Facebook, Twitter, &c are the precursor of the cyberpunk "net". If there's social media in STF why couldn't there be The Net as well.
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The leader of the cult is the great wyrm gold dragon now known as the Tarnished Destroyer, a broken soul dragon tortured and brainwashed by Dahak himself. The PCs must put an end to his pitiful life.Mengkare?
The truth is, we, Gold Dragons, are all pretending.
Someone, possiibly a deity, lets slip that Golarion is not the first planet to be vanished. It has happened before, and could possibly happen again.
...
Bonus points if the Vanished turns out to be the true home planet of a non-golarion race, one that even that race didn't know existed until now. How will they reconcile the history they always believed to be true, and the new one they're now starting to remember? And if they're in the core setting NOT warlike or expansive, is the vanishing why they're like that in the first place
So Ive thought more on this, and pretty much decided that this will turn out to be the home planet of Andriods...of a sort. In this "secret history" version of them, their base form is actually akin to grey goo, and their bodies are merely technomagical contructs they created to better use tools and interact with other races. But the vanishing locked them out of their "true" form and forced them to only be alive inside their android forms. It also caused mass amnesia, and the "slaves" that the andofman thought they created were actually prisonoers of war and captured crèches brought by would be conquerors.
This news is not greeted with universal acclaim, somehow. Some androids are pushing to go to the Vanished to learn how to free themselves. Others want to nuke the planet from orbit for daring to challenge their identity. Others are just confused.
The PCs take an escort contract to ferry a VIP to some secret conference. When they arrive they discover it's a low-ranking devil. He/she reminds them of their obligation and surrenders his armaments with the promise of doubling their fee if they take him to a specific location in the Drift instead of this conference.
While inside the Drift, the PCs discover a hidden city-world cobbled together from the outer-planes flotsam of former trips. The hidden city is populated by celestials and fiends who have reportedly taken oaths of neutrality and nonviolence in order to try to make their new home slightly more tolerable.
As it turns out, the city takes on new residents but only sparingly, and new members must be vouched for by existing ones. The city occasionally sends out member of its own to find refugees and offer residency to them, but otherwise "fight club rules" apply.
The PCs' new friend obviously had heard of the hidden city, so it's not as secret as its inhabitants hoped. Why did their new friend want to confirm the city's existence? And how does the city's population react to unannounced visitors not having gone through the normal channels? And how did the PCs' new friend find out about this place anyway?
Is the neutral city so peaceable as we'd like to believe? Can opposing outsiders coexist peacefully? Or is the whole setup a ruse to lure wanderers in for some ulterior motive? Maybe it really is the utopia they think it is--or maybe the evil outsiders are just waiting for the right moment to backstab everyone else. Or perhaps the upper planes residents are all turned to the dark side, and the whole city is evil and corrupt. And maybe someone or someones in town has just been biding their time, hoping someone will be stupid enough to show up and surrender their starship to the city guards, and the townie(s) will soon attempt to run off with the ship to escape the Drift and get back to their home plane.
Let's hope the PCs just make it out of there alive, reward or no reward.
I've got a little started adventure planned to introduce everyone (including me to the rules & setting).
The group are contracted by a space station trying to get its hydroponics started. They are to fly out to an ice field and tow a comet back. On arrival to the ice field they meet other contractors doing much the same, except a few of them would rather others do the hard work and scoop up the profits themselves. Starship combat, boarding actions and diplomatic resolutions are all possible. But wait, there's more!
The group needs to "land" on the comet and attach the huge towing chains. Except the comet is invested with ice elementals, none too happy about their home being turned into a giant slushee back at the station. If the PC's survive and begin towing the comet away, all may seem well... except the little elementals they defeated may only be miniature versions of a much bigger and angrier opponent. Cue space chase!
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Characters start on Absolom Station on a far outskirt bar. A massive ship appears out of deep space. The station defends itself with a everything it can, but the ship simply ignores the attacks and flies closer. The massive ship slices off a chunk of the station,(Including the bar the party is at) pulls it into its hull and disappears back into space.
