I lasted posted about DMing Star Trek Adventures some ten months ago, promising a further post once my players had got through my opening story arc... that has finally happened! It was a five-episode arc, so yes, it takes us about two months to do a single episode. I want here to reflect on the game in general so far, explain my campaign, and review the individual episodes we've played.
Our Campaign: Beyond the Rim of the Starlight
Our campaign is set in 2371, the year after The Next Generation ends but before Generations; after the Dominion has been discovered on Deep Space Nine but before the Dominion War has begun. This lets us play with most things in the TNG/DS9 toolbox without worrying about the continuity of the big political changes DS9 introduced. The "Rim of the Starlight" is a barrier in space, beyond which lies a largely uncharted mass of the galaxy... but occasional holes do open up, meaning there have been sporadic visits by the Federation or other familiar species, which would let me make use of the published missions.
There are five published missions that claim to be designed to introduce players to the system:
- "The Rescue at Xerxes IV" (included in the Core Rulebook)
- "Signals" (part of the "Quickstart" free download)
- "A Star Beyond the Stars" (a three-part campaign, part of the "Starter Set" pack)
I decided to incorporate all three into my opening campaign, designed to introduce the players to the game, and the characters to the area beyond the Rim of the Starlight. There's a narrative break between parts one and two of "A Star Beyond the Stars," so I put "The Rescue at Xerxes IV" there, and then I stuck "Signals" at the end. This also worked well in terms of introducing the mechanics... mostly.
I wanted my characters to be "lower decks" ones, a group of ensigns just graduated from the Academy. I guess I was influenced by watching Lower Decks, but also I was coming from a traditional D&D idea of RPG progression: start at the bottom and work your way up. This, I would come to realize, is not how STA conceptualizes things. It would be easier to go all lower decks if I was writing my own missions from scratch, but so far I have stuck with published ones, and some require some pretty big tweaks to explain why a group of ensigns is at the focus! (I assure my players that between missions, the ships gets into all kinds of exciting scrapes in which they play absolutely no significant role.)
The tricky thing has also been creating a senior staff for their ship, the USS Ayrton. I mean, they all exist with names and stats, but I've struggled to work them in without overshadowing the player characters, which means the senior staff barely appear, and my players never really remember anything about them.
(The Ayrton is an old Constellation-class starship that has served on many venerable exploration campaigns. My players have complained that whenever the ship rolls to assist, it fails, so it must not be a very good ship.)
Our players have fluctuated. So far they have included:
- my wife Hayley as Liana Carver, human science officer (all episodes)
- Cari and Andy as Jor Lena, Bajoran security officer, and Gurg bim Vurg, Tellarite doctor (all episodes)
- Jeremy and Daniela as Samel, Vulcan engineer, and Ioza Morganth, Betazoid pilot (episodes 1-3)
- Claire as Mooria Loonin, Trill command officer (episodes 3-4, but intends to return in future)
(Two new players have joined us beginning with episode 6, as well.)
I will say the Star Trek format makes characters appearing and disappearing much easier to justify than D&D. ("Uh, this guy stayed in the tavern this week.") Especially with my lower decks focus, I just have to say that the captain didn't assign someone to beam down this episode!
Episode 1: "A World Beyond the Starlight, Part I: The Alcubierre"
As published, this mission is about the player characters going aboard a derelict Federation starship, the USS Alcubierre, that was testing an experimental engine, which would allow it to go faster than warp five without causing subspace pollution (tying into the TNG episode "Force of Nature"). They discover that the ship was attacked by Romulans, but end up discovering on top of that that the Romulans are being controlled by the parasites from the TNG episode "Conspiracy."
I retooled this to fit my campaign: the Alcubierre was testing out a device to cross through the Rim of the Starlight at will. When it crossed through, the device malfunctioned, stranding it, but also it was attacked by Romulans. In a last-ditch effort, it was able to cross back; the Romulan warbird was cut off, but the ship had still been boarded. I wasn't interested in working with the "Conspiracy" parasites, though, and replaced them with a fungus, loosely based on the so-called "zombie-ant fungus."
