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Starfinder Alien Archive - Game Review


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This first sourcebook for Paizo's popular Starfinder role-playing game brings a lot of additions. On the outside, most seasoned gamers would expect a book like this to just be a list of monsters for players to fight during their adventures. It's really much more than that. The book adds 22 new alien races that are fully playable as characters, or can be NPCs. Each new race also comes with 2 sets of sample stats at different challenge levels to give GMs more to challenge their players with. There are some other nice extras as well. Some of the alien species featured also have rules for associated equipment. There are some monsters that are capabale of fighting against starships using the starship combat rules--making that aspect of the game more interesting. As for the monsters featured, there is a good mix of original ideas and science fiction tropes. Some players will just want to play a classic sci-fi space-reptile or a cute little furry alien. They can play reptoids or skittermanders. Some of the more original ideas include the Assembly Ooze--bio-mechanical manufacturing equipment gone awry, and Hespers--fae creatures who live in nuclear engines. These new ideas make the game interesting. As well, there is a good mix of classical fantasy creatures as well, such as Drow, undead, and dragons. A big part of what this book offers to enhance gameplay is in its appendices at the back of the book. Among its biggest contributions are the rules for the 'Summon Creature'--a staple of fantasy magic rules, but conspiciously missing from the Starfinder core rules. This book adds that somewhat crucial piece, with several pages of tables of summonable creatures and requirements for summoning them. As well there is an appendix with some nice, mechanical guidelines for game masters to use when creating NPCs and monsters for your game. It's a nice feature that can reduce your game prep time. The other appendicies give information about modifying creatures to add flavor and a nice rules summary of creature abilities used through the book--both are very useful. The only downside is that despite all of the great content, it's not particularly easy to find some of the supplemental rules. Though there is an index to help game masters find creatures by their challenge rating, there isn't a comprehensive index of all of the associated rules and concepets. As well, there is a really handy system of symbols that are associated with each creature to tell you what their focus is--skills, combat, or magic. That's great when you are running a game and need to figure out what to throw at your players in a pinch. Overall, if you're playing or running Starfinder, you should own a copy of this book. Few supplemental RPG books add so many options for both players and game masters as this book does. Alien Archive can really bring a lot to your game, or offer you more options as a player. Between this, the first supplement for Starfinder, and the core rulebook, Starfinder has shaped up to be an RPG universe with a great deal of depth at a very early stage.

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