Starjammer Core Rulebook (Pathfinder)

Welcome to the Void. Welcome to Starjammer!

Some people look to the stars and wonder what they are, what they mean, and what is out there.

Your characters are about to find out.

Welcome to Starjammer, a wild ride through the void built upon and compatible with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. This tome is over 200 pages of star-exploring options, including:

• Four new player character races including the Abiarazi (shapechanging oozes), the Manu (innovative crafters of magitech), the Pasimachi (a beetle-like hive race with a wealth of genetic variations), and the Transgenics (half human/half alien nomads)!
• A toolbox approach to creating and customizing your own spacefaring vessels to travel the stars as explorers, traders, pirates, mercenaries, or even as a part of an organized space fleet!
• New racial options, archetypes, and traits for all of the new races as well as for the core Pathfinder Roleplaying Game races!
• Additional uses for skills, plus new skills to use technology!
• New class archetypes including heliacal healer (cleric), shock trooper (fighter), and void tracker (ranger)!
• New racial and class features to specialize your characters for their journeys away from their home planets, such as the Infinity Oracle Mystery, Elven Rocketjocks, and much more!
• Unique roles for space vessel crewmembers, specialized crew roles, and synergies between officers that grant benefits to the crew!
• Factions of the Void, including the knowledge-seeking Bastion Incantorum, the militaristic Infinite Star Legion, the charismatic Israfel Order, the avaricious Red Tang Spice Guild, and the preservationist Shaman Knights.
• New rules for skills used in space, including Craft (vessel), Knowledge (geography), and Profession (pilot)!
• Over a dozen new feats for PCs in space!
• New equipment for space-based adventures including magnetic shields, misfortune lanterns, hardsuits, dwarven steamsuits, star marine armor, and more!
• Over a dozen new spells to survive in or control the void around you!
• Environmental hazards of space and space travel including antimagic fields, asteroid fields/meteor showers, comets, dust clouds, nebulae, oort clouds, radiation belts, ribbon storms, solar flares, wormholes, and more!
• Rules for planet shapes, environments, and classifications!
• A sample gazetteer to spark your imagination when creating your own bold new worlds!

Take to the stars and begin your adventures either on your own or with a hearty crew of brave friends.

Explore the infinite reaches of the void or bring a bit of the stars to the games at your own table today!

Reviews!

Sam Hearn — 5 Stars!

First the good stuff: We start off with a couple of new races, info on the standard races, and then some racial archetypes. This is followed by some archetypes for classes, and faction information for new factions. We have some new skills and feats, as well as new spells and equipment. All of this takes up some 90-odd pages.

After this, we have more than a 100 pages of GREAT stuff. The stuff we all want - Space! Or rather, the Void, as it is called. First there is the hazards, with random encounter tables for things like meteor showers, radiation belts and wormholes (but not limited to just these!). This is followed by information regarding different types of planets you might encounter, and the environmental hazards that might accompany them. Enough information for you to create hundreds of different worlds your group might visit. There are also a number of pre-built worlds, complete with adventure hooks for each world. And then even more info, for example trade goods from different worlds.

And then we come to the reason we all want this product - the rules for traveling the Void. Rules to build your own ships. What (and number of) crew you will need, complete with bonuses if your crew is specially skilled in their position. For example, a Tactical Officer can give you bonuses on attack rolls against enemy vessels, as well as bonuses in combat against enemy crew who may have boarded your vessel. And if you don't have enough PC's to crew your ship? Well, you can then hire NPC's, or your DM might allow you to buy droids that can fulfill certain tasks.

On the ships themselves, you can have anything from a Ultralight vessel, usable by and intended for a single character, all the way to Superheavy vessels which are the flagships of space-navy fleets, and which can have entire invading armies on board! There are pre-built vessels, but (more importantly) there is also rules for building your very own vessel! And all of this is only starting to touch all of the information in the book!

Pros: It is Spelljammer for Pathfinder. Need I say more?

Cons: There are a few minor editing errors in the book, but they are few and far between, and will be fixed in future editions. Also, this book references other Paizo material. However, the material referenced is available on D20PFSRD.COM

ComputerSmurf — 4 Stars!

This is a meaty book with all sorts of goodness to delve through. Due to character limits I will be as brief as I can while doing the book justice.

You have 9 Chapters in this book

• Character Races 
• Class Options 
• Skills & Feats 
• Equipment 
• Magic 
• Environmental Hazards 
• Traveling 
• Fighting 
• Bestiary.

In the races section you have the standard core races with their new roles in space, you have a fun Ooze People (Abiarazi), a fast rising species that is great at tech/magitech (Manu), Beetle Bug People (Pasimachi), and the Alien/Space Monster + Human version of Aasimars/Tieflings. Each of the new races comes with feats/archetypes and either new equipment or new spells for them.

