I'm done with Pathfinder

Sorry for the clickbaity title but this post came from really strong feelings that occured due to a breaking point. But really its not as bad as it sounds.

What do I mean when I say that I'm 'done' with Pathfinder? Well here's what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean that I'll stop talking about Pathfinder on this blog. It doesn't mean that I'll stop writing reviews of third party material or ignoring news about it. It doesn't mean that I am angry at Paizo or Pathfinder. It doesn't mean that I'll stop playing Pathfinder.

What it does mean is that I won't be going out of my way to buy new Pathfinder material whether its third part stuff or Paizo stuff. I'll pick up some things that I wanted to pick up for a long time and things that are too good to pass up but I'm not thrilled with getting more stuff and will soon eliminate my Pathfinder budget. The Villain Codex will be my last hardcover purchase. The hardcover Curse of the Crimson Throne will be my last Adventure Path purchase. I do not intend to get new Player Companions or Campaign Settings. I have some third party things I intend to get to round out what I have, such as the remaining Spheres of Power supplements and maybe additions to the corruptions from Horror Adventures. But that's it.

Why?

1) I have enough stuff.

I have a shelf dedicated to holding all my Pathfinder hardcovers and the player companions/campaign settings. I have another shelf that holds all my print third party stuff. I have another shelf that's half full holding my adventure paths and modules. I haven't gotten the chance to even use all of it. I've only completed less than half the adventures I have, I have used bits and pieces of most of the other material but I haven't really used much of the options and classes and alternate rules that are on these shelves. The same goes for the gigabytes of pdfs on my computer. I'm pretty sure that I have enough Pathfinder material to last me a long while before I get bored, and better yet I have enough material to handle most concepts, settings, and styles that I can think of as long as they have some magic in it. I have material for outer space, cyberpunk, Ebberon-like dungeonpunk, and almost 200 different classes to work with. I'm good. I don't need any more. I can already do whatever I want now. For christsake, I have Ponyfinder, Thunderscape, and Aethera coming soon. I can throw ponies in space with magitech arms coming out of their backs that shoot lasers and they all fly through Stargates in a TARDIS to fight Galactus (LPJ's Crisis of the World Eater). What else do I really need at this point? Even the additions to the stuff I like are getting kind of unappealing because I'm not bored with what I have already. I have third party things that are expansive enough to represent things that will keep me busy for years but still have new things coming out of it. I was not actually ready for a Path of War 2. I wasn't ready for anything psionic past Ultimate Psionics. I already have so many things to do with that material.

2) Starfinder is coming.

I dedicated a lot of effort to collecting material to bring Pathfinder into outer space and making scifi or sci-fantasy adventures. Now Paizo is putting out an entire game where it's on a silver platter, and given the space Pathfinder game I'm currently running it'll probably go smoother than what I'm doing right now because I'll tell you right now that it is difficult to manage even with all the scifi crap that's out. Depending on what it winds up looking like I'm either going to discard or convert the scifi material I have because I know that Starfinder is going to wind up becoming my go-to Sci-fantasy game leaving Pathfinder to handle the straight fantasy stuff. That's an entire realm to be explored now that there is going to be a dedicated corner of Paizo working on it. And that's when we already have a shrinking new idea pool in Pathfinder itself that we take a huge chunk of territory to handle and just shoot it over to a new game. Plus its a new game to learn that's probably less crunchy than Pathfinder but likely more crunchy than Dungeons and Dragons. Either way given my enthusiasm for Space stuff in Pathfinder I'm all but guaranteed to buy Starfinder and Starfinder is pretty much going to talk over quite a few grounds that I use Pathfinder to cover because of it's nature. And its not just Starfinder.

3) I've been playing other games lately. 

