Chitrani: An alien race, originating on the planet Jigath, the Chitrani were responsible for the genocides of eight other sentient species, before their defeat at Sayleen in 1872 led to their complete destruction. No Chitrani are known to have survived the fall of their homeworld, and they are believed to be extinct.
Physical Appearance
Chitrani ranged in height from 5'3" to 7'3", with an average height of 6'1". They weighed between 150 lbs and 400 lbs, with their optimal weight being 250 lbs. They had dark blue skin, ranging in tones from purple to greenish-blue depending on what area from their homeworld they originated on, which appeared to be lightly scaled to human eyes; this was, in fact, merely thick skin, and did not follow the rule of Earth reptiles. As with all known sentient species, they were bipedal beings and oxygen-breathers, and were warm-blooded beings from a homeworld with 1.2 times Earth's standard gravity. Chitrani were entirely hairless by the time they were encountered by humanity, but there was evidence that they had once had body hair, and a very few had small amounts of throwback hair. Chitrani had two arms, each with three long fingers and an opposable thumb. They appeared more slender than their weight would typically account for, and they had eyes of all varieties of colour that were otherwise similar to human optical design.
Typical Chitrani lifespans were between one hundred and one hundred and fifty years; they began puberty at approximately the age of 15 human years and reached full adulthood at approximately the age of 25.
The most common super-powered trait amongst the Chitrani was psychic capability, followed by pseudotechnology. The Chitrani bred for these capabilities, and almost completely lost all other strains of superbeingism.
Cultural Tendancies
There is evidence to suggest that the Chitrani once had several dominant cultures, but by the time of their first contact with other alien species, their homeworld was entirely under the control of its dominant culture, with other cultures providing only minor regional alterations. The Chitrani culture respected power, ambition, and loyalty, but had little room for mercy. Death-duels over points of status were not uncommon amongst their people - such duels had few formal rules, preferring to give victory to the most cunning combatant. At the same time, Chitrani were expected to announce such rivalries, and undermining someone without having a rivalry declared was considered to be treason against the Chitrani Dominion.
Most other information about the Chitrani is dubious and prone to misunderstanding; without any living Chitrani to explain the subtleties of their festivals, beliefs, and dominant religions, archaeologists have had to guess their way through the few surviving records and artifacts of the race.
History
The Chitrani's history, even more so than that of humanity, was one of violence. Unlike humans, Chitrani typically considered most wars not to be over until their opponents were completely subjugated. Their early history is filled with records of wars between Chitrani nations, interspersed only by the occasional alliance and pause to regroup. This warfare began, as far as human and sayleen historians have been able to determine, as soon as the first Chitrani tribes encountered each other. It continued for over 5000 human years, gradually slowing as technology advanced and the Chitrani forged continent-spanning empires. During this time, a Chitrani scientist began working on combining psychic powers with pseudotechnology. With some effort, he succeeded in tapping into his planet's Psychic Resevoir; the technology rapidly spread across the planet, until all of the Chitrani were using psychic energy with abandon.
The pivotal turning point for the Chitrani came when they were visited by an older alien race, the Doyi. Little is known of the Doyi, but they apparantly decided that the Chitrani were too violent to be allowed to develop further, lest they become a threat to the Doyi in the future. The aliens launched an invasion, attempting to wipe the Chitrani out. The remaining Chitrani empires joined together against the Doyi, and a war began that would last over seven hundred years. The details remain unknown, but it was during this war, their own reserves running dry, that a Chitrani scientist discovered that sentient beings release a great deal of psychic energy upon their deaths - energy which normally dissipates, but that could be harnessed. By using their own deaths and those of their enemies to power their weapons, the Chitrani took the upper hand in the war, pursuing the Doyi back to their own homeworld. They proceeded to kill every last one of the Doyi, and to completely obliterate their civilization from the face of the galaxy.
The energy that the Chitrani harnessed from the destruction of the Doyi revitalized their psychic technologies, but it also brought them to the attention of other races that the Doyi had dealt with. These races were initially uncertain of how to relate to the Chitrani, but the Chitrani were not. Over the course of the next four thousand years, they engaged three more species in warfare, and destroyed all of them completely. In addition, they gradually shifted all of their production and industry to psychic ones - they even altered themselves to no longer require food or sleep, subsisting entirely off the death-energies that they were harnessing in order to make themselves into pure conquerers.
Ultimately, these changes, though they were likely the main thing that helped the Chitrani survive their early ways, proved to be their undoing. When the great empires of the Galaxy were reduced to ruin, the Chitrani discovered that they had no way to go back; without new foes, they could not produce psychic energy at the rates they needed to survive, let alone thrive. They set out to find new species to destroy. These races were much weaker than the Chitrani, but also less numerous. The Chitrani became increasingly desperate, falling into a familiar cycle. They would eradicate a race, fall into decadence for a few hundred years until their supplies of psychic energy began to fail, then pick a new target and begin again. Four races were obliterated in this manner.
The fifth target of the Chitrani was the planet Sayleen. Sayleen still had some psychic reserves of its own, but had few superbeings with which to use them, and lacked significant defenses against the Chitrani. Sayleen space fleets fought valiantly, only to fall one by one to the inexorable Chitrani advance. The nations of Sayleen threw all of their resources at defeating the Chitrani, but managed only to slow their advance. If events had continued, the Chitrani would have been successful - but in the second year of the invasion the ancient psychic warpgate in the sayleen capitol activated, and the League of Adventurers arrived on-planet.
The results of the League's contributions to the war are well-documented. Using Atlantean technology combined with Sayleen Artificers, the League led a counter-attack against the Chitrani, culminating in a daring raid on the Chitrani mothership. At the end of the battle, the League forcibly warped the Chitrani back to their homeworld, and used the last of Sayleen's own Psychic Resevoirs to create a psychic barrier around the planet, preventing the Chitrani from escaping. What they did not realize was that the Chitrani were nearly out of their own psychic energy, and could no longer survive without it. When the barrier faltered in 1907 and a human and sayleen expeditionary force landed on the planet, they found a dead world. There is no evidence that there were ever any Chitrani colonies, and in a hundred years no Chitrani has been found alive.