Step 10: Finishing Details

You can choose to take on edicts and anathema to reinforce your character's beliefs and guide how they'd react in certain situations. Edicts are behaviors your personal philosophy or code encourages. Anathema are the opposite: actions contrary to your point of view and violations of your personal code. For example, you might follow an edict to keep records of any planet you visit, or you might consider it anathema to erase data or conceal information from the public.

For most characters, these are entirely optional, though it's best to consider taking some on as you create your character to hone in on how they think. If you follow a deity, you might take inspiration from the edicts and anathema listed for them on the Deities page. Ancestry entries list edicts and anathema prevalent among their communities.

Your character’s port of call is a place where they spend downtime between adventures or have adopted as a temporary home. This might be a world or space station they spend a lot of time on, or even a generation ship like the Idari where they currently live or often visit.

Your character’s home world is the planet, satellite, or starship where they were born or grew up. See the Planets page for more information about major locations in the galaxy where your character might be from, or make up your own!

Write down the deity your character worships, if any. Your character might worship several deities as part of a personal pantheon. You might instead choose a philosophy or decide your character is an atheist. See the Deities page for more about Starfinder’s deities.

Decide your character’s age and note it on the third page of the character sheet. You can play a character of whatever age you like. There aren’t any mechanical adjustments to your character for being older, but you might want to take it into account when considering your starting attribute modifiers and future advancement. Particularly young characters can change the tone of some of the game’s threats, so it’s recommended that characters are at least young adults.

Characters of all genders are equally likely to become adventurers. Record your character’s gender, if applicable, and their pronouns on the third page of the character sheet.

A class DC sets the difficulty for certain abilities granted by your character’s class. This DC equals 10 plus their proficiency bonus for their class DC (+3 for most 1st-level characters) plus the modifier for the class’s key attribute modifier.

Your character usually begins each game session with 1 Hero Point, and you can gain additional Hero Points during sessions by performing heroic deeds or enthusiastic gameplay. Your character can use Hero Points to gain certain benefits, such as staving off death or rerolling a d20.

Your character’s Armor Class represents how difficult they are to hit in combat. To calculate your AC, add 10 plus your character’s Dexterity modifier (up to their armor’s Dexterity modifier cap), plus their proficiency bonus with their armor, plus their armor’s item bonus to AC and any other permanent bonuses and penalties.

Your character’s maximum Bulk determines how much weight they can comfortably carry. If they’re carrying a total amount of Bulk that exceeds 5 plus their Strength modifier, they are encumbered. A character can’t carry a total amount of Bulk that exceeds 10 plus their Strength modifier. The Bulk your character is carrying equals the sum of all of their items; keep in mind that 10 light items make up 1 Bulk. You can find out more about Bulk in Chapter 6.