Leon Aquilla's page

Not sure I want to buy a setting book in May for a ruleset coming out in August.

It's taken over 30 years to get some of the answers to questions that were laid out at the beginning of Warcraft and we're still not even close to done. It's exhausting.

You have roughly 5 years I think to put forth an answer to a mystery or to flesh out a faction you've prototyped in your fiction.

After that, the community has created its own answers, and they find them more interesting than whatever you can come up with. I think with TTRPG's, where GMs are constantly required to have answers to questions not contemplated by line developers, this is even more true.

ONE MORE THING

I'd love to hear feedback from folks who are using and playing the latest Starfinder adventure paths, which ARE presented from day 1 as a single book, rather than multiple books.

And for that matter, Pathfinder 200, Seven Dooms for Sandpoint, which does the same.

Are folks' concerns about disparity between volumes lessened in those cases?

Scoured Stars lacks connective tissue between the parts. So there's no jank, but that's mostly because the GM is responsible for creating an organic connection between each segment himself.

Mechageddon seems to have good continuity between the parts.

To follow up on Mikeawmids point, at least regarding Starfinder, I understand that you can't write a 6-parter expecting everyone will pick up the six parts, but I think you're downplaying some of the jank that should have been picked up by an editor. I've encountered at least three examples:

Devastation Ark 3 Dominion's End Chapter 1 is a massively jarring swerve that wrecks the pacing and sucks the energy out of the finale of Devastation Ark 2. There's also some weird dissonance involved where it's implied you've spent over 24 hours in the ark itself when at the end of Part 2 you left a raging fleet battle.

Similarly, Attack of the Swarm 5 (Hive of Minds) felt so disconnected from the greater narrative that I skipped it entirely and went straight to part 6.

Fly Free or Die 5 is at least relevant to the greater narrative but there's some distinct dissonance in the product -- for instance there's "side jobs" listed in the appendix -- but how are you supposed to do those said jobs when you're stranded in the Golarion system with no drift drive?

Aggressively suppressing the opinions of anyone who doesn't buy into the latest movement of the products can have that effect.

Rest of us moved on to greener pastures, or at least places with less toxic fandoms/toxic positivity.

As of August 15, the creator of Hephaestos has not received anything to make him believe this is going to be rectified, though there was mention he's getting a 'sweetheart deal' that just needs to be sent over to him for a lawyer to review.

Everyone else is screwed though.

He's store-brand Vecna.

When I saw "Triumph of the Tusk" I was excited that I was getting a sequel to Quest for the Frozen Flame. Ah well!

It's hilariously broke but I took the undersized power core as a story point, as CQ mentioned

We've come a long way since Rise of the Runelords...

Well yes, there have been almost 200 AP's released.

I'm not going to reply directly to this tone-policing but personally I don't think you can square the circle of "game that can stand on its own" and "100% compatible with Pathfinder 2e" without compromising something that will leave me saying "that's a great campaign setting splat, but it's missing what made Starfinder 1e unique".

Anyways, like I said, look forward to your playtest. Not really impressed by the SF hack for PF2e though. If that's all it is, I'll just keep my PF2e rules and use the SRD material.

Finoan wrote:

Sounds like Andromeda.

I'm not familiar with Andromeda, I googled it and saw it was a TV show at one time. does it have a ship as a character?

It has THE BEST ship as a character.

Aside from what's already been said, I have yet to see separate game lines that are 100% compatible with zero changes whatsoever, drop in/drop out, fully swappable unless they are literally just campaign setting splats

This reads like a random passage from a Lewis Carroll book.

There are known knowns. There are also known unknowns. But there are also unknown unknowns...

I will clamor for a PF2e NPC Guide. Probably the most invaluable sourcebook from 1st edition was the NPC Guide.

Yup. If you want monsters in Pf2e, they've got you covered. If you're running an adventure, they got you covered.

If you want a generic NPC with a set of feats from various classes or spells, you're pretty much doing all the legwork yourself.

I mean, PF2 and PF2R are still perfectly inter-compatible, so it'll be fine.

How do you do alignment damage when a character doesn't have an alignment? I think you're not arguing in good faith.

The Foundry module is going to be removing all references to OGL material, including monsters. I think it's a little more complicated than a condescending "They're inter-compatible so don't worry your pretty little head about it".

