Review copy provided.

The Star Trek Adventures RPG Second Edition boxed set and Spock Messiah for scale.

Last time I reviewed the Star Trek Adventures Second Edition Starter Set, the components and the system. In order to help my findings I ran the “Infinite Combinations” campaign and a couple of Mission Briefs from the Campaign Guide.

To help give a better understanding of what the game entails, I’ve gone through my experiences and thought I’d share them with you, in case you want to run the game.

Charlie’s Crafting Corner

I’m a good GM, but I’m also also a fairly lazy GM. I like to have reference materials for games, but I’m not going to go nuts with it, so here are some things I put together:

GM Screen

My GM screen and behind-screen setup.

I have a customisable GM Screen which I bought from a Savage Worlds stall at UK Games Expo. I’ve had one of these for years, but my old one finally broke. It’s landscape, which is my preferred orientation, and I can put in anything I need.

I didn’t have a pdf copy of the starter set, so I downloaded the free quickstart guide and used the snipping tool to slice out tables. I also used Word to write down a list of the characters and one of the most essential things for any RPG: pick-lists of NPC names. I then made four sheets which went beat-for-beat through each of the main stories and then one for the three Mission Briefs. I put in boxes for any extended tests and took a dry erase marker so I could write on the screen.

For the final sessions, the group said it would be good to know how much Threat the GM had and I’d been honest whenever they’d asked, so I made a little stand on a corner of the screen to put it on. It meant I could quietly take some and look directly at a player who noticed something bad was happening.

This was fine on my side, but the tables were a little small on the player side. While there is an official screen, it wouldn’t have these things and if you bought the starter set, you’d have a pdf you could snip better tables from. In the future, I think I’d probably try and just make some reference sheets in the style of Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark GM sheets.

Map & Tokens

Character and ship tokens printed out.

There are maps in the campaign book, but not in the box. For the first session I just went Theatre of the Mind, but for the third I realised that modern phones are actually pretty good at taking photos, so that’s how I got a photo of a nebula, printed it out and used that.

I have a token tool which I’ve used with VTTs and used the snipping tool with the quickstart pregens (handily also this set’s pregens), then put them in tokens with their duty station and used index cards to show who was where in the final session. I don’t think I’d have fully mapped this out anyway, to be honest.

Shuttle Stats

I bought the Star Trek Adventures Core Rulebook a little while ago and had a pdf of it. I was going to do my best not to refer to it during the review, but I did use the snipping tool to grab the shuttlecraft stats and print them out for the players. This is one of three instances I used the core book.

Character Logs

Without a pdf, I typed up the characters’ logs for each of the missions as it was a nice idea handing them over and having a player read them out. I typed a little too quickly and had some typos in the first one, but luckily no one took the ship’s captain at that point.

Infinite Combinations

Be warned, spoilers.

The Group

We had five players in alternate line-ups. This was going to be played during the absence of one but ended up going on before and after they were away. Luckily this was an episodic game, so it worked with rotating players.

Lee played Lt. Jg Rashid Kemal, a hotshot pilot who loved skateboarding.

Vinny played Dr Vorall, a Vulcan who had an alien encounter, showing her the value in emotions.

Mark played Lt. Cmdr Burk Ven Jaxa, an old Tellarite who had seen it all and was good at jury-rigging.

Arthur played both Ensign Lanyar Tennan, a Betazoid, and Commodore Nella Xen, a secretly-joined Trill.

Gihan played Xanthus Th’raviq, an Andorian with an icy demeanour.

Episode One: Incursion Point

A sky city, like this one, but it doesn’t depend on The Machine What Kills Children

Starring: Kemal, Vorall, Ven Jaxa and Tennan.

The game started with disaster recovery already happening. The flying city of Cressida above a Jovian planet was being attacked by strange creatures. The crew had to help with the evacuation effort. While it was good to kick things off in the middle of action, it felt like it went into a combat-type situation pretty early. What didn’t help was how I’d not paid attention to how the minion rules meant the entities harassing evacuees should only take one hit. The doctor ran into harm rescuing people, Ven Jaxa and Kemal started attacking, while Tennan sensed great distress. The good thing is they didn’t instantly go into murderhobo brain and attempt to kill the creatures.

We next had an extended test with the group trying to evacuate people, including corralling people, using PA systems and nabbing engineering transporters to transport people. Part way through, the group figured out a kind of defoliant drove the creatures away and used that along with some rappelling gear to rescue a trapped transport lift. Once that was over, a section of the city started to fall. Kemal did some hotshot flying with Tennan helping out. As Arthur was going on holiday for a few weeks, they decided to have Tennan, a redshirt, sacrifice himself to help save people. So yes, we did have a redshirt die in the game.

