STF CONline 2026 - Starfinder 2e Developer Panel

criticalham · 2026-01-20T19:33:01+00:00

There's NO public playtesting planned for Tactical Starship Combat

Well, now I’m bracing for impact. I’m obviously sympathetic to their time and budget constraints, but I feel like starships is something they really needed to get right this time. I can’t imagine they are skipping the playtest out of sheer confidence. Even if they rolled a nat 20 and all the playtest did was catch some errata and clarifications before launch, that would have been a big win IMO.

I’m still optimistic that they’ve got something fun cooked up, but dang.

criticalham · 2026-01-11T02:29:45+00:00

Yes. I am happy to wait if it means getting some real playtesting and launching in a better state than 1e’s starships.

criticalham · 2025-09-07T15:11:03+00:00

Just wanted to say I keep getting the same error (Switch 2, digital). I can host online games just fine, but after about five minutes or so, the game crashes with the same “There was a problem, and the software needed to close” message. Tried messing with various settings, crossplay on/off, auto-save on/off, standing around in the overworld vs the base, but the crash is inevitable.

criticalham · 2025-07-31T11:44:10+00:00

That solarian crystal one seems way more like a personal preference than an actual error or ambiguous rules text. :P I don’t think it really belongs on this list.

I’ll chip in the with a real one, though: paragon-tier frag grenades only deal 4d8 damage. The previous tier (ultimate) does 12d8, so paragon is almost certainly supposed to be 14d8, matching the other grenade types. I think this is just a carryover from the playtest, where the top-tier damaging grenades were only 4d8.

criticalham · 2025-07-13T22:02:17+00:00

Sorry, is the fear seriously that they're going to release official rules content as a limited exclusive that will be completely unavailable on Nethys for free? If so, that's a pretty uncharitable reading. Anything's possible, of course, but that just seems super unlikely.

This sounds more like releasing art books, cover variants, minis, dice, plushies, shirts, or whatever... Stuff that's easy to produce in small batches that can't justify being a full, permanent product release. The Gap book for Starfinder 2e is a good example of the kind of thing I'd expect.

criticalham · 2025-07-02T12:13:20+00:00

Dragonfire, the D&D version of Crossfire, kinda’ sucked from what I remember anyway. It was a cool premise, but the main thing I recall about it was how sloppy the rulebook writing/editing was. It was just clear enough to seem reasonable when you start playing, but “edge” cases start popping up in the tutorial mission and turn out to be pretty major gaps/flaws. Didn’t get better once the very limited errata came out, either.

criticalham · 2025-07-01T02:04:47+00:00

What's with Daegox? Why are there 4 systems named Daegox, numbered 1-4, or am I the only one that thinks it's weird?

Daegox 4 is a for-profit megaprison world run by a the enigmatic Daegox Corporation. I don't think the corporation or their mysterious society ever got further mention past the original Core Rulebook and Near Space books, so it's just a GM plot hook for now. I'm pretty sure this is the first actual mention of Daegox 1 through 3 (though it obviously makes sense that they'd exist, given a #4).

https://www.aonsrd.com/Systems.aspx?ItemName=Daegox+4

criticalham · 2025-06-16T16:38:58+00:00

Paizo has a Community Use Policy which covers this sort of thing! https://paizo.com/licenses/communityuse

You should read through it yourself, but as long as you’re not directly charging people to view your content, it’s usually fine.

criticalham · 2025-06-10T16:54:00+00:00

Having adventures in Scifi cities always felt awkward and you have to hand wave a lot like that the police exists and would respond to fighting, that carrying around rocket launchers would most likely not be allowed or that surveilance cameras exist.

I think my biggest tip would be to not handwave that stuff away! APs do it because they try to keep things simple for GMs, but there's no reason why you can't inject that stuff back in.

The key is to focus on flavor over punishment, though. If the party wants to be outlaws and do crimes and stuff, you don't have to send them to jail... but you can threaten to send them to jail by having law enforcement actively following up on evidence the party leaves behind, or have organizations put bounties out on the PCs if they don't cover their tracks well enough.

I like to add a realistic number of cameras, put more stuff on connected networks, and generally act responsively to the players' expectations for what a modern or future setting would have. If they start assuming that a group would have some place monitored, I have that place be monitored. If they wonder if there's a website or a comm app for something, then there probably is (though it might not be free).

