Scanning for Intelligent Life-Forms

Friday, October 27, 2017

By now, many of you have seen the myriad of interesting and incredible creatures found within Starfinder Alien Archive (and if not, what are you waiting for?), but you might be wondering how we went population this book. After all, the galaxy is a very big place, full of all manner of beings—and that doesn't even begin to cover the infinite planes of existence.

Luckily, we had a few places where we could start. When we started thinking about Alien Archive, the Pathfinder RPG had already printed five Bestiary volumes (Pathfinder RPG Bestiary 6 was at the printer at the time) that we could mine for ideas. In addition, Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Distant Worlds established a number of tentpoles regarding the Starfinder setting, albeit in the distant past. Conceivably though, some of the monsters and cultures name-dropped in that volume would still be around!

However, to truly capture the feel of a weird, science-fantasy universe, we also needed brand-new creatures. To that end, several of us here at Paizo absconded to a conference room and began filling up a whiteboard with ideas: general concepts (space mermaid), cool-sounding names (assembly ooze), and specific alien features (ability to break into constituent pieces). The fruits of our labor can be seen below.

After all that, we needed to make some hard cuts. We knew dragons should be in the book, but we couldn't give them the space that Bestiary volumes give them, so we stuck with the evil chromatic dragons. We thought angels and devils should be represented, but we could only have one of each. We wanted to make sure that each creature type would be represented, and And, of course, each of us had our own ideas for the book.

I argued that we needed at least one starship-sized creature. Rob McCreary noted the Azlanti Star Empire with their Aeon Guard was one of the setting's core threats and should be in the book. Owen K.C. Stephens persistently urged for the inclusion of the nuar, a nod to one of the first things he ever wrote for the world of Golarion. Amanda Hamon Kunz wanted to design a creature for the kaiju-infested planet she wrote for the core rulebook. Similarly, James Sutter was interested in fleshing out some of the races he originally wrote about in Distant Worlds. Some of our other coworkers who took freelance assignments for the book (Crystal Frasier and John Compton) voiced their own opinions on what it would be fun to write.

All this information went into several spreadsheets and we organized and re-organized it until we hit on a final list, which was sent out to writers, who returned with some terrific takes on what were sometimes very odd requests. In the end, I think we curated a fine collection of creatures that flesh out the world of Starfinder, as well as provide GMs with a wide array of foes for their players and players with some exciting new choices for races they can play!

Jason Keeley
Developer