Aqua Zesty Man's page

CorvusMask wrote:

Nah Triune is just having outage. Remember to turn off wait 10 seconds and turn it on again

That's what happens when you sub-contract your transit overhead with Spectrum Interstellar! Nothing but outages and relentless subscription calls from here on out.

That's why you should always go with Interstellar Spectrum. They are SO much more reliable and only cost twice as much.

Don't worry folks, Triune will be temporarily shut down for scheduled maintenance between 322 A.G. and 422 A.G. Please ensure that all Drift transits have been completed before this window to ensure no cargo or personnel is lost to the void. Apologies for any convenience this may cause!

--The Admin

I really hope archaic weapons will also get a little love. The choices for level 1 characters have seemed lackluster from the beginning, compared to the wealth of options for level 1's in Pathfinder.

For my part, whatever they decide to do with this book, I'm putting the Pact Worlds setting in the Large Magellanic Cloud for campaigns I'll be running.

It's a really cozy but lively place down there in Nubecula Major, bustling with evolving races and civilizations.

It's also the first destination of choice for countless starfarers from the "mainland" of our galaxy wanting to explore beyond the outer rim.

The Milk Spiral dominates the night sky of every world in the Cloud, whether in Near Space or the Vast. It's the one cultural artifact nearly every civilization has in common, but the names and mythologies dreamed up about the Pageant of Heaven are as varied as the races themselves. "They say life here, began out there..."

Why do Hobgoblin characters lose their racial +2 Con bonus from Pathfinder 1E? This seems like it should be an errata point since every other PF1E race conversion to Starfinder carries over all racial ability modifiers as-written.

Any chance they will include Baba Yaga's homeworld in this book?

Does anyone know when there might be a pocket edition of this book?

Kasatha would be the default of course!

But Vesk masks, Ysoki masks, Lashunta masks (with or without antenna attachments)

Seems like it would be a decent seller to go with T-shirts at cons.

I am not terribly impressed with the choices of Investigator and Swashbuckler for 2E conversion. Is 2E intended to consolidate classes so that Investigator subsumes Inquisitor, and Swashbuckler takes over the Brawler niche?

As well, any plans to publish a for-purchase app on Google Play or the Apple Store?

Are there any plans to release expansion cards or blanks?

From the sound of things I would say it's a lot like Jugger.

A no-contact variant LARP version.

Any ETA for content from the Character Operations Manual? I am starting a new Starfinder campaign soon (first for that system) and have been wanting players to have access to the new classes for making their characters without having to juggle the one hardcopy we have.

Because all high-level full casters went back in time, before the Gap, to live on Golarion. Why? Because they could. And that's why there's no left.

I guess they all pitched in to build an Atavachron?

My main opposition to Players Roll Everything is that, as GM, I'm also playing the game, and I like rolling dice too.

I totally get that, and I have to admit it is the biggest obstacle to implementation. I have a box of twelve sets of dice organized by color for use when I GM, plus eight more of everything so I can roll twenty of any given size. I would have to give that up for GMing if I implemented my own suggestion.

I agree that players would want to feel like they could have stopped their character from being flesh-to-stoned or hit with a kill-trap because it feels too much like a GM fiat when an enemy caster throws a spell and there was nothing the player could do but hope the GM rolls badly.

But the same thing happens, all the time, whenever an enemy martial character shoots an arrow or swings a melee weapon. Granted, few weapons are as powerful or decisive as a spell once you start getting into middle-level or high-level monsters and NPCs. But only if the GM is playing with kid gloves can a player expect there to be no risk at all of having their PC be felled by a series of unfortunate events.

Perhaps some kind of mitigation mechanic could also be implemented, similar to action points or hero points, which would be available for defensive purposes. A "karma point" could be spent to negate a critical hit confirmation, or turn an enemy's successful weapon attack or spell attack into a miss. Karma could be earned for good deeds, acts of kindness or justice, accomplishing story goals, or just whenever the PC gains a level.

David knott 242 wrote:

The fairest idea would be to have opposed rolls for everything, but doing that would REALLY bog down actual play.

Also you'd be doubling the randomness of the game. Randomness hurts players more than it helps since those characters make more rolls over a life-time.

So that's a double whammy.

That is also the best argument against the use of fumble rolls and fumble decks.

This is mainly about saving throws.

It is not essential that Pathfinder 2E, if it really does hold no cows sacred, to have the same people always rolling the dice for a given game effect. Examples in 1E:

Attack rolls: attacker rolls against defender's AC (a DC).

Combat maneuvers: Maneuveror rolls against maneuveree's CMD.

