If a player wants their character to have a specific focus, it’s probably possible and they are welcome to lean into it. Picking your alien species will give you certain boons, but doesn’t make picking other aspects of your character feel like a trap or a chore. Well it’s good at that, too! Character creation and gameplay both aim to give you, the player, a fair amount of freedom. RGPs with art that manage to capture the essence of an IP that I already love will always stick to me (See the Alien Game), and the visuals team for these books nails it.īut we’re not buying art books here, we’re playing RPGs. Everything either has that colorful retro-future cleanness or art that is frankly beautiful. Modiphius aimed to crate a game that feels like Star Trek and darn it, they succeeded.Īesthetically everything from the books to the character sheets to the planetary maps look like Star Trek. In June 2017 Modiphius released Star Trek Adventures, filling an obviously vacant hole in the nerdophere for a slightly more modern Star Trek tabletop RPG. This week on RPG Spotlight we boldly roll where no one has gone before with Star Trek Adventures. But if you’re working on a budget, it’s hard to recommend it over other supplements and releases for the game.Hide that red shirt and set phasers to fun.
Star trek adventures rpg full#
If you’ve already committed to picking up the full range of Star Trek Adventures books or simply want a nicely presented tome of lore, it will stand you in good stead. Now, none of these issues take away from the fact that the Beta Quadrant Sourcebook is a solid supplement. The very final part of the book is devoted to sketching out campaign seeds in the Shackleton Expanse and, while this is handy, it’s far from a comprehensive setting guide. Other than the Klingons, the most well-known species on offer is probably the Bolians or Benzites, and if you can picture what they look like without having to pull out your phone then you’re probably far beyond the point where you need a sourcebook to fill you in on the galaxy. The list of new species for players to take on their trip through the stars is impressively long, but they aren’t exactly the iconic faces you think of when you picture Star Trek. There are profiles for a few of the rarer ships and enemies that could crop up, but most of the truly iconic foes already appear in the core rulebook and leave the section feeling a little sparse. With that in mind, there’s a lot riding on the second section of the book – the new rules and options.Īgain, while these are all nice additions to the game, there is very little that most GMs would view as vital to running a campaign. The information wouldn’t be as well presented or written, and you’ll miss out on a handful of original creations unique to the RPG, but you would have saved yourself a handful of cash.
Even if you aren’t a diehard fan of the show and are truly on the hunt for lore, you could probably get everything you need by spending a couple hours browsing Star Trek wiki pages. If the idea of reading up on Klingon wedding ceremonies really appeals to you then you probably know most of the lore already. However, this dedication to the background lore does place the Beta Quadrant Sourcebook in a rather strange position when it comes to a target audience. Even if you weren’t planning to run the game at all, the book makes for an enjoyable read that could even surprise a few hardcore Star Trek fans. More than half of its pages are devoted to background information about the various worlds and cultures living in the vast region of space, interspersed with samples of in-universe messages, reports and notes.Įvery page is stuffed full of interesting information – apparently Klingons are big fans of ice hockey and Moby Dick – that’s been pieced together with obvious love and respect for the source material.
However, while it’s a wonderfully well put-together piece of work, it probably shouldn’t be at the top of your shopping list.Īt its heart, the book is a guide to playing in Star Trek’s Beta Quadrant, home to iconic races including the warlike Klingons, stoic Vulcans and devious Romulans. You would think it’d be impossible to sum up a full quarter of the galaxy in a single book, but the Beta Quadrant Sourcebook makes an impressive attempt at doing so.