Who is already playing Starfinder

[Malwing]

As the title said, how many of you are already playing Pathfinder in space campaigns?

I've been toying with the idea for a while and have been running a game for the past few months facilitated by third party materials so I'm sure some people were on board ages ago. Talk about your experiences with Starfinder before Starfinder.

[Lady Ladile]

Well, I'm currently playing in a Legendary Planet game here on the forums. We've only barely gotten into the actual AP part (just finished the prelude adventure The Assimilation Strain) but I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing where our game goes.

Also we're a gang of four goblins, a gnome who wants to be a goblin and pull down the sun, and a grumpy human summoner and her good-natured eidolon. Goblins in space, what could possibly go wrong? :3

[Tacticslion]

Lady Ladile wrote:

Well, I'm currently playing in a Legendary Planet game here on the forums. We've only barely gotten into the actual AP part (just finished the prelude adventure The Assimilation Strain) but I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing where our game goes.

Also we're a gang of four goblins, a gnome who wants to be a goblin and pull down the sun, and a grumpy human summoner and her good-natured eidolon. Goblins in space, what could possibly go wrong? :3

I... can't... waaaiiiit... to play Legendary Plaaaaaaaneeeeeet...

That said, we've a couple of games with space-related themes, even if they themselves don't have space, one of which resulted in the ascension of a nascent god (mythic character with divine source). She's a wyrmscourge paladin descended (unbeknownst to herself) from space dragons (which, themselves, were actually quasi-sentient shapeshifting space blobs that integrated into dragon bloodlines in Golarion in an unfathomably distant past).

(She's growing prominent in western Taldor and the southern-most tip of Galt, and a few sprinkled places of Andoren, where most of her adventures have been, but mostly Taldor. Also there's an alien planet that's made contact with her and uses her as a source of worship/oracular guidance, since she's apparently the only deity that speaks to them or something.)

[Malwing]

in my current game the players have not reached space yet. They are on a mining station on a backwater planet, but they do have a lot of fluff that they asked for. Its a mix of concepts that I lifted from Distant Worlds, Aethera, and Hypercorps 2099. There are thousands of different governments but they pool together into 4 different factions. Throughout them there are corporations that handle most aspects of space life from waste management, Hypernet (an internet dimension) and technology development. The corporations don't have their own armed forces but do hire agents that to do very dirty work.

The players are currently exploring a crashed Grey ship that is emitting tachyon particles that is disrupting faster than light travel around the area and are finding escaped experiments and specimen that came out of the ship. They are working for the Ghowld Mining Company as general muscle and we plan for them to play the corporate sabotage game as they stop evil CEOs from gathering resources to do something terrible.

As far as future campaigns go there is a surprising amount. I have the first book from Legendary planet and the second one came out recently. LJP Games will put out a Galactus-like storyline that can be adapted. There's the unfinished Santiago AP.

[Tacticslion]

Malwing wrote:

in my current game the players have not reached space yet. They are on a mining station on a backwater planet, but they do have a lot of fluff that they asked for. Its a mix of concepts that I lifted from Distant Worlds, Aethera, and Hypercorps 2099. There are thousands of different governments but they pool together into 4 different factions. Throughout them there are corporations that handle most aspects of space life from waste management, Hypernet (an internet dimension) and technology development. The corporations don't have their own armed forces but do hire agents that to do very dirty work.

The players are currently exploring a crashed Grey ship that is emitting tachyon particles that is disrupting faster than light travel around the area and are finding escaped experiments and specimen that came out of the ship. They are working for the Ghowld Mining Company as general muscle and we plan for them to play the corporate sabotage game as they stop evil CEOs from gathering resources to do something terrible.

As far as future campaigns go there is a surprising amount. I have the first book from Legendary planet and the second one came out recently. LJP Games will put out a Galactus-like storyline that can be adapted. There's the unfinished Santiago AP.

D-... daggummit. Now... now I... I have to...

You... you fools... you... you've made me... you monsters~!