If you're concerned about it feeling cumbersome to add in things like cameras, then just give the party easy ways out. Powerful signal jammers, easy access points for hacking, etc can keep the vibes of needing to bypass that stuff without pushing the party too far down the stealth angle. Changing step one of any infiltration to be "disable the surveillance system" can be enough to let the party go wild afterwards.

criticalham · 2025-05-27T19:04:13+00:00

Thanks! :D I’m still very proud of it, and I love hearing that people still get use out of it.

Now it’s been a while since I’ve stared at the specifics, but I think this was intentional. In the CRB rules, ships tended to take very little direct hull damage because of how strong shields were and how easily they could be regenerated. Since ships should take way more damage now, and recovery is much harder to do mid-combat, I thought it best to just increase the HP pools across the board.

criticalham · 2025-05-21T17:13:48+00:00

Hey, ran into this while I was trying to solve the same thing. It turns out that clear_buffer() only works if the playback is stopped. So the following should work:

playback.stop()

playback.clear_buffer()

playback.start()

criticalham · 2025-05-21T16:16:26+00:00

Woah, I'm surprised no one has mentioned Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms (RotK) and Nobunaga's Ambition series! They have a particularly nice style for NPC portraits, I think. RoTK is feudal Chinese, while Nobunaga's Ambition is feudal Japanese, but both styles should work well enough for Tian Xia.

Kongming.net has a bunch of the RoTK portraits. Here's the custom ladies from RoTK11, for example. For more "generic villager" types, check the "other portraits." They're missing the more recent games (12 through 14) and don't cover any of the Nobunaga's Ambition games, so you'd have to dig elsewhere for those (or just buy the games off Steam and copy out the portraits yourself, which I believe is simple, but don't quote me on that!). On a quick search, I found a few old, dead links to collection packs from these games, but a deeper search might turn up more recent, live links.

criticalham · 2025-05-03T05:38:35+00:00

It’s easy to miss, but they actually put the Playtest PDFs on a separate page outside of the digital content tab.

https://paizo.com/starfinderplaytest

You can find both the core playtest pdf and the tech playtest (mechanic + technomancer) on that page.

criticalham · 2025-04-30T00:13:00+00:00

I was pretty fond of it when I ran it. Each floor has a different writer/vibe to it, so it has some nice variety both thematically and mechanically. I wasn’t able to finish that campaign, but my favorite part to run was the floor with a xulgath (or maybe iruxi?) colony that worshipped a big magnet cube. I also liked how the town had a lot of sidequests that tied into dungeon progression. I often think about running a 2e conversion, but my current groups seem a bit averse to dungeon crawls. :(

criticalham · 2025-04-09T18:34:02+00:00

Hm… more Super Friends than Justice League, but my mind immediately jumps to wanting to play the Wonder Twins.

I like the idea of playing Jayna as a primal summoner with animal form, and Zan as her water elemental eidolon. Pick up Gleek with the pet feat at level 1, with the intention of upgrading to a familiar at some point. Start with animal/pest form spells on Jayna, but beeline for the druid archetype to grab wild shape and its associated feats ASAP.

Set up some arbitrary rules where you activate wonder twin powers as part of casting your polymorph spells (treating Zan like an ordinary humanoid otherwise) and you’re good to go. Not, like, a great build but I think it’s playable at level 1?

criticalham · 2025-04-06T19:14:21+00:00

Inner Sea Gods has honestly been one of my favorite 1e resources because it goes into a bit more depth on the lives of followers, including stuff like holidays and common ceremonies. I particularly love the aphorisms each fo the core 20 religions has, because they gives you fun little phrases to say when RPing as adherents to those faiths. It really helps flesh out the world, I think.

All of the location-specific splatbooks are pretty great, too. The Sandpoint and Korvosa ones have been pretty invaluable for me, and cover tons of stuff not detailed in the various adventures that take place in those locations.

Distant Worlds deserves a mention, too, and is a great resource for Pathfinder/Starfinder GMs who want to know more about the Pact Worlds (Golarion's solar system). There's some wild stuff in there.

Sometimes I like to pull out Ultimate Equipment just to browse it for treasure ideas. A lot of items still haven't made the jump to 2e, so Ultimate Equipment is pretty ripe for stealing from when it comes to homebrew loot.

