Radam's page

We don't have a lot of conversations like this one in Starfinder. The settings, lore, and tech allow for almost everything to just fit in. The gap conveniently erases connections to human history and, old D&D tropes and their baggage. If you want to modify your self Starfinder has six categories of how to do that: Biotech | Cybernetics | Magitech | Necrografts | Personal Upgrades | Species Grafts. If you can't buy something off the self, every party likely has multiple members with the skills to build all most any accessibility device at level 1. If you're not sure why someone would choose not choose to address a perceived issue, any shirren is happy to explain the importance and joy of choice. They might even get sidetracked and tell you all the choices on how to talk about choices. Starfinder has naturally accruing species that are deaf, blind, or limbless. One of the few representations of accessibility missing in Starfinder is the three-action economy some PF2e players demand.

I would expect that exactly because of those reason this would come up more often in Starfinder.

Personally I don't think the boat race picture is very good. Maybe its supposed to be a different ancestry, but that neck of the first red rower just looks wrong (and also the second one which has the near exact same pose).

Well, considering most are aliens with a completely different biology I would assume real alien cuisine would taste quite bad if not downright indigestible.

Or at least taste really strange and not like food. To quote Dumbledore "Alas! Ear wax"

So food synthesiser would be everywhere non "locals" gather.
Or at least from a culinary point of view species would be grouped together into who can eat the same food like it was mentioned in Mass Effect.

So as we do not have any half-dragon(kin) and from how the wording of their entry is I assume the offspring of a dragonkin is a dragonkin with some small features of the other parents species (smaller, more dexterous hands, that sort of thing)?
Or I guess its rather the species of the mother with slight features of the father?

Do astrazoans have any kind of extra bonus to identifying each other while disguised? I'd assume the answer is no, which would be one of the reasons why astrazoans have a hard time forming their own communities.

In Interstellar Species there is a feat which lets shapeshifters more easily detect other shapeshifter. And while not limited to a specific species its listed in the astrazoan section.

Just some thoughts in no particular order and I probably forgot half what I wanted to write about

- Awesome Atrazoan art. It takes skill making a walking starfish seem badass
- Space Marine Kelo. Seriously, that is not space marine inspired, thats a picture of an Ultramarine with the skull images removed
- The lines between Soldier and Operative gets even more blurred. And with the Operative being one of the best skill users already and now stealing more and more stuff from Soldiers they become a bit too good imo
- Dragonkin can reproduce with other species? Is that a normal thing in Starfinder or something special to Dragonkin only? Their entry doesn't seem to think that its a big deal.
- Generally Dragonkin are a bit one sided, its all about the bond. On one hand, having such a detailed topic is nice, but on the other hand it makes them one trick ponys. What about them looking like how Vesk think their heroes will be transformed in the afterlife? No mention of that?
- The equipment and feats being spread through the book is a bit sup-optimal in my opinion.
- Would have liked a bit more explanation of what the creature type influences instead of just saying that its mostly for flavour. Like giving an example of spells that only work on humanoids, ect.

There are so many possible combinations that its probably too complicated to find ways to have a shared education between species unless the differences are really minor or those two have been integrated for a long time like Ryphorian and Dragonkin. So probably the default will be separate classes by species paired with homeschooling depending on population sizes.

I forgot.
In the build a species section it says the creature type is mostly for flavor.
I would have preferred if they had mentioned what is affected by creature type like the hold spells which do not work on non humanoids.

That gets overlooked a lot.

Radam wrote:

Dragonchess Player wrote:

Radam wrote:

And have there been any picture of a Akiton human anywhere so far? But considering how small and inhospitable Akiton is I do not think that their population is comparable to lets say Ryphorians.

Pact Worlds page 53.

As far as numbers go, Arl (Pact Worlds, page 52-53) alone has nearly 7 million humans (more than three times the entire population, counting all races/species, of Absalom station) and doesn't include all of the other communities and tribes on the planet.

Compared to a entire inhabited solar system 7 million, the size of Hong Kong for example, is not much.

Earth just recently reached 8 billion people. And even though the Pact System lacks a densely populated world like earth for biological species (probably), Castrovel, Triaxus and Verces still likely have a few (2-3) billion inhabitants each.

Nice way to ignore the difference between a single city (Arl) and an entire world (Akiton), even though I specifically stated Arl "doesn't include all of the other communities and tribes on the planet." Also, that 7 million is just the humans in Arl; total city population is over 18 million, per page 53.

As you mentioned, it is likely that none of the Pact Worlds is as heavily populated as modern Earth; however, assuming that Akiton is almost entirely empty wasteland when it has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years from before the gap to the current Starfinder setting (and, in fact, one of the most important pre-Drift space/starship manufacturers as the primary source of thasteron no more than a couple centuries ago) is rather illogical.

Akiton being a wasteland kinda is the theme though. Just read through the Pact Worlds entry. No surface (and anemic ground) water and hardly any plant life.

Just some thoughts in no particular order and I probably forgot half what I wanted to write about

- Awesome Atrazoan art. It takes skill making a walking starfish seem badass
- Space Marine Kelo. Seriously, that is not space marine inspired, thats a picture of an Ultramarine with the skull images removed
- The lines between Soldier and Operative gets even more blurred. And with the Operative being one of the best skill users already and now stealing more and more stuff from Soldiers they become a bit too good imo
- Dragonkin can reproduce with other species? Is that a normal thing in Starfinder or something special to Dragonkin only? Their entry doesn't seem to think that its a big deal.
- Generally Dragonkin are a bit one sided, its all about the bond. On one hand, having such a detailed topic is nice, but on the other hand it makes them one trick ponys. What about them looking like how Vesk think their heroes will be transformed in the afterlife? No mention of that?
- The equipment and feats being spread through the book is a bit sup-optimal in my opinion.

