Because I saw an image of a research ship stuck in arctic ice, this island of yellow light amidst black water and white ice, and it reminded me that I love Verces, Starfinder’s tidally locked Pact World whose dark side is an icy industrial hellscape. And I still want my ice trucker, since Xalke turned out more of a stationary industrial worker out on one of the ice rigs. I want a tough little hover trucker making deliveries to the industrial platforms out on the endless midnight ice.
I did want to build this around trucking. Vehicles. The Piloting skill and the Ace Pilot theme. And that suggested a Dex build, so, you know. Let’s go Operative. For fun points, Operative actually has a Driver specialisation, so yeah. That fits nicely. And then I just had to decide her race, and …
Did you know Space Goblins get racial bonuses to Engineering, Survival and Stealth? Because they’re tough, scrappy little buggers who are used to roughing it out in the holes and garbage pits where other species are disinclined to venture. And, like. Who takes a shitty job that nobody wants, driving out alone onto vast icy hellscapes where no one wants to be? A goblin, is who.
I did, mind you, also consider a dwarf. Because dwarves just feel like science fantasy truckers. But I think goblin wins here.
Character Concept: Girta Highhands, Vercite Ice Trucker
Specialisation Skills (Skill Focus plus auto rank per level): Piloting, Survival
Skill Bonuses: +2 to Engineering, Stealth & Survival (Goblin Scrounger feat), +1 Piloting (Ace Pilot), +3 to Piloting & Survival (Skill Focus), +1 to everything (Operatives Edge)
Race: Space Goblin
Starfinder goblins are stowaways and scavengers and clever little buggers who eked out a whole civilisation for themselves in the maintenance ducts and mechanised bowels of other species’ homes. They’re tough, smart, tenacious little buggers, and they go where they’re not wanted, and they stubbornly survive regardless. Not even necessarily out of spite, but just because what? This is liveable. Y’all don’t like it down here? I love them. Them and ysoki fill a particular niche for me.
And I do like the Scrounger feat for an ice trucker. Bonuses to Engineering, Stealth and Survival. What better set of skills to get bonuses to when you’re piloting a lonely vehicle out over monster-infested ice sheets? If your truck breaks down out there, you’ve got the skills you need to stay hidden, stay alive, and get it moving again.
Granted, goblins aren’t naturally found on Verces. Absalom and the Diaspora are more their sort of haunt. For a start, they don’t have any form of cold resistance, and Verces’ Darkside is fucking cold. But. That’s what technology is for. And goblins hitched rides on ships (not always with the ship’s knowledge) and wound up pretty much everywhere, so this tough little goblin wound up on Verces, and there were shady companies offering money for shitty, dangerous work, and you know what? She can do that. Don’t even worry about it.
Description:
The heavy door of the truck popped open with a pneumatic hiss, and out of the reasonably large opening a surprisingly tiny bundle of armour and snow suit hopped down onto the ice, clicking its heels together to deploy the ice spikes in its boots. A surprisingly well-tended laser pistol jostled for position with a collection of tools on a grubby belt as the figure turned, a gleam of scowling red eyes the only visible feature under the weather gear. Even that was abruptly obscured, however, along with pretty much everything else, when the creature activated the light projector in the armour and blinded everyone in a fifty foot radius.
“Well?” a surprisingly high, growly voice asked, hands on hips while they all blinked the dazzle out of their eyes. “What are you all waiting for? Shit’s not going to unload itself!”
(Notes: among her equipment I’m giving her Frosthiker Soles, because ice sheets, and the Light Projector armour upgrade, because midnight ice sheets. She’s a one-woman floodlight. Also, obviously, Environmental Clothing (cold climates) and an Engineering Kit. I’m not fully sure how to go about functionally equipping a Starfinder Character, beyond armour, weapons and ammo, but I figured I’d throw in a few bits for flavour).
