Starfinder Inspirations

Monday, July 17, 2017

Few appendices have made as big a splash in gaming history as Gary Gygax's Appendix N. (I thought Cosmo's appendix bursting at Gen Con that one year might have it beat, but he reminded me that was technically a gallbladder removal, so it's OUT OF THE RUNNING!) That formative list of novels hit in 1979, in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. In it, Gygax laid out some of the works that had made the largest impact on him in the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, from Leigh Brackett and Robert E. Howard to Jack Vance and Andre Norton. In doing so, he created a reading list for an entire generation of gamers and fantasy fans, and had a tremendous impact on the genre as a whole.

When we created the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook in 2009, we gleefully took the opportunity to publish our own version of Appendix N, keen to introduce fans to our new favorites like Clive Barker and China Miéville, along with grand masters like C. L. Moore. Yet it was ultimately still a fairly small list—just a single column of text—and cribbed heavily from Gygax, focusing solely on novels.

When I first sat down to paginate the Starfinder Core Rulebook, I knew that space was going to be at a premium. I had, by some estimates, 800+ pages of content to cram into something even smaller than Pathfinder's 576 pages. Yet I also knew that just one page of inspirational media wasn't going to be enough. In order to make a game like Starfinder, we had to stand on the shoulders of innumerable giants, both childhood heroes and our friends and peers. We couldn't in good faith restrict ourselves to just literature, either. How could you have Starfinder without Star Wars and Alien? Without Shadowrun and Warhammer 40,000? Without Starcraft and Mass Effect? It just wouldn't be the same.

So here, in its entirety, is the Inspirational Media list from the back of the Starfinder Core Rulebook. These are just a few of the science fiction and science fantasy works that most influenced us in our creation of Starfinder's rules and setting. Staff members from many different departments contributed their nominations, and believe me, cutting the list down to just two pages was brutal. I also want to give a particular shout-out to the folks in the Tabletop RPG section. It was really important to us to include not just the games we grew up playing, but also our favorite modern games like Numenera and Eclipse Phase. There's no question that there are some brilliant SF games out there at the moment, and we're excited to be joining their party.

So what are you waiting for? From Illuminae to Hyperion, Saga to Serenity, there's a world of amazing speculative fiction waiting for you—and hey, you've still got a month to kill until Starfinder launches!

James L. Sutter
Creative Director