A beginning battle ensues where the chunk of space station is boarded. Characters defend themselves as best they can until finally gas is released and everyone knocked unconscious.
Characters wake up in the ships prison. Eventually they escape, sneak or fight their way to an escape pod, and jettison themselves out towards a nearby planet. But the ship is deep past known space.
The Characters land on an unknown planet with nothing but supplies they could grab before their escape. They have to evade and scavenge from the search parties of their mysterious kidnappers. They must find a ship, learn what mysterious society could so easily remove part of Absolom station, and more importantly, discover why.
...A fail safe, created by super advanced aliens, hunts down any civilization that has ftl capabilities, tracking ships by their signature when they jump. In this way, the advanced aliens remain top dog of the galaxy. Now humans have to contend with this weapon while exploring the stars and expanding their empire.So... basically ME: Andromeda? ;)
I read this as an adaptation of some of Alastair Reynolds' ideas in Revelation Space, or Jack McDevitt's Academy series of books.
I just gave my players a few options:
1) You're on a space station in the far reaches of space, and a deadly enemy of the station has just arrived, threatening the integrity of the entire station. You're too far out to get support from the central government. It's up to you to solve the problem.
2) You are currently at a gambling hall. You've just won a planet in a game of poker. The guy you won it from doesn't seem angry that he lost. He seems relieved.
3) You've been captured by a powerful organization. They seem to have mistaken you for a serial killer/cannibal, and they've brought you in specifically because you're to meet the leader of a powerful space pirate gang - one who happens to be completely infatuated with cannibals and knows your every kill in all its details.
4) You've been hired to impersonate an ace pilot. The adventure starts at the first meeting.
Neat ideas, all of them.
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Something that popped into my head last night:
AbadarCorp is a massive, sprawling company, with branches doing all kinds of things out in the Pact Worlds. Every now and again, though, a branch does something...questionable. Promote the wrong director, create a product with troubling side-effects or hire a scientist whose ethics turn out to be TOO flexible. That's where you come in. Formed as a collaboration between AbadarCorp and the Stewards, you're an elite team sent to audit obscure AbadarCorp enterprises, ensuring their activities follow both company regulations and Pact World laws. When a branch manager begins violently crushing his android employees attempt to form a union, when a new brand of cookie appears to drive their consumers insane with cravings, when an entire research facility goes dark and their last transmission sounds like an angry roar, you're sent in to investigate, and if necessary, neutralize the problem with deadly force. Officially, you're company auditors, but most lower level employees call you...THE CLEANUP CREW.
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More of a seed, a planet devoid of life, after an experiment taping into the plane of positive energy goes too well. all the plants grew too fast and sucked out all the nutrients from the soil. all those that were living in the area died from being too healthy. a few survivors are left but they have to keep hurting themselves to stay alive and not pop with positive energy. the positive energy keeps them sustained without food or water. play with it as you want.
Player will be part of some unconnected incidents across the pact worlds. Later they discover that all of them are staged by the same shady person.
This person is an agent of an long forgotten race which was banned from this dimenstion. Due to some ancient relicts on several worlds they can't re-enter this dimension. And guess where these incidents were? Exactly at the relicts.
So the agents are destroying these relicts/anchors to let their master back into this world.
(Nice twist: the players are destroying some relicts them self, without knowing what they are doing^^).
Once the player realize waht happen it's to late. The old race already got a foothold in this dimension and is starting to conquer the pact worlds one by one.
The players then have to united the worlds, gather a fleet and
defeat the old race once and for all to claim back their worlds.
(Mix of Babylon 5, Mass Effect and several other scifi series.^^)
So many good ideas indeed, I think my opening campaign is going to be "You find yourself without arms or armor, memory wiped, sealed inside a bone white room 5 foot square. An image of a haunting beautiful eleven face appears on the screen before you, slowly counting down from 10. You find yourself on an Eox reality television show. How did you get here?
In the game of Eox reality television, you die. Period.
The party find themselves among a group of 16 contestants on an Eox reality show with no memory other than they chose to be here and how to use their rudimentary class skills. They must act quickly to setup a defensive position against the hostile environment, win competitions, make alliances, avoid unwanted attention and control the vote.
