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PCs are deputized by a colonial marshal for an expedition to reestablish contact with a frontier colony that hasn't been heard from for ten years. When they arrive in system, they find a gas giant with seven moons (Alpha through Eta) large enough to be self-rounded. It must be a beautiful night with so many...

The colony occupies the second moon (Beta) which is the only one with a breathable atmosphere. Beta has a day/night cycle of 12 standard hours. The moon's orbit takes it behind the gas giant once every 60 standard days (120 rotations). If they hail the colony they will get no reply, only a repeating signal on low power (barely enough to be picked up in-system) asking for someone to send for a colonial marshal before coming down to the surface.

Arriving at the planet, they find the main settlement and provisional capital abandoned and partially stripped of building materials. They will also locate five to seven outlying cobbled-together suburban settlements (which resemble shantytowns or refugee camps than anything else). Two of these will be empty and show signs of widespread property damage and lots of bodies. The colonists are mix of all races including a large number of Shirren who had been the largest minority.

Four of the surviving suburbs will shoot at the PCs and attempt to drive them off. The one town that doesn't will show some hostility but allow the visitors to approach. They will relate a story of infiltration into the colony of a dangerous creature who has been stalking and killing colonists at night. No one has actually seen the creature, but only its results at sunrise and occasionally whenever there is a solar eclipse which lasts several minutes? hours? days?

All the communities are suspicious of each other and accuse one another of harboring (if not conspiring with) the serial killer that's been taking one victim after another for the last three standard months. Different stories think it was one of the Shirren, others say it was a Vesk, most eyewitnesses just don't know because the creature looked so weird.

The real culprit, however, is a host-Shirran wolf-lycanthrope (an undocumented immigrant who stowed away on the last supply ship that visited). Their condition is provoked by a special mineral found on the Delta, Epsilon, and Zeta moons (though not on Beta itself or the other two moons). So whenever it's nighttime or when the gas giant eclipses the sun, enough of the "bad moonlight" reaches the colony and triggers another lycanthropic episode. The alien biology of the Shirren is somehow not entirely suppressed by the werewolfism, so during a lycanthropic episode the creature looks like a furry sort of giant ant, which is impossible because there is no native life on Gamma.

Doc_Outlands wrote:

A haunted space station, being run by an AI - who may be dealing with a virus and thus be ... unreliable.

I hope your players will have a pleasent day on Citadel Station.

I don't doubt the Shirren PC will take offense at being called "Insect"...

alexgndl wrote:

I really just hope the conversion rules from Pathfinder to Starfinder are good, because I just know that the first chance I get, I'm putting a bunch of low-level PCs on a ship and throwing a Hive Warrior at them. I want to see how long it'll take before someone realizes we're literally just doing Alien.

Replace Jonesy (the cat) with a pet goblin. Let the chaos ensue.

Yes, Dobby will help slay the creature! Only just don't give him ay armor or defensive item to wear , to keep him alive or to help you fight or get past obstacles or it counts as freeing him...

It's a basic rule of d20. Six standard abilities, all have scores with normal range of 3 to 18, each value above 11 translates into a bonus, every value under 10 translates into a penalty.

All I want to know is where the Tarrasque Homeworld is...(points finger like a gun)

Is it possible to teleport inside the Drift? How about for very long distances? (Interplanetary Teleport)? Does being in the Drift impede your ability to scan for threats or detect rogue comets or planets floating deep space?

How does the Dark Tapestry feel about having an entire other plane basically "paved over" their exclusive domain? Can the natives of the Dark Tapestry interact with things in the Drift or attempt to impede their travel in any way?

Do they take credits or UPBs?

By default, all filters on the Bestiary Index are turned on. You click on Bestiary Index in the sidebar, and all the monsters are displayed.

I think it would make a nice improvement if there was an intermediary screen where you could decide which filters to start with; for example, "start with all Bestiaries checked/unchecked" or "start with all CRs checked/unchecked".

In other words, let there be an option to check or uncheck all the filters we want to use before we start actually querying the database.

There is a lot of processing and database access time being spent retrieving the selected database rows each time a filter is checked or unchecked (even with uncheck all). Anything that could speed up this process would be helpful.

I loved sneaking around in the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker.

I made some changes but couldn't apply the edits...apologies for the double post.

An android should have little trouble changing its "skinning", going from humanlike to catfolklike or orclike or wolflike or other exotic themes, much like we can change the case of our devices on a whim. It's just clothing to them.

