Today, we’re launching the Starfinder Beginner Box Humble Bundle to support ComicBooks For Kids! The bundle’s tiers include PDFs of the Starfinder Core Rulebook, Starfinder Alien Archive, and the complete six-part Dawn of Flame Adventure Path—and at the highest tier, physical copies of both the Starfinder Beginner Box and Pact Worlds hardcover!

The $5 tier includes PDFs of the Starfinder Core Rulebook, three Starfinder Society Scenarios, four Starfinder Flip-Mats associated with those adventures, the first volume of the Dawn of Flame Adventure Path, and more. For $15, you’ll also get PDFs of the Starfinder Alien Archive, GM Screen, chapters two and three of Dawn of Flame, three additional Starfinder Society Scenarios, and five more Starfinder Flip-Mats! At the $30 tier, you’ll also get PDFs of the Starfinder Beginner Box, Starfinder Pact Worlds, two more Starfinder Society scenarios, three additional Starfinder Flip-Mats, and the final three volumes of the Dawn of Flame Adventure Path.

Finally, Humble Bundle is offering a $50 physical reward tier that includes all 32 of the PDF products from the lower tiers, plus physical copies of the Starfinder Beginner Box and Pact Words hardcover delivered right to your door! Fulfillment is handled by Paizo, and you’re responsible for shipping fees. We anticipate that domestic shipping will run in the $17–$20* range and that international shipping will be in the $43–$65* range.

Humble Bundles offer great deals and support great causes. Purchasers can decide how much of their donation goes to each participant in the bundle by expanding the “Adjust Donation” section on the right-hand side of the page, just below the Checkout button.

Thank you for supporting Paizo and ComicBooks for Kids!

Get Your Starfinder Beginner Box Humble Bundle!

- The Paizo Team

About ComicBooks for Kids!

ComicBooks For Kids! has one mission: to provide kid-friendly comic books and coloring books to children and teens in hospitals and cancer centers across North America. In all cases, they work within the medical facility's infectious disease policies to ensure hospital compliance for each custom shipment.

* Recipient is responsible for any additional location-based import costs, customs fees, or taxes. Some locations may have VAT or sales tax calculated and applied along with shipping & handling through paizo.com, while others may have to work with their local post office to remit payment. Shipping and handling ranges provided are estimates based on the average costs to a variety of regions. Shipping and handling costs for some locations may be outside the estimated range.

The amount of work, courage, and passion each Game Master puts into their gaming session is simply amazing. In celebration of those who GM, we created a coupon code to celebrate you. Use gmthanks21 on your next checkout at paizo.com for 20% off your order.

The GM's Day code expires at midnight Pacific on March 7. The discount is not valid on subscriptions, preorders, backorders, non-Paizo downloads, or gift certificates, but it does stack with other discounts, including the Paizo Advantage.

Now is the time to get discounts on some of the most popular Paizo products! Start with the Starfinder Beginner Box and Pathfinder Beginner Box – the perfect tools to introduce new players to roleplaying games and get them started on a lifetime of fun and adventure.

Perhaps get your hands on extra, updated copies of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook or Starfinder Core Rulebook with deep character customization and immersive campaign settings.

Use the code to stock up on just about everything on our website, including Pathfinder First Edition, the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, and so much more. Feel free to browse around our store landing page and fill up your cart for yourself, your GM, and your whole gaming group!

Adventures Ahead!

Aaron Shanks,
Marketing and Media Manager

As excited as we were to construct the Starfinder Beginner Box as a fun, intuitive, and effective introduction to the Starfinder universe, we were also daunted by the challenges of trying to make a complete game that did justice to something we first presented in a 528-page rulebook. Even just the Tactical Rules chapter of the Starfinder Core Rulebook is more than 50 pages long, which would eat up more than a quarter of the pagecount we had in the Beginner Box rulebooks that also needed a solo adventure, introductory adventure, an introduction to numerous RPG concepts, advice, character classes, setting material, and so much more.

