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
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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!
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.
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!
I find no Aliens or creatures in the core book. For once I wish they would include a few or a GM way of creating a few of there own. I get tired of waiting on Monster manuals.
I find no Aliens or creatures in the core book. For once I wish they would include a few or a GM way of creating a few of there own. I get tired of waiting on Monster manuals.
It is industry wide, every monster manual or bestiary came out after the Core Rulebook or DMG.
Monsters take a while to do as you need all the artwork in addition to the rules, which you can't make if the rules aren't done.
Credit to Paizo for at least putting out free bonus bestiaries and first contact so at least there's something to play with. :-)
There are also six pathfinder bestiaries just waiting to ravage the cosmos. :-)
I'm just saying they should have at least a dozen or so Aliens or Creatures to hold you over until the Alien Manual is released or a few pages of generalized stats for NPC's/Aliens with some type of templates to add on to make robots or creatures with until then. It wouldn't hurt them to help the customer out once in a while but paizo and others seem to think everyone likes to wait months for creature books.
I gave away all my Pathfinder stuff so I don't have that to use anythow, besides the way Starfinder works I really don't see how the KAC & EAC's will work with PF AC system.
I'm just saying they should have at least a dozen or so Aliens or Creatures to hold you over until the Alien Manual is released or a few pages of generalized stats for NPC's/Aliens with some type of templates to add on to make robots or creatures with until then. It wouldn't hurt them to help the customer out once in a while but paizo and others seem to think everyone likes to wait months for creature books.
I gave away all my Pathfinder stuff so I don't have that to use anythow, besides the way Starfinder works I really don't see how the KAC & EAC's will work with PF AC system.
It won't help in your situation, of course, however with regard to the latter:
Page 501 of the Starfinder Core book suggests using a PF monsters AC as KAC (adding one if it functions in a combat role) and to set it's EAC as AC-1.
This Starfinder stuff looks pretty awesome. Do you guys think that some of the creatures in this book (that have just now appeared, so space goblins don't count) could be adapted to pathfinder?
In addition to the new aliens, I hope we see some conversions of common, iconic Pathfinder monster. I'm not really thrilled with straight conversions of something like a Succubus, which has issues with energy resistances and sky high DCs (compare to a Necrovite 6 CR higher) that make it way too tough. Basic outsiders and dragons would be nice.
I'd also like to see tech adapted/using outsiders. There's no reason the libraries of Hell and Heaven should use be using technomagical computers overseen by outsiders with abilities not entirely dissimilar to relevant technomancer spells.
amazon has it scheduled for nov.7, are we still talking oct or is amazon correct?
Amazon is its own entity with completely separate often unrelated release dates. For some reason, this is particularly bad with Paizo products. It’s something on Amazon’s side. Unless they change the date on here, October 18th is still the release date.
May I ask how much "legally creative" Paizo can be with aliens?
Ok, so in Pathfinder, they clearly inspired themselves for modern/sci-fi fictional works for some monsters, such as Mogaru (Godzilla) and the Hive (Aliens' xenomorphs). However, thoese were fantasy versions, and thus aren't "carbon copies" of the actual creatures.
For aliens, it feels a little... trickier... as it's an existing modern/sci-fi creature converted into a new modern/sci-fi setting. While I don't think that Paizo would publicly announce that Toho Entertainment and/or 20th Century Fox sued them for making similar monsters in a fantasy setting, it remains a possibility :S
So... for instance, how legally "in the clear" is Paizo for creating aliens that look and feel like Chozos (Metroid), Lombaxes (Ratchet & Clank) or Locusts (Gears of War)? or Kryptionians (Superman; DC), the Symbiotes (Venom/Carnage; Marvel) or the Utroms (Krang; TMNT)? or Vulcans (Star Trek), Ewoks (Star Wars) or Na'vis (Avatar)?
That wasn't a joke. You asked a question that requires legal and factual research, takes a heap of time and is best handled by somebody who's a lawyer with experience in gaming, comics and movie industry, and those don't just grow on trees. And since we're talking about gray IP law zones where lawsuits fly like a swarm of stirges, it's best handled carefully. And best not answered publicly, else somebody takes such advice, runs with it, gets sued and comes back to sue me because I said they could and now they found out the brutal way that actually, they couldn't.