If you want to change an Android's entire body plan, then non-humanoid Androids could benefit a great deal from the rules for Eidolon base forms in the Summoner class.

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/base-classes/summoner/eidolons

Biped (default shape)

Ability score adjustments are applied on top of normal racial adjustments.

Aquatic (merfolk shape)
Speed 20 ft., swim 40 ft.; AC biped+2; Attack bite or gore (1d6); Ability Scores unchanged

Avian (two or four wings) [I'm taking some license with the variant fly speeds and maneuverability here]
Speed 30 ft., fly 30 ft. (good) or 40 ft. (poor) or 20 ft. (Perfect); AC +2 natural armor; Attacks 2 fists or claws (1d3); Ability Scores Str -4, Dex +4

Quadruped (four legs)
Speed 40 ft.; AC unchanged; Attack bite or gore (1d6); Ability Scores Str -4, Dex +2

Serpentine (including centipede- and millipede-like shapes) [swim, burrow, and constriction are merely conjecture]
Speed 20 ft., climb 20 ft.; swim 10 ft; burrow 5 ft; AC unchanged; Attack bite (1d6) and tail slap (1d6) and maybe constrict (1d4); Ability Scores Str -4, Dex +4

Tauric (two arms and four legs) [kick and gore attacks are conjectured]
Speed 40 ft.; AC unchanged; Attacks 2 fists or claws (1d4), kick or gore (1d6); Ability Scores Str -2, Dex +2

and there could be others if you got creative. Maybe Hexaped (six legs, antlike), Draconic (four limbs and two wings, or two limbs and four wings), Sphere (BB-8), Cylinder (R2-D2 and similar morphology), Tenticular (body with two or more highly articulated limbs, octopus/squid/jellyfish), Decapod (crab), Face (immobile or levitating body, Dr. Theophilus)...

An android should have little trouble changing its "skinning", going from humanlike to catfolklike or orclike or wolflike or other exotic themes, much like we can change the case of our devices on a whim. It's just clothing to them.

If you want to change an Android's entire body plan, then non-humanoid Androids could benefit a great deal from the rules for Eidolon base forms in the Summoner class.

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/base-classes/summoner/eidolons

Biped (default)

Aquatic (merfolk shape)

Avian (two or four wings)

Quadruped (four legs)

Serpentine (including centipede- and millipede-like shapes)

Tauric (two arms and four legs)

and there could be others if you got creative. Maybe Hexaped (six legs, antlike), Draconic (four limbs and two wings, or two limbs and four wings), Sphere (BB-8), Cylinder (R2-D2 and similar morphology), Tenticular (body with two or more highly articulated limbs, octopus/squid/jellyfish), Decapod (crab), Face (immobile or levitating body, Dr. Theophilus)...

I have a question:

What happens if somebody steps through the ship's airlock and goes outside when in the Drift? Do you need a spacesuit to survive in the Drift? If the drift pulls in pieces of various planes, many of those planes have breathable atmospheres, does the Drift itself have a breathable atmosphere, thus making spacesuits unnecessary while in the Drift?

There is not enough information to give a meaningful answer.

Foremost is how realistic the natural laws of the Drift are. How does gravity behave with respect to ad hoc gravity wells, or gas temperature and pressure law with respect to equilibrium? What is standard temperature and pressure in the Drift? If a hundred mile diameter sphere of material from the Elemental Planes of Water or Air were to appear in the drift, would it expand through random atomic motion to fill the available volume, would it maintain its original T&P from its home plane, or would it collapse under its own gravity until nuclear forces balance out the gravitic collapse.

With more information on how things work inside the Drift we can figure out how a given mass of extraplanar material would behave. Assuming all conventional laws apply, the best case scenario is the flotsam is from the Elemental Plane of Air or Earth, with enough breathable air and no toxic gases to last at least round of breathing, and possibly some errant earth and stone to increase the gravity of the contiguous mass. Even so, you need a lot of air in one place for it to pull together under gravity into a ball dense enough for partial pressure of Oxygen sufficient for conventional humanoid life to respirate. But this will not last long because heat will radiate away if the Drift environment is colder.

But even if the mass collapses enough to maintain PP of O2, the air at the center may be too dense to breathe and may compress into liquid metallic air or even some 'hot ice'.

