Beyond The Pact Worlds


General Discussion

Grand Lodge

I am wondering if Paizo is going to tackle things outside the pact worlds more specifically will they try flesh out the rest of the galaxy?


It's more than likely, though my guess is incrementally. I mean it's been almost a decade and they've just scratched the surface of Golarion.

Grand Lodge

1 person marked this as a favorite.

From my perspective they have filled in 95% of golarion.

what I wonder is if any spaces will by left blank for GM's to add their own personal locals?


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Adventuring Knight wrote:

From my perspective they have filled in 95% of golarion.

what I wonder is if any spaces will by left blank for GM's to add their own personal locals?

The majority of golarion is still mostly undescribed, at least to the point where it would be difficult to make a campaign without a heavy amount of worldbuilding. There have been books fairly comprehensively detailing Avistan, Tian Xia, and Northern Garund. However, Arcadia, The islands that comprise Azlant, Casmaron, The Crown of the World, and Sarusan have gone largely undefined.

In terms of starfinder, I highly doubt paizo is willing to fill out every planet within an entire galaxy. ~100 billion planets are theorized to comprise the milky way. To say the least, it would be a bit difficult to describe all of them.


Archmage Variel wrote:
Adventuring Knight wrote:

From my perspective they have filled in 95% of golarion.

what I wonder is if any spaces will by left blank for GM's to add their own personal locals?

The majority of golarion is still mostly undescribed, at least to the point where it would be difficult to make a campaign without a heavy amount of worldbuilding. There have been books fairly comprehensively detailing Avistan, Tian Xia, and Northern Garund. However, Arcadia, The islands that comprise Azlant, Casmaron, The Crown of the World, and Sarusan have gone largely undefined.

In terms of starfinder, I highly doubt paizo is willing to fill out every planet within an entire galaxy. ~100 billion planets are theorized to comprise the milky way. To say the least, it would be a bit difficult to describe all of them.

Indeed, we're likely to get a great deal more info on the pact worlds, but considering that one of the core races is from a different stellar system it's not unlikely we will see info on other systems.

Scarab Sages Developer, Starfinder Team

7 people marked this as a favorite.
Adventuring Knight wrote:

From my perspective they have filled in 95% of golarion.

what I wonder is if any spaces will by left blank for GM's to add their own personal locals?

It's a setting with a form of FTL travel set in a galaxy. That's approximately 100 thousand million stars.

Even if we planned to leave no spaces blank (and there's no such plan), we'd never get to everything. You can set entire star empires in the cracks between defined systems.


My guess is we will end up going to or dealing with something from beyond the pact worlds in the first AP. They are showcasing a new setting with it so i expect we will get a brief introduction to a few places and powers in the pact worlds and then see a bit of the weird(er) crazy(er) stuff that made the pact worlds need to happen in the first place.

Also, Owen, there is the challenge now. 100 thousand million stars and your team needs to write enough material to fill 95% of those stars with something that is Starfinder Canon in the next 8 years. Good luck! :P


Owen K. C. Stephens wrote:

It's a setting with a form of FTL travel set in a galaxy. That's approximately 100 thousand million stars.

Even if we planned to leave no spaces blank (and there's no such plan), we'd never get to everything. You can set entire star empires in the cracks between defined systems.

There is a good "yes" answer to the question, if there ever was one.


If it helps, there are third-party publishers like Legendary Games and Frog God Games who are creating extra worlds with varying traits that can be used for your home games.

Grand Lodge

What brought this up is I am Working on creating a small section of the galaxy called "The Spine"


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

My guess is the first AP will cover what's new in the main solar system and visit a few neighboring system's planets, and then each of the other APs will expand further into those systems and beyond.


I fully support GMs and 3rd Party publishers for Starfinder to come up with their own stuff for everyone to use. The game is open, the Galaxy is open, the visible Universe is open, lets all be cool and explore where we want.