Theme: Ace Pilot
Trucker! Ice trucker! Also goblin, so she just likes vehicles. Mostly self-taught regarding how they work and how to drive them, there may or may not have been a large amount of dismantling wrecked (or not-so-wrecked, at least before she got her hands on them) vehicles in her youth, but she just likes mobile machinery. And the bigger the better, so a good solid slab of a truck is quite appreciated. Might make climbing in and out of cabs a little tricky at 3ft tall, but don’t worry about it. She’ll make it work.
Class: Operative (Driver Specialisation)
I love the description of Driver subclass. “Your lightning reflexes and cool-headed judgment are without equal when you’re behind the wheel.” It feels somewhat geared towards getaway driving, which you might not think makes too much sense for an industrial ice trucker, but do you know what’s out there on the Vercite ice sheets? Trust me. A good (read: living) ice trucker knows when to get shit in gear real quick. Heh. Operatives also have several exploits that double down on the vehicle thing, but that might be overkill. I just wanted her to feel like a trucker first and foremost. A professional driver.
That operatives are also skill monkeys and potential snipers is also not a problem. There are a lot of problems out on Verces’ ice sheets that are best solved with a nice sniper rifle from a comfortable distance away. Like from the nice warm cab of a hover truck, for example. Heh. Not that I think I’d be starting her with a sniper rifle or anything. Probably small arms. But she would vibe with the sniper ethos, for sure. Quick, quiet, and preferably a long way away, that’s how we roll.
Summary:
Verces is just really pretty? In a bleak, industrial, horrifying sort of way? It might be my second favourite Pact World after the Diaspora, although Liavara and the Sun are also in the running there. I just really vibe with the midnight icy and the floodlit industrial platform aesthetic of Darkside. And I know I already did Xalke, another Darksider, but she was stationary, an industrial station worker, and I wanted to go back to the ice trucker idea, the lone traveller out on the ice, doing a shitty job in a scary place. And you just. You gotta love goblins? They’re tough, they’re scrappy, they’re willing to wade through shit, they’re a lot smarter than you think. I deeply enjoy them.
Verces also just warps people, I think. Like Xalke, I want Girta’s first feat to be the Toughness feat. Darkside is about survival. Industry, horror, and survival. So a goblin really does fit. Engineering, Stealth and Survival. The perfect trifecta of Darksider skills. Heh.
So. Have a frozen bundle of goblin grit bombing cheerfully along in a hover truck across the midnight, monstrous ice sheets? Girta Highhand, a goblin Vercite ice trucker!
The hotly anticipated role-playing game is filled with strange characters and places; here’s a close look at one of the worlds you can explore.
Starfinder aims to catapult forward in Paizo’s Pathfinder fantasy universe, and tell stories set in a science-fiction meets fantasy setting of goblin-crewed starships, magical laser rifles, and dragon space explorers. We’ve had a few opportunities in the last several months to highlight Paizo’s upcoming tabletop RPG, including an interview with the creative director and a first look at one of the game’s iconic characters, Iseph the Operative, and later a broader look at all the central characters of the new fiction.
Today, we’re continuing the trend to show off a first look at one corner of the Starfinder universe, and some of its inhabitants, including another closer look at one of Starfinder’s iconic characters.
Verces is one of many explorable planets in the Starfinder universe. The images below each highlight a different aspect of this single planet, but it’s worth noting that the actual Starfinder setting includes info on numerous worlds and moons, space stations, and civilization arc ships, all that neighbor Verces, not to mention the way the Starfinder setting opens the door for galactic exploration of the solar systems that lie further away.
I’ve had a chance to begin exploring some of the Starfinder RPG, and Verces and its many unusual features are a good representation of the creativity on offer in the game. For players fascinated by the meeting point between magic and technology, Starfinder may be a great fit when it releases later this summer.
Each of the images below highlights an aspect of the planet of Verces, including both art directly shared from Paizo and written commentary from the development team.
Verces
Verces is a tidally locked world, meaning the same side always faces the sun, making the light side a parched desert and the dark side seas of frozen ice. Only along the planet’s terminator – the narrow band where the two sides meet – are conditions right to feed and support a robust society. And they have – Verces’ famed Ring of Nations is perhaps the most technologically and socially advanced humanoid society in the Pact Worlds, their urban megacities blending into each other and national borders all but subsumed by an effective worldwide government.
