts of an Earth-like planet as simple animals . . . until the Precursors intervened. Females of the species had a rudimentary ability to exchange memories on direct physical contact with their maternal line. Genetic enhancement by the mysterious Precursors improved this ability. Over the millennia the amazons have gone on to develop a complex telepathic technology.

The amazons are sexually dimorphic: the males are unintelligent jellyfish-stingray creatures. The females, on the other hand, are immense—3 to 4 meters across—and grow throughout their lifetimes; larger specimens are too large to move about on land. An elderly amazon could reach 20 meters across, and though completely immobile, she would be constantly informed through mental contact with her daughters and granddaughters.

Culture

Amazonian thought-signals are complex webs of association and nuance; their written language looks like a bunch of network diagrams. They dismiss human writing as cryptic and crude.

Much of amazonian culture is hidebound and conservative: a social defense against infectious memes transmitted telepathically. Amazons have an elaborate legal-religious set of taboos regarding scientific inquiry, which they regard as exceedingly dangerous: scientific advances early in their history rapidly led to political chaos and warfare. As a result, most of their scientific accomplishments—controlling gravity, jumping through hyperspace—came from reverse-engineered Precursor wreckage, with the least possible attempt to figure out why that technology works. The amazonian word for philosopher is also its word for criminal.

Though the Precursors themselves appear to be lost to antiquity, the amazons view them with a mixture of superstitious awe and secular curiosity. While some of the more ignorant amazons refer to the Precursors as "star-gods," many other amazons regard the Precursors as just another species--albeit a mysterious and busybodied one. The amazons in our region of space represent a mixed group, eager to find their long-lost benefactors.

Amazons prefer time-tested precedent to innovation; even the most wild-eyed amazon would seem hidebound by human standards, with a reverence for tradition reminiscent of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Amazons enjoy talking to us, but they view our politics as a form of insanity, and refuse to get directly involved. Their own politics seems to be built around the “clan/guild” structure, where each extended family performs a specialized economic role. The amazons enjoy comedy (though their sense of humor tends to be very gentle and ironic), sculpture, and their equivalent of wine-tasting.

The amazons have settled hundreds of worlds, and travel in immense city-ships housing millions of individuals—but all of that is very far away. The five city-ships that visited our solar system represent a cultural minority, on a holy journey to find the Precursor homeworld. Most of these amazons still dwell on their ships, but tens of thousands have left to explore the galaxy alongside humans.

Design Decisions

Confession: I have taken these almost whole-hog from the incomparable Anders Sandberg. The Star*Drive canon features a bland, telepathic species of "little green men" called the fraal, which I always found boring. I wanted that same niche--technologically advanced mind-readers--and Sandberg's aliens fit perfectly.

The amazons are included as a somewhat more "civilized" species than humans, though that's partially because they aren't dealing our set of problems. One of the great things about Sandberg's critters is that they're very exotic, yet with some effort you can imagine their strange way approaching problems. I dig that.

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