IndieRPG – The Dice Pool

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.

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.

Old School v Old School Essentials

Downtime Discussion

I had a really interesting discussion last night with, friends of the blog, Tom and Isaac. They’ve both been along with me for the Editioning ride and have some great insights. We have started a monthly round-up of games in a Discord video chat. We’re calling it Tables & Tales Downtime. It’s a simple opportunity, that we don’t generally get at the table, to talk about the games we’re playing. We’ve only had two of these Downtimes and they have each turned out quite different. The first went into detail on the games themselves, what happened in the sessions of the previous month, how the systems and mechanics worked at the table, what surprised or delighted players, or what didn’t work for them. In this second one, it was just the three of us so we got into a fairly free-wheeling discussion of the things we had been thinking about games in general recently.

Isaac has been preparing to run the classic AD&D 1st Edition module, Ravenloft, grappling with its copious verbiage and unwanted levels of detail. Meanwhile, I have been reading a couple of OSE adventures and coming to grips with their house-style, which feels like the exact opposite. Tom’s perspective was unique in this mix as the DM of our Dungeon World game, coming up with all their adventure ideas off the dome, which presents its own challenges and opportunities.

The Keep on the Borderlands

I can’t comment too much on Ravenloft since I haven’t read it, but it sounds similar to many adventures of the time. It is arranged in paragraphs, long and wordy. It’s got stats and descriptions for NPCs and areas that are almost certainly never going to be needed. It makes a lot of assumptions about what the PCs are going to try to do and it provides the DM ways to thwart their idiotic plans.

Another prime example is B2 The Keep on the Borderlands. As a beginner module, it has a lot of advice for the starting DM and even for players included. But it also spells out the consequences if the party decides to go on an anti-social rampage through the keep, the exact numbers and stats for the guards, their locations, how many are on duty and in armour, etc. etc. The cognitive load this requires of a DM is not to be underestimated.

Description of hte guard towers in the Keep. — Description of the guard towers in the Keep.

We’re going back in time with adventure modules like this, of course. Maybe comparing them to more modern styles of adventure presentation is unfair. Every adventure produced relies on creators who learned from the mistakes and successes of those who came before, after all. But, in preparation for this post, I read some reviews of Holy Mountain Shaker, the OSE adventure I’m going to use as comparison. Some reviewers and commenters simply hated the OSE house style used to present it because its terse bullet points and single phrase descriptors didn’t include enough sentences or actual paragraphs. Some DMs feel like they need a piece of prose to get to grips with the atmosphere, the setting or the characters. Some people want to have to read through a module two or three times before they feel ready to bring it to the table. The Keep on the Borderlands suggests this approach in the “Preparation for the Use of the Module” section.

Now, up until this point in the text, Gary Gygax has been really bigging up the DM, Here’s an except. Sorry it’s so long. Gary needs an editor tbh:

So, you can see that he has been buttering up the poor rube who agreed to run this classic adventure before telling them they have to learn the damn thing off by heart in preparation. And you can see that that would be no mean feat given the style of writing, the denseness of the prose and lack of distinction between description and stats.

I want to make one thing very clear at this stage; I played The Keep on the Borderlands recently and thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought it was a great module with lots of player freedom, options for the DM to customise and almost endless possibilities for how it might play out at the table. But its the reading of these older adventures that’s a chore. I don’t really want to read them through once, never mind three times. It takes a long time and it’s boring.

Adventures are for playing, not for reading. Is that controversial?

Holy Mountain Shaker

Holy Mountain Shaker is a 2021 adventure module for Old School Essentials by Luka Rejec of Ultraviolet Grasslands fame. I think it’s interesting that UVG was the first RPG book that got me to stop reading it so that I could start playing it. The longer I spent reading it the more it dawned on me that it was a reference book, not a work of fiction. Anyway, Holy Mountain Shaker is an ambitious adventure that includes a really large number of compelling and enormous locations as well as a town with a few relatively unimportant factions. This is a point crawl where each point is big, like a massive underground chasm, an enormous ziggurat under a mountain, an entire mine. That sort of thing. These are not accompanied by maps of the areas. This is only a 56 page adventure. Instead, the DM is given some of those terse descriptors, a few options for what a party might do in the locations, where their investigations might lead to and some encounters and events.

