Frank Herbert’s Dune is high in the science fiction pantheon. The novel combined originality and prescience in a way that has continued to inspire readers over the last 55 years; it has also defied adaptation. Both film versions of Dune (prior to the upcoming 2021 movie) were beautiful failures in their own right, and the version that never happened, plotted by psychedelic filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, was so ambitious that its lack of production still inspired a documentary. Dune’s RPG history is similarly troubled. Dune: Chronicles of the Imperium was designed by Last Unicorn Games and held up by licensing disputes. When Wizards of the Coast acquired Last Unicorn, they got permission to print any pending projects, and a 3000 copy print run of Chronicles of the Imperium was made. Apparently the entire run got scooped up on the con circuit and the game fell into obscurity after WotC scrapped further printing in favor of converting the whole thing to d20, which fortunately died on the vine in a new spate of licensing disputes. So, literally two decades later, Modiphiu
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Frank Herbert’s Dune is high in the science fiction pantheon. The novel combined originality and prescience in a way that has continued to inspire readers over the last 55 years; it has also defied adaptation. Both film versions of Dune (prior to the upcoming 2021 movie) were beautiful failures in their own right, and the version that never happened, plotted by psychedelic filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, was so ambitious that its lack of production still inspired a documentary. Dune’s RPG history is similarly troubled. Dune: Chronicles of the Imperium was designed by Last Unicorn Games and held up by licensing disputes. When Wizards of the Coast acquired Last Unicorn, they got permission to print any pending projects, and a 3000 copy print run of Chronicles of the Imperium was made. Apparently the entire run got scooped up on the con circuit and the game fell into obscurity after WotC scrapped further printing in favor of converting the whole thing to d20, which fortunately died on the vine in a new spate of licensing disputes. So, literally two decades later, Modiphius has the vaunted Dune license and has made good with Adventures in the Imperium, their latest 2d20 title.
I must admit, with my recent experience with Star Trek Adventures I wasn’t sure how I felt about 2d20’s alignment with the Dune setting. After reading through the core rulebook, though, I’ve changed my mind. Adventures in the Imperium casts all the player characters into the same Great House, and pushes on intrigue between Houses as the primary plot driver. It’s a calculated risk, leaning more towards something like Reign than a more traditional sci-fi RPG, but I think it pays off. At the same time, the hoary weight of the combined Dune canon is painfully clear in this book. Modiphius leans hard on simplification to make 2d20 as flexible as possible here, but at the end of the day this is still Dune. Whether ultimately for good or ill, Adventures in the Imperium feels like you’re trying to resolve 10,000 years of history with only one type of die.
Setting Materials
There’s about 90 pages of straight uncut setting material here. Not items, not playable character archetypes, just pure backstory. To be honest, distilling the Dune series into 90 pages is admirable abridgement, and I read through it and mostly understood what was going on, which stands in sharp contrast to when I watched David Lynch’s adaptation. There is one page within the setting section which I found immensely helpful, which was essentially an alignment of the Dune bibliography to eras of the Imperium’s history. Now, full disclosure, I’ve never read Dune…this does mean that from an accuracy or importance perspective, I’m not necessarily the best judge of this book’s setting section. But, I did come out of the section understanding the setting, understanding the events of Dune, and roughly understanding which books talked about what parts of this history.
If you, like me, are not incredibly familiar with Dune’s setting, this 90 page preface is essentially mandatory. The setting conceits and most of the character conceits are completely entangled within this setting, and while there is some repetition the book is very much structured with the assumption that you will read this section, absorb it, and go into play from there. For better or for worse, once you read this and understand it well enough to make a character, you shouldn’t need to return to it (you may want to, there is a reason Dune is such a successful book and a lot of that is captured in the setting). This does mean that absorbing the setting and absorbing the mechanics are going to be two separate efforts; fortunately the 2d20 system does a great job here of getting out of the way and letting you the player grapple with the fictional, rather than mechanical, choices needed to get the character you want to play.
Characters
Character creation in Adventures in the Imperium is, like other 2d20 titles, relatively straightforward and without much mechanical complexity. Characters are defined first by Skills and Drives. There are five each of Skills and Drives, and the core mechanic of the game is attempting to roll d20s under the sum of an applicable Skill and applicable Drive. Both Skills and Drives are rated from 4 to 8, which give them relatively even mechanical significance (in contrast to another game like Star Trek Adventures, where Attributes peak at 12 while Disciplines only go to 5). The five Skills are Battle, Communicate, Discipline, Move, and Understand. These very broad skills are bulked out by Focuses. Like in other 2d20 games, having an applicable Focus allows you to score a critical (two successes) if a die result is less than your Skill rating. For character creation each character must choose a Primary Skill which gets a rating of 6, and a Secondary Skill which gets a rating of 5. These decisions are aided by Archetypes, one word descriptions for each combination of Skills. As all 20 permutations of Primary/Secondary Skills are granted an archetype, they serve to guide decision making rather than further restrict skill choices. After choosing Primary and Secondary Skills, a player gets five points with which to raise their Skills, though no Skill can be higher than 8.
Drives are interesting. The five Drives, Duty, Faith, Justice, Power, and Truth, represent your character’s value system, and in character creation are assigned in priority order the scores 8, 7, 6, 5, and 4. Additionally, any Drive with a rating of at least 6 (so your three highest starting Drives at character creation) gets a statement which fleshes out how your character views the Drive more specifically. Your highest-rated Drive also defines your character’s Ambition, which is supposed to be a long-term overarching goal. Drives are definitely an unusual way of defining a character, though not a completely unique one; Cortex Prime has a Prime Set that works very much like Drives do here. Drives also end up working nicely for how Conflict is defined in the system, which I’ll discuss in a little bit.
There are a few more things that make up a character. Talents are specific abilities that a character can buy and they work pretty much exactly the same as Talents in other 2d20 games. Traits are situational descriptors, and the two Traits which characters take at character creation are meant to encompass the character’s titles and affiliations (‘Duke of House Atreides’) and their core reputation (‘Just and Wise’), respectively. Mechanically, Traits also apply to scenes as well as characters, much like Fate’s Aspects. More on that later.
The final element of note to characters is Assets. Assets represent things that the characters can call on…gear, vehicles, and money, yes, but also contacts, information, and favors. Assets can work like Traits (more on that in a bit) but also play a key role in how conflicts work in the system, arguably the most interesting part of the game’s mechanics.
Mechanics
As noted above, the core mechanic of the 2d20 system is rolling d20s, at least two but as many as five, and trying to roll ‘successes’ by rolling under the sum of the game’s two core attributes (in Dune, that’s Skills and Drives). There is Momentum, which players can spend to gain extra dice or other effects, and there is Threat, which the GM can spend to make things more complicated and which the players can give the GM to delay the effects of poor rolls. These all carry over across the 2d20 corpus, and as such Seamus’s discussion of Star Trek Adventures, which is grounded in actual play, is likely a better place to learn about the mechanical implications of these meta-currencies. Other than Skill Ratings being higher on average than disciplines (and therefore making foci more valuable), Dune and Star Trek have similar dice math. What they don’t share, though, is much more interesting.
Someone at Modiphius has read a lot of Fate. Traits have a lot of structural similarities to Aspects in Fate, and just like Aspects they apply primarily to characters and situations. Unlike Aspects, though, Traits are more passive. A Trait in a scene has one of four consequences: It makes actions easier, it makes them more difficult, it makes them possible, or it makes them impossible. All 2d20 games use Traits as the representation of situational elements which modify or permission tasks. What makes Adventures in the Imperium so different from, say, Star Trek Adventures is that the Traits have to pull a lot more weight when it comes to describing the character. My Star Trek character, Captain Salok, has one Trait: Vulcan. All the other situational elements of the character, like his rank and role on the ship, are defined outside of this system. In Adventures in the Imperium, there are none of these other identifiers, only the two (three if the character is in a Faction) Traits your character has.
Assets are more interesting still, being a unique element of the system for Adventures in the Imperium. Assets are technically a subset of Traits, and are either tangible, representing actual gear and goods, or intangible, representing information, contacts, or favors. All Assets, though, come into play in Conflicts. Conflicts in this game are also likely inspired by Fate. The GM establishes a number of zones over which the conflict is taking place. When a character has a turn, they can either move an Asset or use an Asset. That’s it. If you’re imagining a knife fight this system lacks subtlety, but it scales upward very elegantly which is what makes it interesting. There are five types of conflicts defined within the game that all use the same basic mechanics: Dueling, Skirmishes, Warfare, Espionage, and Intrigue. All of a sudden it makes perfect sense why a sword and information with blackmail potential are modeled the same way. In order to keep conflicts consistent, the d6-based damage mechanics of other 2d20 games are completely gone. Instead, attacks against major characters are modeled as extended tests, with the number of successes required to win based on the opponent’s relevant Drive. Defeat in these situations once again takes a page from the Fate playbook; the circumstances of the defeat depend on the circumstances of the conflict, but generally speaking defeat need not equal death. That said, you can always spend Momentum to ensure your foe gets a grievous, memorable injury. Each of the five conflict types has its own section within the rules; while they use the same basic mechanics, there are procedures laid out to ensure that a Duel feels different from Intrigue, and that you wouldn’t mistake a Skirmish for Warfare.
Overall, I think Adventures in the Imperium is executed well. I didn’t talk much about the House Creation that comes before Character Creation, but it serves both to get players aligned in the story they’re going to tell as well as shifting them as far away from House Atreides and House Harkonnen as they want to go. That’s always the tough thing about licensed settings; it’s tough to both capture the feel of the setting but also still leave players with a viable game that has enough flexibility to serve most groups.
If anything, Modiphius leaned to the latter side of the equation. There’s tons of material provided here; in addition to the aforementioned setting section, the Assets chapter provides even more grounding to Herbert’s setting through pages and pages of specific weapons, vehicles, and items, as well as character sheets for a number of the books’ key characters. But, even with all the setting material being provided, the game is not tied to anything particularly, uh, Dune-y. While I think the way the setting is presented will satisfy fans, I’m more able to say it also presents a game which will be interesting even if you aren’t coming just for the spice and sandworms. The flip side of this is that I’m not entirely sure what about this game makes it especially Dune. Dune might be the grand-daddy of science fantasy feudal intrigue, but this game is more built around that broader idea of science fantasy feudal intrigue than leaning hard into Arrakis in particular. I personally don’t think this is a bad thing, but I’m also unsure what a Dune fan would want coming into this game and even less sure if they’re going to find it.
As a non-fan, though, I’d say this is a recommend. Modiphius has spun the 2d20 System into domain conflicts and intrigue much more adeptly than I would have thought before reading. The game manages to be relatively light but still generate conflict where it’s needed, and then gives your group the tools to play out that conflict however you see fit. I’m not sure how well the game is bearing the weight of its license, but the fluff-focused summary approach will work better for most gamers and is less likely to draw the ire of any author’s estates as well. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the new Dune movie comes out, but until then, Modiphius is slowly but surely pushing 2d20 into the furthest corners of the Imperium.
Dune: Adventures in the Imperium is available on DriveThruRPG.
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Gamemaster’s Log, Stardate 57252.7. It has been several months since the launch of the New Orleans-class starship U.S.S. Verrazzano, NCC-07302, from the Foggy Peak system. Since that time, I have seen her crew serve with distinction in accordance with the finest traditions of Starfleet. I have also seen them called before a board of Admirals to review their actions and directive violations, and while impressive the fact that no fewer than three starbases have had to be commissioned to deal with the discoveries from their missions is beginning to put a notable dent in the power requirements for the local sector’s industrial replicators. As the Verrazzano is currently away, responding to a distress call from a Vulcan Expeditionary Group, I have decided that this is a fine opportunity to review their so-called ‘Star Trek Adventures’ in-depth, to better understand how they have and will continue to boldly go where no one, not even the rest of Starfleet, has gone before.
Characters and Core Mechanics
The most basic mechanic for Star Trek Adventures is this: you’re rolling 2d20, and you’re trying to get results on the individual die that are equal to or lower than a target number. The more results that are equal or lower, the more successes you get, and different actions will require a different number of successes. A task requiring 1 or 2 successes is quite possible, but obviously if you need any more than that you’ll need something special. Enter the crew of your Starfleet vessel. Characters have six Disciplines that represent their specialties in Starfleet (Command, Engineering, Science, etc.) and six Attributes (Fitness, Daring, Insight, etc.) which represent their personal abilities. When you’re facing a task, your target number is determined by a combination of a Discipline and an Attribute: Security+Control to fire a phaser, Conn+Daring to fly a runabout through exploding asteroids, Medicine+Reason to diagnose an alien virus.