Q.Q

*begins thinking about Pathfinder X-Com, while sob-laughing*

[Sharoth]

Tacticslion wrote:

Malwing wrote:

in my current game the players have not reached space yet. They are on a mining station on a backwater planet, but they do have a lot of fluff that they asked for. Its a mix of concepts that I lifted from Distant Worlds, Aethera, and Hypercorps 2099. There are thousands of different governments but they pool together into 4 different factions. Throughout them there are corporations that handle most aspects of space life from waste management, Hypernet (an internet dimension) and technology development. The corporations don't have their own armed forces but do hire agents that to do very dirty work.

The players are currently exploring a crashed Grey ship that is emitting tachyon particles that is disrupting faster than light travel around the area and are finding escaped experiments and specimen that came out of the ship. They are working for the Ghowld Mining Company as general muscle and we plan for them to play the corporate sabotage game as they stop evil CEOs from gathering resources to do something terrible.

As far as future campaigns go there is a surprising amount. I have the first book from Legendary planet and the second one came out recently. LJP Games will put out a Galactus-like storyline that can be adapted. There's the unfinished Santiago AP.

D-... daggummit. Now... now I... I have to...

You... you fools... you... you've made me... you monsters~!

Q.Q

*begins thinking about Pathfinder X-Com, while sob-laughing*

Wow. I am playing XCOM 2 right now. I would like a Pathfinder X-Com. ~thinks~ Why am I wearing a red shirt? And why am I the first one out of the shuttle?

[Malwing]

I've never played XCOM but if its an action game where you are space mercenaries tasked with fighting off xenomorphs then I'm game.

[CorvusMask]

Malwing wrote:

I've never played XCOM but if its an action game where you are space mercenaries tasked with fighting off xenomorphs then I'm game.

Its tactical turn based game were you defend Earth from alien invasion. You start out with modern weapons and reverse engineer better weapons from aliens' stuff because of course as a video game they send weaker forces before stronger ones that arrive as invasion progresses.

[Charrend]

My friends & I have homebrewed something like this over the last couple of years, but it's likely not going to hold a candle to what Paizo put out.

But this might work out as we can integrate the classes & races we already made into this without a problem.

[Evil Overlord]

CorvusMask wrote:

Malwing wrote:

I've never played XCOM but if its an action game where you are space mercenaries tasked with fighting off xenomorphs then I'm game.

Its tactical turn based game were you defend Earth from alien invasion. You start out with modern weapons and reverse engineer better weapons from aliens' stuff because of course as a video game they send weaker forces before stronger ones that arrive as invasion progresses.

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! You ALWAYS send the stronger forces first. Toying with the heroes never works.

[Freehold DM]

There will be the possibility of going into space at the end of the Kingmaker game I am running as well as in the Iron Gods that will be the sequel.

[Malwing]

Charrend wrote:

My friends & I have homebrewed something like this over the last couple of years, but it's likely not going to hold a candle to what Paizo put out.

But this might work out as we can integrate the classes & races we already made into this without a problem.

What did you come up with if I may ask?

[Danubus]

We have played in a mixed sci fi/fantasy campaign called LunarFall. Humans created FTL and could get to Mars in minutes. On the way home they had coordinates wrong and crashed through the moon. Blowing it up. The energies from the FTL drive mixed with moon energies and devastated the earth. 250 years later magic changed people that were left. Some became mutants. Elves were called deities Our group woke up in cryo pods. Didn't know who we were or anything about this new world. Was a fun campaign and we only explored parts of western USA. Mostly near Seattle.

[Jegianoid]

A Kingmaker game went REALLY off the rails a few years back, and we wound up hopping around the solar system with mythic tiers. We even met Aroden, who in my GM's mind has been hiding out all Ben Kenobi style in some Akitonian cave. As with all galactic sandbox games, it ended when the Wizard accidentally dropped a 15 kiloton uranium bomb on us. Good times.

[Charrend]

Malwing wrote:

What did you come up with if I may ask?

Gosh, the documents are somewhere on one of my hard drives, not counting the many notebooks of hard copy notes we've made that are spread between our individual apartments.

