The Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Starter Set provides an introduction to Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition. It comes as a handsome boxed set containing two booklets—the forty-eight page ‘Rules Booklet’ and the sixty-page ‘Campaign Booklet’, four Reference Sheets, a Ship Sheet, seven pre-generated Player Character Sheets, a sheet of forty-four tokens, and a set of five twenty-sided dice. The Ship Sheet is for the U.S.S. Challenger, a Constitution Class multirole explorer. The seven pre-generated Player Character Sheets are for the ship’s captain, a Joined Trill; an Andorian security officer; a Vulcan physician; a Tellarite engineer; a Human Scientist; a Human Helmsman; and a Betazoid Engineer. These are all done on stiff cardboard and on the back of the character sheets there is a list of tasks and targets particular to their roles.
What is noticeable about this, is that the books and the reference and characters sheets are all done on a white background rather than the LCARS black background of the first edition of Star Trek Adventures. This makes everything very easy to ready and gives the whole Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Starter Set a very shiny, clean look and feel. The adventure for Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Starter Set is set in 2259, the era of Star Trek: The Original Series, but the changes necessary to run its mini-campaign, whether to Star Trek: The Generation or Enterprise, are merely cosmetic.
A Player Character in Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Starter Set is defined by Attributes, Disciplines, Focuses, Traits, Talents, and Values and Dictates. The six Attributes—Control, Daring, Fitness, Insight, Presence, and Reason—represent ways of or approaches to doing things as well as intrinsic capabilities. They are rated between seven and twelve. The six Disciplines—Command, Conn, Engineering, Security, Science, and Medicine—are skills, knowledges, and areas of training representing the wide roles aboard a starship. They are rated between one and five. Focuses represent narrow areas of study or skill specialities, for example, Astrophysics, Xenobiology, or Warp Field Dynamics. Traits and Talents represent anything from what a character believes, is motivated by, intrinsic abilities, ways of doing things, and so on. They come from a character’s species, upbringing, training, and life experience.
Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition employs the 2d20 System previously used in the publisher’s Mutant Chronicles: Techno Fantasy Roleplaying Game and Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of, as well, of course, as the first edition of Star Trek Adventures. To undertake an action, a character’s player rolls two twenty-sided dice, aiming to have both roll under the total of an Attribute and a Discipline. Each roll under this total counts as a success, an average task requiring two successes. Rolls of one count as two successes and if a character has an appropriate Focus, rolls under the value of the Discipline also count as two successes. Target difficulties range from one to five, and if a player rolls more successes than is necessary to beat the difficulty, they are converted to Momentum.
Momentum can be spent for various effects. These consist of ‘Create Opportunity’ to purchase more twenty-sided dice to roll, up to a total of five; to ‘Create a Trait’ in a scene; to ‘Keep the Initiative’ in an action scene; to ‘Obtain Information’ by asking the Game Master questions; ‘Reduce Time’ to achieve objectives faster; and to have an ‘Extra Major Action’ or ‘Extra Minor Action’. There is a maximum amount of Momentum that the Player Characters can have and any excess is lost. So, the players are encouraged to spend Momentum rather than save it.
Main characters like the Player Characters possess Determination, which works with their Values or with the Values of the mission. A Value can either be challenged once per session in a negative or difficult situation to gain Determination or invoked once per session to spend Determination to gain an extra die for a check (a ‘Perfect Opportunity’) or to get a reroll of the dice in a check (‘Moment of Inspiration’). They also have Talents and Traits which will grant a character an advantage in certain situations. So Bold (Engineering) enables a player to reroll a single twenty-sided die for his character if he has purchased extra dice by adding to the Game Master’s Threat pool.
Now where the players generate Momentum to spend on their characters, the Game Master has Threat which can be spent on similar things for the NPCs as well as to trigger their special abilities. She begins each session with a pool of Threat, but can gain more through various circumstances. These include a player purchasing extra dice to roll on a test, a player rolling a natural twenty and so adding two Threat (instead of the usual Complication), the situation itself being threatening, or NPCs rolling well and generating Momentum and so adding that to Threat pool. In return, the Gamemaster can spend it on minor inconveniences, complications, and serious complications to inflict upon the player characters, as well as triggering NPC special abilities, having NPCs seize the initiative, and bringing the environment dramatically into play.
