It's almost here! In less than a week, the Starfinder Beginner Box will roam the wilds of outer space—and retail stores across the globe—bringing a unique and introductory brand of Starfinder to players everywhere.
Here at Paizo HQ, we couldn't be more excited. The Starfinder Beginner Box represents countless hours of passionate game design and development, layout and artwork, editing, playtesting, and much more. With the Beginner Box, we've put our hearts and souls into creating a great experience to introduce brand-new roleplayers into the hobby that we all love, and to create first impressions of the Starfinder RPG that players of all experience levels will never forget.
For certain, the project was a monumental undertaking. But knowing that our product might create deeply formative experiences for new players—in the same way that our early experiences with roleplaying changed our lives forever for the better—kept us all going the entire time. Now, we can't wait to share this game and this beginner's product with the world.
The Starfinder Beginner Box hits stores on April 24, and to help promote it, our partners at Two Kings Entertainment helped us put together the ad you see on this page.
Meanwhile, the Starfinder team members who helped bring this product to life have some thoughts to share about the process.
Creating the Starfinder Beginner Box was an extremely challenging and rewarding project that took dozens of people to execute. For my part as one of its designers, I did everything I could to pack as much of the Starfinder core experience into a package that's accessible to anyone with an itch to explore our weird and wild science-fantasy galaxy. I'm proud of the character sheet and especially happy about the player-aid cards. I hope they help give novice players a sense of agency and serve as a handy reminder for those with more experience.
—Joe Pasini, Starfinder Beginner Box Design Lead
I'm really excited to share the world of Starfinder with so many more people—from those who want a handy way to check out what Starfinder has to offer, to those who have never tried a roleplaying game before. I look forward to hearing everyone's epic tales of galactic adventure!
Early on in my RPG-playing hobby, I often had no one to play with. I ended up spending a lot of time with solo adventures, which helped me learn the rules at my own pace and without the pressure of making mistakes in front of more experienced players. That kind of solo-introductory experience isn't a thing most tabletop RPGs do much anymore. So even though this game supports group play and learning how to GM, I was also super excited to see the solo portion of the game.
I hope it lets someone else who doesn't want to try to learn a game with a group, for whatever reason, figure out the basics at their own pace.
—Owen K.C. Stephens, Starfinder Beginner Box Design Lead
A boxed set of basic rules was my first introduction to RPGs, so I've been looking forward to doing a Starfinder Beginner Box since we first started working on the Starfinder RPG. There is so much in that box that I'm excited about, but I'm particularly proud of the adventure I wrote for the Starfinder Beginner Box: “Steel Talon's Lair.” It was a fun challenge to write an introductory adventure for Starfinder that also would help GMs and players navigate through what could be their first roleplaying game experience ever! I don't want to spoil the adventure here for those who might play it, but one encounter features a strange effigy of an alien quadruped, and I wanted to share a little bit of flavor about the relationship between space goblins and horses that unfortunately had to be cut from the adventure for space: “Horses have long been an object of fear and hatred to goblins, and they hope that an image of such a fearsome creature will scare away intruders. Of course, these space goblins have never seen a real horse, so the effigy is more a representation of what they think a terrifying horse would look like.” Suffice to say, the sculpture looks nothing like a real horse—but it's still terrifying to space goblins!
—Robert G. McCreary, Starfinder Creative Director
I had the privilege of designing most of the creatures for the Starfinder Beginner Box. (Rob McCreary created the adventure's villain.) The primary point was usability. It was fun to pare the monsters down to their essentials, and to rework the language and format with that goal in mind. The creature section also has plenty of evil NPCs, so GMs have scoundrels to use right out of the box. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that other members of the team, especially Joe Pasini, made sure my work meshed with the overall system. The results take me back to when I started with RPGs nearly 25 years ago with another beginner's box. I hope the Starfinder Beginner Box does the same for a new generation of roleplayers!
—Chris Sims, Starfinder Developer
That's all for now! Keep your eyes peeled for this gorgeous product soon!
Amanda Hamon
Starfinder Managing Developer
