Tabletop Tuesday — The Nyberrite Alliance: The Halee
Happy Tuesday! I’m back on Star Trek Adventures again this week for Tabletop Tuesday, with the last of a quartet of species I fleshed out for my group playing their way through the Shackleton Expanse campaign put out by Modiphius. Three weeks ago I introduced the Nyberrite Alliance with the Nyberrites themselves, then two weeks ago I added the Balduk, and then the R’Ongovians, and finally today: the Halee, which is another “blink and you’ll miss it” mention from an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation.
HaleeTOS ERA ONWARD
Halee II, the Class M homeworld of the Halee, exists on the inner edge of the star system’s habitable zone and has a particularly high axial tilt, which, combined with its orbit, leads to an extreme variance between seasons throughout the planet’s two-hundred-and-ninety-five-day year. Punishingly hot and humid summers are followed by winters where sunlight is scarce for a quarter of the year, and temperatures plummet. Yearly hurricanes seasons used to pummel the coastal areas of the planet, and while weather detection and adjustment satellite systems have been in place for nearly three decades as of the 2370s, the dreaded “storm season” lives on in the minds of older Halee citizens. The Halee hav a cultural—and spiritual—sense of communal care and compassion, alongside a religious tradition of honouring and elevating the dead who died in service of the community.
Halee evolved from brachiating primates, originally surviving the larger predators of the dense forests and jungles by learning to work together and climbing to safety, and working to gather necessary supplies to ride out winter in nest-like structures they built and insulated in the higher-altitude forests before the first temperature drops. As humanoids, their skin tones are generally shades of yellows and oranges matching the bark and branches of the forests of their homeworld; their eyes pale yellow, grey, or gold; and their lean bodies are built to be graceful, with longer-than-average arms that hang lower past their waist than most humanoids (a throwback to their brachiating heritage). Most have black hair that greys as they age, which grows from high on their scalp and notably also in two denser groupings from high on either temple—the young can cling to the denser hair growing from both temples while riding parental backs, as they retain a strong-grip reflex even in infancy, though most modern Halee prefer to carry their infants and children with cloth wraps. As beings that evolved on a very warm planet, they find most locations a bit cold for their liking, and often wear voluminous robes to compensate.
Halee II contains a wide variety of predators, all of which live very much up to the notion of nature being “red in tooth and claw.” For example, flights of white-tailed Halee condors—an avian with a wingspan of nearly four meters—form mutualistic relationships with prides of Halee grass leopards, the two species working together to herd smaller, quicker prey that might otherwise escape either predator species on their own. This means humanoids in the wild need to look down and up, just like the rest of the prey species on the planet—and greater predators than these exist among the wilder interiors of Halee II’s four large continents.
The need for protection when Halee venture into the deeper, predator filled jungles of their world led to the rise of a legion of protectors—Halee Rangers—tasked with learning the routes to the isolated communities within the deeps (traditionally the source of rare substances). Any willing to take on the dangerous job are considered—even those with less-than-stellar pasts. In fact, disgraced Klingons are known to choose serving in this legion in exile if they wish to seek a more honourable death—of which those serving know there are ample opportunities—while defending groups heading into the deeps.
Fairly recently the Halee have colonized Halee III, originally a Class L world within the outer edge of the habitable zone of the system. Aided by their fellow Nyberrite Alliance members in its terraforming and expansion of the initial sites, Halee III is set to become a thriving world over the next few decades, with a great deal of expected immigration coming from Halee II itself given Halee III’s lack of native fauna. Of note, this colony has been a contentious issue among the more religiously and spiritually aligned of the Halee, who believe removing themselves from the dangers of Halee II is akin to rejecting all those who gave their lives to ensure their continuance on the world that gave them birth.
The Halee are a part of the Nyberrite Alliance (having joined the organization after its initial founding as the fourth member), and while as a whole the Nyberrite Alliance are not quite as technologically advanced as the Federation, each of the species work together and their overall collective technological capabilities are about on par with the Cardassian Empire or the Ferengi. In the Nyberrite Alliance, the Halee provide much of its environmental technologies, as well as providing adaptable and think-outside-the-box engineering acumen.
EXAMPLE VALUE: Together we remain standing where those apart would fall.
ATTRIBUTES: +1 Control, +1 Fitness, +1 ReasonTRAIT: Halee. While not particularly large nor one of the strongest humanoids in the galaxy, the Halee have a strong tradition of acrobatics going back to their brachiating ancestors, have both a keen sense of balance and proprioception, as well as particularly strong grips and dextrous fingers. Similarly, their eyes are fairly well adapted to noticing detail and motion even when in dim lighting or shadows, which their genetic ancestors used to watch for predators among the upper branches of their trees. TALENTS: The character receives access to the following talents: NATURAL CLIMBERREQUIREMENT: Halee, or gamemaster’s permission.
Even modern Halee spend a great deal of time—especially while young—climbing and balancing in the trees of their homeworld (though usually in safer, predator-free, areas), and for those with this Talent, their senses of prioperception and balance, and their climbing skill, have been well honed indeed. In any Task where a sense of balance or ability to climb is involved, characters with this Talent reduce the Difficulty by 1 to a minimum of 0. Further, they may ignore the first Complication rolled in any such task.
NAMES
Halee personal names tend to be short, single- or double-syllable sounds, while their clan names are longer—most clan names were originally formed by amalgamating ancestral lineage names into one longer name as a kind of spoken lineage equivalent of “Elm, father of Ara, mother of Aya.” Younger Halee sometimes create their own clan names, and some have even borrowed other species nomenclature practices in doing so, especially if new species have married into the clan, which may perplex outsiders expecting a Halee-typical introduction only to be given a Balduk or Nyberrite-inspired clan name.
Male Names: Elm, Moto, NisFemale Names: Rin, Ara, OyaNongendered Names: Noth, Osh, EthSurnames: Elmaraya, Prishonwen, KarlinpayaExample names: Rin Elmaraya, Shon Payawennis, Eth KhatethUSING THE SPECIES
The Halee were a species I brought into my Shackleton Expanse campaign specifically to flesh out Narendra Station’s ambassadorial presences, but also to further detail the Nyberrite Alliance as another polity of note in the Beta Quadrant area of Federation Space, especially during the Klingon-Federation war of 2372-2373. Given their only real canon mention was that dishonoured Klingons sometimes chose to be exiled there to gain an honourable death, I came up with the notion of their predator-laden interior jungles and the idea of “Halee Rangers” to explain it.
For your own games, the Halee can offer another face to the Nyberrite Alliance, as well as being a “go-between” species with an apparently cordial relationship with the Klingons during times when the Federation perhaps does not. Their colony world provides some options for Federation terraforming aid—especially if you want to highlight a positive relationship between the Federation and the Nyberrite Alliance, or bring up a conflict between the more spiritual, ancestor-elevating Halee and those seeing the colony as a safer future—and their homeworld can be a great setting for a “crew vs nature” conflict if they somehow found themselves (willing or not) in the deep Halee jungles, surrounded by predators.
