I made a quick trip to PaizoCon last weekend, and I had a great time. The events were all quite fun, and I was able to sit down an talk with many of my developers about projects I'd recently completed for them, as well as pending projects they'd like me to write.

There was also the usual series of announcements at the banquet. Most years, I have a good sense of what those will be, and I'm rarely surprised. This year, I knew that the Ironfang Invasion adventure path would be announced (I wrote the second chapter in that a few months ago; Crystal has already been developing it). I had expected the announcement about the hardcover Villain Codex, which I'd heard about but didn't work on. I hadn't expected the announcement of the hardcover after that, the Encounter Codex (which I'm working on right now).

I heard while at the convention that there was a "big announcement" to be made. I half expected it to be a refresh of the rules set--a Pathfinder 2.0--but that didn't make sense considering the other long-term writing projects that I had just been talking to the developers about.

I was therefore taken wholly by surprise to learn about Starfinder, the new RPG set in space, several thousand years in the future. Like many gamers, I've only dabbled in space RPGs (primarily Star Wars RPGs in one incarnation or another); fantasy worlds tend to dominate. I backed the Aethera kickstarter (and even got to play a great game of it at PaizoCon), but I know I'm buying it just to read it, not because it's likely to get any play around my gaming table. To be honest, I'm also not likely to play Starfinder, although I'll certainly pick it up when it comes out. I agree with a few other online posters that Starfinder is almost certainly a way to "test the waters" for a Pathfinder 2.0 by streamlining and revising the rules and seeing how they are received (in a way that won't hurt the overall Pathfinder game brand too much).