Category Archives: Star Trek Adventures

Declan Waters, Modiphius, RPG, Rules Reviews, Rules Roundup, Sci-Fi, Star Trek Adventures

Rules Review – Exploration Guide

Leave a comment

Star Trek Adventures by Modiphius Entertainment

A Guide for a GM looking to expand their stories in the Star Trek Adventures Galaxy.

Our friends at Modiphius have recently released a new book for their Star Trek: Adventures RPG. It’s their Exploration Guide, and they were kind enough to send us a copy for a read and a review. Thanks to them for supporting Woehammer!

Modiphius Entertainment

Regular readers may be better acquainted with the wargames that Modiphius sell (and they’ve got more than a few including Fallout and Five Leagues from the Borderlands). But they also have an extensive range of RPGs (role playing games) including the Star Trek Adventures series – now going into it’s second edition.

Star Trek Adventures

Star Trek Adventures RPG provides the players and their GM with all the tools needed to play through Star Trek episodes (or ones of their own imagining). It uses the 2D20 system from Modiphius and it is great fun! I’ve loved Star Trek since The Next Generation, and my credentials go all the way back to joining and Star Trek society at university, so I’ve been a fan for a long time.

Exploration Guide

Book Cover: Modiphius

The Exploration Guide is a full colour, hardback book of 144 pages with a full colour double side map of the Alpha and Beta quadrants. It includes everything a GM needs to create their own missions on the strange new worlds which are present in the Star Trek galaxy.

As with most expansions there are some new character options, but where this book really shines is the creation of sectors, solar systems, planets and biomes. And if that sounds like a lot of potential you would be right.

Each section is beautifully illustrated (with artists credited… /cough), and with many, many tables for generating the next away mission.

A Federation vessel escaping from a pulsar (Art: David Metlesits)

And did I mention the tables… I love the tables. My RPG playing goes back to the days of Traveller, and I sometimes struggle with story telling when being a GM, so a table is great to prod me into action. Just remember to bring the D20s… no D6s here!

Hmmm… tables! Maybe I need to get better at taking pictures from books!

Playing in Biomes

The majority of the book covers nine different Biomes from cave systems (complete with 60s polystyrene if you want), to deserts and everything in between. In each section there is a description of what our intrepid explorers might meet, the sub-types of biomes and potential threats and advantages of being there.

Of particular note here is that each section is crammed full of mission ideas and story hooks. For when you are struggling for inspiration.

So grab your GM, D20s and an exploration party and soon you may find yourselves in a Temperate Flower Forest, in the middle of a recent Burn Scar that has torn through a Glade. But remember the mission: There’s a distress call from deeper in the Forest.

And if I can do that in a few D20 rolls, imagine where it can take you!

Buying a Book?

The book costs £35, and as always, buy where you play; so check your local FLGS to see if they have a copy or can order in.

Alternatively check out Modiphius Entertainment’s own website.

If you are in the UK, you can find them at Dragonmeet at the end of November on stall D22.

What’s the conclusion?

This is a great book and a brilliant edition to a franchise I love… so it was always going to go down well. But the production quality, artist credits on the superb pictures and tables, tables, tables… have all combined to definitely convinced me it’s worth recommending.

So we give it 5 Woehammers!

And just in case you run other sci-fi RPGs or skirmish wargaming, and you’re looking for inspiration the solar system generation, and the biomes sections of this book are mostly rule agnostic and you could easily use this in another setting as an aide for idea generation.

Thanks again to Modiphius for providing us a copy to review.

— Declan and Eeyore

Modiphius, New Releases, Peter Holland, Pre-orders, Sci-Fi, Star Trek Adventures

Star Trek Adventures: Second Edition Pre-order

1 Comment

The starter set for the 2nd edition of Star Trek Adventures, a roleplaying game set in the Star Trek universe, is now available for pre-order from Modiphius Entertainment.

The starter set contains everything players need to begin their journey into the final frontier, including an epic campaign of three linked missions designed to challenge a brave crew of 3-7 player characters.

Travel to the edges of known space, to colonies in need, to the borders of neighbouring galactic powers, or into the eye of interstellar phenomena. Explore strange new worlds, encounter fantastical alien life-forms, and engage in dramatic adventures in a detailed and immersive Galaxy!

The Star Trek Adventures second edition starter set includes:

  • Rules Booklet: A 48-page booklet providing an overview of the 2d20 game system adapted for Star Trek Adventures, for use with the included campaign.
  • Campaign Booklet: a 60-page booklet containing the epic three-part campaign “Infinite Combinations”, which guides you through the rules as you play so you can begin exploring the Galaxy straight out of the box.
  • Ship Sheet and Character Sheets: A statistics sheet for the Constitution-class U.S.S. Challenger and seven player character sheets, with rules references on the back of each sheet.
  • Reference Sheets: Four double-sided rules reference sheets.
  • Dice: Five twenty-sided dice (d20s) in a unique colour only available in the Starter Set.
  • Tokens: Six Momentum tokens for each of six different civilisations (i.e. 36 total momentum tokens), 36 Threat tokens on the reverse side of the Momentum tokens, and 9 Determination tokens.

Project Manager Jim Johnson said “One of our key goals for second edition was to make the game accessible to new players, not just of Star Trek Adventures but of RGPs in general. I challenged the Starter Set campaign writers to think about what new gamesmasters and new players might need to know as they play the game, and we wrote as much of that advice as possible into the campaign booklet. I hope you’ll be able to pick up the box, open it up, hand out characters, and then jump right into the first adventure and cooperatively tell a fun, evocative Star Trek story together. This one’s got it all – a dramatic rescue of citizens in peril, alien life-forms to investigate, and a science-fiction mystery to dig into and solve.”

Webstore pre-orders are expected to ship in late December, with the retail release in January.

The second edition of the game opens up the possibility for players to step outside the Starfleet-focused gameplay and tell stories with the well-known species of the Star Trek universe, including the Klingon and Romulan Empires, in addition to others present across the franchise. With the addition of Strange New Worlds to the license, the new edition will feature art themed around the popular new series.

UK Pre-orders

US Pre-orders