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Starfinder Alien Archive

4.10/5 (based on 24 ratings)
Starfinder Alien Archive
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Strange aliens both friendly and fearsome fill this tome of creatures designed for use with the Starfinder Roleplaying Game! From the gravity-manipulating frujais and planet-killing novaspawn to space goblins and security robots, the creatures in this codex will challenge adventurers no matter what strange worlds they're exploring. What's more, player rules for a host of creatures let players not just fight aliens, but be them!

Inside Starfinder Alien Archive, you'll find the following:

  • Over 80 bizarre life-forms both classic and new, from the reptilian ikeshtis and energy-bodied hallajins to robotic anacites and supernatural entities from beyond the realms of mortals.
  • Over 20 species with full player rules, letting you play everything from a winged dragonkin to a hyperevolved floating brain.
  • New alien technology to help give your character an edge, including weapons, armor, magic items, and more.
  • A robust NPC-creation system to let Game Masters build any aliens or creatures they can imagine.
  • New rules for magical monster summoning, quick templates to modify creatures on the fly, and more!

ISBN-13: 978-1-60125-975-2

Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:

Hero Lab Online
Fantasy Grounds Virtual Tabletop
Roll20 Virtual Tabletop
SoundSet on Syrinscape
Archives of Nethys

Note: This product is part of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscription.

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4.10/5 (based on 24 ratings)

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5/5 —

Pretty much essential to run the game with

5/5 —

-- if you want to make any of your own NPC's/monsters.

Very good essential book

4/5 —

Beautifully illustrated, rich with monsters and playable races options. The part about how to create monsters is fantastic and absolutely needed. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is that I found a few errors (mostly missing stats) which bring down the polish of this product quite a bit. Furthermore, due to the complexity of the equipment side of this game it makes for a decent amount of cross-referencing the core rule book in order to find what you need, and that sucks.
An F.A.Q./errata is needed, please!

Expensive for size, but Excellent

5/5 —

The Alien Archive is the first Starfinder "monster book." It includes sixty different creatures. Although GMs would be the natural audience for a book like this, players can get a lot out of it as well because no less than 21 of the creature entries have rules for running them as PCs. In addition, several of the entries introduce new weapons, armor, or other magical items. The book is structured pretty much like you would expect, with a short introduction, a whole bunch of creatures in alphabetical order, and then some (very useful and important) appendices. I'm going to go through each of these sections, but first I want to highlight the overall design and look of the book: it's absolutely gorgeous. The full-colour artwork is uniformly excellent and fits the "feel" of the Starfinder universe perfectly, the intelligently-designed footers and page borders make it very easy to tell where you are in the book at any moment, and the layout of the creature stat blocks and description makes the text very readable. Paizo is one of the best in the business at this part of RPG publishing, and their attention and expertise to detail (not to mention investment in quality artwork) shows here to full effect.

The book starts with a two-page introduction that has a couple of different topics. First, there's an explanation that the aliens given special rules to allow them to be played as PCs have often been scaled back in power from the same aliens when played as NPCs by the GM. This makes sense from a game-design perspective (because otherwise many of the playable alien races would be overpowered), but it can be somewhat disappointing as a reader to stumble on an alien that seems awesome only to realize that, if you want to play one, it's abilities will be significantly nerfed. Second, there's a "How to Read a Stat Block" section that explains each line in a creature stat block. Most of this will be pretty familiar to readers of Pathfinder Bestiaries, with some minor distinctions, like only showing ability score modifiers (not the scores themselves), only showing usable feats (not ones that are "built in" to the statistics), and the disappointing omission of the little one-line description in italics that I used to read out to players when they encountered a new monster. Another minor difference is that instead of having little symbols that define monsters by environment, the Alien Archive has little symbols that identify them as "Combatants", "Experts" (skillwise), or "Spellcasters".

The core of the book (120 pages), of course, is the creature entries. Each entry gets a full two-page spread. The advantage of this is that many entries include multiple stat blocks (such as Space Goblins getting a CR 1/3 "Space Goblin Zaperator" and a CR 2 "Space Goblin Honchohead"), there's room for the aforementioned new items or PC racial traits, and there's a *lot* of description. This last thing is probably one of my favourite things about the book, as the writers could go into much more depth on each creature than if they just had one-page entries. The background/description sections are full of flavour and setting lore, and I saw some great adventure hooks buried within some of them. The obvious drawback of two-page spreads for each entry is that it does limit the overall number of creatures in the book, which is already slim (a topic I'll talk more about below).