We mostly used the Armor as DR rules, along with some we made for energy shields with recovery over time mechanics, new weapons that included laser rifles (This was before Iron Gods), lightsabers, laser gatlings, sonic screwdrivers, etc. Also classes we made, like Legionnaire (full BAB that got special abilities with chosen weapons and could combine 2 together), Lumenumbra(Rogue-like class that manipulated light & shadow), Engineer (Technomancer), a slew of others I can't remember, but we had I think 8 or 9. New races we made, one of which was a race of Groots. And new monsters we made for different planets we explored.

It's around 3 years of off-and-on work we've put into it, along with a couple test campaigns we did. Right now we're running Hell's Vengeance, so all this is on the back burner, but that'll surely change when I show this to everyone.

[Malwing]

Unfortunately I have way too many third party investments to abandon my current set up so I really hope that the backwards compatibility is solid.

[Lord Fyre]

Freehold DM wrote:

There will be the possibility of going into space at the end of the Kingmaker game I am running as well as in the Iron Gods that will be the sequel.

Oh! Sounds like it would be a great Joss Whedon series!!

[Mighty Squash]

It will be a bit harder to get people to play awkwardly merged Pathfinder/Spelljammer once there is this, which will probably do much of it better but with different fluff (i.e. not the fluff my nostalgia wants).

My regular pathfinder group may have run a whole campaign using Spelljammer ship maps and setting fluff relatively recently.

[Lithrac]

We played the Skull and Shackles AP with a twist... In Spaaaaace!

It was a blast - although it was more a mash-up of various sci-fi / space opera settings than actual Starfinder. For example, we had a jedi adept and a protoss zealot in the group, had reflavored encounters from Star Trek, Dr. Who or the Star Wars universes. Our ship was called "The Millenium Yak", with an antropomorph yak as its second-in-command!

We played it on these boards as a PbP, feel free to check out the campaign if you want. Unfortunately, we had to stop after part 3 of the AP.

[Garrett Guillotte]

I've been playing Pathfinder in space at some level since the Tech Guide came out, seeded by Iron Gods but with Valley of the Brain Collectors replaced with

Spoiler:

Unity reviving the last intact pod of Androffans from stasis in the Silver Mount and Borg-ing them up to recover Cassandra and conquer Numeria, with the party resolving it by either destroying the Androffans or reversing their augmentations.

At the end of the AP, the Androffans give the party the keys to a functional shuttle from Divinity left in orbit, and Cassandra finds a way to implement a magic-infused miniaturized wormhole drive to make it starflight-capable. The Androffans want someone to return to Androffa and tell their people what happened... and per Jacobs, Androffa has regressed in tech to Golarion levels, making the players and Divinity survivors the technologically advanced "aliens" landing on an unknown fantasy world. That led directly to the Ultimate Campaign tech advancement rules and the weapon/armor augmentation rules that I eventually put into Fantastic Technology.

The hardest thing I dealt with by far was three-dimensional combat, whether in vehicles or zero-gravity close-quarters fights. It's doable, but we wound up throwing out Pathfinder's vehicle and character combat rules in space and replaced them with a gridless pursuit system.

[The Pale King]

Currently part of a PbP on these very boards that is playing Legendary Planet and I am loving it. By far my favorite play by post experience so far! Though that is also because of our wonderful GM, Rednal of course!

[Scythia]

Awhile ago I was running a game set on the moon, after quasi-magical terraforming, in a post-apocalyptic ruins if an advanced society game inspired by Thundarr the Barbarian. The idea was that humanity had to flee earth due to environmental damage, and different coalitions of nations colonized different celestial bodies.

Anyway, the party had acquired a ship with jump capability from a military R&D facility deep underground. Unfortunately before they got to using it to explore, they encountered the Confederation (basically the Evil Empire) who had only recently learned that the moon was now ripe for the taking.

Then the game blew up, due to a mix of poor player decisions and unlucky rolls.

[Simeon]

I'm running Iron Gods and I'll probably be sending my players into space to continue after book #6. Starfinders going to be awesome to GM.

[Drahliana Moonrunner]

We haven't had an interest in Space D+D since Fantasy Flight Games canceled Dragonstar. Dragonstar was a heck of an idea for a fantasy space setting, and I really doubt that Aethera or Paizo is going to come something thats anywhere close to it's awesomenness, especially if it's rooted to Golarion.

