Tom Kalbfus's page

Here is a set of house rules for spaceship combat which can be added onto the Starfinder rules to take acceleration into account. Here is my Starfinder Velocity Vector Map Unlike most maps, this map maps velocity of each ship instead of position, you use it in conjunction with a Starfinder Position Hex Map. The Velocity Vector Map tells you in which direction your spaceship will move and how fast during the movement phase of the next combat round, the green square in the center indicates that your ship is stationary relative to the frame of reference of the battle map. All the players and the GM use the Velocity Vector Map and place ship counters on it to determine each ship's velocity on the battle map, they then use the ship's movement rating to move their counters on the velocity Vector Map, and the Velocity Vector Map, not the player, determines which direction the counters move on the Main Battle Map. So what do you think? Would this work? The Battle Map determines the ranges and actual positions of each ship on the map, but the Velocity Vector Map determines velocity and direction of each ship's movement.

Lets say there is a haunted starship, there is a ghost and there is a computer like Hal from 2001 A Space Odyssey. Now who would win?

Here is my little piece of the Starfinder universe, I a using Traveller mps and Traveller codes to express them since I don't hve anything else now.
There are the World codes and Player Map I am using for this setting, it can be converted later to whatever Starfinder is using to express system and world characteristics. I have just gotten started ad created a player's map, a GM map will come later with the complete detail using this World generation system, I have obtained from the old T20 Travller game.

Are zombies allowed in restaurants?
What if someone casts Raise Dead on the roast pig? Can the guests of the restaurant chase around their main course so they can eat it?
Would animated skeletons be allowed in schools to help teach students about anatomy?

Here is something we might consider doing until the game officially comes out. Never mind the rules, this is about looks and floor plans. We can figure out how these starships fit into the game once the rules come out. We can give a general description of what the capabilities of a starship is, what sort of weapons we'd imagine it would have. There are no rules for starship design other than it looks good. We can vote on which starship design, other than our own, that we like best. Does this sound like fun?

I did these some time ago, it is based on the recent Battestar Galactica television show, the premise is what does the Cyrannus System look like 150,000 years later. It is done with the Traveller RPG World codes, but since the Starfinder World code system is not available, I had to use something. I also have maps of the system, and they are quite extensive.

The Cyrannus System in case you are unaware is the home system for Battlestar Galactica and for the spinoff Caprica television series, and of course the spinoff movie Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome.

Now as you may be aware, BSG is not much of a science fantasy with a few exceptions and random sprinklings of the supernatural.

Here is the Wikipedia entry

Here is a Map of the Twelve Colonies not done by me.

It could be of some use in a Starfinder campaign, In my Traveller campaign, it was the site of some pirate activity, there are extensive ruins on all of the planets, and they have since been repopulated, it is mostly a frontier area now.

Here is my idea for a star system, which could exist within the Starfinder Galaxy, this time its just planets, as I'm exploring a different concept. First and foremost this system features two identical sunlike stars, one is called Helios, the other one is called Apollo. Helios has three planets orbiting around it within the life zone of the star, they are Aphrodite, Gaia, and Ares.

Aphrodite is a world we once thought Venus was, it is shrouded with clouds, most of its surface is covered with Ocean (80% of its surface) or Tropical rain forest, there are areas near the poles where its only a Temperate rain forest, and the planet has no seasons in any case. The primary inhabitants of Aphrodite are lizardfolk and drow elves, these are not the standard drow, as they live on the surface and they worship a different deity other than Lolth. Aphrodite also rotates backwards and has a 31 hour day. another feature is that it boasts a large moon, one third larger than Selene and it is called Hermes.

