How To Use This Chapter

This section provides guidelines and tips for running a campaign featuring tactical starship combat. If you’re looking for starship downtime activities, advice for how PCs can acquire or customize a starship, or guidelines for creating your own starship maps, you’ll find this section essential when running your campaign!

The Starship Archive contains dozens of starship stat blocks that you can use to represent non-player starships acting as enemies or allies in tactical starship combat. The beginning of the Starship Archive also includes guidelines for generating your own non-player starships.

Space is a dangerous place, even for a crew on board a starship. This section presents guidelines for deploying hazards during tactical starship combat, including hazards that appear on the player starship map and starship-scale hazards that appear on the sensor map.

Tech Core introduces the rules for tactical starship combat, but GMs running a campaign with starships might consider exploring a few additional resources. GM Core includes the cinematic starship scene subsystem, which you might use to resolve a dramatic chase or an encounter with obstacles to overcome instead of enemy starships to blow up. Starfinder Galaxy Guide is a data-packed primer for the Starfinder setting, introducing many places a crew might explore in their starship, and Starfinder Absalom Station: Center of the Galaxy provides an excellent kickoff point or home base for any starship campaign—remember, even at the edge of the Universe, Absalom Station is always as close as the nearest Drift beacon.

As a GM, you might find yourself needing to teach tactical starship combat to other players. A key point to emphasize is that, while tactical starship combat adds more rules to Starfinder's existing combat systems, these rules are designed to fit seamlessly with what players and GMs are already familiar with. For example, there are new conditions, and starship positions are indicated on a sensor map, but there aren't new rules for initiative, actions, or rounds, and your players will be moving around on the starship map like they would in any other combat encounter. Even enemy starship stat blocks work like existing creature stat blocks. When introducing tactical starship combat to players, start small! The best tool in a GM's arsenal is a group of players who know the system and are excited to use it, and easing them in from an early level in your campaign might work better than introducing tactical starship combat into a high-level campaign without taking the time to learn how it works first.