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There are plenty of settings that do not use the undead as purely evil.
Eberron comes to mind immediately. It was by far my favourite setting for 3.5 purely because of its moral greyness. There were evil undead in that game, but there were also non evil undead including the deathless leaders of the eleven nations.
Disc World (which has its own games associated with it) has non evil undead. They are even protesting their rights to proper citizenship in that game.
Some of the barbarian and other tribal classes have access to spiritual ancestors who provide advice or fight next to you briefly or guard you at night etc etc. they are spirits who protect the living.
Star Wars has force ghosts!
I fully support the idea of not liking a setting because it doesn't meet your needs or expectatiOns though.
For me personally, the setting is never the reason I dislike rules. There are so many settings out there I can choose whatever one I want and lay the Starfinder Rules over the top of them.
For Sci Fi, my two favourite settings from game companies so far are from Fragged empire (humans are extinct in this setting, and there's already been two apocalypse events from which societey has re emerged.), and Infinty (table top game by Corvus Belli)
Star Wars could also work fairly easily for Starfinder, just retooling the fluff of mystics and technomancer into Jedi and Sith aspects.
So if it's just setting that bothers someone, no real,issue.
However, the original poster who began this particular train of thought on the undead had a plethora of reasons why they didn't like the game, not just the setting.
I hope they add 9th level casting back in. There's nothing innate to spell levels 7-9 that makes them "broken." No one is complaining that polar ray ruined their plotline. In fact, most of the spells that GMs complain about in Pathfinder are below level 6 - spells like fly, teleport, and speak with dead.
I doubt they will had them back in. Why add in 7-9 level spells when you can do the same with the numbers they have. To me you already get 6th level spells earlier than you would 9th. I believe it's lvl 16 for 6th level and lvl 17 for 9th. From what I have read they do the same things. And Again, "Why would you want to waste a spell slot for a light spell when you can just buy a flash light?"
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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Me neither. They clearly rebalanced the magic engine with the specific purpose of not adding 9th-level spells back in, and that's to the good. The system's treatment of casters is a feature for enough of the player base that I doubt it's going anywhere.
It's not a feature for me, or for many other players that post on these boards. While neither of us really has any way to read designer thoughts, I got the impression that the lack of full casters is more due to space constraints in the core book than any overarching design goal. Adding in a full caster would have taken up space in both the classes and magic chapters that they needed for other things. Thus, bumped to a supplement.
I may have missed a designer comment about their philosophy regarding casters, but if I haven't, none of us know what the "plan" is and it's presumptuous to assume we do from our very limited data.
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Please don't belittle important real world issues by such flippant comparisons.4. The grey moral tone of the world. Sorry, but Eox should not be a Pact World, it should be the main enemy. Undead are evil, except in extraordinary circumstances, and then only for individual undead. Any character worth playing is going to smite undead on sight.Ummm, That's racist.
It's not when you think about what you are saying. You are instinctively thinking that Eoxians are evil because of who they are and that is the same thing the silver flame did to the shifters in Eberron. They wiped out thousands. Women and children, it didn't matter because of who they were. If that is how you want to play that is fine. But I for one, do not believe the sins of the father are the sins of the son.
If you do make them evil then all the Vesk should be evil only too. They did try to take over the galaxy and all.
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However, the original poster who began this particular train of thought on the undead had a plethora of reasons why they didn't like the game, not just the setting.
It just happens to be the most interesting one to talk about. Only so many times we can go around the wheel with "NPCs are too different" and "for some reason I miss Pathfinder's action system," innit. ;)
To wit:
The use of their non-living nature is juxtaposed against the evil done to them specifically to illustrate how terrible mortal/banal evil can be. They come back 'wrong' because the world is wrong and they exist to set it 'right'. It's an object lesson meant to underscore some hidden point. (see Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, any story involving a revenant or poltergeist, The Christmas Carol, Braham Stoker's Dracula, stories from the 19th century involving mummies, et cetera). It's only a product of TSR's satanism scare in the 80s that we got all undead being all evil all the time.
This is a really interesting analysis and I can see how for a lot of older "undead" stories this fits. I am not... 100% sure if Dracula is one of those, but then it occurs to me that my ideas about Dracula are mostly received from film, I've never actually read the original book.