Are there plans for a Foundry module release for this? And if so, how are you going to get over the fact that they are not supporting the old ruleset if it's designed with OGL in mind?

If you're mad about PF1 PDF's having a price hike, there are a lot of discounted used softcovers floating around, including in Paizo's warehouse.

343 megabytes for 197 pages. The Devastation Ark compression bug has returned, dethroning Starstone Blockade as the second largest SF book by overall PDF size on release. Coming in 4th is Pact Worlds at 235mb for 220 pages. Waking the Worldseed still in 1st at 347mb.

Per page, Starstone Blockade, Waking the Worldseed, and Whispers of the Eclipse (Horizons of the Vast #3) are still undefeated.

(Looking at my digital library, it looks like Waking the Worldseed and Starstone Blockade got fixed...but Whispers of the Eclipse is actually 35mb bigger than it used to be. Wack.)

Someone said Vesk-6 was confirmed in the keynote address as the planet joining the pact worlds. (I haven't relistened to that again to confirm it.)

Neutering the Veskarium by creating an enclave within the Vesk system seems like the kind of implausible situation that the writers would go with. I wish I could say I was surprised but my expectations for the 'setting' writing are through the basement. I really wish they would not use the Vesk as a punching bag for their whiggish impulses but that's the kind of carebear writing I've come to expect the past couple years.

rip Veskarium, you didn't deserve to get Worfed like this.

I'm thinking...

All Guns Blazing: You have four arms. That means four guns! When you put your mind to it, you can send a lot of pain downrange. You can't really *aim* it all that well, but quantity has a quality all its own, right?

...and then you give them some way to treat four hands full of pistols like an area effect weapon, in a way that's cool, but not *too* cool, and probably chugs ammo like a dehydrated camel. Possibly make it a three-action activity. Maybe give it a ten-minute cooldown or have it cost a focus point or something because it's kind of intense and you need to take a bit of a breather before you can do it again. The basic advantage is that if the enemy is all nice and clustered (like, say, at the very beginning of the fight) you can just unload into the mass of them and probably do pretty well for yourself, and then as soon as they start to split up and get in between people and area-effect is not so much your friend anymore, you can go back to using your pistols as pistols. It gives you your little moment of "I have four hands worth of awesome" in a limited enough way that it...

You mean Fusillade?

Yeah... dhampir seems like an obvious case for the value of the PF2/SF2 crossover.

Having anxiously hoped they would have added Dhampir as an option when they went in deep on vampires in Horizons of the Vast #3 and coming away disappointed, I agree that PF2E covering a lot of ground in fantasy staples already is one of the best cases put forward for adapting SF to PF2e's ruleset. It allows the Starfinder books to cover the space/sci-fi covered options, which is something they've always stressed they were more focused on in publishing SF1 anyways.

You may feel that this is PF2 players taking your game from you, but to our group, SF1 players trying to keep the rules as-is are akin to squatters keeping a fantastic game from reaching its potential.

TIL that I, the person who's bought every single SF product is a squatter whereas you who haven't played it in years "just wants it to reach its full potential". I can't imagine where the OP got the impression that he was playing second chair to PF2e fans with that kind of attitude. And shame on Johnathan Morgantini for tolerating it around here.

I agree with the OP. The playtest was ill-marketed towards its core audience. Respect them or you'll lose the people who kept SF going when Pathfinder players were ditching it. The window-shoppers aren't going to sustain the product line any more than they did 5 years ago. You should be convincing us to move editions, not trying to sell us on bards in space or pew pew lasers in Numeria while slyly winking at the PF2e audience. This game deserves more than the Spelljammer 5e treatment.

Good - I'm happy that all the people who refused to touch SF because it uses an obsolete ruleset can put their money where their mouth is.

Concerned - I'm worried that SF will lose the things that made it unique from Pathfinder. It sounds like SF will become a Pf2e subsidiary product line, but we'll have to see what happens. There are pretty big balancing issues such as flight and all the casters being hybrid-classes rather than full casters that are unique to SF they'll have to get past. Grenades will likely also be massively cleaved since all the Evocation stuff from Pf2e will be available.