As for the creatures themselves, I guess it's not really practical for me to go through all sixty of them. Some general observations: 1) They struck a reasonable balance between (re)introducing some Pathfinder creatures into the new setting (like Dragons, Drow, Elementals, and Goblins) without turning the book into just an updated Bestiary. The vast majority of creatures in the book are new. 2) Despite being an "alien" book, most of the creatures are roughly two arm/two leg/one head humanoids. There are definitely some exceptions, such as my beloved barathu (floating jellyfish-like creatures, one of which I'm running through Dead Suns), skittermanders (six-armed over-helpful little creatures that have become Starfinder's break-out hit), and exotic threats like the tech-devouring "assembly ooze" (cooler in theory than in practice). 3) Even with a relatively small spread of creatures, some entries are pretty unimaginative and fall flat: I'm looking at you Formians (generic ant creatures), Grays (generic mysterious aliens), Mountain eels (eels . . . on mountains!), surnoch (forgettable giant worms), and the Swarm (generic bug monsters). 4) The book somehow manages to handle, incredibly concisely, some entries for creature types that should take up several pages: all of the chromatic dragons, for example, are included into a single two-page spread (through the use of templates), and all four of the basic elemental types and sizes are summarised through similar means in just two pages. I admire the economy of space, though I worry the templates don't include enough special features to make a white dragon play significantly differently than a blue dragon (for example) or for a water elemental to really seem different than an air elemental. 5) A few of the creatures are large enough to post a threat to entire starships, and have been given additional stat blocks for starship combat. 6) The creatures are heavily skewed to the low to middle levels of gameplay. There's only one or two creatures each for CRs of 13 or above.

Appendix 1 weighs in at a hefty 17 pages and provides a GM with instructions for creating custom monsters and NPCs. There's a nine-step process which includes selecting an ability score array, creature type, special abilities, etc. The process is designed to be quick and painless, and operates on the premise that what's important from a player-facing perspective is what cool things a creature can do during an encounter rather than whether it has precisely the right amount of skill points or one too many feats. This was a conscious decision by the Starfinder designers, and is a big break with the D&D 3.5/Pathfinder model which operated under the premise that monsters/NPCs couldn't "cheat" (so a Level 5 Wizard NPC couldn't have more spells than a Level 5 Wizard PC "just because"). The choice has led to criticism from a lot of GMs who prefer the Pathfinder way. I almost exclusively run pre-made adventures these days so I haven't used the monster/NPC creation rules in the Alien Archive myself. Perhaps the only problem I've noticed is that monsters and NPCs can seem very "samey" because they're not built organically with real strengths and weaknesses (there's never a Level 6 creature running around with a 10 KAC because it's slow and doesn't wear armor, for example--it'll have a fixed KAC of 18, 19, or 20 depending on which array is chosen).

Appendix 2 (five pages) provides the rules for summoning creatures in Starfinder. It introduces the Summon Creature spell and the associated tables for what exactly can be summoned for each level of the spell. One of the differences from Pathfinder is that a spellcaster must decide, ahead of time, which four creatures they're familiar enough with to summon (instead of being able to summon anything on the table). In addition, there are some alignment and class restrictions on what can be summoned, which is an intelligent limitation. I personally hate summoned creatures, animal companions, and familiars, so anything that can be done to curb the abuse we see in Pathfinder is welcome as far as I'm concerned.

Appendix 3 (two pages) provides 16 new templates (called "Grafts" here) that can be applied to creatures to change them up a little. A couple of these are familiar from Pathfinder (like Celestial, fiendish, and Giant), but most of the others are new for Starfinder (like Cybernetic, Synthetic, Miniature, and Two-Headed).

Appendix 4 (7 pages) is the most important of the appendices, as it contains what every GM will need to reference frequently: universe creature rules. When a stat block says a monster has Blindsense, Grab, or Undead Immunities, they'll need to turn here to figure out exactly what that means in mechanical terms. Some of these rules will be very familiar to Pathfinder GMs, but there are enough little differences that it's worth reading the entries carefully.

The most commonly heard complaint about the Alien Archive is that it's just too short for its price. It's $ 39.99 for just 159 pages, while a hardcover Pathfinder Bestiary is 328 pages and a $ 44.99 retail price. I think the criticism is fair, and I wouldn't blame people for choosing to instead get the $ 9.99 PDF. Apart from its length/price, however, this is a really strong book full of gorgeous artwork, strong writing, and a good array of various creatures. It's definitely worth picking up in one format or another.