So here is the list of games that I've been getting into lately and will probably talk about more on this blog. Ryuutama, Savage Worlds, Dungeons and Dragons, OVA, Golden Sky Stories, and Fate. Now I have assorted feelings about each of these but most of them have a place and a mode of play that Pathfinder doesn't really reach or does not reach easily. I think that if I want to run a module or one-shot from Pathfinder, I'd much rather do Dungeons and Dragons than Pathfinder because its faster to make a character and conversion is very easy. Pathfinder doesn't do low fantasy very well and I suspect Starfinder won't do 'hard' scifi very well so I've been getting into Savage Worlds. Same goes for anyone who is fairly mundane like college students  and stuff like that is hard to do with Pathfinder because even 'mundane' classes get super sturdy quickly. Some games I really need to represent something obscure or deal with entire campaigns where fighting just isn't a thing so I have the other stuff.  Its not that I'm tired of medieval fantasy or whatever Golarion is, I just have some other stuff to play too and in some cases they are absorbing some aspects that I was using Pathfinder for due to campaign length or complexity. And really once that happens the more I don't need new Pathfinder stuff. I already have what I need to represent medieval fantasy to renaissance steampunk with airships, but I also want to play around with contemporary settings with normal people or a high school drama, or fighting Nazis on a land of the lost. I just have some other stuff to play and I don't want to deal with Pathfinder to do it because Pathfinder is kind of complicated. Which leads to my next point.

4)  Pathfinder is kind of huge, bloated and unbalanced. 

Over the course of collecting third party material I think I've found ways to handle pretty much any general balance issue that exists in the game. If magic in general is overpowered, just replace it with something more far reaching and more balanced. If martial options are too week there's stuff out there to make them better from just better options or entire rewrites or replaces the weaker classes. Skill distribution is unbalanced? Just introduce rules from Pathfinder Unchained. But that's the way that Pathfinder is 'unbalanced'.  Pathfinder is unbalanced starting from its very premise just by the fact that it is very possible to have a badly made character and very possible to make a very well made character and the gap between that is huge. that the Strategy Guide exists is somewhat proof of this and that it starts with the core rulebook. Because of this as the game releases more and more options this gap gets wider. Now it is entirely possible to restrict books so that things aren't overwhelming but that kind of makes it seem like the complexity, the glut of options and the growth you experience by being able to make a 'good' character is a bad thing when that's one of the best parts about the game. It gives choices meaning, it makes you think about your character and it makes just the process of making a character an exciting experience. Not only that but having to look up stuff, crunch numbers or make builds just adds to the amount of hours being involved with the game and if that is fun for you, then its just more hours of having fun and the fun extends past the table. However there's a consequence to this and that is that new players that don't want to or can't look deeper into the rules because they don't want to spend the time or don't have the time or don't find it fun just kind of fall behind. It is possible to come to a table and your character just sucks and the rest of the party has to carry you or ignore you whenever combat happens, or even worse, the other players have to reign it in because one or more player can't hack it and start to resent not being able to do anything because its overpowered by comparison or use interesting options because it's restricted to another book.  When everyone is on the same page Pathfinder works beautifully even if everyone is a new player just learning the game but I personally am starting to resent everyone when they aren't on the same page. I have to tell some players to tone it down because other players aren't up to speed and the gap is so huge that they need to basically break a leg to get in line. I have to spend an entire session to teach players how to make a character, even though they have played the game before, while the players that know what they're doing either have to twiddle their thumbs or just not attend session zero. I have to check character sheets so that players aren't running around with vanilla Rangers with 10 wisdom (which has happened before) or that they aren't geared towards making an army of summons or clones. I have to adjust the difficulty of NPCs so that they have to be able to handle the guy with a million AC but not be capable of immediately killing the guy that still doesn't know how Power Attack works. Its actually less work when everyone is overpowered because I can throw whatever I want at them and I don't have to check character sheets or explain things. Its also easier when everyone sucks because I don't need to look at stat blocks that look like essays because NPCs don't do anything more complicated than run up and attack, plus everyone is learning and growing together and getting into more and more advanced options and ways of thinking. But for now, since I actually like perusing and using the huge list of options I perfer to play or run Pathfinder when everyone knows what they're doing and leave everyone else to Dungeons and Dragons.

5) I have far too many adventures to run. 

