Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 255 - Cliches and review of the Starfinder 2e Galaxy Guide

Episode Date: June 8, 2025

Ever wondered if "chosen ones" and "horny bards" have a place in your RPG campaigns? In episode 255 of Taking 20 Podcast, we dive into the world of RPG clichés—when to use them, when to subvert them, and how they can elevate your game. Plus, I also review the Starfinder 2e Galaxy Guide! Join us as we explore familiar tropes and exciting new worlds..     #pf2e #Pathfinder #Starfinder #gmtips #dmtips #dnd #rpg #cliches #tropes Resources: Episode 75 Better Backstories - https://taking20.podbean.com/e/ep-75-better-backstories/ Episode 104 3 Bullet NPCs and Backstories - https://taking20.podbean.com/e/episode-104-3-bullet-npcs-and-backstories/ Episode 190 - Integrating Character Backstories with Rick Sandidge - https://taking20.podbean.com/e/ep-190-integrating-character-backstories-with-rick-sandidge-of-find-the-path-ventures/ Episode 137 The Gap and Empty History - https://taking20.podbean.com/e/ep-137-lore-series-starfinder-gap-empty-history/ Episode 182 Campaigns Bigger Than the PCs - https://taking20.podbean.com/e/ep-182-campaigns-bigger-than-the-pcs/

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. Chasing MacGuffins, the violent act in a normally quiet and friendly town can be found in probably every GM's notebook or adventure running history. You've used them, I've used them, there's no shame in that at all. Tropes make it easier to design the story you're home brewing or to adapt a pre-written story into your world. Thank you for listening to the Taking 20 Podcast, episode 255, a discussion of whether you should use RPG cliches and a review of Paizo's Galaxy Guide for Starfinder 2E.

In honor of my review for the galaxy guide, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Space. I tried to start a restaurant in space, but it failed. The food was great, but there was no atmosphere. Now you might say, Jeremy, haven't you done that joke already? And my answer would be, maybe. There have been over 500 puns at this point so far and if you don't like that I repeat them, sorry. Thank you so much for listening to my little podcast. If you do like it, please give it a like and subscribe wherever you happen to find it.

YouTube, Spotify, Podbean, wherever you found it, please give it a like and a rating and a subscribe if you wouldn't mind. There are more RPG cliches and tropes than I can possibly list in one episode, much less cover in depth. The wise mentor NPC, the adventure revolving around a chosen one, a horny bard sleeping with anything with a pulse and half the things without it. While some of the tried and true cliches will be included in this episode, listing the cliches isn't the purpose. The question I want to ask you, my beloved GMs and players out there, should you use tropes and cliches

for your characters and in your games? Editing Jeremy here, I noticed throughout the episode I interchanged the terms trope and cliche. Technically there is a difference between tropes and cliches. A trope is a commonly used story device like a love triangle where cliches are overused in predictable turns of events or story selections. I use both terms throughout the episode and just know that advice for one can apply to the other as well. Back to the episode. I promised I'd have a few cliches as examples, and as threatened, let's talk about some of them that crop up in characters.

I previously mentioned horny bard, so let's just not mention that trope again. Much respect by the way if you know where that soundbite came from. If you're a player, I want to ask you, how many of your characters your role-playing have a tragic backstory of some sort? Hey, you're not being attacked by the way. I'm just asking Chances are a lot of you and I mean a lot of you would admit that your character's backstory contains one or more tragedies They're an orphan their spouse or child or children or family died. They were abused their house was destroyed They're starving. Something awful happened that pushed these characters to take up the mantle of adventurer.