In mmost cases, whoever's turn it is, is the player rolling.

But not with saving throws.

To "unchain" the dice, we can consider any of several approaches:

--

Traditional Rolls: How 1E does it.

--

The Actor Rolls: Whosever turn it is will always be the one rolling the dice. Saving Throws get turned into Spell Attack rolls. Whatever your caster's "Spell Save DCs" used to be, that's how they calculate the Spell Attack: d20 + key ability modifier + spell level, plus anything else they can add. On the flip side, saving throws get calculated as Save DCs for the _spell targets_. For example, Fortitude DC = 10 + defender's Fort bonus + defender's Con bonus. (Coincidentally this also means poisons and diseases (or their makers) also make "fortitude attacks" against their victims; the higher the roll, the deadlier or more potent. The same for traps and "Reflex attacks".) As well, spells that must be "aimed" or require a touch attack of some kind will still work as written, using those rules.

That, IMO, would make 2E better, giving spellcasters a stronger feeling of agency. They would get to roll dice as much as the martial players do.

--

The other two main methods I'll just mention for the sake of completion:

Players Roll Everything: Monsters and NPCs stats get boiled down to DCs for everything. Armor Class for a PC becomes an Armor Defense Roll (d20 + Dex mod + armor bonus + shield bonus + size mod, etc). Fort/Ref/Will for PCs are rolled like the Traditional method. GMs are disadvantaged in having less ability to fudge rolls up or down, and may telegraph actions to the players whenever they make a concealed or secret skill roll for the PCs.

GMs Roll Everything aka The Storyteller method: the opposite of the aforegoing, basically. GMs can fudge basically anything he wants. The players have only their stats, no dice. Useful for play by email or online campaigns, and possibly games where there is very little table space (road trip, etc).

--

Most of the tangible modifications would appear as differences in design on the character sheet. Each method would have its differences shown visibly in how the calculations are broken down.

I believe Paizo should take down this website. It hasn't been updated in 2 years, and is now out of date and chocked full of errors. In addition, Paizo is focused on moving PF 2.0 forward (as they should since it's their next BIG thing). I'm sure they no longer have the time and resources for this project that it's probably no longer on the "To Do" list. To further support this, they haven't released a new FAQ in months.

I haven't personally visited the PathfinderPRG site in almost a year, using other sites that have the time and resources to keep their content current and (mostly) error free.

A better solution would be to open up the 1E SRD editing to the community to directly edit it as a wiki. Consensus verification of edits and corrections should be enough for most of the errors remaining outstanding, while someone on Paizo staff might drop in once in a while to put the final stamp on a correction once it has been crosschecked against the original manuscript.

Let's say I cast a Wish that undoes a recent misfortune (bullet #10 in the PRD description of Wish). Could my enemy then counter my Wish with a Wish of their own to turn reality back to its original course? What if I then try another Wish to undo that one? And so on until one of us runs out of Wishes, or the situation makes it impossible or irrevelent to continue the Wish duel.

Can I bolster the effect of one Wish by casting another on top of it? For example Wishing for an important NPC to be brought back to life, then a second Wish worded to prevent another being's hostile Wish from undoing the resurrection of the previous Wish? Precautions would need to be taken to prevent assassination by more conventional means, but short of this, can a Wish be used in this way?

Lucas Yew wrote:

Speaking of which, why did the U.S. fail to introduce metric properly? I've heard rumors about bin Laden's attack on New York invoking fervent patriotism nationwide having to do with its last straw, but surely that alone can't be the whole story...

Because people weren’t comfortable using it in day to day business and life.

To be more precise, no single American generation since we started taking metric seriously has wanted to be the one to actually bite the bullet of trying to learn two systems from scratch.

If the WW2 Generation had volunteered to do it, all the Baby Boomers and younger would have grown up with metric and it would be second-nature to everyone younger than them. But they decided to pass the buck to the Baby Boomers, and they passed it off to the Generation-X'ers.

Then Generation X said "why us??" so now it's up to the Millennialists.

I'm hoping for some input for how a hybrid race might be concocted in Starfinder, which might be the result of genetic engineering or something.

I was looking at the RP values assigned to everything thus:

A.R.G. racial traits broken down by RP values

So I had the idea of doing crossbreeds by allowing a certain amount of traits to be swapped over.