I like making adventures that are interesting or quirky or play around with genre. I also have a lot of published adventures. And really I find it difficult to get through them all and part of that is because I primarily focus on Pathfinder. One thing you'll notice is that the list earlier of RPGs I'm getting into is full of non fussy and easy systems. These aren't the only RPGs I own or that I like,  but I only have room in my heart for one really crunchy system and the list is full of simpler games for expediency and price. I want to be able to run more concepts as one shots or short campaigns and I'm tired of doing that with Pathfinder because it is option heavy and front-loaded. If you bother to make a character in Pathfinder using a bunch of options and stuff I imagine that you're in for the long haul. At least 12 levels of campaigning that can take about a year. Because that character took work and investment compared to the 5 minutes it takes to make a character in Savage Worlds, Dungeons and Dragons, or FATE. So those adventures that take a few levels or five sessions to complete seems like a waste of time. Worse yet, I have trouble keeping a Pathfinder game going for long before somebody has a baby, or gets a new job or some other obligation and nobody can agree on a new time. The only adventure path I personally saw from start to finish had 12 different players go in and out, and only two of us (not including the GM) were there from the start. I have several Pathfinder Adventure Paths and actually got to play about half of them due to this. And again, I love having an invested character built from a ton of options in a long game but sometimes I can't do that or I only have a certain range or a certain power level of ideas. Sometimes I just shorten them out so we can get something done that has an actual conclusion. This is why the primary new games I'm getting into is FATE, OVA, and particularly, Savage Worlds. For a low price I can get a lot done really quick and the range is wide. Heck, I don't even like FATE all that much but its a game that builds other games instead of a game that has a very narrow focus so I'm good with it enough to need it for obscure concepts rather than having to pick up a whole new game that can only handle it's own specific type of play. And despite the difficulty to maintain group long enough to complete an adventure path apparently I have a lot of people in my area that want to play and like my campaigns so I just have a lot on my hands and Pathfinder doesn't go through it fast enough.


So that's why I'm done with getting new Pathfinder stuff. As I said before this doesn't mean that I will stop posting new reviews of third party stuff. I have enough of a backlog to go on with that for a long time. I also won't stop playing and running Pathfinder because I do really like the system. Some would say 'with it's warts and all' but in my case I really like the warts. I'm like a troll from Elfquest, that stuff just gets me off. I just have had my fill of it in the sense that I have more than enough to do quite a bit and lately I've been getting into things that can handle whatever Pathfinder can't handle without getting too much in the way. I just hit a wall where new Pathfinder stuff isn't really useful to me anymore so I'm just going to stop.

As it stands now, here is my RPG list and what I use for what.

Pathfinder: Heroic Fantasy and Dungeonpunk for long campaigns.
Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition: Heroic fantasy for short Pathfinder modules or string of modules.
Starfinder: Mostly speculation but, heroic sci-fantasy for long campaigns.
Savage Worlds: Contemporary fantasy/horror, gritty fantasy and dungeonpunk, hard sci-fi, superheroes, and anachronistic pulp for long or short campaigns.
Ryuutama/Golden Sky Stories: For their intended purposes (they have very narrow modes of play). Particularly for young players.
OVA/FATE: the remaining weird stuff that needs abstract or very narrow sets of mechanics like high school romance or replicating a linear subgenre. Particularly non-action or non violent subjects.

FATE, D&D and Savage Worlds has the most support so I'm going to talk about those on this blog the most after Pathfinder and maybe Starfinder when it comes out. Of course this is pending my overview of each of those games as a whole.

Horror Adventures: Drunken Overview Part 1

So when Ultimate Intrigue came out I decided to get my opinions out there early and read the pdf while typing out my general impressions on what I read. Reading a 300+ page book that’s mostly rules left me tired and staring at a screen for so long made my eyes burn so halfway through I started drinking a bottle of wine my sister recommended and finished off the overview pretty drunk That overview was actually a pretty popular post so I decided to have a go again, now that Horror Adventures is out, only this time I’m not messing around by getting drunk halfway through. I’m starting drunk.