The bottom two fight to their death, or in special elimination round they may need to kill their opponent but also survive a secret aberration guest monster.
Can the party survive? Can they control the vote? There has to be a way to escape, the game is rigged.
Kicker would be that everyone will die - just that the ultimate winner becomes one of the risen...
The characters are all Humans from Earth, abducted by aliens. They wake up in an odd, dark chamber, during an earthquake, get chased by weird, spider like things when the lights turn back on, and escape in a ship they somehow know how to fly. Where did they just escape from? Apostae. Turns out they were abducted during the Gap, have no clue how they got the skills they now have, are being chased by the Drow for their ship and the knowledge of how to get into the vaults, the Watchers of the Sleepers to get them back in their pods, and looking for a way to get back to Earth.
I just had my first session of a new campaign last night, and here's what I'm planning so far.
The party started out coming into a company town on Akitan called Kraseth, run by the Aspis Consortium to house the workers in one of the planets few remaining profitable thasteron mines. They were hired by the extremely unpersonable chief security officer, Darvus Pohren Aldul, an iron-fisted Kasathi with an evil space-sheriff vibe. He wants them to find out what's been happening to foremen that have gone missing in the mines. They ventured inside and after they had gotten into some of the deeper tunnels, they were attacked by their Ysoki guide, as well as several other Ysoki workers. Right now, they're assuming that the ysoki are striking out in vengeance for the atrocious conditions they work under (and they can't realistically leave because most of their wages go towards paying for food, and company housing is part of their contracts. They quite and they're out in the desert with nowhere to go).
I truth, one of the miners, an Ysoki mystic, discovered a strange pyrimadal object deep in the mines that boosted her powers and gave her control over several akata that were slumbering in cocoons nearby. She has started in a cult of Lao Shu Po in the bowels of the mines and is intent on killing everyone except her fellow Ysoki. Once the PCs deal with her, Darvus will demand that artifact, claiming it as Aspis Consortium property, but he's a huge dick so the PCs will probably resist and I'm going to give them some sort of means to escape to the nearby Hivemarket where most of the ore is sold so they can find a means off planet. If Darvus survives (fingers crossed), he'll be a recurring NPC villain and eventually join the Hellknights as he continues to hound the PCs.
In any case, I plan to steer them towards Absolom station and they'll be contacted by the Starfinder Society as word of what they carry gets around. The Starfinders have a similar object in their vaults, and when the two artifacts are brought together, they connect themselves. Presuming there are others out there, the Starfinders contract the PCs to find them. They will also be courted by other interested parties after the artifact, including the Aspis Consortium, who recognizes them as skilled individuals and wants to let bygones be bygones if it means they can bring a potent new resource into their fold.
I haven't worked out exactly what the artifacts are yet, but they'll be something big when they're put together, and the most pressing threat will be once the Cult of the Devourer decides they want it. All I know for now is that is has potential as a weapon, but can do other stuff too, and its covered in symbols that seem to predate any language in the known worlds, but has some similarities to an ancient and archaic dialect of Aklo.
I was thinking that about half way through one of the previous eliminated players comes back as the risen, with a vengeance or grudge against the other players. Makes for a good re-occurring villain for the party.
The party escapes and each of them tries to track down their own personal vendettas and or memories. A trail of sudden obstacles or coincidental climatic moments lead them to believe that they have been continuously recorded all this time and never really left the game show. The final show down is with the executive producers...
You could have some of the escapees/survivors have necrotic augmentation or be infected with necro-nanities that are slowly turning them undead? Game (within the game) never ends... Clock is ticking type of scenario.
I think Armitage III would make for an amazing Starfinder campaign setting. It has so many layers, ranging from questions on life and love, to ethical quandaries, to interplanetary politics.
I think Armitage III would make for an amazing Starfinder campaign setting. It has so many layers, ranging from questions on life and love, to ethical quandaries, to interplanetary politics.
Here's a better video sample that more accurately shows what Armitage III is all about.
