That Cantina Feel

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Ever since Alien Archive was announced, the organized play team has received a veritable flood of questions concerning the legality of this new book. As was recently revealed, Alien Archive contains 22 new playable races for the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. So today, I want to take some time to discuss our current and future plans for getting these amazing new alien races into the Starfinder Society.

First off, I want everyone to know that the "cantina feel" is important to the Starfinder Society campaign. We want players to have access to a wide array of fun and unique species to create characters with. We want those characters to explore the similarly diverse universe that is Starfinder. Along with that, we also want to balance the experience for those dedicated people behind the GM screen. Most people are still getting acquainted with the Starfinder rules, so introducing 22 playable races right away can be another layer of complexity for some. So, to start, we will be introducing several of the new playable races in a way that shouldn't overwhelm GMs, while still promoting some of our core goals for the campaign.

Method 1: Regional Convention Support

Conventions are a major source of pride for many communities, and we've repeatedly heard from event organizers and venture-officers that access to race boons is a big draw for many people attending conventions. We'll be providing several Alien Archive races via conventions, but with some additional tweaks to make a wider array of races more accessible to people across the world.

First, over the coming weeks, we'll be creating a group of four informal "mega regions" that group together existing organized play regions; these are just ways for us to organize this distribution, not a new administrative unit with assigned leaders. Conventions in each of these larger regions will receive a GM reward Chronicle sheet that provides access to a choice of two different Alien Archive races, similar to how existing convention support works for the Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild but with more options. Because these mega regions will have different available races, it should also provide some additional incentive to travel to different areas in search of new race boons.

If you're concerned about missing a desired race boon because it might be in a different region, fear not! We're aiming to regularly rotate which races are available—roughly every quarter—so that players can still have a chance to collect these boons locally, without having to travel outside their region. For example, Races A and B might start in Region 1, and Races C and D might start in Region 2. After about three months, they might swap so that Region 1 GMs would have access to Races C and D.

Method 2: Player Focused Boon

For those of you who are not able to attend conventions, we recognize that there needs to be other means of accessing playable races. The first method, available today, has its roots in the Regional Support Program GM incentive. Rather than focusing on GMing, this new Chronicle sheet is entirely based on games played. In the same vein as the Regional Support Program, this is a multi-tiered boon that will begin by allowing players access to a ryphorian or wrikreechee after playing in six unique scenarios with any combination of characters. For those holding onto the Chronicle sheet a bit longer, the barathu race becomes available after playing 12 unique scenarios.

There are some key things to note about this boon. First, it is entirely based on games played, so GMing does not count towards completion; we have the Regional Support Program and convention rewards for GMs. Second, while the boon itself requires that you "...play an adventure for which you have not previously received credit on this boon..." it does provide greater progress for playing sanctioned Adventure Path material. Along the same lines, once you apply a boon from this Chronicle sheet to a character, the Chronicle sheet is considered used, but you can immediately start filling in a new copy of this Chronicle sheet. While standard replay rules apply, you can fill in a few of the lines by partaking in repeatable content—so while you can't fill these Chronicle sheets out by continually replaying Starfinder Society Scenario: #1-01: The Commencement, you can still get a few extra lines filled from those repeatable adventures when you start filling in a new Chronicle sheet.

Finally, you'll note that this boon has a limited period of validity. This is intentional, as we hope to swap out the races on this boon to make more available to the general player base. Given this shortened period, it seems appropriate to issue an immediate ruling: previously played Starfinder Society scenarios are considered valid and can be applied to this Chronicle sheet immediately, so long as they follow the required rules listed in the Chronicle sheet. For some of you, this might mean you've already completed the Tier 2 requirements and now have access to the associated races—enjoy!

Download the Alien Archive Player Boon — 533kb zip/PDF

Method 3: You Decide the Future

Finally, I want to open up a discussion in the comments below about future methods of distributing playable races to our players. We're already hard at work planning out scenarios that could allow access to new races, as well as other potential events where we can release Chronicle sheets opening up further options. But, despite our best-laid plans here on the organized play team, I would like to get some feedback on how our players would like to see playable races added into the campaign. As we're really just finishing our "First Steps" (bad pun, sorry) feedback is important, and now is a great time to see what you, the players and GMs, think about how we can proceed.

Until next time!

Thurston Hillman
Starfinder Society Developer