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.
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.
So....what kind of space pathfinder are you playing right now cause something else is coming down the line a wee bit sooner. :-)
ReplyDeleteI've been kind of lax about posting updates due to time and prioritizing other things, but what I've written so far is in the 'Infinity Matrix' tag. I went with a world where most things are handled by technology but there are a number of companies that produce magical goods and services. For example, I adapted a corporation from Hypercorp 2099 to be partially a post-life insurance firm. The entry I gave to players in the setting handout was this:
DeleteNECROMANAGEMENT [LE]
Industry: Goods Manufacturing, Insurance
Necromanagements is the quadrant’s largest employer and manager of extraplanar entities and undead, thanks to a skilled team of necromancers. This efficiency comes at a steep cost of high employee turnover and a living employee’s death means a new employee in the outer plane or a body to animate. Necromanagement also produces magical consumer goods and sells services and insurance such as afterlife lobbying, planar ferrying and resurrections.
Also I've been adapting Fleshgrafts and new classes of alchemical items as magic or alchemical instant-gene-mods and cybernetics. There's a space station run by a very rich Vortex Dragon. The players have been having a wonderful time.