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The PCs are a salvage team off a bulk freighter when they find a derelict starship. Approaching the derelict, their freighter is suddenly fired upon by an unknown ship... and completely destroyed.
Lacking any other option, they board the derelict and find it's got enough power to fight off the attacker and get back to port. And that's when they find their primary employer assassinated and his business assets seized by Abadarcorp.
What secrets do they have?
Who is willing to kill to get their hands on this ship and why?
Are they next?
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While salvaging/exploring a derelict station the PCs come across some sort of obelisk. After the obelisk bathes them in some sort of energy, a corporate team barges in and opens fire. The obelisk is now featureless and inert. When the party gets back to civilization, they find that the corp has trashed their rep and painted them as monsters. What is this obelisk? What did that light do? And Why is the corp out to ruin the PCs now?
A massive ship is detected on the fringes of the Pact system, and it is either unwilling or unable to respond to any efforts to communicate with it. Although it is on a course straight for Absalom Station, it appears to be significantly older than it. The best guess of anyone looking into the matter is that the thing is headed to where Golarion theoretically used to. If there is sapience controlling it, they would not be happy to see it gone. If there isn't, there's potential that it will crash into the station and utterly destroy it -- and with it the Pact, leaving the rest of the system in bloody chaos.
Numerous expeditions are competing to get into the anomalous object, discover its secrets, and possibly get rich doing it. It's a lure no explorer worth anything can resist. Before you're done, though, you may wish you had.
Steal the synopsis of the movie, Virus, and place it in space. Ought to make for a pretty good adventure. :D
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I've been toying with an idea. I know my friends frequent the boards and I might want to run this for them one day (as soon as the bestiary equivalent comes out) so I'll hide in in spoilers.
See, the Azlanti have predicted that if they launch a surprise attack, they can take out both the Veskarium and the Pact Worlds and bring them all under Azlanti control (and Absolom station, with the Starstone, makes a VERY tempting target.) The only variable they can't account for are Solarians, because they don't know how they derive their power or what they can do, they are worried about striking against something they don't understand.
So they have secretly supplied and nurtured this cult, learning how to fight against solarians, and trying to unlock the secrets (surprisingly difficult for them, as Solarians require at least an understanding of the cycle, and that would mean for the Azlanti casting aside Lissala, which they are lothe to do.
This will probably have to wait until a bit later in Starfinder history, but --
The PCs have been tasked to investigate what is behind a sudden and apparently long-lasting increase in attacks by Fiends. Of course, the blaming eye turns towards Drift drives tearing off pieces of planes, but the use of Drift drives has not changed much from before this started happening to after. Something more is afoot . . . and while the PCs investigate some new and newly empowered Fiendish cults, they find that somebody in Hell figured out how to predict what parts of various planes will be torn off, and when, and is already making use of this knowledge to turn it to the Fiends' advantage. Asmodeus wants his old status back . . . and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the Demon Lords and (worse yet) even Qlippoth Lords are all too willing to get in on the action.
Tombworld of the Spider King
An splinter race of space faring Drow broke away from Apostate sometime during the Gap and founded an empire that stretched throughout a twelve planet solar system. But at some point before the end of that same Gap, the last ruler of these renegade Drow gathered all of his citizens and all of his slaves onto his throne world and some how forced the entire civilization to commit suicide.
Since the end of their empire, the Tombworld of the nameless "Spider King" now sits dead and quiet. Overgrown with vegetation and covered in dust, the crumbling super structures and planet wide cities are quiet and still.
But a single signal remains. The sound of an endless beep from some piece of technology with valuable pre-Gap knowledge on it's hard drive.
Deep in the dead capital of the dead city, something stirs...
one scenario that I plan on running in my episodic game is;
A deranged cult seeks to revive a deceased nova spawn that has sat near an inhabited world since it was first defeated more than 50 years ago. The crew must track down the original heroes who first killed it if they are going to make their way into the heart of the thing in time to stop the ritual that will raise it back from the dead and let it complete its terrible life cycle and destroy the neighboring planet.