Adventuring Knight wrote:
What brought this up is I am Working on creating a small section of the galaxy called "The Spine"

Stick it in the halo in an open cluster. I very much doubt if that's all going to be detailed, and you'd get a fairly self-contained region with an absolutely marvellous night sky. It's what I'm planning on doing.


Owen K. C. Stephens wrote:
Adventuring Knight wrote:

From my perspective they have filled in 95% of golarion.

what I wonder is if any spaces will by left blank for GM's to add their own personal locals?

It's a setting with a form of FTL travel set in a galaxy. That's approximately 100 thousand million stars.

Even if we planned to leave no spaces blank (and there's no such plan), we'd never get to everything. You can set entire star empires in the cracks between defined systems.

That many stars means that even if every person on Earth went to work on it and flesh out 1 star system in their spare time, the task wouldn't get anywhere near finished.


UnArcaneElection wrote:
Owen K. C. Stephens wrote:
Adventuring Knight wrote:

From my perspective they have filled in 95% of golarion.

what I wonder is if any spaces will by left blank for GM's to add their own personal locals?

It's a setting with a form of FTL travel set in a galaxy. That's approximately 100 thousand million stars.

Even if we planned to leave no spaces blank (and there's no such plan), we'd never get to everything. You can set entire star empires in the cracks between defined systems.

That many stars means that even if every person on Earth went to work on it and flesh out 1 star system in their spare time, the task wouldn't get anywhere near finished.

To be exact, if every person on the planet fleshed out 1 star system per day, for about two weeks, then you would get 100 thousand million star systems.

Grand Lodge

I will be posting details on the spine in a week or so.


BeastMasterFTW wrote:
UnArcaneElection wrote:
Owen K. C. Stephens wrote:
Adventuring Knight wrote:

From my perspective they have filled in 95% of golarion.

what I wonder is if any spaces will by left blank for GM's to add their own personal locals?

It's a setting with a form of FTL travel set in a galaxy. That's approximately 100 thousand million stars.

Even if we planned to leave no spaces blank (and there's no such plan), we'd never get to everything. You can set entire star empires in the cracks between defined systems.

That many stars means that even if every person on Earth went to work on it and flesh out 1 star system in their spare time, the task wouldn't get anywhere near finished.

To be exact, if every person on the planet fleshed out 1 star system per day, for about two weeks, then you would get 100 thousand million star systems.

Good luck fleshing out a whole star system in 1 day, since Golarion (never mind Golarion's solar system) isn't even finished.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
UnArcaneElection wrote:

Good luck fleshing out a whole star system in 1 day, since Golarion (never mind Golarion's solar system) isn't even finished.

Most of them are empty or would be barren of life, so maybe the people that finish early can help the others?


Maybe . . . but more likely, the people that finish early would be the ones that have to go back to their jobs because their bosses won't give them time off for world building.


UnArcaneElection wrote:

Maybe . . . but more likely, the people that finish early would be the ones that have to go back to their jobs because their bosses won't give them time off for world building.

That's ironically true.


How fast is Drift travel? If there are worlds far enough away that no ship from Pact space could reach them during the lifetime of the established setting, then we can safely leave such planets undeveloped as they are beyond the "event horizon" (in a literal sense) of the Starfinder setting.

There are 100 billion stars in a certain galaxy. A supercluster can contain thousands if not millions of galaxies. We do not have to map star systems that no one in Starfinder will ever be able to explore within the current cosmological decade. Nor should we ever really concern ourselves with star systems so distant they might be visited perhaps once in the setting's lifetime. Such "throwaway systems" would better rely on characteristics generated at runtime, or randomly chosen from a database of single-use pregenerated star systems.


