Starfinder: An Introduction
In my first story I promised I would be talking about Starfinder soon, so now seems like a good time.
A little background for anyone who’s interested. Starfinder is a science fantasy role-playing game from Paizo, Inc., the creators of the well-loved Pathfinder RPG. While many of the systems and some small details of Pathfinder can be found in the new game, the setting, races, and overall flavor of the game is completely different. Starfinder was released in 2017 and received moderate coverage and reviews.
I received the Starfinder starter set for Christmas last year, and while it was very interesting and exciting, I didn’t have any time to get a group together. A few weeks ago though, I grabbed a small group of friends and my sister and proposed getting a game together. Were torn between World of Darkness (an awesome modern fantasy game I might have to talk about in the future) and Starfinder. After some voting, we decided to give Starfinder a try, it helped that 3 of the 5 players are huge science fiction nerds.
My Prep
As the Game Master it was my job to learn most of the basic rules for the game, decide on a pre-made adventure or write my own, and prepare all the game “equipment” for that session. Of course I started with the Core Rule Book (CRB) and a ton of Youtube videos. The videos were less helpful than I’d hoped as many were just reviews from around the time the game was released. Since the game was only about a year and a half old there wasn’t nearly as much content as other, more popular RPGs.
Then I created a character so I would understand the basics of this critical game mechanic and made some crappy notes about the different rules that I thought would come up. I have been playing Pathfinder for several years and so I knew the rules would be similar with some key differences. Some big differences from your standard fantasy RPG are exactly what you would expect. Moving in zero gravity is now a thing that you need to account for, laser weapons and advanced technology change the standard weapons and armor, and starship battles have their own set of dizzying rules.
I tried to prepare for these as I knew the players probably wouldn’t. While a few had decided to invest in a rule book, most player tend to think in characters first, world second, and how to get stuff for my character from this world third. Gameplay therefore is generally up to the GM. It helped that most players were at least familiar with Pathfinder in some sense and had a basic understanding of terminology. I actually plan to teach an RPG 101 class this fall, but thankfully I didn’t need to go that far into the basics for this game.
With my general understanding and notes in hand, I looked into different ways to get started. I don’t consider myself a very creative person. I write a little and daydream a lot but in general I’m a hard numbers kind of person. However, I consistently take on the role of GM in almost all my games, something about being Master of the Universe appeals to me I guess.
Also, being the one with the books and enthusiasm helps. Because I struggle to create adventures on my own I really love using pre-made Adventure Paths. Adventure Paths are complete stories, from little oneshots to huge campaigns, that have all the world building, plot points, battles, and treasure already done for you. These are an awesome tool for GMs who need help, an introduction to a game, or just some inspiration for their own creative ideas. I have used these straight from the book, but I’ve also played games where I tweak them throughout for a different experience.
For this game I chose “Into the Unknown” a free Quest from the Starfinder Society. This little adventure was designed to take about five hours, but in little one hour chunks. You could play all five, or just the ones you feel like. Perfect for learning the rules and getting a feel for the setting. I decided to do one combat encounter and one starship battle so we could see how these two major components felt. I drew some maps using the pictures in the AP as a guide, and got a big starmap printed. Unfortunately, the starmap was printed incorrectly so it was skewed and I didn’t notice until it was too late. I also created some handouts for the various positions on the starship as they function completely differently than any other part of the game.
With all my handouts, notes, books, and maps I was ready for game day!
Session 0
For this first session I knew it was going to go slowly as we were all learning the rules and getting a handle on a whole new setting. We had 5 players and me as the GM. In order to streamline this little oneshot I decided to have everyone play an Iconic Character. These are pre-made characters that Paizo provides for quick access or organized play. Everyone chose a character that they were curious about and we got into it!
In this quest, all the characters are members of the illustrious Starfinder Society. They receive a mission from their Captain to investigate the disappearance of one of the Society’s exploration starships and it’s crew. He gives them a place to start and send them off quickly. I won’t breakdown the individual actions as I hope you go and give this game a try!
There were some minor growing pains, remembering all the traits of the different characters and how different rules work. Interacting with all the different races was very fun though and there was some great role-playing. After a little struggle we were able to get through a combat. In any combat focused RPG (Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, etc.) combat can bog things down, so while our first experience was a little slow, I think overall it was very clean and should only get smoother with time.
After the combat was complete the players gather some information that sends them out into the far reaches of space, known as The Vast. This was something everyone had been looking forward to, starship combat! Before the game I had done a ton of research on this as it was a completely new system I had no context for. I was glad I investigated because it turns out the CRB rules had been re-written to fix some balancing issues. So with this new knowledge I created some handouts with the new rules.
For starship combat each player takes a station on board the ship, Captain, Pilot, Engineer, Science Officer, and Gunner. Each station has its own unique abilities and actions and can help boost the ship’s systems or attack the enemy ship. One critique I would have is that these stations are not created equal, the pilot has many choices of actions, while the Captain and Engineer only have a few. Some good role-play and keeping starship combats relatively scarce should make these manageable overall. All the stations also gain abilities as the characters level up, and customizing the ships can offer new and exciting capabilities.
Our starship combat was a little clunky, partly because it was so new and also because no one had any idea what their station would be or how to play it until moments before we started. My skewed map didn’t help anything. We played a few rounds to get the hang of things and get a feel for the different stations. After a little while though it became apparent that we were running out of time and still wanted to create characters! So we put aside the one shot to dig into the main adventure.
The players talked about what kinds of characters they likes to play and any ideas they had been rattling around and then got into the numbers. It was a little rough but we got through the worst of it. Now we have our starting lineup:
Noxylisch aka Nox — A Shirren Solarion and Captain
Twik — A Ysoki Mechanic and Engineer
Shin Arion — A Korasha Lashunta Operative and Pilot
Kosmo Pennypacker — A Gnome Envoy and Science Officer
Cradossk — A Vesk Soldier and Gunner
We will be playing the Dead Suns Adventure Path about once a month. Hopefully I can keep up with this blog to archive the campaign, probably in more detail as we go along. So here we go into The Vast, “Never give up, never surrender!”
