I've been thinking about expanding the background of an alien race, and finally giving them a name. These guys.

The aliens known as "the war lords". That is in fact not their real name, as indeed, their Head of State calls himself "The War Lord". That's like calling your people "the Presidents." They are very humanoid in appearance, but they are implied to have a relatively different biology, and may be more closely related to the Gallifreyans than to humanity. During the days of the Pythian Empire, Gallifrey colonized numerous planets, and shortly before Pythia was overthrown, and Rassilon, Omega, and the Other took over, and started playing with spacetime and turning some of the Gallifreyans into Time Lords, they ceded. Perhaps the "war lords" are among the descendants of these Gallifreyan colonists, as, likely, are the Trakenites, the Logopolitans, the Dulkans, the Apalapucians, the Terileptils, the Chelonians, and perhaps even the Osrians have some connection, though they could be older than the Gallifreyans, and a totally different people entirely.

So the question is, what are these "war lords" as a species, and what do I call them? What kind of history do I give them? I thought about simply identifying them with an already existing alien race that looked suitably human but didn't have a human biology. However, most superficially human aliens do possess a reasonably human biology, like the Vulcans, the Klingons, the Chiss, the Zeltrons, the Echani, and the Lorridans.

However, this isn't to say that possibly inhuman human-looking aliens exist, and I think I found a couple that either are not human in biology, or are ambiguous enough that it's not hard to imagine them as such.

The Betelgusians from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Including Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox, the peoples of Betelguese lived on several planets orbiting the star Betelgeuse, were the most common and powerful people in the Galxy, and were implied to only be humanoid on the outside. Apparently, they had distributed nervous systems, meaning that it wasn't hard for them to surgically attach more appendages and even extra heads for the Hell of it, and took more than just two parents to make, resulting in first cousins and half-siblings being almost the same things to them, and lots of (mild) incest on their planets. Assuming it's the same Betelgeuse as Star Trek and Space Dandy, and counting both, would mean that it already had three (unrelated) very non-humanoid aliens on the planets orbiting the star.

If that is the case, it's not hard to guess how the more humanoid Betelgeusians were either once "the war lords" or later became "the war lords": To squash the indigenous peoples there that they, as colonists from Gallifrey, were fighting.

The Black Hole Aliens from Terror of Mechagodzilla

Not to be mistaken for the apelike Black Hole aliens from the previous movie, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, the ToMG Black Hole aliens were severely disfigured by, apparently, the carcinogenic pollution on a planet they once lived on, but were still suitably humanoid.

They were apparently an ancient people, judging from successfully colonizing planets that orbited a black hole. Black holes usually would come from ancient stars and would be more around the center of a galaxy...Gallifrey is supposed to be near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. So it's possible their "Black Hole Third Planet" is close by. The black hole itself likely wasn't dangerous so long as the planet was far enough away: With black holes, things caught in the gravity of one will locked into its orbit for millennia before they finally draw close enough to the black hole to be sucked in. An alien race that's been caught by one could likely be in such an ancient part of the galaxy that they may be old and advanced enough to find ways around being destroyed by a black hole and might also grow an artificial sun. Taking this and the Black Hole Aliens from the previous movie into account, it's possible that the more humanoid Black Hole Aliens took over a planet already inhabited by an ape-like race, enslaved them, and polluted the planet into uselessness. With the planet inching ever closer to the black hole, and nothing else to lose and everything to gain, they set on making an army to take over enough of the galaxy to conquer more viable planets.

But could either of these work? Any more ideas? There could be countless more superficially human but sub-ficially inhuman aliens out there that could, in some way, be seen as "the war lords", that you guys must know of, but I don't.

4865205 Hitchhikers.... DEFINITELY Hitchhikers. Also as for history, I'd say that upon finally attaining planetary peace..... They simply decided to keep war going as a form of entertainment as the entire race has become so inbred for violence and conflict they simply keep it going. One side of the planet fighting against the other in a designated "War Zone" in the middle.

4866314
Yeah, that's Betelguese culture in a nutshell. All about entertainment in the form of sex and violence.

Any other alien races that you can think of that look suitably human on the outside, but are probably suitably inhuman on the inside?

4866422 Hmm...... Uh..... The Kree?

4866788
Thanks!

...But I'll probably stick with the Betelgeuseans. They're more superficially similar to humans and less superficially similar on the inside. They probably ended up that way because, first of all, like I said, they became a war-celebrating culture due to a long history of fighting with the native peoples of the Betelgeuse solar system, and each other, and like you said, when they were finished, they loved violence and rape so much that they decided to convert two or three planets for the sake of doing so just for entertainment, and took various human-types, especially humans themselves, for the project, forcing them to reenact their most cruel and vicious wars, like WWI. And for the grand finale, the ultimate punchline?? They would then use the refined and perfected human army to conquer the galaxy! Why, they even got their own President, titled, for the intents and purposes of their twisted form of entertainment, the "War Lord" involved! For those less-involved Betelgeuseans watching the holograms at home, the ratings would have surely skyrocketed!!

...But...some really inconvenient people from Gallifrey came, quite tired of the actions of the Betelgeusean Republic. They weren't too keen on them messing with the Earthling time stream, and thought that conquering the galaxy was a rubbish idea. So they had to erase their President from the time stream and put their Capital planet under a time-lock. Quite inconvenient! And that was when the War Games was starting to get good!! The fans were most upset!!

Meanwhile, next season's project, of a season that never came to be, when they were planning on conquering the Andromeda Galaxy and its satellite sub-galaxies orbiting it, there was a planet in one of these sub-galaxies, and it was still inhabited by kidnapped humans there. Without "benevolent" Betelgeusean aid, the human armies left their time zones and mingled, combining cultures through conquest and assimilation. This planet, they called Skaro, and that is why the Thousand Year War had such a mix of technology, not from being fought for so long, but because they were a mix of every army that fought with little honor and much bent to destroy, and also why the Skaroan peoples tend to have Armenian mispronounciations of Greek (in this case, probably Spartan or Minoan) names like "Davros", and Dutch (probably particularly Boer) names like "Nyder". Mix of different cultures meant all kinds of names from all kinds of languages.