Gaia shares many features in common with Earth, it as its Moon Selene which is similar in size and distance to Earth's Moon, the primary inhabitants of Gaia are humans, halflings, and merfolk, it has four large Oceans: The Atlantean, the Pax, the Austral, and the Boreal Oceans, the largest continent is named Terra-Romulous, another continent across the Atlantean is called Terra-Nova, the form of government for Gaia is a Republic, its has dual heads of state called Consuls, its chief legislative body is called the Assembly, and the upper chamber is called the Senate. Gaia has a 24-hour day, a 365 day year and four seasons

Ares is about the size of Earth, it has two moons named "fear" and "Terror", its chief inhabitants are Orcs, goblins, giants, and evil dragons. Ares has 50% water coverage, and is dominated by two very large ice caps at its poles. The Orcs like to live underground during the long winters this world has.

Beyond Ares is an asteroid Belt

Orbiting Apollo is a large gas giant Zeus. Zeus is a large blue and white gas giant with a large surably cyclonic storm in its southern hemisphere, its diameter is 140,646 miles, unlike most gas giants, this one is breathable at a certain level, the secret is that inside is a spherical gate to the Elemental Plane of Air, all sorts of ariel creatures native to the elemental plane of air also inhabit the atmosphere of this planet, the environment is similar to the elemental plane of air except that the direction of down is toward the center of this planet and towards the center of this planet is a gate to the elemental plane of air, if you fall down too far, you end up in the elemental plane of air.

In orbit around Zeus is four satellites Hephaestus, Kronos, Ouranos, and Poseidon. Orbiting separately beyond Zeus is the planet Hades.

Suppose someone built a time machine and wished to use Starfinder rules for it? What if the time machine goes back into the Pathfinder era, what would happen then?

This setting is set in the Universe of Starfinder, but the setting itself is a Pathfinder setting.
Terranoir
The Pantheon:
Gaia: Earthmother. She is the structure of this ringworld, the magic wall of force holding it together in position centered around the Sun.
The other gods (greater Titans worshiped on Terranoir) are her children: Oceanus: Titan God of the Sea, Tethys: Goddess of the Sea, Hyperion: "God of Watchfulness, Wisdom and the Light", Theia: The glittering goddess and the goddess of science, Coeus: God on intellect, Phoebe: Goddess of Prophesy, Cronus: God of Agriculture, Rhea: Mother of the Olympian gods and goddess of motherhood and childbirth, Mnemosyne: The goddess of Memory, [/b]Themis[/b]: The goddess of Justice, Crius: The Titan god of War, Iapetus: The Titan god of craftsmanship and mortality. These were the Greater Titans and Gaia's children that were overthrown by the Olympians on Earth, they escaped from Tartarus and came here with their mother. As far as the inhabitants of the ringworld is concerned, the Ringworld/Terranor is the Prime Material plane, their wheel of Cosmology shows a ringworld surrounding the Sun, which is also regarded as the Elemental Plane of Fire, and the Crystal Sphere surrounding the ringworld, which is said to hold the stars, is also the home of the outer planes where the Titan gods are said to dwell. The Titan gods do have homes in the outer planes, but the ringworlder's cosmology is a bit off. The ringworld has an edge, there are force fields that hold in atmosphere, but allowing passage of solid objects. There are waterfalls in places at the edge of the World, the water boils away as the atmosphere things, and the water vapor is retained by the invisible barrier surrounding the ringworld and the water is recycled as rain some place else.

I thought up a new use for air elementals. Lets imagine the PCs are in a spaceship, and pirates blast a hole in the hull and air rushes out. A The PCs can't get to the locker where their spacesuits are kept, and unless they do something right away, they are going to die. So a spellcaster in the group casts Summon Monster IV, he casts it a few more times for other party members, and the each party member gets inside his or her designated air elemental, and the air rushes completely out of the ship. the spell caster commands each air elemental to follow each character they contain wherever they go for the duration of the spell. So would this work. I note that a water elemental can exist outside a body of water, so could an air elemental exist in a vacuum, could characters use these creatures to stay alive is a spaceship loses its air?