The crossbreed chooses one parent to be the 'dominant' heritage, and gets all their traits by default. If there's ever a game effect that affects or does not affect by race, then for purposes of game rules the crossbreed will register as humanoid type of the dominant-parent subtype if it's a positive thing, but the crossbreed will also register as belonging to both racial subtypes if the effect is a net negative. (GM's discretion)

Further, the crossbreed can decide to give up a certain number of traits from their 'dominant' side that add up to a certain number of RP, which they can then spend on traits from their recessive parentage, no more than the listed number of RP.

Traits with a zero or negative value can't be given up nor can they be bought. If either parent has a 'weakness' then you have it regardless, but it doesn't let you buy extra traits from your recessive parent anyway. (example: light sensitivity)

You can't buy a trait from the recessive parent that will 'overlap' with a built-in trait from your dominant parent. Example: you can't get Skill Focus (Perception) from both heritages and expect to double your bonus.

I'm just brainstorming here and I'm sure there's lots of loopholes and things that need more clarification... what's your thoughts?

Keep the bioweapon idea but make sure it is a secondary consequence, and something that happens not right away. Leave it be as a plot escalation that only happens after a few hours or days. Till then, warn the PCs. Warn them right and left: nasty-bad things are trying to escape, testing their cages, and the cages are slowly powering down.

Anyway, for the beginning: make it so the station fails because some idiot started implementing new maintenance protocols with the power plant (stealing from Chernobyl real life here), which have not been tested enough in the simulators. He felt like he needed to move to the Real Thing quickly. (He was also bucking for a quick promotion come next quarter). So his maintenance experiments went a little long.

Now these experiments overlapped with a shift change, during which time some raw green trainees got put into critical positions they really were not qualified to handle. But hey, understaffing sometimes means no one to supervise and there's nothing wrong with a little "on the job training," is there? (As long as everything is run 'by the book', at least, which it most certainly is not in this case.) So when their boards start displaying weird data, they try to improvise solutions at their end that should have worked but didn't. End result, a few nasty explosions, power goes down all over the station except for backup generators.

The backup generators are also keyed to containment facilities for the bioweapons you speak of. Only they are now stuck on battery power. And when they fail, containment fails, and a lot of bad things get loose.

Once per year, for about a week (plus or minus 12 hours), Absalom Station vanishes and a planet called Earth pops out of nowhere in its orbit and position. Earth people are as human as anyone can tell, but they and their cultures, languages, nations, and planet's geography are completely unfamiliar. Their technology level and civilization is just on the verge of switching over to modern energy sources from fossil fuels. The few things they have in common with our humans is Baba Naga mythology and a few other legends. (Including St. Cuthbert)

When Absalom Station comes back and Earth disappears again, anyone on Earth goes with it; anyone outside a certain distance from Earth stays over here.

From Earth's perspective this always happens right around October 31st of the common calendar, as early as October 24th but no later than October 30th. They seem as baffled about the exchange as anyone else (Absalom Station reports transitioning to a vaguely similar, but utterly inhabited solar system other than themselves and any ships that were in the vicinity of the station during the changeover).

Many crews and explorers from both sides have been lost when caught away from Shared Space at the end of the "witching week".

The Aboleths did it.

Yes. Where are all the aboleths?! Why does no one think of the aboleths??

Personally, I think the Aboleths have been really busy building themselves an empire called the Universal Union in another dimension/timeline, so we shouldn't concern ourselves about them anymore.

Do they ever explain who moved the Starstone from its place on Golarion to the Station itself or how they did it?

In the Aliens universe it is strongly implied that the legal-political system of nation-state sovereignty has been overrun and destroyed by the rule of megacorporations, which have few limits on their activities within their territories. It is a world dominated by corporatocracies instead of traditional national governments; even superstates like the EU no longer wield effective power within their borders. So for example Weyland-Yutani could do whatever it wanted on LV-426. There was no political entity with any teeth that could have held Weyland-Yutani liable for the actions of its managerial staff in their exploration and handling of the xenoforms and artifacts recovered from the derelict Space Jockey starship. Even though the entire colony and its population were lost in the disaster, any disciplinary actions taken or justice rendered would have been entirely in-house. Whoever was the lowest-ranking manager that could be saddled with the blame might have gotten reprimanded, demoted, fired, etc by upper management at the pleasure of the shareholders, but that would be all. That's corporatocracy in action.

If the civilization of Starfinder operates under a similar paradigm, it will be a civilization divided into corporate republics, perhaps punctuated by revolutionary syndicalist "buffer states", self-governing socialist communes, and anarchy zones in continuous (but irrelevant) conflict with the megacorporations in areas that no megacorporation thinks is profitable to expand into (neutral zones).

