Paizo Publishing's Starfinder is the company's follow-up its popular Pathfinder role playing game. Referring to the genre, Publisher Erik Mona calls it Science Fantasy and teased players with new playable races.
Creative Director James Sutter told Polygon, the game has laser guns, alien planets, spaceships and magic. He went on describing, ninjas with chainswords, wizards with laser guns and four-armed aliens with blasters casting spells.
Paizo Starfinder will launch as a single, large volume. The game will be set in the Pathfinder universe, thousands of years in the future.
A phenomenon called The Gap was conceived as a safe-guard from players manipulating the existing storylines of Pathfinder. It was described as a case of multiverse-wide amnesia and is also the premise of the political and existential crises in Starfinder.
Aside from humans, on launch, there will be six playable races. However, only four were revealed.
Lashunta are a telepathic and hyper-intelligent race. They were described to take a role similar to Vulcans in "Star Trek."
Ysoki are a tiny rat-like race. This was thrown-in partly for fans of Rocket Racoon.
Kasatha are a four-armed mysterious people. For lack of better descriptions, they are space samurai.
There is also a race of androids. They were built to serve, but were emancipated from humanity and are true artificial beings.
Starfinder parties will start the campaign with a starship. This will serve as their home base and a powerful starting weapon.
Space combat will be done on a hex grid like the classic Battletech franchise. The entire party will be piloting the same ship with individuals manning stations. By design, every member should be involved and not have a single player doing all the work.
The Pathfinder universe has almost a decade worth of lore in a large collection of books. Paizo Starfinder gives new and veteran players a chance to start fresh. The game will be playable by simply picking up the Core Rulebook, Geek & Sundry reported.