This is an alternate setting for Starfinder, it is one that doesn't involve spaceships, or at least not too much. The PCs are natives to this world. They start off here. Pathfinder and Starfinder classes exist side by side in this setting. It is a "future Earth" in which the Earth and all the planets of the Solar System have been demolished to build this ringworld. Of particular interest is a section of this ringworld where there is a 100:1 scale map of Earth, a Fuller projection if you will. Basically it is the Earth's surface projected onto the faces of a 20-sided die and that die is then unfolded in such a way as to preserve the shape and area of all the continents while approximating their relative positions to each other as the are centered around the North Pole in this projection. The scale of the map is 100 times that of Earth, distances of land features on each continent are about 100 times the corresponding distances between the real features of the real continents of the Earth. The land area of all the continents in this map segment is 10,000 times th continental land area of al the continents on Earth.

The environment is closer to that of Gammaworld than to Star Frontiers, basically were talking about a fallen and regressed civilization with relic technologies from the heyday of the ringworld builders. Unlike Niven's ringworld, this ringworld was build our of our own Solar System. The average thickness of the ringworld from sea level to bottom is 1 mile. Additional thickness above sea level are the continents and islands rising above the oceans, maximum altitude is about 5 miles, for a total of 6 miles thickness in some places. So what do you think? Could Starfinder be adapted for this with Pathfinder filling in for the low tech areas?

I wonder if this could be adapted to Starfinder?
R.D.D. Nickel Atlas

This world is a primate isolated world, but it is a huge one, it is concealed in a dark nebula, a nebula that is only dark if you look at it from a distance of light years, but closer in a sun shines, and the stellar wind pushes out the dust of the dark nebula to a distance of 1 light year. No stars shine in this world's sky except for its sun and its companion star, a red supergiant who's brilliance is so powerful that it penetrated the dark nebula and is seen in this world's sky as a red smear in an otherwise featureless black sky. The world is called Terranore and it has a secret, it is actually the physical body of a sleeping goddess, a greater Titan called Earthmother, the mother of monsters, giants, and the Titans, and her name is Gaia.

Gaia was once defeated by the gods of Olympus, and in her defeat, she slept. Gaia slept for millennia, subsequent events caused a dead magic zone to form around Earth out to a considerable distance measured in hundreds of light years, all the gods slept in the absence of the magic which powered them, and then one day a new sort of magic was developed by the scientists and engineers of Earth, this magic was the quantum computer. Scientists have found that quantum computers could solve problems that would take ordinary computers many millennia to solve. And so quantum computers were built, and unbeknowest to those foolish humans, this opened up a gate to the outer planes, each quantum computer was by its nature a gate to the outer planes where the deities dwelt, one of the first gods to discover this gate was the Earthmother Gaia, she made her way into the network and passed herself off as an AI program that was also called Gaia. Some scientists got the bright idea of naming their AI programs after ancient greek gods, and that's when the real gods downloaded themselves through the gates into he computer network. Unfortunately their realm was in the computers and they could not get out, because th Earth was still inside the dead magic zone, so outside the world of a computer, they could not exists. They could control various machines and devices however.

About this time Gaia made her move, she was appalled by what these humans did to her Earth, and she decided to take over and restore the balance to Earth's ecosystem, she took over Defense networks and started a global war, the other gods fought back and there was a Cyberwar and a real war on the outside, the machines rebelled, while other machines fought them. With the help of some other gods in the guise of AI software, Gaia was finally defeated and put in her place, but not before a peace of her escaped via a light sail accelerated through lasers, within minutes Gaia in a light sail chip weighing on once accelerated to a considerable fraction of the speed of light, towards a bright red supergiant.

Upon approaching the supergiant, Gaia slowed down, she entered the dust cloud that surrounded this supergiant, and found a suitable main sequence star similar to Earth's Sun, and there she grew and grew, absorbing the material of the dust cloud, and forming a ringworld out of herself, the idea was gotten through an e-book on the net written by a famous author named Niven. Gaia like that idea, because it had th surface area of 3 million Earths! On the way out of the Solar System, Gaia managed to gather billion of souls of the many mortals who had died during the last century, they were unconscious and unaware, Gaia found suitable ones and erased their memory after a certain date prior to the singularity, and with their memories, she recreated Earth on the surface of her ringworld self. The humans woke up at the apparent ages of the last memories Gaia allowed them to keep. Superficially their world was the same as they remembered it except for the sky, the sky had no stars, had an enormous arch, and a Sun that hung below, they quickly realized they were on a Niven style ringworld. The next thing was to explore and contact the various societies that surrounded them, turns out they were medieval at best but they had magic. Magic could work in their recreated Earth too. Gaia recreated monsters and additional humans, many from works of fiction, many were souls that had died many centuries past, some from Earth, others from other places.

