Review: Starfinder Galaxy Exploration Manual (Paizo)

The world is a big place to explore, but it’s not much compared to a whole universe. Seek out new planets, meet their mysterious inhabitants, and boldly venture where no explorer has gone before? Sounds like a great Starfinder campaign to me.

But how does a game master (GM) build an open-ended universe for their players without spending untold hours and hopelessly draining their creativity? They start with the new Starfinder Galaxy Exploration Manual from Paizo.

This 160 page book outfits players and GMs with new class features and equipment, as well as guides, charts, and randomization tables for everything from character backgrounds to planet generation.

Let’s check out the top five things you need to know about the Galaxy Exploration Manual.

New Class Features

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Even though characters aren’t the focus of this book, each of the Starfinder character classes gets new supporting material to expand their repertoire.

The new material grows the classes’ options rather than adding major features. For example, Biohackers get new theorems, Witchwarpers get new paradigm shifts, and Solarians get new stellar revelations.

Mystics and Soldiers come out a little ahead of everyone else, with Mystics getting new connections and Soldiers getting both a new fighting style and a bunch of gear boosts. Still, there’s something for everyone.

Scattered Equipment, Feats, and More

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Since we’re discovering new places as we explore the universe, it makes sense that the Galaxy Exploration Guide serves up a broad variety of new equipment, feats, and spells for outfitting your characters.

The main equipment section focuses exploration gear designed to keep the characters alive and moving regardless of where they land. New grenades, medicinals, and serums round out the other offerings.

You’ll have to read the book carefully to find everything else. Like the Alien Archives, this book scatters specialized gear, feats, and even spells through every world-building chapter.

Building Worlds

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The meat of the Galaxy Exploration Guide lives in the chapters about world building. Your characters found a planet. That’s great, but what is the world like and who (or what) lives there?

Instead of wracking your GM brain for something new and different, this book gives you a process to build and populate the locale your players just found. It starts with the type of planet and moves on to biomes, inhabitants, cultural mores, and more.

Each biome chapter offers a sidebar of information and ideas ranging from societal notes to equipment lists, all invaluable for GMs and players alike.

Open-ended Adventuring

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The final third of the Galaxy Exploration Guide outfits the GM with a step-by-step framework for creating an open-ended campaign. This style of game is commonly known as a “sandbox” because you can plop the characters into it and let them play.

It gives GMs high level guidelines and advice, then follows that with details on choosing a thematic setting and populating that setting with interesting places, creatures, and potential problems.

From there, it drills down to the mechanics of starting characters with a deliberately small area to explore then growing the game from there. The first Star Wars movie (no, the real first movie, what’s now called Episode IV) followed the same progression with Luke’s journey, so you know the concept works.

A Character Building (and Writing) Dream

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Creating a really interesting character takes imagination, but even the most creative Starfinder players can use a boost sometimes.

This book’s character backgrounds section is filled with ideas for the events that shaped characters, the people who influenced them, and the dark mysteries they may not understand. And for GMs, it also offers story hooks for how the party members met and what might be hunting them in the future.

Switching to my writer’s hat, anyone who wants to write in any genre of science fiction will love the Galaxy Exploration Guide. Every chapter will fuel a writer’s imagination with plot hooks and story twists galore. Need a planet? Build one. Working out plot hooks on a magical world? They’re in the book.

Verdict

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The Galaxy Exploration Guide is a story creation playground for Starfinder GMs and players.

It gives GMs the practical guidance they need to launch engaging worlds for players to endlessly explore. We particularly loved the biome-specific filler details like arctic celebrations, common urban districts, and the delicacies enjoyed on airborne worlds. They add texture and spark to game settings, plus they give GMs great jumping-off points to build and expand.

For players, the book is a trove of new character options, equipment, and background ideas. I can imagine all kinds of interesting combinations growing from this book, including a few I’m going to launch myself.

Looking more broadly at the book’s content, the Galaxy Exploration Guide will make a perfect addition to any science fiction writer’s toolbox. The sandbox adventure creation steps make a great plan for building a setting that can support 1,001 futuristic tales.

The Galaxy Exploration Manual easily earns a proud place on our bookshelf.