Bad - Unless they're planning to bring out a massive 640-page tome like Pathfinder 2e's original corebook was, there is going to be a lot of fun toys that are going to disappear, and given that SF's publishing schedule is about half the size of Pathfinder's, no idea when they'll be coming back.

I've never cared for the mandatory item progression of striking runes in Pathfinder 2e, or how 'tight' the math is so that anything +2 Cr above is a fight against God and a fight against anything -2 CR below is a snoozefest. Starfinder allows you to use tactics in lieu of just "hit harder, take less hits". There's also a lack of non-monster NPC enemy support in Pf2e.

Who Cares - 3 Action Economy and Universe revamp:

People treat the 3 action thing like it's the most innovative TTRPG design element since THAC0 and boy does that get tiresome.

I suspect they're going to sandpaper the edges off the Veskarium and make them likeable as a lot of staff and freelancers have said they want the Pahtra to emancipate themselves and are uncomfortable with having a likeable autocratic state (full disclosure, I solved that contradiction with my preferred method: The Vesk Imperial family reclaiming the title of Emperor and marrying a Pahtran woman and making it mandatory that the governor of Vesk-6 is always a Pahtra) which will probably mean emasculating the Veskarium. But ever since I saw the recent editorial bent in Pathfinder's material I've suspected that the universe I've enjoyed reading about would become neutered and I've made my peace with it.

Having played almost all the AP's I don't really have a lot to grieve about -- I got my money's worth. But I am curious about some of the balancing choices they'll have to make and how they're going to make Starfinder classes stand out.

If you're making your system 1:1 compatible that means Starfinder will have 10th level spells, which it currently lacks. Soooo that unleashes a whole new can of worms on how you're going to balance Mystics/etc. You're going to need to sell me on why I would rather take a Mystic or Technomancer over a Wizard or Cloistered Cleric.

There are a couple of options: You make them full casters, which seems a poor design choice when you already have them, or you zap them from existence and just say "Play a wizard in a spacesuit", in which case I'd stick with 1e.

Also -- flying is reserved for levels 16-20 in Pathfinder 2e. You can buy a jetpack at level 3 in Starfinder. How they'll reconcile that, I don't know, but if the solution is to make jetpacks a high level item...again, I think I'll stick with the game where I can buy a jetpack at level 3.

That may not be the case for Space Drow.

We can hope, but so far in the past 8 months Paizo has chosen a hatchet when a scalpel would do. So I'm pessimistic.

Trying to be 1 to 1 compatible means this game will definitely just be a PF2e supplement line that is in Space, rather than a SF2e.

That's my main concern. Unless they're going to change Starfinder so that its casters are "full" casters instead of the half-caster design decision they made very early on, nobody's going to play a Mystic or Technomancer when they could play a Wizard or Cloistered Cleric.

Also -- flying is reserved for levels 16-20 in Pathfinder 2e. You can buy a jetpack at level 3 in Starfinder. How they'll reconcile that, I don't know, but if the solution is to make jetpacks a high level item...again, I think I'll stick with the game where I can buy a jetpack at level 3.

The PDF version of this product is not available for sale. Any idea why that is?

It appears to be purchasable as of 8/1/2023.

Until Drivethru accepts cash, I think this guy's still out of luck.

I get all my stuff via USPS Media Mail. So not sure how that would affect me.

You can't "unpublish" product under the OGL. Everything would have to be rewritten from the ground up, major NPC's would have to be rewritten, etc.

The Second Coming of Christ is more likely than the entirety of Paizo's back-catalog for the past seven years being republished sans OGL.

I interpreted it as allowing for at least 1-2 rounds as her body slowly dissolves into the basement floor before the monster comes alive.

Ironically, I want to point out that in fact the USSR was never a state that banned religion in itself, so comparing Rahadoum with them is not entirely logical. The USSR had problems mainly with the church and other organizations due to potential competition for public sentiment. This distinguishes the USSR, for example, from Albania, where the existence of religious organizations was outright outlawed.

What is this tankie nonsense.

For a system touted as "the math is really solid and balanced", nobody seems to be eager to do a straight adaptation of Pathfinder 2e.

The funny thing about this is I feel like this was a missed opportunity for a Starfinder run-and-gun style game, where the gameplay might support the theme instead of....whatever this is.