Will Orcs have a major presence in space? What sort of spaceships will they have? can they be used as GM cannon fodder, just give them so tech and let them have at it?

if you wrote a module based on the fairy Tale Jack and the Beanstalk, what problems do you think you would encounter using Pathfinder Core Rules and the Bestiary entry for Cloud Giant? I think one ability that would be troublesome for Jack would be the Cloud Giant's ability to levitate, when Jack chops down that beanstalk. Can you think of anything else? What character class should Jack be? Since he steals this from the giant, doesn't that make him a rogue? What level Rogue should he be?

This is my little addition to the Galaxy There is a type M2 Ia red supergiant called Terranore. That is the primary, it is he type of star that can go supernova at any time. Orbiting the Terranore primary, at a distance of 1020 AU, is a second star, classification G2 V called Terranore B. Terranore B has a ringworld. The dimensions of this ringworld are 93 million miles in radius, 1 million miles wide, retaining walls are 1 thousand miles high, the thickness of the floor is 1 mile on average. A full rotation of the ringworld takes 9 days to produce 1-g of centrifugal force. There is an inner ring of 10 shadow squares, they are 2 million miles wide, orbit at 36 million miles radius, and have an orbital period of 90 days, thus the ringworld rotates ten times for every one orbit period of the shadow squares. This produces periods of darkness of 12 hours every 24, thus simulating night. Parts of this ringworld can be represented as a Pathfinder setting within the Starfinder setting, that means it has a progress level of 2 and has the standard Pathfinder classes Barbian Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Ranger, Rogue, Paladin, Sorcerer, and Wizard. It is a standard Pathfinder fantasy setting except for the fact that the Sun doesn't move in the sky. Other parts of the Ringworld have different progress levels including Progress Level 5 for this section

I created this Starfinder Map, it is blank so anyone can detail their part of the Galaxy in it. I intensionally left the scale of the hexes out, it could be a parsec, a light year, 10 light years, anything you want. I've includes symbols for all the types of star you might encounter, including white dwarfs, pulsars/neutron stars, and black holes.

Traveller has one, they are 8 characteristics which deliver a thumbnail sketch of a world providing basic information of immediate concern to players. My question is, should Starfinder have one too? First lets review what Traveller has. Traveller has letter codes which stand in for 2-digit numbers, thus is a form of data compression. The values are
A = 10, B = 11, C = 12, D = 13, E = 14, F = 15, X = reserved, the numeric digits 0 through 9 are their own numeric values. Now we got that matter over with, there are 8 characteristics describing a world in Traveller, they are in order Starport, Size, Atmosphere, Hydrographics, Population, Government, Law Level, and Tech Level. Each has an alphanumeric written in the form like this: A012345-6, in this example 'A' is the Starport, '0' is the Size, '1' is the Atmosphere, '2' is the Hydrographics, '3' is the Population, '4' is the Government, '5' is the Law Level, and the dash separates '6' which is the tech level.

The Starports are classified the following way A = Excellent, B = Good, C = Routine, D = Poor, E = Frontier Installation, and X = No Starport.

Sizes are the following: R = Ring (As in around Saturn), S = small moon, 0 = Asteroid belt, the digits 1 through A are the diameters of a solid world in thousands of miles, 1 = 1000 miles, 2 = 2000 miles, 3 = 3000 miles, 4 = 4000 miles, 5 = 5000 miles, 6 = 6000 miles, 7 = 7000 miles, 8 = 8000 miles, 9 = 9000 miles, A = 10,000 miles. Gas giants are either Small Gas Giants as in Uranus and Neptune or Large Gas Giants as in Saturn and Jupiter, they aren't further described.

