Inqui's page

I didn't mention UPBs at first as they are a huge topic as you can see and the entire economy side of Starfinder is screwed up anyway when you apply the "adventurer economics" to the entire setting.

Is there a ready AP for conversion the way Kingmaker broke Pathfinder out into videogames, or would an original story be a better fit?

Depends on who is doing it really and how much experience they have with story writing.

Assuming Owlcat does it they will likely draw from an AP. Imo either Dead Suns because it gives a good overview of the setting or Horizon in the Vast as adding a management part is their thing and Kingmaker was well received.
Against the Swarm might also be possible.

For the tiara's , I don't think people can appreciate how much space a cargo hold can.. well hold.

A single cargo hold is 25 tons

50,000 pounds

7.5 Bulk averages 1 pound

=6,666 Bulk. That is a LOT of trips back and forth with the tiara. You're going to have a mishap trying to make up for a ship.

Depending on how many Null Space Chambers you are carrying its not that many trips. They are small devices, so can be stacked in a backpack and when the cargo is small enough to be split up into Mk. 1 chambers matching a cargo hold with an average 3.5 days travel time only costs a little less than 250k for 80 Chambers.

Large bulk machinery of course can't be transported that way. But why would you even trade that, or anything basically, when you can create anything from UPBs?
Sure, for mass manufactured items its easier to make them in a factory and ship them, but there is no reason to transport specialty items or large machinery when instead you can craft them on site.
And the longer the trip takes, the better tiaras become.

But yes, for bulk transportation starships would beat tiaras, depending on how much starships cost in the end both to construct and to maintain.

As far as the aeon stone, there’s a difference between ‘fed’ and ‘happy’. Imagine never having your favourite pizza or whatever ever again. Also, there’s the issue of having that many credits on hand at one time, which is an issue with real life purchases too — the Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of economic inequality.

Having a Clear Spindle stone does not prevent you from eating normally when you want. Just take the stone off for the day or the meal, depending on how they exactly work. Thats why I said that eating becomes a luxury. How often do you have your favourite pizza and how often do you have ok meals you are not particular invested in?

It came up again with the gate ritual in Galactic Magic, but is something that I observed for a long time.

Starfinder paints a fairly generic space opera setting with a slight fantasy twist.
Yet many of the items presented in various books would alter the setting in a very big ways so it would not look like how the lore and short stories present it.
As for why this disconnect exists is outside of the scope of the thread as I envision it.

Rather here are the list of things I found, with no claim that it is comprehensive.

Clear Spindle Aeon Stone
While of only small use for adventurers, hence its cheap price, it would be invaluable for "normal people" who live in the setting. Unless someone survives entirely on field rations one can expect that they spend at least 1 credit a day, the lowest amount of wealth in Starfinder, on food. In a year this is more than the cost of the stone. And even when you argue that despite it never mentioned in any book, people could cook cheaper and maybe live 3 days for a single credit, the stone would still pay itself back in 2 years.
With the stone representing such a big cost saving potential everyone who can would have one (and considering the prices of other mundane items, that circle of people would be very large). This in turn would affect the gastronomy industry as eating now becomes a luxury for a large number of people, only done for special occasions. So no more cheap fast food restaurants.

Tiara of Translocation
The tiara allows anyone to teleport to other planets in the same system or even galaxy wide. And while they are expensive for individuals, companies on the other hand would be able to afford them in bulk. And more importantly, the alternative for the tiara are starships. And while we do not have prices for them, building a starship, even a small one, wouldn't be cheap either and in my opinion not cheaper than the tiara. They also have maintenance cost and perform worse than the tiara, needing 1d6 says for intra system travel and possibly months to travel between systems.
In that time someone with the Tiara could perform many jumps, matching or even exceeding the passenger capacity of the starship. And with Null-Space Chambers/Kennels the tiara user can expand the number of passengers he can carry by multitudes.
Tiaras are all around simply better than starships for travelling and also transportation for small cargo which can be fit into a NS-Chamber. That means most travelling in Starfinder would be done by teleportation instead of starships.
There is only one problem with that, and that is the next item

Gate ritual
Even more efficient than the tiara are gates. A high level ritual which connects two gates with each other, no matter the distance. The gates are expensive, 2 million in total, but again, for companies this is manageable. And gates offer huge advantages over regular travel, both for the military and commercial purposes. So instead of using starships or teleporting with tiaras most people would simply purchase a ticket and step through a gate to reach a connected planet. And there is no reason why not all Veskarium planets and all planets in the Pact System would not be connected by gates by now, considering they have no downside.
You need high level characters to create them, but with billions of inhabitants they are not exactly rare. After all we have plenty of high level starships in the rulebooks which need high level characters too, and then there are species who are naturally high level like dragons who can build their dragoncorp around gates they create by themselves.
Gates also alter how the military works. You could have gate ships, meaning a gate connection between your mustering grounds and a spaceship, then land that spaceship on an enemy planet and you just have cut down your supply lines to 0 for an invasion force.
In fact that is the only real way to invade developed planets as the fleet to transport and supply a force which has even a fraction of a chance against the millions of soldiers a developed planet can muster (+ its industrial capacity in form of combat robots) has to be gigantic. Without gateships the Veskariums attempt at invading Triaxus was extremely foolish and doomed from the start.