Characters are built through a series of stages that gradually build these stats up: species, background (plus whether you accept or reject your upbringing), what branch of Starfleet you go into, and a series of career events like being forced to call out a superior, making scientific breakthroughs, or a conflict with a hostile culture. Along the way they’ll pick up Talents that enhance or grant extra abilities, and Focuses that can (if they can roll underneath their Discipline rank as well as the target number) grant a second success on a check. Characters also define Values, things that they care about and believe. All of the other stuff is about what your character can do; Values are about who your character is. All of this leads to characters that just . . . they just click very easily. Values provide a challenge, as while there is advice on how to create some, they are entirely unique to every character, not picked from a list. But overall creation is simple, and you immediately have a lot to work with mechanically and narratively.
Aboard the Verrazzano, that gets us the Vulcan Captain Salok, forced to take command, who focuses on Diplomacy with a firm belief that Diversity Is Strength. His first officer, the Gnalish Commander Korg, strives to Defend and Aid Those In Danger or Need and is a known friend to the Klingons. Lt. Commander Flint Northrock’s file is mostly redacted, but he is a particularly Bold helmsman: “My answer to any distress call is “’I’m Coming’”. Lt. Commander Be’zur is the ship’s Chief Engineer, a Liberated Caitian Borg with a knack for Improvised Technology, a talent for pushing things Past the Redline, and a conviction that There’s No Such Thing as The Unknown, Only the Temporarily Hidden. Lieutenant, later Lt. Commander, Ava is a sliver of an extra-dimensional being; naturally, he serves as the Science Officer with A Mind for Design and Insatiable Curiosity about the universe he finds himself in. The Bajoran Lieutenant (j.g.) Edon Reil might be a relatively young officer but he has Untapped Potential, and serves as a fine Chief of Security: “Beware invaders calling themselves ‘friend’”.
Here’s something to consider, especially if you’ve been playing games that are more hardscrabble: STA characters can be extremely competent in their particular area of expertise. It’s certainly possible to build something akin to a generalist, but given that characters are naturally going to gravitate towards certain roles (the Captain, the Chief Engineer, the Science Officer) it’s very easy for them to have a target of 17 or so for their primary focus (5 in Science and 12 in Reason for the Science Officer, for example). Speaking of Focuses, if chosen well there are plenty of opportunities for them to come into play, offering multiple successes on a die. As I’ll address shortly, there are multiple ways to roll 3 or even 4d20 just on your own, as well as a way to automatically get at least two successes. Other characters can assist you, and if you’re on your starship it usually contributes another d20 to the pile as well.
Some actions are going to be impossible, and you’ll need to create an advantage to make them something you can actually achieve. I’ve read the number of successes called out as being impossible as five, though, and that’s . . . not really the case. Seeing six, seven, and even eight successes hit the table isn’t common, but it’s not all that rare either. So, a minor but important point, while needing 4 successes is probably still a good high-water mark, I would keep the reason for a task being impossible as purely narrative.
So, in short, this is not a game with an awful lot of failure, further reinforced by the fact that you can Succeed At A Cost, with ‘failing forward’ actually being built into the mechanics outright. STA is more about characters figuring out what needs to be done and how they want to do it than whether or not they’re going to succeed, followed by the consequences of their actions (even if they succeed) as further enabled by the aforementioned costs and Complications. On the one hand, GMs shouldn’t be too concerned if things seem ‘too easy’ for their players at first blush. On the other, well, a few things: don’t be afraid to ask for three or four successes on really difficult and important stuff, you can get a little extra challenge by throwing things slightly out of a character’s area of expertise at them, and when failures do come up they need to matter. When Northrock (who includes among his Values ‘The Best Way to Defeat An Enemy Is To Make A Friend”’) failed to resist the impassioned plea of an oppressed species convincing him that patience and diplomacy would not work, that he would have to violate the Prime Directive, that needed to have an impact. It actually kicked off a small not-mutiny, actually, along with a few other consequences that I’ll get to use as examples later.
Meta Latinum
There are three types of metacurrencies in Star Trek Adventures: Momentum, Threat, and Determination.
Momentum is a player resource, gained via extra successes – 3 successes on a Difficulty 2 check, you get 1 Momentum. Momentum has a lot of uses. When used immediately it can be used to boost attacks by doing more damage, ignoring Resistance, or activating weapon traits. It can be used to create Advantages that can make future tasks easier or impossible tasks possible. In my experience it is most commonly used immediately to Gain More Information, a key use that often sees characters diving past their basic observations to really discover what’s going on or what they’re dealing with. If not spent immediately, however, points of Momentum go into a pool; they can be used in several ways once there, but by far their most common use is buying more dice to roll for a check. A 3rd d20 costs one Momentum, a 4th one costs two.
Threat is primarily a GM resource, and in several ways it mirrors Momentum. It can be used for adversaries rolling extra dice, it can make attacks lethal (by default they are not), it can make tasks more difficult or increase the chance of a Complication (something Bad that usually only happens if a character rolls a 20 on a die). With enough Threat in their pool GMs can even end scenes entirely and take narrative control, which strongly reminds me of the Doom Pool from Cortex games.
GMs begin every mission with twice as many points of threat as there are players, which is good, because in my experience you’re not likely going to get too many more. There are a couple ways to add more Threat, but the only one that doesn’t require a specific circumstance is that player characters can also use Threat by choosing to give it to the GM instead of spending Momentum at the same rates. That’s great, because it gives the GM more to play with and gives the players options if they run out of Momentum. Honestly, though, it doesn’t seem to happen very often. A large part of this is certainly biased in this specific campaign by the luck of the dice and the characters themselves. The Verrazzano crew have often been able to generate more than enough Momentum for their needs, rarely running completely out. Also, the entire line of Bold Talents, which let you re-roll dice if you have used Threat to enhance the roll, are designed to be a big motivator for Threat use – but only Northrock and Reil have any of them, and they both have only the Conn variety. So, you might find yourself with players giving you oodles of Threat . . . just be prepared to use what you get at the start of a mission carefully, if you don’t.
The final metacurrency is Determination, and it’s the big one. Every character starts a mission with at least one, and it is deeply tied to the character’s Values: if they are acting in accordance with a Value, a character can spend a point of Determination to add a die to their roll that is automatically set to a result of 1, meaning an automatic two successes towards the roll. Note that this still counts as adding a die a la Momentum/Threat, in that if you want a 4th die you’ll need two points of those other resources, but still! Alternate uses of Determination still require you to be acting in accordance with a Value, but include: re-rolling all your dice, immediately taking another action on the same turn, and automatically creating an advantage.
You can get more points of Determination if you challenge a Value, meaning your character is having a big think about whether or not they actually believe that any more. You can also be offered Determination by the GM to compel you to act in line with a Value when it would make things more difficult for you, which reads an awful lot like Fate points. Determination isn’t just a big deal because of the mechanical impact, although that can’t be undervalued either. But since Determination, whether spending it or gaining it, plugs into your Values it is often a very important factor in your characters ‘leveling up’.
Advancement
‘Milestones’ are the method of advancement in STA, and there are only three ways to get them: suffering (and surviving, obviously) a lethal injury, challenging a Value (thus getting a point of Determination), and using a Value either positively or negatively (meaning you either spent or received a point of Determination while acting upon it). You get a ‘Normal’ Milestone for just doing one of the above during a mission. The GM can award a ‘Spotlight’ milestone if a character or characters would earn a Normal Milestone and also made a particularly big impact in a mission, and the players decide who among them receive it. Eventually, you acquire enough Spotlight Milestones that your next one is an ‘Arc’ Milestone instead (or, if the GM feels it appropriate given the character’s actual narrative arc, they can award one out of hand). Here’s the thing, though: the Arc Milestone is the only one that actually adds anything to a character.
With a Normal Milestone, first of all, if a Value was challenged it gets rewritten or replaced to reflect how the character’s perspective was changed. After being forced to realize that “The Best Way to Defeat An Enemy Is To Make A Friend” would not always be the case, and subsequently getting in a fair bit of trouble for acting as such, Northrock reaffirmed his commitment to the crew and to following Salok’s lead instead of going off on his own: “When The Way Is Unclear, I Follow My Captain.” Aside from that very cool and dramatic and character-growth-driven aspect, though, Normal Milestones are very light: you can move a point from one Discipline to another, or replace one Focus with another. Spotlight Milestones let you pick one of the options from the short list of the Normal Milestone’s, as well as one of several others: moving points between Attributes, replacing a Talent, moving points between the ship’s Departments or Systems (Discipline and Attribute counterparts, really), or replacing the ship’s Talents. Arc Milestones grant the benefits of a Normal and a Spotlight Milestone, but are the advancement that finally lets you increase a Discipline or Attribute, gain an additional Talent, Focus, or Value, increase one of the ship’s Departments/Systems, or add another Talent to the ship.
As mentioned above, STA player characters are probably starting off as very competent just based on stats, never mind what their Talents can bring to the table, so they don’t really need to be growing mechanically all that much. What’s really important to this system is how their Values, what they care about and who they really are, are highlighted, are challenged, are grown and changed. Changing up Attributes, Disciplines, Talents, and Focuses also reflects this choice of priority – a Captain who starts to take more of an interest in what’s going on down in the warp core while leaving the navigation of the ship up to their hot-shot helmsman might shift a point from Conn to Engineering.
So far, they seem to be working just fine. Captain Salok and Lt. Commanders Northrock and Ava are both on the cusp of their first Arc Milestone as of this writing, and given how competent the characters are nobody seems to be minding that they haven’t been ‘gaining’ anything, and there have been comments that they like the idea of switching things around to better match the character – it’s true that you’ll certainly never have a dead-end Talent or Focus for very long.
I’ll admit that awarding the Spotlights has felt . . . a little anemic on the GM’s side of things. The book recommends giving out a single one every two or three sessions, but these are players and characters who have really taken the ‘Go Boldly’ thing to heart. Salok ‘crushed’ a mutiny with little more than an iron will and by convincing the mutineers that a starship takes many to succeed but only one to fail. Northrock took command of an absolute disaster involving a wormhole, a shapeshifter, friendly fire, and a dying ship and somehow got everyone out alive. Ava solved an astrogation and physics problem that had confounded Starfleet for decades, and then went on to help establish a stable wormhole to another universe. Be’zur’s technological monstrosities have caused me to throw out more notes and plans than any two other characters combined. Korg and Reil have both been responsible for saving the lives of their crewmates from certain death or worse, whether it was a rampaging tentacular plant unleashed from the Verrazzano’s labs, Orion raiders trying to steal an artifact powered by time, or a desperate and murderous Starfleet doctor gone rogue.
So, in short, I’m probably awarding Spotlights a little more frequently than the book would like me to, every other session at least, and I’m often throwing two out at once. Since Normal and Spotlight Milestone benefits can be banked for later, the system certainly doesn’t seem to be breaking as a result. If it were a longer, slower-burn campaign I might stick closer to the book’s recommendations but to be honest I think that, as with determining if a task is impossible, you’re best served by ignoring hard numbers and focusing on the narrative.
Support Characters
If there is any one mechanic that has been a runaway hit during the campaign, this has been the one. Supporting characters are the ‘extras’ on set, the people in the background of the show that only get speaking roles every few episodes, if ever. Star Trek Adventures lets you bring those characters into the spotlight by spending points of Crew Support – every ship gets an amount that is determined by how big the ship is, and then player characters can each take a talent to get more, which two Verrazzano crew members did. Broadly speaking there are two reasons to play a Supporting character. First, because they cover a skillset that the main player characters lack. This was the case of Lt. Gunther von Doomstone, the Chief Medical Officer, and Lt. Khumail Jaosh, the transport chief. The second is when it doesn’t make sense for a player character to be present, such as on away missions, but the player still wants to be a part of the scene. This was the case for Lt. Joran Mal, a Joined Trill diplomat, when Captain Salok had to remain behind on the ship. Sometimes it’s both. Cadet Groorin, part of the second wave of Ferengi following in Nog’s footsteps, appeared when the players decided Joran needed an assistant to deal with an upcoming legal tribunal, but really got played when Lt. Commander Northrock was stuck at the helm and there was a Ferengi away team to negotiate with.
I suppose there’s also a third reason, which is because you have a cool character idea you wanted to include. Lt. Jurling, Klingon Ship’s Counselor (“It is a good day for conflict resolution!”), was added to the crew to cover that role, yes, but mostly because I wanted him to be there. Consider it my payment for running the game.
