Welcome to Starfinder

The camera pans to the open vastness of space, nothing as far as the eye can see save for the inky blackness of the void. Then a flash of blue phosphorescent light shatters the silent gloom of the void and an oval-shaped planetoid about the size of Earth’s moon, plus or minus a hundred kilometers, appears in frame. Crackling rays of drift energy cascade off the surface of the rocky moon into the void of space as it settles in a self sustaining stationary orbit. 

 

The camera pans out and one by one a multitude of vessels from all manner of ports of origin pop out of the drift with a resounding CRACK and begin descending upon the planetoid while blue drift lightning streams off of their hulls. The camera focuses even closer, revealing a sprawling city nestled in a deep crater on the planetoid’s surface, with a large mountainous pillar jutting outward from the center. It glitters softly with neon lights from the multitude of palatial estates built into the rock of the pillar, each with their own colorful heraldry like an audacious middle finger to good taste. 

 

The camera holds upon the pillar, zooming in to focus on wild parties full of bacchanalian delights, the high stakes games of fortune, and tense battle planning committed by savage-looking individuals even though they sport rich finery of a civilized world. The camera pans down below the lofty estates to the lower quarters, winding its way through a rat's nest of dirty, twisting corridors filled with bustling markets offering all manner of foreign finery, all of which are being hawked by loud and braggadocious criers. It stops and focuses on a fight that breaks out between two of these criers, two whose competitive barbs have gotten perhaps too personal. In their struggle the larger crier screams and clutches his chest, grabbing at the dagger plunged within. He drops to the ground and the smaller, six-limbed crier resumes hawking his wares as if his competitor’s blood was not staining the streets a few feet from him. The camera pans through shops full of exotic wares and creatures that can’t find anywhere else in Near Space, past aliens whose home planets have not yet been catalogued by the Star Finder Society, past brawls and fights, past dirty dealings of all kinds, until we pan out to view the city of scum as a whole once more and words begin to phase into the screen “Welcome to Providence”.

 

And to you, my listeners:

 

 

Welcome to Starfinder.