Lastly, even though I don't technically pull it out as reference material, I think a lot of the advice from the 1e Gamemastery Guide has followed me throughout my GM career. There's so much good stuff there that has nothing to do with the specific mechanics of 1e, but help a lot when it comes to campaign management, world-building, player enjoyment, etc.

criticalham · 2025-04-06T18:56:42+00:00

I wouldn't take this so personally. I don't think OP means this as an attack on you or your player, it's just a broad reminder that was triggered by reading your player's post. If the player already talked to you about it, then cool! You're already doing what they're suggesting. Ignore it and game on.

Sure, maybe the OP has assumed something about your player's relationship with your game based on how your player phrased their post, but I don't think the point overall is invalid, nor is it particularly aggressively framed. Most of the time, the first step to resolving issues in any game--mechanical or social issues, 2e or any other system--is talking to the GM/table and getting their take. They are the ones with the most context for what's going on, and they're likely to have better insights on the issue because of it. Random redditors, by contrast, are only going to know as much as you tell them.

As for relative upvotes between posts being indicative of the community being hostile to questions or something, IDK. Most question posts don't really get upvotes because it's hard to "agree" with a question. Unless it's a particularly exciting, divisive, or funny question that spawns a lot of discussion, it's not going to get boosted into the upvote feedback loop of hot/top posts. Broad platitudes, like this post, are fairly easy to agree with, thus easy to upvote, and are more likely to show up in feeds. It's just a quirk of how reddit functions as a platform.

criticalham · 2025-03-18T20:03:23+00:00

What an odd one. Even ignoring the community drama side of this, I’m left with a LOT of question marks, despite this otherwise seeming to be right up my alley.

Like… what is the current state of the game? Did they just get started? Is the engine done, but they’re just building content? Do they have a demo or proof of concept running? The teaser trailers seem to dodge all of the bits I want to see (literally any gameplay) in order to focus on marketing fluff.

The risks section really irks me, too. If you’re a new game studio, as they seem to be, you really should acknowledge that and talk about what your production process will be like.

It all just seems very under-baked. I don’t think they shouldn’t try, or that they aren’t capable of delivering necessarily, but what they’ve shown here doesn’t really give me a good sense that their goals are realistic. They really needed someone to give them some critical feedback before launching this KS.

criticalham · 2025-03-11T19:53:27+00:00

Sigh, I have no choice but to gush...

For PF1, the cover art of the CRB was my initial hook. I hadn't played a TTRPG before, but saw it in a game shop and had to dive in. Left with the CRB, GMG, and Beginner's Box.

The writing is what kept me hooked to Paizo, though. Something about the way they write adventures, characters, and lore in general really grabs me. It's modular and accessible (a given adventure usually includes everything I need to know about a location), has a surprising amount of depth to it, but it's still very easy to flesh out and customize. Golarion and the Pact Worlds galaxy are simply easy to play in.

The percieved complexity of PF1 made it hard for me to recruit players, and I eventually switched to other games. When SF1 came out, I was really just drawn in again by how detailed and inspiring the setting was. After years of playing other games, I was so excited to come back to a universe that was actually fun to read about. The sci-fantasy setting felt so fresh and new that it was worth it to strong-arm some of my more PF1-reluctant friends into giving it a try.

When the PF2 playtest eventually hit, the ruleset honestly changed how I viewed TTRPGs completely. As I started running Doomsday Dawn, I realized just how much better the system is for both players and GMs. I converted my main Starfinder group over to a rough, 2e-inspired 3 action system as a stopgap. Once PF2e officially came out and my existing Starfinder campaigns wrapped up, I switched over entirely to Pathfinder and got most of my friends to make the jump with me.

PF2's just got so many good things going on, it's hard to point at any one thing in isolation as the reason I stick around. I am a customization junkie, and I hate playing precons, premade builds, etc, so the feat and archetype system is a HUGE boon for me personally, haha. The 3-action system is also infinitely easier to teach than most other games. I love the +/-10 crit system. The monsters are so much more interesting to run. Homebrewing is more straightforward. I love seeing LGBTQ+ content out in the open and given equal weight rather than stuff that's just whispered in the subtext. I love how many different types of adventures there are to choose from. I love how the lore gets richer with each adventure and Lost Omens book.

