Starfinder has a lot of unanswered questions. The cause of the gap, the fate of Golarion, and (especially) the *many* numerous lesser mysteries about races and ruins throughout the Pact Worlds.
It is clear the authors intend these to be imagination-inducing kickoffs for GMs to build adventures around and have players discover these answers.
BUT...
It is also the case, that we know Paizo will be releasing adventures and other materials that may provide eventual answers to these. So what do we do?
It seems like we are going to unavoidably have our individual games end up in alternate canons, and may not be able to use some materials that come out.
For that reason, it kind of makes me want to build storylines about completely different worlds and mysteries and leave the mysteries in the books alone entirely. But that seems like I'm missing out on a lot of good opportunities.
How do you handle this and how does Paizo say we should handle this?
Thanks :)
I GM at my table and I run mostly homebrew with a lot of people with busy work schedules, so I had to figure out a way of explaining why certain characters weren't at certain sessions, so at our table I Rick and Morty the setting, where there are many parallel universes so that if someone isn't there they never were there. my advice is to do the same when new published resources come out to the contrary simply flip over to another universe where that has always been the case. This lets me and the group have as much fun as possible without worrying about continuity issues.
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You might take a mystery, run a campaign on it, and be done before Paizo ever gets around to developing their take on the mystery. Or maybe you're two years into your campaign when Paizo develops a canonical thing with it.
At that point, is it really important that you're in a side universe? Every home campaign eventually deviates from/goes beyond canon.
Canon is not to be a yoke, even less a prison.
If things in your home game work out differently than they end up in official storyline... It's fine ?
It's not that often that the official adventures tackle the big mysteries either, specifically for that reason. Dealing with major known issues, sure. Answering the big unknowns ? Rarely.
Another option is to go ahead and use the setting as a jumping off point for your adventures, but don't ever fully answer the questions in your homemade campaigns. That way if the official adventures ever do, they won't conflict with the things that you have done in your worlds.
Save the day, rescue the things, unravel plots and conspiracies, be awesome. But the elusive answers to the great mysteries are still elusive.
Starfinder has a lot of unanswered questions. The cause of the gap, the fate of Golarion, and (especially) the *many* numerous lesser mysteries about races and ruins throughout the Pact Worlds.
It is clear the authors intend these to be imagination-inducing kickoffs for GMs to build adventures around and have players discover these answers.
BUT...
It is also the case, that we know Paizo will be releasing adventures and other materials that may provide eventual answers to these. So what do we do?
It seems like we are going to unavoidably have our individual games end up in alternate canons, and may not be able to use some materials that come out.
For that reason, it kind of makes me want to build storylines about completely different worlds and mysteries and leave the mysteries in the books alone entirely. But that seems like I'm missing out on a lot of good opportunities.
How do you handle this and how does Paizo say we should handle this?
Thanks :)
Our approach is generally to treat the published canon as a fresh starting point for each campaign.
In our last SF campaign, we solved many of the problems and explored many plot hooks Paizo had placed within the burning archipelago. Our next campaign is likely to be the Dawn of Flame AP where we’ll solve them all over again (and get different answers to the mysteries).
It means we don’t have a “persistent world” feel where we come across signsnof previous PC’s actions, but I always find that kind of irritating anyhow, so it’s not something I miss.
Thanks everyone :)