Star trek adventures
Today is a good day to 20-sided die
Trek is a phenomenal fit for pen and paper roleplaying. Gene Roddenberry’s plot structures, philosophies and character archetypes slide naturally onto the tabletop, a gaming environment that has always favoured clearly-delineated player roles, crisis-of-the-week encounter design and creative problem solving. Star Trek is, at its heart, about a family of characters coming together to talk through a solution to a problem. It’s about teams, not individuals, and as such the distance between five Starfleet officers on a starship bridge and five friends sitting around a table is shorter than you might think.
Infused with respect for the setting – specifically the nonAbrams Prime universe circa The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager – this core book introduces a straightforward but powerful dice-based roleplaying system designed to replicate not only Star Trek’s principal features, but the rhythms and themes of its storytelling.
Players take up the roles of bridge officers aboard a starship, under the guidance of a game master. Each player builds their officer through a step-by-step process that encourages creative engagement at every turn. In addition to investing points in skills and attributes, players also pick a series of values informed by key details in their character’s history – their experiences at the Academy, crises they’ve encountered, and so on.
These values are phrases that define a character’s outlook – something like “Sometimes intuition is all we humans have to go on”. The book provides lots of examples drawn from the TV shows and movies, but players are encouraged to come up with their own. Adhering to these values in your roleplaying has practical benefits, but also helps guide the improvisational storytelling that Star Trek Adventures encourages.
Success and failure is determined using a handful of 20- and six-sided dice, but little else. Advanced rules allow for some complex interactions, but the system is – crucially – flexible, allowing groups to set their own balance between gaming and storytelling. Similarly, the system scales well between in-person challenges and
starship-sized conflict.
It is also to the game’s credit that it invests as much as it does in providing GMs and players with ways of presenting and resolving non-combat challenges. Often, pen and paper games become “about” combat by virtue of the fact that combat is the most complex thing that players do. That would be inappropriate for Star Trek, and this game respects that. Deployment of a few choice rules has the potential to turn repairing a breaching warp core or formulating a cure for an alien virus into encounters just as storied as a Kirk-approved bout of fisticuffs.
The latter pages of the book contain a lot of good advice for new GMs, along with an initial adventure to introduce players to the game. There is a sense, however, that this book’s Prime Directive is to furnish existing Trek fans with the tools they need to play out their own stories. It is less useful to prospective fans – the background material, while extensive, is scattershot and often delivered via in-universe means like chat logs and diary excerpts. While gratifying for long-term fans, many of these excerpts lack context if you don’t already have a solid working knowledge of the shows. Similarly, while the book is nicely laid out, the quality of the illustration is weak. This isn’t a book you would hand a nonTrekker friend to sell them on a universe that you love – but it is a great way to celebrate that world when the love is already there. Chris Thursten
Star Trek is about teams, not individuals
Star Trek Adventures intends that you’ll set your stories circa TNG, but provides tips for roleplaying in earlier eras too.