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honourablejester · 2 months ago

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More Starfinder Cool Creatures

I recently acquired Alien Archives 3 & 4, so I had a browse through to see what other weird and wonderful space fantasy creatures the Starfinder universe might have to offer.

I’m going to divide these into three broad categories, because there’s a couple of themes to my preferences. Heh. First, we have space undead. Because I just deeply enjoy space undead. Then we’ve got a loose cluster of what I’m going to call space hazards/space ecologies, creatures that inhabit the void of space and make life interesting for spacers. And finally we just have a grab-bag of more random planetary and weird beasties.

Space Undead

I deeply, deeply enjoy Starfinder’s sheer range of space undead. Because the elemental terrors of the void leading to uniquely fucked up deaths and resulting unquiet souls is deeply satisfying to my space horror loving soul.

Endling. Endlings are basically the ghosts of extinct species trying to wreak vengeance on whatever they believe brought about their end, ghostly vengeance on a species level. There’s a planet in the Veskarium that was aggressively mined out, obliterating the native ecology, and the capital city is now menaced by what are essentially spectral ghost pigs. Which is amazing.

Itmi Vruh. Okay. So we know I deeply enjoy space undead. And we know I deeply enjoy the scary end of FTL and hyperspace travel. The Itmi Vruh are the perfect fusion of those two space horrors. When a ship tries to perform a jump into the Drift and something goes wrong, rather than throwing the whole ship out or crashing, sometimes the ship makes it through, but the souls of several people onboard don’t, and are sucked out to blunder around the Drift, leaving their bodies inexplicably dead behind them. Itmi Vruh want those bodies back, and if they happen upon other ships in the Drift, they will attempt to possess people on them. So there’s two fantastic spacer horror tales to be afraid of: that the Drift will suck out your soul if you jump wrong, and that the fucking resultant space ghosts from hyperspace will possess you even if you make it safely in. Absolutely fantastic. Love it.

Vorthuul. Vorthuul are undead left behind by people who got sucked into a black hole, and they’re formed of two elements: a super dense obsidian skeleton overlaid by a screaming spectral form. Kasathan mystics think that these are in fact two separate quantum spirits formed when the forces of the event horizon fucking bent time and space so that two versions of the same person got overlaid together, one being horrifically stretched and screaming in agony, the other being crushed by gravity into infinite density. So you get two torturous deaths for the price of one! Any ship, station or observation post that passes too close to a black hole, even if it avoids being sucked in, might get invaded by one or more of these tormented things, like hideous avatars of the inimical force waiting to devour us all. They are so cool. Horrifying, obviously. But so cool.

Space Ecology/Hazards

There is something about imagining creatures that live in the void that is just … extremely happy-making to me. These are all creatures that kind of create an ecology in the emptiness of space. And/or creatures that create hazards in space, things that make the already-terrifying void and vacuum even more dangerous in interesting ways. These aren’t planetary sorts of dangers, they’re things you encounter in starships. Or inside stars. Or on space stations. And I love them.

Dawn Beetle. They’re giant iridescent solar dung beetles who dig around for debris inside the middle layers of stars to make giant heat-resistant junk balls that eventually are drawn back down to the core of the star to be used as a hatchery for future dawn beetles. If there is no debris (eg asteroids, shipwrecks, etc) inside the star, they sometimes try to ride solar flares out into the universe beyond, usually winding up stranded. They’re just delightfully weird, beautiful, funky little guys. They also hang around the Burning Archipelago of bubble cities in the surface of the Pact Worlds’ sun, which is one of my favourite locations in the setting.

Giant Space Tardigrade. It is a tardigrade. The size of a starship. It’s a titanic lumbering space bear-bug that is trying very hard to eat your starship, because there’s not a lot of food in the void of space and it’s very hungry. They’re extraordinarily tough, and they have personalities, varying from vengeful to playful, if usually still rather destructive even when trying to be friendly. They’re a fantastic combination of adorable and deeply aggravating, and just a fantastic thing to exist.

Kaion. I love the Diaspora as a location so much. The asteroid belt is home to so many of my favourite things in this setting. Here, they’re starship eating metallic space molluscs with bioelectricity and biomagnetism and weapons that function as basically railgun harpoons where they use their magnetic fields to launch hardened bodyparts at prey and draw them back via the same biomagnetism. I love when space ecology gets weird.

Lurker in Light. Evil space fey that are invisible in light and hunt in places like high tech cities and space stations and starships that are basically perpetually lit up. They’re sadistic little fuckers who like to hunt and hurt people, and to find them to make them stop often involves having to power down whole damned sections of the city/station/ship to force them into the open. Which. On a ship or a station. You have to turn off power in the void of space because an evil space fairy is hiding in the glare of the lights to hurt you. That is an excellent horror story right there. As they get older they become radioactive, which is just excessive, honestly. These are evil little things, and they’re excellent.