Serums of Healing/Hypopens
Those two items make most of the hospitals superfluous. Any physical injury can be healed by applying enough serums of healing which are very cheap. Hypopens are more expensive and an argument can be made that it is in the long run cheaper to create regular medication, but when you are in a clutch you do not need hospitals to diagnose and cure diseases, you just need enough hypopens. And hospitals are expensive. The equipment, the personnel which need to receive a lot of training, etc.
The only real time you need them if you have a disease with such a high DC that it can't be cured by hypopen. And even then, bringing in a mystic with spellcasting might replace a entire hospital.

Environmental Field Collar. Very cheap and you will never ever run out of environmental protection again.

I'd use house rules of escape pods having just enough thruster to stabilize (so you aren't tumbling tilt-a-whirl style until rescued) and just enough fuel to nudge you toward the nearest planet if you are in a system. Why not have the slowing mechanism be a buoyant helium balloon/paraglider. On a terrestrial planet a successful piloting roll improves the chance of landing on your preference of land or water, and if you fall into a gas giant, you might stabilize and float at some level and have a chance of rescue too.

I have my doubts that a helium balloon is enough to slow a pod down during reentry, unless it goes straight down with no orbital spin.

I assume you mean the "not making slavery a central theme" policy?
If yes, how is that different than before? I can't think of any place where androids were specifically enslaved and the abolitionist front was active. Probably the Azlanti, but they enslave anyone.

All Veskarium planets are likely connected by gates. The Vesk have a centralized, military government so can simply order their high level characters to build them and it makes sense to project force on possibly unruly planets.
And with centuries of more or less peace the pressure to finally do something useful with the gates and open them to commercial and civilian use increases.

It also fundamentally alters the way wars are fought with gateships.
Put a gate (or several) in your mustering grounds, the other end on a ship and land it on an enemy planet to basically remove your supply lines.
Thats basically the only way how planetary invasions could work and would make the Veskariums attack on Triaxus an actual threat instead being doomed from the start.

On the other hand, the Idari looks rather useless now. Why build a gigantic generation ship instead of one, or multiple, smaller ships and have a gate on them to allow for crew rotation and a much larger number of colonists. Unless the Idari was also designed as an ark in case the Kasatha go extinct on their home planet.
At least the plan of invading Akiton looks a little less silly if the Idari had a gate connection back to the homeworld.

I find it very hard to believe that in 200+ years no one of the billions of inhabitants of the Pact Worlds managed to set up gates for either military coordination against the Veskarium, building a fortune for him or his descendants (or because being a follower of Abadar) or as a show of unity of the Pact Worlds.

And even when lvl 15+ people are rare, there are still tens of thousands or more of them around considering how large the Pact System is.

Imo its sadly another example of Paizo not realizing the effects of the content they add.

No idea why you suddenly start talking about slavery, unless you want to want to lock the discussion. It is pretty clear that I am talking about transportation.

In the rules text of the kennel it only talks about creatures and not companions, the same word used for example for Escape Pods. Likewise there is no justification why and how the kennel would reject a "not pet" creature.

Inqui wrote:

Not a spell but Null-Space Kennels are basically the death kneel for intra system personal transportation with spaceships.

Even for inter system travel I would argue a Tiara Mk 4 and kennels are cheaper than a starship, especially when you consider that travel is instant.

Even if we didn't assume the wording on null space kennels means that sentient creatures can't be put in them (which I feel it supports):

How is this different from null-space containers that can stuff 8 dwarves in them?

Nowhere is the term creature limited to non sapient ones.

But I missed the Gate ritual. Thats even more easy and would replace starship travels completely. At least the planets in the Pact world and Veskarium would all be connected by Gates and there is probably at least talks to set up gates between the Pact and Veskarium, with appropriate precautions.
It would also heavily affect APs. With how much money was poured into colonization, why didn't they set up gates in Horizon in the Vast?

Panopticon would mean most politician and businessman but also celebrities would avoid staying on Absolom as much as possible as everyone who lives on the station or just stays there and has access to a screen would be able to snoop in on them as this ritual would cover the entire station.