If extraplanar gases do not dissipate in vacuum (or there is no zero pressure environment to expand into) then the extraplanar air will retain its integrity. If gravity does not collapse large masses, then a mass of extraplanar air will retain its original shape although loss of heat may shrink it and force it to freeze out.

Bottom line, though, is the Rule of Cool should apply here. Maybe gravity, temperature, and pressure laws apply, but any Drift jump that causes a planar rip can easily bring through spheres of material hundreds of feet, to miles, to perhaps thousands of miles across, so that the Drift becomes littered with asteroids, comets, planet-sized balls of solid rock or asteroid fields. In extreme cases a Drift jump may create a rogue super-earth, a gas giant, ice giant, brown dwarf, or a red dwarf star (via plane of fire). Many of these will come pre-inhabited...

In a region constantly trafficked through by lots of extreme jumps, though, a lot of material will slowly build up in one place, which will also collapse and make bigger and hotter stars, eventually leading to deep gravity wells dominated by neutron stars or full fledged black holes...

There would be calls for policing Drift travel in these threatened areas. Too much heavy traffic and you'll be slamming into black holes populated by angry outsiders every time you jump into Drift space....

What I would like to see is Drift Gravity having a repulsive effect between large bodies at short distances. If many planetoids are formed in one place they will want to crash together under mutual gravity and make a big ball of homogenous and uninteresting ball of molten lava and debris. But if two or more planets or moon sized rocks appear in proximity they will enter a kind of mutual orbit without ever crashing together.

If you have seen lots of soft cience fiction and fantasy artwork you will know some of those worlds have background moons or other planets (usually in crescent or gibbous phase) at very close distances astronomically. Some are close enough that in real life those moons or other planets should not exist, being within the foreground planet's Hill sphere and subject to destructive tidal forces, or else impacting or sucking up the atmosphere of the foreground planet.

If in the Drift planets and moons can coexist in procimity, without getting smashed together by gravity, then all those astronomically unrealistic pictures may as well be exhibits of explorers, wildlife, or locations of worlds located somewhere in the Drift.

A colossal android character built to fight kaiju, but he has these other feelings ingrained into his soul that makes him want to live out his existence as a diminutive children's action figure...

Rich man's neutronium would have to be mined from a neutron star itself.

In some iterations, the First World has the timeless trait.

It would be interesting if the machine god appropriated big chunks of the First World to make the Drift so that it allowed travel faster than light, and kind of comedic too, since the cold metal of technology and the wild nature of the fey and their druidic allies are philosophical opponents.

If there are multiple worlds where humans showed up and never had previous contact, but they can all interbreed on day one of contact (Kirk meets Princess), then there might easily be other races with multiple spawn points, all interfertile subraces. Given how the new races of Starfinder have bubbled their way to the top of the heap, we may speculate that there's more than one true homeworld for these 'favored' races.

We can hang it all on the Reincarnate spell. Whether a certain caster has ever met all the possible races of Reincarnate or not, the spell doesn't care about their ignorance; all possible outcomes are still viable outcomes. Once the spell is known on a given world, it is only a matter of time before enough of a population of a 'nonnative' species is 'reborn' to make a sustainable genetic pool.

Even on a world of the Veskarium, there could have been a statistically improbable event of rebirthing dead Vesk into Lashunta, Ysoki, Shirren, Human, Elf, Kobold, Kasatha, or any number of other races native to the Pact. These genetic offshoots would know nothing of the cultures or existences of their genetic brethren living under other suns, but these Reincarnees would remain steeped in Veskarian culture and habits--though nothing would stop someone from using divination to learn more about their new exotic racial identity.

Similarly, there must have been at least a few instances where Reincarnates took on a strange shell of a race that no one had ever seen before. But because no sustainable population of Vesk or Shirren were known in antiquity, we may surmise they didn't appear as Reincarnations enough to make a sustainable population. Or if they did, they went into hiding and remained unknown on Golarion or other Pact worlds until modern times (and perhaps remain hidden still).

If there are other races that have become more common than the ones who dominated in ancient times, then it must have been a combination of highly prolific birth rates, favorable economic circumstances, and particularly good results coming out of the otherwise random effects of many Reincarnate spells cast on many planets, and where all the humans that have been spawned on many planets have nonetheless met and mixed together and created a shared racial heritage that transcends culture, language, history, and homeworld.

Maybe it's not always a hit or miss thing, suppose that (in your version of Starfinder universe), there are specific long-distance travel routes that won't cause planar breaches. (Maybe there's nothing left over there to tear away, or the hypergeometry of the planes makes it possible to avoid a rip altogether).