I had the player characters shuttle over to the Alcubierre with an NPC first officer character in command of the mission. This meant that I could provide some guidance as they figured out the system, but my plan was also for the commander to get knocked out at some point, so that one of the players would have to be put in command.
Overall, this mission went pretty well. The players spent their time learning the system, but soon figured it out. They quickly proved themselves adept at coming up with interesting solutions. In this mission, they find there's just one survivor on the Alcubierre, Ensign Jim LaSalle, an engineer who helps them do the cold restart of the ship's engines, which allows the players' ship to beam people over and win the day. The players are supposed to fight their way into Engineering and then fix the engines.
My players had the idea that instead of coming with them, LaSalle should stay behind and cause a distraction, drawing some Romulans away from Engineering. I let them do this, but I think I should have handled things slightly differently: if I was making the combat tasks easier by reducing the number of Romulans, I should have made the technical tasks harder. (Instead of having LaSalle there to talk them through things, they had to depend on his notes.) I still think this would have played to their strengths; at the time, there was just one character who was worth anything in combat. But overall it went well!
They did some creative stuff, too, in terms of capturing a Romulan. On the other hand, we struggled a bit with combat, and it wasn't until partway through episode 2 that I realized there was a very basic rule about how to use STA's custom "command dice" when rolling for damage that I had totally overlooked because it's printed in a different part of the CR than all the other information about combat! It's a good system, but it's not always well explained.
Episode 2: "A World Beyond the Starlight, Part II: The Rescue at Xerxes IV"
So I had episode 1 end with a tug arriving to tow the derelict Alcubierre back to Deep Space 8, and the player characters being assigned to go with it to do debriefing on the fungal threat. Episode 2 opened, then, with them flying on a runabout back to their own ship, the Ayrton, allowing me to integrate the starter mission from the Core Rulebook. In the mission as written, the characters discover that all life-forms on Xerxes IV are devolving, including a Federation science team which they have to evacuate. The scientists don't want to leave, though, because they're researching a medicine, and if they don't get samples now, the plants they need will devolve too.
I tied this into my ongoing plot by having it be an antifungal that they were researching—and by giving a piece of paper to Gurg's player that indicated this antifungal was, according to a medical briefing he'd seen on DS8, exactly what was needed to remove fungus from someone's brain without harming their brain. Pretty big coincidence? Well, they also learned that a mysterious signal had been intercepted by the Xerxes outpost computers several months ago... the outpost hadn't been able to decode it, but a couple days later, they'd received orders from the Federation Ministry for Science telling them to research antifungals. Only, later the characters would learn the Ministry had never sent any such orders...
Other than this, I didn't change much. The mission works really well as an introduction to the STA mechanics overall: it begins with some basic tasks, then some simple combat, then teaches you Extended Tasks. My players again surprised me: at the beginning, they get attacked by devolved scientists ("Neanderthals" according to the mission; my players made fun of the science here), and they managed to capture one and brought him along with them! Which was not a thing I had anticipated. This proved especially challenging when the players had to cross a ravine, and they had to get this tied-up Neanderthal to walk across a log! There were some good shenanigans there.
The climax of the episode is both clever and somewhat confusing for a first-time GM. Basically, the characters have to split up and undertake three different things simultaneously, all within a time limit: they need to find parts to repair their damaged runabout, they need to cure the devolution, and they need to gather plant samples to use in the fungicide, but an ion storm is bearing down on the planet that will make taking off impossible. My players debated what to do a bit. Ioza, who was in charge of the mission, didn't think gathering materials for the fungicide was worth the time. On the other hand, Gurg knew how valuable the fungicide could be... but the briefing he'd learned that from was classified, and I'd added a Mission Directive of "Maintain operational security and protect classified information."
Carver, our science officer, was game to find the samples, and Ioza was willing to go with her if she insisted; it seemed logical that Gurg would cure the devolution, and Jor the security officer wanted to help him. But Gurg kept insisting he didn't need help—his way of trying to make Jor go work on the more important task without revealing what he knew! But one of Jor's Values is "Tight with Gurg," and I ended up giving her a point of Determination if she refused to listen to Gurg in order to help Gurg.