In reality it's the megacorporations who hold the real power. It'll be whichever megacorp has prevailing or majority jurisdiction over a certain space station, surface colony, planetside city-state, or geographical region that decides the gun laws, or who hands down the orders to the commissioner of police to enforce (or not enforce), that decides what happens if some gang of well-armed folks is spotted packing heat in public.

I'm a firm believer in the tech tree philosophy of worldbuilding.

All rocket research leading to ships that can escape the atmosphere of your homeworld eventually leads to:

Tech 1: Ion drives, which open up the rest of your solar system to colonization and interplanetary nationbuilding. Ion drives still limit travel time between planets to days or weeks instead of months or years, but eventually someone invents the:

Tech 2: Gravity drive, which allows "gravships" to reach the outer planets and the very fringes of the solar system from the inner worlds in mere minutes or hours, instead of days or weeks. Gravship technology builds on the unity of the moons of each outer planet far better than radio comms ever could, and the outer colonies invariably seek more autonomy or outright independence from the homeworld, whom they have broken away from culturally a long time ago. There follows political tension, outright civil war, or a longing for more breathing room which provokes technological innovations such as:

Tech 3: The generation I spacefolding drive, which allows expeditions to other star system far more reasonably than even the most advanced gravity drives (which are still constrained by the light barrier). The first expeditions may require travel times of a few years to reach all but the nearest stars, but these expeditions will be followed by colony ships of people just trying to "get away from it all". Spacefolding drives will eventually get faster and more energy-efficient, such as:

Tech 4: Generation II spacefolding drives, allowing star-to-star travel in months instead of years...

Tech 5: Generation III spacefolding drives, linking the interstellar community and shrinking the universe still further. Even the most distant colonies can conduct trade over hundreds of light-years in just a few weeks' worth of travel. Then the next great leap:

Tech 6: Near Teleportation: Now a person can commute to jobs on the other side of the planet. Intraplanetary vehicular transportation will eventually become obsolete due to teleportation. Only the military and ultra-secure courier services will have need of aircraft, land vehicles, or seagoing vessels anymore. If ion driven spacecraft weren't obsolete before, they are now.

Tech 7: Far Teleportation: Planet-to-planet teleportation within a single solar system becomes a reality. No one needs to use gravships to travel around the core solar systems anymore, unless they really really want to, or they're expanding the teleportation network a little bit farther out.

Tech 8: Extreme Teleportation: When the first star-to-star teleporters are invented, the civilization is likely well on its way to colonizing a large portion of the galaxy, and the rest of the habitable worlds in the galaxy will belong to them...it's just a matter of time.

Tech 9: Personal Teleportation: The steady evolution of consciousness will by this stage allow guided evolution into beings of energy and thought, allowing the most advanced members of the civilization to lead the way into ascending to incorporeality.

These are kind of harder to pin down, so I had to get creative here. As a side not, it's my opinion that no race listed as a playable race is either intrinsically evil nor even predisposed to evil. Duergar aren't evil, nor drow, nor goblins, even if they are seen as such by narrow-minded fearful humans. If they are regarded as evil by the other races (like orcs and goblins often are), it's purely the result of racism, prejudice, and xenophobic attitudes toward minority races that have been marginalized, ostracized, forced to live in the least plentiful or arable lands, and continually hunted and persecuted by the dominant races for generation after generation.

Fetchling common: probably sounds similar to Wayang, since both races have ties to the Shadow plane.

Strix common: in mythology they seem to be related to vampires and other blood-sucking creatures (probably the same source that inspired the stirges). There is nothing predatory or vile in the reimagined version, however. Drawing solely upon the "Suspicious" trait of the Strix who live in a state of paranoia, that the older generations from the former Warsaw Pact nations will still remember, we may say that Strix might sound like something vaguely Slavic. They are a proud race who own the skies but have had a long-running feud with the human race (as represented by the races whose accents mimic those of the Western European languages), who have oppressed their kind with imperialist methods for ages.

Svirfneblin common: follow the Welsh of their gnomish cousins but are probably harder to understand since their accents will be thicker.

Suli common: Probably vaguely Middle-Eastern, since they are related to the jann of Arabian lore.

Nagaji, Vanara, and Vishkanyan common: Lore concerning the mythological bases of these races come from the Indian subcontinent, so their accents may well sound vaguely related to the Samsaran common accents to the untrained ear. The subcontinent is hugely diverse linguistically, so there are plenty of possibilities. My ear is just not attuned enough to pick up on variances (just like I can't tell any difference between German accents beyond the most superficial level). Someone else will have to do the work here.

Gillmen, Gripplis, and Merfolk: I really have no idea what to do about these races.

