By Jim Johnson, Star Trek Adventures Project Manager
Art by Carlos Cabrera
The broadcast release of the latest season of Star Trek: Lower Decks is upon us! Smooth out your skant, fire up your T88, and let’s cover how to use the Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide with the shiny new second edition ruleset!
The campaign guide is packed full of information about playing junior officers and the lower decks experience. This includes insights into career planning and character development for playing as a junior officer instead of a captain or other senior officer. The guide also contains eight character species options, a spacedock-load of additional spaceframes, and much more. And since first edition and second edition are smoochy relations, it’s easy to port information from the campaign guide into second edition. How, you might ask? Read on!
The first 65 pages or so of the campaign guide are packed with setting lore for the Lower Decks time period, useful for those players and gamemasters running a game post-Nemesis, in the 2370s–2380s time frame, or if you’re playing a lower decks-style game in any era of play. All of the information, and the many random tables throughout are usable as-is with second edition games, even if yours doesn’t use the comedic tone of the series.
The information in Chapter 3.2 presents details on how a lower decks-style campaign might work with non-Starfleet characters and crews, including the Klingons, Pakleds, Ferengi, Vulcans, Andorians, Tellarites, and even the Borg! Because what player wouldn’t want to spend an entire game session kicking it in a regeneration alcove?
Chapter 3.3 presents a lot of advice for junior officers and jobs they might take on, all useful grist for character generation and development, no matter your era of play. Chapter 3.4 introduced supervisory characters into first edition as complementary to the supporting character mechanics, which was largely folded into second edition.
Art by Berenice
Most of the content in Chapter 4 about science is easily ported, and the creature generation system in Chapter 4.2 can easily be adapted to second edition by adjusting the notes about damage, talents, and special rules, which were updated in Chapter 11 of the second edition core rulebook.
The eight species presented in Chapter 5 can be ported into second edition with little issue—the attribute modifiers remain unchanged, the trait description is already in place, and you can simply pick one of the two species talents presented and use that as your second edition species ability, and use the other listed species talent as an option to select during character generation or development. Alternatively, you can use or adapt one of the many talents in the second edition core rulebook as a species talent. The gear and weapons presented later in the chapter can be easily used in second edition as well; simply remove the Challenge Dice icon from the listed weapon damage and adjust the weapon qualities to bring them in line with second edition. Feel free to add 1 to the listed damage rating if you want! Pakled clump gun go big boom, amirite?
Chapter 6 is chock-full of gamemaster and storytelling advice useful in whatever game edition you happen to be using, and the mission briefs are useful for any edition of the game and even Captain’s Log. The spaceframes in Chapter 7 are easily portable as well (in fact, the California and Luna are already in second edition, in the core book and toolkit, respectively). The other spaceframes were built using the guidance presented in the Utopia Planitia Starfleet Sourcebook and can be used in second edition as well. Ditto the NPC ships presented in the rest of the chapter; you’ll need to adjust their weapons, talents, and ratings for shields, resistance, etc. to match up with second edition rules. The same goes for the many NPCs presented in Chapter 8—replace talent and special rule descriptions, adjust damage values to remove the Challenge Dice icon, and tweak to taste.
Art by Tobias Richter
Finally, the mini-campaign offered in Chapter 9, “Unsung Heroes,” requires minimal adjustment, aside from changing up the NPC stat blocks and adjusting the various extended tasks, following the guidance in this blog post.
So, there you have it! Take your copy of the Lower Decks Campaign Guide and gently bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate it into use in your second edition games. You too can develop your lower decks characters and grow a Boimler-style beard all season long (no matter your gender identity. It’s the 24th century, after all; anyone could grow a beard!). Let’s goooo!
And if you don’t yet have a copy of the Lower Decks Campaign Guide, you can get it now in print or digital formats, and order your print copy of the second edition Star Trek Adventures core rulebook (now in standard format or one of three limited edition covers)! And order a print copy of the second edition Game Toolkit as well, to expand your options for exploring the final frontier. All physical orders receive the digital versions right away.
Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide:
2nd Edition Core Rulebook (Command):
2nd Edition Core Rulebook (Sciences):
2nd Edition Core Rulebook (Operations):
Alternatively, you can now order the digital editions by themselves of the standard core rulebook and the Game Toolkit.
2nd Edition Core Rulebook PDF:
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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