Star Wars: Aliens, Salarian

Salarian

Attribute Dice: 11d

DEXTERITY: 2d/5d

KNOWLEDGE: 3d/5d

MECHANICAL: 2d/4d

PERCEPTION: 2d/4d

STRENGTH: 1d/3d

TECHNICAL: 3d/5d

Special Abilities:

Amphibian: Salarians are amphibians.
Limited Sleep: Salarians only require 1-2 hours of sleep per day.
Eidetic memory: Salarians have remarkably keen memories. As such, the cost of all skills is reduced by 1 Character point, to a minimum of 1 Character point. 

Story Factors: 

Short lifespan: Salarians have lifespans, usually only living about 40 years. 

Move: 10/12, swim 10/12

Size: 1.6 to 2.1 meters

Salarians are renowned for their mental acuity, technical skill, and aptitude with espionage.

Salarians are a bipedal race of amphibians, with tall, elongated bodies and skeletons composed of cartilage. Salarian heads are long and thin, and have a pair of horns protruding from the top of their skulls. Skin varies in color, from bright reds and greens to the more common shades of blue or grey. Their blood is a greenish color. Salarian eyes are large and oval and have thin membranes in place of eyelids that blink upwards, The pupils are a wide slit, oriented horizontally, and the irises can be dark green, purple, or brown.

Salarians have a very high metabolic rate, lowering their life expectancy to about forty Earth years, but also necessitating very little sleep, around 1–2 hours per day. In fact, they are considered to be hyperactive by most other races; salarians, however, disagree with this diagnosis, considering other races to be slow and dim-witted. This is shown primarily by their near rapid-fire speech, which many salarians must consciously control to be understood. They are intellectuals by nature, constantly devising and implementing new plans, experiments, or studies to expand their already considerable knowledge pools. Salarians also have an almost worker-bee mentality, having a sequential loyalty to larger and larger collectives of salarians. Because salarians always think two steps ahead, it is generally assumed that they always know more than they let on. Salarians are egg-laying, and gender is assigned via haplodiploid sex-determination systems: fertilized eggs become females, the rest males. As such, gender ratios amongst the salarians heavily favor males by 90%, and females often hold positions of political power.

Salarians have eidetic memory and possess a form of psychological "imprinting", tending to defer to those they knew in their youth. Salarian hatching is a solemn ritual in which the clan Dalatrass (matriarch) isolates herself with the eggs. The young salarians psychologically imprint on her and tend to defer to her wishes. During the hatching of daughters, the Dalatrasses of the mother and father’s clans are present at the imprinting. This ensures the offspring have equal loyalty to both, ensuring the desired dynastic and political unity.Salarian History

On their first three interstellar colonies, the salarians planted settlements named Aegohr, Mannovai, and Jaëto. According to Kirrahe those settlements "remain at the heart of salarian territory to this day".

The salarians were responsible for the elevation of the krogan race to combat the invading rachni, and they were subsequently responsible for creating the genophage biological weapon used to quell the later Krogan Rebellions. The salarians provided the krogan with advanced technology and a new, tranquil home planet (in order to manipulate the krogan into eradicating the rachni). The peaceful home planet and better technology put less strain on the krogan as a species; they no longer had to worry about simply surviving on a dangerous planet with primitive technology, as they did before contact with the salarians. This comparatively easy life, combined with their exceedingly high birth rate, allowed the krogans the time, numbers and energy to spread through space, aggressively claiming formerly allied planets as their own.

Salarians excel at invention, preferring to use cutting-edge technology rather than settle for anything less. For example, their starship defenses put emphasis on high performance over reliability even though a malfunction could cost lives. The salarians see information gathering and even spying as a matter of course when dealing with other races, but this is not underhanded: they simply embrace the dictum of "knowledge is power". Normally, the rare salarian females are cloistered on their worlds out of tradition and respect. Powerful female Dalatrasses are dynasts and political kingpins. They determine the political course of their respective regions through shrewd negotiation. Though male salarians rise to positions of great authority in business, academia, or the military, they rarely have any input on politics.

