Hi there, welcome to the write-up of our first Q&A session on discord!
On Tuesday 10th June 2025 we held our first open Q&A call, answering a mixture of written-in and on-the-day questions about the game, universe, and event 1.
There’s a lot to go through, so there are going to be several blog posts to cover the full 2.5 hr call. Each one will focus on a different category of question, which will roughly follow the order everything was covered in the call (with a few on-the-day questions moved to be in different categories).
This first category is Character Building questions! We had a huge chunk of the call dedicated to lore questions so some of those have been folded in here.
Your Dev Team
This Q&A was led by the core members of the dev team, which I’ll quickly introduce here.
- Keith (he/him): gamerunner, admin, and game mechanics
- Nathan (they/them): lead writer for lore and story
- Becky (she/they): graphic design, automation and project management
- Alex (he/him): assistant writer, diplomacy specialism
- Olive (they/she): all-rounder, weapons checking and sound fx specialisation
Now onto the questions!
Will you be making a feedback form for lore or anything players come up with so we can let you know about our ideas/what’s been done at events?
Great idea!
We’re always open to emails, and some of our dev team are (currently) open to DMs about the game. But we’ll look into different ways to make it easier for players to submit ideas and let us know what they’ve come up with IC.
Aliens
How open are the team to the players shaping the culture/background of the alien species?
Players are welcome to build on what’s already there in the species briefs. We’d like to encourage you to think of it not as creating new lore, but finding ways to express the existing lore in a way that’s meaningful to your individual character or your group.
There will always be gaps in species or planet lore, because we can’t cover everything (and if we did, each info document would be the size of a phone book). This early on in the game’s life, we’ve focused on getting a solid groundwork laid for the game, and do plan on slowly adding to the lore of each planet and alien over time.
If there are big gaps that players want filled, we encourage you to come to us first so that the team can work on it. If new lore is expressed organically through play or players do something in play with notable implications for the lore, we encourage you to come to us afterwards so that we can reconcile the new information and discuss where the story is going. This goes for all areas of lore!
In summary:
- Big gaps in the lore: come tell us first, so that we can fill them.
- Small gaps in the lore, or changes to existing lore: have a go first, but then come find us after for reconciliation and development.
- Lore embellishments, or lore as relates to one or a few characters: go for it! And let us know afterwards, because we can work the story around it.
Can I make up my own alien, or really go hard on customising an existing one?
We aren’t allowing completely new aliens at this stage, and want to focus on the currently developed universe.
As the story progresses, we do want to gradually unlock more aliens. We’ve had to limit what we put out for the first few events to give the game the best start and not give a daunting amount of options to players (multiple alien concepts didn’t make it to game launch for this reason)!
On customising existing aliens, we’ve tried to make the physrep requirements quite broad, with a mix of easy and extensive costume options, so if you have a particular idea you like but think could be too “out there”, do drop us a message. We want our aliens to have variations within their species and not look like someone’s copied the exact same makeup onto ten people (unless they’re meant to be related).
Can anthroids have other physical traits? For example, if I want to play an anthroid that emulates one of the other player species, would that be ok?
Also asked: are synthetic animal anthroids (bipedal) a playable option?
This comes under the heading of customising existing species. We would not be opposed to Anthroids made in the image of alien species other than humans, but we would want to work with any player who wanted to go down that route to reconcile their character concept with existing Anthroid lore.
Please do get in touch with the dev team about customising Anthroids to look like aliens or having non-human features. We aren’t saying a hard no, but it isn’t an automatic yes either – we’ll approach this on a case-by-case basis at this stage.
Anthroids – LEGA-C Variants: – How old are these Legacy models? What would be more expected for LEGA-C Anthroid players compared to Newer Variant Anthroid players.
Player LEGA-C Anthroids are roughly 50-60 years old, and are viewed as the “grandparents” of the current Anthroid generation. Lean into this as much as you wish!
We’ll work on developing this roleplay difference between LEGA-C and newer Anthroids over time, and are very open to ideas players have surrounding this.
Does biology work the same way across player species (within reason)?
For the purposes of Biomed and roleplay, all player species are assumed to have analogous organs or other vital structures in roughly the same place as humans. Humans, Skala and Vari all have their hearts and stomachs where you’d expect, while Anthroids and Omdua explicitly resemble other humanoids and therefore have the right bits in the right places. You are however welcome to embellish this with details through roleplay.