Anyway, these travel routes will become well-known as event-free flights that can be made. Naturally, travelers of all sorts will want to know where these safe routes are

Enterprising explorers will work hard collecting these safe routes and publishing them (whether for profit or not). Some people will be very famous for their well-detailed and comprehensive travel maps. Others...not so much. It's not just a matter of cataloguing all the black holes, neutron stars, and other bad stuff that would ruin your day if you got too close. A few of the safe routes are fairly straightforward and simple, with not many waypoints or course corrections. But other safe routes (especially those that wander near the galactic core or stray too close to a stellar cluster) require a lot of precise and well-timed course changes to avoid the 'crash zones' where planar breaches have a higher probability of being triggered.

Very brave and well-funded rsk takers will devote their lives to going around trying to discover a new long distance safe route (which is pretty hard to do these days, but it does happen). Occasionally some child prodigy will discover a new safe route or two purely by mathematical analysis of the existing safe route network. Newer safe routes tend to be highly convoluted and sometimes not very useful, since they don't always start or end anywhere near some truly interesting or important star system. But there are 'path finders' who love charting new safe routes as a end unto itself.

As well, there'll be scammers who will sell fake maps, or they'll steal your collection or remote encrypt it with a virus, and hold it for ransom. A starship crew out on the frontier and suddenly deprived of their long range safe route map may have to crawl their way back to civilized space if they're in bad enough shape they wouldn't be able to handle a planar breach random encounter with who-knows-what. In more reputable circles, you can pay for a subscription to any of several drift route services to receive free updates.

Travel maps occasionally need updating. All things change over time, including the hypergeometry of planar boundaries. Consequently, routes previously thought of as safe will slightly become more risky; others less so. In very rare instances a safe route is pinched shut by planar tectonics and becomes a crash zone. In other instances a previous "no-go" route will become safe. Such occurrences may happen once every few years or so. It's not as if everyone's route maps become obsolete overnight, but a map that's been dug up from a few centuries ago is unlikely to be reliable. Similarly, it might not be very effective to try to time travel into the future to steal someone's more advanced safe route map, because many of their routes won't even exist yet. (But if you could do that, you might be able to position some assets to take advantage of those new safe routes for when they do open up...eventually.)

Is it confirmed that only outer planes are being cannibalized by Drift travel? What if every plane has a chance to be carved up?

It would be hilarious, in a way, to drop out of warp only to be confronted by lots of very angry sprites, brownies, pixies, and perhaps some little blue people as well...

I would expect a new multiplanetary calendar to have been more or less accepted. Not everyone's planet rotates at the same speed. Besides, when you're in space, it's always lunchtime somewhere.

Old timey folks, and those reenactors from the Institute for Inventive Incongruency will keep up the old ways, but there's no reason for everyone else in the Pact to do it.

Naming days of the week makes as much sense as naming them after the colors of the rainbow. I would not be surprised if some cultures had a different name for each day of every month. The plethora of feast days in Christendom comes close; each day of the year could be dedicated to (and named after) someone given enough time.

For the Shirren we have to break it down to the biological level.

<< Shirrens have three sexes: male, female, and host. During reproduction, female and male shirrens provide the initial eggs and sperm, and hosts incubate the fertilized eggs while also adding their own genetic material and immunities. Shirren young spend their first 2 years in a tiny, wormlike larval form, and are often carried around in protective containers to let them safely observe the world. >>

In humans, both sexes contribute genes through their gametes. One sex contributes the stationary gamete and the other the traveling (motile, flagellated) gamete. The ovum maker also carries the zygote / embryo created from fertilization, for the full term of gestation.

In the Shirren species, all three sexes contribute genes through (I assume) their own versions of gametes. I am not sure if we are meant to take the terms "eggs" and "sperm" literally, but if so, then the S-male gametes can travel while the S-female gamete cannot.

Not all species with gametes follow this pattern. Examples exist in nature where all gametes of a species are flagellated, and where none are flagellated. (Isogamy) Because biological transfer occurs between the S-female and S-host, we can infer that the fertilized eggs (zygotes) of the Shirren retain the flagella of the male gametes which let them transfer to the third gender for further gestation, after which the S-host also contributes genes (which could be anything from another kind of flagellated gamete to something much less complex like soaking the embryos in a bath of naked DNA molecules exponentially generated via polymerase chain reaction). So it appears from an anthropocentric biological point of view we have two possibilities (false dichotomy fallacy notwithstanding):

One, that two of the three sexes create motile gametes (and therefore should be thought of as two male sexes), while the ovum-producing sex is female. Gestation by the S-host sex is also a female characteristic, which ought to suggest the third sex be considered at least semi-hermaphrotic.