Keskodai, Starfinder’s Iconic Mystic
While not native to Verces, many shirren – such as Keskodai, our iconic mystic – settled Verces upon their arrival in the Pact Worlds system, having made first contact with Vercite aethership crews. Today, shirren have spread throughout the Pact Worlds, but that first desert colony in Verces’ parched Fullbright region remains a well-populated bastion of shirren culture. Among their most interesting qualities is the fact that, as former hive-mind creatures who managed to achieve independence, shirren derive physical pleasure from making choices, no matter how small. While most of them manage to keep this under control, it’s not uncommon to find shirren blissed out in so-called "option-bars,” feeding their addiction with seemingly minor decisions.
Bloodbrother, A Creature Of Verces
Native to Verces’ dark side, bloodbrothers are terrifying predators who don’t merely devour their prey. Instead, they place the victims inside their hollow chests and use tiny vampiric tendrils to link their circulatory systems together, using the prey as a spare heart. Bloodbrothers can keep these imprisoned creatures alive for months, slowly siphoning off their stored energy using the prey's own metabolic processes, before finally abandoning the desiccated corpse.
Ringworks Wanderer, a Starfinder Starship
Verces’ native verthani — humanoids with protruding, mouselike eyes and color-changing skin — were the first civilization in the Pact Worlds to take to the stars in their majestic aetherships. Today, Verces’ shipyards at Skydock, an orbital platform tethered to the ground by a space elevator, make some of the best starships in the Pact Worlds. Illustrated here is a Wanderer-class starship built by the Ringworks aerospace corporation. While wanderers are most commonly encountered in their shuttle configuration, the company also sells slimmed-down and armed-up versions like this Starwasp for planetary defense or use as a short-range fighter. While Starfinder is primarily a game about individual characters and their adventures, the Starfinder Core Rulebook also contains complete rules for starship combat, rules for building and customizing ships, and sample starships for a variety of different races.
A Cybernetically Augmented Adventurer
Even in ancient times, the traditional caste system of Verces included the Augmented — people who pioneered early cybernetics and other forms of technological body-modification. Today, most people on Verces embrace or at least condone such modifications, and some of the best cybernetics in the system come from their labs and factories.
The Augmented Faction
Grown from a local caste into a social movement that includes people of all species, the faction known as the Augmented seeks to further evolution and self-improvement through technology, and advocates on behalf of those ostracized by their communities for extreme augmentation. From their headquarters on Verces, the organization’s ruling Cypremacy Collective seeks to fund advanced research by groups like the Everlife Adaptation Corporation and the Spellsight Cooperative, while quietly hunting down and silencing those technoterrorists who tarnish the group’s reputation by seeking to “enhance” others against their will.
Thanks for checking out our first look at Verces. We'll be continuing our coverage of Starfinder with an in-depth look at the final game closer to release in August. In the meantime, for additional tabletop gaming recommendations, check out our Top of the Table hub.
Because I was browsing around the class descriptions more, and my Vercite Darkside industrial worker is now a Vanguard instead of a Soldier/Mystic. Because it fits so nicely. Darkness, ice, isolation and decay. I like it. It’s so easy to imagine an incident, an accident, they got locked out of the installation in the polar night, or maybe less of an incident and more of a slowly building fascination, and the vast midnight ice sheets of the Darkside of Verces induced an almost spiritual understanding of entropy for them.
Yes. We’re doing this.
Character Concept: Xalke Syzon, Vercite Entropic Darksider
I possibly should fix the racial flaw to Strength, but it’s not going to be used until 10th level, so … frankly, I’m not gonna. I’ll put some in with ability boosts as we level, but at the minute I like Wis more.
Starting Skills:
We’ve got 6 at level 1. Acrobatics, Athletics, Perception, Stealth are the main four I’m going to level continuously. I’ll also put a point in Survival and Sense Motive, just for theme here. Later on, might put some in Intimidation, Mysticism, Piloting and/or Engineering?
