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I'm curious to here from the community how they are using Starfinder for their campaign? Are you going straight from the book and using the Pact Worlds, creating a homebrew setting, or perhaps using your favorite movie/book/video game as inspiration.
I'm just now putting the pieces together to run a Starfinder campaign. There's plenty of movies that I adore and would like to pull ideas from, namely: Alien/Aliens, Blade Runner, Dune, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
What's your campaign like?
What's your campaign like?
I have a Campaign Journal running here.
We run pretty much RAW (saving a couple of house-rule widgets for XP and dice rolls) in the Pact Worlds setting. I create my own adventures for the table, drawing on the official setting and materials.
As I note in one of the early journal posts, my group come to the table for:
- Getting out and exploring the cosmos.
- "Find a crew. Find a job. Keep flying." Varied jobs Firefly-style, everything from heists to wedding security to shipping wacky critters to obscure moons.
- Also somewhat Firefly-style (or Mass Effect-style, or Cowboy Bebop-style, or Dark Matter-style), adventures that let us explore one or another character's background and/or backstory and sometimes have some fun with the contrasts between their worldviews.
Thus far our adventures have run on Akiton, Absalom Station, Castrovel and in the Diaspora, and we've done a one-off on Eox. A mixture of shoot-'em-up action and more cerebral space opera (with complicated moral quandaries and diplomatic challenges). Great fun thus far.
I posted mine in the Kaidan 2.0 thread in this forum.
So far kept to the official stuff, but I'll definitely add the Psionics Guide and Bestiary when Dreamscarred Press publishes them.
So far kept to the official stuff, but I'll definitely add the Psionics Guide and Bestiary when Dreamscarred Press publishes them.
Well I just released Starships, Stations and Salvage Guide by Edward Moyer, art and deck plans by me.
21 new starship frames, including anthropomorphic/zoomorphic ships, living bio-hybrid ships, necroships, and salvage ships, all with full color multi-deck deck plans.
47 new expansion bay options, even several arcane bays for giving ships arcane weapon attacks, and special shields (invisibility, gr. inviso, limited blink, holographic image (like mirror image)).
Dozens of system upgrades from AI to weapon systems.
New options - shadow drives, satellites and probes, space hazards, salvage rules, optional cargo bay and tonnage rules based on ship scale (goes around the 25 ton cargo bay rule), and others.
A one-shot module using the new rules.
A 10 Space Monster Bestiary.
25 custom starship deck plans and a 3 deck colossal space station.
It's not official, but might make your game better!
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So far kept to the official stuff, but I'll definitely add the Psionics Guide and Bestiary when Dreamscarred Press publishes them.Well I just released Starships, Stations and Salvage Guide by Edward Moyer, art and deck plans by me.
21 new starship frames, including anthropomorphic/zoomorphic ships, living bio-hybrid ships, necroships, and salvage ships, all with full color multi-deck deck plans.
47 new expansion bay options, even several arcane bays for giving ships arcane weapon attacks, and special shields (invisibility, gr. inviso, limited blink, holographic image (like mirror image)).
Dozens of system upgrades from AI to weapon systems.
New options - shadow drives, satellites and probes, space hazards, salvage rules, optional cargo bay and tonnage rules based on ship scale (goes around the 25 ton cargo bay rule), and others.
A one-shot module using the new rules.
A 10 Space Monster Bestiary.
25 custom starship deck plans and a 3 deck colossal space station.
It's not official, but might make your game better!
Hey thanks for derailing my post with your product advertisement!
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Hey thanks for derailing my post with your product advertisement!
Sorry, I actually think I posted this in the wrong thread and forum. I just flagged my post as "being in the wrong forum". My previous post points to the setting I will be publishing and worth checking out. But I didn't mean for this product listing to be a part of this thread.
I was bouncing between threads (last night) intending to put this elsewhere, but I must have gotten the threads mixed up. Really it wasn't intentional.
I had 4 instances of the Paizo Boards open - my product discussion page, what I thought was my own homebrew thread (obviously not) and two of the 3PP forum. Since I was looking at the middle of threads and not the titles - I got them mixed up.
So to create a setting idea post that more officially fits with this thread...