I talked about some of this by the way in episodes 75, 104, 190 and probably others. It's a trope and honestly, spoiling information for later, there's nothing wrong with a tragic backstory for your character. I mean given how dangerous being an adventurer really is, someone would likely need to be in some sort of desperate situation to start delving into lost ruins full of traps and hazards and curses and the occasional dragon or two. Either they're desperate or have something happen to them against their will. I'm playing an awakened bear barbarian in a Pathfinder 2e campaign and he had no say whether or not he would be given higher intelligence, the ability to speak, and other trappings of society. He was a bear in a circus and had a simple if unremarkable life. See? Tragic

backstory. It's like if Flowers for Algernon happened to Charlie but the experimental surgery was entirely against his will, and Charlie was a bear. Moving on... Again, there's nothing wrong with allowing these tropes. The first advantage you have is that tropes are familiar, they're comfortable, they're well-worn. Chances are you've seen most tropes multiple times in your life without even realizing it. They are, in effect, a shared storytelling mechanism that spans genres, civilizations, and even generations. Let's take one trope as an example. The naive young person who doesn't know that they're about

to go on a huge adventure. Does that sound familiar? How about Luke from Star Wars or Aragon who discovered and hatched a dragon egg or Westley who is just a farm boy, literally, who becomes the Dread Pirate Roberts? Commander Shepard in Mass Effect if you choose the colonist origin story where you were born in a backwater planet. Players, if you want to play a naive young person who's experiencing the wide world through an adventure, you're in a lot of company and there's nothing wrong with that. GMs, you probably know what I'm going to say here.

So your player wants to play a character with a cliched background. So, do you know how many players I've DM'd who've had the chosen one as their backstory? There's some obscure prophecy given by Oracle Shmuckety Shmuck number 632 and little Bobby thinks he's going to save the world. Okay, fine, let's do this thing.

Besides tropes being well understood, tropes are damn near universal. I work with and I am friends with people from all over the world. Everyone has a story about the brooding loner or the dastardly villain trying to steal what's not theirs, whether that's land, a person, or wealth, or anything else. Almost everyone in the world understands that trope, so using them in your character backstory or in your game will make it more easily understood and easy to relate to. And DMs don't think you don't use tropes as well. Adventures about retrieving an artifact or assembling the pieces of one, the reawakening

of a world-ending villain, chasing MacGuffins, the violent act in a normally quiet and friendly town can be found in probably every GM's notebook or adventure-running history. You've used them, I've used them, there's no shame in that at all. Tropes make it easier to design the story you're homebrewing or to adapt a pre-written story into your world. While these are cliches, they've become so for a reason. They often provide familiar hooks and archetypes that are easy to jump into. That universal understanding of common tropes means that they're easier to design and improvise around. If you need to provide a well-meaning but

naive rebel or a shady inside information dealer, we can probably all think of a few examples from books and movies and whatever else and quickly improvise someone like, yes, I can get you the information you need, but it will come at great risk to myself, which means you're gonna have to pay. Describe a noble warrior in glowing metal armor wielding a sword of light, bam, people are immediately thinking paladin

or at minimum, some sort of heroic knight. Meanwhile, a shadowy, hidden, roguish thief automatically puts the players into a certain mindset and while we're there some cliches are used depending on the type of game that you're in. The eerie creeping dread or jump scares in a horror campaign. Are they tropes? Oh you bet. Overdone? Maybe, but everyone recognizes them. For my final reason that the DMs and players should lean into tropes is the opportunity to subvert the trope, to turn it on its ear and twist

the expectation. The Lego movie, by the way, has a great example of this where there was a prophecy given that a chosen one would come along. Come to find out that the chosen one really was completely inept and didn't really know what was going on, and the prophecy was made up to begin with. I mean, I can't say it as well as Morgan Freeman, but you get it. Emmett was supposed to be the Chosen One, but he was the least powerful and probably least capable person to try to fulfill it. They treat him like he's the Chosen One, even though he really has none of the characteristics described. Of course, there's a twist after that, and a twist after that, and also there's a twist that you know what, just go watch the Lego movie if you haven't already. But I do have some warnings some

