Galaxy Guide
Galaxy Guide is a core supplement for the Starfinder Second Edition space fantasy RPG, written by Kate Baker, Rigby Bendele, Joseph Blomquist, Jessica Catalan, John Compton, Anthony Dollinger, Alexi Greer, Sen H.H.S., Thurston Hillman, Jenny Jarzabski, Mike Kimmel, Dustin Knight, Dennis Muldoon, Quinn Murphy, Emily Parks, Letterio Mammoliti, and Kendra Leigh Speedling and published by Paizo.
By Aaron T. Huss
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Galaxy Guide is an overall companion book for Starfinder, presenting source data and mechanical options for players and GMs alike. It provides insight into the Starfinder timeline, a large chapter with guidance for creating different types of adventures, locations, factions, and new ancestries. We’ll delve into each one a bit, but note that the largest concentration of content focuses on creating different types of adventures (not just vanilla space fantasy) for your Starfinder games. From a utility standpoint, that feature alone could be enough to convince a gaming group that they need this book in their library.
Galaxy Guide starts with a somewhat rushed overview of the history of the setting prominent in Starfinder. I understand the desire to know how things came about and why things are what they are in the “present day” of the setting, but there are a lack of details. This can be good – allowing the GM and players to fill-in the gaps – or bad – leaving out too many details that the content ends up being unusable. But it does establish a framework for where Galaxy Guide is coming from.
The book quickly moves on to the meat of the content in a chapter simply titled “Adventures.” This chapter takes the simple concept of playing a Starfinder game and demonstrates all the different ways you can skin your game. There are seven skins – dystopian, high-tech, fantasy (fairly vanilla), war-torn, into the unknown, horror, and weird. Each one is provided with a simple introduction to understand its meaning and is then followed by a whole lot of valuable content. This content includes locales, with some details to support them, important people, adventure hooks to get you started, conflict ideas to keep the game interesting, and bits of flavor sprinkled in to meet the theme. This is a valuable approach to this type of companion as it opens the game to something more than just its space fantasy roots. To me this drastically increases Starfinder’s replayability and provides ideas for keeping those campaigns fresh and memorable!
After this are a handful of prominent locations within the game’s base setting, providing valuable insight into each location and some easy-to-mine adventure hooks. I’ve seen some of these locations in previous reviews of first edition books, so it’s nice to see the series tying itself together. The book then moves on to a selection of factions for the PCs to join along with Feats associated with each faction and some flavor text to flesh out those characters.
Galaxy Guide finishes with some pretty interesting Ancestries that deviate far from what you see in typical fantasy games. This is another great feature as it focuses on the idea that not every sapient being across the galaxy is going to look humanoid nor may it even be recognizable. These ancestries alone can generate some exciting new game opportunities and open up the group to dealing with a variety of viewpoints across the galaxy (kind of like being xenophobic). It would also be interesting to see how players assume those Ancestries and make them their own. To go along with those Ancestries are different Heritages and Feats to match, creating the mechanical value for players (and GMs creating NPCs).
Galaxy Guide is a great Starfinder supplement. The price point is kind of high for the number of pages the book is, but I totally get it that printing and shipping costs go up, driving the price of the printed books up. I will say that if you are looking to get more than just space fantasy from Starfinder, you should get your money’s worth with this book. If you want to stick to the core themes of Starfinder, then either pick-up the PDF or look for a different supplement to appease your desires.