Supporting characters start off comparatively light – their highest Attribute will be a 10, their best Discipline a 4, with three Focuses but no Talents or Values. Supporting characters don’t gain milestones themselves, although a player character can choose to use the benefit of one of their own milestones to switch things around for a supporting character. Instead, Supporting characters improve by the number of missions they appear in through the use of Crew Support – every time they show up they gain something, and while they still have lower caps (they can only ever improve a Discipline once, for example), they can still end up fleshed out quite a bit. Funnily enough, Supporting characters are thus going to ‘advance’ at a much faster rate than player characters will, which can help scratch the itch a little for those players who enjoy getting mechanical rewards.
Supporting characters are . . . kind of strange, in terms of gameplay and narrative. First of all, for groups with a lot of players they’ll end up taking up most of the NPC slots left on the ship – that hasn’t stopped me from making more NPCs, but it has felt a little odd to jump into a Supporting Character now and then as the GM.
They’re also supposed to be supporting characters but in many cases they’ve been in the spotlight just as much, if not more than, the ‘main’ characters, and some of them are quite beloved. Like any character, you end up wanting to make them interesting, and together we have. Doctor von Doomstone is from a planet that would have featured in a TOS Planet of Hats episode, a Frankenstein setting, and he’s trying to avoid going down the mad science path of his ancestors. Jurling has a reputation for unconventional ‘team building exercises’, a love of Klingon opera that’s shared with Commander Korg, and a genuine care for his patients. Joran quickly gained a reputation for being in over his head and soldiering on anyway, surrounded by literal piles of PADDS and joining the Captain in his coffee habit while reviewing First Contact protocols.
I wonder at what point you might just give up the charade and make them main characters in their own right with storylines of their own, capable of gaining milestones for themselves and surpassing the limitations of a supporting character. Perhaps a player could have multiple full characters (while many are shared, I’ve noticed some support characters functionally ‘belonging’ to a single player), or perhaps the ‘upgraded’ characters could remain in a pool for troupe play, which would keep the pool of Crew Support fully functional.
Supporting characters as a concept have also highlighted for me the need to have time spent back on the ship and in the ready room, for the simple reason that the Captain just doesn’t leave the ship very often. In terms of ‘screen time’, Aaron has spent more time portraying Lieutenants Joran and Jurling than he has Captain Salok, and yet the Captain has still managed to net himself some Spotlight Milestones, primarily on the bridge and in the aforementioned ready room.
Material to Work With
Star Trek Adventures is extremely well-supported. Since release there has been a unique book for all of the galaxy’s quadrants, another one each for Command, Operations, and Science, two full mission anthologies, character profiles for a bunch of the shows so you can play as/interact with them, and a whole bunch of standalone missions. This is on top of the free Quickstart, the free character sheets, and the free character builder (which incorporates player character creation, supporting character creation, and starship creation material from pretty much everything I’ve already mentioned, it’s a fantastic resource). There’s also a Klingon core book which I haven’t even touched yet. You’re not exactly going to run out of reading material very quickly, is what I’m saying.
I want to particularly focus on the pre-made missions, however, for the simple reason that – with a single exception – my campaign has consisted entirely of them. This is a symptom of the fact that the U.S.S. Verrazzano was sort of rushed into service, as it were – I put Star Trek Adventures up as an option to run for a short campaign because I owned it and thought it might be interesting, but I didn’t picture it as a front runner and I didn’t expect it to catch quite as well as it has. It’s still going to be short, as campaigns in this group are reckoned lately, but still: suddenly I was running a game and had exactly zero material prepped or even ideas solidifying. So, I turned to the mission files.
So far I’ve run Nest In The Dark, Stolen Liberty, The Prize, and A World With A Bluer Sun. I’ve got two more queued up at the moment, but I won’t say which because there are players lurking about. Through these missions the crew of the Verrazzano have struggled through time dilation, radiation bursts, disruptor fire, crushing gravity, and interdimensional phenomena. They’ve been forced to face intelligences vastly superior to their own, weigh the oppression of an entire species against the Prime Directive, race against archeological poachers, and navigate the factions of a Starfleet crew turned on itself. So there’s the first thing I’ll say about the pre-made missions Modiphius has put out: oh my goodness there is a lot of variety. Not every mission will fit every crew, but many will, and aside from a certain predilection towards First Contact scenarios (come on, it’s Trek, duh) the Verrazzano has never really faced the same problem twice.
One additional good thing is that many of these missions could be used as a launching point for further adventures. Every one ends with a ‘Continuing Voyages’ section that highlights how a crew could follow up on the events of the mission or how said events could otherwise impact the campaign. I haven’t been able to take advantage of many of these yet, but there have been a few new crewmembers of a sort added to the ship’s roster as a result. More dramatically the events of Stolen Liberty saw Salok, Korg, Northrock, and Be’zur having a chat with some Admirals about the Prime Directive and their viability as a command team while Ava took command of the ship to chart a cataclysmic nebula (and blow some Jem’Hadar holdouts out of space, although they didn’t know that going in), the only non-pre-made mission so far.
A nebulous thing is that the missions are always written with a specific era (ENT, TOS, or TNG) in mind. They also always have advice for running the mission in a different era, which usually involves switching out who the bad guy is – if the Borg are the threat for a TNG mission then it’s probably the Klingons for a TOS crew or the Andorians for the ENT crowd. I’ve been able to put that advice to good use for several of the missions, but . . . there are also a few that don’t quite fit right, for me. A TOS mission that’s a little too Those Old Scientists, a little over the top with giant rock monsters for a TNG feel, or the TNG tech is just too necessary to solve the problems facing an ENT crew. In the anthologies, that’s not so big a deal since there’s something for everyone, but you might want to read up on a one-off mission carefully before purchase to see if it’ll work for you.
Some of that actually falls to layout – there are some TOS missions that are done up in a completely different style from the core book and the other missions, and maybe it’s silly but that just makes it harder for me to think about transplanting those specific missions over for the Verrazzano. That leads into another thing: sometimes there are some editing flubs. Missions are sometimes written out with a very specific series of events in mind, or don’t quite explain why certain events happen the way they do, and neither is the kind of thing that can survive contact with players. This is old advice, but if you’re running one of these pre-made adventures, you’re going to want to have read the whole thing, and you’ll want to be ready to throw the rails out the torpedo tubes.
One final thing about the actual material: thank the stars for whoever created the index in the core rulebook. It’s comprehensive and well-organized, making it easy to find whatever you need . . . and without it the book may have just been unreadable. It is crowded in there, there is practically no negative space of any kind, every spare inch has been packed with art or console designs or words and words and more words. There is a lot here, and reading it straight cover to cover would take forever. Remember that this campaign went from an option in a poll to an active game very, very quickly, we’ve all been learning the system as we go (partially why I think writing about it has some value, to be honest), and without the index allowing us to flip to where we need to I know I at least would’ve been completely lost.
Everything Else, And Final Thoughts
So what are all those words about? We’ve covered the basic mechanics, advancement, supporting characters, none of which are particularly thorny, what else is there? Well, of course there’s a fair bit of space spent on listing individual talents and such, ships the crew can serve on, planets they could visit, GMing advice . . . but there are also a lot of other actual mechanics that are way more situational. There’s an entire reputation system, tied to rank, privilege, and responsibility. There are mechanics for extended tasks that might be the focus of an entire mission, and slightly different ones for when a crew is applying the scientific method (which is how Ava solved the nebula charting problem). Then there’s the ship, with its many different stations, it’s Power resource that needs to be managed, the various systems and the myriad, unique, and advancing things that happen to each and every single one of them if they happen to be the one hit when the shields get breached.
The core mechanics? Pretty straightforward! All these other bits? A fair degree more fiddly, and they might not show up every session. Every other mechanic adds more complexity, triggers more page-flipping (there’s the index saving the day, again). By no means does it jam up the works like, say, Shadowrun’s many many subsystems. But we got the knack of the basics very very quickly; going into our eighth session, there’s still a fair bit of rust on the others. Given more time that would probably go away, but only if we spend the time to focus on those systems, and in some cases I don’t see it happening.
In checking in with the players about how they felt about the system, Aaron managed to sum it up the best way, which I’ll use here. The group has dealt with games where the system got in the way for us, like Exalted Second Edition. When we tapped into the Powered by the Apocalypse ruleset, we found that the system actively helped us. Star Trek Adventures is in the middle.
It handed us the basic toolset and then has mostly stayed out of our way, piping up from the back of the crowd when it’s needed. It demands very little in terms of mechanical understanding on a task to task basis, but wants you to pay more attention when certain situations crop up. What it really wants is for you to have good, strong Values that your characters can believe in and challenge and change; everything else (you might note that the Gnalish species isn’t RPG-official, and Ava’s existence as an extra-dimensional avatar is original to us as well) can be tweaked, but that one is non-negotiable. That being the case, it’s really the players who are going to bring what’s truly necessary for Star Trek Adventures to function the way it wants to.
Star Trek is, primarily, a television series. It can do novels and comics, it can do big movies and long-running arcs, but it’s always eventually returned to a weekly format, and the heaping majority of that is episodic in nature. Look, I’ve tried the episodic thing in a bunch of different games, every time it gets a bare handful of ‘episodes’ in before one plot or another gets too complex and grabs the controls and takes off. Star Trek Adventures, like Star Trek at large, certainly could manage a blockbuster event, or a Dominion or Burn-style long arc, but it sings as an episodic game, and I think that’s because the game trusts its players to bring what they know and love of Trek to the table and fly “second star to the right — and straight on ’til morning.”
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RPG licensing. RPG licensing never changes. In some ways it’s amazing that it took until 2021 to get an honest Fallout tabletop RPG, given the original game’s mechanical dalliance with GURPS and other design elements borrowed heavily from pen and paper games of the time. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until Fallout 4 that the series turned back to its roots and, with the help of Modiphius, got an official licensed port. Fallout the Role-Playing Game leans heavily on the most recent iteration of the video game series; both the mechanics and the setting borrow heavily and almost exclusively from Bethesda’s Fallout 4 for source material. Comparing this game to a Bethesda game ends up being quite apt, though; like most of the modern software titles released by this game’s licensor, Fallout the Role-Playing Game shows a lot of promise and appears at first glance to be ported well into its new mechan
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RPG licensing. RPG licensing never changes. In some ways it’s amazing that it took until 2021 to get an honest Fallout tabletop RPG, given the original game’s mechanical dalliance with GURPS and other design elements borrowed heavily from pen and paper games of the time. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until Fallout 4 that the series turned back to its roots and, with the help of Modiphius, got an official licensed port. Fallout the Role-Playing Game leans heavily on the most recent iteration of the video game series; both the mechanics and the setting borrow heavily and almost exclusively from Bethesda’s Fallout 4 for source material. Comparing this game to a Bethesda game ends up being quite apt, though; like most of the modern software titles released by this game’s licensor, Fallout the Role-Playing Game shows a lot of promise and appears at first glance to be ported well into its new mechanics…but in reality it’s hampered by a raft of grave unforced errors in editing and product management. So is it endearingly buggy, or is it hopeless? Let’s take a look.
Fallout, like essentially all of Modiphius’s RPG products, is built around their house system 2d20. 2d20 is at its core quite simple, but that’s what makes it so easy to modify so it feels different for games like Dune or Star Trek Adventures. Fallout is actually the most traditional iteration of 2d20 I’ve read so far; all 2d20 games center around two attributes which have their values combined to produce a target number for the eponymous (though frequently expanded) 2d20 roll, and in Fallout these two attributes are good old stats and skills. There are 7 stats, the SPECIAL stats that all Fallout players know and love (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck) and 17 skills (the 13 skills from Fallout 3 plus Athletics, Survival, Throwing, and Pilot). These are longer lists than most other 2d20 games though in the neighborhood of other traditional RPGs, and of course the relatively close relationship the lists have to the video games does help with mental load.
“Close relationship to the video games” is pretty much the watch-phrase for how tabletop Fallout is built. While there are 2d20-typical traits associated with the Origins you can select in character creation (in addition to a Vault Dweller there are options to play Robots, Ghouls, and Super Mutants, among others), the vast majority of ‘traits’ in the game are in fact Perks, which like in the Fallout games you earn upon levelling up…yes, levelling up has been shoehorned into this game too, but in a typically Fallout way where you gain a perk and some additional hit points and the like, as opposed to the whole D&D rigamarole. There are even rules for magazines, like in the games…while magazines don’t confer permanent bonuses just by reading them, they do give you the option to take the magazine’s special perk as the perk for your next level up. If there’s something else you want more, though, you won’t get another chance to get the magazine perk until you find another magazine.