A must for Starfinder fans

5/5 —

The first "Bestiary" is just amazing, plenty of alien creatures, new races that players can choose for their characters (this is one of the most amazing features of Starfinder), simple and easy rules to create your own alien species. An amazing book, people complain that is not as big as the Pathfinder Bestiaries, but hey, they are giving us Alien Archives every couple of mothns (third is on the way). In that sense, I prefer "smaller" books, that arrive more often. Very happy with this!

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Community & Digital Content Director
4 people marked this as a favorite.

We will not list the creatures in the book in the product description, but you can expect some previews on the blog as we get closer to release.
3 people marked this as a favorite.

I like the little Stitch aliens.

Chris, are you gonna save one for an avatar for yourself?
4 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
James Sutter wrote:
Et cetera et cetera wrote:

Perhaps different phrasing may be better.

What was the design philosophy that lead Alien Archive to be smaller than a Bestiary?

My Personal Theory: With fewer people working on Starfinder there are less resources to work on a Bestiary sized book. Said people are focusing resources on developing the Core Rulebook. In addition monsters from Pathfinder can be imported into Starfinder, therefore the need for new monsters is lessened.

This is definitely part of it. There was no way we were going to be able to put out a 300+ page creature book a month or two after a 528-page Core Rulebook. That said, there are some other factors as well: As you noted, a lot of Pathfinder monsters are still around in the Starfinder universe, but we didn't want to just update a ton of old creatures, so we leaned toward doing new stuff. And to be completely honest, there's also a big element of risk to doing a new game like this, and it's safer for us to put out slimmer books that reflect less of a resource investment than a massive all-hands-on-deck hardcover—we *know* roughly how many copies a Pathfinder Bestiary will sell, but until we've got some numbers on Starfinder, we need to be cautious!

I'm assuming that the decimation of Starfinder supplies at GenCon is a positive sign on that front.

Silver Crusade
1 person marked this as a favorite.

This will be an early birthday present to myself.
1 person marked this as a favorite.

Very glad to see more books but Paizo sort of screwed the pooch on the Starfinder roll out. Really needed to be more books at launch.
Doug Bailey wrote:
Very glad to see more books but Paizo sort of screwed the pooch on the Starfinder roll out. Really needed to be more books at launch.

You can use several Pathfinder books for Starfinder with a few minutes of convertion.

Chris Lambertz wrote:
We will not list the creatures in the book in the product description, but you can expect some previews on the blog as we get closer to release.

Since the Alien Archive book will come out before the pawns do, wouldn't I have a pretty good idea what is going to be in the pawn set as soon as I get my hands on the Alien Archive book?

Dark Archive
Pathfinder Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Starfinder Charter Superscriber
David knott 242 wrote:
Chris Lambertz wrote:
We will not list the creatures in the book in the product description, but you can expect some previews on the blog as we get closer to release.

Since the Alien Archive book will come out before the pawns do, wouldn't I have a pretty good idea what is going to be in the pawn set as soon as I get my hands on the Alien Archive book?

yes, but Marco was asking for a list of the creatures in this book before you get a hand on it (basically the TOC since it's a monster book)

Oops -- I thought I was in the pawns product description when I posted that.

Sorry -- never mind!
1 person marked this as a favorite.

"Over 20 races with full player rules, letting you play everything from a winged dragonkin to a hyperevolved floating brain."

Thank you ^_^ People have been requesting a dragon race for a while now.

I'm curious about how they got changed in Starfinder, because according to the lore, the dragonkin DNA-engineered themselves to make themselves... smaller, or Medium.
Liberty's Edge
1 person marked this as a favorite.
JiCi wrote:

"Over 20 races with full player rules, letting you play everything from a winged dragonkin to a hyperevolved floating brain."

Thank you ^_^ People have been requesting a dragon race for a while now.

I'm curious about how they got changed in Starfinder, because according to the lore, the dragonkin DNA-engineered themselves to make themselves... smaller, or Medium.

I think well have both sizes, but players will only have acess to the smaller one.

Will any of these races be available for Starfinder Society?
Paladinosaur wrote:
JiCi wrote:

"Over 20 races with full player rules, letting you play everything from a winged dragonkin to a hyperevolved floating brain."

Thank you ^_^ People have been requesting a dragon race for a while now.

I'm curious about how they got changed in Starfinder, because according to the lore, the dragonkin DNA-engineered themselves to make themselves... smaller, or Medium.

I think well have both sizes, but players will only have acess to the smaller one.

Well, the Large one is a 10HD Large creature... not very practical...

Terevalis Unctio of House Mysti wrote:
Will any of these races be available for Starfinder Society?

