Category: What I’m Playing

The Editioning, AD&D 1st Edition, Part 2

So Charming

He turned up at our door. The lord of the realm, Count Strahd von Zarovich, just appeared at our door on our first night in Barovia. We were expecting maybe wolves? Nope. The great vampyr himself paid us a visit in person. I’ll be honest, we were at something of a loss for how to deal with this. There was a silence around the table (video call.) And then, Warder Jon Blackhall, my paladin, gallant protector, answered the door. He’s not that smart, but also, he believes in good manners. Actually, his lack of smarts drastically compounded the situation moments later. The Count cast Charm Person on him, and just like that, they were best buds.

Charm Person in AD&D 1st Edition is a potentially ruinous spell. There are a few of these low level spells that really punch above their weight. Hold Person is another one. They feel powerful in a satisfying way, whether they are used on you or by you. Strahd cast Charm person on Jon and he was ready to invite the master vampire inside. I had fun roleplaying this and the whole scene was great because the other players had to work hard to convince Jon he was being manipulated. They eventually succeeded and the door was closed. But that didn’t change the fact that he could still under the Count’s sway for at least another week! Lucky old Jon, he’d be allowed another saving throw at that point. This sounds punitive when you look at it through a modern D&D lens. We weren’t even in combat and an element of my PC’s independence was hijacked. And there was nothing we could do.

My other PC, Merryn, the elven Magic User had attempted to learn Dispel Magic during character creation, which would have been enough to remove the charm, but she had failed, and, according to the rules of AD&D 1st Edition, she simply cannot ever learn it now(! This, too, feels rough, at the time.) But, what I found, at the table, was a fantastic prompt for role-play. I think, when player’s complain about their characters’ losing agency, it is often because the game does not go the way they had planned in their head that it should go. But, just like a GM starting a game with an exact idea of what will happen in it, this approach will lead only to frustration and dissatisfaction. This way of thinking presupposes that everyone else at the table is not only ok with your ideas for how your character’s story will go, but also that they are willing to sacrifice their own fun to make that happen for you. Instead, if you go into it with a few major personality traits and ideas for how the PC might act in a given situation, and then roll with the punches, you are far more likely to have a freewheeling good time. For me, Jon getting charmed felt like a pivotal moment for him. Either he would remain charmed for the rest of the game, potentially, and act in Strahd’s best interests when he otherwise wouldn’t, or he would get the spell lifted and this whole adventure would suddenly become much more personal. Read on, dear reader, to discover which way that went!

Night in Barovia

If you haven’t read the first part of our adventure, dear reader, and you want to catch up, please go here. If you think you might want to be a player in Ravenloft, someday, turn back now! There will be SPOILERS!

My paladin, Warder Jon, upon hearing of the missing village girl, Gertrude, felt it important that they make an effort to find her. He thought perhaps she might have run off into the forest, and having found the messenger killed by wolves in the woods, he was worried for her life. I wish I hadn’t pushed this now, actually. I do think this is how Jon would react to hearing about the missing girl, but Isaac had already told us there was nothing more to find around her house. No clues, no tracks. I think it is fairly obvious that we’re supposed to think she might be found in the castle. All roads lead there, after all. Anyway, we wasted a bit of the session doing that.

Afterwards, we still had some daylight so we bought some supplies and returned the Burgomaster’s house to help repair it. We boarded up windows, reinforced doors, patched up holes in the walls, that sort of thing. And then we waited. Merryn went looking for spell books, and found none. Endrei went up to the top floor and looked out over the cemetery with Ireena, the Burgomaster’s daughter who had been bitten by Strahd. Together they witnessed the mass exodus of the ghostly adventurers who had met their end in the castle. They rose, silvery and ethereal, from their graves and progressed up the hill to the castle. Ireena said they did that every night.

And then Strahd came a-knocking. I outlined the upshot of that above. We sent him packing but not before Jon got enchanted. He went to bed thinking the vampire was his best friend. And so, when an aspect of the Count appeared at his boarded up window in the dark of the night, he welcomed it. He was in the shape of a bat, and I’m not sure if this was just a dream or if it was real. Either way, Strahd asked a reasonable favour of Jon. He wanted to know if one of our number possessed a sword that had been broken in two at some stage. Jon thought this might refer to the fighter, Caldan, whose sword had seemed to pull him through the gates into Barovia the previous day. He promised he would get the sword for his new undead mate.

Ireena - a dark, curly haired, white woman in a cloak, golding a sword.
Ireena

The following day, we visited Madame Eva, accompanied by both Ireena and her brother, Ismark. She was to be found at a camp with the rest of her people, along the river. Merryn was very excited to witness what she insisted on referring to as “human magic.” Eva drew the cards for those of the party who entered her tent. For this, Isaac was able to use the Tarokka deck that I had recently procured. It is the official one made for the recent 5.5E version of Ravenloft, but one Tarokka deck is as good as the next, I assume. Anyway, since we were playing online, Isaac drew all the cards himself, and then read out the readings from the adventure. These gave us a lot of clues! I believe they also have a concrete effect on events within the adventure itself, although I’m not sure exactly how since I haven’t read it yet. We discovered something of the location of a “protector of good,” discovered that knowing the history of the place would help us, that the object of our search could be found where a prince is buried, that there is a weapon of light in the hands of darkness, and that all of this would be cast in a dark shadow.

Once the reading was done, the group asked Eva to remove the magic laid upon Warder Jon. She did so in exchange from a promise that we would bring her the two parts of the sword that was broken! We didn’t reveal to her that part of that might be in Caldan’s possession but we did promise we would bring it to her. So, she dispelled the Charm Person and Jon was freed! Of course, he swore an oath to kill the Strahd for the ignominy of ensorcelling him.

Castle Ravenloft with a cariage approaching through a storm.
Castle Ravenloft

From the camp, we made out way back along the road and took the other fork in the crossroads. Up we climbed until we discovered an unmanned black carriage and set of ebon horses, all beautifully appointed and apparently waiting for us to climb board. Only three of us took the ride, including Merryn and our resident gnome assassin, Celfi. The rest refused on principle and, instead, got soaked to the skin as the weather worsened. Eventually we all reached the castle, and it was introduced with some very evocative read-aloud text from the adventure, which, I think, assumed that the whole party would take the carriage.

The front door of the keep stood open, braziers flickered in the hall and it seemed warm and welcoming. We rejected it despite Celfi’s insistence that going in the front door would be the last thing the Count would expect! Instead we investigated the northern side of the courtyard where we found a gate. We easily opened that and found ourselves in another open yard. This one played host to the coach house which was, eerily, filled with the carriage which had just transported some of us there, despite the fact we had just left it on the road out front moments before. Also in this yard, surrounded by high walls was a gate into a neglected garden right at the back of the keep. Our assassin picked the lock for us and we investigated. The garden itself was a sorry affair but right at the back was another gate leading out to the overlook. This promontory jutted out from the pillar of rock the castle was built upon, and allowed an unparalleled vista of the count’s domain. From here, we were also able to line of windows below us, set into the rock face, glowing slightly with a feint light.

We returned to the yard once again to try the back door. This was the only door into the keep other than the front door, so we thought we should enter this way. Inside, we discovered a small, cold chamber. There was a pair of armoured skeletons slumped on either side of a stairway leading down from the room. Upon investigation it became obvious that they were not undead, merely decorative. The room also had a table and on that table rested an ancient book. It was half filled with names, all illegible. Some of us signed the tome, Merryn signed the pseudonym she said she used for her novels, Theodore Woolyfoot. Another member of the team signed it, Count Strahd von Zarovich! Anyway, it then occurred to us that this book could contain the names of all those adventurers who are forced to return to the castle at nigh as ghosts. If that were the case, perhaps destroying it would free them! We took it out to the overlook where there were a pair of bare stone structures sheltered from he wind and the rain. Just as we were about to set it alight, we heard a voice from the shadows behind us, welcoming us to his castle. The Count had come to greet us. Jon prepared to fulfil his oath! Time to roll for initiative!

Conclusion

The cover of the 2012 reprint of the AD&D Player's Handbook - faux-leather cover, with an inset illustration of the head of the famous demon statue from the cover of the D&D Basic set.
AD&D PHB 2012

What I have described above were the events of two sessions. Both were a little short, about two hours each. So, after three sessions, we have not had to interact with the mechanics of the game too much. I get the impression that’s about to change. I recently read the Player’s Handbook cover to cover so I’m pretty well prepared for it, I think, though I am still a little unsure how to factor ⁣segments into a combat round. Thankfully, I’m not the DM so Isaac will have to figure that part out!

I’m very excited to finally be in the castle and exploring. And encountering the antagonist himself, not once, but twice in the course of the adventure so far has been very cool. It makes me feel like he is a real personality and not just a bag of XP and treasure. How will the fight go? Badly, I expect. Let’s find out next time!

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 7

Nostalgia v Nowstalgia

Nostalgia rarely serves you well, I always think. If you let yourself be solely motivated by nostalgia, you’re destined for disappointment. Nostalgia is a feeling; it’s the feeling you get when you yearn for the feelings things in the past stirred in you. It often gets mistaken for the things themselves. I certainly worried that I was making that mistake when I came up with the Editioning, our challenge to play an adventure in every edition of the venerable dragon game over the course of about 24 months. I told myself I had academic motives; I wanted to compare them, see how they changed through time, how the changes in designers affected them, what happened with the emergence of different play styles, character first stories, actual plays. All that. But, I was particularly excited to run AD&D 2nd Edition. There was no doubt this was driven by nostalgia. I played 2E more than any other edition of the game, concocted some of my favourite campaigns with my players, created worlds for their characters, some of whom would live forever in infamy. Those games live large in my memory.

But I’ll give myself credit for going in with my eyes open. I understood that nostalgic feeling in myself from the start and decided to approach the experience almost as if it were a new one. This turned out easy enough. I really did have to reread the books, relearn the rules, refamiliarise myself with the setting and the adventure. I had no concrete memory of any of that. Before diving back in, I couldn’t have told you that initiative was rolled on a d10 and the lowest roll wins. I didn’t realise that paladins only got spells at level 9 and certainly couldn’t have explained the surprise rule to anyone.

A Collection of Complete Handbooks for player classes and races.
A Collection of Complete Handbooks for player classes and races.

Taken from that perspective, here’s what I learned. Character creation in this game is a task to be endured. It might have been less difficult and time-consuming if I had not chosen an adventure in the Planescape setting with its peculiarities of race and place and faction. It might have been easier if I had not insisted on everyone at least considering the kits in the various “complete handbooks.” I did that because it felt like a uniquely 2nd Edition experience that I didn’t want my players to miss out on. If you only allow the races and classes from the Player’s Handbook and you leave out the optional non-weapon proficiency rules, your Session 0 might involve fewer players tearing their hair out, and it might only take two hours instead of four. Whether or not my players appreciated the pure, unadulterated, 2nd char-gen, I’m not sure. I think some got more mileage out of it than others. But here’s what I am sure of, once that process was over with, we all loved those characters and the adventure we went on. Eventually, it became clear that the best way to play it was to embrace the long-winded spell descriptions, the needless crunch, the haystack-like books and the needle-like rules. If you can laugh about those things together at the table, while also using those rules to create cool stories together, then you are doing AD&D 2nd Edition right, I think. I got frustrated with it on occasion, but that was mainly during prep, when I tried to do most of my rule research. I know some of the players struggled with spells, spell slots, spells per day etc. But, importantly, my priority during play was always to try to keep the session moving. So, in some instances, I made rulings that maybe didn’t reflect the rules. But that’s in the spirit of the game in my opinion. Generally, that would be my advice for any GM and any game, to be honest.

The Eternal Boundary Crossed

The cover of Planescape adventure, the Eternal Boundary. A pale, bald dustman pushes a gurney with a sheet-covered corpse in the foreground. The silhouettes of adventurers peek through an archway in the background.
The Eternal Boundary

Dear reader, this is the last instalment! If you are interested to read all the previous ones, go here. If you think, however, that you might be a player in this adventure, The Eternal Boundary, someday, maybe give it a miss.

Last time, our heroes’ investigations brought them to somewhere unexpected. They’d leapt through a portal in the Mortuary that would take them to the Elemental Plane of Fire. There, they found themselves on an asteroid-like rock floating amongst the never-ending inferno, protected, somehow from being burned to cinders. The rock played host to a citadel of sorts. It had platforms with great ballistae to protect it from the more hostile denizens of the plane, a marble-clad temple complex of some sort and guard tower watching over everything. After killing some sentries, the PCs tricked some hobgoblin mercenaries into believing they were new recruits. They’d been advised to report to the high-up men in the temple. To do so, they tried to by-pass that tower, but the guards questioned them and their prisoner, Toranna the Grey, shouted for help. A fight broke out! The paladin ran in to take on the guards at the door while the thief fired some arrows and the cleric used his Spiritual Hammer to attack the archers on the roof. Even the witch’s goat got in on the action. They took some damage but eventually managed to defeat all six guards inside, steal their uniforms and stock up on weapons and supplies before heading on to the temple. During the chaos of the battle, they misplaced Toranna.