The mechanical emulation of the video games extends deep into the core gameplay loops of the tabletop version. The typical 2d20 metacurrency pools of Momentum and Threat have been folded down into Action Points, which as you might expect from the video game are used primarily to buy additional actions in combat (though like Momentum and Threat they can be used for a few other things as well). While Action Points are clearly meant to align with the video game I do have to concede that for this game having Momentum and Threat be only one thing is a solid, rather elegant choice; in essence, the difference between Action Points to the player and Action Points to the GM is only which characters get the benefit, so it all balances out quite nicely. Fallout does use the same d6-based combat system that Star Trek Adventures does, with a couple big additions for emulation’s sake. First, in a nod to making the item list as long as the one in the video game, there are three damage types, and each weapon and each piece of armor is rated differently for each one. This is, of course, taken straight from the video game. Then, in the spirit of VATS, there are hit locations. This, too, is taken straight from the video game. The problem here is that I’m not sure either of them are going to work as well on a tabletop as they do in a video game. While I concede I was a fan of hit locations in Cyberpunk 2020, the more I’ve played systems with them, the less I think they’re worth the extra time and extra rules. Still, this will make combat feel more like Fallout, in addition to taking twice as long as it needs to. And, just as a cherry on top of the “I can’t tell if they playtested this” sundae…there are ammo types. Twenty of them. So you too can enjoy the feeling of running around with an empty hunting rifle and seventy-five railroad spikes, thanks to the scavenging rolls you made.
The strongest bits of genre emulation are the inventory mechanics, which arguably drive the game at a lot of levels. The breadth and extent of the item, crafting, and scavenging systems make it clear that the collection of stuff is what drives the game. And I want to say up front: this is not a bad decision. The inventory rules revolve around a set of scavenging rules which defines what you find in a given location, grounded with five attributes: Category, Level, Scale, Degree, and Items. This means that every location comes keyed with information about what items you’re likely to find, whether it’s been searched before, and what sort of enemies will interrupt you, among other things. A lot of these items are ‘junk’, which as any Fallout 4 player will know means that you can use them to craft other, cooler items. Junk is the only part of the inventory system that’s been simplified…you don’t have to worry about running out of adhesive at the tabletop. Still, that does mean that an exhaustive (exhausting) list of items from the game have made it into tables. Blamco Mac and Cheese? Yup. T-51b Power Armor Left Arm? Uh huh. Nuka-Cola? Why, there’s a table just to figure out if it’s Original, Cherry, or Quantum. I’d normally look askance at the huge item tables, but as I said, this is the point of the game. Scavenging, crafting, scavenging some more for missing crafting ingredients, this is clearly the focus of Fallout the Roleplaying Game, and I think that both for broader market alignment as well as fitting in with Fallout, that is broadly a good choice. It does mean this is a game for groups who like keeping track of a lot of inventory items. It does mean that encumbrance jokes will apply on the tabletop as readily as they apply in the video game. Once again, not a bad thing! But be aware that’s what you’re signing up for.
So this all sounds good, right? Doesn’t sound like a game to be sent up as a scathing indictment of the laziness and greed of large publishers, right? Well, strap in. The book is beset by problems, both accidental and intentional. Accidental, like none of the PDF bookmarks work. At all. In 2021 that’s utterly unacceptable. There are references to deleted rules still in the book. There are typos. There are reference errors. These are the sort of things I could mention in a one-man effort (and I have), but when you’re one of the top five largest RPG publishers in the western world…no. You don’t get to release a product like this and have me gloss over it. Modiphius is a seven-figure revenue company, you can afford to either add a full-time editor or pay your freelance one enough to give a damn.
Let’s get to the intentional sins. Those location rules I mentioned above? Sound pretty cool, right? They’re not in the book. I mean, the list of attributes I cited is, but none of the rules or derivations are in the book, nor are there those attributes for any of the canned locations in the setting chapter. They’re coming in something called the Gamemaster’s Kit, which is a $36 pack of pop-out gewgaws and a little booklet that contains, from what I can tell, either 16 or 32 pages of deliberately omitted rules and tables. Why? And the worst part? It isn’t done yet. Now that may not have been intentional, but it was stupid. Once again, top 5 RPG publisher in the western world, arguably the largest producer of licensed RPGs currently operating. Modiphius, what’s your excuse?
So neither the Gamemaster’s Kit nor the Starter Set are finished yet, and both are referenced directly in the core book. The GMing rules necessary to actually run any location in the game rules-as-written are completely missing. Other rules, like promised hit locations for non-humanoids, are absent. In the errata thread, the reason noted for this was page count, which I dismiss as a valid excuse. Even a 600-page hardback still costs less than $33 per copy to produce (way, way less actually if you’re offset printing), which is about the current price premium between the PDF and the hardcopy of the book at present. All I see is a cynical attempt to increase margins, and in doing so make the game worse at every turn. Not to mention the fact that the game was rushed, line management is non-existent, and ultimately the only superlative we get for Fallout the Role-Playing Game is “almost as poorly edited as Shadowrun”. Oof.
My feelings on this game turned from suspicion to excitement to utter disappointment. This has the bones of a great Fallout game, honestly it does. What was published, though, is so far below the level that a commercial game should be at, and it’s on the top seller list anyway. I know every enterprising GM will tell me how easy it is to work around the omissions, errors, and document design flaws, but ultimately that’s not the point. This game isn’t worth the money. Not at $21 for the PDF, and definitely not at $54 for the hardcover book. I know how many fans will make excuses. This game, though, is not editorially fit to print, and yet here it is being sold. And when you’re already one of the top 5 largest RPG publishers, I’m not appreciative of being pissed on and told it’s summer rain. Buy Apocalypse World, or Other Dust, or any post-apocalyptic product on the entire RPG market besides this one. Rush jobs and settling for less don’t deserve to be rewarded, especially from a company which already makes so much money. And to Modiphius: Finish your goddamn game before releasing it.
This review was written using a copy purchased on August 10, 2021, and reflects errors in the text as of that version. While I am aware that future versions may resolve some of the issues noted in the above text, I believe the fact the game was released at all in the sorry state it was in on August 10th is more damning than future corrections can or will forgive.
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Please post all questions and errata here, and we will try to get back to you as soon as we can. Please leave discussions around individual topics in a certain thread, but if you’re able to answer someone else’s query please feel free to do so.
Frank Herbert’s Dune is high in the science fiction pantheon. The novel combined originality and prescience in a way that has continued to inspire readers over the last 55 years; it has also defied adaptation. Both film versions of Dune (prior to the upcoming 2021 movie) were beautiful failures in their own right, and the version that never happened, plotted by psychedelic filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, was so ambitious that its lack of production still inspired a documentary. Dune’s RPG history is similarly troubled. Dune: Chronicles of the Imperium was designed by Last Unicorn Games and held up by licensing disputes. When Wizards of the Coast acquired Last Unicorn, they got permission to print any pending projects, and a 3000 copy print run of Chronicles of the Imperium was made. Apparently the entire run got scooped up on the con circuit and the game fell into obscurity after WotC scrapped further printing in favor of converting the whole thing to d20, which fortunately died on the vine in a new spate of licensing disputes. So, literally two decades later, Modiphius has the vaunted Dune license and has made good with Adventures in the Imperium, their latest 2d20 title.
I must admit, with my recent experience with Star Trek Adventures I wasn’t sure how I felt about 2d20’s alignment with the Dune setting. After reading through the core rulebook, though, I’ve changed my mind. Adventures in the Imperium casts all the player characters into the same Great House, and pushes on intrigue between Houses as the primary plot driver. It’s a calculated risk, leaning more towards something like Reign than a more traditional sci-fi RPG, but I think it pays off. At the same time, the hoary weight of the combined Dune canon is painfully clear in this book. Modiphius leans hard on simplification to make 2d20 as flexible as possible here, but at the end of the day this is still Dune. Whether ultimately for good or ill, Adventures in the Imperium feels like you’re trying to resolve 10,000 years of history with only one type of die.
Setting Materials
There’s about 90 pages of straight uncut setting material here. Not items, not playable character archetypes, just pure backstory. To be honest, distilling the Dune series into 90 pages is admirable abridgement, and I read through it and mostly understood what was going on, which stands in sharp contrast to when I watched David Lynch’s adaptation. There is one page within the setting section which I found immensely helpful, which was essentially an alignment of the Dune bibliography to eras of the Imperium’s history. Now, full disclosure, I’ve never read Dune…this does mean that from an accuracy or importance perspective, I’m not necessarily the best judge of this book’s setting section. But, I did come out of the section understanding the setting, understanding the events of Dune, and roughly understanding which books talked about what parts of this history.
If you, like me, are not incredibly familiar with Dune’s setting, this 90 page preface is essentially mandatory. The setting conceits and most of the character conceits are completely entangled within this setting, and while there is some repetition the book is very much structured with the assumption that you will read this section, absorb it, and go into play from there. For better or for worse, once you read this and understand it well enough to make a character, you shouldn’t need to return to it (you may want to, there is a reason Dune is such a successful book and a lot of that is captured in the setting). This does mean that absorbing the setting and absorbing the mechanics are going to be two separate efforts; fortunately the 2d20 system does a great job here of getting out of the way and letting you the player grapple with the fictional, rather than mechanical, choices needed to get the character you want to play.
Characters
Character creation in Adventures in the Imperium is, like other 2d20 titles, relatively straightforward and without much mechanical complexity. Characters are defined first by Skills and Drives. There are five each of Skills and Drives, and the core mechanic of the game is attempting to roll d20s under the sum of an applicable Skill and applicable Drive. Both Skills and Drives are rated from 4 to 8, which give them relatively even mechanical significance (in contrast to another game like Star Trek Adventures, where Attributes peak at 12 while Disciplines only go to 5). The five Skills are Battle, Communicate, Discipline, Move, and Understand. These very broad skills are bulked out by Focuses. Like in other 2d20 games, having an applicable Focus allows you to score a critical (two successes) if a die result is less than your Skill rating. For character creation each character must choose a Primary Skill which gets a rating of 6, and a Secondary Skill which gets a rating of 5. These decisions are aided by Archetypes, one word descriptions for each combination of Skills. As all 20 permutations of Primary/Secondary Skills are granted an archetype, they serve to guide decision making rather than further restrict skill choices. After choosing Primary and Secondary Skills, a player gets five points with which to raise their Skills, though no Skill can be higher than 8.
Drives are interesting. The five Drives, Duty, Faith, Justice, Power, and Truth, represent your character’s value system, and in character creation are assigned in priority order the scores 8, 7, 6, 5, and 4. Additionally, any Drive with a rating of at least 6 (so your three highest starting Drives at character creation) gets a statement which fleshes out how your character views the Drive more specifically. Your highest-rated Drive also defines your character’s Ambition, which is supposed to be a long-term overarching goal. Drives are definitely an unusual way of defining a character, though not a completely unique one; Cortex Prime has a Prime Set that works very much like Drives do here. Drives also end up working nicely for how Conflict is defined in the system, which I’ll discuss in a little bit.
There are a few more things that make up a character. Talents are specific abilities that a character can buy and they work pretty much exactly the same as Talents in other 2d20 games. Traits are situational descriptors, and the two Traits which characters take at character creation are meant to encompass the character’s titles and affiliations (‘Duke of House Atreides’) and their core reputation (‘Just and Wise’), respectively. Mechanically, Traits also apply to scenes as well as characters, much like Fate’s Aspects. More on that later.
The final element of note to characters is Assets. Assets represent things that the characters can call on…gear, vehicles, and money, yes, but also contacts, information, and favors. Assets can work like Traits (more on that in a bit) but also play a key role in how conflicts work in the system, arguably the most interesting part of the game’s mechanics.
Mechanics
As noted above, the core mechanic of the 2d20 system is rolling d20s, at least two but as many as five, and trying to roll ‘successes’ by rolling under the sum of the game’s two core attributes (in Dune, that’s Skills and Drives). There is Momentum, which players can spend to gain extra dice or other effects, and there is Threat, which the GM can spend to make things more complicated and which the players can give the GM to delay the effects of poor rolls. These all carry over across the 2d20 corpus, and as such Seamus’s discussion of Star Trek Adventures, which is grounded in actual play, is likely a better place to learn about the mechanical implications of these meta-currencies. Other than Skill Ratings being higher on average than disciplines (and therefore making foci more valuable), Dune and Star Trek have similar dice math. What they don’t share, though, is much more interesting.
