Science fiction in Pathfinder is a vast and perilous landscape. If d20 has taught us one thing during the 2000s it’s that the system is pretty flexible for a rules-heavy game when it comes to genre. Being a child of d20 Pathfinder shares the same guts that can be pretty flexible itself. Most of the time when we want to go out of genre we move on to a different system, sometimes even another d20-spawn, but luckily we don’t necessarily need to with Pathfinder so you can enjoy your status quo and turn it up on its head too.
Equipment
Superficially, science fiction is distinguished by advanced technology, so when you run Scifi Pathfinder you want some laser guns, some robots, maybe even a spaceship. The best and worst thing Paizo has done for this arena is their Technology Guide that came out right before the Iron Gods adventure path. It had a ton of items, introduced the concept of power charges and reactors that produce charges, and even gave a means of using your old skills for scifi junk with the barrier of the Technologist feat. The book was great. The bad thing was that this was so concisely done that every third party scifi product that came before it instantly became dated. At this point in time, unless you don’t like tracking charges on your technological items and thus avoid Paizo’s technology guide, rules made before that are in an awkward position by not being completely compatible. You see, for the most part most technological items worked without energy or charges and can be crafted anywhere. So they were magic items that had a different name. In some cases there were just instructions to file off the serial numbers off of magic items to make them technological. That was all well and good back then but having technological items need power makes too much sense, plus on top of being really good and encompassing a lot of item types the Technology Guide is a part of the main game to the point of now being on the online reference document despite being printed in the Campaign Setting line. Additionally it didn’t change that much leaving you with new rules but little to have to memorize to get a technological game going.
Luckily there are some third party products out there that come out after the technology guide that fill in a few gaps, chief among them is Call to Arms: Fantastic Technology from Fat Goblin Games. If you run a technological game, Paizo’s Technology Guide should be your first purchase and Fantastic Technology should be your second. It introduces an item enhancement system in the form of Magnitude (which everyone should follow from now on), gives you some material for kingdom building, and keeps melee weapons in the game. There’s so many small gaps that this book fills in that I’m just sad that it’s so small. It could have easily been the size of a hardcover with as much subject matter technology brings.
Legendary Games didn’t slack either with Treasury of the Machine, a book of new technological items building on the rules from the Technology Guide, but sadly that’s about it. There’s some things that look pretty promising. As of this post d20pfsrd.com publishing is developing something involving space ships. Dreamscarred Press is playtesting some sort of technopsionic expansion with psionic mechs. But that’s about all that I’ve seen on the Technology Guide expansion front. Of course there are older titles but really your bases are pretty well covered with the Technology Guide, and its free online so they end up being put in a big pile of things I don’t use. And outside of old d20 modern material there is a huge hole in the giant robot department. Well for now there is. The closest adequate thing I could find is Infinite Future’s Mecha Guide and Charles Smith Games’ Mecha Construction Guide. Spaceships are tackled sporadically but for me at least the king of that category is Space Potato Productions with their stupidly free books of preconstructed starships.
Classes
There is, however, stiff competition when it comes to technological classes with some of the pre-Technology Guide classes aging pretty well. So well that I can’t really recommend one as the top of them all, they’re all so good. about the only bad thing I can really say is that I generally hate for technology and technology use to be class-locked but with the Technology Guide out the tech classes actually improve, because instead of being classes that are a barrier to science fiction that you have to have to hit your scifi tropes they become specialists that pull it forward better.
Barring the tech classes that come more from a steampunk or magical artifice direction a lot of classes that deal with technology seem to follow a pattern similar to the Alchemist. They get a list of gadgets that are for most purposes spells, and have some sort of talents they they choose every other level. Additionally they tend to have some kind of major choice that functions like a mini-archetype or Sorcerer bloodline. Legendary Games has the Cyborg, LPJ has the Machinesmith, Radiance House has the Technician. And like the Alchemist they are all very diverse classes with a lot of solid design. Running a game with high technology I’d be hard pressed to not include them. The class that stands out that goes out of the mold is the Tinker from Interjection Games. It’s more of a build your own pet robot class but makes it very surprising how diverse a pet robot can be when you loosen your view on what robots are supposed to be.
