By Fred Love, STA Contributing Writer
The thing that got me most excited as I started writing for the Star Trek Adventures Player’s Guide was thinking of all the wildly diverse play styles the game supports.
If I had to guess, the lion’s share of gamemasters and players participate in the standard crew-aboard-a-starship campaign. These campaigns usually focus on episodic adventures that take the crew from one strange new world to the next, mimicking the pace and feel of the original series or The Next Generation. And that’s great, because you can tell some terrific stories in campaigns like that. But Star Trek Adventures can go far beyond that format too. That’s why we decided to devote an entire section of the Player’s Guide to different styles of play that help gaming groups push beyond the default expectations of how their adventures are structured. We endeavored to provide concrete suggestions for how players can get the most out of these alternative modes of storytelling.
I wrote sections on playing aboard a space station, starbase or outpost. I also expanded on previously published material on admiralty-based campaigns, and I wrote up a section on how to make your campaign feel more like the cinematic entries in the Star Trek canon. Each section sent my head spinning with possibilities as I realized just how much space you can cover with Star Trek Adventures. Let’s preview a few of the possibilities:
- Station-based games, including games set on outposts and planetary starbases, provide players with a unique opportunity to world-build and interact with a diverse supporting cast.
- Admiralty campaigns, first described in the The Command Division supplement, take the players inside the situation room where their decisions could affect billions of intelligent beings. The Player’s Guide goes in depth with a discussion of the various roles players can take on in such a campaign and what sort of missions admiralty campaigns may include.
- Political games set on core worlds allow players to interact with some of Star Trek’s most iconic locations, such as Vulcan or Qo’noS. This allows you to immerse your game in the culture, history and politics of a particular region.
- Campaigns based around long story arcs mimic the first several seasons of Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard, meaning players can invest their time and effort exploring a central mystery or solving a major problem.
- Cinematic campaigns allow the players to take on dastardly villains and risk it all to save the day. If a player characters dies, there’s always hope for a resurrection in the sequel!
And you’ll find plenty more potential styles of play discussed in the Player’s Guide. So consider this a call to action. The storytelling possibilities in Star Trek Adventures are as infinite as the final frontier itself. Mix things up. Try something new. Take a break from your starship-based exploratory campaign and play a one-shot set in a completely different setting with a completely different objective. The Player’s Guide contains plenty of inspiration to get you on your way.
Thanks for reading this article, and thank you for your interest and support of Star Trek Adventures! Keep frequencies open for news about additional STA products in the coming months. Live long and prosper!