Scenario includes mostly flashbacks where they will get to play the original crew initially overcoming the nova spawn and then the last remaining member leading their actual characters through those same place from the flashbacks.
The PCs are selected from various pre-FTL civilizations. They awaken on a city sized derelict spacecraft in fixed orbit around an unknown planet with no memory of how they got there. There would be three general acts.
The first being the PCs exploring the ship, dealing with the other passengers, and making vital repairs before it plummets to the planet below.
The second acts involves the PCs descending a massive orbital tether to secure the supplies for the craft to fully repair itself and refit for long term habitation.
The third act would be mounting a defense of the ship and planet to repel the attentions of some suitably nasty threat from beyond the system.
General themes would be resource management, balancing alien biologies against each other, diplomacy with alien species. I’m toying with various resource allocation mechanics that would balance quality of life and morale against things like unlocking new equipment from the ship’s matter printers or better relations with the handful of factions.
A lot of the inspiration frankly comes from Farscape more than anything. I would probably restrict the number of humans in the party to encourage players to do some world building with their characters.
Also a Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai/Battle Beyond the Stars campaign
With the passing of Carrie Fisher, I am thinking of adapting Starfinder to play in the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
The characters would be members of the Rebel Alliance.
Consider
Fringer - Operative* (or Operative/Mechanic multiclass)
Noble - Envoy
Scoundrel - Operative*
Soldier - Soldier
Scout - Operative* (or Operative/Soldier multiclass)
Tech Specialist - Mechanic
Force Adept - Mystic* - Different Archetypes
Jedi - Still need to figure how to model these classes. I would need more information on the Solarion.
I find that arming a Mystic with a plasma sword and taking feats that allow projectile deflection works well to emulate the Jedi.
one scenario that I plan on running in my episodic game is;
A deranged cult seeks to revive a deceased nova spawn that has sat near an inhabited world since it was first defeated more than 50 years ago. The crew must track down the original heroes who first killed it if they are going to make their way into the heart of the thing in time to stop the ritual that will raise it back from the dead and let it complete its terrible life cycle and destroy the neighboring planet.
Scenario includes mostly flashbacks where they will get to play the original crew initially overcoming the nova spawn and then the last remaining member leading their actual characters through those same place from the flashbacks.
Flip the script: The characters must seek out a dormant nova spawn to relight the dying sun that an inhabited but freezing planet orbits around.
I'm working on a planetcrawl based on some antiauthoritarian postapocalyptic '80s YA s-f books, and an exploration/first-contact scenario involving an alien (from the perspective of the whole galaxy) space ark.
Flip the script: The characters must seek out a dormant nova spawn to relight the dying sun that an inhabited but freezing planet orbits around.
The vlaka would like a word with you about that. An encouraging one, most likely.
OK, well since someone already necroposted in here a few months ago...
I once had a grand idea for a first Starfinder campaign back when the game first came out. Some epic. Something original. Something furry... because the game only launched with Ysoki and Vesk meaning we'd have to wait a few year for all the Bestiaries to bless us with a wealth of furry race options.
I spent a lot of my first years after the game came out homebrewing this instead of actually playing the game... and of course I burnt out on it. Still, wealth of ideas I'll loot for new projects, so here's the synopsis.
Somewhere in the far space there is a solar system that was a space fairing before the Gap. They were doing well, with most of the planets in that solar system forming a republic and starting a slow expansion outwards to other star systems. (And we do mean slow. Their FTL system was a homebrewed Ether-Rail system, meaning they were literally laying down rails to the next star system. It's like some dwarf in a bar said nothing could be slower than a generation ship, and a beaver said hold my bear.)
Unfortunately, all great empires had to fall, and for them it was due to the undead borg invaded the capital planet of the republic. (Do we have undead borg yet? I haven't heard of them, but I'm behind on Bestiaries.) During the attack the undead borg break the planets discount-Starstone-macguffin, causing the entire planet to disappear leaving just half of the macguffin behind.