Two, that only one sex creates motile gametes (and is male), one creates stationary gametes (at least initially) and is female; and that when the S-female mates with the S-host to inseminate the latter with her zygote fluid, this is not quite the same process, semantically speaking, as the initial union of ovum of sperm (or we would classify the female as hermaphroditic). After the zygotic transfer, the S-host inundates the zygotes with more genetic material (produced via a naturally-occurring polymerase chain reaction), which only then causes the unicellular zygotes to begin mitotically dividing and transforming into embryos.

If we accept the latter model (which IMO seems like a more reasonable explanation) then what we have are two forms of Shirren that have gender, and a third form that is sexless. In humans, there are individuals which do not actively present as male or female biologically, such as X0 chromosome type (Turner syndrome) or full/partial androgen insensitivity syndrome, or other conditions where expression or male or female traits is suppressed or mixed. In such cases where the masculinizing hormones are suppressed or the body is insensitive, the developing fetus reverts to feminine traits by default.

To that end it seems appropriate, even if it's more of an artifact of English's limitations in its pronouns than anything else, to refer to the male Shirren using masculine pronouns and to refer to the female and host Shirren using feminine pronouns (given that they share feminine characteristics of egg production and gestation).

I advocate a more personal use of pronoun, because while it seems more formal to refer to all Shirren (even non-Shirren) as singular-they, in the case of the Shirren there is a distinctive thread of worship of the individual. It is quite possible that some Shirren would take offense at being called a "they" because it is a reminder of the bad old days of being integrated into a collective mind.

[William Sethares](http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/) loves to compose music using different scales (Exomusicology and Xentonality) and exotic things like that. Three Ears is one of my favorite.

Gigantium, a corporation that caters to giants, has been shopping around the Diaspora for a suitable location to build a "pleasure dome" that would be suitable for beings of their...dimensions. One such planetoid has been found that would work just great, but the problem is it's already occupied by other people who don't want to give up their homes--not for any price. So Gigantium has been paying some folks to "encourage" the existing owners to accept the corporation's lavish offers.

Part 1: PCs are stuck having to help defend the planetoid from a raiding party of these legbreakers.

Part 2: The PCs are asked to investigate and discover whatever financial or political ties these ruffians have to their clients.

Part 3: Go to the mercenaries' home base and wreck it.

Part 4: A contingent of Gigantium's own private army pay a visit to the planetoid and scuffle with the PCs.

Part 5: The PCs track down one of Gigantium's branch offices to do some corporate espionage and maybe discover some skeletons in their close.

Part 6: The PCs travel to the headquarters of Gigantium, fight some rent-a-cops (but they're all giants, so the PCs will be outmatched in size unless they have mecha to fight in). If the PCs get past them, they can then present their ultimatum: leave our friends alone or you'll get more heat from other corporations than you can handle. Gigantium calls off the intimidation campaign but promises the PCs will have a bad day some time in the near future because of all this...

Using old pop music is actually quite sensible. Things like the Star Trek theme are simply too recognisable and 4th wall breaking.

Having said that, I have the theme to "Space above and Beyond" on my iPhone which is suitably epic without being that well known. Original Galactica and Buck Rogers themes might not be recognised by younger players. I think they might id Babylon 5 though. Series 2 theme is probably the most epic.

For more serious stories, copying Kubric's 2001 and using a classical score would be a good way to go.

TOS Trek's theme is too recognizable, but the themes for the movies would be alright (other than TMP, which is a prehash of the TNG theme).

Everyone Uses Singular 'They,' Whether They Realize It Or Not (NPR)

Of note, there is also the sci-fi book _Ancillary Justice_ by Ann Leckie. It is a "space opera set thousands of years in the future, where the primary galactic power of human-occupied planets is the expansionist Radch empire. The empire uses AIs to control human bodies ("ancillaries") that are used as soldiers, though regular humans also are soldiers. The Radchaai do not distinguish people by gender, and Leckie conveys this by using female personal pronouns for everybody, and by having the Radchaai main character guess wrongly when she has to use languages with gender-specific pronouns." (Wikipedia)

To counter the 'body farms' there's probably a group out there who believe in these future corpses' "right to life" and will try to rescue the pre-undead or else resurrect the already undead.