cautions about using tropes that you need to keep in mind. Some tropes are representations that can perpetuate harmful stereotypes. An example would be that all members of a particular race or belief are all the same. All drow are evil. All wandering groups are technologically backwards savages, all female characters need a strong man to save or protect them. None of that is true. These are the tropes that I love to subvert. The wandering group do so to protect a powerful advanced piece of technology that they've

learned causes nothing but destruction. Or maybe in the faraway castle, the princess is holding the dragon hostage and that's what needs saving. 2. Tropes can lead to metagaming. The man who changes into a fearsome werewolf by the light of the full moon can be defeated by hiding out until dawn because we know how werewolves work. And also, taking care of the problem may just involve, oh that's right, werewolves are weak to silver. You the player know that, but the character probably shouldn't or wouldn't.

Three, also if you're not careful, if every adventure has the same tropes over and over and over again, then the game becomes trite and boring and samey and you won't really break any new ground on your creativity. So to sum up, tips for using cliches. One, yes use them and maybe subvert them to make them new. Put your own spin on a tired old trope. The wise sage is actually a con artist. They don't actually know anything, they're just pretending that they do. The dark lord of unspeakable evil is doing these horrible things to prevent an even greater

evil from appearing. Sometimes the most effective use of tropes in your game is to defy them in creative ways. 2. Mix and match your cliches and tropes from different genres or themes to create something unexpected. The naive farm girl goes on a mission to save the world with the power of friendship only to allow her compassion to cause a catastrophe not prevent it. Talk to your players about these cliches and ask if having a haunted house with the traditional it's built on an ancient burial ground or the horror is manifested through a kid's toy or monstrous jump scares ask them if that would be fun for them and if so,

lean hard into it and include it in your game. Just because something has been used many times or is even overdone doesn't mean we can't enjoy it at our own table. If it's fun for your group, that's what matters. There are a lot of benefits to using non-harmful cliches at your table. As promised, let's talk about the Starfinder 2e Galaxy Guide. In the interest of full disclosure, Paizo was kind enough to provide me a review copy of the book, but getting the book for free does not influence my review of the material. If I love it, I'm going to tell you, and if I don't think it's worth it, then I'll also tell you.

To start with, the book is 176 pages in length. It costs about $60 for the hard copy or about $20 for the PDF. The book has five main sections. The introduction and timeline, the adventures section, ports of call, factions, and finally some new ancestries. In the introduction, this is primarily useful for those who play Starfinder 2e and it details the timeline since the end of a mysterious period in history known as the Gap, where there is no history and no records and no one knows why it happened or how long it lasted or anything else. For more details about the Gap and suggestions for eras of empty history in your game, see episode 137. I love playing Starfinder and I'm thrilled to see it getting a second edition to upgrade it and bring it in line with Pathfinder 2e mechanics. That being said, I don't want to spend a

lot of time in the introduction because I know that Starfinder isn't as popular as other game systems, but that doesn't mean that the book isn't useful because let's talk about the adventure section. This section details different types of adventures you can run and this information can be used by DMs and GMs no matter what game system you're using. Any type of adventure the book defines, there are some common places in the Starfinder universe where these types of adventures would naturally fit. But then the authors give you details about the planet, the brief history, the culture, important areas, and NPCs. This book is useful because you can lift entire ideas out of the Starfinder universe and put them in your game. For example, the first

section of adventures talks about dystopian adventurers that take place in horrible, horrible places. One of the locations is the gloomy port city of Night Arch. It's controlled by the leader of an ammunition manufacturer named Shontail, a ruthless drow elf. They maintain multiple manufacturing locations, but only Night Arch is open to outsiders. Those who find their way into those closed off manufacturing areas could run afoul of automatons, malfunctioning manufacturing equipment, golem guards, and goodness knows what else. This has already given me an idea for an area of my campaign that I would make them dark

dwarves or regular dwarves instead of elves. Next is a section detailing high tech adventures. And to show you that there are some common tropes included in the book, imagine taking your PCs to the capital world of a progenitor alien race, perhaps making them ambassadors to a previously uncontacted civilization. This would make for a fun social encounter-based campaign where the right choices could lead to untold riches for every race on their home planet, or it could bring an extermination squad back home. The machine world is represented by a group of androids called the Concordial Array, and in this book they're detailed on page 33.