It turned out, once they entered the temple, that she had alerted the guards, the priests and the citadel’s commander, Green Marvent, that they were coming, so their clever disguises counted for naught!

It was a long, wide chamber with a series of columns on either side and an altar at the far end. A large, glowing gem hung, suspended in the air above the altar. It seemed to be important. The PCs were outnumbered here. There were just the four of them and they had just been in a couple of fights. They were not at their best. So they had to think laterally. They played a delaying game as they were engaged in combat by the guards inside the door, the human captain of the guard and the head of the hobgoblin mercenaries. They cast Silence on the spell casters gathered near the altar, forcing them to move, and preventing them from casting things like Command and Scare. This helped Trance, the thief to get close to the altar, before being rendered unconscious by Green Marvent. The Githzerai commander of the faction in charge of this place, the Illuminated. I gave the others one round to help Trance before she would die. Devansh came through with a heal just in time as the fight continued. Aurora, the bariaur witch, was down to using her sling-staff and no-one except the paladin was doing well for hit points when Trance managed to grab the gem and threaten to destroy it. This brought the fight to an abrupt end. Green Marvent explained that the gem was all that was preventing the rock from being consumed by the flames. The hobgoblin chief was swayed by Glaermond the paladin’s superior charisma and agreed to switch sides, seeing how the wind had changed direction. He went out and ordered his lads to go after the other Illuminated guards.

Finally, Devansh used Command on Green Marvent to “Explain.” And so she did. The Illuminated, she said was her faction. It was young and still light on power but she had come up with a way to bring the other factions of the Planes down from the inside. The plan was kidnap the barmies off the streets of the Hive, cure them of their madness and then convince them that their very own deities had brought them back from the dead, assigning them with one task, to join the Society of Sensation, or the Governors, or the Dustmen or the Doomguard or any faction, and to do as they were bidden when they had done so. Of course, Green Marvent was the one using illusions and disguises and appropriately fitted out chambers in the citadel to persuade the former barmies of this. And she would be the one giving them their orders, rather than Saint Cuthbert or Bahamut or Gruumsh or whatever deity they worshipped. It was a long game, perhaps, but she was patient. And she would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for these pesky adventurers.

Once the hobgoblins had dealt with he rest of the guards, the PCs rescued the few ex-barmies who were still not eh Rock and delivered them and Green Marvent back to Sigil. The Governors would deal with her treachery, if the Lady of Pain didn’t get to her first.

Meanwhile, Aurora considered the citadel for a new lick of paint and took its measurements for some more witchy decorations…

Conclusion

I had to make some changes to the adventure in the end. “Green Marvent” was the big bad hinted at in the body of the adventure. They were the one issuing orders via messenger and letter. They were the one with the plans for the Illuminated. But, as written, they never appeared in this adventure. I can only assume they were meant to turn up in a sequel to the Eternal Boundary that never happened. So I swapped out the commander of the citadel, Imogen, for Green Marvent. That way, the PCs get a sense of closure to the plot, at least. Other than this, I wouldn’t change too much about this adventure. I do think it was slightly too linear for my liking. I occasionally struggled to fight the text’s efforts to get the party back on the rails. In the end, they got where the adventure needed them to be, but maybe in a different way. As I think I mentioned before, having a member of the Dustmen faction on the team was a shortcut that ensured they did not have to treat the Mortuary section like a dungeon crawl, and that was a significant proportion of the adventure as written! I would imagine, if that hadn’t been the case, or if the PCs couldn’t come up with a clever plan to bypass it, the adventure would have taken at least a session or two longer than the 6 it took us.

In the end, we all agreed that we’d go back to these characters and this campaign and the Planes. I loved the PCs they created and I want to see more. I would like to give them a chance to pursue the original adventure hook given them by Bendon Mawl of the Senstes, the seek out the key to the portal to the Isle of Black Trees, which had been teased several times throughout the game. And I want to see how Devansh’s little temple turns out, not to mention Aurora’s new wizard’s sanctum.

But all that will have to wait. AD&D 1st Edition will continue for a while, but I won’t be running any more D&D until the New Year. I just need little break. I’ll run something else though so be sure to come back, dear reader, and see what that is.

Star Trek Adventures 2E, Dare to Be Wise

Success at a Cost

This phrase comes up a lot in the second adventure from the Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set Campaign Book; success at a cost. What it boils down to is that, no matter how well or poorly the PCs do, this here train is going to stay on its rails. This is one of my main gripes with “Dare to Be Wise,” but not the only one.

Dear reader, if you’re following along with my Star Trek Adventures adventure, welcome back! If this is your first time aboard ship, that’s cool too. But you might want to go back and take a look at some of my other posts in this series. In fact, my review of the preceding adventure, Incursion Point, is probably where you want to start. It should give you context for both the game and the campaign.

Going back to “success at a cost;” I think it describes the adventure pretty well. This second of the three full adventures presented in the Campaign Book continues the mission of this boxed set to teach you how to play the game. But, I think it does that at the cost of something essential to a good adventure, something Incursion Point had, freedom. The freedom of the PCs to decide what their next steps would be, what tasks they wanted to try, what ends they wanted to pursue, what mistakes they were willing to make. There was an inevitability to the events of Incursion Point; that city was always going to fall into the core of the gas giant, after all. But the PCs were more or less free to decide what they were going to spend their time doing while that occurred. Dare to Be Wise, though, in two different acts, is trying to teach you how to use the linear challenge, a mechanic that requires the team to complete a series of key tasks in a particular order to achieve a greater goal. The tasks they are to complete are prescribed in the text, and there is a note at the end of several key tasks to say failure allows they to success at a cost. This was dull to run and the tasks themselves felt relatively inconsequential (at least to me; I didn’t tell the players that they would have succeeded at a cost even if they failed) so we sped through them, and the entire scene that they consisted of. Maybe it’s just this mechanic that I don’t like. But I feel as though there was a way to make these tasks feel more like they mattered, by simply giving the PCs the series of problems to solve, but leaving the solutions to them.

The Adventure

There’s a handy summary of the whole adventure on the first couple of pages, along with a callout that indicates that it can be easily adapted for other eras, even though it is meant for the mid-23rd century. There’s a short section on the spotlight roles of this adventure (engineers, flight controllers and communications officers) and another with suggestions on what sort of actions other types of officers might be able to take.

There is also a prelude section here, before the start of the adventure proper. It suggests a period of shore leave and that’s where I got the idea for our heroes to explore the starbase which got extended with my little haunted ship episode, both of which I detailed here. I really appreciated this suggestion and I suspect its the kind of thing I’ll come back to in future.

Spoilers from this point on for “Dare to Be Wise,” by Al Spader.

The USS Challenger received new orders. It was a nice, easy survey mission to an asteroid field that’d been rumoured to contain a lot of heavy metals. Leaving Starbase 343, they were looking forward to a quiet, scientific survey, but they were unaware that the ship had been sabotaged by Urotoxa, the Nausicaan archaeologist they rescued from Cressida in the last adventure. At first, the sabotage revealed itself only in a couple of negative traits, which the GM was supposed to apply to the ship. These traits made any navigational or sensor tasks more difficult. In play, I indicated to the players performing those tasks only that they seemed to be more complicated and difficult than normal. They noted that, but didn’t immediately pursue it.

USS Challenger Ship Sheet
USS Challenger Ship Sheet

The first roll the text has a PC make is to create a trait. This is for the conn officer to plot a course to the asteroid field. This is a Difficulty 2 Reason + Conn task, but it has been raised to Difficulty 3 because of one of the negative traits I mentioned above. This roll also let the players practice getting assistance from the ship. I don’t think this should have been a roll at all, and, if had it to do again, I wouldn’t have made it one. There were no stakes, nothing interesting would have happened if they had failed. It did alert them to the fact of the extra difficulty, but this might have been done more dramatically later, when we were in the tick of the action. The other thing it did was give the conn officer -1 Difficulty to any Conn-related tasks for the rest of the adventure, which doesn’t make sense to me either.

Once they got to the asteroid field, they revealed the presence of gradon particles amongst the rocks through the use of a Sensor Sweep major action (also hampered by the sabotaged systems) and the spending of Momentum to Obtain Information. They also detected gradonic radiation around the trimetric spatial fractures that allowed Bryozoan beings to come through from another dimension during the Cressida disaster in the last adventure. I just don’t know what would have been gained if this sensor sweep failed. They would not have gotten this interesting piece of information and the adventure would have been the poorer for it. Anyway, at this point, the impulse drive kicks in of its own accord and they are launched into the first of two linear challenges in this adventure. I have already outlined my thoughts on these challenges above, so I won’t go into detail. Suffice it to say that the PCs had to fix the navigational controls, then the impulse drive and then modulate the fluctuations in the engines. Once they had done all that successfully, it was time for Act 2.

Uss Challenger - shields being drained by Bryozoans
Uss Challenger – shields being drained by Bryozoans

In Act 2, the crew were much freer to perform any tasks they wanted to try and determine what was happening. We had sensor sweeps, telepathic links, and computer searches. These revealed that a trimetric fracture had opened here, releasing large numbers of Bryozoan beings, which draining the Challenger’s shields. The longer this went on, the more danger they were in. So they had to figure out how to get away. With a Control + Engineering task success the Chief Engineer discovered a pulse in the warp core that aligned with the frequency of the pulses from the fracture.

At that moment, a bunch of Bryozoans entered Engineering and formed themselves into a vaguely humanoid form. It was clear it was attempting to communicate with them, but the universal translator was not up to the task. Time for another Linear Challenge. This time they had to identify the manner of communication, modify the universal translator and, finally communicate. This suffered from the same issues as the first one, in my opinion. I think there is a way this mechanic can work better. I just need to think of it for the next time it comes up.

The final act had the crew getting some answers from this Bryozoan Conveyor, racing against time to repair the ship and escaping the trimetric fracture. They talked to the aliens and found that they were an ancient species which used to travel the dimensions, exploring. But, essentially, they got sick of everyone else’s bullshit and decided they would rather not be sentient. In their home dimension, it was possible to live separately, blissfully unaware of their own place in the universe. With the incursion of our dimension they were forced to combine into sentient colonies for some reason. Turns out the colonies voted and decided that the source of the pulses that created the fracture should be destroyed. That was the USS Challenger, of course. But this one colony dissented and came to warn the crew, which was nice. At this point, the PCs had a moment to determine what was causing the issues with the ship and to find the cause of the pulses in the warp core. With a bit of investigation, they discovered Urotoxa’s worm-like virus that she deposited at the starbase when she was aboard the Challenger. This virus affected the systems but also caused the resonance in the warp core that she knew would create a trimetric fracture under the right circumstances.

Armed with this information, the crew got to work on a Timed Extended Task. This was like the extended task to evacuate Cressida in the previous adventure, but with the added pressure of a timer. It was a 12 point progress track. But every time the PCs completed a task towards the goal of breaking free, it took two Intervals. Once they reached 10 intervals, they would have failed. Now, I had been doing the extended tasks wrong last time. Impact is the number of points of progress a PC makes against an extended task’s progress track. I thought they only got 1 Impact per task last time, even though that didn’t make sense because an extended task with a Resistance of 1, would mean they got no progress at all. I had thought that only every second task had any Impact at all last time. Looking back that was so obviously wrong that I wish I had just double-checked the rules in the core book. In fact, the Impact made is equal to the Department rating used by the PC in the performance of the task. So, if it was an Engineering task performed by our Chief Engineer, Burk ven Jaxa, the Impact would have been 5, reduced by the Resistance of 1, to 4. This made a lot of sense I was glad to have come to this realisation.

Anyway, an extended task like this allowed the PCs to do whatever sort of task they thought could be of help and they did. Lt. Kemal gunned the impasse drive to try to escape, Tennan, somewhat cursed by complications brought about by my spending of Threat points ran from pillar to post around the ship trying to find a working communications panel to let the aliens know they meat no harm, and finally Burk created a barrier around the warp core, to contain the pulses. The fracture collapsed, the Bryozoans retreated and the ship escaped.

Our session ended up with the PCs describing how they gained milestones, linking their actions in this adventure back to resonant moments in the last one. This allowed them all to improve in some way and then we totted up their Acclaim points so the could increase their reputations, gain awards, curry favours or earn promotions.