Early on we had to make some tough decisions about what our goal was for this product, and how our goal would inform our design choices. One of the things we wanted this product to do was serve as both an introduction to Roleplaying Games in general, and an introduction to the most key concepts of Starfinder in particular. When we were discussing which rules to keep, which to alter, and which to cut entirely, we had to balance those design goals with things like the limitations of our page count, wanting to be playable quickly from the time the box is opened, and giving enough material that a group could continue to play with their GM making new adventures once all the pre-written encounters have been experienced. That lead to the decision to create a one page set of rules for modifying and even building enemy creatures from scratch, so GMs would not be limited to the small number of creatures we had room to present with full stat blocks.

Some decisions were based on a combination of concerns. We felt we wanted to have as many of the playable races and classes from the Core Rulebook as possible, but knew we could do all the core races, and legacy races, and all the classes, especially given we wanted each class to tell you how to build a character. In the end, we decided we needed to cut at least one class, and the solarian was clearly the one that needed the most complex explanations of its different rules. Since our iconic solarian is a kastha, we also removed that as a playable race so all our remaining iconics could represent one class and one race.

In other cases, we had goals that drove us to add additional components. The desire for the game to be a complete experience in a box meant it had to have dice, and character pawns, and a map. Joe Pasini specifically had the great idea to add player reference cards with things like the actions a character to take each turn clearly spelled out. We hadn't originally planned to have that kind of stand-alone player aid, but it was immediately apparent how useful that would be to simplifying the process of being able to play and learn the game, so we took the time to design them and added them to the components box!

It's also important to acknowledge how much we leaned on the design choices of people who have made entry-level boxed sets before us. Many of the Starfinder team have fond memories of some specific early introduction to RPGs, and we discussed what made those experiences fun and memorable, and what we thought we could improve upon. The fantastic work done on the 1st-edition Pathfinder Beginner Box was a crucial road map for us, and while we often decided to take different twists and turns in our design challenge, it was extremely useful to have such a successful product as a starting point, allowing us to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Owen K.C. Stephens
Starfinder Design Lead

It's a monumental week here at Starfinder HQ! The Starfinder Beginner Box escaped into the wild yesterday, representing untold hours of Team Paizo's passionate work to bring an exciting and introductory Starfinder experience to players everywhere. No matter your level of experience in tabletop roleplaying games, the Beginner Box contains everything you need to enjoy the futuristic fun of Starfinder, either alone or with a group of friends.

As much as we worked to bring you this product, we're also working diligently to get the word about it out. Yesterday, Paizo's Twitch stream brought you an exclusive live-play stream of a Beginner Box game. If you want to watch some space antics in action (and hear some wacky voices!), check out the replay video of Starfinder Developer Jason Keeley, Starfinder Creative Director Rob McCreary, Starfinder Beginner Box Design Lead Joe Pasini, and Customer Service & Community Manager Sara Marie playing through a wacky adventure of my creation. (And if you'd like to read some of the Beginner Box designers' thoughts about making this beautiful product, check out last week's blog!)

But the stream certainly isn't the only way we're shining the flashlight on the Beginner Box. With our partners at Two Kings Entertainment, we have put together a character creation video to help players get started building their first (or second, or fourth) Beginner Box character. We hope this video, and the idea of creating your very own futuristic hero, will help players get started on the delightful path of a lifelong love of roleplaying—or supplement an existing passion for creativity, ingenuity, storytelling, and every other fulfilling aspect of tabletop games.

So if you're inclined, check out the video, forge some ideas for a Beginner Box character, and let your science-fantasy adventures begin!

Amanda Hamon
Starfinder Managing Developer

It's almost here! In less than a week, the Starfinder Beginner Box will roam the wilds of outer space—and retail stores across the globe—bringing a unique and introductory brand of Starfinder to players everywhere.

Here at Paizo HQ, we couldn't be more excited. The Starfinder Beginner Box represents countless hours of passionate game design and development, layout and artwork, editing, playtesting, and much more. With the Beginner Box, we've put our hearts and souls into creating a great experience to introduce brand-new roleplayers into the hobby that we all love, and to create first impressions of the Starfinder RPG that players of all experience levels will never forget.