[Naive Wolf Joshua]

At the moment my players have traversed one of the elf-gates to Triaxus, arriving inside a "gate room" frosted over from the years of abandonment and the century long winter season raging outside, encasing the building itself in a thick barrier of ice and snow. The way which they activated the gate back home was with the aid of "bard song", but without the song for Golarion they have to find it on Triaxus or be stranded there forever.

I'm not sure if this qualifies as a "Starfinder" game, as I'm still keeping within a great deal of fantasy, with settlements reliant more on magic. But also has an edge of psionic to aid the feeling of an alien world so it does at least dabble.

We've already joked my game has turned into "Gatefinder".

[Malwing]

Stargatefinder?

But yeah, I started the thread because I'm a big fan of using Pathfinder for scifi campaigns so I noticed a ton of space material is already out there for Pathfinder. Some came out recently but some has been out for a long while. I thought if I drew attention to the fact that its been done before would give everyone more confidence in Starfinder becaus I am definitely on board specifically because I've been dreeaming about and running Pathfinder as a scifantasy setting for a bit adn it totally can work even without Starfinder. Look no further than the success of the Aethera Campaign Setting on Kickstarter. They were asking for quite a bit and even I had doubts that there were enough people willing to give it a shot to fully fund the project but it went through and more.

[Jack_of_Spades]

I've actually made a large starmap when I did a mix of spelljammer and pathfinder. "sometime in the past" all the races went to war against the "ominous threat" that threatened the galaxy. After that, the Orcs were the first to recover and quickly expanded over previous territories that were controlled by races.

It's not that there was an "orc world" or "gnome planet" but there were worlds where the governing body was primarily composed of a certain race.

Anyway, if you're interested, you can open this campaign file in Maptool. the particular map to look for in that is Starmap. I named several solar systems, planets, how many moons they had... All so I could have an extensive map for adapting skull and shackles to space. It was fun but ended before the party really got to explore.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sve4dl703sjgk4k/spellfinder2.cmpgn?dl=0

If you have questions, let me know. Like many DMs, I love to ramble on about my brainmakings.

[DeathMvp]

I have GM'ed a home game that was the D20 Starwars with the pathfinder class brough in from a back water world. It was alot of playing with it to work but may and my group had fun with it. Magic was intresting to play with to work with space ships but we got it to work.

The best was when a Collosal Gold Dragon did battle with a Star destroyer.

[Imbicatus]

DeathMvp wrote:

I have GM'ed a home game that was the D20 Starwars with the pathfinder class brough in from a back water world. It was alot of playing with it to work but may and my group had fun with it. Magic was intresting to play with to work with space ships but we got it to work.

The best was when a Collosal Gold Dragon did battle with a Star destroyer.

Unless Lasers did fire damage, the star destroyer would have completely destroyed the dragon. Even then, ion cannons and missile launchers should have chewed it to pieces. A colossal dragon would only be the size of a Corellian corvette. We all saw how well that went in the opening scene of A New Hope.

[Odraude]

While never leaving the planet, I've had players deal with aliens both ancient and recent. One adventure I'm going to run will involve delving into a ruins that was built over an old star ship with the original alien still in there in stasis.

[Clarence Bugman]

Lithrac wrote:

We played the Skull and Shackles AP with a twist... In Spaaaaace!

It was a blast - although it was more a mash-up of various sci-fi / space opera settings than actual Starfinder. For example, we had a jedi adept and a protoss zealot in the group, had reflavored encounters from Star Trek, Dr. Who or the Star Wars universes. Our ship was called "The Millenium Yak", with an antropomorph yak as its second-in-command!

We played it on these boards as a PbP, feel free to check out the campaign if you want. Unfortunately, we had to stop after part 3 of the AP.

That is awesome! Super jealous. I can't wait to PbP Starfinder personally, too bad 2017 is so far away. Hopefully there'll be a way to beta or sneak peeks released?

[GM Zed]

The Pale King wrote:

Currently part of a PbP on these very boards that is playing Legendary Planet and I am loving it. By far my favorite play by post experience so far! Though that is also because of our wonderful GM, Rednal of course!