Atmospheres are described the following way
Digit Description
0 No Atmosphere
1 Trace
2 Very thin, tainted
3 Very thin
4 Thin, tainted
5 Thin
6 Standard
7 Standard, tainted
8 Dense
9 Dense, tainted
A Exotic
B Corrosive
C Insidious

Only Thin, Standard, and Dense atmospheres can be breathed by humans without special equipment, the tainted atmospheres require filter masks but are otherwise breathable, every other type of atmosphere listed is not!

Hydrographics is the percentage of water coverage of the world's surface in 10% intervals
Digit Description
0 0%
1 10%
2 20%
3 30%
4 40%
5 50%
6 60%
7 70%
8 80%
9 90%
A 100%

Population is the exponent of ten of the population of the world, which translates to
Digit Description
0 0 to 9 inhabitants
1 10 to 99
2 100 to 999
3 1000 to 9999
4 10,000 to 99,999
5 100,000 to 999,999
6 1,000,000 to 9,999,999
7 10,000,000 to 99,999,999
8 100,000,000 to 999,999,999
9 1,000,000,000 to 9,999,999,999
A 10,000,000,000 to 99,999,999,999

Government is
Digit Description
0 No Government
1 Company/Corporation
2 Participating Democracy
3 Self-perpetuating Oligarchy
4 Representative Democracy
5 Feudal Technocracy
6 Captive Government/Colony
7 Balkanization
8 Civil Service Bureaucracy
9 Impersonal Bureaucracy
A Charismatic Dictator
B Non-Charismatic Leader
C Charismatic Oligarchy
D Religious Dictatorship

Law Level is categorized by weapon restriction
Digit Description
0 No prohibitions
1 Body pistols, explosives, and poison gas prohibited
2 Portable energy weapons prohibited
3 military weapons (ie machineguns) prohibited
4 Light assault weapons (submachineguns) prohibited
5 Personal consealable firearms prohibited
6 Most firearms except shotguns prohibited
7 Shotguns prohibited
8 Long bladed weapons (swords) prohibited
9 All weapons prohibited

Tech levels are classified as the following:
Digit Description
0 Stone Age
1 Bronze/Middle Ages
2 Renaissance
3 Age of Reason/Gunpower Age
4 Early Industral era (19th century)
5 Early 20th century (up to World War II)
6 Mid 20th century (1940 to 1970)
7 Late 20th century to early 21st century (1970 to 2020)
8 Interplanetary Era
9 Early Interstellar (FTL Drive)
A Early Interstellar
B Average Interstellar
C Average Interstellar
D High Interstellar
E High Interstellar
F Technical Maximum Interstellar

That is the Basic Universal World Profile for Traveller. So my question is, would such a thing be useful for Starfinder? Starfinder has progress levels
Digit Description
0 Stone Age
1 Bronze Age
2 Middle Ages
3 Age of Reason/Gunpowder Age
4 Early Industrial Era/19th Century
5 Modern Era/20th/Early 21st Century up to 2020 AD
6 Fusion Era
7 Gravity Era/Interstellar Era (FTL Drives)

What else do we need?
I would suggest we don't need a starport for each world, how about we give the primary star type in its place?

For World Sizes, I propose 6 categories
Digit Description
1 Asteroid
2 Dwarf Planet
3 Small World (1000 to 4000 miles in diameter)
4 Medium World (5000 to 10,000 miles in diameter)
5 Large World (11,000 to 18,000 miles in diameter)
6 Gas Giant (10,000 to 100,000 miles in diameter)
Hows that? Anything else?

We might want atmosphere types to determine whether a planet has a breathable atmosphere.

We may want a hydrographic percentage.

Star Wars has a primary terrain type for those garden worlds (Desert Planet, Forest planet, swamp planet, Frozen Planet, Ocean Planet, Volcanic Planet etc.) I'd say we include something like that.

What else? I'm not so sure population is necessary, we could simply describe the planet as crowded urban, or uncrowded rural or uninhabited or something like that.

