[Let’s Study: Star Trek Adventures] Introduction

After an overwhelming victory on votes against Shadowrun 5th Edition in a Twitter poll, we’ll be doing a Let’s Study on the freshly minted Star Trek Adventures RPG from Modiphius!

Disclaimers and Background

I was lucky enough to receive this electronic review copy from Modiphius. Also, I’m not all that familiar with the world of Star Trek, having only watched a few of the movies and some episodes of the original Star Trek, and Star Trek: TNG on local TV.

Introduction

“Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, ,to boldly go where no one has gone before.” – Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

As a geek of any stripe it’s not difficult to get goosebumps at this opening line, and in my head it rings with the same weight as Conan’s “Know, oh, prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis…”

It’s a daunting thing to tackle Star Trek, with such a heavy legacy from so many sources, but the book jumps right into it.  What I really appreciated is how easily they broke down the kinds of adventures you can expect. For those used to the lore of the setting, you can participate in any of the various hotspots of the Federation against its neighbors.

There’s mention of the U.S.S. Enterprise 1701-D, the U.S.S. Voyager and the U.S.S. Defiant, as well as the conflicts and missions they were to encounter. These would be the template of the kinds of adventures that the player characters, as members of Starfleet can expect to participate in: from high-stakes politics, to first contact with strange and alien species and participating in exploratory and scientific missions.

The Basic Mechanics

Star Trek Adventures uses the 2d20 system that Modiphius has used in several other games, such as Conan, Mutant Chronicles and the upcoming Infinity RPG.

Whenever an action is taken with a risk of failure the character rolls a pool of 20-sided dice (usually 2, but that can be increased with other factors) and tries to roll below a value determined by their Attribute and Discipline.

Of course, there’s more to it than just rolling 2d20 under a target number, but we’ll talk about those as we run into them on the rules.

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In our next installment, we’ll be taking a look at the setting and history of the Start Trek Adventures RPG. It’s a hefty chunk of the book but I’m looking forward to checking it out as I want to better appreciate the next bit after that Starfleet and Character Creation!

If you’re interested in buying it on PDF, you can purchase a copy of Star Trek Adventures over at DriveThruRPG for only $15.56!

EDIT: Seeing as a lot of you are finding the first article linked in various sites, I figure I might as well link to the rest of the entries as I write them: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 (Mechanics), Part 5 (Character Creation), Part 6 (Scientific Discoveries), Part 7a (Social Conflict), Part 7b (Combat), Part 8 (Tech, Weapons and Equipment), Part 9a (Starships), Part 9b (Starship Combat), Part 9c (Starship Creation & Alien Vessels), Part 10 (GMing, NPCs, Review)

Also if you’d like to support my efforts in writing Let’s Study style reviews, consider being part of my Patreon.

Thanks for reading!