To round out the list a bit more:

Catfolk common: From their native lands in Garund near Holomog, their accent is likely near to Tanzanian or Ugandan English (just to make a geographical analogy here).

Duergar common: will sound hauntingly like some lost or strange Dwarven (northern British Isles) accent, but there is a harsh 'otherness' to it. Not unlike the differences in pronunciation between the R.P. English used reciting most Shakespeare today, and the revived Shakespearean accent as explained by Ben Crystal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi-rejaoP7U

Drow common: Most likely their accents will have a faint ring of the old elven tongue, but long years of separation will have ensured that Drow-accented common is easily distinguished from the elided and "H-less" accents of the elves.

Tengu common: Virtually nonexistent. Crows and ravens are found almost everywhere on Earth, and it seems Tengus are just as widespread on Golarion. They are linguistic and cultural scavengers as well as materialistic ones. Therefore there is no one consistent "Tengu common" accent, since Tengus are quite good at adapting their speech to fit into the wider world. http://www.d20pfsrd.com/races/other-races/featured-races/arg-tengu/

Aasimars, Changelings, Dhampirs, Fetchlings, Ifrits, Oreads, Sylphs, Tieflings, and Undines will usually take after their human parent's or relative's accent.

We can easily imagine the native languages of each alien race creates an accent in Common that leads to some recognizable real-world accent. For instance, this may be an actual sentence in Yoski Native:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPC-u5fP6GA

In my games I'm just gonna run with this! Just because. Note: am Southern American

Human common: sounds like Received Pronounciation among the high nobility, while the middle and lower classes will sound more Londony or East Anglian or some shades of Birmingham.

Elf common: When elf nobility speaks common as a second language, it takes on a Dublin quality, but most elves have some kind of northern Irish island accent; others may have a highlander Scots who've criss-crossed cultural and linguistic influences with the dwarven clans. There's an elf-dwarf pidgin out there somewhere too, probably, but if so, it's likely endangered.

Halfling common: Their original native tongues have been dead for generations, but they've held on to their accents even after having adopted the languages of the 'daikini'. Dorset, Somerset, Cornwall...halfling pirates? heh.

Dwarf common: Glasgow, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Geordie; the upper classes of dwarves have stuck to their Edinburgh

Gnome common: Southern and Northern Welsh, maybe some Liverpool too.

Orcish common: Deep Southern American (Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, upper and middle Florida). The ruling families of the Orc nation invariably have a more 'genteel' accent, sort of dripping like molasses off the tongue (non-rhotic), while low-born orcs will have more of a crusty drawl like some rural rednecks. (definitely rhotic)

Half-elf & half-orc common: will follow whoever put in the most time raising them, or if their parents stayed together, they'll have an exotic mishmash of the parents' accents. Some half-Orcs may favor more 'watered-down' Southern dialects like Missourian, Tennesseean, Kentuckian, Virginian. There is a distinct half-orc "exile" accent that evolved from a colony of mixed-race and human self-exiles that gives their common speech an Appalachian twinge and a set of loanwords that may seem rather confusing to other Common speakers.

Hobgoblin common: New England accents (NYC, Boston)

Goblin common: The range of Canadian accents, because goblins are such a diverse bunch.

Bugbear common: Texan and Southwestern.

Kobold common: Californian, so-called "Valley Girl" parody is a stereotype. (So what does pure Draconic sound like, hmm?)

Lashunta common: French. Parisian-style spoken by the upper classes, everyone else favors different accents from the rest of Francophonia. A small portion of Lashuntan speech will have a distinctive Quebecois or maybe a "Cajun" twang to it, which the other races tend to parody the most.

Ysoki common: Australian as per this thread (although Australian has its own shades of different regions)

Vesk common: The ruling classes favor the Hochdeutsch or High German speech. The Vesk military families have evolved their own accent (Berliner) which have been influenced in part by the languages of the vassal races within the Veskarium. Vesk who come from colony worlds conquered by the Veskarium will often exhibit regional dialects of Vesk diluted with the characteristics of the conquered races; these Vesk will often be bilingual as well. The Vesk "colonial speech" is often lampooned, frowned upon, or outright ridiculed by the "pure" Vesk speakers.

Shirren common: Swedish! and maybe some other Scandinavian accents too. While the free Shirren only represent a small portion of the Swarm's genetic diversity, all regional variation in Shirren-speech was stamped out by the hivemind a long time ago. What variations that exist in the variation of Shirren familiar to the Pact World today is the result of very deliberate alterations in speech patterns as more and more Shirren consciously seek to innovate their own distinct accents. While all Shirren speech is mutually intelligible today, one should expect that over time, the free Shirren have created many divergent and mutually unintelligible languages.