Bryozoan Conveyor in Engineering - a vaguely humanoid collection of beings surrounded by flabbergasted crew.
Bryozoan Conveyor

Conclusion

I had my problems with this adventure, as you will be aware, dear reader, if you made it this far. There was not enough freedom for PCs to do what they wanted. It should have presented more problems and fewer solutions. Some of the plot points felt like they were full of holes and still do. But, it did succeed in teaching some major mechanics of the game and linked the first adventure with the upcoming final one. Was it worth it? Sure. I mean we still had fun with it and there were parts that were genuinely dramatic.

Our trek through the stars will continue soon, dear reader. In the meantime, live long and prosper.

The Editioning, AD&D 1st Edition, Part 1

1E or 2E?

The covers of both 1st and 2nd Edition Player's handbooks, side by side.
1E v 2E

I don’t have a lot of experience with AD&D 1st Edition. By the time I felt ready to move on to an “advanced” version of the game, 2nd Edition was available and TSR was releasing a truck-load of source-books, settings, splat-books, adventures and accessories for it. It was natural to move from Basic directly to that. So, I couldn’t really say what the big differences are between the two versions.

PHB page 4 - illustration with a wizard blowing smoke rings and the credits for the book. All writing credits are Gary Gygax.
Smoke Rings

The creator is different, of course. Gary Gygax wrote 1E. And, I mean, he’s Mr D&D, right? That’s got to count for something. Here’s what he has to say about that in the preface to the 1978 Player’s handbook for AD&D 1st Edition:

…the game’s major appeal is to those persons with unusually active imagination and superior, active intellect — a very demanding audience indeed. Furthermore, a great majority of readers master their own dungeons and are necessarily creative — the most critical audience of all! Authoring these works means that, in a way, I have set myself up as final arbiter of fantasy role playing in the minds of the majority of D&D adventurers. Well, so be it, I rationalized. Who better than the individual responsible for it all as creator of the “Fantasy Supplement” in CHAINMAIL, the progenitor of D&D; and as the first proponent of fantasy gaming and a principal in TSR, the company one thinks of when fantasy games are mentioned, the credit and blame rests ultimately here. Some last authority must be established for a very good reason.

I’ll let you make of that what you will, dear reader. But, one thing’s for certain, Gary was sure there was only one man for the job!

From his writing early on in the PHB, Gary seems to have intended this as almost an add-on to the earlier B/X D&D. Here’s another excerpt from the preface:

I am convinced that it does for the old D&D + supplements what GREYHAWK did for D&D when it first appeared, and then some.

Here, he’s referencing the Greyhawk supplement for OD&D, which greatly changed and added to the rules, the classes and the gameplay of that game. And then, in the introduction he states how easy it should be to port your existing D&D character over to AD&D:

You will find it easy to integrate your existing character or characters into the new system, and at the same time the game will be both familiar and different.

I mean, its obvious that the games are built on the same foundations, and that it should be relatively simple to update a PC to work in any version of it, but I don’t think I had realised before that it had been one of Gygax’s intentions going into this project.

To compare, this is an excerpt from David “Zeb” Cook’s foreword to the 1989 AD&D 2nd Edition Player’s Handbook:

It’s not accurate to say this is a book that I alone have written. First off, there are a lot of other names listed in the credits. They, especially the developers, contributed time and talents that I don’t have. Improving the organization and readability was one of the reasons we started this project in the first place. These are tasks that can’t be done without talented developers and editors who play and care about the game. If you discover that it’s easier to find rules during your gaming sessions and that everything seems to make more sense, thank them.

He goes on to state how much the input from players shaped the entire edition here, too. You can see a different approach from the outset I suppose. But is the result all that different?

As to 2nd Edition’s compatability with previously published D&D materials:

Overall, it is best to approach the AD&D game as if it is a completely new game and be pleasantly surprised when you find overlapping concepts.

It’s pretty clear that, in the post-Gygax era, TSR’s attitude to AD&D as a game had shifted. Of course, both D&D and AD&D were being sold concurrently and marketed separately as two distinct games. The D&D Rules Cyclopedia was just around the corner at the time 2nd Ed came out. Indeed, I remember playing a Hollow World campaign run by a friend, using the Rules Cyclopedia, while I ran Dark Sun in AD&D 2E, around the same time. There were good business reasons to see them as separate entities.

I would have to agree that the two games are related but not interchangeable, though, whether we are talking about 1st or 2nd Edition. Your characters generally feel more powerful at low level in AD&D, the options on your character sheet are more numerous, the rules are more likely to dictate the outcome of situations than the DM.

I have to say, the actual character creation process for 1st Edition was time-consuming and involved a great-deal of page-flipping. We created two PCs each for our AD&D 1st Edition adventure. I went for a Magic User and a Paladin for maximum variety. If we had not only recently been through the AD&D 2nd Edition character creation process, I’m sure it would have taken even longer, actually. The two are more similar than different. In fact, this is so much the case that I began to wonder if the two systems are really different enough to even require an entry each in the Editioning. Still, in the end, it’s the playing that matters. I’m excited for it either way.

This surface level analysis has not led me to an answer to the question in the subheading. But then, we have only just started our playthrough of our AD&D 1st Edition adventure, Ravenloft!

Ravenloft

Friend of the blog, Isaac is taking the baton for this leg of the Editioning. He had actually been planning to run Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, but after the way my adventure for OD&D worked out (crashed, underground spaceship, lots of constructs and weird tech,) he felt it might be a bit too similar in theme. Anyway, given the season we were starting in, he decided to switch to the classic gothic horror adventure for 1st Edition, Ravenloft. He even got a copy of the original printed module for it. The adventure is by Laura and Tracy Hickman and was first released in 1983.

Ravenloft, Realm of Terror boxed set cover and Ravenloft, the Horror Within cover
2E Ravenloft and 5.5E Ravenloft

This module has spawned more rereleases, reimaginings, re-hashes and reproductions than maybe any other in the history of the game. Personally, I’m more familiar with the 2nd Edition Ravenloft setting, where Barovia joined a plethora of other strange and moody countries to make up the Demi-plane of Dread. These days, I would imagine that most players are more aware of the incredibly popular 5E module, the Curse of Strahd, or even the 5.5E setting, Ravenloft, the Horrors Within.

Anyway, it was with a great deal of excitement that I joined this game as a player, having never experienced it before.

Including yours truly, there are four players, with two PCs each, all starting at 5th level. Isaac felt that, as the adventure is designed for 6 to 8 players of levels 5 to 7, we would not get by with just one PC each. We’ve got:

  • Dowi playing Din and Dar, twin half-orc fighters, one neutral good, one neutral evil
  • Tom playing two humans, Caldan the fighter and Endrei the cleric, more siblings!
  • Jude playing Celfi, the chaotic evil gnome assassin and Nicholas Duskwater, the neutral good half-elf ranger
  • Me playing Warder Jon Blackhall, the lawful good human paladin and Merryn the true neutral elven magic-user

It’s a doughty crew with so many fighter types but we are fairly stacked when it comes to anti-undead powers and spell-casters. So, I’m confident we’ll come out of this with most of our blood if we’re not too stupid…

Our characters were all that remained of the Company of the Summer Sun, a mercenary band that had recently endured the worst defeat in its history. This ragtag band assumed that they were the only survivors, of course. Although, some of you clever readers with particularly good memories will recall that this was our origin story in Isaac’s previous Editioning game, of Basic D&D. So, Edmund of the Sun and Eandril Summerstream had trudged off to find employment and adventure at the Keep on the Borderlands, knowing nothing of these other survivors who ended up on the road, somewhere near the Svalich Woods. A small, but satisfying nod for those of us who took part in that game.

Welcome to Barovia

The Cover of Ravenloft. illustration by Clyde Caldwell shows the Vampire Lord, Strahd van Zarovich staring moodily from a darkened balcony.
Ravenloft

From this point on, there will be some SPOILERS for Ravenloft so turn back if you think you might play in it sometime.

Our adventure began in a tavern. While enjoying a drink and planning our next move we were approached by a recently arrived traveller, with a message for us and a drink for everyone in the bar. He took off immediately, leaving us to follow the message’s directions all on our own. It begged us to make haste to the aid of the Burgomaster of Barovia, some day’s travel through the Svalich Woods. The love of his life, Ireena had been afflicted and he needed help to deal with it. Merryn, my magic-user, concocted a story on the spot about how she knew the Burgomaster well, having spent a wonderful time in Barovia with him and his family. Just before we began the session I decided I needed at least one major personality trait for each of my characters. Merryn’s was being an inveterate liar, which is tempered only sometimes in the presence of Warder Jon, the Paladin of Forseti, who never lies. Of course we set off the very next morning.

Following the road, we came upon a great gate, with beheaded statues either side of it, which opened eerily before us, welcoming us in. One of our three fighters, Caldan, felt as though his sword was pulling him through the gates and into Barovia. We entered…

Not far down the road towards the town of Barovia, we discovered a corpse. The man looked to be a messenger, who had been torn apart by wolves. Searching him, we found another letter. This one, also seemingly from Kolyan Indirovich, Burgomaster of Barovia and dated before the first message, had very different contents. His daughter, Ireena had been bitten by a Vampyr who had controlled and cursed their land for 400 years. The letter implored the reader to give them up for dead and never to enter Barovia.

Too late did this warning come for our Company of the Summer Sun. We proceeded into the gathering dark, on to the town, taking the poor messenger’s corpse with us. Here we found most of the shops and homes closed up and shuttered. Jon and Endrei took the corpse to the church, where they discovered Father Dunovich in a bad way. He looked in desperate need of sleep and his church looked to have been ravaged by some creatures with great claws. He told us that we were trapped now in Barovia, thanks to the evil powers of Strahd von Zarovich, who resided there, in Castle Ravenloft, a thousand feet above on the mountainside. The town was being attacked every night by creatures, he said. His was the only power able to hold them at bay, which explained his exhaustion and the state of the building. He also told us how the Burgomaster found Ireena near the Pillar Stone of Ravenloft, years before and adopted her.

In town, Caldan and Merryn went shopping and then went for a drink. Here I got to really go to town on Merryn’s lies. They were elaborate and completely unnecessary, about how she held an interest in a vineyard back home and how she couldn’t wait to see some “human magic” in operation. They tried to get some chat from a group of Vistani but got nowhere. They seemed like a bad lot who acted like they owned the place. Even buying them drinks did no good. They did tell us we could visit Madame Eva at her camp along the river if we wanted our fortunes told. In the Blood ofn the Vine tavern, we also encountered Ismark, the burgomaster’s son, who invited us to the big house.

Finally, all the other members of our troupe went to investigate the weeping they had heard from one of the boarded up houses on the Main Street. They found a woman crying endlessly in grief. Celfi, assuming she was some sort of evil spirit, wanted to stab her in the back but Dar tossed a book into her room to get her attention, spoiling the chance for a backstab. The woman was inconsolable, but eventually, the PCs found out that she had imprisoned her daughter, Gertrude in the house, “for her own good.” But she had escaped and now the mother feared the worst.

Later, we all reconvened at the Burgomaster’s house. It, too, was covered in battle-scars: claw-marks, broken windows and burns from the nightly attacks. Warder Jon demanded entry, introducing himself as a paladin who never lied. This prompted Ireena to open the door to the party. Jon used his ability to sense evil on her, but detected nothing. Here we discovered the the Burgomaster was but recently deceased of natural causes and that the nightly wolf attacks had continued until the Burgomaster’s death. We were also told that the ghosts of other adventurers who threatened Strahd rose from the unmarked graves at the church every night. We decided to stay at the house that night to see what happened and then to go on to see Madame Eva the next morning.

Conclusion

So far, so excellent. I have not been a player in an AD&D adventure in well over 30 years. It felt good to be back! And for such an iconic adventure? Genuinely exciting. It’s so timely too, as the nights close in, the winds begin to howl and the cold begins to claw at the door…

I’ll be continuing my analysis of AD&D 1st Edition and comparing it to the other versions in the Editioning over the next few weeks as our Ravenloft experience continues, dear reader. Do join me.

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 6

Who Plays RAW Anyway?

AD&D is a famously crunchy system. It took the relative simplicity and, dare I say, elegance of OD&D, and started piling on subsystems for magic, combat, falling, drowning, encumbrance, surprise, skills and proficiencies, experience, encounters, etc. etc. It’s not an easy system to learn and I’m not sure anyone is really meant to learn the whole thing. Rulebooks are reference books, of course. That’s the case for any game, but it’s a necessity if you want to play AD&D rules-as-written.