Here’s how this is going to work; as I type the introduction out I’ll be nursing a mix of rum and coke. Eventually I’ll be switching to Everclear and fruit punch. I’ll read a significant section or chapter, and then I’ll type up my assessment. I held off reading the book when it first became available to download so all of my first thoughts and impressions are from an inebriated state of mind. This does mean that this is not much of a review and more of an overview since I don’t think alcohol is going to make my judgement on rules more precise. I have my phone set to deliver an alarm every hour so I can pace myself with pre-measured shot classes of what I’m mixing with my soda and fruit juice so that I don’t die. My wife will be spotting me to further prevent my from dying. My computer is still broken so I’ll be using my tablet. Luckily I got myself a bluetooth keyboard to make this easier but this still means that I’ll be typing without a great ability to edit on the fly so I’ll be getting to that when I’m sober. I’m through my first glass so I’ll start up now…

We’re skipping the introduction and table of contents because I don’t care. I will say that the cover is kind of fun. We have the iconic Wizard, Paladin and Cavalier getting mobbed by zombies. If this was anything but a 3.X game I’d be worried but if they’re high enough level this will be easy to get out of. The Wizard is probably fucked though if he needs to make some Fort saves. I’m always playing games where arcane casters are complete chumps against undead. Especially witches.

The first chapter opens up with the Paladin turning evil and now the Monk has to fight her. The Monk is probably dead by now. Unless he’s unchained, then he might stand a chance I guess. Or he’s a really sick build, but I saw his stats in the NPC Codex and he’s not so great.

The book then tells us how to make a character for a horror game, although I’m pretty sure all of these are ways to play any game. It tells you to ask yourself things like what your character’s motivations and fears are so I thought to myself, you know, like every character should whether they’re in a horror game or stabbing ponies in Sparkleland. I shouldn’t criticise it that much though. It's not like this happens as frequently as I’d like. And I enjoy that about pathfinder. some games try to tell you how to role play to the point where you might as well not play after character creation, the game just plays itself. Anyways, blah blah, teach us how to roleplay like rollplayers, moving on.

We get some rules on fear. This initially seems overly convoluted for something we already have status effects for, but for the most part it's just adding some extra severities on fear effects by dividing the stages that exist into more steps. Also you get some variant rules about replacing fear immunity. Then there’s sanity. Basically your highest mental stat becomes your sanity AC and different stuff will attack you with brain menacingness when you fail saves and stuff and if you lose, depending on the severity, you get some kind of insanity. So if you’re pissed off that you couldn’t stab things more often in Call of Cthulhu, there you go.

Corruption gets a pretty deep subsystem. Basically you get some corruption that scales like spell levels that give you feat-like powers based on how much corruption you have. The powers differ based on the nature of your corruption. But these powers have some kind of downside and many of them are pretty harsh. Your level of corruption also starts messing with your alignment and can also lead to occasional loss of control over your character. This is kind of a  wet dream for anyone that likes to roleplay significant weaknesses and purity struggles, and a literal wet dream for anyone that’s into Corruption of Champions. if you’re into werewolves then, this is a great fun way to handle lycanthropy curses. speaking of which, I just agreed to play an 5th edition game and made a character along those lines and my list of options made me miss Pathfinder so bad for options like this. Currently my character is forced to half-ass my concept.

The core races get some new alternate racial traits and favored class bonuses, which disappoints me because I barely use Core races outside of humans at this point. Who want’s to play a horror game with an elf. That’s is super weak. I want to play with a mud monster man, or a ratfolk or something else spooky. In Frankenstein the monster’s plan was for his dad to make him a woman and go off somewhere but Frankenstein didn’t want to because that would make a race of Frankenstein monsters. I want to play that. Some half constructs that are born with bolts in their necks and get healed with lightning damage. Do we have that already? a Flesh golem race? Or just zombie people? I’m pretty sure I have some third party thing about it.

