We played the second adventure in the Living Campaign series set in the Shackleton Expanse, “Doomed to Repeat the Past”. This was our second time playing at the Crowfoot Public Library, which is a very nice location to play at with a great view.

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I would say the only problem with playing at the Library is that on Sundays they open at noon and close at 5:00, and if you have booked one of the meeting rooms like we do, you need to be out of the room around 4:30.

For us, that meant I ran a little short of time. There is a third act in that adventure that basically consists of a Starship Combat. However, because the players had come up with a cure for the plaque affecting the colony ahead of schedule, and they had decided to do all the research work on the ship rather than going down to the planet, thus controlling the flow of information, I decided that they could avoid the circumstances that led up to the starship battle. They agreed that they would rather do that than carry it over to next months session.

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Overall the adventure went quite well. I did find this one a little harder to run than the first one in the series because of the way it was laid out. It was more generalized in what was happened and didn’t really lay the scenes out in a lot of detail. In particular, there is an NPC, Cmd. Natalie Sigmund, that is present in the adventure that initially gives the characters some important information and a piece of equipment, then near the end of the adventure has another bit of a role to play, but there isn’t much in the way of guidance for what she is up to between those points. Just kind of hanging around I guess.

This was also the first time we had an adventure that had an Extended Timed Task, so we were working out the process for doing that. It brought up a few questions that I need to follow up on.
The first question was whether rolling an effect on the die counted as a one or a two. We did find that on page 91 under “Extended Tasks and Effects”. They normally count as a 1. It also says “However, characters can obtain benefits which will trigger when Effects are rolled. If the character has multiple benefits, then all of them are triggered when an Effect is rolled.” It then lists the benefits, Triumphant, Scrutinize X, Progression X. However, it doesn’t say how you get these benefits. I made a temporary ruling that they could buy them as an Advantage with Momentum. I’ve posted the question on the Star Trek Adventures RPG Facebook page. Hopefully someone shares the answer.

I reviewed the rule for challenging values and used it with one of the characters during the game as we hadn’t done that before either. I did mention that there is a method for character advancement but said I would do a followup email on that rather than spend game time on it.

This was also the first adventure I’ve run where nobody ended up using any of their Determination, and they had their Momentum pool maxed out for most of the adventure. That’s partially because I didn’t spend any Threat along the way, I was saving it for the final act, which we ended up skipping. In hindsight, I should have spent some to make the Extended Task more difficult as they basically breezed through it.

Overall the session was a success, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and there were a few foundation pieces set up for some future sessions.