Someone at Modiphius has read a lot of Fate. Traits have a lot of structural similarities to Aspects in Fate, and just like Aspects they apply primarily to characters and situations. Unlike Aspects, though, Traits are more passive. A Trait in a scene has one of four consequences: It makes actions easier, it makes them more difficult, it makes them possible, or it makes them impossible. All 2d20 games use Traits as the representation of situational elements which modify or permission tasks. What makes Adventures in the Imperium so different from, say, Star Trek Adventures is that the Traits have to pull a lot more weight when it comes to describing the character. My Star Trek character, Captain Salok, has one Trait: Vulcan. All the other situational elements of the character, like his rank and role on the ship, are defined outside of this system. In Adventures in the Imperium, there are none of these other identifiers, only the two (three if the character is in a Faction) Traits your character has.
Assets are more interesting still, being a unique element of the system for Adventures in the Imperium. Assets are technically a subset of Traits, and are either tangible, representing actual gear and goods, or intangible, representing information, contacts, or favors. All Assets, though, come into play in Conflicts. Conflicts in this game are also likely inspired by Fate. The GM establishes a number of zones over which the conflict is taking place. When a character has a turn, they can either move an Asset or use an Asset. That’s it. If you’re imagining a knife fight this system lacks subtlety, but it scales upward very elegantly which is what makes it interesting. There are five types of conflicts defined within the game that all use the same basic mechanics: Dueling, Skirmishes, Warfare, Espionage, and Intrigue. All of a sudden it makes perfect sense why a sword and information with blackmail potential are modeled the same way. In order to keep conflicts consistent, the d6-based damage mechanics of other 2d20 games are completely gone. Instead, attacks against major characters are modeled as extended tests, with the number of successes required to win based on the opponent’s relevant Drive. Defeat in these situations once again takes a page from the Fate playbook; the circumstances of the defeat depend on the circumstances of the conflict, but generally speaking defeat need not equal death. That said, you can always spend Momentum to ensure your foe gets a grievous, memorable injury. Each of the five conflict types has its own section within the rules; while they use the same basic mechanics, there are procedures laid out to ensure that a Duel feels different from Intrigue, and that you wouldn’t mistake a Skirmish for Warfare.
Overall, I think Adventures in the Imperium is executed well. I didn’t talk much about the House Creation that comes before Character Creation, but it serves both to get players aligned in the story they’re going to tell as well as shifting them as far away from House Atreides and House Harkonnen as they want to go. That’s always the tough thing about licensed settings; it’s tough to both capture the feel of the setting but also still leave players with a viable game that has enough flexibility to serve most groups.
If anything, Modiphius leaned to the latter side of the equation. There’s tons of material provided here; in addition to the aforementioned setting section, the Assets chapter provides even more grounding to Herbert’s setting through pages and pages of specific weapons, vehicles, and items, as well as character sheets for a number of the books’ key characters. But, even with all the setting material being provided, the game is not tied to anything particularly, uh, Dune-y. While I think the way the setting is presented will satisfy fans, I’m more able to say it also presents a game which will be interesting even if you aren’t coming just for the spice and sandworms. The flip side of this is that I’m not entirely sure what about this game makes it especially Dune. Dune might be the grand-daddy of science fantasy feudal intrigue, but this game is more built around that broader idea of science fantasy feudal intrigue than leaning hard into Arrakis in particular. I personally don’t think this is a bad thing, but I’m also unsure what a Dune fan would want coming into this game and even less sure if they’re going to find it.
As a non-fan, though, I’d say this is a recommend. Modiphius has spun the 2d20 System into domain conflicts and intrigue much more adeptly than I would have thought before reading. The game manages to be relatively light but still generate conflict where it’s needed, and then gives your group the tools to play out that conflict however you see fit. I’m not sure how well the game is bearing the weight of its license, but the fluff-focused summary approach will work better for most gamers and is less likely to draw the ire of any author’s estates as well. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the new Dune movie comes out, but until then, Modiphius is slowly but surely pushing 2d20 into the furthest corners of the Imperium.
Dune: Adventures in the Imperium is available on DriveThruRPG.
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Gamemaster’s Log, Stardate 57252.7. It has been several months since the launch of the New Orleans-class starship U.S.S. Verrazzano, NCC-07302, from the Foggy Peak system. Since that time, I have seen her crew serve with distinction in accordance with the finest traditions of Starfleet. I have also seen them called before a board of Admirals to review their actions and directive violations, and while impressive the fact that no fewer than three starbases have had to be commissioned to deal with the discoveries from their missions is beginning to put a notable dent in the power requirements for the local sector’s industrial replicators. As the Verrazzano is currently away, responding to a distress call from a Vulcan Expeditionary Group, I have decided that this is a fine opportunity to review their so-called ‘Star Trek Adventures’ in-depth, to better understand how they have and will
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Gamemaster’s Log, Stardate 57252.7. It has been several months since the launch of the New Orleans-class starship U.S.S. Verrazzano, NCC-07302, from the Foggy Peak system. Since that time, I have seen her crew serve with distinction in accordance with the finest traditions of Starfleet. I have also seen them called before a board of Admirals to review their actions and directive violations, and while impressive the fact that no fewer than three starbases have had to be commissioned to deal with the discoveries from their missions is beginning to put a notable dent in the power requirements for the local sector’s industrial replicators. As the Verrazzano is currently away, responding to a distress call from a Vulcan Expeditionary Group, I have decided that this is a fine opportunity to review their so-called ‘Star Trek Adventures’ in-depth, to better understand how they have and will continue to boldly go where no one, not even the rest of Starfleet, has gone before.
Characters and Core Mechanics
The most basic mechanic for Star Trek Adventures is this: you’re rolling 2d20, and you’re trying to get results on the individual die that are equal to or lower than a target number. The more results that are equal or lower, the more successes you get, and different actions will require a different number of successes. A task requiring 1 or 2 successes is quite possible, but obviously if you need any more than that you’ll need something special. Enter the crew of your Starfleet vessel. Characters have six Disciplines that represent their specialties in Starfleet (Command, Engineering, Science, etc.) and six Attributes (Fitness, Daring, Insight, etc.) which represent their personal abilities. When you’re facing a task, your target number is determined by a combination of a Discipline and an Attribute: Security+Control to fire a phaser, Conn+Daring to fly a runabout through exploding asteroids, Medicine+Reason to diagnose an alien virus.
Characters are built through a series of stages that gradually build these stats up: species, background (plus whether you accept or reject your upbringing), what branch of Starfleet you go into, and a series of career events like being forced to call out a superior, making scientific breakthroughs, or a conflict with a hostile culture. Along the way they’ll pick up Talents that enhance or grant extra abilities, and Focuses that can (if they can roll underneath their Discipline rank as well as the target number) grant a second success on a check. Characters also define Values, things that they care about and believe. All of the other stuff is about what your character can do; Values are about who your character is. All of this leads to characters that just . . . they just click very easily. Values provide a challenge, as while there is advice on how to create some, they are entirely unique to every character, not picked from a list. But overall creation is simple, and you immediately have a lot to work with mechanically and narratively.
Aboard the Verrazzano, that gets us the Vulcan Captain Salok, forced to take command, who focuses on Diplomacy with a firm belief that Diversity Is Strength. His first officer, the Gnalish Commander Korg, strives to Defend and Aid Those In Danger or Need and is a known friend to the Klingons. Lt. Commander Flint Northrock’s file is mostly redacted, but he is a particularly Bold helmsman: “My answer to any distress call is “’I’m Coming’”. Lt. Commander Be’zur is the ship’s Chief Engineer, a Liberated Caitian Borg with a knack for Improvised Technology, a talent for pushing things Past the Redline, and a conviction that There’s No Such Thing as The Unknown, Only the Temporarily Hidden. Lieutenant, later Lt. Commander, Ava is a sliver of an extra-dimensional being; naturally, he serves as the Science Officer with A Mind for Design and Insatiable Curiosity about the universe he finds himself in. The Bajoran Lieutenant (j.g.) Edon Reil might be a relatively young officer but he has Untapped Potential, and serves as a fine Chief of Security: “Beware invaders calling themselves ‘friend’”.
Here’s something to consider, especially if you’ve been playing games that are more hardscrabble: STA characters can be extremely competent in their particular area of expertise. It’s certainly possible to build something akin to a generalist, but given that characters are naturally going to gravitate towards certain roles (the Captain, the Chief Engineer, the Science Officer) it’s very easy for them to have a target of 17 or so for their primary focus (5 in Science and 12 in Reason for the Science Officer, for example). Speaking of Focuses, if chosen well there are plenty of opportunities for them to come into play, offering multiple successes on a die. As I’ll address shortly, there are multiple ways to roll 3 or even 4d20 just on your own, as well as a way to automatically get at least two successes. Other characters can assist you, and if you’re on your starship it usually contributes another d20 to the pile as well.
Some actions are going to be impossible, and you’ll need to create an advantage to make them something you can actually achieve. I’ve read the number of successes called out as being impossible as five, though, and that’s . . . not really the case. Seeing six, seven, and even eight successes hit the table isn’t common, but it’s not all that rare either. So, a minor but important point, while needing 4 successes is probably still a good high-water mark, I would keep the reason for a task being impossible as purely narrative.
So, in short, this is not a game with an awful lot of failure, further reinforced by the fact that you can Succeed At A Cost, with ‘failing forward’ actually being built into the mechanics outright. STA is more about characters figuring out what needs to be done and how they want to do it than whether or not they’re going to succeed, followed by the consequences of their actions (even if they succeed) as further enabled by the aforementioned costs and Complications. On the one hand, GMs shouldn’t be too concerned if things seem ‘too easy’ for their players at first blush. On the other, well, a few things: don’t be afraid to ask for three or four successes on really difficult and important stuff, you can get a little extra challenge by throwing things slightly out of a character’s area of expertise at them, and when failures do come up they need to matter. When Northrock (who includes among his Values ‘The Best Way to Defeat An Enemy Is To Make A Friend”’) failed to resist the impassioned plea of an oppressed species convincing him that patience and diplomacy would not work, that he would have to violate the Prime Directive, that needed to have an impact. It actually kicked off a small not-mutiny, actually, along with a few other consequences that I’ll get to use as examples later.
Meta Latinum
There are three types of metacurrencies in Star Trek Adventures: Momentum, Threat, and Determination.
Momentum is a player resource, gained via extra successes – 3 successes on a Difficulty 2 check, you get 1 Momentum. Momentum has a lot of uses. When used immediately it can be used to boost attacks by doing more damage, ignoring Resistance, or activating weapon traits. It can be used to create Advantages that can make future tasks easier or impossible tasks possible. In my experience it is most commonly used immediately to Gain More Information, a key use that often sees characters diving past their basic observations to really discover what’s going on or what they’re dealing with. If not spent immediately, however, points of Momentum go into a pool; they can be used in several ways once there, but by far their most common use is buying more dice to roll for a check. A 3rd d20 costs one Momentum, a 4th one costs two.
Threat is primarily a GM resource, and in several ways it mirrors Momentum. It can be used for adversaries rolling extra dice, it can make attacks lethal (by default they are not), it can make tasks more difficult or increase the chance of a Complication (something Bad that usually only happens if a character rolls a 20 on a die). With enough Threat in their pool GMs can even end scenes entirely and take narrative control, which strongly reminds me of the Doom Pool from Cortex games.
GMs begin every mission with twice as many points of threat as there are players, which is good, because in my experience you’re not likely going to get too many more. There are a couple ways to add more Threat, but the only one that doesn’t require a specific circumstance is that player characters can also use Threat by choosing to give it to the GM instead of spending Momentum at the same rates. That’s great, because it gives the GM more to play with and gives the players options if they run out of Momentum. Honestly, though, it doesn’t seem to happen very often. A large part of this is certainly biased in this specific campaign by the luck of the dice and the characters themselves. The Verrazzano crew have often been able to generate more than enough Momentum for their needs, rarely running completely out. Also, the entire line of Bold Talents, which let you re-roll dice if you have used Threat to enhance the roll, are designed to be a big motivator for Threat use – but only Northrock and Reil have any of them, and they both have only the Conn variety. So, you might find yourself with players giving you oodles of Threat . . . just be prepared to use what you get at the start of a mission carefully, if you don’t.
The final metacurrency is Determination, and it’s the big one. Every character starts a mission with at least one, and it is deeply tied to the character’s Values: if they are acting in accordance with a Value, a character can spend a point of Determination to add a die to their roll that is automatically set to a result of 1, meaning an automatic two successes towards the roll. Note that this still counts as adding a die a la Momentum/Threat, in that if you want a 4th die you’ll need two points of those other resources, but still! Alternate uses of Determination still require you to be acting in accordance with a Value, but include: re-rolling all your dice, immediately taking another action on the same turn, and automatically creating an advantage.
