By Jim Johnson, Project Manager
Art by Enoch Driscoll
The pre-order release of the new Star Trek™ Adventures second edition game supplement, the Exploration Guide, provides a wealth of new random tables that can be used in conjunction with your Captain’s Log solo RPG characters and stories. Let’s talk about the value of using these two game books together!
Chapter 1 of the Exploration Guide provides a wealth of new character options for Star Trek Adventures characters. While Captain’s Log characters do not make use of talents, you can use the talents provided in the Exploration Guide as idea generators to enhance and deepen your characters and NPCs. You can also use the new optional career paths, career events, and secret rules to add even more depth to your Captain’s Log characters and NPCs.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of the Exploration Guide can be used with your Captain’s Log stories to create and enhance the locations your character chooses to explore. If you need a new sector of space, a new planetary system to check out, or even a new planet to beam down to and research, you can generate them very easily by using the random tables and the handy flowchart on page 25 to guide you.
Once on the planet, you can use any of the nine biome subchapters contained in Chapter 5 to add more detail to the specific location your character is visiting on a given planet. Just as in Captain’s Log, you will find advantage tables, complication tables, story hook tables, and plot seeds tables for each biome. Collectively, they should make it easy to use the Exploration Guide to enhance your Captain’s Log stories.
Once you’ve created an interesting story hook with the Exploration Guide, you can add even more detail with the tables contained in the Captain’s Log appendices. And, because the random tables in both books are robust, every time you create a new planetary system or culture, you’re almost certainly creating something entirely new.
As an example, let’s continue where we left off last week. We have a moon inhabited by an agricultural, pre-warp civilization wracked with a mysterious memory erosion malady. There’s also a pair of Orion Syndicate operatives embedded within the local population, and they too have lost their memories. Why are they there? What was their mission? Who were they before they lost their memory?
Hitting the tables on pages 283–285 of Captain’s Log, I start rolling for options to help add detail to the story. Here’s a summary of what I got as results:
- NPC Archetype table (once for each Orion Syndicate NPC) yields Engineer and Soldier
- NPCs’ Upbringing Environment table yields Holy Site and Isolated Colony
- NPCs’ Cultural Traits yields Expansion and Power
- NPCs’ Goals yields Earn Fame and Revenge
- NPCs’ Tactics yields Revealing Secrets and Sacrifice Self
- NPCs’ Federation Outlook yields Furious and Terrified
That provides me with a lot of data points to use to fill out these two Syndicate Operatives as characters and personalities. Each has different motivations and tactics, and different outlooks on the Federation which should make things interesting as I start to unravel the mystery.
What mission were the operatives on, anyway? Flipping to page 257 of Captain’s Log, I get Aid and Relief off the Mission Type table and Prevent natural disaster with science off the Aid and Relief table. Interesting! That raises interesting questions: Why would the Orion Syndicate send operatives on an aid and relief mission? What’s so important on this moon or in this system that has the Syndicate doing this? The plot thickens.
As you can see, by combining these two books and the wealth of random tables and storytelling potential, we’ve created an intriguing story for our player characters to dive into and explore. Given the countless possibilities involved between the two books, you have a lifetime of Star Trek roleplaying and storytelling ahead of you by combining these two books.
How are you planning to use the Exploration Guide in conjunction with Captain’s Log? Share your ideas and insights with your fellow fans at the official Modiphius Discord!
Preorder the print edition of the Exploration Guide now and receive the final digital edition right away. Print copies are expected to ship in October 2025 worldwide.
Thanks for reading this article, and thank you for your interest and support of Star Trek Adventures! Keep frequencies open for news about other upcoming Star Trek Adventures product releases. Live long and prosper!
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