I think out of >20 we can safely say that at least some will be SFS allowed

dharkus wrote:
Terevalis Unctio of House Mysti wrote:
Will any of these races be available for Starfinder Society?
I think out of >20 we can safely say that at least some will be SFS allowed

If PFS is any precedent, there will probably be some sort of boon required to play members of these races.

Paizo Employee Organized Play Lead Developer
6 people marked this as a favorite.
Terevalis Unctio of House Mysti wrote:
Will any of these races be available for Starfinder Society?

Thurston Hillman and I have been reading over these species for some time now. While we're yet to lock in which ones will see play first and through what means (e.g convention boon, scenario boon, Fame-purchasable boon, Always Available, etc.), we'll no doubt see many of the species in the organized play campaign.

"New rules for magical monster summoning, quick templates to modify creatures on the fly, and more!"

OK, really hope for these: [planet]-evolved creature, have a template that corresponds to the planet's ecosystem... so you can transform any animal, vermin, plant, magical beast, dragon and such with one quick set of rules.

Hey, it beats waiting for 3 bestiaries per planet until you get a reasonable fauna to pit against your players :P

For instance, Castrovel has a nature-heavy ecosystem, compared to Eox, which is... dead. Castrovel could have healthly, more powerful animals, while Eox could have grunt, scavenger-like vermins.
John Compton wrote:
Terevalis Unctio of House Mysti wrote:
Will any of these races be available for Starfinder Society?
Thurston Hillman and I have been reading over these species for some time now. While we're yet to lock in which ones will see play first and through what means (e.g convention boon, scenario boon, Fame-purchasable boon, Always Available, etc.), we'll no doubt see many of the species in the organized play campaign.

I'm really just hoping for PFS rulings for the People of the Stars races like Red Skinned Akitonian Humans or Triaxians (like are they Summer born or Winter born in PFS?)

Who did the cover art for this? Is there any way to get a print of it?
Community & Digital Content Director
3 people marked this as a favorite.

Remko Troost is the cover artist. Though, it doesn't appear that he sells prints online.
Chris Lambertz wrote:
Remko Troost is the cover artist. Though, it doesn't appear that he sells prints online.

Out of curiosity, I always thought Paizo owned the rights to art you commissioned for covers and so forth. Did I imagine that?

Silver Crusade
Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Steve Geddes wrote:
Chris Lambertz wrote:
Remko Troost is the cover artist. Though, it doesn't appear that he sells prints online.
Out of curiosity, I always thought Paizo owned the rights to art you commissioned for covers and so forth. Did I imagine that?

Artist owns the rights to sell the work in medium X, Paizo owns the right to use it in any way except for selling it in medium X. Typical IP law clause.

Yeah, I'd heard that in general but I seem to remember a conversation (with Vic, probably) that Paizo pay more to own the copyright and exclusive distribution rights (for the covers anyhow). It could well be confusion on my part though.

The context was not needing to pay fresh royalties when reusing art or reprinting books.
Paizo Employee Chief Creative Officer, Publisher
9 people marked this as a favorite.
Doug Bailey wrote:
Very glad to see more books but Paizo sort of screwed the pooch on the Starfinder roll out. Really needed to be more books at launch.

There's only so much pooch to screw, alas, and we left the poor critter in pretty bad condition as it is.

Paizo Employee Chief Creative Officer, Publisher
10 people marked this as a favorite.

Which is to say, we do not have the resources to release more than the 8+ products we released this month. We're putting stuff out as rapidly and responsibly as we can, and October is the earliest we can get a good monster book out for this game.

I can understand if you may have wanted it sooner, but we simply cannot make it any faster than we already have.
1 person marked this as a favorite.

There also six bestiaries all itching to be converted to rampage across the cosmos.
Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer
1 person marked this as a favorite.
Steve Geddes wrote:
Chris Lambertz wrote:
Remko Troost is the cover artist. Though, it doesn't appear that he sells prints online.
Out of curiosity, I always thought Paizo owned the rights to art you commissioned for covers and so forth. Did I imagine that?

We do generally own all the rights to the art we commission, though our contracts permit the artists to sell prints. (We have experimented with our own prints a few times, but in general it's just not worthwhile for us.)

Vic Wertz wrote:
Steve Geddes wrote:
Chris Lambertz wrote:
Remko Troost is the cover artist. Though, it doesn't appear that he sells prints online.
Out of curiosity, I always thought Paizo owned the rights to art you commissioned for covers and so forth. Did I imagine that?
We do generally own all the rights to the art we commission, though our contracts permit the artists to sell prints. (We have experimented with our own prints a few times, but in general it's just not worthwhile for us.)