^Good question. If it is like hyperspace travel in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series (instantaneous but required many short jumps with substantial setup time in between) or Star Wars (setup time of only a few minutes, and then go very fast for as long as you want), then getting across the whole galaxy and even some way beyond the visual edge of the galaxy is at most only a moderately big deal; by implication, getting to another galaxy would be a huge deal but definitely doable with appropriate preparation and resources. If it is like warp travel in Star Trek, you would need decades to get across the galaxy unless you find a wormhole big enough to get through, and centuries to get to the next galaxy even with a souped-up warp drive.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
UnArcaneElection wrote:

^Good question. If it is like hyperspace travel in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series (instantaneous but required many short jumps with substantial setup time in between) or Star Wars (setup time of only a few minutes, and then go very fast for as long as you want), then getting across the whole galaxy and even some way beyond the visual edge of the galaxy is at most only a moderately big deal; by implication, getting to another galaxy would be a huge deal but definitely doable with appropriate preparation and resources. If it is like warp travel in Star Trek, you would need decades to get across the galaxy unless you find a wormhole big enough to get through, and centuries to get to the next galaxy even with a souped-up warp drive.

Of course with a souped up warp drive, you'll end up turning into salamanders.


2 people marked this as a favorite.

Ugh. Nothing quite says Star Trek like kidnapping and raping your CO, then mutually deciding to abandon the resulting children and pretend it never happened.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

In my headcanon everything that happened in that episode after the warp 10 trip were all false memories given them by the Q (which makes sense, because only Q would make up something that silly). In fact, Warp 10 makes you a Q-like being with Q-like powers.

When Paris went to Warp 10, he came back normal, then began manifesting thought into reality. He got this power from reaching the End of Universe ("Where No One Has Gone Before"). It starts out weak parlor tricks then gets really out of hand. Ultimately Paris tries something drastic once he feels he has mastered his new powers. It fails, then Q shows up.

Paris' voyage got the attention of a LOT of powerful races who came over to investigate, because that's apparently how a race graduates to become demigod in power. Some of them are aghast at how primitive these humans still are, and probably want to destroy Voyager because humans aren't "ready" for that kind of power yet. Some of them accuse Q of shenanigans trying to uplift other races for his own amusement....he denies everyrhing of course. Now the Traveler also shows up, along with Wesley Crusher and advocates on behalf of the humans and Voyager crew. It's a great big brouhaha with Voyager stuck in the middle. Half of them want to kill everyone just for making this huge fuss, and the other half want to actually help Voyager--not by getting them home, but by ascending them all as Q-like beings and joining the community of demigod races (although they would also have to give up on ever returning to their old lives and families).

Q is annoyed, because he considers humans "his" pets. But he is also mildly impressed by their being able to engineer a Warp 10 drive so early in human evolution. As an act of mercy, he prevents the malevolent demigod beings from destroying Voyager outright, rigs the Warp 10 engine (as a concession to the bloodthirsty beings) so that it would explode and wipe out the whole Voyager crew if it's ever activated again, and finally brainwashes the Voyager crew's memories so they'll be too afraid to try again. Because salamanders is how Q really sees humans still. Salamanders who know how to build warp drives.

Grand Lodge

I am now going to bring you a primer on the Spine...

The Spine is a dense star cluster taking up 9 percent of the galaxy made remarkable by three factors: first the Spine itself, a portion of a nebula constituting 35% of the region strikingly shaped like a vertebra in addition ancient records seem to indicate this nebula did not exist before the gap and that the star systems inside predate it by possibly millennia. Second a larger than average number planets and planetoids are currently or formerly habitable due likely to ancient terraforming. third is growing number of reports detailing an "anomaly" at the edge of spine facing the Galaxy with reports implying "missing time" and analog as well as digital records being corrupted beyond use.


Why necessarily corrupt the data? It'd be more of a plot lure or macguffin type of thing if you allowed that the "lost files" only merely turned out to be encrypted in some way that none of the most advanced computers or cryptographers available can make heads or tails of how to break the encryption. It's not quantum encryption, but it's something weird and we can't figure it out.

Even more funky would be to have the memories that are repressed, if they are somehow brought to the surface through hypnosis or magic or whatever, are experienced by the hypnotizee as a Matrix-like waterfapp of ideograms, interlaced with auditory notes of strange music (think like BSG when All Along the Watchtower was being heard--but the same moment of time being revisited always has the same sequence of symbols and notes of music, no matter how many times that moment is revisited in later sessions.) probably familiar smells, touches, and feelings of warmth or cold or pain occur too, but they don't make any sense together...