As for the "raised ones", they might be like infants in adult bodies, but that would be less interesting than having them end up like the freed humans from The Matrix, where their minds were capable of grasping language and basic problem solving-skills. But their consciousness was trapped in a life of tedium and servitude, making escape or rebellion all but unthinkable until suddenly they were liberated from their undead masters. Unlike the people who were born live and were enslaved after death, these individuals would have never had a normal life to start with.

Whoever is familiar with the Ghost Brigades from Old Man's War? These are fast-grown clones of 'realborn' persons. They are created and raised to fight; they are rapidly educated through a lot of "unpacking" preprogrammed knowledge and skills that occurs as they develop.

In another sense these resurrected drone clones may have the minds of adults but will need to go through the equivalent of a GED program to integrate them into normal society. They're going to have a lot of struggling to understand higher human emotions and social cues, perhaps the drone clones will end up somewhat apathetic, sociopathic, or exhibit some behaviors resembling Asberger-like autism, but they will be able to relate pretty well to androids who are more or less in the same boat.

1. "The Machine Awakes" by Steven Bryant

Gameplay and roleplay should sometimes trump scientific realism.

English is the Borg of languages when it comes to assimilating the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs of other tongues, but is terrible at absorbing or innovating other parts of speech.

Anything that doesn't sound like it could be a real English word for these restricted parts of speech is going to fall into the verbal uncanny valley, and any sentence which dips into this valley with made-up wirds as such, will sound unnatural, awkward and contrived.

For our purposes, pronouns that sound like existing ones will sound nicer to the Anglophone ear than ones that don't. Instead of the third person plural They / Them / Their / Theirs, you might replace the initial consonant with some other phoneme that is accent-agnostic and won't create a homophone pair, such as Ch, Sh, Z, and Zh. You may as well spell it with an initial 'X' while you're at it. Xey, Xem, Xeir, Xiers.

An upstart corporate executive of a popular cybernetics company has been clandestinely dumping energy blades and chainswords in key markets which, , without quality controls in manufacturing or proper training for customers acquiring these items on discount, will soon lead to increase of demand for cybernetic limbs...

How does an AI become a god? If it runs the simulation it can! There is a computer on Golarion that runs a simulation of the Starfinder Universe, because in reality, it is impossible to go faster than the speed of light. Do you know what a Mastrioshka brain is? It is quite literally a machine god, or as close as you are ever going to get to one in the physical universe. it is a type of Dyson Sphere that harnesses the energy of the Sun to run a giant computer, the computer can do a number of things, it can host an AI god, it can also run a simulation of a part of a Universe, the people being simulated in that universe don't know they are being simulated and for all intents and purposes, the AI running the simulation is a god. So you want to know where Gorlarion is? Take a guess!

This would make some sense if the purpose for hiding Golarion turns out to be a safeguard against infinite recursion of the simulation; but it is reasonable to assume every additional lawyer of simulation runs slower than the layer of simulation above it. (diminishing returns)

You don't want your sim-Golarion being able to enter a state in which it spawns its own version of AI that wants to iterate the whole thing all over again as an infinitely nested series of simulations. So at least one iteration has to eliminate one of the starting conditions necessary for the next layer of AI to manifest itself. Bye bye Golarion.

What about life insurance...or being dead insurance...or is it undead insurance in case you die(ie: raise undead...urh raise you)...maybe it's kind of all three? ;)

I think it works with the deals mentioned in the posts above.

Is the insurance meant to help with your reanimation or is it to save your corpse from the cadaver traffickers? "By accepting this insurance payoff you agree to surrender the corpse of the holder of said policy to their next of kin, without necromancy or other desecration performed on it after death or for any purpose other than preservation of said corpse against natural decay..."

Torbyne wrote:

Could a living entity get a loan against their body? Some cheap credits that if you dont pay back means Eox has the legal rights to your body if and when you die?

"Its your money and you should have it now!"

"Because you cant take it with you!"

"Why pay for a funeral when we will pay you to do it for you?"

Want to see Eoxian Space Hearses now...