Not a spell but Null-Space Kennels are basically the death kneel for intra system personal transportation with spaceships.

With those kennels a single person can carry a lot of passengers with him and use a Tiara of Translocation. Sure, the initial setup costs a lot, but so does building and maintaining a starship.
And while we don't know the prices of starships I would even say that a ship for 60 or so passengers is more expensive than a Tiara of Translocation Mk3 and 4 Mk 3 kennels.

Even for inter system travel I would argue a Tiara Mk 4 and kennels are cheaper than a starship, especially when you consider that travel is instant.

Best race: Any

Don't let game mechanics dictate what you play.

I think the wrecked spaceships are still emitting dangerous radiations. It's not a once and be done thing.

So is Chernobyl, but the area around that is no wasteland devoid of vegetation and life either. Quite the opposite actually.

A nuclear explosion 3000 years ago would hardly have any effect on the environment except some background radiation, but nature would have recovered by then.
Just look at how Prypjat/Tchernobyl looks now.
Mutations also would not mean a collapse of the ecology for 3000 years, but rather mean that by now some plants and animals which could adapt in that environment would have evolved by now.

And the website is gone.

I wonder if this is real whether it will be turn based or real time.

I do like that they made vesk look beefy and bigger than other medium sized creatures.

I highly doubt that this is in game graphic. Looks more like a mock up to me.

As for using abilities real time, for recurring modifiers Kingmaker used toggles instead of having to click them every time. (Power Attack, Manyshot, etc.)

I wonder if Owlcat will be involved.
Its imo still a bit too early for Owlcat to announce a new project as they still have the DLCs to finish and a lot of bugfixing to do (and most people expect also a improved definitive edition).
A bit too early to announce a new project, especially if they do it over kickstarter like in the past and require peoples goodwill. Owlcat has mentioned that there will be big news soon, but based on teasers that likely means DLC 1 for Wrath of the Righteous.

And if rook1 does it on its own. Well, Owlcat also came from nowhere, so they might be able to do it, but only having a mobile game credited to them does not inspire too much confidence.

One developer studio in Moscow which did support Owlcat with Pathfinder Kingmaker as outsourcing company has a picture of a unannounced "Classic isometric party-based computer game set in a famous universe" and the picture of it clearly shows several Vesk and a Kasatha.
http://rook1.com/
http://rook1.com/images/photo_2020-04-27_12-34-09-1.jpg

Now if this is true and not just assets they grabbed from the net I would expect this to be of a much lower production value than Pathfinder as that company only made a single mobile game so far which isn't even released yet.
Unless of course they are also just supporting by outsourcing, although they apparently were not involved in Wrath of the Righteous.

The use of escape pods is limited.
With only 7 days of life support rescue is highly unlikely unless you are in a populated system. And the chance that you are in orbit of a planet is tiny. Relying on the armor is usually even worse unless you have a very expensive, high level one, or when you cheese with Environmental Field Collars which are superior to any armor when it comes to survival in space and very cheap. Bundle that with a cheap Clear Spindle Aeon Stone, which lets be honest everyone in the Starfinder setting should have, and you can survive in space for months.

And the really large vessels just have a Shuttle Bays with a shuttle frame spacecraft with external expansion bays and passenger seating for up to 96 medium creatures (+ 4 crew)

Alternatively, when you want to be a bit more realistic and don't have "spaceships exploding in a gigantic fireball", just look for some undamaged bulkheads in the spacecraft, oxygenate the room and wait for rescue there. Works equally well as an escape pod.

The addition of environmental seals to every armor and cheap items was a mistake. It completely takes out the space from Starfinder.

^. . . and maybe succeed in keeping them long enough to get them repaired to full working order with some future technological improvement.

Plus, you don't want to be dependent for basic life functions on something that is potentially hackable, if you can avoid it. Or to have to be at the mercy of the manufacturer for maintenance and possibly even some End User License Agreement where you basically have to sign part of your freedom over to them.

You forget that regeneration is also rather cheap in Starfinder (Regeneration Serum for 600 credits)

Soo many.
Numeria: I find the idea that you have people who at least on a basic level can make use of futuristic equipment and have no problem with androids in the middle of Conan barbarians in a fantasy setting rather silly.

Shakles: I dislike pop culture pirates in general

Galt, Osirion, many places in Tian Xia: Lazy copies of real world nations neither done right or with its own character

Alkenstar, if it is too much "western": For basically the same reason as Numeriam too out of place.

Probably many other places I can't think of right now, but would roll my eyes if pitched to me.

I'm all for the cyberpunk style 'I don't feel like waiting a month for my broken arm to heal, chop it off an give me a laser cannon instead' kind of ridiculousness starfinder can do.