As this goes though:
I feel like the story of Eox is supposed to be something like that. There was a great evil and the Elebrians built a superweapon to stop it. But in their haste, the weapon destroyed their own planet as well. What's left is a tragedy that is in many ways pitiable, not innately evil.
Canonically there is a certain amount of real evil, or at least disastrous hubris, in the Eoxians' background, even if not all of them are evil. According to the CRB, Eox destroyed its own biosphere by attacking a neighbouring world in an interplanetary war, creating the Diaspora and accidentally bombarding their own planet in the process. So in a way they are a cautionary example of arrogance.
That said, there seems to have been an attempt to develop them into a genuinely complicated civilization. The Splintered Worlds AP module is quite nifty in this regard.
It's not a feature for me, or for many other players that post on these boards.
For whatever value of "many," yes, I know. That's why I recommended and linked to that Rogue Genius Games supplement earlier. If you really want full caster builds and the old spellcasting engine there's someone out there who has you covered.
I'm just telling you that it's enough a feature for the rest of us that I very much doubt Paizo is going to rewind their new system back to what you want. I for one would definitely bail -- or simply stop purchasing new products -- if they regressed. Pathfinder already exists, there are third-party supplements that will mod Starfinder for you, I'm sure there will be plenty more of both and room for all.
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Please don't belittle important real world issues by such flippant comparisons.4. The grey moral tone of the world. Sorry, but Eox should not be a Pact World, it should be the main enemy. Undead are evil, except in extraordinary circumstances, and then only for individual undead. Any character worth playing is going to smite undead on sight.Ummm, That's racist.It's not when you think about what you are saying. You are instinctively thinking that Eoxians are evil because of who they are and that is the same thing the silver flame did to the shifters in Eberron. They wiped out thousands. Women and children, it didn't matter because of who they were. If that is how you want to play that is fine. But I for one, do not believe the sins of the father are the sins of the son.
If you do make them evil then all the Vesk should be evil only too. They did try to take over the galaxy and all.
All the Vesk did was act as fallible living beings. Undead are by their very existence inimical to all living beings. The divide between them is larger that the divide between angels and demons, between Einstein and a slug on the path.
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All the Vesk did was act as fallible living beings. Undead are by their very existence inimical to all living beings.
No, there's no need for them to be. Again, we're talking about a sci-fantasy universe with pronounced science fiction elements. The undead now have technological means of coexisting with the living and maintaining their undead forms and it makes sense for them to do so. Your insistence on this trope would fly in the face of that aspect of the setting.
(I do take pithica's point that you're vastly oversimplifying the role of undead-ness in "fantasy," too.)
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All the Vesk did was act as fallible living beings. Undead are by their very existence inimical to all living beings. The divide between them is larger that the divide between angels and demons, between Einstein and a slug on the path.
But the Eoxians are actively trying to be not inimical to life, they are trying to be a member of the pact worlds (And heck, they are basically THE Founding member).
Which is sorta where the racism (Or bigotry, if you don't concider undead a race) part comes in. Eox is defying expectations of what undead can be. Is it right to say we should automatically assume that they'll be evil because 'All of those sort are' or 'You can't trust rotters'? Or should you treat them based on their actions and what that says about their morality?
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It seems more to me like a change on the meta level.
While types of undead have been evil in Pathfinder, it's not part of the Undead type itself (As shown by the non-evil types of undead). Eoxians are mostly a specific sort of undead (We don't have rules for yet), so they could easily be non-evil.
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Is that actually said or implied in the source material - that undead can now coexist thanks to technological means?
Yes. It is sort of implied in the CRB, but explained in more detail in Splintered Worlds. Undead don't have to be liches to sustain themselves in the long-term without just rotting into dust.
If that sort of fix didn't exist, Eoxian society would need on the whole to be more predatory and have a harder time coexisting with the living. After all, the signal drawback of an undead planet is that almost nothing on it can reproduce by normal means -- whether or not it directly has to prey on the living for sustenance -- and in the long term it would need to acquire biomass constantly to just keep from decaying into non-function or losing most of its access to the corporeal world. (Unless you're a really small number of high-powered undead.)
So there are in-setting explanations for why this doesn't have to happen. There are even...
