Star Trek Adventures: The First Adventure

Space…the Final Frontier…

Just last week, Bakura Matthews of Athena Games got her hands on the brand new Star Trek: Adventures Roleplaying Game. The game itself is currently going through testing and she was lucky enough to be part of the testing team and so ran a one shot on Saturday.

Alpha Testing

Captains’ Log Stardate: 112016

This weekend I ran an alpha test one shot at short notice for my most anticipated RPG of the year: Star Trek Adventures.

To put this in perspective, I will be attending Dragonmeet in London for the (Among others) purpose of meeting Modiphius and getting a figure of Jean-Luc Picard. I also went out to a local shop and bought myself a t-shirt (The Blue one, representing a science officer – no red or yellow shirts for me!)

So anyway, after much excitement I finally received the files. Posting about it in the roleplaying facebook page for Athena Games (Roleplay @ Athena Games) and immediately got a lot of interest. Unfortunately, many people were not available, but excitable me wanted to test the rules as soon as I could, so set up a one shot for the soonest time. Our journey would begin on Saturday.

Maiden Voyage

So, despite having to delay the start due to various reasons (A dead printer meaning I had to find an inventive, but expensive, way to print all of the files) I arrived at Athena Games armed with my dice, pencils, 74 pages of paper and no idea where to start.

Now, the recommended player group is 3-7 plus a Game Master (or GM), but due to short notice and illness, I had two players to start with. However, because this was for Alpha testing, we didn’t mind and began to read the rules.

Technobabble

The game comes with pre-generated characters (I assume because it’s easier for them to track that way) which are Human, Andorian, Trill, Denobulan and Vulcan. Each has a male and female name with no difference in the stats. So, after my pair chose the Denobulan Yolan and the Human Malik Demir, we began to play. Although, we were quickly joined by another player who played the Andorian Thiaranest Zharath.

Now, I’m not going to ruin or spoil the story for others, so I will merely give some annotations and findings we made from the gameplay.

The system runs on D20’s and D6’s. Lots of D20’s and D6’s…

I recommend having a good pool of these. We ended up using all of my D20’s and I’m a magpie when it comes to them.

Determination!

The game also requires counters for use as determination, threats and momentum. I don’t recommend using chocolate for this. We learnt that the hard way.

The determination/threats/momentum system is actually a nice feature. You can generate momentum by “overkilling” a task and do extra things or add to a pool. Alternatively, you can use determination to make sure a task succeeds, this has the effect of adding threat which the GM can use to spend on their rolls too.

So far the rules can be a little confusing about certain aspects. Soak, obstacles, and timing events come to mind, but it’s an alpha test after all. There’s also nice little things that allow the players to do silly actions. For example, at one point the Andorian became rather trigger happy with his phaser. He decided to burn his way through an area I don’t think he was supposed to. At some point, the Human decided he’d had enough of an area and so spent a determination to declare they got through it fine.

Make it so!

Much of the joy of the game came from the players loving the world, or universe of Star Trek. They were debating about how they could actually be a Cardassian spy, or how they were looking forward to Klingon expansion.

I, myself am simply looking forward to the next episode being released so we can playtest that. This time, it will be taking place aboard the U.S.S. Belloraphon!

Have you played the game or are you interested in playing?

End Log