I recently ran the first adventure in the three adventure mini campaign from the the Star Trek Adventures Starter Set from Modiphius Entertainment. Overall we had a good time playing through it and it worked quite well. Here are a few random observations and questions that came up along the way. I’ve also tried to avoid any major spoilers for the adventure.
The first thing I noticed is that the Starter Set comes with five pregenerated Player Characters and one Ship. The Quickstart Guide which is available for free on the Modiphius website has the same five pregenerated PCs plus one additional one, the Denobulan Science Officer.
What makes this interesting is that on the sheet of tokens that is included with the Starter Set actually includes a token for the Science Officer even though she isn’t included in the set.
I just printed off the Science Officer from the Quickstart Pdf and threw the sheet in the Starter Set box with the rest of the PCs and we used her during our game.
I did come across one mistake in the adventure, on page 17. The characters need to climb down a turboshaft, which the adventure says is a “Control + Fitness” task. When rolling for tasks in the game you take one Attribute and one Discipline and add them together to come up with your Target number. The problem here is that Control and Fitness are both Attributes. We figured it should be Fitness and Conn and went with that. Normally I’d consider that a fairly minor problem, but when you are using an adventure that is specifically designed to teach the game, it’s fairly important to get those sorts of the things correct.
Another very minor issue was with one of the maps. You are told to pull out map 2.3, easy enough, here is a picture of the map.
Next, you are supposed to refer to the back of the book and layout the Romulans where indicated on the map, and have the PCs come in near the Star Fleet logo on the other side.
Notice anything odd? I was directing one of the players on where to place the miniatures and he seemed to be putting them in the wrong spots. Then I realized that the room on the left where the Romulans go is reversed between the layout guide in the adventure book and the actual poster. It makes very little difference to the adventure but did throw things off for a moment. The adventure also didn’t describe what would happen if the PCs managed to stun several of the Romulans. I simply spent some Threat and had the last standing Romulan close the door between them and the PCs.
A question that did come up during the game was around the disruptors that the Romulans were using and whether they have a Stun setting. From what most of us could recall from the TV shows they don’t. One of the mechanics in the game is as the GM I would need to spend a Threat token to have a weapon set to lethal rather than stun, which I didn’t really want to do so I ruled that they could be set to stun. Checking the Core Rule book later, the disruptors don’t have the “Deadly” quality so that was a correct call.
Another question that came up was whether the range to a target affected the difficulty to hit. I.e. was someone at Close range harder to hit with a phaser than someone at Medium or Long range? This particular adventure did have a Location Trait that stated that the Difficulty increased by one for Medium range and beyond, but didn’t say anything else. Checking the Core Rule book didn’t come up with any modifiers for range for weapons although there are modifiers for identifying creatures or objects and trying to communicate.
The only other question that came up that we couldn’t quickly find an answer for was how many characters could assist on a task. I allowed only one, but that was more due to the situations and lack of space for multiple characters for the task being attempted at the time. The Quickstart rules do say “One or more characters may assist the Task”. I didn’t notice if it mentioned the maximum five die limit on tasks anywhere in the Quickstart rules, I didn’t find it in a quick search, but I do know it is in the Core Rules.
Overall, I think the Starter Set is a good product. The maps are rather strangely sized, roughly nine and half by 18 inches. There are two double sided sheets and each side has two parts, some connecting rooms, some completely separate maps. In the Print and Play pdf that you can get for the Starter Set, each part is on a separate page. Unfortunately they are also in black and white. I think I may scan the color ones in, split them and enlarge them slightly to print on a 8.5 by 11 cardstock then trim them.
We had fun playing the first adventure, one memorable event was one of the characters fumbling their phaser in the turboshaft and bouncing it off another characters head. It ended up being a good thing as the Conn Officer was able to take the damaged phaser and jury rig it as a stun grenade, which quickly came in very handy.
I look forward to running it again at the Calgary Expo and then running the second and third adventures with the Calgary Star Trek Gaming Meetup group. My thanks to the players in that group that allowed me to dust off my Gamemastering skills and test this out with them.