According to the mission as written, the characters should have 15 intervals to do all of this. In STA, a Task by default takes 2 intervals, though players can spend Momentum to reduce that to 1, and if they roll a Complication, it increases to 3. The mission seems to indicate that you should rotate between the characters, with each Task taking 2 intervals, but 1) doing all three of those things would be totally impossible, you would just run out of time, and 2) it also doesn't make much sense from a narrative standpoint. The characters are working simultaneously: why should Carver scanning for samples in one location give Samel less time to look for engine parts in a different location? It also says to spend some Threat to add Neanderthals to some scenes, and that combat should take 1 interval... but also to just integrate the Neanderthals into the turn order. So the whole combat is 1 interval? How can you do that and maintain the turn order?
I ended up treating each location as its own separate Timed Challenge, and just trying to move back and forth between them in a way that made sense: if 2 intervals passed in one location, but 4 in another, then I went back to the one where 2 had passed to "catch it up," so to speak. And I had player combat Tasks take 1 interval by default. This all worked out very well, actually; pretty much every group finished in the nick of time, and there was some good rolling and rerolling. But it was more confusing than I feel like something aimed at first-time GMs and players ought to be! I posted in one of the STA facebook groups to ask if I was interpreting things correctly, but the advice I got didn't really clarify. I've never seen anyone else complain about this mission being confusing, though, so maybe it's just me!
Anyway, that aside, it was overall a fun one, and it was by the end of this mission that I felt that STA as a system had really clicked for me and my players, with them effectively using Momentum, Determination, Talents, and Focuses to their advantage, and me figuring out what to do with Threat.
It took two-and-a-half sessions to play this one; one of my players complained after the first session that she didn't really know what was happening narratively in the first Extended Task. She understood the mechanics, but what was actually taking place? This was good feedback, and I made many of the Tasks in the later scenes more detailed as a result. As written, the mission just says the characters are collecting samples, for example, but I would say things like, "you're looking for a tree of genus Ditasa," which I think helped the immersion.
I had the episode end with the Xerxes science outpost broadcasting a mysterious signal through the Rim of the Starlight, opening up a hole in it. (All this stuff with the signals was me working in foreshadowing of what would be the arc's last episode, "Signals.")
Episode 3: "A World Beyond the Starlight, Part III: We Are Not Ourselves"
Episode 3 thus opened with the main characters back on the Ayrton, joined by a new crew transfer, Loonin, and the ship assigned to cross through the Rim of the Starlight to find the Romulan warbird and the alien fungus. I set it up with a series of chained Tasks as the ship crossed through the Rim: Carver was in the science lab on scanning duty, Samel was on the bridge on Engineering duty, Gurg was in sickbay, and the other three characters were on a damage control team together.
- Carver in the science lab does a Reason + Science Difficulty 2 Task to determine where the Rim is going to fluctuate. She sends this information to Samel on the bridge...
- Samel on the bridge does a Reason + Engineering D2 Task to figure out where to send the damage control team...
- Loonin does a Command + Presence D2 Task to get the damage control team moving quickly and efficiently...
- Ioza does an Insight + Engineering D2 Task to fix the system while...
- Jor does a Fitness + Security D2 Task to rescue a crewman trapped by the damage and get him to sickay...
- Gurg does a Reason + Medicine D2 Task to stabilize him.
Each player could spend Momentum off the back of a successful Task to reduce the difficulty of the next one, e.g., if Samel did a very good job identifying where the damage would happen, that would make Loonin's job easier. My players seemed to like it, it gave their "lower decks" characters something to do, and they ended up with a nice big pool of Momentum at the beginning of the episode.
This episode has two discrete parts as written: first the players investigate a derelict Klingon space station infected by the parasites (fungus in my version) and then they go to a base where the parasites are performing genetic experiments. As written, the parasites are trying to create superior hosts for themselves, but keep triggering devolution by mistake. I had to change this a bit: we had just done devolution in the last mission! I also wanted the fungus to be up to something more interesting (more on that when I get to episode 4). So I had the fungus experimenting to make itself more intelligent; they were inducing mutations in the Klingons to increase their cranial capacity, and then harvesting those neurons and injecting them into fungal samples. Despite this, my players made a connection to the devolution they had seen on Xerxes IV. Two totally unrelated phenomena in two weeks making people devolve: that's just life in Starfleet, I guess.
