Starfinder Brings Big Changes With New Drift Crisis Event
Paizo is shaking up its popular Starfinder universe with a brand new catastrophic event. This week, Paizo announced the year-long Drift Crisis event for its Starfinder tabletop roleplaying game. The event kicks off when the alien civilizations who inhabit the Starfinder universe are suddenly cut off from the Drift realm, which allows ships to span massive distances without resorting to faster-than-light speeds. Communication between galaxies are cut off, ships traveling through the Drift are either shunted back into the Material plane or lost entirely, and the sentient god-like AI who controls the Drift falls silent. When ships try to re-enter the Drift, they discover that the realm has been transformed into a strange and deadly void with escape not guaranteed.
Drift Crisis will feature multiple tie-in products, including a Starfinder Drift Crisis that provides GMs with 20 detailed story hooks for adventures set during this traumatic time period, and help to explain how various cultures and civilizations are dealing with the crisis. Paizo will also publish two Adventure Paths set during Drift Crisis, with Drift Crashers taking players from Level 1 to Level 7 and Drift Hackers running from Level 7 to Level 13 and providing a "canonical" ending to the crisis.
Starfinder is a science fiction-themed spinoff of Paizo's Pathfinder franchise. While the games are set in the universe and have some links together, Starfinder is set in far future after Golarion (the world where Pathfinder is set) has disappeared. The game's ruleset includes starship battle rules and a variety of different class options, allowing players to have a wide variety of options for different kinds of space-fantasy and science fiction campaigns.
One interesting part of Drift Crisis is that the event will be "backwards compatible" with past Starfinder adventures and products. Starfinder Drift Crisis will provide players with updates on how the crisis can be used in past Starfinder Adventure Paths, so that GMs can incorporate the reality-shaking event into their own campaigns.
Starfinder Drift Crisis will be released in May 2022. More information about the event can be found in a Polygon feature posted earlier this week.