T.H. Gulliver created a setting as part of another product I published, where the galaxy used is an alternate of our Milky Way galaxy, with the setting based around an alternate Earth. Where after advances in starship and space technology at hand, following centuries of resource exploitation, the poisoning of the oceans, and disruption of the climate - Earth became sentient, and gave a decade long order for all humans to leave it forever. An odyssey of ships vacated Earth over that 10 year period, and now humans and all other sentients are banned from Earth.
The 20 or so nearest star systems to Earth became known as Corporate Space governed by the many MegaCorps over it's corporate citizens. A second odyssey made by those not wanting to be controlled by the MegaCorps of Corporate Space went further out to become independant, in what is called Colonized Space.
Now my upcoming setting which is based in this larger one, will be a feudal Japanese empire/shogunate on a distant world at the edge of colonized space. Several Japanese MegaCorps paid a finder's fee to a much larger non-Japan based MegaCorp called Anomaly Investments Ltd (created by T.H. Gulliver), and as the company's initials might reveal, Anomaly Investments' CEO, board of directors and share-holders are all artificial intelligences. They had sent a million probes into deep space searching for potential investment opportunities. One of those was a distant star system with an Earth-like world, which drew the Japanese MegaCorps to choose as their future homeworld. After paying an exhorbitant fee to Anomaly, followed by a steep 20% of the nation's GNP over a century period, the Japanese MegaCorps are finally free of their debt to A.I.
Now I'm building a feudal Japanese horror empire/shogunate based on that paid-for planet/star system, and they've expanded through invasion/colonization into nearby star systems. MegaCorps, the Yakuza and cyberpunk aspects are mixed with an otherwise feudal Japan interstellar empire - and that is the "setting" I'm building now.
From the time humans were exiled from Earth up to the current timeline of the empire - about 400 years have passed.
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I'm running a short Starcraft campaign (started level 5, planned to end around level 7) set on the dusty outer edges of the Koprulu Sector. My players consist of a:
Human (Terran) Operative (Ghost)
Human (Terran) Soldier (Firebat)
Human (Terran) Drone Mechanic (He keeps calling out "SCV ready!")
Protoss Solarian (Templar)
Protoss homebrew race is pretty much as you'd expect, +2 Str, +2 Wis, -2 Dex, limited telepathy, PSI shields (built-in forcefield). It's been pretty fun so far.
Well, when I'm running it, the PCs are in a game set in the Bahamut Sector. A region of space located on the Scutum-Centarus arm of the Galaxy. In this region of space is the Liga System (Greyhawk/Greyspace), the Krynn system (Dragonlance/Krynnspace), and the Dol Arrah system (Eberron/Eberron space). So far, we are expanding this little 50 star cube.
One of the planets so offered contains a psionic race. A race of catfolk has expanded with generation ships in every system (kinda like the Idari). And there are more details than I care to remember. It's a cool little campaign cube.
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I'm a fan of conspiracy-themed shows and adventures, so I started building a campaign setting called "Gapwatch". It's based on the published Pact Worlds setting but with a lot of my own twists. I like the challenge of being a kind of Borg GM -- assimilating distinctive elements of other published materials into my own collective. I created a website for my players. If you're interested, you can view it here.
Inspiration and material for the Gapwatch campaign come from:
- d20 Dark*Matter
- Alternity Dark Matter
- X-Files Lone Gunman
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Rising Tide)
- Starfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Quest: Into the Unknown
- Incident at Absalom Station
- Fires of Creation (Iron Gods AP)
I'm a fan of conspiracy-themed shows and adventures, so I started building a campaign setting called "Gapwatch".
Looks slick so far. (And I see that Shadowrun-inspired Lifestyle system in there. ;) I have a rules widget borrowed from Shadwobeat so I'm feeling that.)
I dropped the Pact Worlds entirely and am doing an atom punk Galactic Empire campaign in which the player characters are out on the frontier safely away from the civilised systems.
Looks slick so far. (And I see that Shadowrun-inspired Lifestyle system in there. ;) I have a rules widget borrowed from Shadwobeat so I'm feeling that.)
Thanks. One of my goals is to create a variety of plot threads and dangle them all in front of the players, knowing that, behind the scenes, those threads all connect to deeper conspiracies controlled by the dark forces at work. I work to "seed" each adventure I run with characters, items, events and relationships that foreshadow or hint at the other moving parts of the overall campaign setting so that, when they eventually come across those things again, they feel familiar, sometimes producing a genuine feeling of the surprising "reveal" or discovery.
