The Veen - setting-building notes

I have a very specific thing in mind when I write the Veen. It's the early Victorian British, mainly, the early to mid-1800's, but with fashions and art more suited to the Rococo or even Renaissance, lots of gaudy colors, and even their battlecruisers have useless crenelations and coral-like protrusions. The mentality is very much White Man's Burden, arrogant Imperialists who believe just because they have the biggest and most powerful stuff they deserve the largest pieces of the cake, and anyone not as advanced as they are inferior and deserve barely mockery.

Note that these are technically good guys. Yeah.

In the setting, the Veen loathe/hate/dislike humans for two reasons. The first is the same reason they dislike any species not their own: They're not Veen. Veen society is, for the most part, deeply bigoted towards non-Veen.
But the second reason, the reason why bigotry towards humans is actually encouraged by the governments of the Veen, is known only to a few of them. It's a deep, dark secret, and one they would prefer never to get out: Humans and Veen might be related.

Genetic deep scans reveal human and Veen to have more than 99% of their DNA in common. In fact, the scientists who performed the tests surmised it would not be impossible for Veen and humans to procreate.

Add to this that humans smell good to the Veen. Their olfactory senses are slightly sharper than ours, and to them, our natural body odors, even hidden away by washing and use of perfumed hygiene articles, trigger several bodily reactions, such as endorphins and other natural reactions. Basically, they like our smell. Some Veen have surmised that this is somehow intentional, going by the Precursor Theories that are common in the Alliance (the idea that a precursor species went about the galaxy seeding life and technology) and theorizing that humans and Veen were made for one another.

...naturally, a fairly tightly wound, up-tight monoculture like that of the Veen Empire can't very well have a walking aphrodisiac species gallivanting about in Alliance space.

For GM's this isn't all that difficult to portray. Humans get a slight bonus to social rolls against Veen, and that's about it.

As for what Veen look like, well, they look mostly human-like, but instead of scalp-hair they have thick, vestigial, mostly useless tentacles, and instead of eyebrows they have little neat fleshy ridges. They have eye-lashes, but that's just evolutionary good sense. The tentacles are pretty much just dead weight, and men have shorter tentacles than women (they still reach the shoulders by adulthood, so there's very little difference to non-Veen). They're also vaguely erogenous zones, about as sensitive as ear-lobes. They're slightly shorter on average than humans, and their eyes lack whites and pupils, tending towards solid-color hues of green, blue, black and purple. They don't see much better than humans, though.