Species Profile: Gorn (LUGTrek with some tweaks)

[Erik Filean]

I was fiddling with a Gorn species profile tonight and figured I might as well post the stats portion (the flavor text is unfinished anyway). My version is heavily based on the LUGTrek Gorn, but I've added a species ability or two that I thought were cool and plausible extensions of the published material. If you haven't read the Gorn material in the LUG TOS core book, there is enough here to give you some broad hints of what's going on.

FAVORED PROFESSION: Diplomat (females); soldier or starship officer (males). Gorn society has almost castelike divisions of labor by gender, with females assuming the key decision-making positions in government, economics, science, and religion while males fill supporting military, technical, and labor roles (including the operational aspects of trade, which involve the risks of travel and alien contact deemed beneath female attention). Gorn society is highly intolerant of nonconformity, so Gorn rogues are uncommon in the extreme.

SPECIES ADJUSTMENTS: Strength +3, Agility –2, Vitality +2. Reptilian Gorn physiology makes them significantly tougher than Humans, and their great size and high muscle density grants them much greater strength. Gorn have a low metabolic rate, however, and tend to move more slowly than mammalian species.

SPECIES ABILITIES:

BONUS EDGE: HIGH PAIN THRESHOLD: Gorn skin is less enervated than that of most species; they literally feel less pain. Injury penalties for Gorn characters are reduced by 2, as it is usually the physical impairment and not the pain of injuries that most affects them.

BONUS EDGE: RAPID HEALING: Gorn metabolism is slower in most respects than that of mammalian species, but it is geared toward rapid repair of injuries. Gorn heal wound points twice as fast as normal (2 per day of natural healing instead of 1).

EXTRAORDINARY CHEMORECEPTION: Gorn have exceptionally keen chemoreceptive ability (especially olfaction, but also taste to a lesser degree) and can detect trace chemical signatures with a Perception attribute test as a free action. Range increments for Gorn chemoreception are Perception x10/Perception x100/Perception x1000/+100 meters.

PHEROMONAL DOMINANCE: Female Gorn rely heavily on the strong influence their pheromones have on males to maintain their dominant position in Gorn society. Furthermore, higher-status Gorn females secrete higher concentrations of these pheromones than lower-status females, and thus attract and influence larger “harems” of male mates.
A female Gorn gains enhanced benefit from her Renown, improving her chances to persuade male Gorn to assist her or follow her orders because of the strength of her pheromonal secretions. When making Influence, Intimidate, Negotiate, and Persuade tests involving male Gorn, the character adds her Renown modifier automatically to the skill test; no recognition test is required. A female Gorn receives an additional +2 test result bonus to such tests when influencing males with whom she has previously mated.

SPECIES FLAW: INTOLERANT 3: Gorn live in an extremely closed culture which acknowledges no role for outsiders except as “barbarians” to be conquered or exterminated. Gorn characters must spend 1 Courage, with no benefit, to engage in social skill tests involving non-Gorn who have not been assimilated into the culture of the Gorn Empire. (Gorn can interact normally with aliens who have been subjugated and brought into the Gorn cultural sphere.)

SPECIES FLAW: NIGHT BLIND: Gorn vision is less acute than that of Humans; they have rudimentary color vision, but their depth perception is limited and their vision is geared more toward the perception of movement than toward the analysis of environmental details. Gorn sight is especially hindered in the dark, where movement is more difficult to spot. A Gorn character suffers double the normal physical test penalties from low light conditions.

[Capt Daniel Hunter]

Pretty good. Not too sure about the rapid healing though, what's your reasoning for it?. I'm curious, is any of this based on research on real reptiles? I figure real reptile physiology and behaviour might be a useful model.

[Sea Tyger]

I don't necessarily have a problem with that. Many lizards regrow their tails after having them lopped off, so you could say they have "greater regenerative ability."

Too bad Star Trek never revisited the Gorn. It would have been neat to see a new look (a la the changes for the Klingons) for the reptilians....anything would be better than the "B"-movie monster appearance.