Grand Lodge

In all honesty the Spine is still in it's drafting stage and I will probably cut the "anomaly" out altogether.

However I am keeping the first two snippets.


Voss wrote:
Ugh. Nothing quite says Star Trek like kidnapping and raping your CO, then mutually deciding to abandon the resulting children and pretend it never happened.

Fixing this for you:

Ugh. Nothing quite says Star Trek Voyager like kidnapping and raping your CO, then mutually deciding to abandon the resulting children and pretend it never happened.

(Although from what I've heard, but not seen, parts of Star Trek Enterprise may have been equally bad.)


UnArcaneElection wrote:
Voss wrote:
Ugh. Nothing quite says Star Trek like kidnapping and raping your CO, then mutually deciding to abandon the resulting children and pretend it never happened.

Fixing this for you:

Ugh. Nothing quite says Star Trek Voyager like kidnapping and raping your CO, then mutually deciding to abandon the resulting children and pretend it never happened.

(Although from what I've heard, but not seen, parts of Star Trek Enterprise may have been equally bad.)

I don't know why you think making it less accurate is fixing it. Every series of Star Trek has horrible stinker episodes with tremendously morally dubious (to outright horrifying) actions by the main characters. Even the good one with the space station.

Next Gen has the 'wonderful' episode where the crew is magically mindwiped of only the script (and not anything that would prevent them from doing complicated things like running a starship), and go on to horribly murder an random number of people on a completely outclassed ship under the excuse of 'just following orders.'

Or the hilariously bad episode where various admirals have been taken over by evil alien parasites in what was presumably an attempt to explain away the general incompetence of Star Fleet, but said aliens never show up again.


^I didn't see the mindwipe/murderhobo episode, but I'll take your word for it; however, Voyager seemed to have the lion's share of stinker episodes (morally dubious or otherwise). That said, the Next Generation episode (Genesis, one of the last ones, but not the very last one) where the crew devolves into animals that aren't even in their evolutionary lineage is mindbogglingly bad, and some of the psychobabble episodes are pretty bad too.

I thought the episode where various admirals were taken over by alien parasites had potential, but (according to what I read independently) at that point some pointy-haired boss(es) made the decision to kill all story arcs, on the grounds that audiences wouldn't be able to follow them.


Oh, yeah. Any star trek episode (and a lot of sci-fi generally) that involves 'evolution' is pretty much automatically bad. The writers don't grasp it at all, and for some reason seem to feel there is an almost set 'path' in the genes for single organism to follow in the complete absence of environmental selection and breeding, both of which are kind of important. Creatures don't just spontaneously mutate into other creatures. Ever. That pretty much requires magic.

And 'devolution' amazingly manages to be even worse, as in the episode in question.


^That said, that misconception is far from being confined to Star Trek . . . . I'd even recommend we make another thread for talking about things like this, but fortunately, one already exists, so here's a new post in that thread.


The alien parasites fell into the hole of plot revisions, the Borg were originally an insect hivemenid rather than a technological one.


I'll be honest, I never watch Threshold. I just remember someone telling me that they went so fast they devolved into salamanders. Hence the joke about it.

Probably should move this back on topic.


It's not the first derail on the SF boards

Grand Lodge

can anyone give me critique of the primer before I post the next section.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Voss wrote:
Or the hilariously bad episode where various admirals have been taken over by evil alien parasites in what was presumably an attempt to explain away the general incompetence of Star Fleet, but said aliens never show up again.

One theory is that the "Bluegill" reinforcements got lost trying to reach Federation space.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Nah. Another ship crew, who happed to be player characters in a Star Trek PnP RPG, sorted them out.

Community / Forums / Starfinder / Starfinder General Discussion / Beyond The Pact Worlds All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Starfinder General Discussion