So the cult leader at the intro for chapter 2 has awesome facial hair. I’m also still endlessly amused that the iconic Occultist is more portly. The cosplay potential for Pathfinder ever increases and now I really feel like ‘I’ could be an adventurer with my own fat ass. Anyways this is the real meat of the book, the class options. As much as the subsystems so far are pretty nice and the corruption bit more than a bit nice, that part is awesome, people are mostly going to look through this book for options so this is the real important part. It’s where everyone is going to open the book and judge it because the GM can already do whatever he wants so nobody cares.  And with no classes introduced in the book we have a lot of room for everyone to get in on the party. It looks like everyone gets two pages of archetypes and options. I’m not looking to see what class is missing.

Alchemist gets two archetypes. One that lets you turn people in kool aide and one that lets you cast extracts above your level at the expense of it being random. It's handy how they did that, you’re limited to the APG list and they tell you the number of possibilities so you can roll some dice without counting. Still kind of a bookeeping nightmare if you aren’t using an app that has all the spells on it.

Barbarian gets some gnarly rage powers and four fun looking archetypes. One is a murder trance guy and one is a werebeast one.

Cleric gets a Cthulhu cultist archetype and two new domains, Stars and Void. Wait a minute. don’t we have those already? I’m pretty sure we did. I’m not that drunk. Okay I’m a little dizzy at this point but seriously I was pretty sure there was alrady a void and star domain. Fuck it I’m tired, i’m not fact checking so these are new domains. Even though I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the Dark Tapestry subdomain before.

Okay so I notice Bard is missing so I guess not everyone is on board the Horror train.

Druid gets a couple of archetypes. I’m noticing one gets a spirit, a la  the Spiritualist class. Seems weird to me. Also weird is the devolutionist Druid that can make animals feral and has a creepy devolved human as an animal companion. I’m not getting the horror theme on that one. Maybe it's a reference to some gross black and white era movie that will give me nightmares when I find it on the criterion collection. I will say that it's creepy but in a gross kind of way.

Page 52, I love that guy. Since he's in the Inquisitor section I guess he’s one of those. Probably the archetype that gets special eyes that are spookier than normal. naw, that’s the hex archetypes He’s probably the bookwork archetype that has Int as a main stat. Because he has a book you see.

Investigator gets three archetypes. I don't’ like most of them but I do like the one that is kind of an occultist but even then I’m not that enthused.  I have to say, so far these options are way different from Ultimate Intrigue, in the sense that in that book the archetypes seem to be for roleplaying first at the expense of being actually useful but for the most part I don’t feel harshly crippled with little payoff with these archetypes. Sure there are exceptions but for the most part I feel like I’d pick these up more readily.

Kineticist gets two archetypes. Psycho and Dark. Both let you use Wis and Int respectively for your powers instead of Con, with different things happening in place of burn, or in the case of the Dark Kineticist, you can burn souls instead. . Its nice to have options like this because I was never that big on Burn. I’m especially happy that I can make myself an M Bison build now.

Good luck using the new Medium Legendary spirits. They’re all psychopaths that get you to do things that wouldn’t fly in most games.

I like the Mesmerist archetypes but really they aren’t making me too excited. I do like the prospect of being a freddy kreuger mesmerist even though in a lot of campaigns it's not exactly useful.

I absolutely adore the Occultist archetypes. One lets you have haunted implements with types chosen among the medium’s spirits, and the other makes for a fun japanese flavored paper talisman mage although the talismans aren’t by default paper.

Paladin Takes a weird turn by jacking class features from the Bard of all things. It's flavored as an effect cause by stigmata. The other two are more ‘normal’ but one switches charisma for wisdom so there's some interesting things to do with that.

Slayer gets two interesting archetypes and one that’s only useful in very specific campaigns.

Spiritualist starts off aping the bloodrager. Here is where I realize that I’ve been seeing a lot of class feature poaching in this book. More interesting is the other archetype that allows your phantom to be an undead creature as opposed to an outsider. Makes sense to me but I’ve seen so many arguments about the nature of undead and how they interact with class features and alignment to know that this will make some people’s head explode due to the way we think about ghosts and the undead in a non planar logic. Hell I’m on my… I don’t know what drink. I had two sodas worth of rum coke and another of vanilla coke rum, and I’m on black cherry soda and peach sake now, but anyways even now I get the difference between dead ghost and undead ghost.