This is an excellent idea and I'm going to go ahead and say it's canon now. :D

I would be surprised if they all were as lenient on the terms. Some of the less...scrupulous...of these cash-for-corpse loan sharks might not be willing to wait for you to assume room temperature before coming to claim your body--or even wait for your brain stem to call it quits before rushing the process along. Some of these guys are probably going to collect on the contract early if it looks like the 'donor' is prone to taking unnecessary risks with the merchandise!

Additionally it's not difficult to imagine some countries or colonies where body pledges are a common thing. Instead of being tied to the land like serfs under the tsars, your modern medieval bondage is you sign away your family's right to your body after death, just so you have a little land to farm on and sell the produce for some extra luxury items. Even in a modern society there will be slavery and exploitation.

Awesome. I can't stop saying "electroencephalon."

I imagine an Eoxian army would be absolutely unstoppable. Every battle would only swell their ranks, regardless of which side won. Kinda like Game of Throne's white walkers.

Time to invest in some Vorpal chainsaws and chainswords...

Get your racer runnin'

Head out on the roadway

Looking for adventure

In whatever comes our way

Yeah, the gods're gonna make it happen

Take the worlds in a love embrace

Fire all of your wands at one time

And explode into space !!

I like smoke and lightnin'

Heavy metal thunder

Racing in the wind

And the feeling that I'm under

Yeah the gods're gonna make it happen

Take the worlds in a love embrace

Fire all of your wands at one time

And explode into space !!

Like a true nature's child

We were born, born to be wild

We can climb so high

We're never gonna die

Born to be wild, born to be wild...

It seems to me there should be a single NPC class that takes certain archetypes based on the character's background or profession. The setting has to allow for all kinds of cultures, caste systems, and economic systems. There just won't be many that many land-bound sharecroppers on Absalom Station who can count on both hands the number of times they've owned a gold piece.

Given the type of connections that they have to their children, I would probably regard the male and the female parents as co-fathers and the host as the mother.

In the _Alien Nation_ TV show, the Tenctonese had a 'third gender' called [Binnaum](http://aliennation.wikia.com/wiki/Binnaum) who take part in the reproductive process but do not contribute genetic material or carry pregnancies. They have masculine traits like the Gannaum (such as greater upper-body strength, deeper voices, and so on) and are treated as masculine by humans but their cranium-patterns have larger spots.

I wonder why aren't the male Vesk the gender that has the natural colorings, similar to how the males of some species like peafowl, mallards, guppies, and mandrills are more brightly colored to stand out and 'impress' the females. So that a male Vesk may 'strut his stuff' or even exaggerate his colorings as a show of intimidation against other male Vesk or to show off in front of the ladies, even if these behaviors don't impress non-Vesk or even make sense.

Having this flipped around makes the race feel more anthropocentric, and less alien.

Magic is involved in all FTL travel, which would mean it was available to anyone with money.

I might be mistaken but my understanding has been that Drift engines were only technological, though I suppose the writers might want to leave the idea for enchantments for more accurate navigation, greater speed, damage regeneration, and so on.

Besides the Dyson sphere, ring world, or swarm configurations, another constructed-world idea might be to have a planet-sized d12 built by the gods or some Q-like race of aliens.

Each pentagon is a self-contained "flat earth" world, with multiple continents and oceans and island chains. Sheer cliffs and mountain ranges jut up from all the edges to hold in the atmospheres. The axis of rotation would run through two opposing vertices so that all the faces got at least some sunlight. The planetary core would spin, of course, to maintain a magnetic shield against the solar wind.

Gravity is variable across the whole surface so that it is always perpendicular to sea level, no matter how close to the border of a pentagon you travel. Mundanely increasing the density of the crust near the edges might suffice to adjust the direction of gravity, or the dodecahedron could have been carved out of an existing rounded planet and then enchanted to keep the gravity regions all pointing the same way.

The dodecagonal planet might have a number of moons, which house observatories and research facilities. For poetry they may take the shape of other Platonic solids: the innermost moon as a d8, the last a d4. The d4 is a spaceport, the d6 is a dormitory, and the d8 is the research facility. All the moons have marked portals linking each other together, while only the d8 moon has portals leading to the constructed planet's surface (marked and restricted-access on the faciity side, and hidden and locked from the planet's side).

Once on the surface, observers and researchers rely on magic to stay hidden so they do not violate their noninterference directive. They are also given or taught teleportation and given scrying equipment so they can move around inside each habitat at will, teleporting to any location visible to one of their sensors. The planet's impassible cliff edges block teleportation across themselves or offworld; the portals are the only way on or off other than by ship.