Climbing and geting down
Climbing and geting down
Encumbrance for animals
Encumbrance for animals
Weapon type v armour type
Weapon type v armour type

I played a lot of 2nd Edition in the 90s. I ran my own home-brew world campaign, I ran Dark Sun, Ravenloft and Planescape and played in some Forgotten Realms games too. I have a lot of experience with the game. But I don’t remember using a ton of the more nitty-gritty rules. Encumbrance is the obvious one that I think many groups would have hand-waved, and continue to. But things like specific rules for climbing (and getting down again,) and rules for specific weapon types vs specific armour types, were all just, well, too specific. I suspect that other groups handled things in a similar way. I don’t think our games suffered due to a lack of these rules. As DM, if the situations arose where a character needed to rappel down a castle wall, I would have made a ruling and we all would have moved on, instead of searching the DMG or PHB for the precise way to handle it according to Zeb Cook. I do remember doing that on occasion, usually when challenged by a player that something should be handled properly. Generally, this would bring the session to a grinding halt while we found the rule in one of the ten different books it might have appeared in, and then read it, read it again to understand it, and applied it to the situation. This would rarely be worthwhile, although, sometimes we uncovered a rule that actually made our play better.

RAW Editioning

The cover of Planescape adventure, the Eternal Boundary. A pale, bald dustman pushes a gurney with a sheet-covered corpse in the foreground. The silhouettes of adventurers peek through an archway in the background.
The Eternal Boundary

The Editioning, our challenge to play and adventure in every major D&D edition over about a 24 month period, has made it far more likely that I will deal with any given situation as the rules require. I am trying to play these adventures that way. But what I have discovered, playing the Eternal Boundary, is that the adventure doesn’t care about most of those rules. The writer got the 2nd Edition surprise rules wrong, the plot does not involve wilderness adventuring, dungeoneering or, really, any type of traditional D&D shit, and nobody has been required to rappel down anything. As I have stated here before, it is far more an investigation scenario than anything else. Each session has been an exercise in pushing the plot forward. When I think about it, many of the ‘90s adventures were like that. It was, I think, a side-effect of having settings with their own histories and stories, exemplified in hundreds of novels, rife with famous and powerful NPCs, where the canon events impacted the types of adventure modules written for them. The plot-heavy adventure became the norm for D&D.

The Eternal Boundary appeared very early in the life of the Planescape setting but well into AD&D 2E’s middle-age. So, although it had not been confined by published canon yet, you can tell that it was trying to define it. It establishes NPCs that could be involved in major events in the future of Sigil, it is more interested in establishing the setting, its factions and its political situation that in providing opportunities for the DM to apply the rules of the system to the situations the PCs get into. I don’t want to go to far into this area right now. I’ll save it for a more thorough review of the module when we are finished. I’m saying that, when it comes to adventure selection, I could have chosen better if I wanted a quintessential AD&D 2nd Edition experience. But then again, maybe such a thing doesn’t exist.

Plane-hopping

If you need a recap, please go and revisit my previous posts here.

Session 5 of the Eternal Boundary kicked off with another fight. The party, reunited and determined to get some answers, decided to take on Toranna the Gray on her own turf, ie, the portal room right at the top of the Mortuary, under the dome. It was a cool location and a cool set up. She was preparing, with the help of an assistant, to send another barmy’s corpse through the portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire, ostensibly for cremation. There were a few zombies lurching around the chamber doing odd-jobs as well. We rolled for surprise, which neither side got, and then initiative which the PCs won. Devansh, the Cleric, immediately turned the zombies, just in case, and Trance, the Thief, tried to use her grappling hook to swing of the chandelier and take down the assistant before they could act. She failed the grappling hook roll (used the Thief’s Climb ability for this) but hit with her attack, killing the 0 level assistant instantly. Meanwhile, Glaermond the Paladin ran into the fray, taking on one of the turned zombies, and Aurora, the Witch, sent her goat in to butt Toranna. What followed was a few rounds of Toranna running around, trying to escape while restricting the party’s movement as much as possible with her magic. Hold Person is a powerful spell in this edition, by the way. Mainly because it is hard to save vs Spells.

Hold Person
(Enchantment/Charm)
Sphere: Charm
Range: 120 yds. Components: V, S, M
Duration: 2 rds./level Casting Time: 5
Area of Effect: 1d4 persons Saving Throw: Neg.
in 20-ft. cube
This spell holds 1d4 humans, demihumans, or humanoid creatures
rigidly immobile and in place for a minimum of six rounds (the
spell lasts 2 rounds per caster level, and the priest must be of at least 3rd level to cast the spell).
The hold person spell affects any bipedal human, demihuman, or
humanoid of man size or smaller, including brownies, dryads,
dwarves, elves, gnolls, gnomes, goblins, half-elves, halflings, half-orcs, hobgoblins, humans, kobolds, lizard men, nixies, orcs, pixies, sprites, troglodytes, and others. Thus, a 10th-level fighter could be held, while an ogre could not.
The effect is centered on a point selected by the caster, and it
affects persons selected by the caster within the area of effect. If the spell is cast at three persons, each gets a normal saving throw; if only two persons are being enspelled, each rolls his saving throw with a –1 penalty; if the spell is cast at only one person, the saving throw die roll suffers a –2 penalty. Saving throws are adjusted for Wisdom.
Those who succeed on their saving throws are totally unaffected by the spell. Undead creatures cannot be held.
Held creatures cannot move or speak, but they remain aware of
events around them and can use abilities not requiring motion or
speech. Being held does not prevent the worsening of the subjects’ condition due to wounds, disease, or poison. The priest casting the hold person spell can end the spell with a single utterance at any time; otherwise, the duration is six rounds at 3rd level, eight rounds at 4th level, etc.
The spellcaster needs a small, straight piece of iron as the material component of this spell.

Also, bonus points for use the word “enspelled” there.

Anyway, this allowed her to last four rounds against the party. The had almost made it down the stairs to look for help when Glaermond jumped on her from the top of the stairs doing a shit ton of damage and leaving her at 0 HP.

They questioned her. Trance even used her Intimidation non-weapon proficiency to good effect. Eventually they got Toranna to tell them about the plan, or at least the part of it she knew. She was working for a faction called the Illuminated and a person call Green Marvent. Green Marvent had asked her to take the “bodies” with a mark behind the ear and send them through the portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire, just like the other corpses. But those ones would not be burned up, instead, they would be taken by the Illuminated on the Rock, the Citadel of Fire beyond the portal, and revive them. Now Toranna didn’t know what they did after that. But the PCs, having already run into Eliath and the Dancing Man, supposedly returned from death by “their own gods,” were already aware of what was happening afterwards. They are still not sure why, though, and they knew they needed to stop this plot so they grabbed Toranna, took her red glass beads, the key for the portal and jumped through…

The Citadel of Fire hangs in the eternal flame of the Elemental Plane of Fire
The Citadel of Fire

On the other side, they found themselves on a wide platform at the bottom of a long set of steps that clung to the side of a cyclopean rock, floating, impossibly unburned through the eternal flames of the Elemental Plane of Fire. They could hear the inferno raging just yards away, though muted, and they could even feel a portion of the hellish heat, but they were not in danger of being roasted. They were greeted by a number of Illuminated guards, led by a priest. The party’s fast-talking fell on deaf ears and another fight erupted. The Illuminated priest sent one of the guards to get help from the next guard post at the top of the stairs, but Trance, the thief was too quick for him, felling him with a backstab before he could get too far. The priest took his first action to cast Command on Aurora, forcing her to Jump. On her turn, she was going to be forced to jump off the edge of the platform into the flames below. This would have been instant death, but, Devansh, taking his turn before her, countered it with another Command to “Stay.” This was such an ingenious use of the spell and saved Aurora’s life, without question. Meanwhile, Glaermond cut one of the guards in half. The others didn’t last long after that. I realise now that I was rolling Morale for them wrong. This is the danger of playing so many editions. I rolled 2d6 for the Morale check instead of 2d10. I can’t say for sure if this would have made a difference now, but at the time this meant they did not run for their lives when they probably should have.

Hobgobln entry from the Monstrous Compendium for AD&D 2E
Hobgobln entry from the Monstrous Compendium for AD&D 2E

The party ascended the steps and got a better view of the Rock. A platform jutting out from the side of it held a couple of ballistae and a quintet of hobgoblin mercenaries. Up some more steps and rising into the fiery sky, a tower stood, and, to their left there was an opening into the interior of this asteroid-like floating citadel. Beyond, in the darkness, they were able to make out a forbidding, dark hallway, draped in ceremonial-looking finery and decorated with sinister carvings. The PCs were challenged by the hobgoblins, who seemed more clueless than the Illuminated guards below. The PCs convinced them that they were new recruits, hired by Green Marvent. Dropping the boss’ name did the trick. The party asked the mercs who they should report to and they were told to go to the Temple, up near that guard tower they could see.

So, off they went. At the tower, they attempted to just ignore the guards standing outside it and the archers on the top of it but Toranna, still their prisoner and reduced to a single hit point, called out for help from her Illuminated allies, who turned to take on the PCs…

And that’s where we left it.

Conclusion

I guess my conclusion from all this is that, if you interact with all of the rules, some of the rules or maybe even none of the rules, you will probably still have a good time. In the Eternal Boundary, the wondrous locations of the adventure, Sigil itself, the creepy Mortuary, the Citadel of Fire, are almost enough to make it a fun experience to play. The addition of the PCs, their idiosyncrasies and personalities, and the cleverness and excitement of the players is always going to elevate any adventure to the realm of actual fun.

Next time will probably be my final update on the AD&D 2E part of the Editioning as the Eternal Boundary is unlikely to go any longer. Will they uncover the truth of the Illuminated plot? Will they find and confront Green Marvent? Will they all go up in flames? You’ll have to wait and see, dear reader.

Write Your Own Star Trek Adventure

Star Base 343

In between missions, the crew of the USS Challenger had time for some R&R on Star Base 343. This particular star base is mentioned only once in a TNG episode as a spot where Picard hinted Riker should take some rest after he had to disintegrate his not-girlfriend. So, I figured it must have something to recommend it for shore leave. It was also where our PCs transported the survivors of the Cressida disaster aboard the Challenger after their city plummeted into the heart of a gas giant, so it stood to reason there would be medical facilities there. Finally, I knew that it was a place where starships could seek repairs. So, when the party arrived on station for a bit of a break, I asked the players to paint the scene for me; how can we tell this star base is a centre for ship maintenance? What shows us that Star Base 343 is renowned for its medical care? What about the station lets us see that this is a good place for rest and relaxation?

And the players did not disappoint. Especially on that last question, I got plenty of detail. All of their answers allowed me to build a living, believable community and place and inspired me to write a short, station-based side-mission.

Laniyar Tennan, Betazoid technichian character sheet
Laniyar Tennan, Betazoid technichian character sheet

Newly minted Lieutenant Junior Grade, Tennan, our Betazoid, felt the need to reflect on the events of the last mission at a sort of temple of his people that stood alongside other places of worship and meditation on the station’s central concourse. I imagined a place where the Betazoids that frequented it went naked as was their practice, and consulted elders for advice. Laniyar discovered a great shift in his outlook that urged him to change one of his own Values, in fact. After that, he got dressed up in his best shirt and went to the bar that he had also described when asked to paint the scene.

Burk ven Jaxa Tellerite engineer character sheet
Burk ven Jaxa Tellerite engineer character sheet

Lieutenant Commander Burk ven Java, our Tellarite engineer, wanted to indulge his longing for a good debate as well as his pastime of metallurgy, by finding someone working on their ship at the docking ring and telling them what they were doing wrong. The Orion freighter captain, Bashorat was incensed, frustrated and, finally, exhausted by Commander ven Jaxa’s arguments. He allowed him to make the necessary modifications to his ship and declared them life-changing! Bashorat took Burk by the arm and dragged him to the bar, insisting on buying him a drink.

Rashid Kemal, human pilot character sheet
Rashid Kemal, human pilot character sheet

Lieutenant Kemal, the pilot, had a personal connection on the station, an old roommate from the academy, a medical track colleague, who had been assigned to one of the star base’s many hospitals. Groznik was a Denobulan who had been taught the wonders of skate-boarding by Kemal at Star Fleet Academy. After a few drinks and some time to catch up he decided it was time to do some show-boating on the rails of the promenade. He replicated a couple of skate-boards and got his ass handed to him by Kemal in a contest of tricks. Kemal watched Groznik come acropper off a rail and they scarpered before station security picked them up for dangerous horse-play. They retreated to the bar, of course, and that’s where they ran into the others.

