Amaze, challenge, and torture your players with alien plants from a strange world — in Wonders of the Cosmos: Strange Plants Under a Red Star!
Each Wonders of the Cosmos attempts to give players and gamemasters some new and wondrous addition to the Starfinder Roleplaying Game in a single, small volume. Be it a new world to explore, a new subsystem to exploit, or just rules clarifications and ideas for how to make something work in the Starfinder Roleplaying Game, the design of each Wonders of the Cosmos is to provide just enough material to help you add the element to your game.
In Wonders of the Cosmos: Strange Plants Under a Red Star, we present the plant life on a planet orbiting a red dwarf. Challenged by this unusual world, the flora of UX-5396 have developed unusual means of survival, resulting in appearances unlike any across the known universe. Included are two new hazards for explorers: spores that cause anaphylactic shock and a pallid vine that paralyzes and then slowly dissolves any who wander too close.
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This supplement clocks in at 10 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page ToC, 1 page SRD, 1 page advertisement, leaving us with 5 pages of content, so let’s take a look!
We begin this supplement with 3 pages of what amounts to a xenobiologis’s handbook, written in character, as the narrator explores the xenobiome of UX-5396 – canopies of laced leaves, microtrees, pink carpets of mucilage – I was positively surprised to be transported into a strange world here, and as soon as we learn about the rainbow lake, a vast plane of lichen atop a sulfur lake’s crust, I was fully engrossed. As a minor drawback, the boots noted for safe traversal don’t get proper stats.
Dormant and subsisting primarily on lionfrogs and arcobeasts, the pdf contains new hazards – anaphylactic spores (CR 6) and paralytic vines (CR 12), and the means to create botanical stalkers, via a CR +3 subtype graft that is added to the plant type graft, all of which are solid, if not too outré. While subtype grafts usually don’t increase CR, here, the template style nature certainly justifies doing so – though adhering to the template graft standards in presentation might have been prudent, for as written, this does generate some work.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are pretty good on a formal and rules-language level. Layout adheres to the series’ two-column full-color standard, and the pdf presents a couple of nice full-color artworks. The pdf comes fully bookmarked for your convenience, in spite of its brevity. There are a few glitch bookmarks here, but they don’t impede functionality.
Jeff Collins’ humble little exploration of a strange planet caught me by surprise – I did not expect to like it this much. The flavor really sells what would otherwise just be a few mechanical hazard tidbits. Considering the low price, I’ll rate up from my final verdict of 3.5 stars, though it should be noted that, if you’re not interested in flavor, you may want to round down instead, as there isn’t that much going on rules-wise.
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