I know the announcement is barely out of the gate, but I hope to hear what the planned scope of the system is meant to be. One of the things that often frustrates me about sci-fi in literature is when writers treat starfaring stories as if they were taking place on the scale of a single planet (or continent): the cultures and ecosystems of entire planets are uniform and homogeneous; events and travel happen nearly instantaneously, regardless of the vast distances involved; fleets of ships are somehow able to conquer entire planets just with some relatively confined bombardments from space; etc.
With an RPG, you've got to try to constrain your boundaries somewhat, to keep the narrative personal for your players. So I'm curious to know how that will work out for Starfinder. Will we see more narrowly focused APs involving relatively smaller areas of Golarion's galaxy, or will there be an attempt to try and paint with a broader brush in order to depict as wide a range of options out there, but at the expense of quite possibly giving each of the planetary systems short-shrift?
Chief Technical Officer
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If you're familiar with Distant Worlds, that will give you an idea of what the Starfinder team's approach is going to be like.
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One of the aspects of SpellJammer that impressed me back when it came out and still haunts my dreams today is the exploration aspect. The linking of campaign worlds was nice but I liked the idea of doing a kind of Star Trek thing. With this and a few other projects I have already supported, there is a lot that can be done. I look forward to this with great anticipation, hope and trepidation.
If you're familiar with Distant Worlds, that will give you an idea of what the Starfinder team's approach is going to be like.
I am very familiar; Distant Worlds is one of my favorite PF products.
I guess my question comes more down to how the APs are going to deal with things, rather than the setting. Distant Worlds is a very broad overview of the solar system, just hinting at the secrets to be explored. I wouldn't expect an AP to jump from, say, the Loving Place in one chapter, then to Epoch in the next; not in the way a Golarion based AP would perhaps switch from a single city to a dungeon in the same country in the next issue.
Planet-hopping APs could be fun for a once in a while thing, but I think I'd prefer something where the scale is more local; a single planet, or even just a region of a planet, for instance. (Or even a single AP on one ship; the size of intergalactic ships themselves can be enormous. Maybe one gigantic derelict ship could be the basis for an single exploratory AP).
At the very least, I hope there is a mix of adventures like that.
I imagine that APs will be as varied as the Pathfinder ones are. Where some mostly take place in a single city, while other have you trooping across a country or what have you. Just take that scale and widen it by quite a bit. Sci-fi and science fantasy aren't only about planet hopping, we need time on these planets to satisfy our curiousity and feed our need for in depth exploration.
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The scope?
Yuge.
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Farscape
Babylon 5
Silverhawks
Space Battleship Yamato
Captain Harlock
Captain Future
Buck Rogers
Flash Gordon
the list of inspirations is practically endless.
A.S.S. Vorpal Blade
Yes, it's an infortunate TLA. The aliens who coined it weren't all that familiar with English. :-)
I've heard that the people behind Aethera and what d20pfsrd.com Publishing has been working on are already on board so I imagine that the core rulebook will give you what you need on a setting agnostic level with at the most GM material for building a setting or exploring new uncharted places, the Adventure Path line and probably a campaign setting line will fill us in on the post-Golarion solar system, and third party companies will have their own details for their own settings.
Currently running a space campaign with a few third party things trickling in and have been planning to add in things in that way. There are several solar systems in the setting but since Aethera is on the horizon I've been hinting at it in game with news reports of a new civilizations being discovered and a hyperspace bridge being built to interact with it. When Starfinder comes out I'll do the same thing; New warp capable civilizations are found and they agreed to build a space bridge to interact.
Is the ship's classification a Destroyer? :3A.S.S. Vorpal Blade
Yes, it's an infortunate TLA. The aliens who coined it weren't all that familiar with English. :-)
Don't think so. Google John Ringo's "Looking Glass" series.
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I think it would be nice if the book contained some discussion about scope-setting topics such as:
- How much detail can be observed from space? If you can only pick out major structures and settlements, that makes it a lot harder to "conquer" or "oppress" a planet from orbit than if you can see all the natives hiding beneath the canopy.
- How easy is it to get to orbit? How fast?
- How easy is it to attack targets on the ground from orbit and vice versa?
- How do you as a GM deal with high-mobility-enhanced players? If they get into the habit of bolting to another planet as soon as the going gets tough? Some GM coaching may be valuable.
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It would be interesting to see how/if the exploration rules might be translated for interstellar "sand box" adventuring.
It would be interesting to see how/if the exploration rules might be translated for interstellar "sand box" adventuring.
I pretty much run exclusively sandboxes, so this would be valuable for me.