What the Momentum and Threat mechanics do is set up a pair of parallel economies with Threat being fed in part by Momentum, but Momentum in the main being used to overcome the complications and circumstances which the expenditure of Threat can bring into play. The primary use of Threat though, is to ratchet up the tension and the challenge, whereas the primary use of Momentum is to enable the player characters to overcome this challenge and in action, be larger than life.
Conflict uses the same mechanics, but offers more options in
terms of what Momentum can be spent on, which includes both social and combat.
Obviously for combat, includes doing extra damage, disarming an opponent,
keeping the initiative—initiative works by alternating between the player
characters and the NPCs and keeping it allows two player characters to act
before an NPC does, avoid an injury, and so on. Now, in the first edition of
Star Trek Adventures this damage would have been rolled for using Challenge
Dice, but these are not used in the second edition. Instead, the attacker determines
the base amount of damage inflicted and can increase its Severity by spending
Momentum, whilst the defender decides to either accept the damage and suffer an
Injury, which would take him out of the action or combat, attempt to avoid the
injury and suffer Stress. This combination of a lack of dice rolled for effect
and increased player choice streamlines the combat process.
Starships are treated in a similar fashion to Player Characters, but have
Communications, Computers, Engines, Sensors, Structure, and Weapons rather than
Control, Daring, Fitness, Insight, Presence, and Reason. There is advice on how
to use each of them and each of them actually serves as a Focus when used by a
Player Character. The various aspects of a ship, such as resistance, shields,
crew support, and more are described before starship combat is explained. Typically,
a Player Character can only conduct a single major action during each turn of a
starship combat and each Player Character will have a role during this
according to his position aboard ship and the appropriate Discipline—Command,
Conn, Engineering, Security, Science, or Medicine. Starship combat is kept
relatively brief, but the rules suggest the same degree of streamlining as in
personal combat. However, personal combat is the easier of the two to grasp,
though the inclusion of a dedicated example of starship does help the Game
Master understand how it works.
The ’Campaign Book’ provides a big three-part mini-campaign called ‘INFINITE Combinations’. It begins with the crew of the U.S.S. Challenger answering a distress call from a mining city floating in the atmosphere of Kizomic VI. The city is under attack by a bizarre, tentacled alien lifeform and its inhabitants are calling for evacuation. There is lots of physical action in this first part as rescues are performed, alien attacks are held off, and desperate shuttlecraft missions are flown through a flurry of attacks and flying debris. There is some planning too, as to how to conduct the evacuation safely, involved, and a minor dilemma over the Prime Directive. The second scenario is shipbound, but again drives to an excitingly different climax after U.S.S. Challenger is stranded in the asteroid field it was meant be surveying and an extra-dimensional invader threatens the safety of the ship and the Player Characters have to race to make the repairs necessary to get away. Armed with some information as who might be responsible for the alien invasions, the crew of the U.S.S. Challenger track his movements to Starbase 23 and from there into an area of space disputed by Nausicaans, Klingons, and Gorn! The Away Team will make some amazing discoveries, but there is still the alien invasion from another dimension to contend with as well as the arrival of a small Nausicaan warship wanting to take control of the discoveries. The climax to the campaign is thus twofold, ideally with the action switching back and forth between the Away Team on planet and their starship above.
Overall ‘INFINITE Combinations’ is a decent mini-campaign,
each scenario taking two or three sessions to complete and providing a good mix
of action and combat with investigation and interaction thrown in. Plus, the ’Campaign
Book’ adds three ‘Mission Briefs’ tied into the events and background to the
campaign, so that the Game Master can develop them and add them to her
campaign.
Physically, the Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Starter Set is very nicely
presented. The books are clear and easy to read, with plenty of illustrations
inspired by classic moments from Star Trek, though there is a scene from Lower
Decks as well. The dice are decent and there are plenty of reference sheets for
the players’ use.
The Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Starter Set is easy to pick up and then run and play if the Game Master has run Star Trek Adventures before, the rules changes consisting primarily of streamlining rather than a heavy rework. It will be harder for the Game Master new to the role, but the Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Starter Set does a good job of explaining things and providing tips and advice throughout, and then providing a good, solid Star Trek style adventure with lots of action and excitement and a moral dilemma or two thrown in along the way.
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