What's up with Guidance?

[Kishmo]

One of my players asked about Guidance, the Starfinder Society's advisor / server farm: is Guidance sapient? Does it, like androids, SROs, and anacites, have a soul (or possiby even more than one?) despite being a constructed entity? It made me realize that we don't really know too much about what's going on there.

There's a paragraph about Guidance in the Season 1 Org Play guide, describing it as "the Starfinder Society’s compiled intelligence of Starfinder personalities" and "the Starfinder Society’s spiritual anchor." The guide also lists Guidance's two main functions: confirming appointments of First Seekers, and welcoming new agents into the Society with a commencement address. There's not much more offered about Guidance that I've seen in the scenarios where it starts things off (like The Commencement, and Ashes of Discovery.) Beyond these tidbits, we don't know too much about Guidance. I'm guessing that it is, at least, sentient and self-aware, but the leap from that to true sapience is a big (and confusing!) one.

It raises a few other questions: what is involved in "uploading" one's personality into Guidance? Does this kill the person doing the uploading? Does the uploaded personality continue to live as a free-willed individual agent housed within programming, like The Matrix? Or are they subsumed into becoming just a part of some greater gestalt mind-meld? The line describing it as a "spiritual anchor" might have significance, too - like it probably isn't a demi-god or anything, but who knows, maybe it has some limited ability to grant diving magic to fervent Starfinders?

Lots to think about, with that big ol' block. Maybe we'll learn more when / if something goes wonky on the inside of Guidance, and daring adventurers need to venture inside its programming to fix it.

...ok, I've inspired myself to go write some kind of fancy "cyber Hao Jin Neural-Tapestry" style adventure, now.

[Dracomicron]

Worst case scenario: Go watch the anime Psycho-Pass.

Have to say, though, in a world of androids, SROs, anacites, and trinary machine gods, Guidance isn't THAT weird.

It is an interesting concept to think about.

[BigNorseWolf]

Absolutely nothing is up with guidance

There is no problem here

All hail our computer overlo.. i mean would anyone like a pizza?

[The Drunken Dragon]

Tbh it sort of reminds me of the Headmaster portraits in Harry Potter, in that it retains the memories and knowledge (and in certain unfortunate cases, personality) of their original owner for the use of the next, in this case, First Seeker. It’s a way if making the whole”I must consult with my ancestors” a literal statement rather than a spiritual one, as you could literally ask a former First Seeker what they would have done in a certain complex scenario.

[Metaphysician]

I don't know anything more about Guidance than the corebook presents, but. . . I really don't see any problem with it being fully sentient and ensouled. Sentient computers are not exactly rare in the setting, they just aren't ubiquitous ( for obvious good reasons ).

Ensouled is trickier, not because its a computer ( its canon that sufficiently advanced computers gain/develop/attract souls, just like biological lives do ), but because it is theoretically based on other, ensouled individuals. I would be inclined to say that it does have a soul, but this soul is not the souls of those who contributed their mind scans to it. Guidance is an individual being that just happens to draw from the memories of others.

However, you could make a plausible case for "it is effectively a minor afterlife", and contains the souls of those who've donated to it. In that case, it probably *is* a quasi-deity in functionality, or could become such.