Race: Winterborn Ryphorian
I wanted a Vercite race, but verthani wasn’t really doing it for me. I did consider shirren and strix, but they’re both more commonly found on Fullbright, not the Darkside. But there is a note that there’s a decent population of ryphorians on Verces, because the tidally-locked divisions remind them of the years-long seasons of their own Triaxus. And if we want a character themed around ice and polar survival, winterborn ryphorians do nicely.
There’s also an interesting thing where ryphorians are culturally rather communal, which might make an interesting tension with a character that’s drawn to isolation out on the ice.
For our racial traits we get Keen Senses (+2 to Perception), Low-Light Vision, Cold Resistance 5 from Winterborn, and a bonus feat. Just because we’re a Darksider, I’m going to take Toughness. We’re just a real hard-bitten sort of a gal out here.
Description:
A lean, rangy, hardbitten woman, absolutely snow-pale from stem to stern, dusted in white fur, and with short, thick white hair that she’s never bothered to dye. Xalke’s never been one for fashion, and there was never any call for it out on the ice sheets and industrial platforms of the Darkside. Of course, that might have been more reason to go for a bit of colour and individuality, but Xalke’s always been one to settle into her environment, always been a still, watchful, slightly morbid sort of presence, blending blithely back into the snowfields.
Theme: Death-Touched
I was really flip-flopping between this and Void Nomad. Both give Con, both fit thematically with a Vanguard’s entropy, and near-death experiences and/or undead encounters are both likely easy to come by working out on the ice sheets of the Darkside. In the end, though, Death-Touched won, just because I might prefer a Perception bonus to a Survival one, and the eventual cold resistance just feels thematic?
(If I’m reading it right, the ryphorian cold resistance will stack with it, so long as we don’t have any other source of cold resistance. The racial resistance stacks with one other source)
So at first level, we get +1 Con, +1 bonus to Perception, and we can use Perception to ID and recall knowledge about undead and negative energy effects.
Class: Vanguard
It’s a melee martial class but it’s Constitution based, and the theming is fantastic. “To you, the inevitable decay of the galaxy is simply a force to shape, control, and even temporarily reverse.” Something happened in your life and you got tuned into the wavelength of inevitable change and decay, to the point that you can reach down through the grounding of your own body and manipulate it. This is basically damage manipulation, either to cause or prevent, but I love the way it’s framed. Definitely A+ theming on this class.
On Verces, and specifically the Darkside, there’s possibly an influence of philosophies like the Ascetics of Nar, the ice cult in Fastness of the Ordered Mind. A compare/contrast sort of deal, maybe. The Ascetics see ice as a blueprint for the frozen oneness of the universe, and some allow it to ravage their bodies to allow that blueprint to remake them. The vanguard channel their senses of the entropic universe through their bodies to allow them to manipulate their surroundings. There’s … not a link, nothing direct, there’s two different philosophies in action, but there’s certainly some calls for comparison there.
Not that Xalke has anything to do with the Ascetics of Nar, beyond having heard of them and vaguely considering them a bunch of masochistic nutters. But maybe the ice does have an effect, whether you plan to let it or not. Maybe if you do commune with the ice and the darkness, gradually over time, or intensely for a brief period (such as, say, going out to check a facility’s fuel lines for ice-damage and getting snowed out for a nearly lethal amount of time, even for a ryphorian), then … maybe it does wake something in you. A sensation of vastness. A physical understanding of it. A touch of something incomprehensibly vast that you can nonetheless feel in your bones.
Maybe you come out a vanguard. And you can pass that understanding, some glimpse of it, from your flesh to other people’s. Heh.
So, as a Level 1 Vanguard, we have the following features:
Entropic Pool, the pool of entropy points that fuel our abilities. We have 16 Con, so we can have a max of 3 EP currently. We only get them in combat (in various ways), they do a bunch of different things, and as long as we have at least 1 in the pool, we get a +1 to AC, we can spend 1 to get a +10 speed bonus, or boost an entropic strike by 1d4 per EP.