"Stellar cartography was irrelevant until Ports of Call" is a smoking hot take in a galaxy where the Swarm clearly expands linearly rather than randomly, and the Azlanti as well. If drift travel worked consistently for everybody, then the Azlanti sphere of influence would be spread out in pockets all over the maps, as would Swarm infestation.

Sorry, not buying it.

If the Starfinder team wants to yank Drow out of Apostae for Starfinder 2nd edition, I completely understand and will assume that it's because that's just the cost of a 2nd ed., much like some things were tweaked when PF2e was first published. What I object to and why I've cancelled my PF2e sub is because things are being rugpulled out from under the community mid-edition. There is a massive difference between "we can't mention them/add them as character options because legal reasons but you can read a 1e book if you want to learn about them" and this "They never existed and any time you thought you were interacting with a Drow has been pulled from existence due to creator fiat" crap.

So I appreciate that you don't intend to do anything to upset the balance in 1e.

I'd have guessed that a plot might have uncovered that what was believed to have been the Drow executive corporation, was just a hidden front for a Serpent-kind led plot to try to eventually own the whole pact worlds. When it becomes exposed, it changes the dynamic of what power was really held by whom, and while they do continue to exist, they no longer are the power brokers they used to be.

Perhaps with the reveal, this gives the serpent-kind the ability to leverage some of their other elven allies that had typically stayed more hidden in the past, or disguised themselves a Drow.

Starfinder already has THREE hidden conspiracy races, between Greys, Reptoids, and those Myconids added in Threefold Conspiracy. I don't think we need a fourth.

It has been stressed a number of times that the story hasn't changed, only the clunky mechanics.

"Your books are still valid, but if they aren't, it's good actually and the things you like are stupid and deserved to get culled" is not going to win over people who were perfectly happy with Pathfinder 2.0

It seems like everyone uses this variant rule.

To the point that it's maybe more common than even allowing the human ancestry. ;)

So I'm kind of wondering if there is anyone out there that doesn't use it.

Players can't react to missing out on variant options they don't know exist. The very online crowd here/on Reddit should not be construed as representative of the greater PF2e community.

The Schools being changed into something so anodyne they look like they came from an undergraduate college curriculum is depressing.

If Paizo is really that starved for people who are good at naming things, call Onyx Path. They always come up with weird, evocative names for stuff, but I think you can do better than "School of Battle Magic/Civic Wizardry"

Path of the Watered Down-Knight.

I'm a bit stunned that though changed the time is the same for drift travel after the Drift event and the new Drift lanes is the same before this event.

It takes 7 days to traverse an entire drift lane, modified by downtime activities and a higher rated Drift engine. But it also takes 1d6 days to reach Absalom Station. So the utility in drift lanes is mainly for outbound traffic. This also creates some really perverse incentives, e.g. Vesk ships jumping without a drift lane from the Veskarium to an intermediate location, then 1d6 jumping to Absalom Station, followed by 1-7 days back to the Veskarium system.

I really would have preferred they do away with the "1d6 to Absalom station", or at least modified it so that there were multiple hubs (eg 1d6 days to Vesk Prime, 1d6 days to New Thespera, etc.)

As it stands it's just a cosmetic difference. Plus the drift lanes only link from Absalom and the Veskarium to various Ports of Call destinations (does Xibion really need its own dedicated single-destination drift lane?)

Some Drift Lanes similar in scope to those in Star Wars like the Hydian Way, Corellian Trade Spine, or Rimma Trade Route would have added a lot of needed flavor to this feature.

So instead of alignment, which everyone viewed as stupid for pigeonholing people, we're going with "Most dwarves love art/hold grudges". Really setting ourselves apart from the pack here. This is why people are going to have to pay 250$+ and we're pulping the old core rulebook?

I think I'll stick with alignment.

Will the revised edition include Call of Cthulhu? Or Numenera? Maybe Savage Worlds?

He made another comment in late April here to the same effect.

I'm fairly certain that the galaxy map only tags locations that are actually referenced in the book. It's definitely not trying to be exhaustive.

Maybe they should have tried harder then.

Places not mentioned in the book (except in passing) but got a shout-out on the map:

Gideron Prime
Marixah
Great Shadar
Daimalko
Embroi