Investigating the Klingon station was kind of tricky. Mostly it's a series of Tasks where you look at a thing, then learn something. The players were a bit unlucky with some bad rolls, and also it was hard to use Threat in a way that made things more fun, I found. Also this is where I learned that making transporting into a Task with a Difficulty beyond 0 can backfire when the plot requires that the characters beam over! Because they did poorly on that Task, they had to use a shuttle... and then they did poorly on that one! So, if something needs to happen, and you don't want to explore negative repercussions, your best bet as a GM is to just make it D0 and let your players earn some momentum.
The second part of the mission was better, though; I did have an NPC member of the senior staff beam down with them, but here is where I learned that that is hard to play an NPC right when the NPC is in command but you also want to maintain player agency, and the NPC mostly faded into the background, her personality not emerging as I'd hoped.
Again, my players surprised me. (Always a good thing.) Advancing on a place where they knew there were some fungus-controlled Romulans and Klingons, they wanted to draw them out in smaller numbers. They had the idea of Loonin—who had a Focus in Animal Handling—making the call of an animal they had been hearing (alien apes the fungus was experimenting on). I liked this... but also thought that it was pretty unlikely Loonin could skillfully mimic something she'd only heard a couple times! So I set it to Difficulty 5. They grumbled a bit, but used their ingenuity to come up with a new plan: they recorded the animal noise on a tricorder, then "bluetoothed" a comm badge to the tricorder, placed the comm badge ahead of them while they hid, and then used the tricorder to make the comm badge play back the noise, drawing out a Romulan, who they took down quite effectively.
They then ended up capturing one of the fungus-controlled Romulans, pointing out it was the only one left. I made this appeal a D4 Task, but they pulled it off in style.
Something I hadn't anticipated when changing the parasites into fungus is that when a fungus-controlled person dies, they release a cloud of spores, which made my players paranoid they were going to be taken over. Eventually, we figured out that they could just set their phasers to "vaporize"! (The fungus absorbs stun blasts, so you have to set your phaser to kill to combat it effectively at all.)
Episode 4: "A World Beyond the Starlight, Part IV: The Pierced Veil"
This episode begins right where the previous one ends on a cliffhanger. As written, the "Conspiracy" parasites are out for revenge, and they have found an Iconian gateway that they can use to travel anywhere in the galaxy once they reactivate it. What I changed this to was that the fungus had found an ancient device that could establish reliable travel though the Rim of the Starlight, allowing it to run rampant in an unsuspecting galaxy. So the players need to find the planet where the device is and stop the fungus.
This mission I made a lot of changes to, the most thus far. Some because of my ongoing plot, some because of player availability, and some because I think the mission as written is actually quite bad.
So the first key one is that the player ship, once it tracks down the ancient device, is supposed to get into a battle with a Romulan warbird, introducing your players to ship combat. But from reading the rules, it seemed to me that ship combat really depends on having the engineer and helm officer as player characters... and ours had quit during episode 3, leaving me with a science officer, a doctor, a security officer, and a junior command officer. So I came up with a different idea: while the NPC senior staff was fighting a pitched battle, Carver would be working in a sensor suite, and the other three would be on a damage control team together. But then Hayley had to put the baby down for a nap when the relevant scene actually happened, so it ended up just focusing on the trio.
This turned out to be pretty fun. I reused a corridor map from the starter set (originally representing part of the Alcubierre), and told them there was a device they had to repair, a plasma fire they had to put out, and a trapped engineer they had to rescue. There was some good tension and drama, especially when Gurg disobeyed Loonin's orders: he had a chance to fix the device, but instead helped someone in medical danger. And then Gurg was put in charge of the away mission!
The mission as written presents a pretty pointless "moral dilemma": the "Conspiracy" parasites say that if the player characters let them go, they'll just go infect the Romulans instead. The players can let them do that, or arrest them. Like, what? Really? Would any Starfleet officer be remotely tempted by this?
