Review: Starfinder Drift Crisis (Paizo)

It just happened. No warning, no explanation. If you were lucky, you heard emergency klaxons and the sound of gear and crew members crashing into the ship’s bulkheads. If you weren’t lucky, then everything you knew simply ended. Including you.

In the Starfinder universe, the Drift is the superhighway of space travel and galactic communication. Revealed when the machine god Triune ascended over 300 years ago, the Drift changed everything. And then it was gone.

Drift Crisis is a new rulebook and setting guide from Paizo for their Starfinder roleplaying game universe. The book contains plenty of goodies for players and game masters alike, but game masters come out a little ahead.

Let’s look at the top five things you need to know as the galactic devastation known as the Drift Crisis takes hold.

Something Completely Different

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Drift Crisis is very different from other source books in Starfinder. Some books give general information on a certain theme, like Galactic Magic or Tech Revolution. Others primarily exist to introduce new creatures or character options, like the Alien Archives and Character Operations Manual.

This book chronicles a traumatic, galaxy-level event: The disruption — and perhaps the end — of the Drift. This isn’t a food shortage or communication disruption affecting one or two worlds; this is happening everywhere at once, across multiple planes.

Themes in a High-level Crisis

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By unplugging the Drift, Paizo’s team laid a foundation that game masters can take in an infinite number of directions. It also created new story tensions as previously unknown or minor groups discovered broad opportunities.

The Drift crash means that regular travel lanes and traditional communication chanels are breaking down. People are missing, and ships have disappeared, been destroyed, or crash landed in strange locales.

Refugees are pouring into Absalom Station because of its still-working Drift beacon. That’s causing fear and uncertainty in the local populace and driving political unrest. And there seems to be growing interest in ways that magic could solve problems instead of trusting more technology.

Things are a mess everywhere — it’s exactly the kind of situation that clever game masters and enterprising players love.

The Player Perspective

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The first quarter of the book is dedicated to describing the Drift crash itself, outlining player character options, and offering news of how the crisis is affecting the Pact Worlds and beyond.

Each planet of the Pact Worlds gets a brief update, with a two-page spread devoted to the planets of the Veskarium. The Near Space section is particularly interesting thanks to new details about lesser known planets, corporations, and organizations such as the Eyeswide Agency.

Players get access to crash-related class options, four themes, and several pages of technological, magical, and hybrid gear. You can also find new feats and gear scattered in chapter 2, but talk to your GM about it if you play in a home game. Your GM might want to keep that information for themselves.

Adventure Hooks Galore

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A disruption as big as this is bound to make an impact on the settings of your at-home Starfinder games. But how can you as the game master bring the Drift Crisis to the players around your table at home?

Chapter two of the Drift Crisis book has just what you need: Adventure Seeds.

Each of the 20 seed sections gives you an adventure theme, the factions involved, locations for the action, and suggested character levels. It also helps you quickly bring the setting to life for your players with plot outlines, special equipment, named non-player characters, and a GM Resources table for filling in background activity.

Connecting with Organized Play

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Season five of Starfinder Society Organized Play focuses on what’s happening in the Drift. The Drift Crisis book is legal for play in Society games, although Paizo published several clarifications and a few limitations for items in organized play.

One of the most interesting character opportunities involves the Drift Crashed theme. Players can unlock this theme by playing in the multi-table convention special 4-99: A Time of Crisis. Once you gain access to the theme, you can use it on new characters plus retroactively apply it on any of your current characters, thus replacing their original theme.

Verdict

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If you love playing Starfinder, running games, or just reading the background information about the universe and tracking what’s happening where, the Drift Crisis book is a must-have for your shelf.

The new characters options help players bring out the best in their creations as they adapt to the chaos unfolding around them. Game masters will be able to quickly tailor adventures filled with prosperity and peril to meet their players’ needs, and then hook those stories to bigger arcs happening in their own storylines.