Bashorat took them all to meet his sister who had arrived on the Challenger as well. Administrator Damaad, who had tried to bribe the star fleet officers to let her use the transporter to beam up her clients’ valuables as Cressida fell, was not best pleased to see them, since they had refused her deal in order to help save the natives of Kizomic VI instead. But she soon came around enough to make them another offer…

Twenty Minute Trek

Here is exactly what I wrote for the short mission I wanted them to breeze through in a single session along with a few notes I took as the session progressed. Is it weird to block quote myself?

R&R on Starbase 343
What do they want to do here?
Passtimes
Consorting

Pike’s Place – the bar

They will run into Administrator Damaad again. She says she bears them no ill will but this is not true. She will ask them to help her recoup some of her losses. If they were to accompany her to complete a deal with a federation contact, it would lend her a sort of credibility that would be invaluable. She says she would owe them a favour. This could involve her contacts among the Klingons.

The deal is a for a shipment of medical supplies which she won in a game of chance. She says she needs this to repay several of her clients from Cressida. If she doesn’t, they may get the Orion Syndicate involved to collect from her in some other way. She is desperate for that not to happen.

But there is a complication: the supplies are aboard a ship that’s docked at the Starbase. It’s an old freighter named the Utah. She claims she won them in a game of chance but that the captain (Captain Ken Sato) of the ship since disappeared. This is true but sounds false.

She would like the PCs to help her get the supplies off the Utah and to the rendezvous that evening.

If they take her up on her offer and go to the Utah, they will find a mystery. None of the cargo is on board, but neither are the crew.

In fact, in order to avoid having to pay up, Captain Sato, desperate, tried to use the transporter’s pattern buffer to hide both the cargo and the crew. But patterns are beginning to break down and, in an attempt to rectify this, the ship’s main computer occasionally re-incorporates the crew in random parts of the ship for a few seconds to refresh their patterns. To the PCs, they will hear momentary noises, thumps and bumps from around corners or the deck above or below, cut off comms and screams of terror or frustration.

They will also discover that the Utah is having problems with both warp and impulse engines. It’s in no fit state to leave the station any time soon.

Ship traits: Engine Faults, Haunted, freighter, Unlocked, stabilise transporters

Captain Sato traits: Freighter captain, desperate, human

That’s it. It took far less time to write that up than it’s taken me to write this blogpost. Here’s how I approached it:

  1. Involve an NPC they already knew – the first part of their time on Star Base 343 all took place in one session. So, I was able to connect Bashorat (who had been improvised) to Damaad when I realised they were both Orion. This bit was not planned but it felt like it was.
  2. Think Star Trek episode – I wanted this to be a stand-alone Star Trek episode, like most of those from the franchise. I wanted it to involve a hapless, maybe unlikeable NPC or one who required help of some sort. I was thinking of characters like Mudd from Mudd’s Women or Vash, from the TNG episode, Captain’s Holiday.
  3. Mystery – I wanted to create a mystery for them to solve with the skills and advantages they had as characters and with the universe knowledge the players had.

Conclusion

This turned out really well. I was ready to just wrap up their downtime and continue with the campaign from the starter set if they didn’t bite. Their previous encounter with Administrator Damaad was less than friendly, so there was every chance they’d tell her to bugger off. But curiosity got the better of them. Well, mostly. Tennan, as the junior officer and the one most affected by the risks they took in the previous adventure added a necessary level of trepidation and desire to run everything past the Captain. The other two heard him out but just kept pushing forward until they were aboard the Utah, investigating the ship itself.

I like to think I brought some OSR sensibilities to this scenario as well. I created the problems but not the solutions. I also improvised a bunch during the session as the players came up with new and varied avenues of investigation. I had to imagine a crew for the Utah, rather than just the captain, and they were pissed off at him, let me tell you. I also had to round out Sato’s motivations and his reasons for taking such drastic measures. I had to figure out a lot on the fly, but since I had kept the framework loose and the details flexible, it worked pretty well.

Also, it turned out quite spooky! I was hoping for a haunted ship feel and that’s what it felt like on the night. I’m very proud of my descriptions of the quickly cut-off comms and the unexplained bumps in the dark and flashes of light on the ship, actually.

We’re taking a short break from Star Trek to facilitate the Tables & Tales Third Annual Talk Like a Pirate Day One Shot (probably a 3 shot this year) but I’m eager to get back into the stars!

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 5

Surprise!

Welcome back, dear reader, to the Editioning, our challenge to play an adventure in every major edition of D&D over a period of about two years. We’ve already completed OD&D and Basic D&D adventures. Had a great time with them. They were both quite rules-light, even if some of the mechanics were not exactly instinctive. And, even if you didn’t know any given rule and you couldn’t find it in the book, the DM could easily make a ruling in the moment. AD&D 2nd Edition is another beast.

Now, I will preface the following complaints with the fact that I am really trying to play each edition as close to rules-as-written as possible. One of the things I wanted to get out of the Editioning was to be able to learn all those rules and another was to be able to compare them to each other. There are, of course, a lot of similarities across each of the editions. They’re all still D&D, after all. But some things change in every edition for some reason. Surprise is one of these things, initiative is another. Today, I want to discuss Surprise in AD&D 2E… because I have a bone to pick.

You know, it’s not even the rule itself that I have a problem with. The rule is pretty simple, actually. Each side, if there’s a chance they could be surprised in the situation, rolls 1d10. If they roll a 1, 2 or 3, they are surprised. There are a bunch of modifiers that can be applied to this roll, including a PC’s reaction adjustment, which comes from their Dexterity. But that’s it. Easy, right? Easy to find? WRONG!

Where would you expect that rule to exist, dear reader? Well, let me tell you where I thought it would be. I thought it would be in the Combat chapter of the Player’s Handbook. But to narrow things down, I checked that book’s index. S, s, s… there it was! Surprise, pages 89, 112 and 113. OK, I thought, now I’ll find out how to determine Surprise in AD&D 2E. WRONG! Page 89 provided me a definition of the term, “surprise.”

Surprise can happen any time characters meet another group unexpectedly(monsters, evil knights, peasants etc.). Surprise us simply what happens when one side–a person or party–is taken unawares, unable to react until they gather their wits. Their opponents, if unsurprised, are allowed a bonus round of action while the surprised characters recover. It’s entirely possible for both sides in a given situation to be surprised!

This is only the first of three paragraphs telling me about the concept of Surprise. At no point does it actually explain the rule to me, however.

I cannot quite express to you, dear reader, how much unnecessary text is contained in the PHB. I don’t think the majority of people reading this book require a definition of surprise, especially when it is not immediately followed by the rules for it.

Medieval Cheers
Medieval Cheers

On to page 112 and 113 then. The index gets this slightly wrong. It should read 111 and 112. 113 is a full page illustration. One of my favourites in the book actually, medieval Cheers! Anyway, we are now in Chapter 11: Encounters. The Surprise Roll is finally described here in some five paragraphs. Here’s an example of some of the absolute sawdust they used to fill out this book.

Naturally, surprise does not happen all the time. There are many easy and intelligent ways it can be prevented. The most obvious is if the player characters can see those they are about to encounter well before getting close. For example, the characters may see the dust of a group of horsemen coming their way, or notice the lanterns of a group of peasants coming through the woods, or hear the grunting barks of a gnoll war party closing through the trees. In these cases there is no way the characters are going to be surprised by the encounter.

And it’s not just a matter of ignoring this bumph. The rules are cleverly hidden away within paragraphs like this!

Anyway, this section has finally described the rule for me, and even told me what the effects of surprise are for both sides! The surpriser gets a free round of attacks but not spells and the surprisee is caught flat-footed so loses their Dex bonus to AC.

But here’s the kicker:

The surprise roll can also be modified by Dexterity, race, class, cleverness, and situation.

I’m sure the designers of this fine game thought to do something as convenient as to provide the potential modifiers to a rule on the same page as the rule itself. WRONG!

The DM has the listing of modifiers that apply to given situations.

“I do?” I thought.

At this point, I was close to despair, dear reader. I had a little cry and a big swig of my beer and dove back in. But this time, I used my noggin. I googled it and found the answers I needed here on the Murphy’s Victim blog. By which I mean I discovered that the table of modifiers I needed was on page 102 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, in the Encounters chapter of that book. So, at least it’s consistent.

The Surprise Modifiers table from the DMG
The Surprise Modifiers table from the DMG

Anyway, there I discovered that the PCs, being in poor light, would have a -1 modifier to their surprise roll. None of the other modifiers applied in their situation.

Dear reader, they rolled a 6, meaning they were not surprised. Nonetheless, they still lost a full round of attacks because they had just been rousted from their makeshift beds and were still a little bit eepy.

I went exploring this rabbit-hole because of a single line in the description of the encounter Sunday’s session started with. This is from the Shadows Abroad in Sigil section on Chapter II The Mortuary:

If the PCs have no watch and are awakened in the middle of the night, the Shadowknave and his men have a +4 bonus on their chance of surprise.

This is an awkwardly phrased sentence, but, essentially, what it means is that, should the Shadowknave and his mates roll to be the ones who are surprised, they would get a +4 bonus on that roll. This would, most certainly, make it more harder for them to be surprised. But, why in the Nine Hells would they ever have the potential to be surprised in a situation where they are breaking down the door to the home of four sleeping individuals who they know for a fact are inside and sleeping? But, since I didn’t understand the surprise rules when I first read that sentence I had to look them up to understand what they meant.

Dear reader, I did not make a surprise roll for the Shadowknave and his lads. That would have been absurd.

This is a pretty good point to segue into what happened last session.

To the Mortuary

It was a hard fought battle in the little run-down church to Varuna that they call home. The PCs were caught off guard (if not precisely surprised) and lost a full round while the mercenaries burst into the church. The enemy spell-caster immediately used his Sleep spell, downing Glaermond the Paladin again straight away. I ruled that our tiefling, Trance, as a half-lower-planar creature, was allowed a saving throw. She managed to save and, somehow, avoided getting hit by the three mercs attacking her and immediately kicked the Paladin to wake him up. The three attackers on Devansh Rao, our Cleric, were not so unlucky (he’s got a Dex of 4, so no surprise.) They knocked him out and then went to focus on the Necromancer who lived in the basement. Aurora managed to use her wand to move the earth from the walls and floor to block off the entrance to her underground lair, while her goat familiar and Spectral Hand continued the attack. Back upstairs, the spell-caster Scared and Slowed everyone in the church, his own men included, and Trance cast a sphere of Darkness that encompassed the entire interior. The Paladin, who had the Blind Fighting proficiency, managed to get a couple of licks in. Trance climbed up into the rafters and then through the front window dropping down silently behind the hooded spell-caster to successfully back-stab him. When he turned to face her, she saw that it was the same half-elf they had seen leaving a “dead” body on the floor of an alley in the Hive the previous day. At this point, the half-elf issued the order to retreat. The mercs grabbed Devansh and his stuff and scarpered. Glaermond managed to take out one of them as they ran off but they soon lost them in the maze of Sigil’s streets.

Devansh woke hours later in a vault otherwise occupied by a foursome of skeletons and a sarcophagus. He had a look around, experimented with the skeletons and examined the sarcophagus. He discovered the skeletons only reacted when he made for the door and then found that there was a cache of useful and incriminating items inside the sarcophagus. Long story short, Toranna the Grey, of the Dustmen faction was involved with someone called Marvent and had something to do with the disappearances of the barmies from the Hive. He also got his stuff back and immediately turned the skeletons with his holy symbol. Unfortunately he was still locked in the vault.

Mortuary Map 1
Mortuary Map 1
Mortuary Map 2
Mortuary Map 2

Meanwhile, the others returned to Bendon Mawl, their patron, to explain what happened and to pick some useful items, Oil of Elemental Resistance (fire) and a Potion of Invisibility. Interestingly, these matched the sorts of useful items that Devansh found in the sarcophagus. Then they formulated a cunning plan involving a coffin delivery that allowed them all to enter the Mortuary by the back door. Once there, they soon heard Devansh calling for help and freed him from his vault. Once they were all together and disguised in Dustmen robes, they ascended all the way to the Overvalault where the portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire was. All the evidence they had gathered so far suggested that there was some connection between Toranna, this portal, the disappearances of the barmies and the return of Eliath and the Dancing Man to Sigil. Toranna was there, feeding another barmy into the portal. The party watched as they planned what to do next…

Conclusion

I was glad I didn’t have to look up that surprise rule at the table. I did all that before the start of the session. But just imagine if you did have to? I would simply not have bothered. I would have made a ruling as soon as I got stymied in the PHB Combat section.

I don’t really remember how I dealt with these situations when I was originally playing AD&D back in the ’90s. I do think I had a better grasp on the rules back then, but I also remember having a fair amount of frustration with the game too.