You can get more points of Determination if you challenge a Value, meaning your character is having a big think about whether or not they actually believe that any more. You can also be offered Determination by the GM to compel you to act in line with a Value when it would make things more difficult for you, which reads an awful lot like Fate points. Determination isn’t just a big deal because of the mechanical impact, although that can’t be undervalued either. But since Determination, whether spending it or gaining it, plugs into your Values it is often a very important factor in your characters ‘leveling up’.
Advancement
‘Milestones’ are the method of advancement in STA, and there are only three ways to get them: suffering (and surviving, obviously) a lethal injury, challenging a Value (thus getting a point of Determination), and using a Value either positively or negatively (meaning you either spent or received a point of Determination while acting upon it). You get a ‘Normal’ Milestone for just doing one of the above during a mission. The GM can award a ‘Spotlight’ milestone if a character or characters would earn a Normal Milestone and also made a particularly big impact in a mission, and the players decide who among them receive it. Eventually, you acquire enough Spotlight Milestones that your next one is an ‘Arc’ Milestone instead (or, if the GM feels it appropriate given the character’s actual narrative arc, they can award one out of hand). Here’s the thing, though: the Arc Milestone is the only one that actually adds anything to a character.
With a Normal Milestone, first of all, if a Value was challenged it gets rewritten or replaced to reflect how the character’s perspective was changed. After being forced to realize that “The Best Way to Defeat An Enemy Is To Make A Friend” would not always be the case, and subsequently getting in a fair bit of trouble for acting as such, Northrock reaffirmed his commitment to the crew and to following Salok’s lead instead of going off on his own: “When The Way Is Unclear, I Follow My Captain.” Aside from that very cool and dramatic and character-growth-driven aspect, though, Normal Milestones are very light: you can move a point from one Discipline to another, or replace one Focus with another. Spotlight Milestones let you pick one of the options from the short list of the Normal Milestone’s, as well as one of several others: moving points between Attributes, replacing a Talent, moving points between the ship’s Departments or Systems (Discipline and Attribute counterparts, really), or replacing the ship’s Talents. Arc Milestones grant the benefits of a Normal and a Spotlight Milestone, but are the advancement that finally lets you increase a Discipline or Attribute, gain an additional Talent, Focus, or Value, increase one of the ship’s Departments/Systems, or add another Talent to the ship.
As mentioned above, STA player characters are probably starting off as very competent just based on stats, never mind what their Talents can bring to the table, so they don’t really need to be growing mechanically all that much. What’s really important to this system is how their Values, what they care about and who they really are, are highlighted, are challenged, are grown and changed. Changing up Attributes, Disciplines, Talents, and Focuses also reflects this choice of priority – a Captain who starts to take more of an interest in what’s going on down in the warp core while leaving the navigation of the ship up to their hot-shot helmsman might shift a point from Conn to Engineering.
So far, they seem to be working just fine. Captain Salok and Lt. Commanders Northrock and Ava are both on the cusp of their first Arc Milestone as of this writing, and given how competent the characters are nobody seems to be minding that they haven’t been ‘gaining’ anything, and there have been comments that they like the idea of switching things around to better match the character – it’s true that you’ll certainly never have a dead-end Talent or Focus for very long.
I’ll admit that awarding the Spotlights has felt . . . a little anemic on the GM’s side of things. The book recommends giving out a single one every two or three sessions, but these are players and characters who have really taken the ‘Go Boldly’ thing to heart. Salok ‘crushed’ a mutiny with little more than an iron will and by convincing the mutineers that a starship takes many to succeed but only one to fail. Northrock took command of an absolute disaster involving a wormhole, a shapeshifter, friendly fire, and a dying ship and somehow got everyone out alive. Ava solved an astrogation and physics problem that had confounded Starfleet for decades, and then went on to help establish a stable wormhole to another universe. Be’zur’s technological monstrosities have caused me to throw out more notes and plans than any two other characters combined. Korg and Reil have both been responsible for saving the lives of their crewmates from certain death or worse, whether it was a rampaging tentacular plant unleashed from the Verrazzano’s labs, Orion raiders trying to steal an artifact powered by time, or a desperate and murderous Starfleet doctor gone rogue.
So, in short, I’m probably awarding Spotlights a little more frequently than the book would like me to, every other session at least, and I’m often throwing two out at once. Since Normal and Spotlight Milestone benefits can be banked for later, the system certainly doesn’t seem to be breaking as a result. If it were a longer, slower-burn campaign I might stick closer to the book’s recommendations but to be honest I think that, as with determining if a task is impossible, you’re best served by ignoring hard numbers and focusing on the narrative.
Support Characters
If there is any one mechanic that has been a runaway hit during the campaign, this has been the one. Supporting characters are the ‘extras’ on set, the people in the background of the show that only get speaking roles every few episodes, if ever. Star Trek Adventures lets you bring those characters into the spotlight by spending points of Crew Support – every ship gets an amount that is determined by how big the ship is, and then player characters can each take a talent to get more, which two Verrazzano crew members did. Broadly speaking there are two reasons to play a Supporting character. First, because they cover a skillset that the main player characters lack. This was the case of Lt. Gunther von Doomstone, the Chief Medical Officer, and Lt. Khumail Jaosh, the transport chief. The second is when it doesn’t make sense for a player character to be present, such as on away missions, but the player still wants to be a part of the scene. This was the case for Lt. Joran Mal, a Joined Trill diplomat, when Captain Salok had to remain behind on the ship. Sometimes it’s both. Cadet Groorin, part of the second wave of Ferengi following in Nog’s footsteps, appeared when the players decided Joran needed an assistant to deal with an upcoming legal tribunal, but really got played when Lt. Commander Northrock was stuck at the helm and there was a Ferengi away team to negotiate with.
I suppose there’s also a third reason, which is because you have a cool character idea you wanted to include. Lt. Jurling, Klingon Ship’s Counselor (“It is a good day for conflict resolution!”), was added to the crew to cover that role, yes, but mostly because I wanted him to be there. Consider it my payment for running the game.
Supporting characters start off comparatively light – their highest Attribute will be a 10, their best Discipline a 4, with three Focuses but no Talents or Values. Supporting characters don’t gain milestones themselves, although a player character can choose to use the benefit of one of their own milestones to switch things around for a supporting character. Instead, Supporting characters improve by the number of missions they appear in through the use of Crew Support – every time they show up they gain something, and while they still have lower caps (they can only ever improve a Discipline once, for example), they can still end up fleshed out quite a bit. Funnily enough, Supporting characters are thus going to ‘advance’ at a much faster rate than player characters will, which can help scratch the itch a little for those players who enjoy getting mechanical rewards.
Supporting characters are . . . kind of strange, in terms of gameplay and narrative. First of all, for groups with a lot of players they’ll end up taking up most of the NPC slots left on the ship – that hasn’t stopped me from making more NPCs, but it has felt a little odd to jump into a Supporting Character now and then as the GM.
They’re also supposed to be supporting characters but in many cases they’ve been in the spotlight just as much, if not more than, the ‘main’ characters, and some of them are quite beloved. Like any character, you end up wanting to make them interesting, and together we have. Doctor von Doomstone is from a planet that would have featured in a TOS Planet of Hats episode, a Frankenstein setting, and he’s trying to avoid going down the mad science path of his ancestors. Jurling has a reputation for unconventional ‘team building exercises’, a love of Klingon opera that’s shared with Commander Korg, and a genuine care for his patients. Joran quickly gained a reputation for being in over his head and soldiering on anyway, surrounded by literal piles of PADDS and joining the Captain in his coffee habit while reviewing First Contact protocols.
I wonder at what point you might just give up the charade and make them main characters in their own right with storylines of their own, capable of gaining milestones for themselves and surpassing the limitations of a supporting character. Perhaps a player could have multiple full characters (while many are shared, I’ve noticed some support characters functionally ‘belonging’ to a single player), or perhaps the ‘upgraded’ characters could remain in a pool for troupe play, which would keep the pool of Crew Support fully functional.
Supporting characters as a concept have also highlighted for me the need to have time spent back on the ship and in the ready room, for the simple reason that the Captain just doesn’t leave the ship very often. In terms of ‘screen time’, Aaron has spent more time portraying Lieutenants Joran and Jurling than he has Captain Salok, and yet the Captain has still managed to net himself some Spotlight Milestones, primarily on the bridge and in the aforementioned ready room.
Material to Work With
Star Trek Adventures is extremely well-supported. Since release there has been a unique book for all of the galaxy’s quadrants, another one each for Command, Operations, and Science, two full mission anthologies, character profiles for a bunch of the shows so you can play as/interact with them, and a whole bunch of standalone missions. This is on top of the free Quickstart, the free character sheets, and the free character builder (which incorporates player character creation, supporting character creation, and starship creation material from pretty much everything I’ve already mentioned, it’s a fantastic resource). There’s also a Klingon core book which I haven’t even touched yet. You’re not exactly going to run out of reading material very quickly, is what I’m saying.
I want to particularly focus on the pre-made missions, however, for the simple reason that – with a single exception – my campaign has consisted entirely of them. This is a symptom of the fact that the U.S.S. Verrazzano was sort of rushed into service, as it were – I put Star Trek Adventures up as an option to run for a short campaign because I owned it and thought it might be interesting, but I didn’t picture it as a front runner and I didn’t expect it to catch quite as well as it has. It’s still going to be short, as campaigns in this group are reckoned lately, but still: suddenly I was running a game and had exactly zero material prepped or even ideas solidifying. So, I turned to the mission files.
So far I’ve run Nest In The Dark, Stolen Liberty, The Prize, and A World With A Bluer Sun. I’ve got two more queued up at the moment, but I won’t say which because there are players lurking about. Through these missions the crew of the Verrazzano have struggled through time dilation, radiation bursts, disruptor fire, crushing gravity, and interdimensional phenomena. They’ve been forced to face intelligences vastly superior to their own, weigh the oppression of an entire species against the Prime Directive, race against archeological poachers, and navigate the factions of a Starfleet crew turned on itself. So there’s the first thing I’ll say about the pre-made missions Modiphius has put out: oh my goodness there is a lot of variety. Not every mission will fit every crew, but many will, and aside from a certain predilection towards First Contact scenarios (come on, it’s Trek, duh) the Verrazzano has never really faced the same problem twice.
One additional good thing is that many of these missions could be used as a launching point for further adventures. Every one ends with a ‘Continuing Voyages’ section that highlights how a crew could follow up on the events of the mission or how said events could otherwise impact the campaign. I haven’t been able to take advantage of many of these yet, but there have been a few new crewmembers of a sort added to the ship’s roster as a result. More dramatically the events of Stolen Liberty saw Salok, Korg, Northrock, and Be’zur having a chat with some Admirals about the Prime Directive and their viability as a command team while Ava took command of the ship to chart a cataclysmic nebula (and blow some Jem’Hadar holdouts out of space, although they didn’t know that going in), the only non-pre-made mission so far.
A nebulous thing is that the missions are always written with a specific era (ENT, TOS, or TNG) in mind. They also always have advice for running the mission in a different era, which usually involves switching out who the bad guy is – if the Borg are the threat for a TNG mission then it’s probably the Klingons for a TOS crew or the Andorians for the ENT crowd. I’ve been able to put that advice to good use for several of the missions, but . . . there are also a few that don’t quite fit right, for me. A TOS mission that’s a little too Those Old Scientists, a little over the top with giant rock monsters for a TNG feel, or the TNG tech is just too necessary to solve the problems facing an ENT crew. In the anthologies, that’s not so big a deal since there’s something for everyone, but you might want to read up on a one-off mission carefully before purchase to see if it’ll work for you.
Some of that actually falls to layout – there are some TOS missions that are done up in a completely different style from the core book and the other missions, and maybe it’s silly but that just makes it harder for me to think about transplanting those specific missions over for the Verrazzano. That leads into another thing: sometimes there are some editing flubs. Missions are sometimes written out with a very specific series of events in mind, or don’t quite explain why certain events happen the way they do, and neither is the kind of thing that can survive contact with players. This is old advice, but if you’re running one of these pre-made adventures, you’re going to want to have read the whole thing, and you’ll want to be ready to throw the rails out the torpedo tubes.
One final thing about the actual material: thank the stars for whoever created the index in the core rulebook. It’s comprehensive and well-organized, making it easy to find whatever you need . . . and without it the book may have just been unreadable. It is crowded in there, there is practically no negative space of any kind, every spare inch has been packed with art or console designs or words and words and more words. There is a lot here, and reading it straight cover to cover would take forever. Remember that this campaign went from an option in a poll to an active game very, very quickly, we’ve all been learning the system as we go (partially why I think writing about it has some value, to be honest), and without the index allowing us to flip to where we need to I know I at least would’ve been completely lost.