But what about classes that aren’t mad scientists and cyborgs and engineers? When I got my print copy of The Machinesmith I was surprised to find that it came with two extra classes. The Fleshwraith, a sort of bio-machinesmith, and The Host, a class that gets eidolon evolutions from its symbiotic mutant creature. (I just stick with it being a mutate class and leave out the symbiote.) Zombi Sky Press put out It Came from the Stars, which included, for lack of a better short description, a space wizard in the form of the Moon Child, and the space-gish Starseed. Of course if magic isn’t your flavor psionic classes from Dreamscarred Press’ Ultimate Psionics feel way more at home in a scifi campaign than they do in medieval stasis-land.
There are plenty of classes in plenty of books that handle mundane space faring folk but a good amount of time I have a hard time justifying them. One of the reasons why the Technologist feat from the Technology Guide works is that if you’re in a setting where high technology isn’t alien then you can give everyone the Technologist feat and that fixes the problem. Meanwhile specialized classes tend to just be another class with some different class skills. I’ve seen a few military grunt classes that are pretty much just fighters with laser beams or are completely outclassed by playing a fighter if the fighter gets free laser beam proficiency. They just come out too narrow for what they could be and too weak to be what they need to be. Rogue Genius Games on the other hand released a godsend for this dilemma with Anachronistic Adventures. Following a similar pattern to d20 modern you have six classes that loosely revolve around the six ability scores. Between them are a ton of archetypes that any of them can have allowing you to mix and match your tropes to a surprisingly huge degree. They also come with progress levels defined so you can set their proficiencies (and the proficiencies of other classes) based on whatever age they hail from. Since they don’t deviate much in terms of rules language and their abilities are pretty setting neutral they work surprisingly well with other rules.
Worlds
Paizo already as a few alien races and worlds under it’s belt and 3pp isn’t really behind. Titles like Veil of Truth, It Came from the Stars, and Age of Electrotech comes with a few races. Infinite Futures comes with it’s own alien race builder. There are a number of races from Skortched Urf. Then there are the numerous races that you can just file the serial numbers off to get the alien you want. But in terms of full-fledge campaign settings I have seen few that tickle my fancy. Part of this is biased because a bunch of crunch I don’t like are mixed in so I wind up not using them and I tend to make my own campaign settings when it comes to space but I haven’t seen too much that I can get attached to either. When it comes to my own setting It Came from the Stars gives me a ton of tools to work with while being setting neutral enough for them to be actual building blocks instead of random elements that I’ve stolen. In terms of campaign settings I could point out Amethyst and Neurospasta from Dias Ex Machina which are dense settings that are more or less intelligent and agreeable but they don’t really spark the creative flair like settings such as Starjammers. I missed the planetary kickstarter that Legendary Games did but I hear good things.
The Future
Since I first stumbled upon it after the kickstarter I have been keeping an eye on Tripod Machine’s space opera book, Conquest of the Universe.
Dreamscarred Press started playtesting an extension of the Technology Guide.
d20pfsrd.com Publishing announced their Starfinder project a while ago.
I jumped aboard the Hypercorps 2099 kickstarter and am very excited.
Savage Mojo promised some sort of techno egyptian setting, and as a Stargate fan I’ll be all over that when it eventually shows up.
So as you can see science fiction has been and is increasingly a hot topic for Pathfinder. As we move on I see more products I have getting pushed out in favor of more streamlined material with Paizo’s Technology Guide as the turning point.
Next time I’m doing a review that is long overdue, I’ll revisit some older reviews and I’ll talk about Kickstarters that I’ve backed and why.
No comments:
Post a Comment