Thank you very much, nightlamp and thoth-amon.
Creatures ... I have just started working on them.
Since Alden has no oxygen atmosphere and therefore no ozone layer, most of
its creatures stay below the surface most of the time, to avoid the high le-
vel of ultraviolet radiation.
Two somewhat typical examples for what the colonists have to deal with are
the Sand Creepers and the Copper Fiends, both based upon creatures from
JBE's Creatures of Distant Worlds series - I use the original stats, but have
changed the descriptions to adapt them to my setting.
Sand Creepers are "worms" (no desert world without sand worms ...
![Wink ;) ;)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
) that
live and hide beneath the desert sand and attack any potential prey they can
locate with their vibration sense. The small ones are just a nuisance, they on-
ly damage a person's boots or environment suit, but the really big ones - up
to 15 meters long - are quite dangerous. Of course, they cannot eat a human
because of the differences in the biochemistry, but they stubbornly keep try-
ing.
Copper Fiends are small "tentacled rats" that obviously need pure metals, es-
pecially copper, for their biochemistry. They tend to gnaw through whatever
contains more than small traces of those metals, for example vehicle parts,
habitat hulls, equipment and machinery of any kind. From the point of view of
the colonists they are far more dangerous than the sand creepers, because
of the technology malfunctions and even hull breaches (remember: exotic at-
mosphere) they can cause.
These two are not exactly innovative ideas for a desert world setting, but I
wanted to start with the obvious "ecological slots" before adding more inter-
esting life forms. I intend to do that with Samarran's "Flynn's Guide to Alien
Creation", which offers a lot of useful options for such creatures, but I have
not really started to design anything with it yet.