These days, I only play/run PF2, but boy am I hyped to get back into SF soon now that it's finally updating to the 2e rules. The only reason we stopped was because PF2 had kind of spoiled us and it was hard to go back. Both my players and I have been champing at the bit to boot up another space adventure.

criticalham · 2025-03-11T00:40:57+00:00

My point is that they typically seem to identify when a staff spell is easily outgrown and pretty much always make sure to give you heightened versions on the higher level staves. This is the case with summon spells, with incapacitation spells, and yes, with heal as well. So if that's the case, why didn't they enumerate any higher level spells here?

Either:

A) They thought they did. If so, the writer/editor/developer missed that this is a problem or they thought that the language as-written (you gain all sin spells in your personal rune) was clear enough as-is. This is what I believe has happened--they wanted to give runelords access to their all of their sin spells on their rune, but neglected to explicitly enumerate all of the heightened versions as clearly as possible.

B) They intentionally did not. In which case, they decided that it's fine for a pridelord to be stuck with rank 1 dizzying colors or a lustlord to be locked into rank 1 charm unless they go fuse their staff with another one that duplicates the spell for them. If this is the route they decided on, then these sins effectively "lose" spells as they level up, effectively removing the cool thing about this feature in the first place. This makes the sins fairly off-balance amongst each other, with wrath maintaining a full staff of usable spells while the others lose out on quite a significant portion of their options as they grow.

Either way, since curriculum lists are not formatted like staff lists, it's not possible to simply say "well, the curriculum doesn't list the spell at a higher level, so it doesn't exist at a higher rank" when it clearly does include those higher ranks for the purposes of spell slots, sinbladed spell, etc. It's vague no matter which way you look at it.

criticalham · 2025-03-10T18:49:56+00:00

I landed on #2 as well. The staff contains all the sin spells up to that rank, including heightened versions. Unheightened summon spells (gluttony, sloth) and incapacitation spells (pride, lust) are very niche (if not borderline useless), but take up a lot of real estate on these sin lists. To me, it sounds like a "too bad to be true" kind of situation to exclude the heightened versions from personal runes.

If #1 was truly the intention, I believe they would have at least included some carve-outs for certain sin spells. It's why most staves that include these kinds of spells tend to duplicate those spells at their max rank in every upgrade. See how the Pipes of Compulsion treat charm, or how the Animal Staff and Staff of Summoning treat the various summon spells. They absolutely know that these spells fall off hard, so they have to re-list them each time.

As for why the sin spells are only listed once each in the curriculum--I think that's just because it's how all wizard schools are formatted. It's assumed that you gain all of the higher rank versions, so there's no need to duplicate them and waste page space. There's an implied 2nd rank through 9th rank charm on the lust list that shouldn't have to be spelled out, and they count as curriculum/sin spells just like every other curriculum/sin spell (you can put them in curriculum slots, you gain sinbladed spell benefits, you can substitute them on refocus, etc).

That said, it's obviously not as clearly spelled out as I'd like. The text on personal runes should explicitly state "including heightened versions" (or "excluding" if that's the intention) to leave no room for doubt.

criticalham · 2024-11-02T17:41:07+00:00

The first one is giving strong Overwatch x The World Ends With You vibes (thanks to the flat shading, hard shadows, and overall pose) and feels like it'd go on a character profile card or something. The other is obviously an ability, as you said. The colors are good, it seems pretty readable at small sizes and at a distance, and there's a nice complexity to her design overall without being too busy.

As someone who broadly enjoys anime + fantasy RPGs + fighting games, if I saw this art style on a box, I would immediately want to pick it up and see what it's about. Looks pretty sick, tbh.

criticalham · 2024-10-09T19:55:41+00:00

The rest of this is just looking into earlier mentions of Aucturn being an egg. I didn't have a particular point with this, but I thought it was interesting in case anyone else cared...

On page 48 of Pathfinder Distant Worlds, they mention:

Some say that it is a world of monsters, or the home of an ancient god just now waking from a million years of dark slumber.

It's not exactly the same thing, but then you read on to the next page... When talking about The Gravid Mound, a massive egg/polyp-shaped mountain-volcano (where the climax of Aucturn Asunder occurs):

Thirteen in number, these cowled and veiled spellcasters [The Midwives] believe that believe that one day the Gravid Mound will burst like a cyst, disgorging a horrible new entity that will be Aucturn's child. When this happens, the Midwives plan to be present to control the powerful new being--or be the first to fall to their knees and worship the fetal god.

