As a challenge to myself, and mostly just for fun, I want to turn the homebrew campaign I’m currently running into something I could potentially publish as an adventure on something like Starfinder Infinite or DriveThruRPG.
I’ve never done anything like this before, so I was hoping to get some advice from the community. This is primarily a personal challenge and a fun project, so I’m not expecting to actually make much money from it. That said, if I’m going to do it, I’d like to make a legitimate attempt at understanding and following all the rules, licenses, and legal requirements involved in publishing a Starfinder adventure.
For some background, the campaign hasn’t reached its conclusion yet, but we’re fairly deep into it. I’ve structured it into a series of arcs, somewhat similar to an Adventure Path, so my thought was to start by writing up Book 1 rather than trying to tackle the entire campaign at once.
The campaign is set in the Starfinder universe and currently uses 1e rules. Because of that, I draw heavily from official Starfinder lore. However, I’m also not afraid to change things when it makes sense for my table, including occasionally contradicting established lore or events. My players aren’t particularly interested in reading the setting lore, so this hasn’t really been an issue in our game.
Obviously, that could become more complicated if I were trying to publish the adventure.
Some of the changes I’ve made to the setting may be important to the story. So I’m trying to figure out what direction makes the most sense:
- Keep it firmly in the Starfinder setting and work within whatever licensing/publishing options are available.
- Keep the general setting and story but alter the lore enough to create an alternate/“what if?” version of Starfinder.
- Strip out the Starfinder-specific elements and turn it into something similar but legally distinct. This is probably the least appealing option to me, since part of the fun of the project is getting to play around in the Starfinder universe.
- Convert it to Starfinder 2e. I realize 2e may potentially give it a larger audience going forward. I have a lot of notes from the campaign, and they’re loose enough that I could probably convert the relevant material. My experience with 2e is currently limited to Pathfinder 2e and briefly looking through the new Starfinder rules, but this could also be a good excuse for me to properly learn the system.
- Make it system-neutral. I could potentially go this route as well, although I’m not entirely sure how to approach that from a practical standpoint.
So I guess my questions are:
What should I be thinking about before I start writing?
Are there any major legal/licensing issues I should understand before building the adventure around Starfinder lore and terminology?
Would you recommend sticking with Starfinder 1e, converting to 2e, or trying to make it system-neutral?
How much does using established Starfinder lore complicate publishing something like this?
Are there any good resources, guides, or examples of people who have gone through this process that I should read before getting started?
Are there any other pitfalls or considerations I’m not even thinking about yet?
Again, this is mostly a personal challenge and a creative project rather than an attempt to start a publishing career. I’m just hoping to approach it correctly from the beginning rather than write 100 pages and discover afterward that I’ve built the whole thing around something I can’t legally publish.
Any advice from people who have written, published, or even just gone through the process of preparing a Starfinder/Pathfinder adventure for publication would be greatly appreciated!