Starfinder Society Sanctioning and Schemes!

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

As I write this blog, we're on the road to soon release our twelfth and thirteenth scenarios, which is a pretty great milestone! One thing I've certainly noticed over the course of the Starfinder Society Roleplaying Guild's development is a wide array of opinions and thoughts with regards to the tier structure for the campaign. I wanted to take some time to discuss some of our internal thoughts on this, and what players can expect to see going forward.

First off, let me address sanctioning. Everyone loves to see Adventure Path sanctioned right away, and I'm proud to say that we've had a pretty good track record with sanctioning the Dead Suns Adventure Path. So far, the first three adventures are sanctioned. We hit a bit of a snag with the fourth adventure, namely because of convention season creeping up and requiring a lot of attention—seriously, who'd think that an interactive special and three months of early releases for scenarios would take so much effort?! I hope to look at sanctioning for The Ruined Clouds in the coming weeks, but I want players to know that this project has not been forgotten. Now, with that being said, the fourth Dead Suns installment is intended for characters of 7th to 8th level, which currently represents some of the highest-level characters in the campaign. How about we talk about that...

Taking a trip in the "way back when machine", the Organized Play team had a series of meetings to discuss the new Tier structure for the Starfinder Society Roleplaying Guild. The idea to condense tiers came from an early brainstorming session sparked by fellow developer, Linda Zayas-Palmer. This led to some future meetings where Organized Play Lead Developer John Compton and I sat down to create a sort of road map for our first season. We've stuck to the roadmap since the campaign started, making necessary adjustments for our change to two scenarios per month, and it's worked out very well. I don't want to spoil all of our upcoming scenario plans, but I do want to give some highlights for things that players and event organizers can expect to see over the coming months.

Following the convention season (post-August), we're going to stick with our general scheme of including more Tier 1-4 content. Expect most months to include a Tier 1-4, with a secondary higher tier scenario filling up the secondary slot.

We remain committed to higher level content, but don't expect to see a new Tier 5-8 every month. We'll be looking to mix up some of our release with a regular offering of Tier 3-6 and some Tier 5-8s.

For the most dedicated players, August looks to be an appropriate time to start up a new character. With Starfinder Adventure Path: The Reach of Empire debuting that month, alongside our other recently announced Starfinder Society scenarios, the future is ripe for new character opportunities.

Faction missions remain something we'll be interspersing throughout our future scenarios. Expect a slight step-back from Second Seekers (Luwazi Elsebo) missions for a bit. There will be more content on that front, but expect a future blog post to further discuss that topic.

Finally, expect to see the campaign start looking towards more high-level opportunities closer to the end of 2019!

Alrighty, those are some of my words of wisdom for our upcoming scenario plans. As always, I love hearing feedback from the community, so please feel free to put any requests or thoughts into the comments below. I know there's a wide variety of play styles, so be respectful of other players when discussing the topic of level ranges for new scenarios. Beyond that, it's time for me to jump back into convention season development!

Thurston Hillman
Starfinder Society Developer