But just saying 'oh chop off your lower body and replace it with cybernetics so you can walk like a 'normal' person' comes off as incredibly insensitive.

Not to mention that Ciravel here seems to suffer from something a bit more complicated than just her legs not getting her from point A to B all the time.

Ciravel suffers from a disease, see the second part of my post.

Edit: Considering that Ciravel is not bound to the hoverchair and can walk with a cane on good days a form of power armor exoskeleton might also be a good solution for her, although the power armor options from the book are entirely unsuitable for that purpose.
Edit2: When you take the fatigue part literally a Endurance Module might help, although it is the most expensive option (slightly more expensive than a elite hoverchair)

Golarion isn’t history, and is under no obligation to reflect it; it’s a product, a vehicle for selling tabletop game material. A pivot away from slavery is fine to me, as there’s no shortage of other Evils to fight. It’s clear that for some, especially on the margins, this particular theme isn’t fun to wrestle with in play, and plenty of other fictional worlds - the majority, even! - remain plenty compelling without slavery in the spotlight.

Nobody is stopping you from running games about it yourself. Nobody is stopping you from using the decade and a half worth of Paizo content that predates this decision. Nobody is stopping you from playing other systems and other settings.

Golarion uses a lot of history, includes slavery in several copies of slaving countries/cultures.

Not to mention the events of Hell's Rebels, which probably made Cheliax's position even weaker. Banning slavery might become a diplomatic necessity. They aren't the Empire anymore.

What's funny to me is that we have, like, tons and tons of content already about slavery, and some people seem to think we need more. Has to be canon, too. Otherwise Golarion isn't realistic enough.

Paizo borrowed a lot from real world history when creating Golarion and that quite openly.

Mentioned it in another thread, and I'll say it again here:

Good for them deciding to remove slavery from their setting as something active.

For those who believe that they need a story reason for this to happen, good news: it actually already has! Absalom has a PFS scenario that abolished it, and Katapesh has a large portion of their slavers as the foes defeated by the PCs. With two major blows to the slave market in two of largest cities in the world, it stands to reason that the market collapsed shortly after.

There. Story reason taken care of.

Not really, you still have Cheliax and Qadira/Kelesh. Those alone would keep the market alive.

The only way of going about removing slavery from the setting that I would approve of is having an in-story explanation, on the scale of an AP with the theme of "you get all the anti-slavery people together, burn every slave-holding nation to the ground, and throw a party on the bombed-out ruins of Egorian--er, Freedomia, sorry, and Cheliax is being renamed the Confederation of Libertopia."

I mean, doing that kind of large-scale societal change is difficult to do in an adventure, but it would be tons of fun. Get yourself a two-fisted lanky lawyer from Andoran in a stovepipe hat, a disaffected Molthuni alcoholic military genius who found owning a slave he was given so repugnant he bought the slave manumission papers the first chance he got, a former slave who freed himself and stole a Chelish warship to boot, and a veteran Bellflower organizer who knows the back-roads like the back of her hand, and go turn every regime that holds people in bondage into Georgia post-Sherman's march! That would be a blast.

I don't think that is quite possible as you are not talking only about Cheliax but also probably about Kelesh based on the description of Qadira.

How can slave trade stop:

- Someone with enough power to enforce it says to stop.
Thats what happened in history when Britain stopped the slave trade through diplomatic and military action, but no single non divine source in Golarion is powerful enough to enforce that

- Lack of slaves
When slavery is tied to a specific ancestry like in Chaliax or being tied to military victories not being able to get more slaves will eventually stop the practice unless another source of slaves can be found

- Loss of value
Slaves, on a large scale, can only be used for certain types of labour. If the value of this labour is dimished by technological innovation or lack of demand of the things they produce then it makes no sense to continue to keep slaves

- Alternate and better source of labour
What (among other things) happened in Europe, instead of relying on slaves which had to be guarded and fed the society was transformed to get your own people to do the work with minimally more rights but less required oversight making slaves not needed as there was not much work left for them to do. Although serfdom wasn't all that nice either.

There's really three ways to handle slavery in this kind of setting:

Either it's ubiquitous like in the antique world, and while Good characters disapprove the average Joe probably accepts it, or it's only found in Evil nations and is seen by the average Joe as a bad thing, or it's nonexistent.

I would prefer #2 but don't necessarily oppose #1 or #3. I just think that since Golarion has traditionally been set up as between 1 and 2, deciding to not mention or deal with the repugnant practice again seems nonsensical.

Not only in antiquity, but slavery was pretty much everywhere until around the 19th century with some, often temporary, exceptions.

That includes many nations Paizo copied quite openly for use in Pathfider which is probably the reason why for example Qadira has slavery (and is still neutral as far as I know).