Shipkiller Bulb. They’re giant space plants that inhabit the ice rings of gas giants harvesting asteroids and ice for minerals and water while absorbing sunlight from the nearest star. Which is all fine, and another fantastic example of weird space ecology, but they’re called also shipkiller bulbs for a reason. And that reason is that they violently hate Drift travel, and if already starving when annoyed, they will violently attempt to tear an offending starship near them to pieces with tendrils and gravity attacks. If they successfully kill the ship, they’ll feed off the hull the same way they’d feed off an asteroid. They’re easy enough to take down with shipboard weaponry if you know they’re there in time, but if you didn’t see them before they absolutely lost their shit on top of you, you might be in for a bad time. I just. I deeply enjoy all these space hazards?

Voraija. Space whales! Different space whales to the previously-mentioned telepathic Omas. Voraija communicate via microwave radiation ‘songs’ that reverberate through starship hulls, can live up to a millennium, and follow long, meandering migratory paths looking for gas giants to birth their young inside. They can wreak absolute havoc on planetary communications systems and have been driven off as a result, and have also been hunted for use in biotech, resulting in some of the older individuals and pods holding powerful grudges. They’re just. I mean. They’re space whales. What more could a girl want?

Random Beasties

And then a final collection of just everything else that caught my eye.

Irokiroi. They’re just beautiful. Predatory sky-serpents with multiple gorgeous wing-fins from the toxic gas-moon of Osoro near Liavara, they’re absolutely deadly and absolutely gorgeous. They’ve recently been attacking a lot of settlements on the moon, possibly related to increasing ‘safari’ trips into the gas clouds stirring them up. Which is an excellent lesson on ecological non-interference, but they’re also so beautiful, so I can kinda understand. I would probably do something ill-advised and likely fatal to be able to see one too.

Kothama. These are less creatures and more people, so arguably shouldn’t be on this list, but they’re seriously enchanting, so I made an exception. They’re 18ft tall multi-legged shaggy ice bear-trolls that are completely peaceful and obsessed with star-gazing, and I love them dearly. They live on two icy outer worlds in the Vesk system that share a moon. Twice a year the orbits of the two planets pass close enough to hand off the moon, and the Kothama go on sacred pilgrimages via magical gates to the moon and the other planet when this occurs. They’re just … so mystical and cool?

Polyphonic Gel. It’s an ooze. It’s a sparkly, smoked-glass looking tiny ooze made up of millions of semi-fluid fibres that eat sound and sing. They can also use said sonic emissions to do horrific damage to people and things, but that’s incidental. They’re so pretty. They can get really big if fed a consistent diet of sound, like the thrum of industrial fans for example, but then get cravings for specific sounds and can thoroughly rampage through a place in search of them. Devotees of the goddess of music Shelyn believe that they’re sacred and can be a little overzealous in trying to help them out at times. Which I fully understand!

Rendalairn. They (or possibly it, singular) are massive (30ft diameter) metallic superweapons that rove around killing planets. They just hurtle around, land on a world, and tear it the hell up until they’ve wiped out everything intelligent down there. There are two known worlds where this has happened. On one of them, the rendalairn sent a polite telepathic message to everything in orbit to stay away from the ‘demolition site’ and then started telepathically playing music from the culture it was destroying as it razed the planet. On the other, there was no music, but it did still broadcast the warning. No one knows who built them, or sent them, or how they choose worlds to target, so it’s all a little terrifying, but it’s another fantastic bit of spacer lore to throw into your setting.

Sapient Purple Orb. Exactly what it sounds like. They’re sentient, friendly little psychic purple orbs that bob around trying to make first contact with new friends. They’re telepathic but also show visions on their surfaces to people. If they like their new friends, they get very protective of them. They also tend to appear in waves, and in noticeably smaller numbers each time, so there’s something mysterious going on there. They’re just a fascinating little phenomenon, and also adorable.

Vasporan. I blame the art for this one, because they’re just adorable. They’re 11ft fucking tall, granted, but they’re adorable blue giant squid-shrews that can rapidly molt or partially molt their shells into either disposable shields or gas pocket balloons for flight. They’re ambush predators, and dangerous, and, again, 11ft tall, but they’re really, really, really cute.

Warpstitcher. These things remind me so strongly of both the Weavers and the Slake Moths from Perdido Street Station. In different ways, obviously, but still. Serious Bas-Lag vibes with this one. They’re interdimensional spider-like aberrations that target powerful magic-or-tech users and stitch their victims onto their bodies to feed on their minds (which normally is irreparably damaging even for the few who survive, but can, very rarely, open the surviving mind up to revelation and euphoria). They hunt the people they do because they believe that magic and tech (especially the Drift) is doing irreparable damage to the fabric of the multiverse. They believe that before the Gap they were responsible for stitching the multiverse into a single whole, but something that happened in the Gap ripped them away from their true abilities and calling, and now they need to punish those they believe might have been responsible. They’re … The Bas-Lag vibes are very strong, yes?

I love the Starfinder setting so much. Science fantasy and space horror are such fantastic genres for me. I enjoy them deeply.

#ttrpgs #starfinder #monsters #creatures #science fantasy #space horror #love this setting #such fantastic and horrifying things it has #also adorable things!

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