[Erik Filean]

Originally posted by Sea Tyger
I don't necessarily have a problem with that. Many lizards regrow their tails after having them lopped off, so you could say they have "greater regenerative ability."

Too bad Star Trek never revisited the Gorn. It would have been neat to see a new look (a la the changes for the Klingons) for the reptilians....anything would be better than the "B"-movie monster appearance.

I thought of the tail-regeneration thing too, but the truth of the matter is that I took the Rapid Healing edge straight from the LUGTrek Gorn writeup (although I used the CODA version, not the LUG one, of course). I'm not at all hellbent on that particular edge remaining there, especially since the Gorn are tough guys to begin with. On the other hand, some natural armor might not be a bad idea.

By the by, I skipped over the Slow edge because I figured the Agility penalty would affect Quickness reactions enough that I didn't need to push the point. However, as I think about it, perhaps penalizing Quickness is better than penalizing Agility, since Agility affects ranged weapon targeting. I see no reason why Gorn should be naturally inferior marksmen.

As I develop a game version of the Gorn (and especially as I look at and work from the LUGTrek information on Gorn culture, which is just plain cool), I agree more and more that I would have loved to see more done with these guys. The brighter side is that since the wrong thing wasn't done and the species ruined, there's tons of gaming potential here. I don't plan to change their appearance too significantly, but I do envision a CGI version of the Gorn with more mobility and range of expression (like a mouth that can actually open!). I'm working on a general picture of Gorn evolution that might explain things like the lack of a tail and the biological basis for female dominance.

[Capt Daniel Hunter]

Originally posted by Sea Tyger
I don't necessarily have a problem with that. Many lizards regrow their tails after having them lopped off, so you could say they have "greater regenerative ability."

That's a fair point, but that isn't a rapid healing ability, it's regeneration. And there would be quite a bit of difference between a lizard growing a new tail and a human-sized or bigger organism doing the same (though as Bashir once commented on DS9, it is a sort of Holy Grail of medicine, and I have no doubts we wil lcrack it on of these days).

[Capt Daniel Hunter]

Originally posted by Erik Filean


I thought of the tail-regeneration thing too, but the truth of the matter is that I took the Rapid Healing edge straight from the LUGTrek Gorn writeup (although I used the CODA version, not the LUG one, of course). I'm not at all hellbent on that particular edge remaining there, especially since the Gorn are tough guys to begin with. On the other hand, some natural armor might not be a bad idea.

Slap me upside the head. I'd forgotten it was in the ICON writeup Still, not entirely convinced it's appropriate.

Anyway, as a you say, a bit of natural armour would probably be good. I also agree that the slow flaw would be better than an Agility penalty. I get the impression, from what we've seen of the Gorn, that while they may be sluggish, they are quite precise creatures (the Gorn Captain almost outsmarted Kirk, and built a neat knife and trap, and could trhow a big rock pretty accurately - it only missed 'cause Jimmy boy dodged well )

The computer game Starfleet Academy did do a nice subtly updated Gorn that appeared in one or two of the missions. They looked pretty good actually (better than the Andorian they did). Worth checking out. One of thjese days, I might actually get the damn game to run again and do some screen caps.

[Erik Filean]

Originally posted by Capt Daniel Hunter
Pretty good. Not too sure about the rapid healing though, what's your reasoning for it?. I'm curious, is any of this based on research on real reptiles? I figure real reptile physiology and behaviour might be a useful model.

I gave some thought to what I know about basic reptile physiology, but unless one radically changes the Gorn from what we saw in "Arena," the analogy has limits. Real reptiles (snakes notwithstanding) have differently structured pectoral and pelvic girdles from any but the most primitive mammals, for instance, but the Gorn more resemble the mammalian configuration. In production terms that comes from the Gorn having been a human in a rubber suit, but I want to stay reasonably close to the "official" version.