Despite all of this, I think we’re all having a good time with the adventure still and even with the system, in many ways.

I’ll be back with more Editioning in a couple of weeks, dear reader. In the meantime, don’t be Surprised if I am back with some other post next week.

An elven king on his throne with a guard on one side and an elven woman on the other
Elven King

Star Trek Adventures Advancement

Character Growth

There are more ways to deal with character advancement in RPGs than I could even attempt to name, never mind describe. A number of them depend on XP, whether it’s in large numbers, like D&D, or in relatively small numbers like Dungeon World or Blades in the Dark. Maybe you use those numbers in a direct, 1:1 ratio to improve abilities or add new powers. Then again, maybe you just add them up until you hit a new level.
Maybe your favourite system eschews XP in favour of improvement rolls, like in Troika, Mörk Borg, or Call of Cthulhu, where your fate might be to not improve at all, or even get worse, despite everything you’ve done. That one can seem cruel sometimes, but, then again, rolling dice is fun, right?
Well, the advancement mechanic in Star Trek Adventures 2E is not like any of the above, and that’s what I’m here to discuss today.

The Character Arc

Player-Facing Advancement: This system of milestones is designed so a main character’s advancement is driven by the player, rather than something which happens passively in the background or at the gamemaster’s discretion. All the decisions made when adding a log entry, reaching a milestone, or completing a character arc are made by you, the player, and they all stem from the decision to use a value. As you begin each session with 1 Determination, you always have the potential to use at least one value or Directive in every mission, so there should always be at least a little potential for growth if the character plays an active part in the mission. The gamemaster can help you along by creating and suggesting opportunities where a value might be useful, but ultimately, the power to guide your character’s growth rests in the hands of one person: you.
Player-Facing
Advancement

We’ve all heard of a character arc in a TV show or movie. We want to see growth and change in our favourite heroes or, for that matter, in our antagonists too. That change we want to see? Is it a matter of them growing tougher, or more powerful? Do we want to see them gain new skills or contacts? I mean, maybe sometimes, but growing in power does not produce a character arc. Not alone at least. Is it more important that Peter Parker gained the proportional speed and strength of a spider, or that he learned that with great power comes great responsibility? Because without internalising that lesson, suddenly, Spiderman is a villain, or, at best like one of those “super heroes” from “the Boys.” Of course that wasn’t the end of Peter’s character arc, though you could argue that it was the end of one of his character arcs.

Commander to Captain, Benjamin Sisko

How about an example from Star Trek, since that’s what we’re talking about. Ben Sisko, Commander of Deep Space 9 arrived on the station, not expecting to be there for more than a few months. He was scarred and bitter from his experience with the Borg when he lost his wife. His only joy in life was his son, Jake. The Bajorans name him the Emissary, a religious figure of great significance. He is uncomfortable with that. Through the course of the show’s seven seasons, he heals the scars caused by the Borg and the loss of his wife, which leads him to accept his new life fully, and eventually, a new love. He becomes devoted to Deep Space 9, its crew and everything it represents and goes to any lengths to defend it. He embraces his position as Emissary and even prioritises it above all other concerns on several occasions. Through all of this, he is promoted, left in charge of the defence of the Alpha Quadrant against the Dominion, gets a cool new ship and enjoys political influence across two quadrants. But the recognisable gains in temporal power are all reflections of his emotional and personal breakthroughs.

This is what Start Trek Adventures is trying to do, and I think I might love it? I am reserving judgement until my PCs get to the point where they can actually achieve a full character arc themselves.

Milestones

A variety of TOS era Star Fleet officers on the surface of a planet.
A variety of TOS era Star Fleet officers on the surface of a planet.

This is not an unknown term in the area of levelling up characters, but in the context of this game, Milestones are handled somewhat differently than in D&D 5E. In D&D, Milestone Levelling is simply an alternative to doling out XP. The DM decides at which points of their adventures the adventuring party deserve to level up. It rarely has anything to do with what the players want, although, if timed correctly, it has the potential to be narratively pleasing.

In Star Trek Adventures, each PC makes a note about each adventure in their own personal log. They can write as much or as little about it as they like, but, at the very least, they should note the name of the adventure. I think it could be helpful to also write down the major events of the adventure and the Values they used during them, as that will be relevant to the advancement process.

All PCs have Values. They are important to this process. You can take a look at my character creation post for a bit more on Values, but I can also save you a little time by quoting myself here:

Values – a few brief sentences that describe what your character believes, treasures, and thinks. They should guide roleplaying more than any other aspect of the character

A PC uses their Values to either spend or gain Determination, one of the several currencies you use in this game to improve your chances of succeeding at tasks. After a PC either Challenges or Complies with a Value, they gain Determination. If they chose to Challenge it, they get the opportunity to change their Value to something new, reflecting the lesson they learned in the situation.

If you used a Value during an adventure, you can take the chance at the end to make an adjustment to your PC:

  • Improve an Attribute by 1 point to a maximum of 11 and at the expense of a point from a different Attribute, which cannot be reduced below 7
  • Improve a Department by 1 point to a max of 4 and at the expense of a point from a different Department, which cannot be reduced below 1
  • Replace an existing Focus with a new one
  • Gain an existing Talent with a new one
  • Change a Supporting Character in a similar way

Later, you need to reach a point in another adventure when you want to use one of your Values, and when you do that, link it to a previous adventure when you used that same Value. You have to show how the current situation is influenced by that first one. If you can, you gain a point of Determination. You can only use each log entry once like this, so you mark it to show it has been used. Then, at the end of the latest adventure, you write down in your log that you gained a Milestone and the log entry you used to get it. When you do that, you can make an improvement to your character!

You can do one of the following:

  • Improve an Attribute by 1 point to a maximum of 11
  • Improve a Department by 1 point to a max of 4
  • Gain a new Focus
  • Gain a new Talent
  • Improve a Supporting Character in a similar way
  • Improve one of the Ship’s Systems at the expense of another System
  • Improve one of the Ship’s Departments at the expense of another one
  • Swap a Ship’s Talent

Now, finally, if you can link the use of that Value to the Milestone you achieved previously? Paydirt. You have yourself a Character Arc. And if you can do that, you can improve even more:

  • Improve an Attribute by 1 point to a maximum of 12
  • Improve a Department by 1 point to a max of 5
  • Gain a new Value
  • Improve one of the Ship’s Systems
  • Improve one of the Ship’s Departments
  • Add a new Ship’s Talent

Every time to you complete a character arc, the next one must involve an additional Milestone, so, that means, another adventure too. I like that this represents the concept of becoming stuck in your ways.

I think this system is a little cumbersome, if I’m honest. At least on paper, it involves a lot of admin from the players in linking their Values and Milestones, not to mention remembering all of this in play. But I love the idea of this guided change in characters’ personalities and Values bringing about significant mechanical changes. This is what I was trying to convey in the summary of Sisko’s arcs above.

Repututation

This is an entirely separate advancement track for your Star Trek Adventures character. It can lead to promotion or demotion, awards or reprimands and it adds another layer to how you might play when you know your PC’s reputation might be on the line.

Your Main Character in Star Trek Adventures starts off with a Reputation score of 3. This represents the score of a reliable Star Fleet officer. Someone their superiors can count on. But you are barely distinguished from the rest of the crew. Of course, reputations change. They can be made or broken by your own actions and how they’re perceived.

To determine how your Reputation might be affected by your actions and words during the course of an adventure you have to make a roll. The Reputation Roll is much like any other task roll except that the target number is your current Reputation score + 7, and the size of your dice pool and the Difficulty of the task are determined by how you answered a series of questions about the adventure you just finished. These questions can be tailored for the specific adventure but the Core Book provides a set of standard ones:

POSITIVE INFLUENCES
Answering yes to the following questions are considered positive influences:

  • Was your mission successful?
  • Did you positively use one or more of the mission’s Directives? Did you obey the orders given to you by your superiors? Did you prevent combat from occurring, or avoid escalating hostilities? Did you establish common ground or peaceful cooperation with those who were newly encountered or who were previously hostile to you?
  • Did you directly contribute to saving the lives of innocent people or your fellow crew?
  • Did you take all reasonable action to render aid to those in urgent need or distress?

NEGATIVE INFLUENCES
Answering yes to the following questions is considered negative influence on the character’s Reputation:

  • Was your mission a failure?
  • Did you challenge one of the mission’s Directives?
  • Were you disobedient to your superiors?
  • Were personnel under your command killed during the mission?
  • Did you employ force to any ends other than the defense of self, ship, crew, or innocent life?
  • Did you employ lethal force during the mission?
  • Did you take any unnecessary risks during the mission?
  • Did you cause, or allow through inaction, innocent lives to be lost during the mission?
  • Did you lie, cheat, threaten, or coerce others to achieve objectives during the mission?
  • Did you permit a colleague or subordinate to act unethically or illegally during the performance of their duties?

The number of Positive Influence questions you can truthfully answer “yes” to, is the number of d20s you roll for the Reputation Roll. The number of Negative Influence questions you truthfully answer “yes” is your Difficulty for the Reputation Roll.

After our first adventure we ran through all of these questions. Most of the answers were straight-forward but some elicited lively debates on what might be considered “unethical” or what is meant by “coercion.” In the end, the players enjoyed a pretty high number of successes as they had Difficulty ratings of no more than 1 or 2 but were rolling 6 or 7 dice! For each success above the Difficulty, they gained a point of Acclaim. It is possible to roll lower than the Difficulty. In this case, you get Reprimand points instead.

You can use Acclaim for the following:

  • Awards – claim Awards like the “Christopher Pike Medal of Valor” or the “Star Cross.” Each Award comes with a beneficial mechanical effect
  • Commend Another – add dice to a colleague’s Reputation Roll
  • Elevation – boost a non-commissioned officer to officer status
  • Gain Favour – Ask an NPC for a favour
  • Increase Reputation – Spend Acclaim equal to the new Reputation to get an increase
  • Promotion – Go up one rank unless the commanding officer refuses
  • Status – gain a new trait for your PC that reflects the experiences they have lived through

On the other hand, Reprimands can lead to detention, being stripped of an award, demotion or even Court Martial! So, best to try and avoid those unless you want a bit of drama.

Conclusion

I think the Reputation system is a fun way to facilitate a very different type of advancement for a Star Trek Adventures character. The Milestone system linked to Values is very personality focused and linked to the PC’s own personal narrative, but Reputation is more like career development and the benefits from that are too. It is, perhaps a little over-designed, in my opinion. Do we really need to have both Reputation Points and Acclaim Points? Couldn’t we find a way to achieve the same ends with one or the other?

But, as I said at the top of this blog post, I think I need to reserve full judgement until we have had a few more Star Trek Adventures. In the meantime, dear reader, live long and prosper!

Star Trek Adventures 2E, Incursion Point

Starter Campaign

Dear reader, last week, I created a character for Star Trek Adventures 2E. His name was Mesh and he was an Orion Star Fleet Officer on the command track. The lifepath character generation system was satisfying and sufficiently different from other games that I felt it novel and enjoyable. But, the fact is, I’m unlikely to ever get to play a character in a Star Trek Adventures game, since I’m the one running it.

I picked up the Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set and Core Rulebook a couple of months ago when Modiphius was having a sale and I haven’t regretted it. Sometimes, when I buy the core rulebook for a game that I’m interested in along with its Starter Set, I wonder why. The starter set can feel like a waste of money. But, the truth is almost always contrary. The general quality of boxed starter sets recently has been really good. Free League are the masters of producing sets of such high quality and with such a wealth of content that I would generally always advise you to pick it up, even if you’re getting the core rules as well. I have played or run starter set adventures of the One Ring, Tales from the Loop and the Bladerunner RPG. All great quality adventures too! The Bladerunner one sticks out as a real highlight for me. The casefile, Electric Dreams was a brilliant intro to the game and the world but was also an engaging and evocative adventure in its own right. That’s a game you could run without ever reading the core rulebook, as long as you have the starter set and you don’t mind pregenerated PCs. We got four sessions out of that game, and I considered that extremely good value for money.