Is it right to say we should automatically assume that they'll be evil because 'All of those sort are' or 'You can't trust rotters'? Or should you treat them based on their actions and what that says about their morality?
More importantly -- or just as importantly, rather -- I think it's the more narratively interesting choice. The setting even leaves the option open: if you really must have an inimical Vecna-in-space for your players to fight, you can always throw them against some element of the Corpse Fleet renegades. If you choose not, you can explore the more nuanced aspects of Eox's relationships with the other Pact Worlds.
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This is a really interesting analysis and I can see how for a lot of older "undead" stories this fits. I am not... 100% sure if Dracula is one of those, but then it occurs to me that my ideas about Dracula are mostly received from film, I've never actually read the original book.
Really? You're using Dracula as an example of not evil undead? I mean, he may well be "an object lesson meant to underscore some hidden point", but he's still a monster. Pretty much all relatively early vampire stories are the same way.
Dracula's character is the only major character in the book that doesn't get a point of view. He's definitely the 'villain' of the piece, and a 'monster' when viewed through the lenses of the protagonists/storytellers, but that doesn't automatically make him evil. There are entire college courses around analyzing the character/story dynamics in that book and a lot of people make the argument that he's the victim in the story, just trying to survive while the main characters try to hunt him down and kill him.
But, yes, that's probably the weakest example in that list, since that's just one interpretation. I was mostly just trying to remember all the pre-20th century ones. Frankenstein is the best of the famous ones. Any story that involves an undead coming back to avenge some heinous crime or religious taboo would also be a better example. There are also plenty of undead like things in Greek, Roman, and Norse Mythology that aren't evil. I'm mostly just trying to make the point that non-evil undead is, in deed, a thing in western culture (not just mid-east/eastern/pre-columbian american culture).
According to the CRB, Eox destroyed its own biosphere by attacking a neighbouring world in an interplanetary war, creating the Diaspora and accidentally bombarding their own planet in the process. So in a way they are a cautionary example of arrogance.
I read somewhere that the reason that whole interplanetary war started was because some high ranking devil and/or elder evil took the other planet over and was going to spread throughout the rest of the system. The weapon they made was an attempt to prevent that spread.
I don't remember where I read that though, and it may not be canon.
Oh. That's an interesting idea. Haven't run across that yet.
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Unless you're talking about the eox war thing...I'm honestly not sure where I read that. I'm pretty sure it was on these boards in a thread about the ambassador in in AP1 where this whole "undead=evil" thing was also hashed out and it may have been in reference to PF material about Eox. It just became instant head canon for me.
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Thanks. I'll have a look round for it. Be interesting to see if that's in the AP anywhere.
Does Splintered Worlds go into detail on any of this? Or are you extrapolating?
I'm partly extrapolating but it makes references to specific industries that tie in with maintenance of the undead body, for example, and makes very clear that there's a whole economy connected to this. (I see pithica kind of beat me to it.)
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It's completely unbelievable that undead would try to not hurt anyone and coexist. Undead are an abomination and by their very nature want to hurt the living.
In terms of full casters, I'm coming at this from the perspective that they're not nonsense, they are the big thing that makes Pathfinder fun. And to get them in Starfinder, you would take away almost all weapon and armor proficiencies, and instead give more spells, higher level spells, and damaging cantrips. Then they can use spells at all times, rather than having to resort to weapons. My full casters all have daggers, but the arcane ones have never used them, other than as a torch.
undead always evil?
i can think of a fair amount of exceptions to that in fiction,at higher levels casters can get away with mostly spells in starfinder
it seems your issue is just that starfinder is not pathfinder.
and thats fair there is no requirement that you like every game.
note i have no doubt that more classes and archtypes will be coming,
lets remember that the game is only 6 months old and has 2 or more hardbacks coming out this year
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All the Vesk did was act as fallible living beings. Undead are by their very existence inimical to all living beings.No, there's no need for them to be. Again, we're talking about a sci-fantasy universe. The undead now have technological means of coexisting with the living and maintaining their undead forms and it makes sense for them to do so. Your insistence on this trope would break that aspect of the setting, it would not improve it.And then on the other hand, as I said earlier, I don't think that makes any real difference. Is that actually said or implied in the source material - that undead can now coexist thanks to technological means?
