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So anyone who knows me is well aware of my love affair with magitech. Whether its an enchanted robot buddy or a soul eating tank powered by the inifinite endurance of the shambling dead.
Starfinder is pretty much exactly what ive been looking for to revive my interest in paizo related products and has reignited what got me writing for it from the start.
That said as a fan of the genre I want to share what I hope for next month.
For one i hope the line between magic and technology is so blurred that the practitioners of magic just do things for free what costs a soldier or operative some money to do. Im not talking about utilizing a skill to operate mage reatricted items but how the scaleable items can match and in rare cases beat magic.
Take for example a police force that often utilizes hold person. That force might employ a few mystics who can use the spell to subdue and apprehend suspects at a distance. However the same force can also employ neural disruptors to get the same results at a relatively cheap cost and woth little training. The difference being the disruptors have a relatively small range and.paralysis time. Fine for regular ofgicers but not so much fpr long ranges or difficult to hit targets allowing the mystics to serve as specialists.
However recent job riots have illustrated the nees for a mass disruptor prompting the manufactirer to propose adding such a product to the police arsenal. However, fearing obsolescence the local mystics guild proposes training their magical officers in the casting of mass hold person. To complicate matters an outside magitech conglomerate proposes a piece of equipment that allows riot officers to activate a vest to project a disruption aura along with a helmet that allows multiple officers to work in conjunction at 1/4 of the cost of the wave cannon.
So in the end the debate doesnt come down to quick but mysterious and rare magic options versus slow ineffective options. But cost, time, training and the details of politics.
I also hope that magic is even more banal than it is in fantasy where magic has this kind of feeling of necessity to it that kind of disrupts the idea of blue collar heroes just being preternaturally skilled. Like, id love it if groups have debates on whether certain spells were even worth using on the basis of having a machine or weapon that can perform the same function at a manageable cost. At that point its not science vs. Magic but magical science vs. Scientifically applied magic.
Ultimately if we end up channeling a bit of the ole Douglas Adams I think we're doing great.
What a great concept. Especially with the example of the police force; imagine a "Bureau of Tech and Magic" in which such decisions come down to whose cousin owns the widget factory or which magical guild the higher bureaucrat owes a favor to.
I agree with you 100%. The way I see it, the duality of tech & magic is analogous to PF's duality of divine and arcane magic: there are some things that just arcane casters can do and there are some things that just divine casters can do, but there are many things that both of them can do, albeit in different fashions.
This is, by the way, why I think the division between divine and arcane is gone. It's now a division within a division, and that was deemed unnecessary.
Come on down to Glorbax's Crystal Cove! We have all the crystals you need to channel the mystic forces of the universe, manufactured in Eoxian sweat shops handcrafted by ysoki artisans! 50% until the end of the current solar cycle!
Hm. Would it count as a sweat shop if the workers don't sweat?
How about plod shops?
** spoiler omitted **
You didn't hear it from me, but the only way some of the Bone Sages feel joy anymore is to watch living people toil away in factories.
I agree with you 100%. The way I see it, the duality of tech & magic is analogous to PF's duality of divine and arcane magic: there are some things that just arcane casters can do and there are some things that just divine casters can do, but there are many things that both of them can do, albeit in different fashions.
This is, by the way, why I think the division between divine and arcane is gone. It's now a division within a division, and that was deemed unnecessary.
I 100% hope that kind of distinction is what they're going for. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping the Mechanic is going to have every bit the mechanical toolkit that technomancers and mystics will undoubtedly have. It's clear it's menat to be a "pet" class though the form that this will take is as of yet unclear.
I 100% hope that kind of distinction is what they're going for. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping the Mechanic is going to have every bit the mechanical toolkit that technomancers and mystics will undoubtedly have. It's clear it's menat to be a "pet" class though the form that this will take is as of yet unclear.
Obviously we don't know any of this yet, but I have a gut feeling that the Mechanic is going to feel a bit like a Techno-Druid, with the option of taking a animal drone companion or a domain cerebral implant while drawing on a library of divine spells mechanic tricks.
This is similar to the treatment of the spacebard envoy, with his arcane spells expertise talents and his bardic performance envoy improvisations.
And no, obviously, it's not a 1:1 match, but we wouldn't want that anyhow. Still, most of the basic party roles have been preserved to make Starfinder fill familiar (yet still fresh) to veterans of fantasy RPGs.
P.S.: I also predict that the phrenic adept archetype is a defacto replacement for 4th-level casting. Not really any evidence for that, but I'm sayin' it anyhow.
It could be, archetypes do get abilities at 4th level, when 4th level casters get their first spells.