Actually, I think of the Gorn more in terms of recent hypothesizing about tyrannosaurs that suggests that, even if they were warm-blooded, they may have been slower-moving scavengers rather than fast-moving, chasing hunters. My version of the Gorn will suggest a similar scavenging carnivore ancestry, although the Gorn clearly developed intelligent, probably cooperative scavenging strategies and later (with technology) cooperative hunting strategies just as hominids did on Earth.

I picture the Gorn as endothermic but perhaps not homeothermic (generating heat internally but unable to maintain a constant internal temperature), which might make them sluggish outside a narrow band of ideal external temperatures. There is a flaw in the PG that covers poor cold tolerance, and I will probably add that to my Gorn to reflect the idea. The PG similarly hints that the Gorn are very specialized in their ecological needs (perhaps not just in temperature), leading them to develop terraforming to a high level of sophistication, and the LugTrek material suggested that another part of this might be a need to create optimal mating grounds that stimulate correct pheromonal secretions in offworld environments.

The high chemoreception comes from the LUG material as well, and I expanded it a bit to create the Pheromonal Dominance ability, which I just thought was an entertaining bit of sociobiology. Since the Gorn have a snout that gets in the way of binocular vision, and drawing also on the old Jurassic Park notion of tyrannosaur vision being geared toward tracking movement, I gave them some limits in their visual abilities. (Incidentally, after seeing the size of the olfactory bulbs in a T-Rex brain, I very much doubt it would have had to see you move to nail you...it could have done that on scent alone.)

[The Tatterdemalion King]

BTW, it the Icon writeup spoken of here just the one in the TOS book, or was there another unpublished fragment from something out there somewhere?

[Erik Filean]

Originally posted by C. Huth
BTW, it the Icon writeup spoken of here just the one in the TOS book, or was there another unpublished fragment from something out there somewhere?

The important stuff is in the TOS core book, yes; but there were also some interesting tidbits in "Price of Freedom." The part of the PoF information that I'm definitely interested in is the speculation that the Gorn had been trying to set up an offworld mating ground on Cestus III that the original Federation colony disrupted, hence the harsh Gorn reaction to the "territorial intrusion." They didn't consider that humans might not be able to recognize the "obvious" pheromonal markers and therefore jumped to the conclusion that putting a colony near the site was a deliberate, hostile act. "Planets of the UFP" speculated that the 24th-century Cestus III settlements include a minority Gorn population, mostly misfits who could serve Gorn interests best by acting as an interface with the pesky mammals and otherwise staying out of the way. I don't recall that there was much about mainstream Gorn culture in that book, though.

[RaconteurX]

I personally would also give the Gorn a species flaw of Thin-Blooded. Reptilian susceptibility to extremes of temperature is well-documented.

[RaconteurX]

One more thing... other than the LUG material, what evidence is there for the Gorn being night blind? I would think that the Gorn would actually have Night Vision, since a fair number of reptiles are able to perceive temperature variations in their immediate surroundings.



Michael

[Erik Filean]

Originally posted by RaconteurX
I personally would also give the Gorn a species flaw of Thin-Blooded. Reptilian susceptibility to extremes of temperature is well-documented.

I agree; when I do the final writeup, Thin-Blooded will be there.

[Erik Filean]

Originally posted by RaconteurX
One more thing... other than the LUG material, what evidence is there for the Gorn being night blind? I would think that the Gorn would actually have Night Vision, since a fair number of reptiles are able to perceive temperature variations in their immediate surroundings.



Michael

The Night Blind flaw isn't directly taken from the LUG information. My take is that just as primates (humans included) have sacrificed chemoreception for highly-developed stereoscopic color vision, the ancestors of the Gorn never developed a strong need for visual enhancement because their chemoreception was so keen, and also because they were never adapted to an arboreal niche.

Besides, one can justify a good many edges on the basis of reptilian ancestry, but at some point there have to be balancing flaws. That's often true of evolutionary biology as well as game balance. I'm assuming that the Gorn are analogous to Terran reptiles (and more particularly theropod dinosaurs) in many respects, but that does not mean that they are entirely comparable. I still like the Night Blind flaw and its rationale, although your mileage may justifiably vary.

