So far we’ve talked about backstories and introduced the characters that will star in the Starfinder posts, but we’ve yet to actually talk about the game. Both in terms of what Starfinder itself is, and what the campaign being covered details.
Starfinder is a science fantasy tabletop game produced by Paizo Publishing. It’s a spin-off of their Pathfinder game series, which was your most fantasy dungeons and dragons style fare. Starfinder shares the setting, but flings it into the distant future. You still see your fantasy elves and dwarves, but they now mingle with aliens on space stations, travel in starships, and shoot laser guns!
It’s not the only setting or game that mixes sci-fi and fantasy, but Starfinder has created a very wide scope for itself and allowed for a wide variety of themes to fit within their setting. Or outside it! The rules can easily be divorced from the setting itself if you want to make one of your own. The Lost Worlds campaign does take place in the core setting though, and we’ll need to explain a few small details of the setting for it to make sense.
The first is the Gap. The Gap is a length of unknown time that began a little over 300 years ago and stretches back an unknown, but long, length of time before eventually ending in the distant past. Everything during the Gap is lost. Memories, history, it’s a mess of confusion. Even physical and digital records are often contradictory in their accounts of this period of time.
From the outside looking in, this serves the obvious purpose of allowing Paizo to support both Pathfinder and Starfinder without concerns over the timeline bleeding over. The Gap is a buffer to allow new stories in Pathfinder to come out that a distant future may otherwise know about. This is further emphasized by the fact that the Gap specifically targeted the planet Golarion, Pathfinder’s main setting.
Which brings us nicely to the next point. Golarion is gone, and nowhere but the gods seem to know where it went. In its place is a moderately sized space station known as Absalom Station. With Golarion gone, Absalom Station serves as the central hub to the galaxy. This is in large part because it is powered by an ancient artifact known as the Starstone.
The Starstone is a beacon, enabling anyone anywhere to quickly reach Absalom Station with the faster-than-light travel known as Drift travel. The Drift is a plane of existence that was only discovered in the ending period of the Gap. The god of machines, Triune, gifted blueprints to many civilizations with how to construct an engine to access and travel through the Drift.
The Drift itself is an infinite plane, and traveling through it comes with the caveat that somewhere in the multiverse, a piece of reality is pulled through into the drift with every jump. These three aspects are the important parts of the setting to understand: the Gap, the missing Golarion, and the Drift.
Now for my campaign. It takes place in the default Starfinder setting of the Pact Worlds, and in fact opens with the Adventure Path Incident at Absalom Station. I chose to use this as a starting point as I found the opening adventure did a good job of introducing multiple aspects of the game to my players. However, I’ve twisted the ending to better fit my own personal campaign, and it soon goes off in its own direction.
Nonetheless, for future posts there is a warning of spoilers for Part 1 of the Dead Suns Adventure Path. Next Saturday, the campaign’s coverage will officially begin.
Weaving Worlds 