That wasn't a joke. You asked a question that requires legal and factual research, takes a heap of time and is best handled by somebody who's a lawyer with experience in gaming, comics and movie industry, and those don't just grow on trees. And since we're talking about gray IP law zones where lawsuits fly like a swarm of stirges, it's best handled carefully. And best not answered publicly, else somebody takes such advice, runs with it, gets sued and comes back to sue me because I said they could and now they found out the brutal way that actually, they couldn't.
They might have been referring to the handy haversack of hilarity right beneath you.
That wasn't a joke. You asked a question that requires legal and factual research, takes a heap of time and is best handled by somebody who's a lawyer with experience in gaming, comics and movie industry, and those don't just grow on trees. And since we're talking about gray IP law zones where lawsuits fly like a swarm of stirges, it's best handled carefully. And best not answered publicly, else somebody takes such advice, runs with it, gets sued and comes back to sue me because I said they could and now they found out the brutal way that actually, they couldn't.
No... I asked a question that requires 5 minutes from a designer/author for him or her to write an answer back.
That wasn't a joke. You asked a question that requires legal and factual research, takes a heap of time and is best handled by somebody who's a lawyer with experience in gaming, comics and movie industry, and those don't just grow on trees. And since we're talking about gray IP law zones where lawsuits fly like a swarm of stirges, it's best handled carefully. And best not answered publicly, else somebody takes such advice, runs with it, gets sued and comes back to sue me because I said they could and now they found out the brutal way that actually, they couldn't.
No... I asked a question that requires 5 minutes from a designer/author for him or her to write an answer back.
No, regarding IPs and shoutouts to such it's kinda like Gorbacz described.
That wasn't a joke. You asked a question that requires legal and factual research, takes a heap of time and is best handled by somebody who's a lawyer with experience in gaming, comics and movie industry, and those don't just grow on trees. And since we're talking about gray IP law zones where lawsuits fly like a swarm of stirges, it's best handled carefully. And best not answered publicly, else somebody takes such advice, runs with it, gets sued and comes back to sue me because I said they could and now they found out the brutal way that actually, they couldn't.
No... I asked a question that requires 5 minutes from a designer/author for him or her to write an answer back.
No, regarding IPs and shoutouts to such it's kinda like Gorbacz described.
Ditto. I don't know that many lawyers that work with the gaming industry, but I've talked to lawyers that worked with contracts. If I had prepaid legal insurance again, I could get a simple question answered quickly without having to pay $100 an hour. I don't think the question asked was simple.
May I ask how much "legally creative" Paizo can be with aliens?
Ok, so in Pathfinder, they clearly inspired themselves for modern/sci-fi fictional works for some monsters, such as Mogaru (Godzilla) and the Hive (Aliens' xenomorphs). However, thoese were fantasy versions, and thus aren't "carbon copies" of the actual creatures.
For aliens, it feels a little... trickier... as it's an existing modern/sci-fi creature converted into a new modern/sci-fi setting. While I don't think that Paizo would publicly announce that Toho Entertainment and/or 20th Century Fox sued them for making similar monsters in a fantasy setting, it remains a possibility :S
So... for instance, how legally "in the clear" is Paizo for creating aliens that look and feel like Chozos (Metroid), Lombaxes (Ratchet & Clank) or Locusts (Gears of War)? or Kryptionians (Superman; DC), the Symbiotes (Venom/Carnage; Marvel) or the Utroms (Krang; TMNT)? or Vulcans (Star Trek), Ewoks (Star Wars) or Na'vis (Avatar)?
You're talking about the area of (American) Copyright law usually called 'Fair Use', which is a broad concept, and like 'Obscenity', it's an 'I know it when I see it' situation.
It really is a grey area, with any solid definitions being provided mostly defined by precedent rather than statute. "What can I get away with' is counterbalanced by the IP holder wondering 'what can I successfully fight', and also the optics of who is being sued.
There is no fast and clear answer. Lawyers earn their money for a reason.
I hope the previews for this one come out earlier. This is like Starfinder's first bestiary, so a bit of expectation management would be welcomed.
I have a question. All creatures in the book were said to be described in two pages, and also get two pictures. So...
Are each of the two pages getting one of the two illustrations or are the two pictures on the same page, just like was done in the Core Rulebook for the core races?