Galactic Swashbuckler's page

Hi Paizo, there's a rumor going around that subscribers' Starfinder Core PDFs will be delayed until street date. Any comment on that?

I hope not! It didn't happen for First Edition. It allowed my GMing to have the save birthday as SF1e - my first session of Dead Suns was on 8/17/17, which wouldn't have been possible without a tiny head start to prepare!

Alright, thanks for your input everyone. I'm going with the consensus here. I did, in fact, flunk flank. :)

Huzzah!

It is very sad that Paizo was unable to meet the demands of its customers.

How can you see people trying the best they can to meet increased demand during a global pandemic and shipping issues heaped on top, and try to add guilt to the mix? Shipping is typically a little bonkers around GenCon, and this is the Year of Extenuating Circumstances.

I'm constantly refreshing the page to look for more info about The Devastation Ark AP because I'm excited. I'm hoping a trailer drops soon. But there is no call to spread negativity. Don't pout, live in the hype.

rknop wrote:

It sounds like Laarafel is not interesting in finding a way to make it work, but is interested in getting the Con shut down for whatever motivation.

*Anybody else* who has issues signing up with Warhorn because of being vision impaired or for any other reason, the VOs have indicated a willingness to help. I know that there is a vision impaired person who's played in a couple of VTT games here (that were mustered via Warhorn). Please reach out to the VOs and find a way to make it work. They really do want to help make it work for you. There's no exclusionary sign hung out anywhere; it just may require a little manual intervention to get things working for you.

(And, heck, that kind of thing happens all the time. I know that a few times I've had to ask for manual intervention to get my subscriptions to ship right, for example.)

You haven't walked a mile in their shoes. As someone who advocates for my kid when they don't have the words to advocate for themselves I would suggest you can be a part of the solution without being a part of the problem. The first line and in stars are unneeded to be super helpful for people who want the help you are offering.

For people who spend their entire lives fighting to have a semblance of what we typicals consider to be normal? Have a little respect for the progress they have pushed through when people put up walls to stop them.

All of that being said. I know Paizo is extremely inclusive, I know the Con organizers will bend over backwards to assist people on a case by case basis if needed!

I also know that as someone who is typical, I can't fully understand the feels of someone who isn't and the irritation they experience when people don't try to see it from their perspective.

Hope that the organizers sort out a fair way to get people to the tables one way or the other, but I also know this is going to be thrown together VERY last minute and just ask that they do their best.

Completely disagree that respect should be one-way here. The approach was all wrong. It wasn't posed as awareness of an issue. It was outrage in the form of a threat and looking for a fight. All attempts to understand and help with the issue were tacitly ignored. I can understand the frustration, but this is the wrong way to approach the issue. Threats over shutting down a fan-made free event should not be encouraged.

Starfinder has sections of their AP books dedicated to lore that -could- be valuable to lore nerds like myself. If I were a player, I would be very tempted to purchase the Starfinder AP books and thumb through the backmatter.

Is this the case for the Pathfinder AP books as well? If it's just flavor to help a GM, I'm skipping it as a player. But if it's interesting lore and helps set the tone or provide tangential details... then I will probably buy them to use backmatter to add color for successful bardic knowledge rolls, for example.

So... what's the point of the "high-priority" quotation from Nyara's prophecy?

My assumption is that that's the "obscure reference" that led the cultists to Nejeor, but it's never explained even for the GM (and the next book doesn't even mention Nyara once).

Naturally, my players latched on to the cryptic prophecy instead of the necrograft, and immediately returned to Castrovel to try to do research about it. I ultimately decided to allow them (via a series of high-DC knowledge checks) to draw the same conclusions as the cultists, but that means they essentially ended up skipping 2/3s of the book and jumping straight to The Ruined Clouds a level early.

The whole Nyara thing is a cool concept, but it feels half-finished. Was the "Sacred Lore" file a red herring, or did something get left on the cutting room floor?

Between this and the issues Paris and KunYul pointed out, the whole adventure is starting to feel painfully disjointed.

The Adventure Background section of the AP book clears this up nicely. The prophecy's meaning is difficult for the cult, but after they receive the information from Tahomen:

...the Devourer cult now believes that Nyara’s prophecy refers to the Stellar Degenerator and suspects that the Gate of Twelve Suns is the key to finding the demiplane that houses the alien weapon. The cult still does not know the exact location of the Gate of Twelve Suns, but Nyara’s oracular writings provided one more clue: an obscure reference to a distant star system called Nejeor. Convinced that the means to finding the Gate of Twelve Suns lies in the Nejeor system...

As far as the literal meaning behind the wording, I suspect we will need book 5 to really know more.

All of the talk about how to make the trek outside Orphys "work" is interesting to me. Eox went through a cataclysm that changed the very geography of the surface. For Wheel of Time fans, I see this as a Breaking of the World-level event. Villages and geographical features that used to be there are completely different now.

Maybe I just got lucky, but my group accepted the explanation that the Eoxian wilderness is such a mess that a land vehicle cannot navigate it. Flying is out because there is nowhere to land. There's an irregular path that is slow going due to hazards, and this is where I described the walls of bone, acid pit, and rock steppes that comprise the final fight of the book as an example. Everything off the path is stalagmites and steep cliffs that are essentially impassible.

Half of the party especially didn't mind a 6 mile walk - they wanted to get immediate use out of the Black Heart necrograft.

Hopefully this explanation of Eox's surface is useful for your games.

As I prep for the next session, I'm curious how other GMs are looking at one aspect that will likely carry through a big portion of the AP.

** spoiler omitted **

Great question and I'm happy with the way it worked out. Since none of the party members are androids, I didn't get any pushback to this idea from players explaining that androids can just get another body and live on.

One of my players was an outlaw running with a group called The Jackals, inspired by Leverage and complete with a mastermind, a grifter, a crazy one, a techie (the PC), and the muscle (an android named Zee). The group fell apart due to an incident

When the outlaw PC reunited with the grifter NPC, she swiftly loaded his personality chip into the bridge (which due to the luck of the dice and murder-hobo syndrome almost started a war within the party involving grenades on the bridge of their own ship...) and Zee's jovial voice boomed through the corridors.

Regarding the music in Fusion Queen, I am going with the Afterlife Club music from ME2 since that about sets the mood for everyone.

Afterlife Theme.

This is exactly what I did, and the players liked it. When they eventually enter the back room, be sure to lower the volume considerably as the door shuts.