Exclusive: Sci-Fi RPG Starfinder Announces Undead Planet and We’ve Got Images

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If you’re a fan of tabletop RPGs, you’ve probably heard of Pathfinder, the fantasy game brought out by Paizo Publishing. Meant to be an extension of Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder became wildly popular, even outselling its predecessor and winning critical and fan acclaim. Coming this August is Starfinder, the sci-fi extension of the Pathfinder universe that takes place thousands of years in the future.

Today, we’ve been given very exciting exclusive information and photos that reveal EOX, a planet of the undead within Starfinder!

Direct from Paizo Publishing:

Have you ever heard the old apocryphal story about how the scientists of the Manhattan Project who tested the first atomic bomb feared it might cause a chain reaction and set the entire atmosphere on fire? Well that’s exactly what happened on Eox.

Once upon a time, Eox was a lush world, until its arrogant rulers created a superweapon capable of destroying neighboring planets. Their device worked, blowing up the enemy worlds and creating the asteroid belt called the Diaspora—but the magical backlash blew a hole in Eox as well and set its atmosphere ablaze. In the wake of the disaster, the few survivors in the irradiated wasteland turned to necromancy to rebuild their society.

Today, Eox is a world of the dead—and pretty smug about it, actually. After all, being undead comes with a lot of advantages in the modern era: Spaceships that don’t need air! A zombie workforce that doesn’t need breaks! While many of the other Pact Worlds fear and resent Eox, no one can deny that it’s better to have the undead working with you than against you.

For more information, head on over to the official Starfinder website.

The Planet EOX

The landscape of EOX

Necrovite – Eox is home to a wide variety of undead creatures, from simple mindless zombies used as beasts of burden and convenient (if disturbing) forms of automation to powerful intelligent undead, often spellcasters with a focus on necromancy. This particular individual is a necrovite—a futuristic version of the lich from classic fantasy RPGs, created by storing your soul in a special technomagical relic called an electroencephalon that protects your consciousness and allows your body to rebuild itself if destroyed.

The Bone Sage – The Bone Sages of Eox have ruled their planet ever since its initial catastrophe. Generally undead spellcasters of extreme power, some of the Bone Sages actually remember life before the disaster, though many more have been destroyed and replaced by usurpers—one of the reasons Eox is divided into many independent fiefdoms, each ruled by its own paranoid Bone Sage. The sage illustrated here, Maligast of Eox, actually appeared in the Pathfinder adventure The Asylum Stone, having agreed to guard a runelord’s dungeon in exchange for the opportunity to study a powerful artifact. Little did we know at that time how important the Bone Sages would become!

Ellicoth – Fifty feet tall and and weighing upward of 30 tons, ellicoths roam Eox’s radioactive deserts, feeding off the vital energy of other creatures. That includes the magical energies animating undead as well, making the giant beasts one of the few creatures capable of legitimately terrifying Eoxian settlements.

Omenbringer – Eoxian starship designs reflect their builders’ unique needs and aesthetics. Most Eoxian ships resemble elaborate bone structures or the corpses of vast creatures, though this is partially an illusion, as much of the bone is actually more advanced materials sculpted into their morbid shapes. Such ships are designed specifically for the undead, with large portions of the hull left open to space, no galleys or heads, and tight-packed workstations in which the crew might be expected to stand at their posts for weeks without moving. All of this makes Eoxian ships extremely difficult to take down in combat, and this is particularly of the massive Thaumtech Omenbringer illustrated here, a carrier ship loaded with squadrons of nimble necrogliders.

Control Undead – Unable to reproduce on its own, Eox’s undead population imports corpses from other worlds and uses magic to create new mindless slaves or intelligent undead citizens. While living people are also welcome on the planet—most notably representatives from various corporations or students at the planet’s magical academies—the planet itself has yet to recover from its ancient calamity, and proper habitats for breathing creatures are few and far between.

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