Identical Games

Most of my gaming time is devoted to the 4E campaign I run. I still participate in some 3.5 discussions and even joined a 3.5 play-by-post recently. I never jumped onto Pathfinder. As a long time Spelljammer fan, the kickstarter for It Came From The Stars Campaign Guide supplement caught my attention. Despite not expecting to use the book directly since it is a Pathfinder supplement, I joined the kickstarter.

I'm still making my way through the full book. The hardcopy is over one hundred twenty pages. While the pdf is over one hundred thirty. The difference is due to the change in formatting. It makes the pdf easier to read on a widescreen which is nice. About a quarter of the book is player material. The majority of the gamemaster material is taken up by the three adventures.

I started reading at the beginning but ended up jumping around a bit. There are five new races. My favorite race from Star Frontiers is the dralasite so the amoebian had obvious appeal. The enlightened are your typical advanced being. They have the interesting disadvantage of being mute and have a telepathy range that increases as their level increases. This means at first level they need to be within five feet to talk to you. The star-touched are militaristic people working for the magnetars. The tachiod are self-replicating robots from the future. Finally you have the coalescent, a swarm race. The coalescent race has a racial class to get more swarm features. I'm not sure I'd play a star-touched but the others looked interesting.

Two new classes are included along with some archetypes. I haven't fully read the moon child but the starseed was what started my jumping around in the book. Someone was running a 3.5 play-by-post game at 20th level sometime ago. I never fully stated out a character but my thought was a goblin (or blue) soul knife with lots of aberrant feats from Lords of Madness and grafts from a couple books. (Now you see why the Weird Cycle line from Zombie Sky Press seemed right up my alley.) The starseed class seemed like a perfect alternative to the soul knife. Instead of blades you get tendrils plus some spell casting later on. The two archetypes, manyskins dancer and symbiote-synthesist, are for druid and summoner respectively. I haven't read them in depth yet.

Continuing to think of my old character idea, I read up on the symbiote feats. They could easily replace the aberrant feats I'd planned from Lords of Madness. Your character ends up fighting for control from the symbiote which probably has different goals than you. It's kinda like an intelligent weapon inside your skin. Unfortunately no graft replacements are found in the book. It has some new spells and tech items.

The gamemaster section starts with descriptions of alien worlds. The descriptions are limited to a paragraph but include ideas of what the party could do on the planet. The ideas are easily usable in a Spelljammer campaign. Hazards and disaster ideas follow the alien worlds. The best gamemaster material inspires you and I feel It Came From the Stars manages that.

There is still the bestiary and adventures section that I haven't even read yet. Some of the new monsters include a space fey that ride on giant space fish, an elder ooze, an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" creature, and giant star beasts. The monster section seems a little short but there is only so many pages in a book. I'll try to give a review of the adventures at a later date once I have a chance to read them.

Overall I feel the book is a good buy. I've already converted four of the races to 4E. (The coalescent is difficult to do justice to. I'm tempted to make it a race plus hybrid class but that will take some time to design.)