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Star Trek Adventures Second Edition Starter Set Review – Roll to Do a Starfleet!

by Charlie Etheridge-Nunn on March 31, 2025

Review Copy Provided

The Starter Set next to a very serious Star Trek novel.

I’m someone who’s been a fan of Star Trek for most of his life, but I’m not a massive Trekkie. I co-host a Star Trek podcast with a friend where we watch three episodes based around a theme, delving into Trek more thoroughly than we’ve ever bothered before.

I’ve only run the Last Unicorn Games version of Star Trek and was enjoying myself until my brother met a Trekkie at his work, invited him along and I freaked out that I’d be “Well, Actually”’d into an early grave. While Ash became a good friend, I still remember that terror of ‘not doing Star Trek right’. Luckily I’m a better GM and a tolerable Star Trek nerd these days, so when Modiphius offered a review copy of their RPG Starter Set, I jumped at the opportunity.

I owned a copy of the Star Trek Adventures First Edition RPG for a while, but never got round to reading it before the second edition came along. When talking to Modiphius at UK Games Expo I did ask if they hated specifically me for doing that, but the idea of changing their 2d20 system to be a little clearer, removing funny dice, it all felt like it would make the game a bit more accessible.

What’s in the Box?

The Star Trek Adventures Starter Set is a nice, solid box which I’ve come to expect from RPGs these days. As far as solidity, it’s about the level of Free League boxes, just a little thinner.

There are two slim books, dice and tokens.

The books next to each other.

The first book is the Rules Booklet. These are about the depth of their QuickStart booklet, but instead of an adventure in the back there are starship rules. The system’s explained in short, clear sections. While there’s a lot of non-text space, there’s some high quality art and little designy iconography to make it look like it’s from the Star Trek universe without resorting to the white text on black background which most of first edition had.

For more trad games, I tend to keep a notepad by my side to draw out the mechanics in the style of a process map (in a past life I did that for a UK regulator). This book handily does that for the core mechanic, breaking it down step-by-step. It looks like a lot, but is nice and simple in practice.

I’m pretty particular with Star Trek the same way I am with Superman. It’s really easy to mess it up. Star Trek: Attack Wing was a reskin of X-Wing which reduced Star Trek to fights. Star Trek Ascendancy was a fun board game which gave species more to do than fight each other. There is a combat section in the starter rules, but it’s not overwhelming and a lot of it is categorised as ‘conflict’ which could be any high-stress situation where moment by moment action is required.

The back of the starter rules have a really nice rules reference. I generally left the book in front of the group for them to refer to during the games I ran.

The second book is the Campaign Booklet, containing a three-part storyline given the fairly generic title, “Infinite Combinations” and three Mission Briefs. They take up 58 pages, a little longer than the rules. Just to touch briefly on them: “Incursion Point” is a disaster rescue mission which starts the campaign in the middle of some action. “Dare to be Wise” gives us some of that Star Trek bullshit I was wanting, as there’s a shipboard problem and an unwelcome guest. “Whatever Should Be Done Must Be Done” brings it all home with some action archaeology and a sequence where the group are split between space and ground-based action.

The Mission Briefs are three one-page mission outlines with some dramatic beats, NPCs, extra details and nicely a little bit of flavour text for the focal role (e.g. security) to read out at the start of the mission.

My second article will go into detail about what happened when I ran these missions, but for folks here, I basically ran mission one and two, then two mission briefs, then the third mission. I found the first mission a little hand-holdy in some good and bad ways. The group found some of it a little linear at first and then grew more comfortable with the system as they went. As an improv-heavy GM, I adored the Missions Briefs and played around with a few bits of my Star Trek knowledge as I went. All in all, we played all but one Mission Brief in six sessions.

Nice, solid character sheets.

There are seven pregenerated characters on some nice, solid card. They each have an image, their stats, background and what their traits do. Some of the players found them a little wordy, especially early in knowing how the system worked. The backs of most of the characters have references for actions particular to just them. There’s a premade ship, The Challenger, which has similar details.

Reference sheets – not enough if you just have the physical boxed set.

There are four rules reference sheets, again on good, durable-feeling card: A rules summary, a conflict reference, a starship conflict reference and a breaches reference. These are nice, if a little intimidating given how many there are. The other problem I had with these is that there weren’t enough general rules summaries for all the players.

The very pretty dice (and one of my own)

There were five 20-sided dice in a light blue which I’m guessing is supposed to be a kind of transporter light kind of style. I’m not sure, but they’re apparently exclusive to this set compared to others the company sell which are based on duty stations. They’re lovely and have a Starfleet Delta on the ‘1’, signalling a critical success. That said, I did need about 2-3 times that for the shared pool the players and I had.

The tokens

Finally there’s a sheet of tokens. These are nine Determination tokens which are larger than the others and have ‘Determination’ on one side, Star Trek Adventures on the other. Then there are dual-purpose Momentum & Threat tokens. There are 36 in total, with a Red Alert on one side for threats, then the others showing the symbols of: The Federation, Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Ferengi and I think Orion? Again, I’m a casual Trekkie. The factions seem an odd touch, I basically gave the Federation ones to the group as Momentum and kept the rest in my hoodie pocket to take out for Threat. I guess they could be used if you ran a Star Trek Adventures campaign with another species or wanted points on a map represented. They’re pretty flimsy to the touch, and if I ran this as an ongoing game, would be the first thing I replaced with something more substantial.

