Venture-Captain, Illinois—Fairview Heights
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According to the RPGG pg. 4, "Adventure Paths are six-volume Starfinder RPG campaigns. The Starfinder Society development team sanctions Adventure Path content on a case-by-case basis
for use in the Roleplaying Guild (see page 11 for more information)." Thus A single adventure Path is 6 volumes, making Dead Suns an Adventure path, and Incident at Absalom Station only 1/6 of an AP.
According to RPGG pg. 11, "A document will be created for each sanctioned Adventure Path that outlines the content for which players receive credit to be applied to legal characters as well as the Chronicle sheet(s) for that adventure. This document can be found on the product page for the sanctioned material or at paizo.com/ starfindersociety/additional." (the space in the URL is in the RPGG and I chose not to edit a cited source). Based on the definition of terms on page 4, APs (in Starfinder) get sanctioned as a whole. In other words, either Dead Suns is sanctioned, or it isn't, with exceptions posted at the above link.
Going to that link, you are directed to the product page for the first volume, which makes sense; the beginning is where you would start looking for information about a 6-volume adventure. On that page, is a section labeled "Starfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Sanctioned Content" where it lists the volume the current page is about, but more importantly, it has a link labeled "Download the rules and Chronicle sheets."
PZO7201-Rules.pdf's very first sentence is "The Dead Suns Adventure Path may be played as part of the Starfinder Society Roleplaying Guild campaign for credit." Immediately to the right, there is a box labeled "SANCTIONED CONTENT KEY" which lists all six individual parts of the AP as sanctioned and for what levels.
The document further addresses how to play every volume and which ones can and can't use pregens. While only the first chronicle sheet was added, so far, it's clear this applies to the Adventure Path, not the first 1/6th of it.
This implies that Dead Suns' volumes are legal for play on the street date, but the additional materials (new Mystic class abilities, new spells, new weapons, new armor, new magic items, etc) require listing on the Additional Resources to become accessible. Which makes sense, rather than releasing unplayable content, they just hold back on the additional player resources until they can determine the impact on gameplay in the context of the Society environment.
Now, I know that the SFS world is rampant with people who still want to treat this as PFS 1.5 and treat everything as having to be the same as a different, individual game, unless an authority tells them they are wrong. This is natural, as change is often opposed by the masses and takes time.
So, while the documents, in multiple places clearly indicate that Dead Suns is Society legal, even though all of the resources contained within may not yet be, I'm sure some people with far more PFS experience than I will naturally oppose this on the basis of "That's not how PFS did/does it," despite the documentation (not to mention previous posts by Paizo employees stating that the intent is for SF APs to be developed to be SFS-legal from the start.
This leaves one obvious conundrum that is not addressed directly, but I believe is still addressed indirectly. Can you play without a chronicle sheet published yet for sanctioned content? I believe the answer, just like the quests and just like the text in the AP rules states about playing over multiple sessions, is that yes you can, but until you have a completed chronicle sheet, that character cannot be used in any other scenario or adventure.
Given that 5/6 player scheduled for my multi-week signup at my LGS for this have already played every scrap of available content, through 1-05, I doubt any of them will have an issue having a character who can't play anything until 1-06 is released anyway locked out while we wait on the chronicle sheet to be published.
Can I have an official ruling on this? We have the first session schedule to take place Thursday, 2 Nov at 5pm Paizo time.
