John Mangrum's page

"Evil serpentfolk" and "shapechanging reptilian humanoids who secretly control society" are not the same concept. Specificity is key, and the latter is very specifically based on Icke's "theories."

It'll probably be a long, long time before I ever get the chance to run this, but I should weigh in now that reading through this prompted in me (a home-game GM who will only ever run this once) that most poignant of complaints about repeatable scenarios: "Dang, I really want to include all three VIPs."

I have no idea where the "shape shifting reptoids" as tropes comes from, but I would guess that it predates Mr. Icke's anti-semitic buffoonery.

Unfortunately, while reptoids/reptilians do have some fictional precedent (the Visitors from V come closest), the concept of "malevolent species of shapeshifting alien humanoid reptiles who shapeshift and infiltrate humanity in order to secretly control society" is squarely founded in Icke.

If there's one thing the Starfinder product line could easily ignore going forward, it would be a covert conspiracy that was successfully thwarted and covered up at the highest levels of government.

There's a map of the galaxy (Desna's Path) in Ports of Call, but it basically just covers planets touched on in the book (and also can't be taken as being "to scale"). A map that's exhaustive would appeal to me, but has its own downsides, not least that it would need to be poster-sized to be legible without also being hopelessly cluttered.

Oh, gotcha. No, you're in the clear there.

I would assume so, yes.

UPBs themselves need to be manufactured from something, after all.

*squint*

...yyeaaah, I think I want this.

There's an oddity in the hobkins gremlin malefactor's stats that makes me suspect it was supposed to have holographic image (2nd level) as a spell-like ability, not hologram memory. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Talking about handheld missile launchers, not the starship weapons.

The NPC Index has been updated to include the Misree's Company web fiction and SFS #1-15, along with a few fixes. This means, I think, that it is finally "complete" for the moment.

I did not see any rule that proactively states a VI occupies a "complement" seat, which is not definitive but I interpret as meaning it does not.

Point to consider: If VIs take up crew slots, then starships that carry a maximum of 1 crew (interceptors and racers) cannot add VIs without replacing the living crew entirely. (And the drone frame, which is inherently operated by VIs, has a maximum crew of 0.)

For the most part, the adventures aren't substantially changed from the scenarios in terms of structure, so I assume they'd run about the same time.

My take is that the ship's complement is referring to what it can physically handle. A VI doesn't physically occupy a console, so it can only "use up" a limited role (1 captain, 1 pilot, 1 gunner per weapon).

Do the maps listed have names or anything to maybe find something close on a flip map or other maps?

Yes; each map that's using a flip-mat or tiles is labeled at the upper left.

The full set of flip-mat and flip-tile sets in use:

Page 2? The Table of Contents?

That's pretty nifty!

The NPC Index has been updated to fix a few errors and to add all of the Paizo blog's web fiction (Meet the Iconics, Iconic Encounters, and Tales from the Drift).

Drow are going to be reimagined in some fashion.

I've compiled a complete (for now) index to all named NPCs and starships in Paizo's official Starfinder sources. This is up to date through the Scoured Stars hardback and Starfinder Society scenario #6-14. I will continue to update as Mechageddon! and SFS Year 7 are released.

You can download the PDF here.

I get that, but the thumb on the scale's a little too obvious for me this time. Particularly since SFS has taken "the third option" into account before -- both with this specific NPC and with an associate.

We all know players are unpredictable and will zag instead of zigging at the strangest times, so based off personal experience, there's two ways I can see this encounter going that the scenario doesn't take into account:

How previous scenarios handled this:

I'm slightly concerned that this scenario is overlooking a distinct third possibility of what PCs will do about a certain NPC...

My first instinct while reading through this is that I'd want to have the PCs already on board the Idari when "the call" goes out. Interplanetary communication and travel times occasionally get overlooked in these rescue scenarios, I feel (see also the initial hook for The Devastation Ark, a far more extreme case of the same issue).

Specifically, I'd just say

Also, is Daemon pronounced Day-mon or Dee-mon?

In real life, dee-mon. In settings with the Monster Manual in their evolutionary DNA, day-mon.

The first deity knocked off the list whom I considered a serious candidate.

Just putting this out there in case devs see this while working on 2nd edition:

As the Primex of Absalom Station, Kumara Melacruz is limited to two terms of office. How long each term of office last has never been specified, but we know that as of Dead Suns 1/Pact Worlds in 317 AG, she was halfway through her first term of office, and that by The Devastation Ark in 320 AG, she is now in her second term.

Once upon a time I crunched numbers to try to figure out when/how often the primex elections take place (also taking into consideration that the first primex, Loqua Tem, was elected in the aftermath of the Gap, prior to the Signal in 3 AG, and was still in office in 7 AG).

The only reasonable number I could land on was that the first prime executive election was held in 0 AG, and that each term of office lasts 5 years. (Thus Loqua Tem was elected in 0 AG and held office until 10 AG.) Any other combination either missed the known dates or resulted in a weirdly long... gap between the anarchy that arose at the end of the Gap and the election that solved that existential threat.

Thus, as of 325 AG, when second edition is released, Kumara Melacruz should be in the process of leaving office and Absalom Station should need a new primex!

I started crunching numbers to try to derive an armchair answer for you, and I came up with two conclusions.

First, the Azlanti battle robot and cybernetic zombie's self-destruct damage values are roughly equal to the damage dealt by their respective energy attacks. And in both cases, the save DC is the standard ability DC for a combat enemy of their CR. Blast radius is anyone's guess, though.

