Psepha's page

Some characters have telepathy or sign language. Or you can text with your comm unit?

But what are the difficulties? I'm not aware of environmental protections limiting things like talking to people, or have I missed something?

During the intro, Ixthia says:

You’ll probably need to seek help from locals, which can be tricky when environmental protections are active. Consider how to communicate without speech.

...what does that mean? I know that mechanically it's a hint towards communication with Uhlsemet, but what is Ixthia actually referring to?

So I've got an ysoki mystic with blindsense (scent), and I was hoping to get him an Advanced Pheromap from Interstellar Species. But I'm confused about how it's been written and what its intention is.

The Basic Pheromap states the following:

"Your olfactory senses are enhanced and connected to the vlaka pheromap, giving you access to the connection between pheromones and emotions for many other species.

"When a living creature is within the radius of your blindsight (scent) as a move action you can attempt a Perception skill check to identify it. The DC of the check is determined by the creature’s rarity, as presented on the Creature Rarity table (Core Rulebook 133). If you have blindsense (scent) or blindsight (scent), you gain a +5 enhancement bonus to this check. If successful, you also determine its initial attitude toward you (Core Rulebook 140). You can attempt this check untrained regardless of the DC, and having this augmentation counts as having access to an information network for the purposes of taking 20 on a check to identify a creature."

So the text says it enhances your olfactory senses but then jumps right into stating what happens if a living creature is within the radius of your blindsight (scent). But it hasn't established a requirement to actually have a scent-based sense prior to this, and then later it goes on to say that you get bonuses if you have blindsense (scent) or blindsight (scent) - but surely having those goes without saying if the whole thing is dependent on the range of blindsight (scent)..?

The fluff text says it's not only for vlakas, but also helpful to other species - and even if it were just for vlakas, not all vlakas have blindsight. And Interstellar Species has a general piece of text in the Overview (page 4) that says they were intending to create things that are "thematically tied to that species, but generally not mechanically tied, so they’re available to a wide array of characters."

So... what's the deal with Pheromaps? Is having blindsight (scent) a pseudo-requirement of using one, meaning my ysoki can't make use of it? Or is it meant to be interpreted a different way?

Ohhhh sounds interesting! Can't wait :)

I do kinda wonder if this book still sticks to the "in the future, magic is magic, doesn't matter if its divine/arcane/occult/primal" version or if other more specific form of magic will be introduced in this AU as well :D

I think it kind of makes sense that Starfinder does it that way. As time goes one things tend to get a bit more reductionist - at the beginning, there's lots of independent things and different ways to do things, but as time goes on you unify more and more as your understanding grows, until you hit an understanding level where it's all really the same core principles but with different applications