In the new class options there a couple of flavorful archetypes (Void Tracker being my favorite), as well as a couple piece parts of class choices (a rogue talent, an oracle mystery, a kineticist talent, and the Siege Combat Style !!!!) as well as factions. The Factions are like most organization rules in the Inner Sea <X> books for pathfinder proper, a little crunch, a little fluff, gives a setting more life.

Equipment operates under an assumption you have access to the technology guide, which is somewhat fair since the publisher being the same group that runs the SRD, but can be a drawback for some users. The important thing to look at here is Table 4-1, the wealth by level chart. Reason this is important is this is where you find your Vessel wealth budget as well. The equipment presented in this chapter is out of the reach of most characters below level 6-8 excluding the spike bomb just based on price. Makes sense as some of these are fairly powerful.

Magic in this book is somewhat of a mixed bag. I understand the need for some of the spells incase objects fail, people wanting to engage in ship combat, always have access to the Mend Vessel spell line.

The hazards chapter is both the environmental hazards in space as well as a planet generation system, ending with gods in space. I can dig it, I'd think they might want to expand on planet generation/sample planets in another book if enough interest comes up. Nothing as massive as this one, but maybe like the size of a Pathfinder Companion book. The gods? Well, the ones they go into depth on with a full god entry block for (sans obedience and boons) are great. Table 6-9: Other Gods? Cthulhu gods in space always makes me have bad C-Tech flashbacks. I hope the devs expand on that table in a future book and give as much love to these guys as they did the ones fully presented in this book.

Travelling/Fighting in the Void chapters: Spaceship rules from Crew, to building, to combat. It's like they looked at Rogue Trader, said "this is a mess, we can do this better" and then they did. It makes me happy to see a cleaner spaceship combat system here than in product line that is devoted to that.

This leaves the bestiary in the back: Rather short, another book is assumed to be owned here for one monster, as it has mythic ranks. Some of the monsters are fun (I'd love to see Racial Stats on the Uzaycin presented), but the Star Beasts? Not so much.

Final Thoughts: Pros: Lots to work with here for most styles of space play. Book refs another one they have planned so it gives hope and shows they are going to expand on things.

Cons: the amount of See Page (XX) notations indicating a few minor editing errors, assumptions on other books owned (or access to SRD), the lack of beetle mount stats for the Pasimachi's Cavalier Archetype (the druid beetle/bug as printed normally is Medium and it's a medium sized race. Do you intend to give Undersized Mount?).

Rating: 4/5. Adjust to 5/5 when formatting errors (Page XX) and the beetle things are fixed.

Starjammer!

Joseph Davis — 4 Stars!

I am a fan of cross-genre material, Iron Gods being one of my favorite AP's, and was deliriously excited for Starfinder, and likewise this product. I will say, I love it, seriously love it. The style is sleek and clean. It's lore-light, offering a good chunk of fluff, but not so much that you can't add your own easily.

Pros: Ship system is simple to use, haven't finished learning it yet, but still pretty accessible. All current pathfinder material seems to be 100% compatible, which is really nice. Planetary crunch and ship based material is really cool, as is the new races.

Cons: Some minor editing issues (found at least two "pg. xx" in the book), and the material, while good, is cluttered a bit. It feels like there should be more general gear. The only new weapon in the core book is a grenade, the game assumes you are using the technology guide to use a chunk of the book, which clocks the book in with at least 3 books needed to utilize this book.

All in all, I love it, and plan to run a homebrew game using it! Thanks guys at D20pfsrd!

Better than Spelljammer from 2nd Edition!

Daniel J. Mello — 4 Stars!

Bringing Pathfinder to space with a mixed bag of magic and science this product proudly brings space travel to the Pathfinder universe. While not touching on the Pathfinder core world it does touch on the core concepts with new classes, 4 new races, new archetypes for existing classes (including some from Occult Adventures). It also brings in a few new monsters and for you high level gamers there are immense new dragons and other creatures who can thrive in the cold of outer space. The book's only failings are that it tries to cover a lot and is only able to skim the surface. The book needs an expansion set to cover ship design and increase the number of space traveling engines and ship types as well as improve on the ship design sequence. It does an adequate job of covering most of what was good about 2nd edition Spelljammer; including some of my favorites like a lifejammer that provides propulsion with Con points and a Spelljammer engine that provides propulsion with spell levels, without totally draining the caster. There are some provision for Dreamscarred Press Psionics, but you would have to create your own Psi Engines. It provides a bare bones rule system for space combat using the existing Pathfinder Ship combat from Skull and Shackles. Ship combat uses Vehicle Points (VP) where 10 hit points equals 1 VP and ships have hardness; usually wood or metal, making ships hard to damage by characters without ramming or using the included siege engines. I don't see any rules for cannon though. I highly recommend the book. Makes me even more curious what Paizo plans on doing with their version of Pathfinder in space.

Complementary Products!

• Gamemaster's Star Log
• Quick Generator - Space & Sci-Fi Encounter Concepts
• Game Masters Soundpack: Sci-Fi: Future Ads
• Astounding Futures: Starships!