While this book is not structured in the best possible way to teach a newbie how to play Starfinder Second Edition, the fact of the matter is that this is a reference book. One might use it one time to learn how to play or, perhaps more likely, one will learn from YouTube videos, a Beginner’s Box product or being taught by friends around the table.

As a reference book, the Player Core is very well organized. It has the most likely stuff that the player would look up (character creation) up front. Based on how I’ve consulted the Player books for Tales of the Valiant and D&D, this is the most likely use for the book.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book. It’s based on a TTRPG. Would it be like the novelization of a movie or some of the books from the Star Trek or Star Wars universes? Would it be cheesy or great? Well, it turned out to be way better than I expected. There were a few things that came through a little bit game-y, but they were few and far between. The two examples that stood out to me were a character who created a psychic bond with her companions allowing them to speak to each other a “battle mind”

I believe this was the first book released for Starfinder Second Edition. As such it had to serve as an introduction to the system as well as what had changed in the solar system since the first edition. Unlike many TTRPG companies, Paizo likes to advance the story of the world and change things up as time goes on.

However, the best part of the way this book is organized is that the first few chapters are based on the types of campaigns you might run - horror, science fiction, fantasy, weird, and so on. For each type of campaign, the writer suggests planets the GM might go to and some campaign starters whether it’s for a one-shot or a long campaign. Just this section alone is worth getting this book.

2025 was the year I leveled up my TTRPG skills (no pun intended). It started off with my participation in New Game Master Month in February. Kobold Press was a sponsor and had a coupon for the core books so I moved off the free rules and onto the main, published rules. I consumed lots of TTRPG content on YouTube, reddit, and enworld - lots of it focused on being a better GM or a more creative GM. This may have come out already if I published the other end of year blog posts before this one, but TTRPGs ended up eating up a lot of free time and reducing the time I spent on reading, video games, and programming as the year progressed.

I grew up in the days of Nintendo vs Sega. But that’s not the only rivalry I’ve been around. There was also Emacs vs Vi/Vim. And Windows vs Linux vs Mac. Basically, anywhere there’s a choice, a huge swath of humanity takes the stance that whatever they’ve chosen is the only good choice and every other choice is bad or dumb. But not everyone! Time and age have taught me that whenever there’s a bifurcated choice like that, it’s often because each is catering to a different need or way of thinking that appeals to enough people to sustain an alternative. With that in mind, as I’ve moved beyond my original TTRPG (D&D) and explored other options, I’ve seen that each publisher seems to have certain strengths. In the spirit of putting something positive out there in the world, here is what I think each publisher does best: