Starfinder Warframe--Powered By Starfinder--Coming To A Tabletop Near You!

In October 2025, a new tabletop RPG adventure called Warframe x Starfinder: Operation Orias will be launching. It's a collaboration between Paizo Publishing and video game developer Digital Extremes.

Warframe is a third-person shooter video game which first released in 2013. As members of an ancient warrior culture called the Tenno you wake after suspended animation to fight different factions using 'warframes', described as 'anthropomorphous biomechanical combat units'.

Starfinder, of course, is Paizo's sci-fantasy spin-off of Pathfinder.

If you're at Gen Con this year (July 31st-August 3rd), you can try the game out at Paizo's booth.

Prepare to reach far beyond the Origin System’s boundaries, Tenno! We’re happy to announce a collaboration with award-winning tabletop roleplaying game publisher Paizo to bring Warframe into the Starfinder Roleplaying Game this October.

Starfinder blends sci-fi and fantasy into a rich tabletop RPG experience and soon you’ll be able to guide your very own Tenno through its universe. This collaboration features cover and intro page artwork by Silvia Barreira Pedregal (Brighan) and an introduction by TheKengineer.

 

[Belen]

I have played Warframe for years. It is a fun, solo or squad-based game of space ninjas. You can earn everything in game.

It is probably the best extraction shooter out there with a strong mythology based set sometime in the future after the Orokin fought a war against there creations, the Sentients. It is a slightly fallen solar system with competing factions vying for control.

The Tenno awaken into this environment. They pilot Warframe battlesuits and start with no memory of their past.

 

[Cynicide]

I read the Wikipedia page and still don’t know what a warframe was, so thanks for that! Everything I could find seemed to assume ‘warframe’ is a commonly used word known to everybody!

Think of them as battle suits with different abilities (Classes). You connect to them via an ability called Transference and you can remote control them. There is a lot of history that you don't need to know up front that can be confusing.

In game you take missions against various factions which are provided to you via an overseer of sorts called The Lotus. Occasionally there is some kind of universe ending threat that must be stopped.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I read the Wikipedia page and still don’t know what a warframe was, so thanks for that! Everything I could find seemed to assume ‘warframe’ is a commonly used word known to everybody!

What a Warframe is, is actually part of the story quests, so its a spoiler of sorts. The player characters start as semi-amnesiacs

Spoiler

Humanity was in a war against AI robots, and humanity was losing. The genetically engineered overlords of humanity, the Orokin, were massive jerks, and the AI wanted revenge. (Oro =gold, kin= family =~ Golden Family)
The Orokin tried making supersoldiers, but the enhancement process made them mentally unstable. But they were the best weapons the Orokin had so they cloned the mostly feral super soldiers, adding a kind of neural interface system that barely worked, and then dropping them in enemy territory in the hopes they'd do enough damage.

A "Tenno" is a survivor of a colony /escape ship, the Zarimon 10-0 (ten-oh). It suffered a failure in hyperspace and, rather than everyone dying like every other hyper failure, the ship limped back into human space with a number of children still alive, all infused with extradimensional energies.

Energy that lets them sync up with various technologies, including the neural interfaces.except for the kids it worked incredibly well, and their extradimensional energies made those cloned supersoldiers able to disrupt AI.

The tenno drove the AI back, then the Orokin were going to kill the tenno because of how powerful they were so the Tenno exterminated the Orokin, but the Tenno were lost in hyperspace for a century or two.

 

[kunadam]

So nice too see that two of my favourite pastimes TTRPG and Warframe finally meets.

 

[BrokenTwin]

While I absolutely love seeing Warframe coming to the tabletop (even if it is just an adventure and not a full RPG?), using Paizo's Starfinder feels weird to me. Hopefully the end result is good.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Not sure I feel Warframe to be well modeled by a Pathfinder/Starfinder game, but Warframe was a bit of a positive surprise when I recently started it, so it might still be worth checking out. Intersting gameplay and the story is really unique.

Though I kinda like the idea of using Warframe ideas for other games. I actually entertained the idea that the characters might find something like a Warframe in a fantasy campaign.

Mechanically speaking, by changing your Warframe, you become a completely different character. One day you're running Excalibur and dash to your enemy, cutting them in half with an exalted blade, the other day you're Gauss, rushing at breakneck speed, dancing around your enemies, and the next day you're Mag, magnetizing people's bones and crushing them.
What is unclear to me how much this actually affects our personality, and how one would model the difference between what makes out the Tenno operating the Warframe and what is defined by the Warframe.

 

[Cergorach]

Mechanically speaking, by changing your Warframe, you become a completely different character. One day you're running Excalibur and dash to your enemy, cutting them in half with an exalted blade, the other day you're Gauss, rushing at breakneck speed, dancing around your enemies, and the next day you're Mag, magnetizing people's bones and crushing them.

While it's technically remote control, but you're essentially piloting a human sized Mech. Something like Lancer does something similar where you can change your Mech when you acquire a new one or the old one get's shot out from under you.

I'm curious how Warframes are implemented in Starfinder, probably some type of construct...

 

[aiouh]

Or Space Ninjas.

Uhm kinda but not really I think the recent update includes time travel to alternate history 20th century. It's a mess.

 

[The_Warlock]

Uhm kinda but not really I think the recent update includes time travel to alternate history 20th century. It's a mess.

That's part of the joy of Warframe, from my point of view, where eldritch horrors that power them go, so to do they. And they are still space ninjas, even when they are fighting conglomerated picture tube TV monsters from the 90s in a destroyed shopping mall. Just like going to Duviri, which is its own techno-fantasy samurai thing. It's all a beautiful, hot mess with weird, impossible things of several different flavors to enjoy. So much, that as a player you can ignore half of it (and I often do) and still enjoy the game and its weird space opera pseudo-anime crit damage loot grind collage.

 

[Belen]

That's part of the joy of Warframe, from my point of view, where eldritch horrors that power them go, so to do they. And they are still space ninjas, even when they are fighting conglomerated picture tube TV monsters from the 90s in a destroyed shopping mall. Just like going to Duviri, which is its own techno-fantasy samurai thing. It's all a beautiful, hot mess with weird, impossible things of several different flavors to enjoy. So much, that as a player you can ignore half of it (and I often do) and still enjoy the game and its weird space opera pseudo-anime crit damage loot grind collage.

Agreed. 1999 is the best update they have done. It adds really interesting NPCs and really human connections for the Tenno.