Item Seed: The Vita-Inversion Assembly Chamber.

Vita-Inversion Assembly Chamber – Google Docs

The Vita-Inversion Assembly Chamber

This device exists in the worlds where the Mad Scientists of the Victorian Era thrived, crowded out all the non-Mad scientists (non-Mad engineers, too), and went on to be the backbone of scientific and technological progress in the Interstellar Era. And, hoo, boy, was there progress. It’s amazing what you can accomplish if there’s no little voice inside anybody’s head that says “Is this wise?” It certainly makes peer review a more… dynamic experience. And quite exciting, at least from outside of the blast radius.

Moving along: the Vita-Inversion Assembly Chamber was created when it became clear that there simply weren’t enough conveniently placed alien species out there.  Sometimes you could go months without finding an inhabitable planet, which is unacceptable in so many scenarios. Thus, the Assembly Chamber: it not so much jump-started the evolutionary process as it flatly overruled it.

Basically, you operated it by placing a sample of organic matter into the hopper: it would then be analyzed by the Chamber’s intrinsic Compu-Brain, and then a viable breeding pair for a brand-new sentient species that could derive nutrition from said sample would be designed and assembled on the spot.  Save the settings, repeat the process a few hundred thousand times, and voila!: instant alien species. Of course, they wouldn’t have a culture, technology, language, or any sense of self — but those sorts of difficulties have been solved problems ever since the aforementioned Victorian Era.
Two things to note about this device, though: actually, there are three.  One: the final ‘product’ typically defaults to humanoid, whenever possible. Two: putting something inorganic into the hopper and then throwing the switch can lead to interesting consequences. Three: this entire procedure is ethically dubious at the absolute best of times. …That last sentence would leave your average Mad Scientist scratching his head, of course. But if the game world in question is one where hubris is a lightning rod for bolts of violent irony, well: there you go.