Rockwell555's page

Okay, you got me ^_^

First time I've checked the Paizo site this month (the 7th), and I see a FREE pdf? Shut Up and Take My Non-Money!!

Five pages in, I finally get the joke ^_^

Can't recall if I commented on this before, so apologies if its a repeat:

While I'm looking forward to this supplement, I can't help but think about something similar in another Sci-Fi RPG: Traveller.

A few years back, the then stagnant Traveller setting was 're-vamped' with a sourcebook that cast the setting into a post-apocalypse.

An intelligent virus knows as simply "Virus" had gotten loose, spread through the galaxy by ships (and wi-fi when 'in system'), causing all computer-connected tech to fail, bringing the galaxy to its knees.

This revamping did NOT go over well with Traveller players, and sales plummeted.

I think, if they had presented it as just a one-shot Setting Option, it would have been accepted better, but from that point on, 'Canon' Traveller was in the Post Virus universe.

Later on the game was re-booted yet again, this time ignoring Virus, and restoring things to status quo, more or less.

I don't think Drift Crisis will be the 'canon' setting going forward, at least I hope not for those of us who liked the universe as it was (I want to come up with something that destroys the universe, not have it forced on me.....now, where can I find some rules for those Octopus Headed Brain Suckers? ^_^)

I can also remember "Traveller: The New Era" by Game Designer's Workshop.

They decided to shake up the setting by introducing "Virus", an intelligent program that caused the collapse of galactic civilization by making any computer equipment dangerous to use (the more complex, the more 'intelligent' Virus would become in it, and of course it had a 'Kill All Humans' attitude, more or less ^_^).

While it was an interesting new setting, it turned off a lot of old time players (like myself) and didn't really seem to capture the imagination of new players.

So the next iteration (Mark Millar's Traveller) did away with the concept and continued as if it never happened.

That being said, I think people were upset because they made a drastic change to a setting that has been around almost as long as Dungeons and Dragons itself (often thought of as the 'First Science-Fiction RPG', and certainly was to me).

If this book is only a 'Campaign Option', and not the Canon for the setting from that point on, I can more easily accept it (I could even see a Witchwarper somehow causing the players to shift to another reality where this happened, and the players working to get back to 'reality', perhaps with a warning of what could happen).

As usual, though, I will certainly pick up the .pdf file when its available, if only for the character/gear options.

captain yesterday wrote:

Not interested.

I guess this will be the point I stop getting Starfinder books. A shame.

I can empathize with this because aside from the fall of Cadia I can't think of a "Shake Things Up" splat that ever did the line any good. Maybe Age of Sigmar? I don't play WH Fantasy that much. But Fall of Cadia certainly earned its payoff by having been stagnant for almost 20 years. Off the top of my head I can think of several "Let's blow things up, kill some darlings" splats that basically became the high watermark line of the series and created a huge rift between "old" vs "new" setting fans:

- Word of Blake Jihad (Battletech)
- System Failure (Shadowrun)
- The Spellplague (3.5)
- Week of Nightmares which cut off access to the higher planes/underworld (old World of Darkness)
- 2nd Day of Thunder (L5R)

And it is somewhat odd to me to make a "Let's Shake Things Up" splat in a 4 year old franchise when you aren't even done exploring what exists inside of it. I would have preferred a "The Vast" splat first at the very least.

BUT.... I trust in John Compton and Pasini to keep things on track and improve the setting with new opportunities and encounters, rather than just "reboot" things.

- Alternate Starship Combat Rules The rules as they are right now are a huge drag that make way too many groups want to skip all Starship combats. I'd love for there to be rules that allow every member of the party to have some meaningful and fun decisions to make, rather than settling into just rolling a die. Also, for there to be more consistent DCs or just less die rolling in general so you don't have to have cheat sheets and other external tools just to run a Starship combat.

Over at the Starfinder Reddit page, someone came up with what seems, at first glance, to be a pretty good rewrite of the Starship Combat Rules:

How useful it is depends on the viewer, though. For example, he does away with ship facing, and initiative goes from Highest to Lowest, as in standard combat.

Also, using these rules may call for rewriting all the starships presented in the various Adventure Paths, if you want it all to be consistent.

https://youtu.be/o3dcDxt-YyE

A teaser trailer for an upcoming Netflix movie called "Space Sweepers", which seems to be about a crew of a small ship going about making claims on space junk to make money, and one of their 'claims' has something special.....and very dangerous.....onboard.

I couldn't help but think of the 'Fly Free or Die' adventure path when I saw this, which has the same " simple people making their way through the galaxy" theme ^_^

I'm sure someone's probably already mentioned it before, but....

I even see stats for one of my favorite creatures (for which I STILL have the occasional nightmare, 30+ years later 0_0).

"Game over, man; GAME OVER!!!"

Huh, and here I am diligently trying to convert "Masque of the Red Death" to Pathfinder/Occult Adventures... all that time wasted :-(

Can't wait for this one though ^_^

Okay, after giving some of the rules a quick look-see, I'm going to give my initial, rambling thoughts.

Note that this is from the viewpoint of a 'rules dabbler', I couldn't tell you how to make a maximized build of any character class to save my life, I just trust that when I make a character the rules will work due to the thousands of people who playtested them before I ever got to see them :-)

That being said, of course I like the book. I can't see any complaints I might have about any of the new character classes, and my initial thought that they wouldn't work in a 'standard' fantasy campaign seem to be unfounded (although of course I think these classes are more fit in an Occult/Gothic Horror style campaign).

I would even say that some of the rules owe just a little bit to Psionics rules (whether 3.5 Edition or Dreamscarred Press' version). The Psychic's 'Phrenic Pool' somewhat resembles a Psion's Power Point Pool (although I think some other PF class uses a similar system). There is even a Magus Archetype that is practically the Psionic Soul Knife :-)

I also like the some of the rules expansions; I think I could even port the 'Psychic Combat' rules to Psionics with very little effort (and probably better than the previous Malhavok Press "Mindscapes" version I was using, at least at first glance).

Unless I missed something, I would have like to have seen them incorporate the Alchemist class more fully into this book (he just seems to fit so well, particularly with some of the mutational abilities a alchemist can get [Edward Hyde, anyone? ^_^]).

All in all I like the book and may actually pick up the hardback version for my collection. As I have said before, though, I plan on using it to recreate the "Mask of The Red Death" campaign setting, so I have some fun tweaking of rules ahead of me (have to check and see if anyone has done a good port over of the "Fear/Horror/Madness" checks, as well as some of the cooler parts of the Ravenloft rules :-))