Alien Body Plans #1: Hexapods and Other Ecdysozoa

It's easy to make aliens: take a person or a dog, slap some antennae on 'em, maybe some ooze and some spooky talons, and then put some random letters together in a nigh-unpronounceable combination. 

As I said, it's easy to make aliens. What isn't easy is making them well. 

Even when you're working hard to be creative, it can sometimes be hard to get out of the rut of familiarity, to go beyond four limbs and two eyes and venture into the realm of, well, the alien. 

Alien Body Plans is about exploring the diversity of forms already lurking around us, breaking them down into short summaries so that you can use them as a jumping-off point for new forms of life and talking about some of the ways that they could be twisted around. By the time that you're done, nobody will guess that your original inspiration was a spider or a velvet worm.