well, they are cybernetically enhanced. they modify their own bodies to control their evolution.
The Hyperion novels offer the concept of Ousters: humans who went their own way centuries ago, and decided to live by a philosophy of adapting themselves to their environment, rather than their environment to them. Wouldn't a race advanced enough to control their physical being do something like that as well? Wouldn't it have members who choose to adapt themselves differently?
This may not be all that relevant for some people on a rock hurtling through space, but nevertheless... that was what came to mind
I'm thinking a little bit of the Elder Things, which adapted themselves and their servants to the sea or the land depending on where they settled, but retained basically the same self-identity and culture regardless.
Alien starfish fungi that colonised the world millions of years ago, before being pushed back to Antarctica by the other Things--star-spawn of Cthulhu, Mi-Go, the Great Race of Yith--which came after.
(Also they travelled through space by the use of strange herbs and minerals which toughened their bodies and slowed their metabolisms, rather than by the use of mechanical technology.)
(And instead of machines, their primary labour-saving technology was biological: they invented the shape-shifting Shoggoths as multi-use living tools.)
@doppelgreener Yeeeah. Shoggoths eventually gained sentience and rebelled against the Elder Things, ultimately --so far as we know-- wiping them out and overrunning their last few hidden undersea and underground cities.
It's implied that Shoggoths never gained a culture or identity of their own, instead adopting the language and forms of their creators long after they killed the last of the Elder Things.
@BESW This does sound similar enough, which brings me to: Ousters are still at their core human. They look human. They just look like different humans. Some of them are more augmented than others: some have wings for riding the solar winds, others have tails to help them navigate zero-G, and as individuals they adapt to the planets they choose to settle on. They only change themselves insofaras they need to do so to adapt, i.e. controlled evolution with a purpose.
May be worth finding a recognisable aesthetics for an Atlantean individual.
Works, but I mean in terms of recognisable bodily features. Consider the diff between: elf-person who's fishlike in a lot of major and minor ways vs elf-person who is still bipedal, to frog person vs possum person
one is definitely identifiable and regardable as a single race, the other is two different fantasy races
i.e. I could probably all day draw a human in different bodily configurations who's still essentially recognisable as human
If you give 'em blue tattoos, we can recognise them as belonging to some coherent whole for sure.
In the case of very disparate appearances (such that we cannot really tell much in common physically between them), "Atlanteans" may be related to more as "name for various creatures which live in Atlantis, like those frog people and those elves", which isn't in keeping with the idea that the possum people are the elves.
Actually, there may be a good way to relate them back to each other:
have partway-froggy individuals, which would suggest either the frog is something else that is a source of the frogginess, or that the frog is just a really, really far-gone person
I think we want them to actually be coherent, culturally and as a matter of self-identity. The question to ask is, "Do we want them to seem disparate but surprise! They're all the same in their minds, because they've transcended body image?"
Or do we want to make their unity more visually obvious so PCs/players still caught up in body image identities can see the solidarity easily?
Which kinda boils down to, "Do we want understanding Atlanteans to be a challenge in itself?"
[ponders.] Physical suggestions of unity help us click that the idea of "they're all the same in their minds" is literally true. Thinking on the way the Ousters are handled, the fact they are also only minimally different suggests that the ability to change is hard and takes work, but it's work they're willing to do, and they find the best they can manage at their current abilities. They still rely on the human body working as the human body, and don't yet know how to mess with it too much
Meanwhile heavily disparate appearances would, even knowing this stuff, be hard to treat as a unified race. I've seen too much fantasy stuff. There's Youkai, who have all kinds of appearances, but they're Youkai, they're all different species.
@BESW Oh! No, I wasn't going for an idea of these people effectively being wild shapeshifters.
When I said that merman looked atlantean it was because he physically looked atlantean. His appearance was radically different to what we might think of as an elf person but if you put them side-by-side you'd go "holy wow you're the same kind of people"
Hrm. I am being less direct than I should be which is a mental pattern I need to break. I have concerns here that I didn't click as things I should say outright:
I do think the atlanteans should be reasonably recognisable in physical body image between each other, so as to let us get what's going on here on every level as players.
Understanding them as a challenge could be worthwhile and they are certainly a different kind of people, but casting them such that we might have a hard time relating to them as anything but a bunch of coexisting fantasy races means we won't recognise what there is that is there to understand.
I don't have any particulars set in mind, but one thing that's in my brain for the body thing is Lord of Light, where people have the ability to transfer their minds from one body to another with a special machine. It's permanent--your old body dies, and you stay in the new body until you jump to another. Adapting to a new body is difficult, and people don't usually jump casually, but it affords a kind of immortality if you can avoid murder or accidental death.
Atlanteans may have the ability to grow adapted bodies which they can then move into. It'd still be a major deal, but it'd open up some... fun potentials.
(Major resource expenditure, psychological shock from the transfer, and personal preference for your own body probably keep it from being a casual thing.)
And this is totally workable with the "minimal modifications to a base form" concept.
Humanity may have to be evaluated as both "mature enough" and "alike enough."
Seerow's Kindness is basically a xenophobic extreme of Star Trek's Prime Directive.
Not just "Don't mess with civilisations before they have warp tech," but also "Don't give any aliens our tech, we can't trust them to use it for good!"
(Might be part of their standoffish attitude toward other humans in the distant past.)
I'm imagining scenes similar to when the SG-1 team tries to convince other advanced alien races to let humanity play with the big boys.
Seerow gave some poor primitive aliens access to basic creature comforts and educational materials, and they hit him over the head, stole his ship, and became the scourge of the entire galaxy within a handful of years.
It's an extreme situation, but not entirely implausible given the context. By comparison McCaffrey's version in Decision at Doona is a heavy-handed and clumsy gimmick for the writer to set up what she needed to establish.
In Doona, the first aliens that humans encountered... committed suicide. All of them. At once. The entire race. For reasons still unknown. After that humans became extremely paranoid about making sure systems had no intelligent life before they went anywhere near 'em.
....and a race of cat-people had the exact same experience with a different alien race, and developed the exact same precautions to avoid repeat events.
Decision at Doona, then, is about humans and cat-people accidentally colonising the same planet at the same time, and freaking the heck out.
It's a good story, but the setup is so contrived it hurts.
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