Ahem!!! Rednal rocks a great Legendary Planet for sure... but last time I looked, Locke Lestrange was in GM Zed's Legendary Planet!!!

Lady Ladile wrote:

Well, I'm currently playing in a Legendary Planet game here on the forums. We've only barely gotten into the actual AP part (just finished the prelude adventure The Assimilation Strain) but I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing where our game goes.

Also we're a gang of four goblins, a gnome who wants to be a goblin and pull down the sun, and a grumpy human summoner and her good-natured eidolon. Goblins in space, what could possibly go wrong? :3

And Lady Ladile is in GM Zed's Goblins in Spaaace!!!!. Like she said, what could possibly go wrong?!?!

BTW, and I think most folks here know it already, but Legendary Planet is awesome!!!

[The Pale King]

GM Zed wrote:

The Pale King wrote:

Currently part of a PbP on these very boards that is playing Legendary Planet and I am loving it. By far my favorite play by post experience so far! Though that is also because of our wonderful GM, Rednal of course!

Ahem!!! Rednal rocks a great Legendary Planet for sure... but last time I looked, Locke Lestrange was in GM Zed's Legendary Planet!!!

Haha, sorry Zed. I had just been reading Rednal's game and got mixed up.

[MikeMyler]

Sharoth wrote:

Tacticslion wrote:

Malwing wrote:

in my current game the players have not reached space yet. They are on a mining station on a backwater planet, but they do have a lot of fluff that they asked for. Its a mix of concepts that I lifted from Distant Worlds, Aethera, and Hypercorps 2099. There are thousands of different governments but they pool together into 4 different factions. Throughout them there are corporations that handle most aspects of space life from waste management, Hypernet (an internet dimension) and technology development. The corporations don't have their own armed forces but do hire agents that to do very dirty work.

The players are currently exploring a crashed Grey ship that is emitting tachyon particles that is disrupting faster than light travel around the area and are finding escaped experiments and specimen that came out of the ship. They are working for the Ghowld Mining Company as general muscle and we plan for them to play the corporate sabotage game as they stop evil CEOs from gathering resources to do something terrible.

As far as future campaigns go there is a surprising amount. I have the first book from Legendary planet and the second one came out recently. LJP Games will put out a Galactus-like storyline that can be adapted. There's the unfinished Santiago AP.

D-... daggummit. Now... now I... I have to...

You... you fools... you... you've made me... you monsters~!

Q.Q

*begins thinking about Pathfinder X-Com, while sob-laughing*

Wow. I am playing XCOM 2 right now. I would like a Pathfinder X-Com. ~thinks~ Why am I wearing a red shirt? And why am I the first one out of the shuttle?

*whistles innocently*

[Unseenmage]

Our group finished Iron Gods, reclaimed/repaired the ship and just kept playing.

We're waging a war against the Dominion of Black in an effort to exterminate them.

We just found the Androffan homeworld and reclaimed the ship's drydock and found out our ship was just the research vessel and we found the warship schematics.

We're even starting another Iron Gods playthrough; the first of a planned round robin where each player runs the game their own way.

Needless to say I am super excited for this product.

[Pyris Magmus]

One of my players really wanted to play Iron God's back when we the tech guide came out. And I said, with this book alone you could make a pathfinder based hardcore sci-fi game, all I had to do was figure out how space combat would work and give some new uses to some skills, and with a few more minor tweeks I had the mechanics for a sci-fi game.

I went so far as to build a mechanic for creating customised space ships, with abilities and bonuses based on the kind of stuff they can outfit them with.

I spent the next few months coming up with the setting, and my friends were warping about a neighboring galaxy. Recently they helped seed a Formian Queen on an uninhabited world, and are now working for the military to find an ancient Aboleth super weapon.

[Sauce987654321]

Imbicatus wrote:

DeathMvp wrote:

I have GM'ed a home game that was the D20 Starwars with the pathfinder class brough in from a back water world. It was alot of playing with it to work but may and my group had fun with it. Magic was intresting to play with to work with space ships but we got it to work.

The best was when a Collosal Gold Dragon did battle with a Star destroyer.