That, too, sounds familiar from my game. :) Hope your group is having fun!
I dropped the Pact Worlds entirely and am doing an atom punk Galactic Empire campaign in which the player characters are out on the frontier safely away from the civilised systems.
I have gone back and forth with doing this as well. Part of me really enjoys tying a campaign to something that feels familiar and well-developed to the players, supported with on-going supplement development and so on. I don't have much time anymore for full-scale world / galaxy building, however, so assimilating and cobbling together bits and pieces from the great work of others gives me a mix of creativity and efficiency.
I have modified the Pact Worlds and "published" the changes for my players on the campaign website. I treat the website as a living document as the campaign develops.
I have gone back and forth with doing this as well. Part of me really enjoys tying a campaign to something that feels familiar and well-developed to the players, supported with on-going supplement development and so on. I don't have much time anymore for full-scale world / galaxy building, however, so assimilating and cobbling together bits and pieces from the great work of others gives me a mix of creativity and efficiency.
I hear you there. I'm running Dead Suns because (1) I wanted to see how the designers develop adventures, but mostly (2) because I don't have the time to do full campaign prep anymore.
Our game is mostly in the vein of Firefly with a bit of Guardians of the Galaxy. It's focused on the core group of misfits, with snippets of the larger world filtering in while relevant. We've found a dose of humor and lack of realism have gone a long way to making the game fun.
I have gone back and forth with doing this as well. Part of me really enjoys tying a campaign to something that feels familiar and well-developed to the players, supported with on-going supplement development and so on. I don't have much time anymore for full-scale world / galaxy building, however, so assimilating and cobbling together bits and pieces from the great work of others gives me a mix of creativity and efficiency.I hear you there. I'm running Dead Suns because (1) I wanted to see how the designers develop adventures, but mostly (2) because I don't have the time to do full campaign prep anymore.
Our game is mostly in the vein of Firefly with a bit of Guardians of the Galaxy. It's focused on the core group of misfits, with snippets of the larger world filtering in while relevant. We've found a dose of humor and lack of realism have gone a long way to making the game fun.
I set the campaign on the frontier so that my core worlds background could be painted with broad strokes and not a lot of detail in about a page. The frontier area and the main station hub is also summed up in a page as well. I've been running games since the late 70s and can improvise the rest as needed, mining all the books I have read over the years for ideas.
I also think the SF background with the pact worlds and the starfinder guild is pretty lame. It is all designed to support organized play which I despise and consider a thing that kills creativity and suppresses GM freedom with stupid regimentation. I wanted no part of it. I am allowing my players to use the notes on the pact world planets for their background if they wish, but those planets are all scattered to different systems and are not being used in any other way.
While I have used "official" campaign materials in my campaigns over the years, mainly it was in the form of city packs and such I modified and dropped into my own worlds. I have always created my own campaigns otherwise.
I don't find org play attractive but I don't particularly care how it relates to the Pact Worlds setting. Easy enough to ignore if it's not one's thing (and the SFS modules have been useful to raid for material). After a fair chunk of play I've still yet to touch three-quarters of the adventure hooks in the CRB that interested me, so, different strokes I guess.
Speaking of raiding things for material: I do enjoy working in stuff from other games where I can, and cyberpunk settings -- with a little rejigging -- provide some great Starfinder material. There was a setting in this old RPG that was super useful as source material for Verces and Skydock. For Starfinder GMs I would recommend trying to track a copy down even if you'll never run that game of itself; it's chock full of great ideas.
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For fantasy games I used a lot of the Harn city packs, they presented great maps and a concise outline of what was happening in the city in four or five pages.
My Starfinder campaign plays in another sandbox of TSR's Star Frontiers, including races unique to Star Frontiers. To that i added a few of my favorite races from SWTOR, and the Orville to be found during space exploration.
I majorly deviated by junking Drift Drive, and created/tweaking my owe rules for Quantum Drive.
Only rules I been mulling over is cryogenic sleep for transporting large number of passengers/marines/soldiers.
Also been trying to break down the formula in starship base forms. Feel that every ship base frame should include more information what is found on a ship (assiming engineering, brdige, and crew quarters) but what else is included with a ship base frame?
Can one assume galley, mess hall, and the head are all part of ship without making anyone one of them an 'expansion bay'.