I don't have 6-13 in my hands yet, so I can't yet offer estimated values for the robots you're asking about, but that should give you a framework.

My second conclusion was that the Azlanti stellar scout, following the tradition of Aeon Guards before it, is wildly overpowered for its CR. It's listed as a CR 6 but its statistics track with a CR 12 combat array.

I'm a little behind reading up on this season (partly due to the subscription woes), but having read this, I want to chime in on how a big part of the appeal of SFS for me is the "living campaign" aspect, seeing NPCs return and evolve over an growing period of time. So, that said, I really enjoyed seeing NPC A (see below) pop up! Coincidentally as I read this I'm in the middle of doing something similar with a different "rescue," NPC B, in my home game.

Got my answer!

Are there ongoing issues with the Society Subscription?

James Jacobs discusses the problems here.

Got another for the pile:

I assume you're right, but in the grand scheme of the cosmos it could also mean antibiotics (Character Operations Manual). Or a mix of the two!

Update: I am working on this, but toward the goal of dotting my Is and crossing my Ts I've created an index of every named NPC and starship in every SFS scenario released to date. I've discovered quite a few connections I'd been oblivious to before!

Expanding that to other SF sources, and then I'll get to work writing up revisions. Though honestly at this point I'm on the fence about waiting for the end of Year 6, but we'll see.

Ditto. SFS sub has not yet shipped, but I did get an order notice on Monday, which is a big step up from the last several months.

Deep dive trivia question here.

In SFS 1-02, PCs could earn the AbadarCorp Annoyance boon through certain actions.
If the PC slots that boon in SFS 1-07, a mysterious hacker helps them out.

Way down the line, in SFS 4-04, we learn that the mysterious hacker is Noname.

Somewhere in between #1-07 and #4-04, Noname anonymously helps out PCs who earned Abadar Annoyance a second time (which Celita vaguely references in #4-04).

Does anyone know in which scenario the hacker intervenes a second time?

My players never earned AbadarCorp Annoyance, so they never triggered these optional encounters, and thus the answer has fallen victim to a gap in my notes.

I'm 99% certain that PF2 playtest books were not included in subscriptions.

John Mangrum wrote:

I don't believe skipping a month is possible. (I know that once upon a time it definitely was not, but don't know if that ever changed.) You'll need to cancel that subscription (and then renew it afterward if you want the final SF2 core book).

You can actually contact Paizo customer service for this, it's something they can do now.

That's good to know, thanks. (But based on past and current experience, I would advise informing Paizo that you want to pause a subscription at least a full month in advance.)

I don't believe skipping a month is possible. (I know that once upon a time it definitely was not, but don't know if that ever changed.) You'll need to cancel that subscription (and then renew it afterward if you want the final SF2 core book).

If you want the starship's computer to join the party as a PC or GM/PC, "SRO or hologram being remotely operated by the ship's VI" is fine for me. (SRO in this case being how I would suggest a player handle playing a suit of autonomous power armor.) But if it's contributing to adventuring, I think it's best to treat it as a PC for all effective purposes (i.e., take its inclusion into account for APL).

Concur; for good or ill, SFS hasn't tied multi-table events to seasonal metaplots since Year Two.

There's only one release left in the SF1 line (aside from Starfinder Society scenarios), and that's the Mechageddon! adventure path. I would be surprised if the PC option in that expanded past some new mech-related options.

In terms of official releases, I think we can safely assume the 1E evolutionist is "feature complete."

No, no updates yet.

The adventure doesn't say, and to my eye does its best to stress it doesn't matter (it's sold and gone by the time the adventure starts). It's referred to as a relic and an artifact, but isn't necessarily either of those in the technical sense. So it's probably some high-level item (magical, hybrid, etc.) that could be found deep inside the sun. If the players get curious, I'd dig up some magic item (or maybe lesser artifact) associated with efreet, the Plane of Fire, or some such. Or you could use it to foreshadow the culture the PCs are going to encounter down the line.

I'm trying to not weigh in on SF2 discussion because, well, I want to be generally positive, but I'll say this. As someone who just isn't interested in the PF2/SF2 ruleset but is interested in the SF setting, I plan to keep up with the game line once it transitions.

The twofold truth of the matter is that SF's creature and encounter design is streamlined enough that converting SF2 adventures to SF1 will likely be relatively painless (I say this as someone who converted all of Legacy of Fire from 3.5 to PF1 to run it.), and it's going to take SF2 a good long while to branch off in directions that SF1 hasn't covered. So my hope is to keep on trucking in the 2E era, converting adventures. Heck, I'd even ponder putting adventure conversion guides on Infinite, but I think I'd slam into a hard OGL/ORC wall there.

Multi-table, I believe.

Does the core pantheon necessarily have to have 20 deities in it specifically?

Only so far as "core deities" is shorthand "branding" for "the 20 deities we're going to focus on."

Oh hey new Forum members :O How many members does Society's Forum even have?

We've never been given solid numbers, but the Scoured Stars hardback suggests that the Forum is actually fairly large. The Forum is "the most numerous of the Society's leaders" and made up of veteran field agents, managers, scholars, and some venture-captains. They're essentially the entire upper-management bureaucracy running the Society.

For me it actually raises the question of whether the faction leaders shouldn't be officially considered Forum members as well.

Thought of another one, related to the Historias:

In my home game, the PCs revealed the truth to the membranes but not the husks. The membranes then hushed it up and basically locked out the Society, so this theme of reconciliation would fit my timeline just fine.