The System

This is going to sound familiar to anyone who read my Dishonored review.

The 2d20 system has a fairly simple backbone. You combine an Attribute (Control, Daring, Fitness, Insight, Presence & Reason) with a Department (Command, Conn, Engineering, Security, Medicine & Science) to come up with your Target Number (TN). You’re going to try and roll under that on each d20 in your pool. By default, you have 2d20, but you can spend the group pool of Momentum or add to the GM’s pool of Threat to gain up to three more.

As ever, it’s always great to roll a crit.

Each result equal or under your TN is a success, and you often need two. That feels like it could be difficult, but there are a few tools which help. First of all, Momentum and Threat which I’ve already mentioned, but also Traits might decrease the amount of successes you need. There are also critical results, which are normally a natural 1 on a d20, or if you’ve got a suitable Focus (e.g. “Reverse Engineering” then your critical range is increased to your Department instead.

As an example, Lt. Cmdr. Burk Ven Jaxa is the head of Engineering. He needs to trace an energy signal back to its source, so he’s going to be rolling Insight + Engineering. This gives him a Target Number of 14, but as he’ll be Reverse Engineering, any roll under a 5 counts as two successes. He buys an extra die with a single point of Momentum and rolls 3, 12 and 17. He’s got three successes, which is enough to trace the signal.

Momentum’s a really useful tool for players, as a group pool which increases every time players hit over the amount of successes they need. It also has a cap of six, which encourages people spending rather than hoarding Momentum. There is a little bit of a ‘rich get richer’ problem potentially, as gambling a lot to get a lot back can be easier as the game goes on, but this is Star Trek and we’re here to see player characters be competent instead of failing all the time.

Momentum also has a number of other uses, like generating Traits and asking questions of the GM which are to be answered truthfully but not necessarily completely. In Conflict it’s possible for players to ‘keep the initiative’ instead of passing it over to an enemy, which felt like it was the main use the players had aside from purchasing dice.

Me, the GM

The counterpart to Momentum is Threat, the GM’s metacurrency. Unlike Momentum, the GM starts with some already generated. They gain it when players roll a natural 20 (unless they want to come up with an instant complication), when they buy extra dice or when they attack with lethal force. It can be spent like Momentum, adding dice or Traits.

The final metacurrency is Determination. Players start off with one Determination and gain it when their values or their directives clash with the mission. Determination allows players to reroll every die in their pool or they can be spent prior to a roll in order to automatically set a die to a 1.

Charlie – his dice cursed.

As well as normal rolls, there are a couple of different types of tasks which can take a little longer. A Linear Task gives a chain of rolls to do, with the examples often providing advancement either well or with negative traits in order to keep the story going. There are also Extended Tasks which I really enjoyed as a way of showing how everyone can chip in to solving a problem. These are tasks with a Difficulty, but also a Resistance which absorbs successes from each roll. Players’ remaining successes fill in boxes on a track until they hit ‘benchmarks’. These could be as simple as reducing the Resistance, or narrative elements like revealing a secret entrance, gaining an essential lead and so on.

Conflicts and fights were alright, with initiative bouncing between player characters and GM characters unless either side spends momentum. Injuries gained are traits, but characters have a limited budget of Stress which can absorb harm.

So how does all of this feel to play?

My GM setup, which I’ll get into next time.

At first, there were a few things to get our heads round, on both sides of the screen. Players spent the first session a little unsure of Momentum spends and only later on got the hang of spending it if they had it. There was a lot of ‘being too polite to take from the group pool’ going on.

The dice rolls were nice and simple and to quote Gihan from my group, “it just works”. The selection of Attribute and Department is pretty easy and I was pretty open to negotiation with my players if they pitched a different combination. The level of success was easy enough to work out, as was playing with overspill on the rolls when they succeeded. The players didn’t really notice the success-at-cost which both the campaign book suggested and I used, but I didn’t highlight when this happened as I didn’t want to slow the momentum of the game down.

When I ran the Mission Briefs, it was easy enough to create my own Extended Tasks on the fly, which I enjoyed doing.

I generally subscribe to the ‘only roll if success & failure leads to something interesting’ mentality which does tend to mean fewer rolls, but significant rolls. Each character had actions they could do which were Difficulty 0, specifically to do narrative things which you’d see in the show and to generate Momentum. Some of the missions have these kinds of actions mentioned, but if I’d have realised earlier, this would have meant the group would have loaded themselves up with Momentum earlier.

As far as the boxed set, I loved the feel of the pregens, the campaign and the mission briefs. The rules were about what I needed and the dice were a nice touch. The tokens were a bit flimsy and extra reference sheets for the core rules would have been nicer than the good quality of them. If I had a PDF copy, this could have been resolved, so for most people this is easily remedied as Modiphius are a Bits & Mortar company.

Personally, I think that this is a really good place to start testing the waters with Star Trek Adventures. For £24, getting around six sessions worth of play, some solid pregens and some lovely dice makes it good value.

Next time I’ll be writing up how my campaign went, so there will be spoilers, but also a bit more detail for those who are curious, and the things I felt I needed to do to help my running of the game.