Archives of Nethys

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Infinite Worlds / Building Worlds

Step 5: Finishing Touches

Source Galaxy Exploration Manual pg. 47
Each biome and cultural attribute is richly supported in this book’s other sections, but there are more ways you can add enriching details to your new world.
Adventure Hooks: With just a couple biomes and the cultural attributes set for your world, you have more than 100 adventure hooks to randomly roll or choose from! Better yet, you can generate nigh-infinite ideas by randomly rolling adventure hooks from different tables and combining them in interesting ways. These ideas aren’t just for GMs looking to challenge PCs, either. Other players might use such hooks to flesh out their background and explain how they got into adventuring—or what they left their home world to escape.
NPCs: While you likely don’t want to detail every sapient individual on a world, it can be helpful to have a few compelling NPCs to serve as points of contact, villains, companions, and the like. You can use the NPC Toolbox on pages 148–149 to easily generate an alien name and species, along with some memorable quirks. You can also roll on the Influential Associate and Party Relationships tables (pages 11–13) from the Backgrounds section of this book for ideas on how an NPC might relate to some or all of the PCs.
Settlements: As with NPCs, you likely want to detail a few major settlements in each world to serve as a landing site or home base. The Settlement Toolbox on pages 150–151 can help you generate rich locations with quirks and challenges to shape a settlement’s character. There’s also a table featuring a bevvy of potential locations for a science fantasy setting—roll a few times to see which locations are of particular prominence in a settlement, and you’ll know a lot more about the people who live there.
Other Features: Feel free to add any features not covered by this system to your world, its places, or its people. Other Starfinder books, such as Starfinder Pact Worlds and Starfinder Near Space, provide treasure troves of interesting science fantasy worlds and locations to inspire your creations!