It’s Official – Starfinder 2nd Edition Is Coming, Playtest Launches In 2024
The shiny new Starfinder 2nd Edition is coming soon, and will be fully compatible with Pathfinder 2E and the Remaster Project.
Gen Con 2023 is shaping up to be a pretty big one. At the big Paizo presentation this past Thursday, news broke that Starfinder 2nd Edition is coming. And a lot sooner than folks were expecting too. This is great news for fans of Paizo’s game of stellar exploration and science fantasy, set in the distant future of Pathfinder’s Golarion.
But, not only is there a new edition of the game, it heralds a new era of compatibility. As part of its release, Starfinder 2nd Edition will be published under the ORC License, and it will draw on the three-action economy of Pathfinder 2nd Edition/Remaster Project, making it compatible with both. At least, according to Paizo.
Starfinder 2nd Edition Is Coming!
At the Paizo Keynote, Starfinder’s Managing Creative Director Thurston Hillman talked about the new edition, the evolution of the ORC License, and the direction everything’s headed in:
“With the finalization of the ORC License, and considering that Starfinder 1st Edition has been evolving since its release in 2017, we felt now was a perfect time to bring the system into the future. We want to take a moment to take all the things we’ve learned since Starfinder began, as well as lessons from the success of Pathfinder’s latest edition, and synthesize those together into a new and better version of Starfinder”.
And more to the point, Paizo wants to learn from you. To that end, a massive playtest is coming in 2024. This will be the most open playtest Paizo has ever launched, with a greater degree of transparency into the process of development. This is because the developers want the rulesets to be completely cross-compatible.
Which means that finally, finally, you can live out your dream of your Pathfinder heroes finding a spaceship and heading out into the galaxy with seamless play between both systems.
But in the meantime, the Starfinder developers are offering smaller “Field Tests”, which will help whet the appetite as well as offer up a look into the design. They’ve talked about four different classes so far: the Mystic, Soldier, Envoy, and Solarion, seen throughout the article.
The Playtest is aimed at showing the development process, though as Starfinder 2E uses the Pathfinder 2E ruleset, how much design/development we’ll get to see in action is anyone’s guess. But the Playtest hopes to showcase new classes, the scaling equipment system, and more.
We’re excited to announce the release of our first Starfinder Field Test! These documents are a little different than the playtest files we’ve released in the past. Each Field Test is a snippet of the ongoing design work from the Starfinder team and is intended to show what we’re working on and some of the directions we’re exploring. Our first document focuses on the first five levels of one of our new base classes: the soldier. Along with this, we’ve included some rules for futuristic weaponry and a couple creatures for you to toss into your games.
It all kicks off with a deep dive into the first five levels of the new Soldier class. Alongside it, new equipment, including the Rotolaser and Stellar Cannon, as well as monsters like the Computer Glitch Gremlin and Laser Wolf (not the guy from Fiddler on the Roof).
What a Gen Con!