Vigilante gets three new archetypes. They aren’t blatantly going superhero this time but still cover some iconic tropes of having a dual identity, like Serial Killer.

Witch gets a hefty slew of Patrons, mostly cthulhu mythos flavored. I couldn’t even read the second archetype because of Gingerbread Witch. FINALLY we get a proper fairy tale witch archetype. This will be my next witch. I’ll name her Totenkinder.  You even get a gingerbread familiar. Mine will smoke cigars and swear and drink a lot with a scottish accent.

Wizard gets some cthulhu stuff. Lots of Cthulhu stuff in this book by the way. We get it. Cosmic horror in a horror book. If we get a Modern book then we’re all set to play Call of Cthulhu conversions I guess,  but also two whole archetypes  based on necromancy.

And that's it for the archetypes. lots of elder god/dark tapestry kind of things and a few stinkers but overall I feel like I’ve found plenty that I really want to play and not much is hampered by the feeling that the options are limited to very specific kinds of games. also lots of casting ability score swapping which is always nice to play with.

Next section is feats. since I don’t want to type about these all day i’ll just note the highlights. Nothing exciting. Some clarification occurs with the availability of monster feats because there’s some of those here. roughly half the style feats are interesting enough where I want to build around them. Story feats are back. Otherwise they are kind of mid ranged feats that you might take for flavor or when you’re running out of feats you need to fight or cast spells but not many actual trap options or anything that will become staples of the game except maybe fleshwarping but I don’t even know what that is yet.

Okay, I’ve been doing this for a while and I just burped up something that tastes like vomit so I’m going to call this Part 1 and finish this later. My general opinion so far, since I’m not even halfway through and we’re already done with feats, is that this book is a bit backed into a corner. If we didn’t have so much spooky crap in the game already, like zombies and occult stuff and all that jazz, then we’d have somewhere to go but right now I’m not exactly feeling the ‘horror’ of the book aside for re-teaching us how to roleplay with some actual consequences. I mean I like the archetypes for the most part but I’m not coming across much that seems drastically necessary. And the general themes seem to lean heavy on the Cthulhu corner since we’ve only really gotten bestiary stuff from that front. Out of the things that are worth the whole book no matter what the rest of it looks like is the Corruptions. That crap is awesome. I kind of wish it had been a class though but there’s more ways to play around with the concept as it is so there’s that. So far its the best part of the book. Of course the fear and sanity stuff is neat and i’ll use them but I’ve been doing something along the lines of sanity using third party stuff so i’m not that excited. And it’s got nothing on Corruptions. I love that subsystem so much. Although its probably a soothing a sore spot because 5e has given me nothing but crap in terms of making my concept actually work. I know people like the game and all and it is a cool game but this stuff constantly makes me feel like I have to play with my balls at home and I have nothing to rely on but DM fiat to do anything. People complain about the flavor options in Pathfinder being trap options but I love stuff like story quests and corruptions. It makes my weird whims and random ways for my character to suffer have some kind of mechanical relevance.

Sober me talking now; That was fun. I’ll find some time to review the rest of the book when I have some more extended drinking time. Please forgive the typos I missed and I’ll see you next time.

Starfinder is Coming!

So over at Paizocon the past weekend it was announced that Paizo would release a new RPG for GenCon 2017. This is big news since Pathfinder is basically Paizo's only RPG, but where I lost it was when it turned out that it was basically Pathfinder in space, and is called Starfinder.

If you've been with the blog from the beginning you'll know that I have an unhealthy obsession with using Pathfinder to play sci-fantasy in space. I've collected a ton of third party material to facilitate playing a space campaign, I've been running a scifi campaign using Pathfinder for a few months now, I've made articles on what classes and races and house rules to use. So obviously the news is a big deal for me. And by big deal I mean that I jumped and shouted a bit about it.

Here's the rundown of what's happening.