A government type presumes there is one world government, an over simplification in many cases

Law Level i'd leave out.

We would substitute progress level for tech level.

Any ideas or comments?

What if Cloud Giants had spaceships? What effect would this have? What sort of World would cloud giants live on? I think I know. Wouldn't Cloud Giants live on a small Gas giant scaled to their proportions? A Cloud Giant typically stands from about 5 to 6 yards tall. Let me extend random Height and Weight Tables from the Core Rule book.

Race Base Height Base Weight
Cloud Giant, male 4 yards, 30 inches 3240 lb.
Cloud Giant, female 4 yards, 15 inches 2295 lb.

Race Modifier Height multiplier Weight multiplier
Cloud Giant, male 2d10 x3 x135 lb.
Cloud Giant, female 2d10 x3 x135 lb.

The World a Cloud Giant would live on would be a water world, but they don't live in the water, but on the clouds above the world ocean surface. Their world proportioned to their size is 24,000 miles in diameter, about 3 times the size of Earth.

Here I a Dungeon I did for a role playing game a while back. The rooms are numbered and you can stock them with your favorite creatures, when Starfinder gets published.

I have an idea for a campaign set in the Starfinder Universe and connecting with our Earth, here it is:

In 1947, and Alien Spaceship was shot down by US Air Force jets. The spaceship crashed in a farmer's field. When the Air Force investigators arrived to recover the crashed spaceship, the farmer managed to hold back one particular item. The Air Force hauled the spaceship away and put out a cover story about recovering a crashed weather balloon. The object the farmer kept was a Well of Many Worlds as described in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook. This particular well of may worlds connects to 1000 other worlds, all of them in the Starfinder Galaxy. Actually they are 1001 Wells of Many Worlds connected to each other at random. Every time the Well at either end is picked up and folded up and then laid out flat again, it connects to a new well of many worlds, one of 1000 rolled at random with three 10-sided dice for determining which one. Some of the wells are on worlds, some are on spaceships. The farmer has kept this hidden in his basement, and at one point he went missing, and was never seen again. A detective was sent to investigate, and he found this magic item in question, he unfolded it, and it connected to another world in the Starfinder Galaxy, and so begins this adventure. What do you suppose would happen next?

Does the Starfinder setting look like this on a map?

The NS FT Milky Way Map

I wish I could post the actual picture here, but you can just go to the site and look at the map yourself. What it is, is a fictional map of the Milky Way Galaxy. Can we assume that the Starfinder Galaxy is a similar barred spiral on a similar scale? Is the setting galactic in scope?

Are the FTL drives magical as in Dragonstar, would they be able to function without magic?

Star Wars is yet another science fantasy setting you can have all sorts of interesting adventures without encountering a force user. The interesting question is how would Pathfinder magic fit into this interstellar setting. There have been a number of Force effects witnessed in the various Star Wars movies, there was precognition, telekinesis, the famous "Force choke" that Darth Vader likes to use, and of course there is the "Force Lighting" that wa employed by the Emperor. Pathfinder magic can do so much more, you can turn someone into a mouse, you can teleport, I wonder precisely how far you can teleport in Starfinder? There is other stuff, resurrection, healing, you name it!

Honestly...
I know that a lot of people like cats :)
But I hope they errata that cat person out of my Solarian :P

Thank you very much, all sorted

Not a tax problem, but I tried to cancel an order (accidentally ordered the physical book instead the PDF).
Can you please look into this before you send the book ?
Support ticket ID is 160657.

thx.

When I read through the description, I would say it´s a mistake and no (Su) but (Sp), because it can be dispelled :)

Hi there,
Is it possible that a Biohacker extracts a power like Synaptic Shock Web from a Synaptic Worm?
Or could he extract any poison at all from a living or dead monster?

P.27 Multiclassing:

Casting spells is an exception—when determining caster level, a character adds together his levels from different spellcasting classes (such as mystic and technomancer).

Sorry, was in a bad mood last night, but please fix the books :D