Unless Lasers did fire damage, the star destroyer would have completely destroyed the dragon. Even then, ion cannons and missile launchers should have chewed it to pieces. A colossal dragon would only be the size of a Corellian corvette. We all saw how well that went in the opening scene of A New Hope.

it probably wouldn't be at all harmed if it chooses to use its magic to protect itself from those attacks. It's a 9th level caster that has access to tons of anti-tech spells, it's not like it's just big monster.

[Imbicatus]

Sauce987654321 wrote:

Imbicatus wrote:

DeathMvp wrote:

I have GM'ed a home game that was the D20 Starwars with the pathfinder class brough in from a back water world. It was alot of playing with it to work but may and my group had fun with it. Magic was intresting to play with to work with space ships but we got it to work.

The best was when a Collosal Gold Dragon did battle with a Star destroyer.

Unless Lasers did fire damage, the star destroyer would have completely destroyed the dragon. Even then, ion cannons and missile launchers should have chewed it to pieces. A colossal dragon would only be the size of a Corellian corvette. We all saw how well that went in the opening scene of A New Hope.

it probably wouldn't be at all harmed if it chooses to use its magic to protect itself from those attacks. It's a 9th level caster that has access to tons of anti-tech spells, it's not like it's just big monster.

What magic though? Wall of Force and it's like will be breached quickly, as will stone skin. Anti-tech field will stop projectiles and lasers, but not explosions.

It could avoid the ship with no problem, but if It just tried to buff up and attack it, it's got at best a 50% chance of winning, especially when you include the ships shields and tractor beams to immobilize it.

[DeathMvp]

In the fight it teleported to the Destory and grappled it. This stop the other big ships from attack with out possible hitting thier own ship.

Also Yes you could cast spells for block laser. Laser was considered physcal attack like a sword would.

[Sauce987654321]

Imbicatus wrote:

Sauce987654321 wrote:

Imbicatus wrote:

DeathMvp wrote:

I have GM'ed a home game that was the D20 Starwars with the pathfinder class brough in from a back water world. It was alot of playing with it to work but may and my group had fun with it. Magic was intresting to play with to work with space ships but we got it to work.

The best was when a Collosal Gold Dragon did battle with a Star destroyer.

Unless Lasers did fire damage, the star destroyer would have completely destroyed the dragon. Even then, ion cannons and missile launchers should have chewed it to pieces. A colossal dragon would only be the size of a Corellian corvette. We all saw how well that went in the opening scene of A New Hope.

it probably wouldn't be at all harmed if it chooses to use its magic to protect itself from those attacks. It's a 9th level caster that has access to tons of anti-tech spells, it's not like it's just big monster.

What magic though? Wall of Force and it's like will be breached quickly, as will stone skin. Anti-tech field will stop projectiles and lasers, but not explosions.

It could avoid the ship with no problem, but if It just tried to buff up and attack it, it's got at best a 50% chance of winning, especially when you include the ships shields and tractor beams to immobilize it.

I don't know why wall of force is going to go down quickly, if used. I don't think we should assume that its weapons are going to instantly do astronomical amounts of damage like we've never seen, because it probably would be balanced like everything else in this game. If anything, it's weapons, like its lasers, could function like a colossal laser pistol/rifle, which is like 8d6 or so damage.

The anti tech field does have an effect against explosives. It's so they don't hit the dragon directly and instead force a saving throw to half the damage.

It doesn't need stone skin. It has its own DR.

I honestly don't think the tractor beams might be all that effective. Vehicles always had low saves and CMD, while the dragon's is going to very high. Again, I'm not going to assume it's weapon is going to just dominate the dragon like it's nothing.

[Tacticslion]

I just assumed they were using the numbers from Star Wars d20 in their calculations.

[Sauce987654321]

Tacticslion wrote:

I just assumed they were using the numbers from Star Wars d20 in their calculations.

maybe, but things always get rebalanced when converted into pathfinder.

[Tacticslion]

Perhaps!
Firearms, seige engines, and tanks are a fair starting baseline in that case, and those are... pretty potent. (Also hardness/energy damage halving of metals compared to their effects in a given universe against weaponry.)