The uncommon races drawn from Eastern and Asian mythologies will probably have accents resembling their native culture, such as Samsaran common resembling the range of Indian subcontinental English accents, or the Kitsune will have a Japanese accent in their common, and so on.

That's all I have for now.

Well, there is a wide spectrum between 100% human and 100% machine.

Type I: True humans conceived from unaltered gametes; also humans cloned from other standard humans are also standard humans.

Type II: A sperm or egg with genetically-modified chromosomes makes a GMO-human, which could lead to speciation. Examples: _Star Trek II_, _GATTACA_.

Type III: Synthetics. They are not true GMOs; they are not genetic copy-pasta. They are built from scratch using natural genomes as a guide, or spliced together from known genes. Examples: _Blade Runner_, _Battlestar Galactica 2004_, _Splice_.

Type IV: Cyborgs, beings with organic brains or intact nervous systems, but with machine body parts. (_RoboCop_ series, _Star Wars_, _Star Trek: First Contact_)

Type V: true Androids, mechanical brains with organic parts, like the Android race from Pathfinder/Starfinder. See also _Bicentennial Man_, _Terminator_ (T-800s with organic camouflage only). It could be argued that the synthetics from the Aliens series (Ash, Bishop, Call) are also Type V's, since they 'bleed'.

Type VI: Fully mechanical beings, Data, all of Asimov's other robots, the toaster-cylons, Terminator T-1000 & T-X, etc.

How I would do it, I'd give them four languages for different functions:

Datagram: For informal, everyday communication. Being robust and permissive of redundancy, this suboptimal protocol is remarkable for its ability to convey essential meanings despite some amount of signal degradation or packet loss.

Transmit: A more formal language which requires error-checking and handshaking. All legal code, blueprints, work orders, and other important data are written using Transmit. Transmit's only drawback is that all streams usually fail over less than a reliable wireless connection.

Encrypt: An auto-ciphering machine language whose ability to obfuscate its contents against unauthorized access is considered just about unbreakable by organics' standards. Encrypt is used for commercial and private data transactions. Encrypt is also known to be used by rogue AIs, deserters, the malware-possessed, and botnet hives.

Assembly: The sacred tongue of Triune, Assembly endows Aballonians with the capability of philosophical thought (technotheology). All worshipers of Triune are encouraged to pray in Assembly, although the deity will accept a divine connection using nearly any other communication protocol.

Earlier today I thought about how one could mashup Starfinder in the same universe as Warhammer 40K.

First we say that time formerly passed at different rates around Golarion/Pact World space relative to Earth/Milk Spiral space. This was caused by the proximity of the Rough Beast, so time passes more slowly. (up to 1/25 ratio in the Golarion star system and surrounding light-years). If anyone crossed over from Golarion in 4717 A.R. they would discover Earth in the present year of 2017 A.D.

Whereas the events of Reign of Winter might have happened only 4 Earth years ago by Golarion subjective time, 100 years have passed on Earth since then (the Great War is long over and it's closer to 2022 A.D. than 1922).

While dismissed as tall tales in its time, archaeologists have since uncovered Pathfinder Society records describing the personal and official records of a second expedition to Baba Yaga's homeworld describing a planet filled with strange technologies and a xenophobic organization called "The Foundation" which quarantined and interned the travelers for several years, during which time many experiments were performed on them and their equipment, variously referred to with strange terminology such as "SCPs", "euclids", and "keters".

Sometime in the 63th century A.R., an attempt was made to try to correct the time flow problem for Golarion and its home galaxy. The source of the time flow problem was narrowed down to Rovagug's Cage, and steps were taken to experiment with different methodologies until the least destructive one was isolated.

The experiment would last for approximately 300 years. The events of the Gap and its experiments would have an effect throughout the Laniakea Galactic Supercluster, including both the Home Galaxy and Milk Spiral. In the end, the time problem on and around Golarion and its local spacetime was "fixed", or reintegrated with the rest of the universe, but to make this a permanent solution, Golarion had to disappear. Unfortunately it also created lots of weirdness with the individual memories of people who were "stuck in slow time" as well as just about anything and everything that got written down, taped, saved on magnetic platters or data crystals, etc. etc. Those memories (wetware and otherwise) were caused to cease to exist as a result of the time correction.