Vorall tried to mind-meld with the station’s Orion administrator, only to fail horrendously and get punched out by her bodyguard.

Session two started with Vorall coming to and finding herself in the middle of an argument. Administrator Damaad was trying to get back use of the cargo transporters to move valuables away, while a Nausicaan called Urotoxa was after getting Starfleet to arm the pre-warp society living inside the Jovian planet’s liquid level. The group managed to shout down Damaad and had some concerns about helping out the local species without breaking the Prime Directive. You know, Star Trek shit.

Kemal beamed up to the Challenger and ran to the bridge where he took the helm. Ven Jaxa had noticed the gradonic radiation in the creatures and changed the phasers to work to that pattern, drawing the Bryozoan entities away from the locals.

All in all, the group saved 550 of 600 people and alas, lost Ensign Tennan.

Episode Two: Dare to be Wise

A warp core breach!

Starring: Kemal, Vorall & Ven Jaxa

The episodic structure’s great, but when you finish an episode mid-session you either call the game an hour in or go on to the next one. We picked to play through and see what happened. Luckily this was all done in one.

The group had dropped off the 550 survivors from Cressida to Starbase 323, including Urotoxa who seemed nice and had requested a tour of the ship before going. The Challenger went from there to an asteroid field of weird metals. Yes! This is exactly the Star Trek spreadsheet nerding I was hoping for!

The ship started acting erratically, bucking forward, having problems scanning. Using a linear challenge, the group had a bit of a look and recalibration of the sensors, while Kemal kept the ship from smashing into asteroids.

A strange collection of beings poured out of a dimensional breach, kind of like those in Cressida, pushing through the shields to the warp core. Ven Jaxa was angry enough that things were going wrong with the ship, only to see this swarm of creatures turning into one weird thing.

Vorall ran down from the bridge and attempted to mind-meld with the entity, failing and getting an “improper syntax” Trait. So far she was two for two with bad mind melds.

The translator eventually was able to be updated in order to talk to this weird entity by the warp core. It was part of a ‘chorus’, a hive mind which had decided to separate itself into separate minds in the Twelfth Dimension. While this was going on, Kemal was trying to load up a torpedo to try and send out gradonic radiation and drive the Bryozoans to it, but abandoned the plan.

Security ran down and Th’raviq asked what’s going on with the glowing warp core and weird hive creature. Vinny tried very hard not to have Vorall say, “Aurora Borealis”.

Terminals were smoking, then burning, causing problems. The group very nearly broke the ship and alienated the Bryozoan entity. Luckily they managed to remove the Nausicaan sabotage which Ven Jaxa had identified as what messed with the warp core and sensors. Then Vorall spoke with the Bryozoan, realising that it had been pulled out of its dimension unwillingly and that forced them back into their hive mind mode. Kemal’s torpedo was used to help open up a fracture wide enough for the Bryozoans to get out of this dimension.

Mission Brief: Sour Deals

A mining station

Starring: Kemal, Ven Jaxa & Th’raviq.

We were down a Vinny and at two, it wouldn’t have been great. I asked around and got a friend and old RPG acquaintance, Gihan, to join us. Two of the three Mission Briefs were security-focused, so I asked if he’d be up for taking Th’raviq. Luckily he was.

Starfleet Intelligence sometimes requisition non-spies for help, like O’Brien that one time he infiltrated a mob and got kind-of adopted by an old crime boss>>>. This time, the cast were sent to Talbot III, a mess of a market town, in order to meet up with Cmdr Sayid Akuffo.

Akuffo’s mission was to get some valuable information from a Klingon defector. This was all set around the Strange New Worlds/Original Series time, so the Federation had hostilities and now were in a state of Cold War with them. The characters picked out some disguises. Ven Jaxa dressed like a miner as this was an old mining town, while Th’raviq dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and straw hat (adapted for antennae) and Kemal dressed as Don Johnson from Miami Vice.

There weren’t many details about Talbot III, so I made a few bits up about the geography and kept notes to make sure I didn’t contradict which district was which. They went to the hideout of Klarn, the Klingon defector, only to find a pair of gangs arguing nearby. The group managed to fake a Klingon gang coming and the gangs had already suffered at their hands, so they fled. The hideout was empty, with a few clues here and there. A 20 result in researching led to me revealing that a Klingon sniper was still there, observing them, even though the characters didn’t know at first. He shot at a witness and ended up in a foot chase.