So I switched things up a lot. The fungus wasn't innately sentient: it only becomes sentient when inhabiting a sentient host. This was the reason for the experiments from the last episode; the fungus was trying to make itself independently sentient. The players ended up in a situation where they could create a fungicide gas or shut down the cross-through device, and what I wanted to happen was this:
- they would trying to shut down the cross-through device, but something (ultimately revealed to be one of those signals again) would stop them
- they would thus have to create the gas
- they would then be captured and learn that if they gassed the Romulans, they would wipe out the only remaining sentient fungus
- then the signal would cut the power to the base they were all in, removing the threat of the cross-through device, and also ensuring that the gas (on its own power supply) would be released
- then the players would have to help save a fungus aliens in true Star Trek fashion, despite the apparently genocidal agenda of whoever was behind the signals
But my players were too damned principled to even make the gas as a last resort! I guess this is what happens when you try to railroad.
So things went a bit differently. An NPC they had met (LaSalle from episode 1, out for revenge against the fungus for killing all his crewmates) was outraged at their principles, and he cut off the air to the base they were in. So now the issue was they would all asphyxiate. Here I got to use Threat effectively: Loonin scored a good hit on LaSalle, which ought to have stunned him, but I spent 2 Threat to Avoid an Injury, giving LaSalle enough time to destroy the air system. It's situations like this that make Threat really shine: instead of having Loonin fail due to GM fiat, she failed because I had the Threat in my pool to spend, which feels less arbitrary and more satisfying, I think.
The characters were able to convince the fungus-controlled Romulans to help them fix the air control system and surrender to the Federation, where Federation scientists would work to find a way to extract the fungus while maintaining its sentience. Diplomacy in action!
So overall, it ended up being an exciting and tense mission, but I feel like that's partially in spite of how it was written.
I will say that overall, "A Star Beyond the Stars" is kind of meh as a starter set. Every episode basically requires combat, but on the other hand across three episodes, there's just one Extended Task! It doesn't really work as written to introduce the players to the full breadth of what the STA system can and should do. And like I said, the supposed moral dilemma is bad, and as written the players don't really play a role in the climax; things fail, but not because of them.
(One other nitpick: there's a bit where the scenario suggests that the situation should be paranoid because the characters won't know if any of the crew has been taken over by the parasites... but also checking to see if someone has been taken over is a Difficulty 1 Task, so how could you not figure it out? I made it harder to figure out if someone had been taken over—you had to try to knock them unconscious and see if the fungus prevented that from happening—but also didn't do anything to make them think any of their crewmates had been taken over. That said, Jor began to be paranoid that she had been infected by fungal spores and didn't know it!)
I was ultimately pretty happy with how I tweaked it... but I also feel like I ought not have had to do so much tweaking!
Episode 5: "A World Beyond the Starlight: Epilogue—Signals"
"Signals" is, like I said, a mission that comes with the free Quickstart. I placed it last because of my "signals" story arc: the players are trying to track down the mysterious signals that influenced events in episodes 2 and 4. But as I came to write it up in detail, I realized that it was a bit of an anticlimax after the events of "The Pierced Veil," more about setting up what is to come than anything else, hence why I ultimately designated it "Epilogue" rather than "Part V." I had a belated idea of making it go between "We Are Not Ourselves" and "The Pierced Veil"; the players could come across Seku VI as they searched for clues about where to find the fungus. But by that point, I'd written up episode 4 already and didn't feel like rewriting.
Also once I dug into it, I realized that "Signals" is super-basic. It opens with the away team already having beamed down to Seku VI, looking for both a lost runabout and some mysterious signals; they fight some Romulans who run away, find two dead members of the runabout crew, find the crashed Romulan ship, meet some settlers who let them see an alien artifact, the artifact self-destructs, and then they leave. It felt more like "and then another thing happens..." than a coherent story. This is kind of intentional, as it's designed to be simple: it's supposed to be someone's first mission, not their fifth!
But I learned that it was a cut down version of a mission from the "Living Campaign," which was a thing where Modiphius would post free missions on the web across the course of a year so that groups could play along at home. That version of "Signals" is more complex: there's some scenes before crew beams down, there's more dangers on the planet, there's a whole space-based subplot about the ship searching for the missing runabout in a nebula. I didn't want the ship subplot, but I added the other stuff back in.