• Starfinder will be billed as its own RPG. It will come out as a core rulebook and have new rules that will be playable without Pathfinder. 
• The release date is GenCon 2017 with no Pathfinder release for that GenCon.
• At the same time it will be OGL and thus have some kind of compatibility with Pathfinder, at least in regards to monster stat blocks. What this will actually mean is currently unknown but I've been seeing the words 'backwards compatibility' and 'new AC system' so the range on how much converting you'll have to do to say, bring in a catfolk Bard using Pathfinder rules is pretty wide. 
• The Starfinder Core Rulebook will contain the core rules and setting information. The setting is basically Golarion, or rather Golarion's solar system only without Golarion. There's a gap in time where Golarion was taken away by the gods with no information as to where it is or what happened during the time gap. Where Golarion once stood is now Absolam Station, a Babylon 5-like central point of the setting and instead of Pathfinders we have Starfinders investigating the nature of the time skip and Golarion vanishing. 
• The predicted page count is at 540 right now. 
• The Distant Worlds book will be the baseline for the setting as it already details Golarion's solar system. This means that we'll see some of those space Ratfolk and Androids are a core race. The core races from Pathfinder will be around but it looks shaky as to whether or not they will be a large part of the core races because there will be at least one non-humanoid core race and there will be an emphasis on aliens. I speculate People of the Stars will give us some clues.
• Several upcoming, and possibly delayed, 3pp products are on board. Aethera is doing something. d20pfsrd.com Publishing changed the name of their project from Starfinder to Starjammer and will have something by the launch of Starfinder. LPJ will be working on something. Until more information comes out it looks like a lot of upcoming projects may or may not have monkey wrenches thrown into their work, especially with the large influx of scifi Pathfinder material. Either way third party publishers will be heavily involved, and in some cases directly talking with Paizo in making launch pretty pretty content heavy.
• There's one subscription line that will include the Core Rulebook and an adventure path. The adventure path will include new rules, monsters, and equipment along with adventures. 
• There will be new classes, equipment and races. The setting and ruleset is distinctly science-fantasy so we get things like magic laser cannons and magical computer hacking. This also means that the assumed laws of physics will be rule of cool or action movie logic rather than be completely simulationist. 
• James L. Sutter will be the creative director of Starfinder. Other names on the project include Rob McCreary, Owen KC Stephens(!!!), and Sarah Robinson. 
• There will be no public playtest. There will be a playtest though. They're reaching out to community members for it soon.  

I am totally excited but also a bit worried. Despite backwards compatibility I really wonder what the fate of the products i already have is. Will Psionics fit in or will I have to get new psionic books? What about Anachronistic Adventures or The Machinesmith?  Some Pathfinder stuff I got specifically to play scifi Pathfinder so I'd like to be able to use them. But if the whole backwards compatibility thing means that Pathfinder classes still work then I'll be all good.

Otherwise I have quite a bit of faith in this project, particularly because I obviously already believe Pathfinder can do space science fantasy. Having a new Pathfinder that is focused on the genre has got to be good. and if not at least I have some compatible material for Pathfinder that I can use to continue to play scifi campaigns. Really, I'm practically playing it already so why not? When it comes out I'll probably be covering Pathfinder and Starfinder equally, especially with all the third party gear that will probably bankrupt me at launch. I'm pretty sure that once it comes out it will be my new favorite thing ever and eventually become my primary RPG to play. I'm still working on my overview of D&D 5th edition and really I feel sorry for it. I like it, but prefer Pathfinder, but once Starfinder is out I won't have time for a second fantasy game. Maybe I can squeeze it in between Pathfinder games but I don't see that happening too often. Owen K Stephens is also a big chunk of hope for me as well. I've gotten plenty of products, both Paizo and third party, that have his name on it and more often than not it's something amazing.

But the worst part of this is the wait. It comes out in over a year and potentially drags projects that were going to be released soon towards that date. I'm playing Space Pathfinder now. I don't want to wait a year to see how this affects me. And I definitely don't want to wait longer for the things I backed on Kickstarter, or even the things I've been casually watching on Kickstarter. Heck even Dreamscarred Press has been playtesting psionic tech rules that I needed published months ago, is that going to be pushed back a year too? And this is all probably going to come out all at once at GenCon. Well I know where my birthday money is going. And probably my Christmas money too. Better start saving up now.