Due to their method of reproduction, salarians evolved without libido, and reproduction is negotiated as a business matter, often involving contracts, and have no concept of romantic love, sexual attraction, or the biological impulses and social rituals that complicate other species' lives. Male-female relationships are rare (due to the scarcity of females) and more akin to human friendship. Sexuality is strictly for the purpose of reproduction. Ancient social codes determine who gets to fertilize eggs, which produces more daughters to continue the bloodline. Fertilization generally only occurs after months of negotiation between the parents' clans, and is done for purposes of political and dynastic alliance. No salarian would imagine defying this code.

A salarian's naming conventions are quite complex, beginning with personal and family names, stretches on until reaching the galactic barony under which they were born. A full name includes – in order – the name of a salarian's homeworld, nation, city, district, clan name and given name. For example, the salarian on Feros is named Gorot II Heranon Mal Dinest Got Inoste Ledra, but he would be called either by his clan name, Inoste, or his given name, Ledra. When dealing with other species they usually shorten this identity to just one or two names. The salarian race also includes the Lystheni "offshoot." How the Lystheni are distinct from mainline salarians and why they are currently unwelcome is unrevealed. Lystheni salarians may be found living among batarians, exiled quarians, and other galactic refuse at Omega.

Salarians celebrate "Betau," the first day of their New Year. Traditionally, it marks the end of winter in the southern hemisphere on the salarian homeworld, Sur'Kesh. During this occasion, they repay debts, and petition favors from one another. Salarians are not notably religious, but as free-willed sentients there are exceptions. One of the less-favored salarian religions worships a goddess, and claims that a certain pattern of overlapping craters in the southern hemisphere of the barren planet Trelyn resembles her. There has also been a small movement towards a kind of "wheel of life" form of pantheistic reincarnation that has taken root to a limited extent among salarians.

Being of scientific and abstract persuasion, they tend to favor political liberalism. The Salarian Union is largely governed by a group of dynastic families ruled by female elders. Structurally, the government consists of fiefdoms, baronies, duchies, planets, and marches (colonization clusters); these are human nicknames, as the original salarian is unpronounceable. Each area is ruled by a single Dalatrass (matriarchal head-of-household) and represents an increasing amount of territory and prestige within the salarian political web. Approaching 100 members, the first circle of a salarian's clan comprises parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins. The next circle includes second cousins, etc., and escalates to well over 1000 members. The fourth or fifth circle of a clan numbers into the millions. Salarian loyalty is greatest to their first circle and diminishes from there. Their eidetic memories allow salarians to recognize all their myriad relatives.

Though their military is nothing special, salarians are currently seen as a premier intelligence and information-gathering species. As such they are well respected, but some races, including a few humans, see the salarians as manipulators.

Militarily, they are considerably weaker than the turians in head-on combat, preferring to employ a small volunteer army that focuses on maneuver warfare (i.e. sabotage, reconnaissance, counter-intelligence, and commando operations against any enemy). However, in unconventional warfare, the salarians are perhaps second to none. They excel at information gathering and while they consider outright direct war to be a last resort, once they do engage in war, it's almost always by surprise (they see concepts of 'do not fire until fired upon' and 'declare a war before prosecuting it' as strategically unsound) and by a strategically dominant force, since they've long since figured out what and who they are fighting and how their foes are going to fight. In every war the salarians have fought, they struck first and without warning. For the salarians, to know an enemy plans to attack and let it happen is folly; to announce their own plans to attack is insanity. In defensive wars, they execute devastating preemptive strikes hours before the enemy's own attacks. On the offense, they have never issued an official declaration of war before attacking. Salarian military wisdom holds that a battle should be won before the first shot is fired.

Counterintelligence agencies endlessly uproot salarian agents and cyber-warfare incursions, but there is little they can do to stop them. The unquestioned superiority of their intelligence services and rules of engagement allows them to leverage their small military's effectiveness. Well before fighting breaks out, they possess complete knowledge of their enemy's positions, intentions and timetable. Their powerful intelligence network is spearheaded in the field by Special Tasks Groups (STG) who monitor developing situations and take necessary action, usually without the shackles of traditional laws and procedures. This may be as simple as scouting and information gathering, or as complex as ensuring a conveniently unstable political situation stays that way.

While capable of defending themselves against most threats, the salarians know that they are small fish in a universe filled with sharks. As a point of survival, they have cultivated strong alliances with larger powers and the salarians take pains to keep this relationship strong enough that anyone who might threaten them risks retaliation.