Entropic Strike. I love this thing. You channel your field of entropy into a(n advanced) melee weapon that you always have. Vanguards don’t ever have to buy weapons (as long as they’re happy in melee). ES scales, as far as I can tell, just fine by its lonesome. Also, it’s Con based, not Str. It’s entropy channelled through your body. I love that. It does either acid (to emulate entropic dissolution) or bludgeoning (for raw crushing force) damage, or a mix of both, and you can choose each time. And you can deliver it with any bit of your body. You can headbutt someone for entropic damage, if you want. Is that a good idea? I don’t know, but it’s a hell of an image. And maybe kind of fitting on our icefield industrial worker. Heh. Though it might be more fun to flavour it as a calmer, colder sort of attack. Maybe not even attack. Gesture. A gentle kiss of the ice. A seeping breakdown of your flesh, gifted gently …
Or maybe not. Xalke isn’t sadistic. Maybe we’ll just headbutt people, like a proper blue collar worker who had no philosophical pretensions, she just got locked out into the serene black-and-white void of the ice for too long, and came away a bit touched.
We also get shield proficiency at 1st level, our first feat (I think we’ll take either Fleet, to get into melee faster, or Weapon Focus: Advanced Melee, to help out our entropic strikes a little) and our Vanguard Aspect, sort of a subclass. I kind of feel like I need more scientific or philosophical background than I have to parse what these mean on a flavour/philosophical level, but I think …
Xalke’s always been rather solitary. Strikingly so, for a ryphorian. She’s always been at home out in the silent darkness of the icefields. She’s the one people do send to check fuel lines, and stand watches, and pull stuff down from remote corners of the mining rig. And she came into her abilities as a result of near-lethal isolation, and the vast understanding that came with it. So I think we’ll go for the Boundary aspect, which involves manipulating the isolation of a system to protect it from entropy. So we get a(nother) Perception boost, we get EP from avoiding damage as well as taking it, and we can use our abilities later to help allies mitigate damage. Which is … it feeds back into ryphorians as communal people, too. As isolated as she is, Xalke still understands and feels, on a physical level, what community is for. She’s on the edges of it, but she’s not rejecting it. She just likes her space, is all. But she’ll help out where she can.
Summary:
On the whole, Xalke is very much a tough, solitary, blue-collar sort of woman, someone who’s spent her life doing a hard job in a tough -but beautiful- environment, and who enjoys the isolation of it to a degree. But she’s not misanthropic, or sadistic. She has a sort of frontier helpfulness about her. If you need help she’ll do right by you.
How did she end up adventuring? Well, I’m thinking that after her little ‘incident’, the mining company wound up letting her go. For a couple of reasons, both wanting to distance themselves from her ‘incident’ and the possibility of having to pay injury benefit, but also because superstition is very much a thing out on the ice, and she came back tangibly changed enough that she unnerved her co-workers. If someone gets changed out on the ice, you don’t invite them back in. You don’t know what she is anymore. Not for sure. And maybe it was more than cold out there. She’s death-touched, too. Exposed to ‘strange radiation, dimensional rifts, or magic’. Maybe that wasn’t a normal storm that snowed her out. You can’t let something like that walk around the rig. No offense. You’re a good woman, and it’s not like we want to hurt you none. But you can’t let something like that on the rig. Even if she’s fine herself, you don’t know what else she’s inviting down.
So she wound up cut loose. And, yeah, she could’ve got another job, there’s enough rigs and smugglers operations and what have you out on the ice, but maybe she took it as a sign. She’d touched something vast. She’d come away with magic in her body, in her bones. She’s no ascetic, she’s not one of them nutters in the monastery, but she does need to go out and maybe explore what she is.
And, maybe, help some people along the way. Pay it forward. It might come back around.
Xalke Syzon. Blue-collar death-touched vanguard from the icefields of Verces’ Darkside.
