Andorians!!

foxspirit13

It's back (note the two !)! That post that caused more discussion than a Jem'hadar with a Tindr profile! I wrote the original long ago, but it got archived, so I decided to repost it.

Original post: https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/934393/andorians/p1

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My favourite Star Trek race - Orion girls run a close second for obvious reasons...

My main is an Andorian science officer... though historically/culturally I suppose she should have been a tactical.

I bought the Among the Clans book from Last Unicorn Games on Friday and I love it. Full of a lot of good-but-soft-cannon information.

So I thought i would post some of the insights for those of us RPing an Andorian, this is soft-cannon stuff, so while its endorsed by the copyright holders, its not really tv/movie cannon - althought some parts were made cannon by the episode of TNG "Data's Day."

Also some of this can be found on Memory Alpha site.

Andorians are communal, they do their best when they are on a ship or in a group with four or more Andorians.

They live in lodges of extended families, and in the distant past, the lodges were comprised of several different families. They also like to sleep in the same room, so nudity is not something they get worked up over. Secrets are their favourite things to keep, even though they are very open and sociable, it is considered acceptable to both keep secrets and to try to guess or somehow get the secret from that person. Secrets also seem to be have a sort of monetary value.

Their bodies are a mix of cartelege and bone, with redundant chambers that protect vital organs and make them very hard to get broken bones. Said systems and extra strength also makes breakages very painful, and the convalescence is very long.

Andoria is mostly ice and with taigas, with oceans filled with icebergs and dangerous sea beasts, theres also a system of volcanic areas that produce thermal vents which gives the planet a brief false summer.

Andoria's natural year is 899 Earth years long, but their calendar year is 300 days.

As noted in the episode "Data's Day," Andorian marriages are a quad; four people are required. This is not due to a biological reason though. It steams from a time during their middle ages when a warrior conquered the world... and I forget the rest of the reasoning, but Andorians are a very traditional people, so they have kept this up to the present.

Relationships start out as normal, girl and boy meet, and they fall in love and want to get married. Then they have to go out and find another couple to complete their quad. This pairing can be romantic or platonic, but they must be genuinely affectionate with each other.

I found no mention of the whole zhen/shen chan/shan bit... nor was there any mention (that I read) about the Aenar, except that they were hinted at in the section about the Neshilev Settlement Project. I think this book was written before the Enterprise series...

Divorce is very very very rare, and comes with a heap of social stigmas. Its so bad that those that do get divorced never remarry.

Andorians often meet their quad-mates, or potential quad mates when they are children, but it is not unheard of for Andorians to get married to couples they meet as adults or through work or college, or even military service. Arranged marriages are not unheard of, but tend to only happen in political arenas.


The Andorian Outlook
Andorians are fascinated with history, both their own, and other races. Partly because they destroyed all their history records from before the time of Lor'Vela (a prophetess of sorts) to keep from destroying themselves with constant warfare.

They are fascinated by Vulcans, their culture is similar to their own, as Vulcans adopted a culture of emotion repression and logic to keep from destroying themselves with war.

They are culturally best friends with the Tellarites, though they wont just come out and say it. Instead they like to poke fun at their neighbours with satires and jokes and parodies and so on. The Tellarites are the same way about the Andorians. To outsiders, this may seem like mutual dislike, but its all good-natured ribbing.

Andorians find terraforming distasteful. They would rather build their colonies and towns around nature rather than making nature work around them.

As I noted before, because of their communal lifestyle, nudity is not a taboo. As such, TRIBBLE and nudity as an erotic artform have no meaning to them. Nudity is legal everywhere on Andoria, but you dont see it outdoors much.

Andorians and Lovecraft would have fallen in love with each other. Both are terrified and in awe of the oceans. They achieved spaceflight and colonization of other worlds long before they sailed vessels across their oceans... those that have before this were often doomed to watery graves. As a result of this cultural terror, one of their religions TRIBBLE involved drowning forever, or was situated in a land far across the ocean.

There are 71 state-recognized Andorian religions, but only two of them are outlawed because they are war-based. None of the religions are considered "more right" than any other. Adult Andorians might change their religion if they have one, as a sign of maturity... other Andorians might be atheist, or become a part of a religion because their family was.
The most common are Borvaeism (kinda like the viking religion in that it has a Valhalla); Eila Clahd - a type of nature worship that considers hunting an act of piety. Emasha Yul is the typical god-based religion, it has 600 dieties and they constantly have new stories written about them; all of which are considered divinely inspired. Hastra Bei Hastra (commonly called Hastra Bei), is a thype of Buddhist religion that believes you get reincarnated over and over until you end up in a pure state where you are then born into an animal and you start your humanoid life all over again when the critter dies. Umarinism is a recent (as of the TOS series timeline I think) religions that sprouted around a girl named Umarin in the mid 22nd century. She had visions that revolved around the Andorians rising up and helping a friend-race that was loosing its spirit and then carries the two races on to the future in a golden-age of exploration and advancement... a sort of Andorian worship.

The Andorian language is very easy to learn if one already knows Starfleet Standard (Im guessing English), it is a logical language that has a set way of writing words.. the book explained it better.


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I bought my copy of the book from Noble Knight Games (website). :cool:

...too much blue? hehe

Edited Addendum: The site that I found the Graalek font and the other two links are no longer existent.