Now I wonder how the builders managed to get the ring world spinning fast enough from the beginning of its construction, to keep the ring world from collapsing under its own gravity.

I could call it a world-sized artifact and accept that it appeared in its entirety ex nihilo when whichever deity called it into existence around such and such star. The people and life forms could have been seeded later, as well as any night cycle paneling or whatever is used to simulate such.

Phrenic scourges are a good Pathfinder-style equivalent to illithids/mind flayers.

If you are wanting realistic orbital ellipses, smaller objects orbit bigger ones, and the barycenter of the system would stay between two worlds of equal mass.

The orbits of similar binary stars would look the same as the orbits of similar binary planets:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/jcFfG.png

http://www.courses.vcu.edu/PHY-rhg/astron/html/mod/021/graphics/binorbit.gi f

How many caster levels can your average ley line support?

Magic is not an infinite resource with infinite shelf life unless you decide it has to be like that. Each world follows its own rules, as the folks from reddit.com/r/worldbuilding would tell you.

You could probably run a TRON type fantasy adventure if the InterWorldNet is MMO based. This MMO becomes a kind of interface where you can interact with other people virtually like a game--butit also has corporations and nonprofits plugged into thus MMO as well. Thus, any given location on the IWN is represented as a location in the MMO; you have to travel in the MMO to the Access Point node associated with that location in order to access their server there.

Of course there is still the Old School Internet where you just type in the name in a search engine and go there, but where's the fun in that? Plus those access points are much more securely firewalled.

The main draw of the public MMO is to draw customers to virtual storefronts where they can shop virtually and meet other people, virtually. Like going into a Walmart store in the middle of Azeroth and looking at and manipulating things through your enhanced visual reality interface with touch, smell, and taste.

The magic infused in the world is what powers arcane stuff. If you want realism, imagine that magic has a finite bandwidth, like an ISP or electrical power grid or the water pressure in your apartment building. With very few users drawing juice from the system, your performance is awesome. But when hordes of casters/customers are sucking out as much as they can, there will be performance issues. Either everyone's performance will suffer loss or the system will overload from the strain and fail like a server DDoS'ed to death.

On the one hand, literacy gives you a competitive advantage over those who can't or refuse to learn. You can teach yourself anything you have the aptitude and time for, and you can learn the symbols of weal or woe that are posted in urban areas where a certain place might be interesting enough to want to break in and steal. If you can read the sign "beware of velociraptor" you can be sure you'll have a bad time if you try to burgle that place!

On the other hand, Goblin tradition says reading and writing will steal words from your brain (and is also a tool for controlling the weak-minded) And if there is anything goblins fear as much as magic it's their war chiefs and tribal priests, who will tend toward conservative values and who are motivated to maintain their personal power through those teachings.

On the third hand, civilization has progressed enough that any goblins who haven't spent their entire lives living under a rock can see that none of the other races have suffered harm by schooling, and in fact can talk even smarter and figure out stuff faster because of this strange ritual called 'Googoling'.

Finally there will be goblins who have accidentally did learn how to read and write, but now they are ostracized by their illiterate cousins for 'acting like a pinkskin'.

I can't wait to try my favorite Star Wars dog fighting manoeuvre!

"I'll try spinning! That's a good trick." - Anakin Skywalker, Age 8.

Still can't believe Lucas gave Anakin that line. He could have said nothing from the time he got in the cockpit till the time he left, and he would have seemed a lot more competent as a pilot (as Ben Kenobi built him up to be when talking to Luke about him).

The leaders of a cult of outsider-worshipers have decided to get bent all out of shape by all the Drift travel ripping up parts of their gods' favorite planes and marooning their gods' servants in the Drift plane. So the cult leaders order a crusade of terrorist attacks against all starship manufacturers, and secretly plant explosives on random commercial and private starships to try to ruin the manufacturers' reputations and to turn everyday people against their products.

Technology being able to outperform magic for the same investment of time, money, or effort ought to argue against the study of low-level magic as obsolete solutions to everyday problems.

thecursor wrote:

I am happy to say that I have met the man who had the first ever Starfinder death in the playtest.

I figured it must have happened already

Even greater will be the first Starfinder TPK

I foresee the cause being GM enraged by powergaming and rules-lawyering players

Planets fall. Everybody dies.

Decree a false vacuum meta-stability event. Everything in the universe explodes at the speed of light. Campaign over.