The group next went to a bar and the large Andorian bartender Klarn was friendly with. Despite Klingon Intelligence spying on the location, the group managed to rendezvous with her and find out where Klarn was hiding. The warehouse district was surrounded by Klingons and disinterested private guards. Klarn had been found and killed. The group incapacitated some snipers and Ven Jaxa caused an electrical fire in the warehouse with Klarn in it. Gihan felt like he was going through every weapon possible, having used a Klingon soldier’s disruptor rifle, his ceremonial knife and finally an actual phaser.

I’d mentioned that Klarn was identifiable by his glass eye (odd as a Klingon would normally wear a patch) and the group found the intel stored in the eye. The mission was complete and despite the characters not noticing, the players were told that Akuffo was reporting back to his real commanders: Section 31.

This was fun and surprised Vinny who’d left them alone for one session only to find that they’d been in chases and fights. Also Gihan had missed the initial sessions and assumed the Starfleet Intelligence/Section 31 side of it meant a lot more than it did. In truth, this was the least connected to the main campaign, although if people do run it, I’d say to bring Akuffo back for the final Mission Brief, as it involves Starfleet Intelligence.

Mission Brief: Behind the Glass

Look, there isn’t really any Regency Star Trek, so I had to use this.

Starring: Vorall, Ven Jaxa & Th’raviq

I love the idea of Federation colonies picking a theme, but a lot of the time it seems like ‘20th Century America’ is far too often what they go with. Aside from LARP Scotland in the Sex Ghost episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I decided to go with a kind of Regency Bath style for the Federation town on Axanar. A Quick Look at Memory Alpha showed me the details of Axanar and the people there. I also needed to come up with a few NPC names and stores.

The group had been sent down to Axanar to look into an Orion pet shop owner who’d somehow got hold of individual Bryozoans and was selling them. To make matters worse, people including the Federation administrator had their pets stolen.

The Orion pet shop owner was livid that the Nausicaans who sold him the Bryozoans had made him an accessory in selling actual sentient beings. The group tracked down some of the people who had theirs stolen, had some nice conversations and realised that it was regular concerts which had drawn the Bryozoans whose tanks were near enough to it.

Eventually, they managed to track the Bryozoans to underneath a park’s gazebo, where they’d been drawn to music. They used UB40 playing from a cargo vehicle to summon them… I forget why. I think it was some talk of ska and reggae ‘classics’ being when some of the Bryozoans were ‘stolen’.

One thing I’ll mention here which never really got explored was that one of the people with a Bryozoan was ‘celebrity’, Rokk of Izar, a fraud pretending to be the son of Garth of Izar, a famous (now mad) Starfleet captain who saved Axanar one time. This made a reference to both Legion of Super-Heroes and an episode of the Original Series, but went understandably unnoticed.

Episode Three: Whatever Should Be Done Must Be Done

I don’t know what this is, but I want to cover it for Casual Trek.

Starring: Kemal, Ven Jaxa, Xen and Th’raviq

Arthur was back and while they’d sacrificed their last character, there were still a couple left. They went with Commodore Nella Xen and I apologised for what was about to happen…

The session immediately started with Admiral Robert April (the only name-level person in this campaign, which is a nice amount of restraint) calling to have Commodore Xen answer for the crew’s recent actions. He was dubious about letting the Challenger go on the hunt for Urotoxa, the Nausicaan archaeologist who sabotaged the ship. The group held their own quite nicely in a group task.

The crew went to Starbase 323 and had a look for any leads to where Urotoxa was. The starbase was in circular levels with a lot of markets and plantlife making it look nice.

Ven Jaxa was looking through logs and cameras, it failed. Xen assigned more security while Kemal and Th’raviq went undercover. The group were getting a little stuck on motives and who would gain from the sabotage, which was understandable, but less necessary at this point.

Kemal went into The Shattered Star to talk to people, but it was too difficult to overhear. Ven Jaxa scanned the station for gradonic radiation while Xen carried out some forensic accounting.

Unfortunately Th’raviq and Kemal got stuck in a merchant’s who did know about Urotoxa, having helped her get off-station, but who rigged the place with an anti-shoplifter forcefield. Jaxa pulled it down, then they set off.

The group had the warp trail of the ship Urotoxa had flown away on and it went to The Shadow Maw Nebula, a massive nebula bordering Nausicaan, Klingon and Gorn territory. Admiral April’s advice about not sparking a war with any of the groups rang in their heads. Kemal flew the Challenger through the Shadow Maw Nebula, where there was a solar system hidden away, with a single planet, four moons and some weird terrifying cosmic tendrils.

Some of the crew beamed down and managed to talk to Urotoxa and her entourage, defusing the situation and finding out that she’d been looking to use her rift technology to break through into something which could show that Nausicaans were an advanced species once. They would team up, for now.

The final session was a full house for the last half of the episode, with Vinny back as Vorall.

