Since I assume most of my audience (hopefully someone read this by now heh heh) are GURPS fans not necessarily familiar with the Starfinder setting, I feel the need for the obligatory exposition. I will try to be relatively brief and interject some personal commentary as for it not to be a pure info dump.
Starfinder is set in the same setting as Pathfinder, but thousands of years in the future. Golarion (the Earth-equivalent where Pathfinder takes place) has vanished and everyone in the universe has forgotten everything which happened earlier than about 400 years ago. All records have similarly vanished. The gods don’t want to talk about it. Instead of Golarion, the massive Absalom space station is located in its orbit around the Sun. The setting is (for now) focused on the Golarion solar system (also called the Pact Worlds), although many others are also described and standard play assumes interstellar travel via a hyperspace-equivalent called the Drift.
That’s actually just another plane of existence, albeit with some quirks I won’t go into right now beyond that it can only be reached via technological means, so no planeshifting to it. In order to (assumingly) simplify travel, travel times through the Drift are the same no matter the distance between two points, the only thing that matters is if the destination is “near” to the galaxy’s center (not necessarily physically, but more in the sense of being easily reachable through the Drift), the so called Near Space, or not – The Vast. In the former case travel takes 3d6 days and 5d6 in the latter, while Drift travel within a single solar system always takes 1d6 days which is marginally faster than traveling with max sublight speed. I like the simplicity, and the setting is definitively not Star Trek. More Star Wars with proper magic. Oh, the Starstone at the core of Absalom Station is a beacon for Drift travel, so the station is always just 1d6 days away.
All of the classic Pathfinder races are also present in Starfinder, but they’re not in the focus, that role is taken by the brand new ones. We have near-humans with forehead-antennae originally from the same world as elves (Lashuntas), four-armed protoss-lookalikes with an affinity for the local variant of the Force (Kasathas), big militaristic lizardmen (Vesk), living androids (Androids, doh), insect-people who only recently discovered individuality (Shirrens) and diminutive ratfolk (Ysoki). Many others are also available from the alien creatures sourcebook.
Gods are still an important part of the setting, although the split between arcane and divine magic is gone now, everything is just magic and there is an additional “school” of technomagic. Some of the old gods are no longer as commonly worshipped as before and there are a couple of new ones, for example the patron deity of technology who also happens to be the “owner” of the Drift. One magical discipline is obviously heavily inspired by the Force from Star Wars, with a skin of manipulating the dual cosmic energies of radiant stars and dark black holes. Creation and destruction, light and darknes, push and pull, yin and yang. Its wielders, the Solarians, are the local pyschic warrior equivalent. As of now, there are no explicit psionic powers in the setting, everything is just magic.
Technology is “standard” space opera, meaning a kitchen sink of basically anything possible although for the purposes of my campaign I have pegged the TL at 10. It’s rather safe-tech, no transformative effects are assumed. A bit of everything, but nothing extremely exotic. Cybertech and biotech are common, together simply called augments. Since the setting inherits from Pathfinder there is also necrotech (corpse ships, necrografts etc), and one of the “core” Pact World members is a race of undead (Eoxians). There’s also the obligatory Cthulhu influence in the form of some gods, elder things, and the outermost planet of the Golarion system for which some assume is a gestating Outer God.
I don’t find the setting exquisite, but it’s decent and I forsee good fun to be had with it. Creating a bounded sandbox within it for the campaign has certainly been so.
Lair Of The Chaotic GM 