Romantic relationships between species are possible. Alliance technology allows for children between mixed species couples, but NOT hybrid species offspring; they will fully be one species or another. We are saying this now as it may come up in future plot or lore; please keep any NSFW stuff in your headcanon.
Is there more lore coming for the aliens? At the moment there isn’t much of a culture for each of them.
The information released has been done deliberately. The team are conscious that there are a lot of choices so the information has been limited to just the essentials for the time being. If there are any essentially you feel are missing, please let us know. The existing lore will progress depending on how the game plays out and is interpreted by players.
For aliens specifically, each brief is intended to work in tandem with one of the planets. Your character is a citizen of one of these planets, or has moved there to join the Ardent mission, so most of your cultural roleplay points will come from the planet brief with a little added flavour from the alien brief. We’re aware only the humans have their homeworld in the planet options currently, this is intentional as the Ardent is a human-led project, and as the story progresses, more planets (including potentially other alien homeplanets) will add their formal support and become playable origins.
Are there any other known alien species?
There are the known species of THRONE and SHADOW (simply called THRONE and Macule respectively), plus whatever is going on with MOSAIC (not that you know what that is yet. We do but we’re not sharing!).
At game launch we are keeping the number of species limited to help set a clear identity for the game and help set expectations with the players.
We are planning for more species, and we don’t intend for them all to be “new discoveries”. For now we are soft hand-waving that other species may exist within Alliance space but simply aren’t present on the Ardent, without naming them. We’d be grateful if players could take a kid-gloves approach to this rather than jumping to fill the gaps – we can roll with player-led lore and are happy to take suggestions but would prefer this to be collaborative.
Backgrounds
Can I play an ex-member of/alien from an antagonist faction?
Currently no. We won’t rule it out forever but the current plan is to keep them non-playable.
We’ve designed the antagonists to be interesting antagonists first and foremost, not necessarily interesting player species. Playing as them would also require you to know lore which is currently a secret to both players and the Alliance!
If you do want to play an antagonist you are absolutely welcome to join the Crew however!
Can I play [character from X media]?
All characters have to comply fully with Ardent Spacers lore and align comfortably with the universe. Direct 1-to-1 plagiarism of characters from other properties is a no-no; we want to ensure players can be immersed in the universe of Ardent, and we also don’t want to be sued! Equally, however, we are happy for players to take inspiration from other sources as we recognise this is part of the appeal and fantasy of LARP for many, and we have tried to write quite broad lore that can accommodate a lot of this.
As a general rule, avoid any obviously recognisable names and symbols from other properties, try to mix or blend your influences, and use recognisable touch points within the game world if you can rather than inventing all your own lore from scratch. Remember that using what’s in our lore, rather than making up your own, with give you more access to story hooks and the game world and lead to more fun! It’s also worth noting that inventing lore that would lead to a very different game setting to the one we’ve written, for example by having access to time travel or being from some massive crusading space empire, is as non setting compatible as relying on something that is outright contradicted by the lore. If there is something missing from the setting that you would like to see included, or you’re not sure how compatible a character idea is, let us know directly and we can work with you to find a solution.
How much can my character know about the antagonist factions already?
Your character is welcome to have had prior dealings with the antagonist factions as long is it’s (a) consistent with the lore and lore timelines, (b) consistent with how much the Alliance generally knows about the factions (so you can have regularly dealt with SHADOW incursions, but you’ll have had no direct interactions with MOSAIC) and (c) consistent with what you yourself know. If you want to work specific antagonist interactions into your character backstory and want more info to fill the gaps, let the writing team know and we’ll see what we can do to accommodate.
How common is planet hopping for work?
It’s comparable to emigrating for work in the present day. For some people, hopping into a teleporter or onto a spaceship for work will be a part of everyday life, for others it might have happened one or two times, and others still might see it as a far-off drem.
Groups
As I want to play with my friends going, does it help to be part of the same planet?
Not necessarily. The game isn’t partitioned off by planet or alien species so much that it’s impossible to be in a cross-planet or cross-species group. Everyone works together on the Ardent!
If you think it’s a cool character hook for all your friends to play with the same origin, go for it! Having that matching group background can help create really distinct player groups. However, you’re more than welcome to have a different thing bind your group together. It could be as simple as you all meeting during your induction on the Ardent and hitting it off, maybe you worked together on another project in the past, had a joint hobby, etc.