Vorall and Ven Jaxa remained on the moon to help Urotoxa, while Xen, Th’raviq and Kemal were on the Challenger. It was time for a split act.

Vorall and Ven Jaxa had an extended test, trying to beat Urotoxa to finding out the details of the strange glyphs they’d found on the moon, while the Challenger was having to deal with a Nausicaan warship that called them heretics for invading holy space. Kemal flew the Challenger out of the way of their torpedoes and Xen said they were damaged, they needed an hour and would clear off. That actually worked!

The moon team opened up a secret staircase, mostly thanks to Ven Jaxa cheating his way through their mechanisms thanks to his engineering knowledge. The group opened up a statue when Urotoxa used her rift device, hoping it would unlock a perpetual energy source, the characters realised what that meant. It was the Bryozoans. The Chorus returned, incredibly angry at being summoned and pushed into a single entity again.

The Nausicaans got impatient and their reinforcements arrived. Xen managed to defuse them, after the initial horror of seeing so many ships show up, customised to survive the battering of the nebula.

Vorall grabbed and smashed the enhancer Urotoxa made. She admitted to not realising it had caused this distress, but that maybe some good could come from this, as the glyphs on the moon showed that the Klingons, Gorn, Nausicaans and Hur’q were possible all united once.

I had the group describe their end of season epilogues:

Kemal span around in his seat at the helm, just happy to be alive.

Burk Ven Jaxa collected up pieces of the rift machine and started playing with them in his quarters.

Dr Vorall was in her quarters, piecing everything together, and wondering what brought these species together in the past.

Xanthus Th’raviq reported to Akuffo that the weapon couldn’t be retrieved, and Starfleet would need to act and make sure the Nausicaans, Klingons and Gorn didn’t make an alliance.

Commodore Nella Xen held a funeral for Tennan, shooting an empty coffin into space as there wasn’t anything to recover from the disaster.

Reactions

This is the last time Spock runs a game for this lot.

Overall, the group liked the system and the stories. The main takeaway was that the Mission Briefs went over the best both from the players and myself.

Gihan had some concerns about Momentum causing a ‘rich get richer’ kind of thing. He also wanted a bit more of a moral quandary at the end and assumed that the Section 31 plot would have been more of a part of it. After Behind the Glass, Gihan mentioned that he was surprised that the solution was music and investigation, rather than having to fight, which was the perfect encapsulation of why I felt this game worked. While Th’raviq was ‘icy’, Gihan didn’t play him that way, but he made for an entertaining member of the team, shining in Sour Deals and making the best of not fighting in other sessions.

Mark liked the stories, especially Behind the Glass. He mentioned only just noticing the Difficulty 0 moves in the last session, some of which were more conditional than others. He wasn’t sure about how a campaign would go. As the only player who attended every session, Mark did a great job at managing to fit engineering into the problems and solutions in sessions.

Lee and Gihan felt that some Focuses didn’t see enough use, and others like ‘Reverse Engineering’ and ‘Computers’ saw a ton of use. As Kemal, Lee doubled up as security before Th’raviq joined the cast. He did a good job of being in scenes, but knowing when to run back to the ship and fly it around.

Arthur felt that some of the character abilities were a bit too situational and there was a lot of text. I loved that as the game went on, Arthur went from being not as active as captain to figuring out ways of giving commands, helping people with traits and being diplomatic.

I’ve mentioned my opinions on the book and the system in the previous review. This time I’ll get into the stories. Despite the vague names, the trilogy of core missions were good, if a little hand-holdy at times in ways which feel disjointed from the starter set rulebook. I felt like I was a little over-prepared in the system after having read the starter set’s rules and then encountering tutorial-level entries in the first episode. I was pleased that it wasn’t all combat, with only the first scene and Sour Deals having fights in it.

I’d read Mission Briefs for first edition and wasn’t sure how they’d work. I can say now that with a short amount of lead time, you can easily prepare them and have a lot of wiggle room. I generally did a little research on places like Memory Alpha for species I didn’t recognise the names of, took photos to show the group, made lists of names and places and themes for any Federation locations. The adventure itself had some really good moments, such as the relief efforts in the first episode and the whole second episode. The locations were distinctive and while there weren’t a massive amount of NPCs, the ones who were there stood out.

Personally, I think this is a very good introduction to the system and while there are a few things to iron out, none of it’s a deal-breaker.

The Star Trek Adventures Starter Set is available on Modiphius’ website

You can also download the quickstart rules which come with an adventure here.

And as one final plug, if you want to hear me and my friend Miles casually make our way through all of Star Trek one theme at a time, check out the Casual Trek podcast.