Geeks A Gogo attended Gen Con 2019 a couple of weeks back, and though the buzz was all about the release of Pathfinder 2nd edition, we caught up with Starfinder lead develoepr, Rob McCreary. We talked about the new releases
coming up for Starfinder, and we're excited to hear about all the new sourcebooks and adventure paths that are coming down the pipe. Here's what Rob had to say:
Geeks A Gogo: So, the Character Operations Manual is out in November, and it has a bunch of new class options. Which ones are you most excited about?
Rob: Well, I'm most excited about the three new classes that are in the book: The Bio Hacker, The Vanguard, and the Witch Warper because they’re brand new things. We went through a whole public play test to really get the kinks out to make him the best they could be, but like you said, there's stuff for everybody in the book.
Also I think more than the class options, I'm interested in some of the ultimate race options. For instance, the androids have a new race option called xenometric android, which lets you make an android that looks like another species. So if you want a Vesk android or a Gnome android or, I guess even a Skittermander android, you could do that.
Geeks A Gogo: Which of the new classes saw the greatest changes from the play test in January?
Rob: No one had more changes over the other, because all three of them went through changes. The Witch Warper we definitely tightened up some of that, because their abilities were kind of all over the place and some didn't work quite the way we wanted to. So, we did completely redo their infinite worlds ability. The Vanguard--there were some issues at low-level play about getting entropy points. So we definitely put some new stuff in there. And then also for the bio hacker, they're supposed to be helping their allies as well as debuffing enemies, but it was a little bit hard for them to help their allies sometimes. We made it much easier for them to basically inject their allies with the good stuff. So, they all kind of went through a bunch of changes based on the feedback from the play test.
Geeks A Gogo: So was there anything that was completely cut from the book after the play test?
Rob: No. We didn't have to cut anything wholehearted, fortunately, because the play test was just to the classes, so we still had a lot of the book left to put new stuff in. There may have been a couple of abilities that were a bit overpowered that might have been cut, but nothing got cut whole-cloth. I think most of the changes just came in sort of tightening up the abilities of the classes and just trying to make them more fun to play at the table.
Geeks A Gogo: So, we're getting another Alien Archive at the end of August. Any surprises to look for in that?
Rob: We have some really cool stuff coming out of Alien Archive 3. You know, of course, there's plenty of playable races and new species, too. The cool thing we have in the back of the book is the creature companion rules. So now there's gonna be ways for any character to get a companion. If you find some little alien creature on on another planet, you could make it into a pet and bring along with you on adventures. There's some templates for a whole bunch of different alien features. So we have some monsters from Alien Archives one and two that, we have templates to turn into companions like the Tashtari or the laser wolves from Alien Archive, too. If you want a little a little Tashtari puppy to come along with you and grow up.
That's that's kind of the big thing that's in there. We've also brought in some of the monsters or the creatures from Startfinder Society that originally debuted in our organized play program. So you have Morlamaws and the big villain for the last season of Starfinder Society play, the Jinsuls. They're fully worked into the game with all their stats.
Geeks A Gogo: All right. So is there anything else coming down the pipeline that you could tell us about?
Rob: Yeah. We've got some new adventure paths coming out starting this month, we have the Attack of the Swarm adventure path, which is all about the big insectoid Swarm coming and attacking everything, and you have to fight them off.
And after that, in February, we have the Threefold Conspiracy adventure path, which is all about the sort of infiltrating aliens that we call the unseen, so we the have Grays and Reptoids. That's just peeling back the layers of conspiracy and seeing how deep they go, it's gonna be a lot of fun.
And then in the spring in March, we're releasing the Near Space books. This is a setting book that sort of describes the next part of the setting, which includes the Veskarium, home of the Vesk.
We're gonna learn a lot more about the Veskarium. All the planets in there, plus other planets in near space.
Geeks A Gogo: That sounds fantastic, I’m looking forward to this. Thanks, Rob.
Check out our previous interview with Rob McCreary:
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