Creating a Character in Captain’s Log

By Jim Johnson, Star Trek Adventures Project Manager
byline Art by Wayne Miller and CBS Studios Inc.

When you first open Captain's Log, you'll discover the first two chapters provide you with an overview of Star Trek, the setting and some of the key elements of the setting that your character would more than likely know, even if you don't. Its a great way to learn more about Star Trek if you're new to the franchise or a great refresher for fans more involved with it. If you want to dive in straight away, you can skip these two chapters and immerse yourself into Chapter 3, Reporting for Duty where you begin creating your character.

After a short explanation of a character’s key elements (traits, attributes, disciplines, focuses, and values), you’ll find a character lifepath flowchart, which you can use to create your character, in about 30-45 minutes or more, depending on how much time you want to devote to it.

The lifepath takes you through your character’s early life and career, step by step, building the character’s attributes, disciplines, and other elements mechanically so that by the end of the lifepath, you have a complete starting character, with a fleshed-out backstory and career you can incorporate into your storytelling.

If you are already familiar with the lifepath from Star Trek Adventures, this version of it will come across as familiar as apart from a few tweaks which streamlined it in Captain's Log, they are essentially the same. We will discuss porting characters created in Captain's Log to Star Trek Adventures in the future, as well as using Captain's Log to delve into more stories about your Star Trek Adventures characters.

Aside from the lifepath character generation process described above, there’s a second method of creating characters, creation in play. This alternate character generation process is a streamlined version of the lifepath that gets you into the game even faster. This process enables you to discover more about your character, their capabilities, and history while working through their adventures. This is similar to how we learn about beloved characters from the various Star Trek series and how they progress from episode to episode.

The show writers rarely know everything about the characters they write and introduce into each series - similarly to the methods available in Captain's Log, they start with a few key facts like their aspirations or where their allegiance lies to then watch this develop over the course of the series.

I hope you've enjoyed this closer look into character creation in Captain's Log and how truly creative the process allows you to be when creating yours! In our next post, we'll talk about creating the other critical component of any Star Trek story - the ship or station your character lives and operates on!

Until next time, set your systems to 'creative' and tap into your unlimited storytelling potential when creating your character.

Preorder your copy of the Captain’s Log Solo Roleplaying Game now and receive the final PDF right away and start creating your own Star Trek stories!

Thanks for reading this article, and thank you for your interest and support of Star Trek Adventures! Keep frequencies open for news about Captain’s Log and other Star Trek Adventures product releases. Live long and prosper!

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