I also had the idea that the settlers wouldn't want the crew to see the artifact; I made them into refugees who saw the artifact as the only thing of value they possessed. So the players would have the dilemma of maybe betraying a trust if they wanted to see it. I then realized this would be more effective if they met the settlers earlier, so I moved the settlement encounter up, and had one of the settlers accompany the players to the crashed Romulan ship.
It still played quicker than any other mission (a single three-hour session got us up to halfway through the last scene!), but it worked even better than I hoped. The players did a great job befriending nervous young Drev Katel, and our Bajoran security officer particularly bonded with them, telling them how hard things had been on Bajor, and what a difference the Federation had made in her life. Drev offered to get the Starfleet characters into the mines to see the artifact, provided they turned it off so outsiders would stop coming to their settlement.
The players, however, had rotten luck and failed the Task to bluff their way into the mines. They then tried to tell the guards why they were really there, but the guards were unimpressed, and an impulsive decision by the security officer to disarm one of them ended with the guard unconscious, forcing a conflict, while a horrified Drev watched the supposedly friendly Starfleet officers knock out their comrades. At that point, the players were committed, and went to investigate the artifact. Then they rolled very well and deactivated its self-destruct, and the security officer stunned the group of four Romulans who pursued them into the mines with one shot.
I had 5 Threat left, so I brought in two more Romulans, and spent one extra to give one of them a good roll, and they managed to stun the security officer. The science and medical officers, Carver and Gurg, are not good at fighting, and came up with a plan: convince the Romulans to let them turn the artifact back on under the guise of sharing data, but in actuality reactivate the self-destruct and run away. Unfortunately, some bad rolls meant they failed to convince the Romulans, who compromised at letting the Starfleet officers run away with their lives.
The episode ends with them going back to the ship, knowing the settlers are going to hash it out with the Romulans over a disabled artifact they learned little from. Talk about a downer! I ended up feeling kind of bad for the players, especially my wife, who had been in command. I feel like player failure has to happen sometimes, but it's not fun when it does.
Star Trek Adventures Overall
In the main, I really like the game. The 2d20 system is very easy to pick up. There are some fiddly bits, especially around combat, but the fundamental idea of always rolling two dice, always aiming to get below a target number, and always needing a certain number of successes, is pretty simple I think. It's also very adaptable: as GM it's easy for me to determine what the players need to do to succeed at something even if it's an idea that would never have occurred to me. The collaborative nature of it is fun; the Star Trek focus on diplomacy and science as solutions is great and has lead to some inventive stuff by my players. They are very prone to going, "no, let's not shoot these guys who are shooting at us, let's ask what they want!"
I'm in a STA GMs facebook group, and occasionally there are questions like, "How do you make travel times work?" Then people will say, "We fudge them," and the asker will say, "Don't your players notice/object?" Well, mine never would! But even so, I would say this is approaching STA wrong. One time, someone in the fb group asked why junior officer player characters with no experience were basically as good as senior officer players with 30 years of experience. I wrote:
The thing you have to keep in mind with STA is it's not a "life in a 'real' Starfleet" simulator, it is a "main characters on a Star Trek tv show" simulator. If a main character on a show is a junior officer, they're generally no less competent[,] because they're still the star.
It got a like from the game's designer, so I'll take that as a win. But it's what I really like about the system, and what makes it fun. It fudges the bits the show itself would fudge, allowing it to emphasize the things the show itself would emphasize: creative problem solving in difficult situations, and working together as a team. Things like Momentum, Threat, Values, and Focuses all work together really well to make that happen.
I have a twelve-episode "first season" very loosely plotted; we started the first episode of it, "Biological Clock," at our last session. If the first five episodes are any indication, it will take us two years to get through that season! I don't know if my players will be up for it for that long, but I will. I have to contain myself, actually, because I keep thinking of ideas faster than we can play them!
(Clearly the solution is to start a second campaign!)
The dedication plaque I made by tweaking a template provided by someone in one of the STA facebook groups; I can't figure out who! The other images are from the game books themselves (episode 1 art from the Starter Set, episode 2 from the Core Rulebook, and episode 3-5 from the Quickstart).
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