Cover of the Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set featuring a group of Star Fleet officers ont he surface of a planet.
Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set
Back of the Start Set box
Back of the Start Set box
five d20s - Star Fleet themed
five d20s – Star Fleet themed
Tokens!
Tokens!
Tokens! Other Side
Tokens! Other Side
Reference Sheet - core mechanics
Reference Sheet – core mechanics
Reference Sheet - Major Actions
Reference Sheet – Major Actions
USS Challenger Ship Sheet
USS Challenger Ship Sheet
Reference Sheet - Attempting a Starship Attack
Reference Sheet – Attempting a Starship Attack
Reference Sheet - Starship Damage
Reference Sheet – Starship Damage
Star Trek Adventures Starter Set Rules Booklet Cover. It features a variety of star fleet personnel from different eras on the surface of a desert planet with a star fleet ship looming above them.
Star Trek Adventures Starter Set Rules Booklet
Star Trek Adventures Starter Set Rules Booklet back cover. GM tables like a narrative flowchart and common NPC qualities.
Star Trek Adventures Starter Set Rules Booklet back cover.
Threat and Player Characters section of the Rules Booklet includes an illustration of a TOS era ship bridge in a serious situation.
Threat and Player Characters section
Tasks section of the Rules Booklet. Features an illustration of the USS Challenger in flight.
Tasks section of the Rules Booklet.

And then we have the Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set. In the box, you’ve got a set of five Star Fleet themed d20s, a sheet of tokens, a bunch of handouts which include pregens and rules references and, of course, a rules booklet. This booklet provides you with almost everything to run this game. The biggest omission is, of course, character creation rules. But, as I said above, if you don’t mind the pregens, that’s fine. The campaign booklet is just that: a booklet with a campaign in it. Inside the sixty pages are three interconnected adventures and three mission briefs, which act as adventure frameworks. After three sessions, I can confidently say, the Campaign Booklet, if played in full, is likely to bring you fifteen or sixteen sessions of play in the Star Trek universe. Now that’s making your latinum strips go a long way! Quark would be proud of you, Modiphius!

Rules

Star Trek Adventures 2E uses Modiphius’ own 2d20 system. Despite owning multiple Modiphius games, this is the first time I or, indeed, any of my players have had the pleasure of using it. I was expecting this to be a lot more trad than it is. It is actually really narrative-focused.

The core mechanic is simple. Every character has six attributes and six departments (see my last post for more detail on these.) When you are asked to perform a task, the GM will tell you which attribute and which department you need to use. So you might be using your Daring attribute of 9 and your Conn department of 3 to chase an enemy craft through an asteroid belt. You add the two scores to give you you target number. In this example, that would be 12. If you roll equal to or below that, that’s a success. You automatically get to roll at least 2d20, but you have various ways to add dice to that pool. A task’s Difficulty rating tells you how many successes you need to complete the task. So, for a Difficulty 3 task, you better get more dice, pray for a crit (a 1 counts as two success) or reduce the Difficulty somehow.

Momentum is a resource that the PCs share. They build it up by scoring more successes on rolls than they need. So, in the example above, if you managed to roll four successes on the Difficulty 3 task, you get to add 1 point of Momentum to your pool. That Momentum pool can’t go above 6 points so you are incentivised to use it up. They can use a point of Momentum to add a die to a pool, three points to add two dice and six points for three dice. There are other ways to spend this resource too, such as to get the GM to give you more info on a particular scene.

Threat is a resource for the GM to use that mirrors Momentum. The PCs can add a Threat for more dice in the same sort of way as spending Momentum. The GM gets to use threat to increase the likelihood of Complications occurring (this happens on the roll of a 20 usually.) Complications can come in many different forms. They might be a simple and mechanical as causing an injury. But they also might take the form of a massive narrative twist that really sticks spanner on the works of the PCs’ plans. This comes up way more often than I expected.

Those are the basics. There’s other stuff like taking Stress to Avoid Injury, Extended Tasks that use tracks, Resistance on tasks and in conflicts that absorb successes, but we don’t need to go into them here. If you are interested to learn more, check out the free Quickstart guide here.

Part One, Incursion Point

Opening page of the adventure, Incursion Point. Two page spread. One page features and illustration of Kirk and Spock.
Incursion Point

Incursion Point is the first adventure in the campaign contained in the Starter Set. The campaign is entitled “Infinite Combinations,” but the reasons for that are not really obvious from reading or playing this first part of it. It was written by Meric Moir.

Summaries of each part of the campaign, Inifinite Combinations.
Summaries of each part of the campaign, Inifinite Combinations.

This is quite explicitly a teaching adventure. In fact, the whole campaign is there to teach you how to run and play this game. It has lots of callouts to help out the new GM, from suggestions on what each type of character might do in the current situation, to advice on what to do if your players roll real bad. Much of the text itself is also devoted to explaining how to handle each situation as and when it’s likely to come up. For instance, the first scene has a high likelihood of conflict so the text runs you through how to order actions, resolve and attack and what to do if a PC gets injured. Where necessary, it will direct you to the relevant part of the Rules Booklet. In my experience, it was incredibly effective in teaching me what to do in my first few sessions. Of course, my clever and adaptable players got the hang of it without the need for such hand-holding. Before the first session was over they were stacking and spending Momentum like they’d been doing it all their lives. By session two, the risk of adding more Threat points to my pool was outweighed by their ambition and they were using it to do just oh so much cool shit.

Dear reader, if you think you might be lucky enough to play in this adventure, stop reading now. I’ve got loads of other posts, go and read one of them. There’ll be SPOILERS below.

Stardate 3422.1: We have received an urgent distress call from the independent floating city of Cressida, a resource-gathering collective on the gaseous world Kizomic VI. Creatures of unknown origin have attacked, causing casualties as well as compromising the city’s superstructure. We have responded to the distress call and are proceeding to Kizomic VI at high warp.

When we arrive, we will have only a few short hours to evacuate the city’s 600 inhabitants before the structure fails entirely and sinks into the crushing gravitational depths of the planet. With the number of beings to be evacuated, our first order of business will be to set up pattern enhancers and then direct the locals to the beam-out sites.

The Captain or other commanding officer is supposed to read out this log entry to introduce us to the current situation. We didn’t really have such a PC in our group, so I read it, which was fine. I like the conceit of this as it immediately feels trekkie.

Map of the initial beam in point. Also has details on taking a hit, healing and concluding the conflict with the Bryozoans.
Map of the initial beam in point.

The situation is dire and quickly worsening. The PCs are left to come up with ways to evacuate the citizens as quickly as possible. And that’s when the plant-like aliens they will come to know as Bryozoans seem to attack the evacuees. This is the start of Act 1: Operation Evacuate! In our game, the PCs, Lieutenant Commander Burk ven Jaxa, the Tellarite engineer, Lieutenant Junior Grade Rashid Kemal, our hotshot pilot, and Ensign Laniyar Tennan, Betazoid technician, stunned one Bryyozoan and frightened off the other before quickly moving onto ways they could speed up evacuation. Everything from locating more survivors to constructing elaborate containers to transport more people at a time, (the human cattle container was the term, I believe) were put into practice. With each success, they ate away at an Extended Task track which continued for the rest of the adventure.

Cressida Falling apart - illustration shows a shuttle pursuing the plummetting dome that broke away from Cressida.
Cressida Falling

Act 2: The Fall of Cressida started with a huge chunk of city breaking off and falling into the lower atmosphere of the gas giant. The PCs hopped in a shuttle without so much as a call to the bridge of their ship, the USS Challenger. They shot down after the plummeting hunk of city and managed to land almost safely. This is when I started to really spend Threat and introduce Complications. The shuttle door was jammed and they began to be attacked by more Bryzoans. The PCs quickly took steps to uncomplicated matters and save the citizens who had been trapped on the falling district just before it broke up into so much debris. They brought them back to the ship and escorted them to Sick Bay. Here the PCs encountered some NPCs. This was really the first opportunity any of had to do a little roleplaying in this adventure, and this was session two. It’s a high-speed scenario that demands quick action and decisive play.

Anyway, a well-dressed Orion woman, Administrator Demaad wanted use of the transporters to beam up valuable trade goods. Meanwhile, Urotoxa, an older Nausiccan academic, wanted them to help the humanoid inhabitants of the planet’s fluidic layer far below by bringing them a shipment of phasers. She was sure they would be decimated by the Bryozoans, and, as she had been in communication with them, she wanted to help them.

During this three-sided interaction, they discovered a lot through the use of Tennant’s Betazoid telepathy. They found out that Demaad had an underhanded ulterior motive and that Urotoxa was probably the cause of the entire disaster befalling the planet and its inhabitants. Despite neither woman coming out of the conversation smelling like roses, the PCs decided to try to convince the Captain of the Challenger to let them help the Kizomans, although, perhaps not by breaking the Prime Directive to furnish them with advanced weapons.

In Act 3: The Fate of Kizomic VI, we saw our heroes contending with the Bryozoan Terror, a massive amalgamation of smaller aliens that they had detected swimming towards the main population centre of the Kizoman people in the fluidic layer. They boarded the shuttle Galileo with a probe ripe for jury-rigging and a trio of EVA suits. While Tennan and Burk worked to modify the probe to emit a high-level of gradonic radiation, (they had figured out earlier that that’s what the Bryozoans fed on, destroying the inanimate objects that contained it in the process) Kemal piloted the shuttle down, down, down until it became a submarine. In modifying the probe, they were too successful, as it turned out. It drew the Terror to them before they had even had a chance to launch the probe towards one of the few remaining rifts that the creatures had emerged through in the first place. The shuttle took corrosive damage that left it immobile and losing structural integrity. They eventually managed to launch the probe to draw the Terror away, but two of them had to exit the craft to effect repairs. They managed it with only moments to spare before their suits ruptured. Kemal got them to the gaseous layer before the hull gave out, just in time to be transported back to the ship. Whew! That was quite the finale! Except there was more.

Here’s where the PCs get one final opportunity to make some headway on that Evacuation Extended Task. They had to each take actions to try to help save some more citizens of Cressida. And they did fine, managing to rescue most of the inhabitants before the city crumbled away to nothing in the atmosphere of Kizomic VI. This felt anticlimactic, though, I won’t lie. I should have taken this part of the adventure and moved it to a point before they went to deal with the Bryozoan Terror.

Conclusion

This was a very well put together adventure. As I mentioned above, the teaching elements worked very well, at least when I got to use them. Actually the most gratifying part of it was that the players avoided doing most things the adventure expected of them. Generally, they avoided violence whenever possible, which felt very Star Trek, and this was great because it got me to engage fully with the mechanics and think on my feet as a GM too.

But also, each Act lasted exactly one session. No overlap, no worries about not getting it finished on the night. Nothing but net. They clearly play-tested the hell out of it.

It could maybe have done with a few more opportunities for role-play, but then again, that’s just not the type of adventure it was. In Act 2, there was that interaction between the PCs, Demaad and Urotoxa, which highlighted social conflict and it worked really well.

Honestly, the only real issue was that ending. The adventure directs you to ask the PCs for more tasks to help complete the evacuation once the finale had already occurred in my opinion. It was an anti-climax and the players agreed. If I had it to do over, I would have taken this and placed it before the Bryozoan Terror encounter.

We are looking forward to continuing the campaign! The players are looking for a bit more of a chance to role-play so I think we’ll have a Starbase episode next!

Star Trek Adventures 2E Character Creation

Boldly Going

Dear reader, if you have been around here for a while, you might be aware that I have an interest in Star Trek. I don’t know if I’m what you would call hardcore, but I am currently in the process of watching every episode of every Star Trek series I can get my hands on. I started more than a year ago on Star Trek The Next Generation and never intended to branch out of the TNG era. I continued watching Deep Space 9 and Voyager. As I approach the end of that series, I have found myself unwilling to give up just yet, so I’ve gone back to the Original Series as well. I’d seen a lot of them before. TOS was required watching in my house when I was a kid and I can vividly remember rushing home to watch TNG after school as a teenager. Anyway, I have more than a passing knowledge of the TV shows and movies, the universe, the tropes and the types of stories that Star Trek tackles. And yet, I had never played a Star Trek RPG! Since I have been on this marathon rewatch recently and because I picked up Modiphius’ Star Trek Adventure 2E in their Summer sale, I thought it was high time I rectified that.

The cover of the Star Trek Adventures 2E Start Set Campaign Book. A variety of TOS era characters are gathered performing investigative tasks on a planet's surface.
Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set

A review of the system, the game, and our campaign will follow in the future. We have only had two sessions so far, so I don’t want to jump the gun. Today, instead, I thought I would do a character creation post. Haven’t had one of them in a while, and they always prove quite popular. Also, since we are playing the campaign from the Starter Set, we are using pregenerated characters from that. The pregens are great, but, using them means I have not experienced the joys of character creation in this system. It always teaches me a lot about a game, so I think this will be a worth-while exercise.

Player Characters

Reporting For Duty Chapter two-page spread. Illustration of a number of crewmembers escorting an injured crewmember on a gurney through a shuttle bay.
Reporting for Duty

Chapter 4.1 begins with an explanation of the types of player characters in Star Trek Adventures. These are split between Main Characters and Supporting Characters. Imagine the Main Character as being your regular PC, a member of the Starship’s bridge crew. Someone like Mr Sulu or Commander Riker, Supporting Characters, on the other hand, are created when needed. They might be a relatively random red-shirt who the players need to march off to investigate a suspicious crater on an alien moon or a transporter chief who needs to modify the transporter to beam back the away team full of Main Characters on the planet’s surface.