[Erik Filean]

Here's a second-draft Gorn profile, incorporating some of the changes suggested in this thread and adding some flavor text.

On the subject of Gorn names: there are only two that I can find in all of LUG's material. Rheuzz'r was the Gorn captain the Metrons put in the "ring" with Kirk, and Kaph-ti'zz is mentioned as a starting baseman for the Pike City Pioneers in the 24th century (not bad for a reaction-challenged bipedal reptile!). I used those as phonetic cues and then started thinking in terms of jawcracking Biblical Babylonian names.


GORN


PERSONALITY: Gorn are highly competitive and status-conscious; males express this through more direct, confrontational attitudes, while females tend to be more circumspect (or at least do not involve themselves personally in most physical confrontations). They are often blunt and unsubtle, preferring either to approach a situation from a position of overwhelming strength or to avoid or escape from a situation less easily managed. Gorn are capable of diplomacy, though usually they are more motivated to talk when they are not certain what they might be facing. This preference for well-defined situations, together with the need to resolve competition between individuals without regular resort to force, is the reason why Gorn social interactions include a great deal of ritualistic posturing.

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: The Gorn are massive, heavily muscled reptilian bipeds standing slightly over 2 meters tall on average. Their thick hides range in color from emerald to dull olive, their eyes have almost insect-like compound facets, and their elongated snouts contain large nasal cavities and jaws lined with sharp carnivore’s teeth. Males have pronounced bony ridges above the eyes and across the top of the skull, but this is the only obvious visible difference between Gorn sexes.

HOMEWORLD: Agornu is a large, hot, high-gravity Class M world with surface environments ranging from desert to rainforest. The Gorn prefer the broad tropical to subtropical savanna and scrub desert zones of the northern and southern midlatitudes, where indigenous or easily transplanted flora create the “redolence of home” in which they thrive best.

CULTURE: The closed Gorn society of the 23rd and 24th centuries is a product of more than eighteen thousand years of steady historical development. With the rise of animal husbandry on Agornu, the Gorn also developed plant domestication to feed their herds, and agriculture in turn made it possible to establish suitable living and mating grounds on previously uninhabitable land. Those Neolithic Gorn matriarchies that proved more successful in modifying their environments or in absorbing or conquering their neighbors experienced a snowball effect by virtue of the pheromonal dominance ranking females exert over males, and in time there was only one matriarchy of note: the One Empire, ruled by the lineage of the Effri’a that survives to this day.
The One Empire is still commanded by the Effri’a, a hereditary priest-empress whose sacred status prevents her from touching uncovered soil and whose duties at first seem wholly ceremonial. This is a misapprehension; although the Effri’a faces real, practical limitations on interacting with most of Gorn society, she wields considerable indirect power through her extensive familial connections and her immense ‘harem’ of high-status males. Beneath the Effri’a is a nondemocratic parliament, the Agarna, which is strongly but unofficially segregated between female planners and male implementers. Most of the Agarna is made up of appointed or hereditary offices, but a small minority of members are elected and serve in theory to voice the concerns of the common Gorn.
A major motivator for Gorn imperialism is the creation of offworld mating grounds whose flora and fauna stimulate the correct pheromonal responses for Gorn reproduction. The Gorn are very specialized in their ecological adaptation, and have developed terraforming and environmental remodeling to a much greater level of accomplishment than many other starfaring species. As terraformable areas on Agornu and the oldest Gorn colonies diminish and population rises, the One Empire finds expansion increasingly necessary.
Gorn culture is highly inflexible and ethnocentric in its interstellar contacts, and has been since the One Empire moved toward the stars in search of new living grounds during Earth’s sixth century A.D. To the Gorn, there are only two cultures: the One Empire and barbarians, who have always been either absorbed or exterminated. The Gorn experience considerable difficulty in dealing with the variety of powerful barbarian cultures with whom they share the quadrant—Federation, Cardassians, Ferengi—and because the One Empire cannot at present conquer these rivals, many Gorn prefer to pretend they do not exist at all.
The small number of Gorn who have any regular contact with barbarians tend to be members of ‘deviant’ matriarchal lineages, not truly dissenters but not fully in sync with Gorn culture, who serve the One Empire by functioning as the interface for such limited commerce and diplomacy as the Gorn conduct with barbarian cultures. The largest such community lives at the colony on Cestus III, the only world the Gorn have officially consented to share with unconquered aliens.

