Starfinder Now on Fantasy Grounds!

Thursday, March 8, 2018

We're happy to announce that SmiteWorks has released version 1.0 of their Starfinder Ruleset for Fantasy Grounds! The ruleset comes with the entire contents of the Starfinder core rules in an easy to read reference manual and with drag and drop data elements for everything like classes, races, armor, shields, and starships. Character creation is assisted by dragging and dropping race, theme and then class. Starship build support and starship combat is still getting finalized but will make an appearance when we release version 1.0.

In addition to the Starfinder core rules, we also simultaneously launched the Starfinder Alien Archive and first three volumes of the Dead Suns Adventure Path. The Alien Archive comes with tokens where possible.

We are collecting feedback on our dedicated Starfinder forums and plan to push a series of smaller patches out over the coming days and weeks.

Like all official Paizo conversions for Fantasy Grounds, Paizo has allowed us to provide a discount for any product where the PDF is already owned at paizo.com. Use the Store > Paizo Account Synchronization to link your accounts and Retrieve paizo.com Purchases to enable a discount on each product owned. Once linked, the products will show a discount equivalent to the PDF price of the same product. This means $9.99 off the bigger core rules products and as much as $15.99 off when you buy one of the Dead Suns adventures. If you don't already own the PDF, buying the Fantasy Grounds version allows you to sync that purchase back to paizo.com to get a free PDF added to your account there.

Doug Davison
President, SmiteWorks

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Tags: Licensed Products Starfinder
President, SmiteWorks

Minor edit: Full starship support will be available when we release version 1.1, which is currently in development.

Silver Crusade

woooooooooooooww

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Can’t wait!!! We tend to play fantasy grounds with Pathfinder, but have done 1 game of starfinder on it. It will be nice to have the full rules!!

Liberty's Edge

1 person marked this as a favorite.

I think this is potentially alright, just a crapton of money on top of already owning the core rules while the Pathfinder ruleset is still free? Will this change some time in the future because I couldn't see shelling out $50 additionally after already putting so much out for the book already. It's things like this that are off-putting on buying into "premium" VTT support.


Great! Now, please include the same for Roll20, which has a free membership option.

Also, unlikely to purchase full module/adventure add-ons unless the price is dropped. They seem quite high currently.

President, SmiteWorks

3 people marked this as a favorite.

You can play Starfinder on Fantasy Grounds using the built-in CoreRPG or PFRPG rulesets and community extensions if you like with no additional purchases. The Starfinder ruleset and Core Rules conversions are pretty nice improves (we think) and represents roughly 6 months of software development by SmiteWorks with many more months planned to continually add greater and greater features. Those features and graphics may or may not matter to you as much. We generally encourage people to check it out and then if they are unsatisfied, they can request a full refund within 30-days.

Great, now do the same for Roll20 [or D20Pro]
Paizo allowed us (and other VTTs) to license the material and they support us by providing us with raw text and graphic assets we can use. The actual building of the product in a digitally interactive format is up to each individual licensee. I can't speak directly to the amount of effort required by each licensee to roll out new conversions, but that's generally why you don't just see each company with everything instantly available or for super low prices.

Re: Prices
Final prices for those of you who already own the PDFs:
$50 for the Starfinder ruleset (required for the items below)
$30 for Alien Archive (optional)
$7 for each Dead Suns adventure module.

For those without the PDFs, you get it for $59.99, $39.99 and $22.99 each but you can sync to get the PDF added to your Paizo account for free.

Even at $50 for the Starfinder ruleset, it will take a lot of sales to recoup our investment. Adventures and supplements help with that ROI in the long run. Like with everything else, supporting things you like to see financially means that you'll see more of those things in the future. Whether that means FG, Roll20, D20Pro or none of the above is up to the consumers.


I'm very confused, hasn't this been out for a while?

President, SmiteWorks

It was launched on Feb 9th. The announcement got delayed due to the website revamp here.


Doug Davison wrote:

Even at $50 for the Starfinder ruleset, it will take a lot of sales to recoup our investment. Adventures and supplements help with that ROI in the long run. Like with everything else, supporting things you like to see financially means that you'll see more of those things in the future. Whether that means FG, Roll20, D20Pro or none of the above is up to the consumers.

Businesses need to make money in order to continue providing content and services. I get that. But I will need to do some upgrades to my older FG license in addition. Unless I am actively running a game, spending $200 to get my FG up to snuff is just not in my price range.

I'm having enough trouble figuring out if I can afford Hero Lab Online to get access to the Starfinder stuff in that platform....

President, SmiteWorks

Amaltopek wrote:

Businesses need to make money in order to continue providing content and services. I get that. But I will need to do some upgrades to my older FG license in addition. Unless I am actively running a game, spending $200 to get my FG up to snuff is just not in my price range.