Ah, I see. So I half remembered. :)

Cheers, Vic.
Dark Archive
Erik Mona wrote:

Which is to say, we do not have the resources to release more than the 8+ products we released this month. We're putting stuff out as rapidly and responsibly as we can, and October is the earliest we can get a good monster book out for this game.

I can understand if you may have wanted it sooner, but we simply cannot make it any faster than we already have.

Totally understood.

Pathfinder had the Bestiary and Gamemastery Guide released in the months following the CRB too, if i remember correctly.

Erik, how are the chances for Alien Archive miniatures? ;-)
Shadow Lodge

Since the monster conversion rules are in the SFCRB I'm looking forward to running a survival horror version of the game where the party is investigating and fighting nothing but mimics and doppelganger (or the SF kind of that feel like "They Live" style aliens).
Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber; Starfinder Charter Superscriber
Marco Massoudi wrote:
Pathfinder had the Bestiary and Gamemastery Guide released in the months following the CRB too, if i remember correctly.

Not quite true:

Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook released August 2009.
Pathfinder RPG Bestiary released October 2009.
Pathfinder RPG GameMastery Guide released June 2010.
Dark Archive

So the two-months gap between the CRB & the "monster book" is the same with Starfinder as with Pathfinder.

Maybe june 2018 will bring a Starfinder GM Guide too. ;-)
Danubus wrote:
This will be an early birthday present to myself.

I have to agree, it's going to be a birthday present to myself as well. I wonder if I can download it on my birthday?

Marco Massoudi wrote:

So the two-months gap between the CRB & the "monster book" is the same with Starfinder as with Pathfinder.

Maybe june 2018 will bring a Starfinder GM Guide too. ;-)

Buy GURPS Space in order to whet your appetite for one. GURPS Space has all you need to create your own Starfinder universe.

2 people marked this as a favorite.

I hope you like math...

Will this have rules for hirelings, purchasable robots, and pets?
1 person marked this as a favorite.

Okay so I saw the final cover online and...um, is anyone else concerned that the cute, colorful little furballs are...shooting at us?

No moreso than goblins with Molotov cocktails.
1 person marked this as a favorite.
Rysky the Dark Solarion wrote:

I like the little Stitch aliens.

Chris, are you gonna save one for an avatar for yourself?

They're called Skittermanders!

SKITTERMANDER SOLARION! I WILL MAKE ONE.
Pathfinder Adventure Path, Rulebook Subscriber

Having read thru most of the "setting" chapter in the SF core rulebook, I am SO excited to see what this book has in store for us! SO. EXCITED.
Rysky the Dark Solarion wrote:
Rysky the Dark Solarion wrote:

I like the little Stitch aliens.

Chris, are you gonna save one for an avatar for yourself?

They're called Skittermanders!

SKITTERMANDER SOLARION! I WILL MAKE ONE.

Are they going to include PC rules for them? I was so hiping that was the case. *-*

1 person marked this as a favorite.
The Gold Sovereign wrote:
Rysky the Dark Solarion wrote:
Rysky the Dark Solarion wrote:

I like the little Stitch aliens.

Chris, are you gonna save one for an avatar for yourself?

They're called Skittermanders!

SKITTERMANDER SOLARION! I WILL MAKE ONE.

Are they going to include PC rules for them? I was so hiping that was the case. *-*

Yes!

They're adorable little ones who keep their babies in pouches like Space kangaroos and they mesh well with Solarions!

Also, summoning rules.

I can do without those.

I really hoped Starfinder would do away with that bullshit, but whatevs, they can't use everything they siphoned off my brain, I suppose. :-)

I have no clue how the summoning rules work, just that they're in there (quick glance).

Maybe they're more like rituals?

Like I said, whatever.

I'm exceptionally happy with Starfinder, so it's no big deal, and certainly doesn't hamper my excitement in any way. :-)
1 person marked this as a favorite.
thecursor wrote:
Okay so I saw the final cover online and...um, is anyone else concerned that the cute, colorful little furballs are...shooting at us?

But what are they shooting? Maybe they're firing the equivalent of the Starfinder Care Bear Stare, and they're spreading beams of joy and happiness throughout the cosmos!! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

Also, underwater bat people.
Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber; Starfinder Charter Superscriber

Rysky where do you get your information from?
4 people marked this as a favorite.

I got to read the books at the Paizo Dragoncon Panels :3
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