Next we have a look at the building blocks that go together to construct a character in this game:

  • Traits – a word or phrase that describes the essence of the character. Generally these would be things like Vulcan and Star Fleet Officer
  • Values – a few brief sentences that describe what your character believes, treasures, and thinks. They should guide roleplaying more than any other aspect of the character
  • Attributes – In this game these are:
    • Control
    • Daring
    • Fitness
    • Insight
    • Presence
    • Reason
  • Departments – These represent the general roles that Star Fleet officers might encompass. They are the areas they would be trained in. You add an Attribute value to a Department value to come up with the Target Number for you to roll equal to or under on 2d20 to complete tasks. That’s the core mechanic for this and other Modiphius games, Here’s the list of Departments:
    • Command
    • Conn
    • Engineering
    • Security
    • Medicine
    • Science
  • Stress – Like in Blades in the Dark, this is a Star Trek Adventures character’s super-power. If they ever want to avoid an injury, they can choose to take the equivalent amount of Stress instead and keep going. This is particularly important in a system where gaining an injury leads to the PC being Defeated, and essentially out of play.
  • Focuses – these are your character’s specialisms. A Main character has 6 of these
  • Talents and Special Rules – These are special benefits that are often selectable by members of particular species or by characters with certain departments above a specific rating. They can bestow bonuses of several kinds. Other special abilities are Species or Role specific.

Lifepath or Creation in Play

The first page of the Lifepath Character Creation section
The first page of the Lifepath Character Creation section
First page of the Creation in Play section.
First page of the Creation in Play section.

Star Trek Adventures presents the player with two options for character creation. The first, and most detailed, is the Lifepath method. It’s difficult not to think of the Traveller character creation method as a major influence on the choice of the designers to include this as the default option. It’s highly detailed, provides a wealth of tables to roll on or choose from and allows for the creation of the type of character you didn’t know you always wanted. Traveller, the OG space exploration sci-fi game, was doing doing this decades before anyone else, of course.

The other option is called Creation in Play. This simplifies the character generation system for those who already have a clear idea of the character they want to play and just need to construct them with stats etc.

It’s my habit is to create characters in as random a method as possible. As such, I have no choice but to go Lifepath here.

The Game of Life(path)

This is split handily into seven steps.

The steps of the Lifepath Creation method.
The steps of the Lifepath Creation method.

Step One: Species

You can ostensibly choose any species you can think of from the Star Trek universe, bearing in mind the species who have been contacted by Star Fleet during the era you want to set your game in. So, no Jem’Hadar in the TOS era, for instance. But, they have provided a one-pager on each of the major species from across multiple Star Trek shows, so I think it would be crazy not to choose one of those. Now, since the game I’m currently playing is set in the time of Captain Kirk’s famous five-year mission across the galaxy, I think I will choose to go for a TNG/DS9/Voyager era character. I have a much deeper knowledge of that time anyway. Also, it allows for far more options since many of the species listed are enemies of the Federation during that TOS era. There are 14 species to choose from so I’ll roll my DCC d14 for this:

  1. Andorian
  2. Aenar
  3. Bajoran
  4. Betazoid
  5. Cardassian
  6. Denobulan
  7. Ferengi
  8. Human
  9. Klingon
  10. Orion
  11. Romulan
  12. Tellarite
  13. Trill
  14. Vulcan

I got a 10! That’s Orion. An Orion appeared in the very first pilot of the the Original Star Trek show, but they have had more prominent roles in more recent ones like Discovery and Lower Decks.

They are green-skinned humanoids who are known as traders. The Orion Syndicate is an infamous criminal organisation that spans half the galaxy, also, so they come with some baggage.

Orion Page
Orion Page

Now that I know the Species I can start building my character

Every PC starts with a rating of 7 in each attribute and a rating of 1 in each department. But an Orion character starts with a +1 in Daring, Fitness and Presence. So here are my attributes at this stage:

- Control - 7
- Daring - 8
- Fitness - 8
- Insight - 7
- Presence - 8
- Reason - 7

They also gain the following trait:

Trait: Orion – Orions have similar environmental tolerances to Humans and are physically and culturally well-accustomed to interstellar travel. The Orions’ reputation as thieves, pirates, and illicit traders can make others wary of them, but it can also open doors and create opportunities in more unsavory parts of the Galaxy.

And the following Species Ability:

NEVER AT FACE VALUE (SPECIES ABILITY): Once per scene, you may add 1 Threat to ask the gamemaster a question about the situation, as if you had spent Momentum to Obtain Information.

That’s a handy little ability.

Step Two: Environment

There’s a table for the environment your character grew up in:

D20 ENVIRONMENT
1–3 Another Species’ World
4–6 Busy Colony
7–9 Frontier Colony
10–12 Homeworld
13–15 Isolated Colony
16–18 Starship or Starbase
19–20 Roll Again or Choose

The text of the section provides a short description of each of the options in the table, but it’s fairly self-explanatory, I think.

Anyway, I rolled a 12, which gives me “Homeworld.”

I need to choose a Value at this stage. Since several sample Values were provided in the description of the Orions as a Species, it seems right to take one of those for a personal from the Orion homeworld.

First Value – I thrive because I do not ignore opportunities.

On top of that, I get to add 1 to one of the attributes I improved when I settled on Orion as a species. I’ll add to Presence, making it a 9.

Finally, in the Environment step, I can add 1 to Command, Security or Science departments. I am beginning to see a potential role for this character so I will choose to add it to Command, making that a 2.

Step 3: Upbringing

It is interesting here that you can choose to either accept or rebel against your upbringing, and this will have a material effect on the character.

Here’s the table:

D20 UPBRINGING
1–3 Agriculture or Rural
4–6 Artistic and Creative
7–9 Business or Trade
10–12 Diplomacy and Politics
13–15 Science and Technology
16–18 Starfleet or Military
19–20 Roll Again or Choose

That’s a 1. Agricultural or rural. I think there is no doubt that this character rebelled against the life of a hydroponics farmer in the hinterlands of the Orion homeworld. They fled to the cities and the stars at the first opportunity.

Given that choice, they get to increase their Presence by 1 point again, making it 10. They also get to add 2 to Reason, bringing it to 9.

Next, they can increase one of the following departments by 1: Conn, Security or Medicine. I think they should be a good pilot. So Conn increases to 2.

I get to choose a Focus at this stage as well. They provide several examples that suit the upbringing. I’m going to choose Navigation as my first Focus.

This step also provides access to a talent. But you are given the option to wait until the end of character creation to choose it, so I’m going to do that since many of the talents have strict attribute requirements that this character cannot fulfil at this stage.

Step Four: Career Path

This is the most important step in building a character for Star Trek Adventures.
So, normally, I would make a roll for every aspect of a character I make on the blog, but, I have a clear idea of this PC being a Command track Star Fleet Officer. It is possible to roll for this. Here are the tables, if you’re interested in what else is available:

D20 CAREER PATH
1–4 Starfleet (Officer)
5–8 Starfleet (Enlisted)
9–10 Starfleet (Intelligence)
11–12 Diplomatic Corps
13–14 Civilian (Physician)
15–16 Civilian (Scientist)
17–18 Civilian (Official)
19–20 Civilian (Trader)

D20 TRACK
1–6 Command
7–12 Operations
13–18 Sciences
19–20 Roll Again or Choose

But, as I mentioned, I have already made the choice. Here’s what I get for my Orion character on the Star Fleet Command track Career Path:

  • Trait: Starfleet Officer
  • Value: The Prime Directive is there to remind us we are not gods and should not act like them. (This is one of several examples provided here. I like it as a stepping stone for the PC.)
  • Attributes: 3 points to be split between two or three attributes. I am choosing to add 2 to Control (now 9) and 1 to Daring (now 9.)
  • Departments: +2 to either Command or Conn and +1 to any two others. Can’t have any department over 4 at this stage. I’m going to top out Conn at 4, and I am going to make Command 3 and Security 2.
  • Focuses: These should reflect the Command track. I’m going to choose Inspiration, Persuasion and Helm Operations
  • Talent: another talent. Still saving these up till the end

Step Five: Experience

There is no table to roll on this time. I must choose Novice, Experienced or Veteran. I think my Orion is a brash young go-getter, so I will choose Novice.
Here’s what the Novice gets:

  • Value: I must prove myself (once again, chosen from some examples)
  • Talent: I receive the Talent, Untapped Potential
    • This means I can’t have any attribute above 11 or any department above 4 but when it has the potential to gain you extra Momentum during play whenever you succeed at a task.

Step Six: Career Events

Captain Picard overseas the Command Track.
Captain Picard overseas the Command Track.

You get two major career events that are likely to have shaped the character. There is a table for this that I can roll on twice. Here’s the table:

D20 CAREER EVENT
1 Betrayed Ideals for a Superior
2 Breakthrough or Invention
3 Called Out a Superior
4 Conflict with a Hostile Culture
5 Dealt with a Plague
6 Death of a Friend
7 Discovered an Artifact
8 Encountered a Truly Alien Being
9 First Contact
10 Lauded by Another Culture
11 Learned Unique Language
12 Mentored
13 Negotiated a Treaty
14 New Battle Strategy
15 Required to Take Command
16 Serious Injury
17 Ship Destroyed
18 Solved an Engineering Crisis
19 Special Commendation
20 Transporter Accident

I got a 15 – Required to Take Command for my first one.
In this case, since my PC is a novice, I am imagining a scenario in which their instructor at the academy was gravely injured in a shuttle crash during a training exercise. My PC was the first to get the situation under control and co-ordinate the efforts of the other cadets to repair the ship, call for rescue and stabilise their instructor.

Gains:
Attribute: +1 Daring (now 10)
Department: +1 Command (now 4)
Focus: Composure

Second roll, 10 – Lauded by Another Culture.
On their first mission, my Orion was involved in the rescue of a Ferengi trading vessel. On board the drifting ship, they managed to restore power, save the lives of the Damon and his crew and even brokered a profitable deal between them and the Federation.

Attribute: +1 Presence (Now 11)
Department: +1 Science (Now 2)
Focus: Ferengi Culture
Trait: Ferengi Trading Partner

Step Seven: Finishing Touches

Almost done. This step provides a little bit of everything and the necessary personal details that round out any character.

Value: Your expectations limit you (one of the Orion examples. They are still an Orion at heart, even if they are a Star Fleet Officer now)
Attributes: +1 to Daring (Now 9) and +1 to Fitness (Now 9)
Here are the final attribute scores:
– Control – 9
– Daring – 10
– Fitness – 9
– Insight – 7
– Presence – 11
– Reason – 9
Departments: +1 to Security (now 3) and +1 to Science (Now 3)
Here are the final department scores:
– Command – 4
– Conn – 4
– Engineering – 1
– Security – 3
– Medicine – 1
– Science – 3
Focuses: Got all 6, Navigation, Ferengi Culture, Composure, Inspiration, Persuasion and Helm Operations
Talents: Time to choose these. I should have two more in addition to Untapped Potential

  • Bargain: REQUIREMENT: Command 3+
    When you use Negotiation to make an offer to someone during social conflict, you may re-roll a single d20 on your next Persuade task to convince that person. If the social conflict with that person involves an extended task, your Impact is increased by 1.
  • Follow My Lead: REQUIREMENT: Command 3+
    When you succeed at a task during combat or another perilous situation, you may spend Determination. If you do, choose a single ally who can hear you. The next task that ally attempts counts as having assistance from you, using your Presence + Command. On this task, do not roll your assistance die: it counts as having already rolled a 1.
  • Final Details:
    Mesh is this character’s name and he uses the pronouns he/him.
    He is 22 years old.
    His passtime is Parisi Squares (a dangerous sport.)
    Mesh’s role is that of the Executive Officer. He gets:
  • ROLE BENEFIT: When an allied character in communication
    with you spends Determination, you may spend 3 Momentum (Immediate) to enable that character to regain the spent point of Determination.
    His rank is Lieutenant Junior Grade.
    Equipment is not important to this exercise so I’ll skip it.

Conclusion

This has taken a lot longer than I expected when I set out to make the character. My advice would be to leave a whole session for several players to make their characters, tweak them, decide on their relationships to the other PCs etc.

But it was fun. I enjoyed delving into the Star Trekness of it all and I think I would actually like to play Mesh, my Orion Lieutenant Junior Grade who dreams one day of commanding a ship of his own.