Mapping Your Starship
Source Tech Core pg. 204
Sometimes, tactical starship encounters spill over onto the decks of your starship, or enemies sneak on board while you’re docked safely at port. You’ll need a map to play out the action and to keep track of important objects on board your starship like your battle stations, expansion bays, and escape pods. You can use the same map for the entire campaign or design a new one whenever your crew upgrades the starship.
You might feel creative and invent a wacky new starship design to amaze your friends. Or, if you aren’t typically an artist or mapmaker, you might be intimidated and overwhelmed by the thought of creating your own map. Either way, you can make your own custom starship map! Creating a starship map is as simple or complex as you make it, and you don’t need to be a skilled cartographer. Remember, you’re making a visual representation of your starship to use in a game you’re playing with your friends. As long as you and the other players can tell where the battle stations, enemies, hazards, and escape pods are, you’ve got a great starship map. If you need more guidance, consider the following tips.
Only map what’s needed. Decide where the battle stations are, then add on the expansion bays. A good starship map might be a sketch of a rectangle with a few smaller squares inside it and symbols clearly marking the squares where battle stations are positioned. There’s even a P box next to each battle station on the Starship Sheet to help you keep track. You need to map only the interior areas of your starship where crew members are likely to spend time during exploration and encounter mode, so it isn’t necessary to draw out every expansion bay.
Size matters. The sample maps provided are intended to be drawn or printed as a physical map with a dimension of 24 inches by 30 inches, with a 1-inch-square-grid—the same dimensions as a typical Starfinder Flip-Mat. A map this size has plenty of space for players to move their character tokens, even when enemy boarders are invading!
Similarly, there should be enough room in every bay for the crew to move around. No bay should be smaller than 2 by 2 squares. If you’re using a standard grid map of the dimensions described above, your medium starship’s interior shouldn’t be larger than 120 feet (24 squares) by 100 feet (20 squares). It also usually shouldn’t be smaller than 60 feet by 50 feet. If you have more room to spread out a map or are using digital tools, you might decide your starship map has greater dimensions, but be careful that it doesn’t take too long for crew members to run from one side of the starship to the other.
Team Up. All players should be involved in the map-making process. You alter the starship map only when the crew levels up or spends downtime upgrading their starship, so it’s important to make sure everybody is satisfied.
Test your map. Draw or print your map out, and place tokens on the grid. Move them as you would your characters, counting each square as 5 feet of movement and seeing how long it takes the crew to move from one station to another at their Speeds. Ideally, all members of the crew should be able to get to another part of the starship in a round or less.
You might feel creative and invent a wacky new starship design to amaze your friends. Or, if you aren’t typically an artist or mapmaker, you might be intimidated and overwhelmed by the thought of creating your own map. Either way, you can make your own custom starship map! Creating a starship map is as simple or complex as you make it, and you don’t need to be a skilled cartographer. Remember, you’re making a visual representation of your starship to use in a game you’re playing with your friends. As long as you and the other players can tell where the battle stations, enemies, hazards, and escape pods are, you’ve got a great starship map. If you need more guidance, consider the following tips.
Only map what’s needed. Decide where the battle stations are, then add on the expansion bays. A good starship map might be a sketch of a rectangle with a few smaller squares inside it and symbols clearly marking the squares where battle stations are positioned. There’s even a P box next to each battle station on the Starship Sheet to help you keep track. You need to map only the interior areas of your starship where crew members are likely to spend time during exploration and encounter mode, so it isn’t necessary to draw out every expansion bay.
Size matters. The sample maps provided are intended to be drawn or printed as a physical map with a dimension of 24 inches by 30 inches, with a 1-inch-square-grid—the same dimensions as a typical Starfinder Flip-Mat. A map this size has plenty of space for players to move their character tokens, even when enemy boarders are invading!
Similarly, there should be enough room in every bay for the crew to move around. No bay should be smaller than 2 by 2 squares. If you’re using a standard grid map of the dimensions described above, your medium starship’s interior shouldn’t be larger than 120 feet (24 squares) by 100 feet (20 squares). It also usually shouldn’t be smaller than 60 feet by 50 feet. If you have more room to spread out a map or are using digital tools, you might decide your starship map has greater dimensions, but be careful that it doesn’t take too long for crew members to run from one side of the starship to the other.
Team Up. All players should be involved in the map-making process. You alter the starship map only when the crew levels up or spends downtime upgrading their starship, so it’s important to make sure everybody is satisfied.
Test your map. Draw or print your map out, and place tokens on the grid. Move them as you would your characters, counting each square as 5 feet of movement and seeing how long it takes the crew to move from one station to another at their Speeds. Ideally, all members of the crew should be able to get to another part of the starship in a round or less.
Battle Stations
Source Tech Core pg. 204
Battle stations each take up one 5-foot-square. Medium starships have plenty of space for crews to spread out. They might house their battle stations in separate bays arranged farther apart from one another. This setup usually places battle stations near a common area or hallway that leads to the escape pods and other parts of the starship in a way that PCs can move from one battle station to another with two or three actions.