GeneStealer

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A Geigeresque alien. Couple of sets of arms, couple of sets of teeth and a habit of impregnating unwilling hosts.

'Terrifyingly' they 'steal' genetic behaviour from those hosts, and can then (after a few generations) blend in seamlessly with the host population.

I'm not quite sure of the shock factor "Look out! They could become human if we're not careful!" but I guess it made sense to the designers. Or possibly they just fell about laughing from that line.

: 4th generation genestealer hybrids breed purestrain genestealers, fool!

: *Kazuhiko tries to remember backstory he read roughly ten years ago* I believe they kept out of the way of civilisation until they could blend in or used MysticPowersTM? to control people they came across...

: Um, ignoring the genetics of that - ok, that makes them scarier. But the whole blips thing worked better anyway. --Vitenka

They turned out to be the genetically engineered advance troops of the Tyrannid fleet. Don't even ask.

: (Fairly standard 'roving hive mind that consumes the resources of planets and then seeds itself onwards' thing. As used in StarshipTroopers? for example.) --Vitenka

Not heavily influenced by the Alien series of films at all. No sir.

MikeJeggo seems to recall that they were a rather scary race to battle against in Warhammer40k - although since he never owned this game and wasn't very good at it, they may not have been all that scary.

: They're SpaceHulk! Although yeah, they do exist in the main game too. Close combat monkeys with limited spell or range support make for a heavy metagame. They win against stuff that is good against vehicles and they win against stuff that has too few units to be able to sacrifice a few to slow them down. They are also interesting in the ccg ;) --Vitenka

: In second edition (being the only one I played to any degree) they were downright scary once they got close - basically being able to rip through two of anything not obscenely good. But they were also good fodder for the latest 'turns out, if I give this squad this, this, and two of these, they hit on a 2+' brokenness. -- TheInquisitor

: Heh. The last brokenness that I'd heard of was that they'd standardised movement speeds to make things easier. Which meant that your troops could back away as fast as their troops could advance. Which made them into artillery paté. --Vitenka