Feb 16, 2025
Pirate Campaign Compendium ~ Legendary Games (2018)
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Pirate Campaign Compendium ~ Legendary Games (2018)
Review at Random: Alien Bestiary (Starfinder)
Welcome to Reviews at Random, today we’re not doing a video game. Today, instead, we’re doing a third party product for a tabletop role-playing game. I’ll try my best to make this friendly for people who don’t know about Starfinder, but whatever.
The Alien Bestiary product is published by Legendary Games, made for the Starfinder system (a space fantasy system made by Paizo, the Pathfinder people) and fueled by Kickstarter (including me, full admission). It came out between the Alien Archive (the first official monster book) and Alien Archive 2 (the second official monster book). This makes it... interesting in how it relates to the official products.
Psychic Headshot - Legendary Games Illustration by Beatrice Pelagatti
An exciting collection of pirate adventures, heroes, treasure, and more for aquatic adventure in 5E or the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.
It is time to set a course for adventure in your 5th Edition and Pathfinder RPG games with a spectacular set of pirate plunder and aquatic adventure on the seven seas and exotic ports of call with the Pirate Campaign Compendium from Legendary Games!
Whether you want to run interludes across the ocean or along the coastal plain or to undertake a full-on nautical campaign, from pure aquatic fantasy to historical high seas adventure, from sea serpents to booming broadsides, you'll find a wealth of amazing accessories in the Pirate Campaign Compendium!The base version of the book comprises a compilation of Legendary Games' full line of Pirate-Plug-Ins for Pathfinder and 5E.
You'll find FIVE complete adventures ranging from 4th level to 14th level, including the smuggling run gone wrong in Spices and Flesh, the mad captain's hidden harbor in Tarin's Crown, the fast-paced high-seas heist of Raid on the Emperor's Hand, the seething rage of an ancient mystic secret of the seas in Scourge of the Steaming Isle, and an all-out assault on the stronghold of the pirate king in Fort Scurvy!
Dozens of maritime magical items in Treasury of the Fleet, including personal items like the hurricane harpoon and sea lord's tricorne as well as magic items for your ship.
A selection of sinister sea monsters in an ever-growing bestiary of the briny blue!
A Pirate Codex of 30 nautical stock NPCs from 1st to 16th level, ready to drop into any encounter at a moment's notice.
A pair of fully developed ship crews to use as allies or adversaries in Cutthroats and Crew. Eight richly detailed and ready-to-play pregenerated PCs in Nautical Heroes, each with detailed histories and backgrounds and advancement notes, perfect as followers, rivals, or even replacement PCs!
That's already over 200 pages of piratical delights for you, but that's just the beginning! With stretch goals, we'll be adding new nautical class options like aquatic archetypes, feats, and spells, more monsters, and even more surprises as we collect stretch goals along the way, where you get to help decide what goes in the final book! With your support, this book easily could pass 300 pages and beyond!
Plus, we'll have a Pirates and Plunder chapter where YOU have the chance to bring a whole pirate world to life with characters and pirate captains and crews of your own, even designing a personal pirate flag, figurehead, or even a treasure map!
Click here to download Chapter Ten Sample Pages: PCC 10p3 and PCC 10p9
Click here to download Chapter Seven Sample Pages: PCC 7p14
Kickstarter campaign ends: Tue, March 6 2018 7:59 AM UTC +00:00
Website: Legendary Games
So You're At Gen Con & Starfinder Is Sold Out. Now What?
As you may have heard by now, Paizo sold every copy of the new Starfinder Core Rulebook they brought to Gen Con. No, seriously, every copy. On the first day of the con. By 4:00 PM.
Which means that there are likely a lot of fans—possibly some of you reading this right now—who are pretty bummed at this moment.
Don’t be.
You know you’re going to be able to get Starfinder in a few days at your local gaming store. And in the meantime, there’s already another Pathfinder-but-in-space book you can get your hands on right now: the Aethera Campaign Setting.
I asked Robert Brookes, publisher of the Aethera Campaign Setting, to tell me more about the book and the world:
RB: The Aethera Campaign Setting is a science-fantasy dieselpunk setting for Pathfinder! Imagine Starfinder, but with a more low-tech, analog and magic hybrid technology approach. Best of all, you can use all of your Pathfinder products with it! Aethera is a massive 500+ page tome that covers an entire star system, with new races, new classes, new archetypes and support rules for every published class, and fully supports all Pathfinder products from Paizo. So it's like Starfinder, except you already know you like it!