Do Lycanthropes even exist in Starfinder?

Radam wrote:

And have there been any picture of a Akiton human anywhere so far? But considering how small and inhospitable Akiton is I do not think that their population is comparable to lets say Ryphorians.

Pact Worlds page 53.

As far as numbers go, Arl (Pact Worlds, page 52-53) alone has nearly 7 million humans (more than three times the entire population, counting all races/species, of Absalom station) and doesn't include all of the other communities and tribes on the planet.

Compared to a entire inhabited solar system 7 million, the size of Hong Kong for example, is not much.

Earth just recently reached 8 billion people. And even though the Pact System lacks a densely populated world like earth for biological species (probably), Castrovel, Triaxus and Verces still likely have a few (2-3) billion inhabitants each.

Doesn't Triaxus has a sizable Gnome population (who overcame the whole bleaching problem?)
And have there been any picture of a Akiton human anywhere so far? But considering how small and inhospitable Akiton is I do not think that their population is comparable to lets say Ryphorians.

I do not think the nature documentary is a good comparison. Yeah, there might be some documentation about the species outside the system, but for the ones within they would not be seen in documentaries but in entertainment.
We know that there movies and entertainment shows cross planetary boundaries with Zo! and I think there was also a whole company mentioned somewhere which ships move tapes around? In the starship book I think.

So eventually people will be exposed to many of the species within the Pact System.

Radam wrote:

I assume that people living in the Pact System at least learn the names and looks of the species living in it.

Common species maybe. But people only generally know the animals they run into and or the ones in their area. People know cats because they're common housepets. People in north america are familiar with skunks, but how many people know zorilla ? And thats on the same planet. Add 12 planets ..

Londo Mollari : But this - this, this, this is like - being nibbled to death by, uh - Pah! What are those Earth creatures called? Feathers, long bill, webbed feet, go "quack".

Vir Cotto : Cats.

Londo Mollari : Cats! I'm being nibbled to death by cats.

Here is where the media comes in. Many people know of lions and similar animals despite them not living in an area where they are common.

It will just take some time till trade rearranged itself to take the 2 extra days into account (and as flight times never were an exact science anyway that shouldn't be that much of a problem). What takes more time is replacing all those ships.

So for a few years trade will be disrupted a lot. Think back to when the Suez Canal was blocked.

I assume that people living in the Pact System at least learn the names and looks of the species living in it. Basically you wouldn't have flash cards with "cat" ect. for teaching children but cards with "Lashunta". The rest is filled in by media consumption.

But I imagine knowledge of species that do not live in the system is much rarer, especially when they do not visit often like Vesk. I doubt the majority of people know what a Stellifera is, let alone recognize one when not using its hydro power. And Astriapi will probably get confused for Shirren a lot.
But with so many species out there most people probably don't care much when they encounter something they do not know. When it walks around Absolom Station its probably another traveller.

Speaking of limited ships, is there information how the crisis affected piracy?

On one hand ships not being able to drift means more targets, but also that they can't get away easily and can be better tracked while the worlds have a more vested interest in keeping their ships safe than they did before which means more patrols.

Non-drift travel in the Pact System is not that much slower than drift travel. And wasn't there a mention of large non-drift AI cargo haulers? Although I might be misremembering and that was a house rule I read somewhere about.

The main reason for interrupted trade is more likely temporary that many ships vanished and there is currently a shortage. That could be solved by portals, but I guess the official lore ignores that capability.

Mass media exists at least within the Pact System, so people there would certainly have heard of gnomes.
Seen one in person? That depends on where they are. People living in a frontier town on Akiton? Probably not. People on Triaxus where there is a sizeable gnome population? Most certainly.

And once you get into near and far space most Pact World races would be rather rare.
Its all about location, not rarity.

We know from adventures that there are male and female dragonkin. So this sentence from the book just means that there are no outward differences between the sexes.
"Choosing what they are" in this context means gender and that because their bodies are the same for both sexes, their gender is the only thing that defines how they style themselves.

And as I already said above, like Corvus I am more interested about the reproducing with humanoids part.
Is this normal in Starfinder (similar how D&D wants to handle it in the next edition)? Something special dragonkin can do (because the D&D dragons at least in the past were fertile with everything, a trait that copied over to Pathfinder, then Starfinder and then dragonkin)?

Generally I am a bit conflicted about the dragonkin entry. One one side having such a detailed account of bonding adds depth, but on the other side that leaves them quite one dimensional and I would have likes also other topics touched upon like how they handle this quite big size variance or the thing from Pact Worlds (I think?) expanded upon that dragonkin look like how vesk think afterlife would look like and what consequences that has.

First non-core species iconic, or?

sounds like a good time to bring in the Mechs

Mechs sounds like overkill. Hard to do horror with dinosaurs when you walk around with military vehicles and equipment.

As it was already pointed out, sexual dimorphism just means (physical) differences between sexes. So dragonkin of different sexes would be the same hight, same color, ect. At best there are likely only slight differences in bone structure to account for the birthing process. And maybe different pheromones so that dragonkin would have at least a hunch what sex another one is as otherwise reproduction would be a bit complicated. But I am not sure if pheromones even fall into the dimorphism category.

Speaking of reproduction, what I find more interesting is that the book implies that dragonkin can have offspring with non-dragonkin.

No idea if there has been an official word yet how cross species compatibility works? I assume dragons and dragonkin in Pathfinder have inherited the D&D ability of being fertile with basically anything.