Third in this section are traditional fantasy adventures. There are sample cities and outposts in this section, and I don't know about you, but I can easily fall in the trap of Western civilization type cities or something from the cradle of civilization on earth. Those types of civilizations. But a quick read through this section tells me about a hive mind queen named Morgabard of the Thousand Spines. A city where there aren't buildings like we know them, but colossal mounds that can serve as a trade hub. What if Morghubard needs adventures to deliver something to a remote outpost?

An idea that's put forth on page 37 of this gorgeous book. Or the planet Triaxis, where the native Rhythorians and Dragons formed a symbiotic relationship. But because of the differences in their lifespans, the magical Union had to be formed and the Dragonkin, or maybe it's Dragonborn in your world, were formed who lived about the same length of time as the Riforians. Their gift given, the dragons retreated to the Drake Lands and continued to watch and guide the civilization from afar. Finishing this section briefly, there are also details about war-torn adventures adventures where violent conflict serves as a background or the basis for an entire campaign. The heroes home is under attack and they're placed into an elite strike force. I talked a little bit about this in episode 182 where you make campaigns that are bigger than the PCs. The book then talks about adventures

into the unknown, horror adventures, and finally just plain weird adventures, like adventures with magic mutated beasts or the arrival of a champion from a far off land who challenges all comers. The book details the moon of Daiken where the silicon-paced life forms do not speak unless they are quote discussing sophisticated ideas or communicating critical information. Steal that idea. Instead of silicon creatures on the moon, apply it to a group of elves who live their lives in stoic silence, researching and learning,

selling their knowledge to those they deem worthy and at a steep price to boot. The only breaks in silence are during the Saturday night debates where thousands show up to watch the great members of their society debate the weightiest of subjects to the benefit and entertainment of everyone. The latter part of the book detailing ancestries and character options will primarily be of use to GMs and players of Starfinder 2E.

There's a wealth of material here, and even non-players and GMs may find some clever ideas they can port over to their game system of choice, such as a character background of a military recruit. There's also an entire section on factions from the honor among thieves type of free captains to the law focused hell knights. The one that caught my eye by the way is the Corpse Fleet, which is an armada of undead supremacists who refuse to bow to the will of the living and work to destroy unity among living civilizations. As always with Paizo, the artwork in this book is absolutely gorgeous and their artists are second to none. Is the book worth it? Honestly? Yeah. If you're playing Starfinder, the book should be a no-brainer. But even if you're just looking for ideas,

$20 for the PDF with its art and collection of designs and ideas from some of the best creative minds in gaming today, absolutely worth it. In summary, I encourage players to use some of the common tropes in their character backstory and for DMs to embrace some common cliches in their game, whether to follow through on them or turn them on their head. I also recommend the new Starfinder book, the Galaxy Guide, and suggest that you can lift some ideas and tropes from that book as well. If you do, I'd be willing to bet that you and your players would have fun doing it.

Hey, follow me on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, Facebook. I don't post often, but when I do, I usually post something stupid and or funny. Did you like this topic by the way? And would you like to hear reviews of a wider variety of games and books? If so, let me know in the comments, social media, or email. Feedback at taking20podcast.com. In two weeks, we're going to talk about a not very fun topic, but one that needs to be discussed again. Player cheating. Before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, space. Did you know that the earth turned slowly on its axis in space? That really makes my day.

This has been episode 255 talking about RPG cliches and a review of the Star Finder 2E Galaxy Guide. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 podcast is Copyright 2025 by Jeremy Shelley. The opinions or views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host. References to game system content are copyright their respective publishers.