Everything Else, And Final Thoughts
So what are all those words about? We’ve covered the basic mechanics, advancement, supporting characters, none of which are particularly thorny, what else is there? Well, of course there’s a fair bit of space spent on listing individual talents and such, ships the crew can serve on, planets they could visit, GMing advice . . . but there are also a lot of other actual mechanics that are way more situational. There’s an entire reputation system, tied to rank, privilege, and responsibility. There are mechanics for extended tasks that might be the focus of an entire mission, and slightly different ones for when a crew is applying the scientific method (which is how Ava solved the nebula charting problem). Then there’s the ship, with its many different stations, it’s Power resource that needs to be managed, the various systems and the myriad, unique, and advancing things that happen to each and every single one of them if they happen to be the one hit when the shields get breached.
The core mechanics? Pretty straightforward! All these other bits? A fair degree more fiddly, and they might not show up every session. Every other mechanic adds more complexity, triggers more page-flipping (there’s the index saving the day, again). By no means does it jam up the works like, say, Shadowrun’s many many subsystems. But we got the knack of the basics very very quickly; going into our eighth session, there’s still a fair bit of rust on the others. Given more time that would probably go away, but only if we spend the time to focus on those systems, and in some cases I don’t see it happening.
In checking in with the players about how they felt about the system, Aaron managed to sum it up the best way, which I’ll use here. The group has dealt with games where the system got in the way for us, like Exalted Second Edition. When we tapped into the Powered by the Apocalypse ruleset, we found that the system actively helped us. Star Trek Adventures is in the middle.
It handed us the basic toolset and then has mostly stayed out of our way, piping up from the back of the crowd when it’s needed. It demands very little in terms of mechanical understanding on a task to task basis, but wants you to pay more attention when certain situations crop up. What it really wants is for you to have good, strong Values that your characters can believe in and challenge and change; everything else (you might note that the Gnalish species isn’t RPG-official, and Ava’s existence as an extra-dimensional avatar is original to us as well) can be tweaked, but that one is non-negotiable. That being the case, it’s really the players who are going to bring what’s truly necessary for Star Trek Adventures to function the way it wants to.
Star Trek is, primarily, a television series. It can do novels and comics, it can do big movies and long-running arcs, but it’s always eventually returned to a weekly format, and the heaping majority of that is episodic in nature. Look, I’ve tried the episodic thing in a bunch of different games, every time it gets a bare handful of ‘episodes’ in before one plot or another gets too complex and grabs the controls and takes off. Star Trek Adventures, like Star Trek at large, certainly could manage a blockbuster event, or a Dominion or Burn-style long arc, but it sings as an episodic game, and I think that’s because the game trusts its players to bring what they know and love of Trek to the table and fly “second star to the right — and straight on ’til morning.”
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Imagine for a moment that you’re back in May of 2017. Cannibal Halfling is six months old, and I’m still tagging all of my articles “Level One Wonk” because I felt more like a guest writer than a co-founder. I hadn’t started doing regular coverage of Kickstarter campaigns yet, so one week I decided to write an article about one that excited me: Cortex Prime. The campaign was about halfway over when the article was published, and I said some enthusiastic and somewhat hyperbolic things, like how Cortex Prime would be the next big thing after PbtA. What I’m trying to say is that I jinxed it. Cam, I’m so, so sorry.
Joking aside, this week is a special week for all of us who backed the Cortex Prime Kickstarter back in May of 2017: As of yesterday (October 20, 2020), Cortex Prime is done, it’s released, the campaign is actually over. After a number of roadblocks and obstacles, we have books in our hands and the game is actually on sale. And you know what? It was worth it. Like many other backers, I was already familiar with the Cortex system and its potential; in my case it was from Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. What Cortex Prime does is take that system and turn it into an immensely powerful toolbox, laying all the switches and dials bare in a way that GMs can actually use.
What gets me more excited about Cortex Prime than other contemporary generic RPGs is that Cortex Prime stands head and shoulders above them in terms of being a useful technical document. There are two broad shortcomings that almost every generic RPG falls into: Some, like Savage Worlds and Genesys, are not particularly more hackable than any other RPG and end up feeling like games that the setting was cut out of (which, in both of those cases, is technically true). Others, like Fate and GURPS, provide such an overwhelming amount of flexibility that entire supplements are written just about how to set them up. Cortex Prime almost falls into the latter category, but escapes it by virtue of clear writing, excellent layout, and more, better worked examples than are available in the core rulebooks of any of the above four games. What should be made clear, though, is that Cortex Prime is a toolkit, more the spiritual successor to the Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide than any of the Cortex-based games. As much as I’m enthusiastic about this game and this book, if you’re looking specifically for a fully realized setting or consider that integral to your enjoyment of RPGs you’re probably going to be a bit disappointed.
The Basics
Cortex is at its core a ‘roll and keep’ dice mechanic. For any challenge the player assembles a dice pool of around three dice, rolls them, and keeps the highest two results. Depending on which of your character’s traits are relevant to the roll, you could be rolling d4s, d6s, d8s, d10s, or d12s, with d6 being average, larger dice being better, and d4 being much less good, especially considering the high probability of rolling a 1. All dice rolls are opposed rolls; the base dice pool that the GM rolls is two dice whose size vary depending on the difficulty of the task.
There are two other mechanics which depend on the die results. First is the Effect Die. Once a player chooses the two dice they wish to keep, they choose the largest remaining die to be an Effect Die. The Effect Die determines the impact of certain dice rolls, and is dependent on the size (rather than result) of the chosen die. This does mean that it might sometimes be advantageous to choose a lower absolute result (provided it still meets the threshold for success) if it produces a larger Effect Die. Second result-based mechanic is the Hitch. A Hitch occurs when a player rolls a 1 on one of their dice. A die showing a one cannot be chosen for results or for the Effect Die. While there are no direct consequences beyond that for rolling a one (only rolling all 1s is considered a critical failure and is called a Botch), the GM may choose to spend that 1 on the roll to create a Complication. Complications, and their positive counterparts Assets, represent circumstances or items that exist in a scene, much like Aspects in Fate. A GM can add the die value of a relevant Complication to the dice pool that opposes a character’s roll, while the player can do the opposite with a relevant Asset. When a character creates an Asset, they may use the Effect Die to determine its die size and therefore its impact on the scene. The other core mechanic of note is the Plot Point System. Each player starts play with a Plot Point, and when the GM activates a Complication from a player rolling a 1, they also give that player a Plot Point. Plot Points can be spent on activating abilities, counting more dice in rolls, and preventing a character from being Taken Out of a Conflict. As more options are defined, so too are more ways to earn and spend Plot Points.
That is, to say the least, a whirlwind tour around the Cortex mechanics. I haven’t gone deep, and haven’t even begun to get into how these dice pools are actually generated, save the basics of Assets and Complications. The issue with trying to explain many basic parts of Cortex Prime, like character creation, is that they are dependent on the options that are available and will look a bit different, at least at a summary level, depending on what you’re trying to play.
The Options
The Cortex Prime book is intended towards those who will be running games, and for that reason it’s laid out a bit like a menu. Although the first 45 pages are about the ‘core rules’, after the initial 8 page primer those core rules are already full of rules mods, reducing the linearity of the chapter. There are five mods for tests/contests, eight mods for Plot Points, and five mods for Assets and Complications. That’s eighteen mods for the ‘core rules’, and it goes without saying that the mods and options for character definition and scene management are even more expansive.
Characters are defined by Traits, and the Traits that are chosen at character creation are divided into Prime Sets. These range from Attributes and Skills, which should be familiar to any gamer, to Affiliations, Powers, and Reputations, which assign die values to the size group your character works best in, chosen superhuman powers, and how well your character gets on in certain social circles, respectively. These choices are somewhat akin to choosing between Fate Core and Fate Accelerated, between Skills and Approaches, but there is significantly more granularity here. Beyond which Prime Sets you choose, the nature of the Prime Sets is incredibly customizable. If you were to use Attributes in your game, there’s a default list of three (Physical, Mental, Social), but you could easily expand that to D&D-standard six. While there’s a default skill list, you can change it as much as you want, and there’s guidance in the book on how to write skill lists with different intents as well as how to use a number of mods around skill specializations, rank structures, and role-defined skills.
All these Traits can be modified further, most notably with SFX. SFX detail specific pairs of costs and benefits which bring more granularity to traits; though they’re essential for certain Traits like Powers they can go with any Prime Set if that Prime Set is centrally important to defining characters in your game. While there are a number of costs and benefits from which SFX can be written, the central purpose of SFX in a game is to flesh out how Plot Points are spent and earned. The default SFX, Hinder, provides another way of earning plot points (the benefit) by allowing a character to bring the die for the associated trait down to a d4 (the cost). While the SFX attached to Attributes or Skills may be character-focused or situational, the SFX attached to Powers and Abilities are core to how they work; as such the book has more detailed lists of Powers, Abilities, and their attendant SFX in an appendix.
The options expand again when you get into running scenes and campaigns. While there doesn’t need to be a lot distinguishing combat from other contests, there are a number of mods encompassing initiative, hit points, Fate-like stress tracks, and anything else you can imagine to gamify your conflict experience. Similarly, the base advancement mechanic measures only sessions that have passed, but mods can get you Technoir-like stress-based advancement or Burning Wheel-like Belief mechanics if that’s the way you want to go.
One other interesting thing hidden in the various and sundry options is that it’s made clear that Cortex has been a game of evolution. Options from Cortex Classic are highlighted in certain places, likely because they’re a bit different from the way either Cortex Plus or Cortex Prime is structured. What these options are is enlightening: Cortex Classic was built around more classic hit point and initiative structures, and the game system as a whole moved away from these structures as it became clearer that they were neither complementary nor necessary. While there might be a hidden lesson in this, what we the readers benefit from is the choice to either go more modern or D&D-adjacent, losing nothing in the choice thanks to the game’s adaptability.
The Implications
So we have another generic RPG on the scene. It’s good, but why do I love it so much? The reason I’m such a fan of Cortex Prime, the reason I feel like it was written for me and how I run games, is that it’s written like a toolkit and with the intent of being used like a toolkit. All the core mechanics are there, all the optional rules are there, and they’re all clearly marked. Everything is explained and there are examples. There are either rules of thumb or meta-rules around how to build your chosen game. If you have a question about how to do something or why something came out the way it did, there’s likely an answer. I was at one point asked what Genesys could do to be a better generic RPG and the answer is, simply, this. Genesys didn’t come close to the utility in Cortex Prime until the Expanded Player’s Guide came out, and still it’s painfully clear that the intent of Genesys is just to make you use the published settings. With Cortex Prime, everything’s there to help you. It’s better technical guidance than Fate (which did get a lot better with supplements, the System Toolkits) and it’s a lot more concise than GURPS (which needed a supplement to explain all the supplements). There are drawbacks to this, especially if you’re just looking for a game to pick up. The organization of Cortex Prime is aimed at players for 8 pages and GMs for the rest, because the book is not a playable game out of the box…it’s even less of a playable game out of the box than Fate or GURPS. This is not a flaw, mind you…but it needs to be understood, because it should structure how GMs use the rules in the book to construct their games. The three settings in the book, in addition to being excellent worked examples of how to set up the game, are excellent examples of how the GM should present the game to their players. If you want to see what I mean, the Hammerheads setting is complete and playable right now, and is available to check out for free.
What makes Cortex Prime so good to me is that it is one of the few examples of a product which has learned from how people actually play and buy RPGs, especially setting-agnostic RPGs. The GM is the book’s audience, the GM wants to know how to run what they want and how to present it to their players. The GM may be the only person in the group who will buy the book. The players will read as little as possible to understand how to play the game, so it is more useful to equip the GM to write their own summary than it is to have an expansive player-facing section. Certain Agendas and Principles work as well for the game document as they do the GM. Structure any discussion of rules variants in such a way that you “Tell the Consequences and Ask”. Provide enough examples and discussion of how mechanics and variants work, but “Draw Maps, Leave Blanks” when it comes to the full breadth of possibility. And finally, “Be a Fan of the Characters” and make it clear that there’s no one right way to play with such a large palette. Cortex Prime may be the culmination of over 20 years of game development, but it’s clear that some big lessons have been picked up along the way.
Cortex Prime has been sent to distributors, and will be available at a game store near you soon. Cortex Prime is available to purchase online at cortexrpg.com.
Header image by Natalia Bacetti, from the Cortex Prime gamebook.