For certain, the project was a monumental undertaking. But knowing that our product might create deeply formative experiences for new players—in the same way that our early experiences with roleplaying changed our lives forever for the better—kept us all going the entire time. Now, we can't wait to share this game and this beginner's product with the world.

The Starfinder Beginner Box hits stores on April 24, and to help promote it, our partners at Two Kings Entertainment helped us put together the ad you see on this page.

Meanwhile, the Starfinder team members who helped bring this product to life have some thoughts to share about the process.

Creating the Starfinder Beginner Box was an extremely challenging and rewarding project that took dozens of people to execute. For my part as one of its designers, I did everything I could to pack as much of the Starfinder core experience into a package that's accessible to anyone with an itch to explore our weird and wild science-fantasy galaxy. I'm proud of the character sheet and especially happy about the player-aid cards. I hope they help give novice players a sense of agency and serve as a handy reminder for those with more experience.

—Joe Pasini, Starfinder Beginner Box Design Lead

I'm really excited to share the world of Starfinder with so many more people—from those who want a handy way to check out what Starfinder has to offer, to those who have never tried a roleplaying game before. I look forward to hearing everyone's epic tales of galactic adventure!

Early on in my RPG-playing hobby, I often had no one to play with. I ended up spending a lot of time with solo adventures, which helped me learn the rules at my own pace and without the pressure of making mistakes in front of more experienced players. That kind of solo-introductory experience isn't a thing most tabletop RPGs do much anymore. So even though this game supports group play and learning how to GM, I was also super excited to see the solo portion of the game.

I hope it lets someone else who doesn't want to try to learn a game with a group, for whatever reason, figure out the basics at their own pace.

—Owen K.C. Stephens, Starfinder Beginner Box Design Lead

A boxed set of basic rules was my first introduction to RPGs, so I've been looking forward to doing a Starfinder Beginner Box since we first started working on the Starfinder RPG. There is so much in that box that I'm excited about, but I'm particularly proud of the adventure I wrote for the Starfinder Beginner Box: “Steel Talon's Lair.” It was a fun challenge to write an introductory adventure for Starfinder that also would help GMs and players navigate through what could be their first roleplaying game experience ever! I don't want to spoil the adventure here for those who might play it, but one encounter features a strange effigy of an alien quadruped, and I wanted to share a little bit of flavor about the relationship between space goblins and horses that unfortunately had to be cut from the adventure for space: “Horses have long been an object of fear and hatred to goblins, and they hope that an image of such a fearsome creature will scare away intruders. Of course, these space goblins have never seen a real horse, so the effigy is more a representation of what they think a terrifying horse would look like.” Suffice to say, the sculpture looks nothing like a real horse—but it's still terrifying to space goblins!

—Robert G. McCreary, Starfinder Creative Director

I had the privilege of designing most of the creatures for the Starfinder Beginner Box. (Rob McCreary created the adventure's villain.) The primary point was usability. It was fun to pare the monsters down to their essentials, and to rework the language and format with that goal in mind. The creature section also has plenty of evil NPCs, so GMs have scoundrels to use right out of the box. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that other members of the team, especially Joe Pasini, made sure my work meshed with the overall system. The results take me back to when I started with RPGs nearly 25 years ago with another beginner's box. I hope the Starfinder Beginner Box does the same for a new generation of roleplayers!

—Chris Sims, Starfinder Developer

That's all for now! Keep your eyes peeled for this gorgeous product soon!

Amanda Hamon
Starfinder Managing Developer

What has six sides, a robot dragon, and contains a galaxy's worth of science fantasy adventure? The Starfinder Beginner Box!

The Beginner Box has everything you and up to 6 of your friends need to embark on an epic journey through space—no experience with Starfinder (or even roleplaying games) required. A few weeks ago on our Twitch stream, we unboxed this deceptive dense grab bag of goodies, from books and maps to player-aid cards (!) and more. No, really, a lot more! Check it out!

Joe Pasini
Starfinder Beginner Box Design Lead