The events of The Gap would also create problems with the Drift, at least for the worlds of the Milk Spiral. Knowledge of the Drift was lost to the Milk Spiral for several millennia. After it was rediscovered as The Warp, its corrupting influences would eventually overwhelm many and turn them into minions of the nascent Chaos Gods who trouble that galaxy.

Like the Starstone, the Emperor of Man serves as a galactic navigational beacon for his home galaxy. Today, the Imperium is still virtually unknown to the Pact Worlds, although sporadic reports of "weird and terrible things hiding in the Drift" have been made by explorers who have succeeded in crossing the intergalactic vastness between the Pact Galaxy and the Milk Spiral, and survived to return to the Pact galaxy.

Depends on the grenade. I could see a fully energy-based one going off like a disco ball, only to be later picked up. Any form of non-explosive chemical load could just be reinserted into the container.

The Goa'uld had a "flash bang" spherical device like this, but I don't remember seeing anyone ever retrieving an expended one.

Count me in if I can sweep up enough loose change for the core book by next week.

Batteries are outsourced.

By now, someone should have already figured out how to reverse the corrosion process that rust monsters use for feeding, to turn base metallic ash back into useful raw materials for building things with.

XLordxErebusX wrote:

I find that almost nothing in the Tech guide would be useful.

The creation rules dont work well for something so abundant.

Pathfinder creation rules in general are time and resource sinks and that is kind of done on purpose to make creation have impact on the players to prevent them from constantly rolling with twice the expected gear and power of a group their size.

Indeed! In Starfinder, commercial manufacturers may be assumed to beleveraging assembly lines and other optimization techniques to realize economy of scale, and churn out dozens of weapons every week if not every day.

Launch with an adventure path, 3 scenarios, and quest. That looks to be about 40 hours of game play AT LAUNCH. I'm frankly quite pleased with the amount of material that exists. If you need more than that, consider yourself fortunate to be able to get a group together that frequently. Also, write your own adventures if needed.

Most first person shooters with a single player or co-op component (or any storyboarded game for that matter) are designed to aim for X number of hours cumulative from beginning to end. Game designers also have to balance complexity and problem solving (make it too hard and you will lose future sales, too easy and the player may feel cheated of a challenge). Unless there's a multiplayer component, if the game is really well made, you can expect maybe up to 36 hours of unrepeated content from a product that costs at least $50 or $60 at release. With mission packs/addons the content time is even less.

Creative writing is not just a skill, it's a labor of love and can be quite tedious if you care at all about trying to craft something that (you hope) will not only be interesting but also internally consistent within the rules you have imagined for your world. You also have to live with the nagging fear of rejection and bad reviews that will inevitably come out. It's your baby and you want it to thrive and win hearts & minds. The hardest thing to do is to step back and let it live or die on its merits, when you have to accept that it has to be good enough deadline or no deadline.

It's hard to give birth to greatness, harder still to rush it or work under pressure from fans and eager critics.

MC (Master of Catastrophies)

CEO (Chief Elucidation Officer)

I'd imagine with such a large base of playable races, there might be some kind of theme that lets you take traits from two races or something like that. It would probably be more work than necessary to create a half-breed whenever a new humanoid race comes out.

You could set this up ahead of time by designing all your races with different labels attached to each of their traits, either primary or secondary. Primary traits aren't crossable; you get either all the primaries from one or the other parent. Secondary traits (less powerful, less game breaking) can be a little more flexible.

So when two species crossbreed, the offspring gets all primary traits from one of their parents, then may get one, two, a few, or several of their secondary traits from the other parent. A point system like Race Builder would trade balance for complexity, but if you left it up to the GM to approve all crossbreeding on a case by case basis then you can keep it a little more simple.

Plus one android also boxed, and with a wonderful personality...

After A Year In Space, The Air Hasn't Gone Out Of NASA's Inflated Module

Bigelow Aerospace wants to make a whole space station with this technology. Bubble compartments made of reinforced cloth and fabric linked together sounds like something you'd see in Spelljammer / Starjammer or Starfinder, wouldn't you say? Probably cheaper than boosting a whole lot of metal and plastic into orbit, anyway.

Build one big enough and you could make yourself a self-sufficient bubble greenhouse (under spin gravity, of course). Grow some fresh food and sell it at a good price to all your fellow orbiteers that can't afford to bring up their own food from the surface.

Planetary orbits don't increase in radius incrementally. That is, the fifth planet's orbit would not necessarily be five times the size of the orbit of the first.

Orbital resonance between planets ensures that the further out you go from the central sun, the more distance there needs to be between neighboring planets if they are to have stable orbits.