Again, many undead never required preying on people to maintain their undead forms, but were still evil.
In particular, the bone sages never needed living beings, as we know since they've lived their long unlives without anything living on their world.It seems more to me like a change on the meta level.
actually the 3rd ap splintered worlds gives us the still living elbrians as a playable race, though notes that there population is small.
the pact world book will go more into undead players and i assume cover alignment in general with them
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I want to make an Icon Elebrian Envoy that is a survivor of their reality shows.
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I like the gap.
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I'm probably going to be the weird one, but I wasn't certain about the Gap until it was explained from a 'meta' perspective.
In essence, it's to divide Pathfinder from Starfinder (roughly the same worlds, some shared development) and prevent the 'Well, this thing happened in Pathfinder to cause Starfinder' situation.
The thing that's really been *jarring* is the two-tier health system where it can really, really kill off starting characters even harder than Pathfinder PLUS punishes folks who try to have a more 'generalized' character versus an *absolutemustmaxorclosetomax* specialist character.
I was quite amused to discover when playing a session of Starfinder that PF players expect a 50% sell on loot. Many lulz were had; such generous merchants! :D
Honestly I don't know that a game like Starfinder particularly needs "loot sell" as a mechanic at all, given the number of other ways there are to convey money.
No one disputes the gap is stupid
I do. The Gap is weird in a bizarre cosmic mystery sort of way but that's not the same thing at all. The Scoured Stars Incident is kind of stupid in its canonical form, though. Luckily you can kind of ignore or change it for normal play.
Good way to go if you feel you need to.
The thing that's really been *jarring* is the two-tier health system where it can really, really kill off starting characters even harder than Pathfinder
I finally took serious HP damage in my session tonight w/ my lvl 1 Solarian! It was actually kind of exciting, I finally got to sweat Resolve Points a little.
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I would again urge the I-want-it-to-be-Pathfinder school to just get this. It was made by people who agree with you and it's got clerics and wizards and maguses and 9th level spells and the whole bit.
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I would again urge the I-want-it-to-be-Pathfinder school to just get this. It was made by people who agree with you and it's got clerics and wizards and maguses and 9th level spells and the whole bit.
I'd recommend heavily, heavily against it. It's really got no real clue about how balance works in starfinder (Bonuses too large, energy resistance way too frontloaded, clerics and wizards managing to get BUFFS since Pathfinder) and...well, that's kinda impressive for a book written by one of the guys on the Starfinder team.
Too much of it is 1:1 translated from Pathfinder despite the different backends for the system and the stuff that isn't directly translated isn't really too much better. It's a book I can't recommend against strongly enough.
Same. I bought the starfarer's companion when it first released and I don't use it. The races and classes were unbalanced and there was a lot of spelling errors. It was really hard to read.
Oh. Well, that's a pity.
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You could likely translate any races pretty easily from pathfinder to starfinder with some basic rules:
- Net +2 Stats
- 3-4 shiny things, generally with a +2 to a couple of skills as one of them
- Have any energy resistances scale as the feat does (1/level) so that it both stays useful for all levels and doesn't completely null that given weapon type at early levels.
- Don't make any bonuses they give too huge (+1 to AC is a very nice bonus for example) since the numbers are more finely tuned and keep the immunities rather limited.
With those general rules you are likely alright. My general philosophy is that it's better to get the 'feel' of a race than do a perfect translation of each rule from pathfinder.
It would be the opposite, actually. Flat 5 is the one that causes serious problems (Which is part of why the Teifling and the Aasimar in the Starfarers companion are so comically overpowered as races), since it completely nulls most weapons of that type before level 3 and even before level 5 stops a disproportionately high amount of attacks. Scaling would only null 1 at level 1 etc so that you don't have to worry about it ever being too low to matter or so high that it flat negates the attack.
Energy Resistance 5 to Fire, for Example, makes the PC borderline immune to lasers before level 3 but it also becomes useless at higher levels when the feat easily overtakes it.
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Last night my Shirren TV Chat Show Host (roughing it as a Mystic) got drunk in a bar then ended up in a shoot-out with some baddies. In between shots he was spouting really bad jokes drunkenly while amazingly actually hitting something every now and again.