Nonetheless, those are just guesses and baselines - until actual Starfinder rules come out, we're left just as ad hocing things from our own guess works and particular need preferences. :)

[Sauce987654321]

Tacticslion wrote:

Perhaps!

Firearms, seige engines, and tanks are a fair starting baseline in that case, and those are... pretty potent. (Also hardness/energy damage halving of metals compared to their effects in a given universe against weaponry.)

Nonetheless, those are just guesses and baselines - until actual Starfinder rules come out, we're left just as ad hocing things from our own guess works and particular need preferences. :)

Jeez, what kind of tank is that. That thing is like more than 3 times the size of an Abrams tank.

[Tacticslion]

I know, right?! Those things are insane!

[Imbicatus]

You think that's bad, look at the heavy weapons in the Technology Guide Remember, those are for handheld weapons. Capital Scale ships are several times larger.

[Tacticslion]

Imbicatus wrote:

You think that's bad, look at the heavy weapons in the Technology Guide Remember, those are for handheld weapons. Capital Scale ships are several times larger.

It's funny. I was all, "Eh, though powerful, these don't look so ba-" and then I saw the rocket launcher and just laughed. (Vortex gun, too.)

((The monowhip, chainsaw, emp pistol, arc rifle, autograpnel, all the rifles, plasma thrower, rail gun and x-laser are pretty goofy-strong... but the rocket launcher was just funny.))

[Bellona]

In the campaigns which I run there has always been some science-fiction stuff going on in the background (or part of ancient history), but it rarely has had any impact on the player characters and their adventures.

One group did find an elf in a stasis pod from ca. 30,000 years ago (her scout ship had been investigating the pros and cons of colonising Toril when it was shot down by Batrachian weapons). The party's "knowledge geek" character almost went crazy when she discovered that there were whole new fields of knowledge of which she'd never heard. Alas, the same character also got her hands on a certain infamous Mythos tome and ... things happened.

Both my current RotR campaigns have a meta-game artefact in play to explain how new characters could replace dead ones. The artefact was delivered to the Desnan temple in Sandpoint by some elves who are secretly "slumming it" on world while their starship is being repaired in orbit. (The ship's high priest had received a vision from his [home-brewed] star goddess, who is an ally of Desna, and he got an acolyte and her friends in the crew to deliver the artefact while they were on shore leave.) Granted, I could have just had an "elves deliver an artefact" story there without the sci-fi elements, but I like to be consistent with my home-brewed version of Golarion (and other campaign settings).

This did result in a few funny moments, like the time the female elven Oracle NPC - who had walked straight into the poison ivy in Book 1 of RotR - complained about the plant-life on the surface. The Paladin PC immediately tried to Detect Evil on her, thinking that she was a Drow in disguise. :) The other group has one of the NPC elves as their meat-shield and he is really bad at skills like Handle Animal, Knowledge (Nature), and Survival - which is perfectly natural (sorry, pun not intended!) as he was born and brought up on a space station. He's always going on about how he only passed his military survival training because he slept with both of the instructors. (Actually, he just has Wis 8, no skill ranks, and a flaw which gave him a -4 penalty.) In both cases, the NPC elves have just intimated that their ship was docked in Magnimar, and the PCs didn't inquire further. (Note, the NPCs were not at liberty to reveal their extra-planetary origin.) Needless to say, these elves do not live in the woods! :)

Anyway, all of this is because I took some ideas from Spelljammer and then home-brewed some variations on them, including adding some real technology into the setting. Plus a pinch of Babylon 5 space travel. Also, Force-users might lurk in some distant corner of the universe. I also like some of the ideas in Dragonstar but the dragon-ruled galaxy was a bit too much for me. Therefore I simply decided that the Dragonstar galaxy is "far away" from the local super-cluster, and that the more local dragons would not go for that sort of thing (being either too suspicious, or seeing the stupidity of the "five good dragons reign, then five evil dragons reign" rule). And like others have already done, "elf-gates" and "stargates" are very similar.

[Hitdice]

Does White Star count?

[Odraude]

I don't see why not. I plan on running it in my ACKS group.