Just recently bought Edge of Empire and am pretty excited about running a game, but I can't seem to find any guideline for creating new aliens - I know for NPCs, I can just assign abilities and talents that 'look right', as needed, but several members of my group are going to be even bigger EU nerds than I am and might want to play a race not covered in EotE or AoR.

I haven't even managed to crack the formula used to determine how much XP the default races start with - either droids are getting cheated or humans seem to be cheating, for example.

Has anyone cracked the formula, or can direct me to a sourcebook with some guidelines?

Droids have lower XP then you'd expect because they can specialize more. Also Droid is a powerful and generally positive ability. Plus they get Enduring. They had more during the early beta, but they were just getting way to effective.

The standard is, basically, 110 experiance, -10 for a 1 & 3 in your statline, -10 again if the one or two species abilities are better than normal (which is all guess & feel).

Oh, almost forgot to mention there is an excellent species guide in the resources section. (unofficial). YMMV on particular species, but in general they're very good and balanced.

Thanks for the breakdown, Quicksilver.

Regarding the species guide, when I clicked on the link in the resources section, I got a 404 error. Rather than wait for the whims of the internet gods to maybe allow the page to return, I thought I'd ask the good people of the forum!

Go to the thread with the title “ The Great Movie Alien Compendium ”. You’ll see how SavageBob is building his alien examples, with extensive notes as to why he’s making his choices, etc….

The books and the “Unofficial Species Menagerie” show you the final result of building alien races, but they don’t show you the process that you should go through in order to actually build them. Which is exactly what SavageBob does in that thread.

IMO, you should consider it a “master class” in the process of building playable alien races.

And yes, the GSA site is currently down. I have a copy of the USM available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/64xpovlru82jboi/USM3RE_lowrez.pdf?dl=0 (the low-res version) and https://www.dropbox.com/s/9gszbr0qgy18h9o/USM3RE_highrez.pdf?dl=0 (the high-res version).

But it still doesn’t tell you or show you anything useful about how you should go about the process of trying to create a playable species, whereas SavageBob does exactly that in his thread dedicated to the subject.

Thank you, bradknowles!

Best advice that I can give you is to reskin where possible. Just take an existing species, keep the same stats, and call it a different name.

If necessary , I would sparingly modify an existing species to give it the proper tweaks. Like swap out one affected skill for another, or trade Claws for Breathes Underwater. That kinda thing.

Indeed, minimalism is the order of the day. Find an official species that's similar, and change the minimal amount possible to make them 'feel' right. At the end of the day even Wookies and Twi'leks arn't that different in this system.

or trade Claws for Breathes Underwater.

Abilities are the scariest thing for me to play with. Juggling stats or swapping skills is no problem, it really is a zero-sum game there. But it just feels *weird* to treat things like Claws and Breathes Underwater as being fungible, since Claws is *always* useful but Breathes Underwater is very situational.

Brad's very kind to point you to my little sandbox. I'll add the caveat that I'm very much a newcomer to this system, so I'm also trying to puzzle things out. For me, learning by doing is the best way to learn, which is partly why I enjoy statting up random aliens from the movies.

But, you're right, there is no real point-buy system in use at FFG as far as I can tell. Quicksilver's breakdown is a good rule of thumb to start with. And the reskinning idea is also a solid one. In my own calculus, I tend to consider situational perks and top-row talents to be worth 5 points apiece (like being amphibious, getting a rank in Plausible Deniability, or getting bonuses in desert environments) and natural attacks worth about 10 points. There are also disadvantages introduced in some books, like the Dressellian's primitiveness, which we're flat-out told gives them an extra 10 XP to spend. The Hutts' ponderousness (limiting them to one move maneuver in a turn) will likely be priced similarly once Lords of Nal Hutta drops.

Ultimately, this system requires a lot more eyeballing of things than an explicit point-buy engine like, say, GURPS.

Oh, and this is the closest I've seen to someone "cracking the code" (which assumes there's a code to crack): http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/98274-species-building/

It's worth a read for anyone homebrewing alien-species stats.