Hopefully it will be a loooooooong time before our guys get fed up with Starfinder. Admittedly we play a few adventures, do something else, then come back to it.
There's too many good RPG things in the world to have fun with to stick to one game but Starfinder is still one of my favourite things in years to come along.
1) Lack of mechanical character customization is a byproduct of this being mostly just a CRB game so far. Though as far as the Mystic comment is concerned, the deity just being flavor is the best part! And if you absolutely must have the thematic link between character options and deity choice, the CRB contains suggestions for which Connection goes with each god/goddess.
Sorry, but what is a CRB game?
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Same. I bought the starfarer's companion when it first released and I don't use it. The races and classes were unbalanced and there was a lot of spelling errors. It was really hard to read.
Just as a counterpoint (not an argument), I too bought that book and I plan on using a lot of it in my game.
There are 20 races in the book and I think all but the Tiefling/Aasimar are in line with the races in the AA. Those two need some adjustment, definitely. They are just a copy+paste from the PF SRD and that doesn't frankly work in this game. I don't remember anything else standing out as OP. There's a few in there that I probably won't allow, but it's mostly because there are already something like 35 playable races in the CRB+AA+APs so it's starting to become a paradox of choice situation on the race front, and I don't think any of my players want to play some of them anyway. There are at least 10 I plan on using, because I know my players want/expect the option, and the port seemed fine to me.
EDIT: I just went back over them and the Suli are just as broken as Tiefling/Aasimar. That's 3 I'm a definite no on without mechanical changes. I recounted and there are 8 I definitely want to use, and another 4 or 5 I wouldn't be opposed to (but don't think anyone wants to play). The last 4 or 5 that just don't fit my flava, story-wise, but I don't think are broken.
I don't plan on using Wizards or Clerics out of it. I do want true 'full casting' classes with 9ths, but I think those are the worst offenders (along with druid) for the OP-ness that goes along with that from other games. So, I'm waiting for either an official SF caster class or a good port of Sorcerer/Oracle/Psion to introduce them, personally. The rest of the classes seemed fine to me. I may have made different design decisions, certainly, but none of them seemed innately broken, to me. I'll probably open them up for my PC's and let them find any problems with them that I failed to notice. That's four extra classes, which for me and my group is a huge bonus.
I've yet to really dig into every spell, item, or feat, but I did read through them and didn't notice any glaringly obvious problems. I'm sure I will find them, at some point, and have to house rule or disallow something. But that's no different than any game I've ever run.
For me, the book was an extra ~150 pages of crunch that I felt was needed, especially with classes, feats, and spells (the races and items were just bonus for me). With that and the core books I have, the only thing I still feel is missing from the game is more archetypes and themes. I thought it was well worth the $20. But that's just my opinion on it. JSR and Ikiry0's point of view is (at least) as valid.
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Core Rulebook.
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Sorry, but what is a CRB game?
Core Rule Book. He means there are (essentially) no splat books full of extra crunch content like new spells, classes, feats, or items, yet.
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I'm really liking it myself so far and I think the Gap is just fine in terms of fluff and something like it is necessary to keep PF and SF fluff separate yet still connected.
The Gap very neatly makes it so we still can have half orc Hell Knights running around while not having to come up with canonical endings for every PF AP that will ever exist.
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Same. I bought the starfarer's companion when it first released and I don't use it. The races and classes were unbalanced and there was a lot of spelling errors. It was really hard to read.
i mostly don't mind the races there are a few that are a hair to good like tiefling but the one in one of my games is not breaking anything.
and I like there robot race better then the androids.
but i am not huge on the class conversions
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Last night my Shirren TV Chat Show Host (roughing it as a Mystic) got drunk in a bar then ended up in a shoot-out with some baddies. In between shots he was spouting really bad jokes drunkenly while amazingly actually hitting something every now and again.
Hopefully it will be a loooooooong time before our guys get fed up with Starfinder. Admittedly we play a few adventures, do something else, then come back to it.
There's too many good RPG things in the world to have fun with to stick to one game but Starfinder is still one of my favourite things in years to come along.
my society character is a vesk solarian based off of richard castle
he is an icon word smith that writes lurid adventure novels.