I added cryo-sleep on my first scenario, the players were travelling that way to the frontier on sponsored flights to move potential trouble makers to the frontier to direct their energies outward, they went in cold sleep to keep costs down.
I don't actually have any rules for it, it just works.
I added cryo-sleep on my first scenario, the players were travelling that way to the frontier on sponsored flights to move potential trouble makers to the frontier to direct their energies outward, they went in cold sleep to keep costs down.
I don't actually have any rules for it, it just works.
I published a FREE one-shot space horror module for Starfinder, called Rude Awakening, and it includes rules for cryo-sleep pods, as well as a table for spending too long in cryo-sleep, in the appendix...
I published a FREE one-shot space horror module for Starfinder, called Rude Awakening, and it includes rules for cryo-sleep pods, as well as a table for spending too long in cryo-sleep, in the appendix...I added cryo-sleep on my first scenario, the players were travelling that way to the frontier on sponsored flights to move potential trouble makers to the frontier to direct their energies outward, they went in cold sleep to keep costs down.
I don't actually have any rules for it, it just works.
Why do you need rules for it? Either the story has the team cold sleep their way to a destination, or the story has their journey go awry and they wake up late in the wrong place, and maybe you hit them with a short term penalty for sleeping late.
What is gained by wasting time writing rules that will be infrequently applied, if at all? I have watched so many GMs invest so much time writing rules that might have been used once, if at all, time that could have been spent simply making the campaign story more interesting.
It wasn't Rude Awakening was my 2014 game system agnostic entry into the One Page Dungeon Contest which earned an award, but I converted to Starfinder, because I wanted to, and due to circumstances in the plot, cold sleep cells were important start of the module, and because the PCs spend unduly long in cold sleep (as tech devices, not magi-tech), I created additional rules for it. It wasn't a waste of time, it was providing mechanics for what was already included in the adventure. Many have commented this is a fun module, so it seems not to have been a waste, at all.
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What's your campaign like?I have a Campaign Journal running here.
We run pretty much RAW (saving a couple of house-rule widgets for XP and dice rolls) in the Pact Worlds setting. I create my own adventures for the table, drawing on the official setting and materials.
As I note in one of the early journal posts, my group come to the table for:
- Getting out and exploring the cosmos.
- "Find a crew. Find a job. Keep flying." Varied jobs Firefly-style, everything from heists to wedding security to shipping wacky critters to obscure moons.
- Also somewhat Firefly-style (or Mass Effect-style, or Cowboy Bebop-style, or Dark Matter-style), adventures that let us explore one or another character's background and/or backstory and sometimes have some fun with the contrasts between their worldviews.Thus far our adventures have run on Akiton, Absalom Station, Castrovel and in the Diaspora, and we've done a one-off on Eox. A mixture of shoot-'em-up action and more cerebral space opera (with complicated moral quandaries and diplomatic challenges). Great fun thus far.
For my Starfinder adventure, I currently have it as an open universe and seeing where it goes to test out the limits of Starfinder itself as a whole (1st and 3rd party). The party ranges from neutral to evil and there are 7 PCs in total. They are apart of a "Mercenary Company" They were given control over the company by a friendly, but mysterious benefactor. This Benefactor is a nice way for the Characters to talk to the "GM" with out being so meta. They have yet to use this privilege so far.
The party consists of a Ysoki Operative (quiet and has a huge fear of xenos, the creepy crawly kind ex:things that can get into vents), Vesk Solider (who is taking a more scientist approach wanting to improve on life), Strix Operative (very cautious, likes to hang back and snipe), Android Mechanic (he has a rather dull perosnality but his exocortex usually interjects into converstions making for some strange conversations), Shirren Technomancer (he is a Professional Video Gamer - Usually playing Operative's Creed on Spasm.tv), LashuntaAeoncarnate (3rd party class, wants to meet new life), and finally the Kasatha Mystic (want's this cooking online cooking show to become great while seeking balance in the universe). One more note, I added a insanity table to the game, similar to Dark Heresy. Increases to this are caused by witnessing things they minds can't handle like horrific beasts (ex: Chaos Spawns, or the Horrors of a Xeno breaking through the chest cavity of a crew memeber), near death experiences, or severe wounds in a traumatic way.