If Triaxus has an eccentric orbit as we assume it would have for its seasonal changes, its orbit would need to be in resonance with its planetary neighbors so that neither planet pulls the other out of its stable orbit around the central sun (at least on the time scale of intelligent life and advanced civilizations developing on said planets). Given enough time, all planetary orbits will fail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_of_the_Solar_System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

A "solar system map" should be considered as representing the sequential order of the planets of a system. If Triaxus is presented as circling between Eox and Liavara, then Eox's orbit most likely falls entirely within Triaxus' orbit, and Liavara's orbit (probably) encompasses Triaxus' orbit, but they wouldn't be of equal distance apart nor comparable of the distance between (say) Aballon and Castrovel, or Absalom Station and Akiton.

With phonetic alphabet words, you can't just listen to the consonants. Listen to the vowels and listen hard, because in radio communications you may only be able to hear the vowels and piece together what words would make sense with that vowel sequence, syllable stress, rhythm, available context of the message, source and intended listener, and so on.

Parsing distorted, all-vowel speech is done automatically by the brain. Star Wars and New Battlestar Galactica both emulate this really well. We don't even realize our brain is being challenged by the signal loss or interference sometimes, it's just a sound effect or audio trope meaning "awesome dogfighting or other space combat about to happen real soon or is already in progress".

I'm just going to assume that any former gods got superseded in one of three ways:

1. They traveled beyond the rim like the First Ones of B5

2. They "retired" themselves by voluntary suicide (merging with the universe like Apollo's kindred from Star Trek)

3. They decided to settle down and stay local, and some of them could had gone with Golarion wherever it went.

Wherever a bigger better god or goddess has shown up to take charge of a portfolio it's not that they forced their predecessor out of office; except for maybe Triune they've always been around, just no one from Golarion had knowledge of them till Starfinder times. Some deities have a sphere of influence that limited to a continent; others a whole planet; some multiple planets, and then there's deities like Pharasma which have achieved a monopoly and kept out all potential usurpers.

Jail time for different offenses probably vary according to species longevity. A ten year sentence means a lot less to an elf or drow than it would to a goblin.

Other crimes:

Genetic theft (misdemeanor)

Cloning without consent (felony)

Cloning a person and duplicating their brain pattern, so the two are identical or near identical twins:capital offense, because you have to recognize the clone as a person at that point and can't terminate them.

Spells like the enchantment school that override a person's will, should be considered a form of mental rape. It is similar to spiking a person's drink then taking advantage of them. If they are under your control and commit certain crimes, you the caster would be the guilty party rather than the involuntary slave.

Ecological crimes might go above and beyond destruction of property or vandalism. If you contaminate a space station's air or water supply or cause the recycling machinery to make it inoperable, it's going to rank up there with manslaughter, reckless homicide, murder. Similarly if you damage or contaminate a colony's or starship's rationed food supply you're also dooming those who depend on it to a slow death by starvation or deficiency of essential vitamins, minerals, etc.

Starship theft should be an infamous crime, like stealing horses or cattle were in the Old West, or grand theft auto in modern times. It represents a person's livelihood (or the whole crew's). So piracy maybe should get you a long jail sentence in some places, or years of hard labor in others. Destruction of a stolen ship: capital crime for sure.

What happens when you try to Wish or Miracle it away? Or polymorph it into a squirt gun?

"The Handmade's Tale"

- A community of advanced magic-using humanoids became decadent in their power.

- They created a community of anthropomorphized various skymetal golems (Handmades) to serve as menials, farmers, builders, and household servants.

- The master race wanted to improve on their golem slaves so they developed the means to Awaken them, giving them intelligence and free will and a deep sense of insecurity, a need to be needed. Some masters were able to get their Handmades to love them voluntarily, though Handmades only took to obedience out of fear and threats of harm.

- The master race grew dependent on their Handmades to the extent they could barely maintain their own civilization. Generations of the master race have come and gone, while the Handmades are effectively immortal and have been assigned to new households as needed. Legally they are considered public property 'on loan' to individual households.

- Eventually the last generation of makers died off without teaching their descendants how to build or repair replacements, and the arcane art of golem creation was believed to be lost, until...

- A certain Handmade discovered a trove of arcane writings, and taught themselves the specific rituals to be able to magically repair themselves and other Handmades, but the ability to create new constructs from scratch or to Awaken new Handmades still eludes them.

The Handmade is on a quest for this information and has even left their home planet to search for someone who can teach them how to do these things. The master race forbade any of the Handmades to leave their world and they're aware the Handmade has fled and are in pursuit of the Handmade to bring them back home to their assigned master.