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A Captain who finds profit in intangible ways and sees everyone as a potential asset.. A helmsman who pilots a Miranda-class like an attack fighter, and who learned all the wrong lessons from human engineers. An Operations Manager determined to make her mark and willing to shred the manual to do so. A Security Chief with a mostly-repaired chip on her shoulder trying to adjust to peace. A Ship Counselor who helps his patients face their issues head on – sometimes with a well-placed strike of the head ridges. We’re boldly going where no Meet the Party has gone before, with the ready-to-play crew of the U.S.S. Crimea (along with the ship herself) for Star Trek Adventures from Modiphius Entertainment!
You can thank your fellow readers for this one! Reader Takeshi Yamato asked if we could do a Star Trek Adventures Meet the Party, and then the funds raised by our affiliation with DriveThruRPG let us
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A Captain who finds profit in intangible ways and sees everyone as a potential asset.. A helmsman who pilots a Miranda-class like an attack fighter, and who learned all the wrong lessons from human engineers. An Operations Manager determined to make her mark and willing to shred the manual to do so. A Security Chief with a mostly-repaired chip on her shoulder trying to adjust to peace. A Ship Counselor who helps his patients face their issues head on – sometimes with a well-placed strike of the head ridges. We’re boldly going where no Meet the Party has gone before, with the ready-to-play crew of the U.S.S. Crimea (along with the ship herself) for Star Trek Adventures from Modiphius Entertainment!
You can thank your fellow readers for this one! Reader Takeshi Yamato asked if we could do a Star Trek Adventures Meet the Party, and then the funds raised by our affiliation with DriveThruRPG let us purchase the core rulebook. In the spirit of the Federation, this was much more of a CHG group project than the usual Meet the Party. Aaron, Aki, and Geni all chipped in during the brainstorming sessions, contributing character ideas, names, and ship-wide concepts. Aki even wrote up one of the characters, Lt. Los Jaro! In short, this was a lot of fun, so thanks to Takeshi and our other supporters for putting this one on our docket.
One we got our hands on the character generator and discovered that a lot of ‘non-standard’ species were nevertheless available for use, we quickly hit on the idea of a crew of misfits that didn’t quite fit neatly into standard Starfleet protocol. While they ended up being a pretty competent looking crew, that original idea of Starfleet command feeling more comfortable with these officers being sent off on their own stuck through. So, five to beam up to the U.S.S. Crimea: a Ferengi Captain, Bajoran Flight Controller, Human Operations Manager, Trill Security Chief, and Klingon Ship Counselor!
Career Events: Required to Take Command, Negotiate A Treaty
Attributes
Control: 10 Fitness: 7 Presence: 10
Daring: 10 Insight: 10 Reason: 9
Disciplines
Command: 5 Security: 2 Science: 3
Conn: 1 Engineering: 3 Medicine: 2
Focuses: Logistics, Inspiration, Persuasion, Team Dynamics, Lead by Example, Diplomacy
Values: A Varied Client Base Means A Thriving Economy, Enemies Are Potential Clients, Subordinates Are Assets, Sacrifice Isn’t Profit But It Does Pay Forward
Talents: Dauntless, Supervisor, Defuse the Tension, Bold: Command
Captain Groorin combines Ferengi cunning with the leadership tradition of Starfleet. Dauntless helps the Captain resists being intimidated or giving into threats, while Defuse the Tension adds a bonus d20 when trying to prevent violence from breaking out. Supervisor increases the ship’s Crew Support, and Bold: Command lets Groorin reroll a d20 when buying more by adding to Threat.
Los Jaro brings the boldness of youth and hotshot flying skills to the Crimea. Orb Experience keeps his We Belong Among The Stars! Value in play longer, while Untapped Potential lets him potentially gain more Momentum. Bold: Conn lets Los reroll a d20 when buying more by adding to Threat, and Technical Expertise allows for a reroll when using the ship’s Computers or Sensors.
Values: Nobody Got Famous Following A Textbook, New Things Are The Spice Of Life, Knowledge Is Power, Take Care Of The Ship And She’ll Take Care Of You
Talents: Spirit of Discovery, Resolute, A Little More Power, Jury Rig
Tala Navarro is the worst stereotype (according to certain societies of the galaxy) of human engineering and science, which makes her the best possible Operations Manager for the Crimea. A Little More Power lets Tala spend a Momentum on a successful Engineering check to regain a spent Power, and Jury Rig lets her slap together emergency repairs. Spirit of Discovery allows Tala allows to spend one Determination to add three group Momentum, and Resolute increased her maximum Stress.
Audrid Nedan is the strong arm protecting the crew of the Crimea. While not Joined, Former Initiate lets her reroll the entire dice pool for Control and Reason checks if she spent Determination on it. Quick to Action ignores the cost to Retain the Initiative during the first round of a combat, Pack Tactics grants a Momentum to characters Audrid assists in a fight, and Bold: Security lets her reroll a d20 when buying more by adding to Threat.
Commander Jurling, Son of Klesso
Species: Klingon
Environment: Another World (Betazoid) Upbringing: Diplomacy/Politics (A)
Assignment: Ship’s Counselor
Traits: Klingon Stress: 11
Career Events: First Contact, Lauded By Another Culture
Jurling, Son of Klesso, takes the fight to the crew’s inner demons, the negotiating table, and anybody else who causes the crew trouble. Bold: Medicine lets Groorin reroll a d20 when buying more by adding to Threat, Studious grants an additional question when using Momentum to Obtain Information, and Quick Study ignores difficulty increases for unfamiliar medical procedures or unfamiliar species. If all else fails, though, Jurling’s Mean Right Hook adds Vicious 1 to the Klingon’s unarmed strike.
U.S.S. Crimea
Space Frame: Miranda Designation: NC-12116
Service Date: 2377 Refits: 10
Mission Profile: Scientific and Survey Operations
Traits: Federation Starship, Long-Serving, Quirky
Power: 10 Shields: 11
Scale: 4 Resistance: 4
Crew Support: 5
Systems
Engines: 10 Computers: 10 Weapons: 10
Structure: 10 Sensors: 11 Communications: 9
Departments
Command: 3 Security: 1 Science: 4
Conn: 3 Engineering: 2 Medicine: 2
Talents: Extensive Shuttlebays, Advanced Sensor Suites, Diplomatic Suites, Improved Reaction Control System
The Crimea has served for roughly a century, but while she’s old she’s still got a lot to offer. Her refits have kept her in shape, although she’s prone to some technological quirks that make Commander Navarro’s life interesting. The Advanced Sensor Suites give her sharp eyes, the Diplomatic Suites give Captain Groorin and Commander Jurling a place to treat with civilizations the crew encounter beyond the frontier, and the Improved Reaction Control System lets Lt. Jaro fly her like an attack fighter.
Who They Are
Groorin wasn’t able to be a ‘proper Ferengi’; profit in the traditional sense wasn’t something that was attainable. The word of the first Ferengi to join Starfleet spread quickly, however, and Groorin saw an opportunity that couldn’t be passed up. A smuggler got Groorin off of Ferenginar and as far as Earth, where a monumental effort was made to gain admission to Starfleet Academy. Groorin succeeded, and became the second Ferengi to attend. Even being on Earth, and even considering the changes occurring back home, it took some time for Groorin to ditch the subterfuge and be recognized as the first female Ferengi in Starfleet.
Despite the lack of currency in the Federation, Groorin applied the philosophy of the Great Material Continuum to her studies in the Command track. Profit and Assets did not have to be restricted to latinum; the Federation’s ability to prosper without it proved that. While her way of thinking is thought of as odd by pretty much everyone, it has worked so far. Carefully managing subordinates to keep them safe and encourage their growth paid off well when she was forced to take command as a junior officer, and her mind for deals has proven more than suitable for treaty negotiations.
Los Jaro grew up in Bajor under the rule of the Cardassian Union, originally brought up to take over his father as a tradesman. However, when he was taken to visit one of the Bajoran monasteries, brought into the presence of one of the Orbs. He saw a vision of himself, and his family, and the entire species traveling amidst the stars. It convinced Los that a simple life as a tradesman was not for him. When Bajor was liberated, Los jumped at the opportunity to join the Federation. He applied to, and was accepted, into Starfleet Academy with the hope that he could become a beacon to spur more members of his planet into the greater galaxy.
Los was moved along the command track at Starfleet, and found that he had a knack as a helmsman. To his (mis?)fortune, he had human engineering instructors, normalizing the tradition of using unorthodox jury rigging with machinery. Los gained a reputation as a bit of a hothead, but one who would lead from the front while keeping his composure, and was skilled at improvisation. This has led to a few quirks, such as one day when his ship away team discovered an archaeological relic. As ranking engineer, his first instinct was to route it through the ship’s power supply, and he isn’t quite sure what it does, but his Bajoran faith keeps telling him there is some reason for it.
Tala Navarro grew up on a remote research colony, the kind where careful study and steady progress were the rules of life. She never much cared for it. An entire galaxy’s worth of wonders to explore and technology to tinker with, and only a human’s lifespan to do it all in. With such limited time to leave her mark on the galaxy, going to Starfleet and continually pushing the limit seemed the only thing worth doing. Even her fellow humans at the Academy were taken aback by her willingness – perhaps compulsion – to think outside the box and exceed the parameters of both the exercises and any technology she could get her hand on. Others, particularly the Vulcans, privately referred to her as ‘one of those humans’.
The safest place Starfleet could find for her, and honestly the best place for her to use her skills, was on exploration missions that took Tala far away from the conventional – and delicate – parts of the galaxy. It never even occurred to her that her assignments were usually made with an eye towards getting her out of an Admiral’s hair, because she was right where she wanted to be. She’s thrived, on the Crimea and before, solving more than one engineering crisis that should’ve killed everyone – most of which weren’t even her fault – and making technological breakthroughs that are currently being discussed at the Academy, much to the fond consternation of her former instructors.
Audrid Nedandreamed of being a Joined Trill, and worked hard to get into the Initiate Program, but in the end the numbers just weren’t in her favor. She was not bitter about it. Definitely not. And it has absolutely no influence on why, upon joining Starfleet, she went into Security and managed to find herself all the posts that tended to involve hitting people with her fists.Most of that kind of behavior has been burned off over the years, though, as Audrid matured and grew into an exemplary Security officer, one who was always ready to protect her crewmembers.
However, the Dominion War was not kind to her. The ship she started the war on was lost during Operation Return, and the rest of the conflict wasn’t exactly easy on her. With the war over Starfleet is having trouble returning some of its personal to thinking like explorers instead of soldiers, so Audrid has found herself shuffled off on the Crimea for lack of anywhere better to put her.
Jurling, Son of Klesso, found himself on Betazed at a very young age when what remained of his family were forced to flee the Empire after coming out on the losing side of an internecine conflict. It was just supposed to be a stopping off point in their exile but Klesso, a widower by this point, found a second love on Betazed and decided to remain. Growing up on a planet of telepaths and empaths, including having one for a stepmother, had a profound effect on Jurling. Combined with the fact that Klesso was still doing his best to raise his son as a proper Klingon, Jurling grew up with an appreciation for facing down dangerous enemies and a realization that the demons of the mind – trauma, mistrust, fears, and so on – were perhaps the most tenacious foe he could ever hope to defeat.
Jurling went into Starfleet Academy on the Sciences track, focusing on psychological understanding and mental health. His somewhat … forceful methods of counseling have often shocked more traditional Starfleet officers, but they have been effective with others, and more importantly they’ve proven popular with several non-Federation sentients, which has earned him their praise after first contact scenarios. All the better that he’s been sent past the frontier; fewer complaints from Starfleet personnel about the Klingon yelling at them to get in touch with their feelings.
So, there you have it! What kind of (mis)adventures can Captain Groorin, Lt. Jaro, Commander Nedan, Commander Navarro, Commander Jurling, and the rest of the Crimea’s crew get up to? What discoveries will they make, which new forms of life will they meet, what dangers will they have to overcome? As always, that’s for you (and your dice) to determine!
Our copy of the Star Trek Adventures Core Rulebook was purchased with funds generated by our Affiliate status with DriveThruRPG. Reach DTRPG through one of our fine and elegantly crafted links, and we get a small cut of whatever purchases you make that we can then use to bring you our readers more content. You can also support Cannibal Halfling Gaming by telling your friends about us, or supporting us on Patreon. Thank you for your support so far, thank you for any help in the future, and happy gaming!
24. #StarTrekAdventures (#Modiphius) Seems that we hadn't finished the scenario, there was still a whole bit of battling with the Prime Directive and an extended contest to make a vaccine. This was sort of OK but it did drag on and took about 20 minutes to resolved with almost all the focus on one player. It does give a Star Trek experience but it is quite slow to play.