I'm having enough trouble figuring out if I can afford Hero Lab Online to get access to the Starfinder stuff in that platform....

If you have an older license, it will still work with the latest version and should update for free. We have people that bought back in 2004 and those keys still work. If you have a Player only Lite license, those can be upgraded to Standard for $20 and a Standard can be updated to an Ultimate license so you can host free/demo players if you want for $110 normally or $88 through midnight EST tonight (Sunday, March 11) due to a sale that is currently running. We try to have sales periodically on the main licenses. A brand new Ultimate license is on sale for $110 (down from $149). That can still be a chunk all at once, so we offer the 6-months 0% interest financing option through PayPal for U.S. based customers. You can find a link to it on the bottom of our Store.

If now is not the best time, please do consider signing up for the newsletter and you'll get notified for sales and new releases each week. Just posting on our threads about physical games you are playing of Starfinder and what features would be helpful to you helps us prioritize where we spend our development efforts as well. If we can't entice you now, perhaps we can eventually by addressing your most requested features.

Exo-Guardians

I was looking into Fantasy Grounds and see they have Starfinder, but I am concerned that I have not seen a lot of recent material talking about it. This forum's last post is from a year ago and very few YouTube videos are out there and they too are nearly all a year old.

I am wondering if Paizo continued to support updates and improvements in areas like starship combat and such.

I am on the fence due to the price but just want to make sure this was not a one-and-done with no new support or a product that was not fully finished. If there is a good site or video showing things like starship combat using Fantasy Ground, I'd love to get a link please.


Sgtsplat wrote:

I was looking into Fantasy Grounds and see they have Starfinder, but I am concerned that I have not seen a lot of recent material talking about it. This forum's last post is from a year ago and very few YouTube videos are out there and they too are nearly all a year old.

I am wondering if Paizo continued to support updates and improvements in areas like starship combat and such.

I am on the fence due to the price but just want to make sure this was not a one-and-done with no new support or a product that was not fully finished. If there is a good site or video showing things like starship combat using Fantasy Ground, I'd love to get a link please.

I currently GM Starfinder using fantasy grounds and would highly recommend it - with caveats.

Firstly, I’ve bought everything and have the fantasy grounds ultimate licence, just so you know the perspective I’m coming from.

I love the automation, the tools it gives me to have everything I need to run a game, the ability to quickly create an encounter and grant the party xp and loot, as well as giving them a tactical battle map to fight on. Being able to run from an adventure module and have everything pre done for you is really cool.

However, learning this took time. It has a very “unique” way of doing this and is a steep learning curve. The fantasy grounds community is absolutely fantastic and there’s loads of wikis and tutorials to get you started.

Starship combat is the big problem though. It exists at the moment but it is not automated to the same standard so you have a lot to do manually there. This is because they had developer issues. The good news is, they have someone new working on it and updating the rule set frequently and they post frequently about what they are doing as well.

Is it the right product for you? Well that’s up to you to decide. Any more questions, give us a shout or join the fantasy grounds discord and forums.

Please note, I don’t work for them in any way, I’m just a really happy customer.

Exo-Guardians

I am watching with baited breath the posts by Samarex on Fantasy Grounds forum. Looks like he is working on it and has posted a couple screen shots. It really is the last piece I need before sinking that kind of loot into some software. I recently bought Hero Labs online and was disappointed they do not have ship building, but they said they have it in their backlog. I really like it for building characters but starships are such a big part of the game I run/am converting that I need all of these programs to catch up.


Sgtsplat wrote:
I am watching with baited breath the posts by Samarex on Fantasy Grounds forum. Looks like he is working on it and has posted a couple screen shots. It really is the last piece I need before sinking that kind of loot into some software. I recently bought Hero Labs online and was disappointed they do not have ship building, but they said they have it in their backlog. I really like it for building characters but starships are such a big part of the game I run/am converting that I need all of these programs to catch up.

Ok, well you don’t actually need hero lab for fg (though I have it too). You can totally build and run a starship as on fg now, just the combat is not automated. What is cool is building a ship on there, you assign your bp and drag and drop the bits you want and it automatically calculates cost and power consumption. I built several ships for the fun of it.

If it’s something you’re really interested in and you have the cash, I’d say go for it, don’t wait for the future developments, as I said, it’s perfectly playable, functional and fun to run a game now.

If you’re still on the fence, I’d download a demo of FG, give it a whirl and ask on discord if someone can run a tutorial session on starfinder in FG for you so you can see how it works and if you would be happy.

It’s a different system, but check out the d&d 5e or pathfinder 1e product page on there. There’s a video showing all the cool stuff you can do as a gm using that rule set (very similar to starfinder).

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