Now, as you all know, the thought of another rulebook makes me shudder with horror. So I asked Robert to give me five things that should make me get excited about the system and the setting. Not being one for following directions, Robert gave me six:
RB: 1: Fully customizable space ships you can pilot with your entire party as bridge crew and gunners.
2: Space-faring cannibal minotaurs who invaded the star system in hollowed out planetoids called Labyrinth Ships.
3: Their enigmatic kyton allies who seek to refine and rebuild life for the sake of the effort.
4: Magic-technology hybrid rules that interface seamlessly with the Pathfinder Campaign Setting Technology Guide.
5: Rules for plant symbionts that your characters can wear and use as unique companions.
6: A unique cosmology without gods, where outsiders are unconstrained by morality and divinity.
There’s nothing worse than walking around a con feeling like you missed out, or going to the book store and finding out that the entire reason you made the trip is gone. (Says the guy who just missed out on an under-$100 copy of the 2e AD&D Night Below box set two weeks ago. Not that I’m bitter.) But Starfinder will still be waiting for you next week. This is a chance to take that $59.99 and get in on the ground floor of an equally fresh space setting you may love in a system you already know.
Also, full disclosure: I’m in no way associated with Aethera or Encounter Table Publishing. I get zero free books or anything for this—I paid into the Kickstarter more than a year ago. And Robert didn’t approach me; I approached him.
In fact, I wasn’t even sure I liked Aethera when I first heard it pitched—I prefer my space fantasy at the Spelljammer (especially in its Shadow of the Spider Moon incarnation) or Distant Worlds technology level. But having written an entire manifesto about how I wanted to see more publishers do new things within Pathfinder, rather than spit out yet another new rules system or OSR clone, I felt like I had to step up and support the Aethera Campaign Setting Kickstarter. Since then, I’ve become impressed with the setting, the layout/design of the book (that pit where most third-party publishers lose me and never get me back), and the people involved. Now I’m at the point where I can’t wait for my copy to arrive in the mail.
If you’re at Gen Con, go find the Aethera folks and check out the Campaign Setting book. If you want to learn more, the website is here. And if you’re not at Gen Con but want to pull the trigger, Legendary Games has you covered.
There are a lot of third-party Pathfinder publishers out there, but nearly all of them tread in the easily marketable safe waters of class splatbooks, monster bestiaries, and spells that go boom. I’m willing to hand over my blog for one night to Aethera because we need more publishers out there willing to take risks, play with setting, commit to serious art and design, and reach for the stars.
(Images © 2016 by Encounter Table Publishing)
For anyone looking for more Starfinder beasties (and who isn’t?), check out this Kickstarter. It’s from the same people doing Legendary Planet, so it’s another way to get our monsters from there along with all the other creatures you need for Starfinder.
Planer Cosmology and the Power of Perspective (Planescape)
I'm going to start this with a stupidly obvious statement. My version of Planescape has incorporated Golarion into it. Different people feel different ways about this idea and the idea I'm about to get into is not right for every campaign, nor is it right for every table. If you're not a fan, I won't be offended.
Here's the rub that I face when I add Golarion to Planescape... the cosmology of their planes is completely different. The Great Beyond and the Great Wheel containing some very basic similarities, but they're are also very distinct from each other.
Let's go back even further, to the very first tabletop RPG book I bought (well... my parents bought after I nagged them). It was 3.5's Deities & Demigods. Not everyone's favourite, for sure, but I have a soft spot for it to this day. One of the neat things that Deities & Demigods did is that it included a lot of information about the Great Wheel, but it also included a lot of information about alternative cosmologies. In addition to featuring the core pantheon, which at the time was from Greyhawk, it featured the Norse pantheon, the Greek pantheon and the Kemetic (Egyptian) pantheon. For each of these, they provided a map and basic description of the cosmology that went with that pantheon. For the record, I adore maps. Looking at each of those three cosmology maps gave me tons of ideas for stories that I could tell.
One more digression, and that I'll have set everything up to get to my point. Aethera came out last week and knocked my socks off. The Aethera solar system has a unique cosmology in two regards. First, the entire solar system is cut off from the Outer Planes. Second, it possesses an extra Inner Plane, the Elemental Plane of Wood. Now, the Elemental Plane of Wood has shown up before, as an optional plane in the 3.5 Manual of the Planes. That got me thinking, why do there have to be only four elemental planes? Wouldn't Planescape benefit from being more flexible if it includes the Chinese Wu Xing elements? The Wu Xing, or Five Agents, are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water for the record. Of course it would. If for no other reason than that it would be less culturally hegemonic. The four elements of the inner planes correspond with the four elements that Aristotle identified. Basing your entire knowledge around them is a distinctly Western point of view.