LANGUAGE: Gorn.

COMMON NAMES: Gorn use only personal names.

MALE NAMES: Kaph-ti’izz, Nebh-azz’t, Rheuzz’r

FEMALE NAMES: Ahzz’rr, Eph-taa’zzt, Shub-nazz’r

FAVORED PROFESSION: Diplomat (females); soldier or starship officer (males). Gorn society has almost castelike divisions of labor by gender, with females assuming the key decision-making positions in government, economics, science, and religion while males fill supporting military, technical, and labor roles (including the operational aspects of trade, which involve risks of travel and alien contact deemed beneath female attention). Gorn society is highly intolerant of nonconformity, so Gorn rogues are uncommon in the extreme.

SPECIES ADJUSTMENTS: Strength +3, Vitality +2, Presence -3. Reptilian Gorn physiology makes them significantly tougher than Humans, and their great size and high muscle density grants them much greater strength. However, Gorn relate poorly to other species in general, and sometimes even to other Gorn outside highly ritualized social contexts.

SPECIES ABILITIES:
ARMOR: Gorn have a thick, hide-like skin that provides some measure of natural armor. This armor deflects 3 points of damage from each attack.

BONUS EDGE: HIGH PAIN THRESHOLD: Gorn skin is less enervated than that of most species; they literally feel less pain. Injury penalties for Gorn characters are reduced by 2, as it is usually the physical impairment and not the pain of injuries that most affects them.

EXTRAORDINARY CHEMORECEPTION: Gorn have exceptionally keen chemoreceptive ability (especially olfaction, but also taste to a lesser degree) and can detect trace chemical signatures with a Perception attribute test as a free action. Range increments for Gorn chemoreception are Perception x10/Perception x100/Perception x1000/+100 meters.

PHEROMONAL DOMINANCE: Female Gorn rely heavily on the strong influence their pheromones have on males to maintain their dominant position in Gorn society. Furthermore, higher-status Gorn females secrete higher concentrations of these pheromones, and thus attract and influence larger “harems” of male mates.
A female Gorn gains enhanced benefit from her Renown, improving her chances to persuade male Gorn to assist her or follow her orders because of the strength of her pheromonal secretions. When making Influence, Intimidate, Negotiate, and Persuade tests involving male Gorn, the character adds her Renown modifier automatically to the skill test; no recognition test is required. A female Gorn receives an additional +2 test result bonus to such tests when influencing males with whom she has previously mated.

SPECIES FLAW: INTOLERANT: Gorn live in an extremely closed culture which recognizes outsiders only as “barbarians.” Gorn characters must spend 1 Courage, with no benefit, to engage in social skill tests involving non-Gorn who have not been assimilated into the culture of the Gorn Empire. (Gorn can interact normally with aliens who have been subjugated and brought into the Gorn cultural sphere.)

SPECIES FLAW: SLOW: High muscle mass and density and a lower metabolic rate give Gorn measurably slower reaction speeds than species of mammalian descent. Gorn suffer a –2 penalty to Quickness reaction tests.

SPECIES FLAW: THIN-BLOODED: Gorn are not homeothermic, and have great difficulty coping with cold temperatures. Gorn characters suffer a –5 penalty to Stamina reaction penalties to resist the effects of extreme cold.

AGING: Child (0-8), Young (9-15), Adult (16-190), Old (191-250), Very Old (251+)

[Sea Tyger]

It looks good, but my math shows it measures out to 21 picks; just a little high for my tastes.

Personally, I'd say drop the Strength bonus to +2, and it would be perfect.