You might think this sounds familiar to Golarian, but there is a key difference between the two. This all happened BEFORE the Gap. In fact the Gap doesn't start for this star system for another fifty years, with those years filled with chaos as people tried to survive/prevent/reverse the collapse. So these people know when and why the planet disappeared, with maybe just a few questions on the how.
Trigger the Gap, and on the other side the star system is still alive, but not in great shape with mainly furthest planet from the sun being the new bastion of unity and things getting more [censored] the closer you get to the sun. Still, they are alive and making slow progress in de[censoring] the place. They get the drift, make contact with the galaxy at large, and things are looking good.
The cue the re-arrivial of the undead borg. All upgraded like a classic Doctor Who bad guy from the original run of the show reintroduced to the new generation.
This causes chaos both in system and in their embassies. It's the embassies who we're concerned with since they are trying to get people to send help before so many drift beacons are destroyed by the undead borg that the system moves from far space to part of the vast. While well wishes are all around, the only person willing to commit forces fast enough is a Vesk General who took their response of "We'll join the Veskarium IF you can solve all the other problems in our solar system" as a challenge rather than a deterrent. So the adventure starts off.
Here's where it gets complicated. Party chooses from one of two time periods: Pre-Gap or Post-Gap. Pre-Gap is only races from this solar system as those races were Pre-Gap, and Post-Gap are those races plus the rest of Starfinder.
For the sake of pacing, we start with the Pre-Gap group. They are on planet in the that's about to disappear on a day of celebration, right on the day the attack happen. Ideally, players who selected Pre-Gap are only working with the material handed to them about this settings Pre-Gap details, while the Post-Gap players are told to zip their lips.
The attack happens. Some battles take place, with Post-Gap players controlling some stock characters if they aren't alt-aholics who'll create characters for a one off just for fun. Then the discount-Starstone-macguffin breaks, end of session.
Next session, Post-Gap players with Pre-Gap players controlling random Vesk red shirts. They arrive in system, and find out that the undead borg have stolen the surviving shard of the discount-Starstone-macguffin, and are making a beeline for the where the old capitol planet used to be. Chase ensues with star ship combat, then the undead borg do something modern Starfinder would blame on witchwarpers and suddenly the entire old capital planet is back. It's crawling with old undead borg with a fleet of the new undead borg surrounding it.
Post-Gap players crash land on the planet plot conveniently close to the Pre-Gap players. Any stock characters die or just stuffed into a backup character folder, and the real champaign begins.
So... yeah. Homebrewing an entire star system, TWICE, was a little too ambitious and the reason I burnt out on the entire thing before ever getting to play it. Still, I'm personally attached to a LOT of the ideas I dreamt up for this system, so I'm now working on a Starfinder 2E version of the system now... just not with this whole time travel plot, so enjoy the scenario if you are brave enough to steal it.
I was hoping to do sth in the continuation of WOTR but in Starfinder. The wordlwound on Golarion was closed and there's no Golarion anymore anyway. So it would be a paranoic chase to figure out if the seemingly random attacks of demons are the prelude to something worse.
I wanted to use Basileus as the quest giver but a devil this close to Asmodeus would know what happens in the Abyss. But the reason why I wanted a devil to do it was to force the PC in a contract to keep doing his bidding. That and I wanted to scare my PC a bit by making them doubt they are "real". The people who should know them can't recognise them because there's a détail that doesn't add up. A little uncanney valley effect.
Landing party. They have a shuttle craft and work out of a large exploratory pact ship. The GM creates or randomly generates systems, skipping over ones with no explorable planets or objects.
Someone invents or discovers a time based warp drive. In trying to find Golarion, they discover thousands of them, all with different histories. Meddling with their own past has resulted in their crowding each other out of the main timeline. As they explore the different versions, any of a number of complications develop.
1: Orderly and chaotic versions may start a war as soon as they become aware of each other.
2: Like minded worlds form their own pacts.
3: Individual worlds build a wormhole to the main timeline, all for different reasons.
4: A particularly dystopian world starts trying to move their world into the main timeline at the expense of the other worlds.
5: The Gods all send emissaries, at the level of the characters.
6: All these and more.