The "Mercenary Company" so far is just starting out trying to establish a reputation. (I'm usually a brutal GM having been baptized in the TRPG of Dark Heresy) I had them face 12 space goblins as their first encounter on Absalom Station. After that I gave them 5 choices for work. 1 was going to be a 1st party made adventure line by Paizo, (they skipped past that in a heart beat) another one was a 3rd party made adventure (they ignored that one two) Instead they decided to flex my mental abilites with this game by picking my one of my own homebrewed missions. They decided to eliminate a Rovagug Cult that was starting to take seed in the Station.
I used this mission as another testing ground to see how strong the team was, I had no intention of killing any of them yet. They were able to get through 2 fights before 2 of them were knocked down unconscious. 1st fight was against 3 goblins, 2 rabid hounds, and 3 cultists. (mind you the cultists were towned down so it wouldn't be a extreme battle) All of my cultists had injection gloves but not a single one was able to pass rabies to the party, not even the rabid hounds, they were very lucky with their saving throws. I even on the fly turned one of their canisters used for injection into a gas grenade with airborne properties to the rabies. Still super lucky rolls on their part.
Next was the 2nd fight were I had a Vesk named Ole One Eye Skeeve fight them with 5 other NPCs 3 of which being lesser followers of the cult. (no injection gloves) A Half Orc bouncer with a Doshko, and a Vesk bartender with a shotgun.(I gave the party the opportunity to ambush this group) The Kashtha Mystic and the Lashunta Aeoncarnate were the ones that got knocked out and were stabilized. After that encounter they were ready to call it. So I had the Hell Knights Clean Up the rest of the Cultist Den. I have two more encounters planned to push the limits. but they could only handle those two. They have only had a total of 3 sessions so far. There is more to their tale but I guess I will stop here for now. Hope you enjoyed what I did thus far.
(I'm usually a brutal GM having been baptized in the TRPG of Dark Heresy)
You ain't kiddin'. :O Sounds like a fun game, though. I'd find a table of 7 PCs pretty challenging, so good on you.
We're on Verces now, running an adventure called "Night and Day" whose parameters I'm kind of figuring out as we go, and partly involving a "evil twin" storyline with our Captain character. I'll be posting summaries soon as I can get to them.
I'm curious to here from the community how they are using Starfinder for their campaign? Are you going straight from the book and using the Pact Worlds, creating a homebrew setting, or perhaps using your favorite movie/book/video game as inspiration.
I'm just now putting the pieces together to run a Starfinder campaign. There's plenty of movies that I adore and would like to pull ideas from, namely: Alien/Aliens, Blade Runner, Dune, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
What's your campaign like?
I created a campaign in which they started off on Castrovel the morning after a retired starfinder just vanished. At characters start one is the son of that hero, another is a bounty hunter. A third is a female lashunta who is basically Han Solo. They meet a Gladiator who was basically Mike Tyson as a wrestler/solarian. So far the Gladiator has ticked off a VERY long lived vampire casino owner,Created his own revanent, angered a dragon and been branded a terrorist during Absolom stations Olympic style games! Every time they push away from the normal I buckle up and roll with it. Having a blast!
It is canon that in the Pathfinder universe Earth and Androffan exists (and I believe although not explicitly stated in any official documentation, the D&D settings also exist in their own corners of space). My Starfinder campaign embraces that and so my campaigns will work to introduce easter eggs of other settings as much as possible.
The Devourer
The Devourer has been worshiped since the beginning of time under many guises, most of he has simply been called the Devourer however some races have known him by other names in their own tongue such as the troglodytes who named him Laogzed.
For some worshipers he has been the embodiment of destruction and sailors have prayed to him to allow them safe passage. Today though such worship is rare as too many worlds and ships have been destroyed without succor.
Today his holy symbol is a black hole acretion disk with a single line of light piercing it. However in times of ancient past there have been many holy symbols for those cultures that lacked an understanding of deep space phenomenon. One such holy symbol involves 5 bones shaped to resemble a claw.
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This links Eberron's Devourer with the AD&D 2e Laogzed (which should cover inclusion of both Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms).
Here is a writeup on androids in my campaign. It covers everything from their origin on Androffa through to their arrival on Golarion, life under the Technic League and what happened to them following the events in Iron Gods. I've also put some more flesh on the enslavement of androids following the Gap and their rebellion and subsequent freedom.
Let me know if you spot anything that contradicts canon Starfinder.