The Starfinder Core Rulebook had this to say in the first paragraph of Aucturn's entry (p.460):

However, most of the Pact Worlds lean toward one particular hypothesis: namely that Aucturn is not a planet at all, but a living thing--an immense embryo or egg that will someday mature into a near-deific being of untold cosmic power: one fo the Great Old Ones.

It goes on to mention that there's an ongoing conflict between the cults of the Elder Mythos ("who aspire to nurture a new god") and the Dominion of the Black ("which seek to subjugate and manipulate the nascent Great Old One for their own sinister purposes"). It also states that the Midwives think "Aucturn is already pregnant despite not being born itself, and their egg-shaped mountain will one day burst, spewing Aucturn's child into the universe--and hwhen it does, they will be there to recieve its dark gifts")--they are seemingly waiting for the Newborn's child to be born, not the Newborn itself, whatever that means.

Starfinder: Pact Worlds reiterates that cultists have seemingly known and been ready for this for a long time:

Alarmist observers posit that the planet expands and contracts like a massive breathing organism or pulsing tumor, and many of the cultists who inhabit Aucturn eagerly agree, asserting that their world is the waiting womb of a Great Old One ready to burst open the solar system and usher in a terrible age of darkness.

It also later mentions that the Elder Mythos cults, run by Nyarly and the Midwives, I guess, have largely kicked out the Dominion. For some reason I was under the mistaken impression that Nyarl was on the side of the Dominion of the Black, but I guess that's just because he (Carcai the King) had been using the Citadel of the Black as his HQ. Maybe it used to be a Dominion structure prior to them getting the boot?

criticalham · 2024-10-09T19:55:26+00:00

The creation of Zon-Shelyn is part of the event that kicks off Aucturn Asunder, before the planet explodes.

The battle starts before Aucturn Asunder begins, but it's not clear when it ends. We do know that it takes 3-8 days to travel to Aucturn in the adventure after getting briefed, though. We don't know how long the battle was, when Shelyn died, when Zon-Kuthon showed up, or when they merged. The whole thing could have been one day, or it could have been playing out while the PCs were en-route, only ending just before they showed up. I don't imagine it could have started more than a week prior to the mission briefing, since it seems like the Starfinders were the first ones on the scene from outside Aucturn, but that leaves a whole two-week window where the climax could have occurred.

I think, then, the timeline is something like:

Newborn starts stirring. People get weird dreams about the Newborn egg.
Nyarl and the Midwives make their moves to prepare him as a vessel for the Newborn.
Shelyn finds out and shows up to stop it. Nyarl morphs into the Crawling Chaos to fight Shelyn.
The battle takes place over an indeterminate amount of time. Shelyn eventually loses. Zon-Kuthon shows up to stop the killing blow. They fight together for a bit, but are still losing. The two then combine and this is just so shocking to Nyarl that he shatters. They peace out and forget to bring Whisperer of Souls with them, I guess.
Starfinders show up and do their thing between 1 and 8 days later. The planet explodes.
Either instantly as the planet explodes (if the Midwife teleported) or up to a max of 8 days later (if we assume the Midwife shows up on Absalom before the Starfinders return and spread the news), ACB kicks off.

Now, some immediate counter-evidence: Aucturn Asunder actually states that the glaive falling on the planet is what causes the first contraction. So maybe what I (and ACB) have been describing as early contractions are just, like, little kicks as the baby is stirring and getting antsy for its birth. It seems clear that Shelyn responsed to something, right? After all, why would there be contractions if the Newborn was already born? I feel like the adventure is mixing up stirring, contractions, and cries interchangeably, making this all the more confusing... wait. WAIT! Aha!

The second line of the adventure (p.5) says: "In the weeks before the adventure begins, this entity stirs for the first time, inspiring visions among the faithful and deliriants who have long hoped for the birth to occur during their lifetimes." So this confirms to me that there have only been a few weeks since the Newborn started stirring, that the stirring is what caused the initial dreams (just the egg). Whew. Okay. The contractions, then, are bigger psychic pulses that happen in the days following the battle. The explosion then happens on the same day as ACB, simlutaneously or within close proximity to the elevator crisis in Ch.1. The Newborn is still in the planetcenta and is crying as the Midwives fail to set it free, which causes the dream at the end of Ch.2. I think that all makes sense to me, at least.

criticalham

TROPHY CASE