Perspective is the solution to all these problems. It is firmly established in Planescape that belief shapes reality. When we look at the Great Wheel cosmology, that description of the planes carries with it a particular bias. Specifically, that bias originates with the Great Modron March and likely comes down to use via the Fraternity of Order. The Great Wheel Cosmology roughly follows the path of the Modrons, with the Outlands acting as the central hub. Furthermore, this cosmology biases Sigil by placing the Spire at the centre of the Outlands. Now, we know this is intentional on the part of the writers since Sigil is an important location and because Sigilites place such an importance on their city, but remember the three rules of the planes. The Rule of Three. The Unity of Rings. The Centre of All. No matter where you are on the planes, you are at the centre of existence. Placing Sigil at the heart of the map is arbitrary, at least as arbitrary as placing Hopeless or Tir na Og at the centre would have been. Hells, you could put Dis at the core of a planar map, and it would be just as accurate (and don't think Dispater doesn't)!
So what's the point? We can deconstruct the rules and categories of planes and nothing about the Planescape setting will break. The Great Wheel has four Elemental Planes that are infinite yet bleed into each other to form a ring. Golarion has four Elemental Planes that are nested inside of each other with relatively discrete boundaries. Aethera has five Elemental Planes, featuring one that is unknown to the other settings. A prime setting that draws heavily on Chinese mythology and philosophy has a different set of five, four in common with Aethera, three with Golarion and the Great Wheel, and the Elemental Plane of Metal, which is unique to its cosmology. All of these settings can coexist in Planescape. Even if they appear to be contradictory, they aren't. The Clueless aren't clueless because they don't know anything, it's that mortals have such a hard time reconciling the complexities of the universe.
People like to categorize and stick things in cute little conceptual boxes. Every year, I have an hour long discussion with my students about how we say there are "ionic" bond and "covalent" bonds in chemistry, but in reality, those two categories aren't separate, they are a continuum. Chemical bonds will have a variety of properties, some ionic, some covalent, based off of the differences in electronegativities between atoms and the two specific chemicals involved with the bonds. It takes them time for this idea to sink into their brains. Planescape likes its boxes for planes as well. Inner, Outer, Transitive, and Prime. Anything that doesn't fit into those boxes either gets labelled as a demiplane (like the plane of dreams or time) or as a planer pathway (like Mount Olympus).
Is that fair though? How are these planes less of a plane than those four main categories. Going all the way back to my Deities & Demigods days, I think that there is a strong argument that Mount Olympus should be a proper plane of its own. Mount Olympus overlaps with parts of what the Fraternity of Order calls the Prime, Elysium, Arborea, The Grey Wastes, Carceri, but that part of the plane exists in none of those places. If you asked a Divination spell where you could find Zeus' Domain, it could give the answer of either Arborea or Olympus, depending on the diviner's point of view, and both would be true. It is important to note that this doesn't mean that Mount Olympus or the Great Beyond cosmology is "just" a subsection of the Great Wheel. Rather, all three cosmologies are accurate and correct, focusing on the aspects of the planes that are relevant to the worldview of the people who created those particular maps. Creating a 100% accurate and inclusive map of the planes is likely impossible. The multidimensional geometry of planar cosmology is too complicated. We can only look at it from certain points of view, and there is much to be gained by changing our perspective to look at the universe in a different way.
What is to be gained through this exercise? A big benefit to storytellers would be flexibility. This allows for many different types of worlds to be incorporated into a Planescape campaign, offering the diversity that is a hallmark of the setting. Creativity could be another benefit. New stories could easily spring forth simply by looking at an alternate configuration of the planes. Even if they don't, they could provide a unique personality for a particular NPC whose worldview is different from that of the PCs. Imagine an archon becoming convinced that the PCs are clueless rubes because they think there are four elemental planes, and how could you have air be an element when metal and wood aren't. That is memorable! The last benefit is sensitivity. Despite it being fuel for flame wars, I like to be able to include contemporary religions as an option in Planescape, but forcing them to conform to the Great Wheel strips intricacy and nuance away from the philosophies and metaphysics that act as the root for those religions. Metaphysical maps are often extremely important to the esoteric and mystical aspects of any given faith. If you do not allow the faith's cosmology to exist, you erase the richness of that culture. Furthermore, it appropriates culture, and there is a certain arrogance to disregarding a religion's internal cosmology and declaring that "this is the way it really is in my world!" It is humbler by far to have both metaphysical configurations be true simultaneously. Even if they appear to be mutually exclusive, you are dealing with the Planes. If you can't believe six impossible things before breakfast, you just aren't going to cut it.