Sure, it might help if you read some of the location descriptions ahead of time to get an idea of what’s coming for the adventurers, but that won’t take very long and you could absolutely get away with not doing it. It’s easy to see, at a glance, what you need to give the players, what they will need to do some work to find, and what might happen if they do certain things. Personally, I think this gives you just enough to improvise with. We’re playing a use-your-imagination-game here, and I like being given the chance to use mine, even on the fly with minimum prep. Admittedly, having run UVG for a while, I have quite a bit of experience doing this, as it is laid out similarly. But, equally, if you play Blades in the Dark, Heart, the Between or any other story game, you are faced with making up locations, NPCs, items constantly. That’s part of the challenge and part of the fun.

The lack of location-specific maps is a little jarring. I get that. I wanted a map of the ziggurat like we got a (kind of) map of the Pharaoh Fish, but, ultimately, I understand that the exploration is meant to be abstracted, and occasionally cut with scenes of discovery where a PC finds one of those wonderful magic items, or by combat, where we zoom in on the action when a random encounter occurs with one of the creatures that is described at the beginning (and only at the beginning) of the book. It reminds me of a Final Fantasy game. Your little guy is travelling by map across country when you suddenly run into a rabid chocobo or whatever. The map disappears and your party are gathered there in a fully realised location facing that one poor flightless bird.

You don’t have to slog through descriptions of endless empty rooms or 30 ft long corridors. We’ve all done that. I get that that’s D&D and I also enjoy the sort of play that involves precise measurement, perfectly drawn maps and searching for traps with ten foot poles. But reading this was refreshing. It presented me with a different way to play even large-scale locations in a mega dungeon that won’t take the rest of your life to play through and was packaged in such a compact and attractive book.

But, for the sake of comparison, we looked at the Keep from Keep on the Borderlands above so let’s look at the town in Holy Mountain Shaker. The town of Plish is described in two pages, both of which are half illustration. The factions get a bullet point each. This actually seems fair since they don’t come into the adventure itself much. Then you get a paragraph about the native Plishlings compared to the Newfolk who have come to mine the mountain. And lastly, there is another short paragraph describing the Cult of the God Carp. On the second page we have a couple of lines about the earthquakes plaguing the town and then a table of rumours. That’s it. No descriptions of fortifications, no guard stats, no structural engineering reports. What it’s doing is trusting that we all know the kinds of things you might find in a fantasy mining town at the foot of a holy mountain. And it’s giving us permission to come up with that stuff at the table (or for the DM to make it up before they start, I suppose.)

Conclusion

Now, I have a some issues with Holy Mountain Shaker as well. I think some of the descriptors used are too obscure for the average DM to know without looking them up. And that sort of stumbling block is a big deal if you only have one word to go on (what is a vitrine, anyway?) Some of the illustrations do not really illustrate what I would want them to illustrate about some of the locations. And I would actually like a bit more involvement from the factions. But I’m not really here to review this adventure, especially as I haven’t played it yet. I’m just here to compare these two styles.

I think it’s worth mentioning that the former style has not completely died out. Some trad games are still presented using dense paragraphs when, in my opinion, bullet points would be better (looking at you Dragon Age RPG, Call of Cthulhu, DCC) but, as I mentioned above, that style still has its fans and adherents. More power to ‘em. But, for me? Keep it minimal.

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

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

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

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:

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.
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.
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!

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.

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.

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 — Star Trek Adventures 2E Starter Set

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.

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

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

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:

Andorian
Aenar
Bajoran
Betazoid
Cardassian
Denobulan
Ferengi
Human
Klingon
Orion
Romulan
Tellarite
Trill
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.

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.

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.

One More Shot to the Heart

Dear Reader, I was away on holidays in the scorched and parched East of England again last week. I enjoyed the break but it has left me with no enough time to write up a new post for this week. I have one in the works but it is far from ready, I’m afraid. Instead, I thought I would share with you again a post from this time last year. Here is my advice for running Heart: The City Beneath as a one-shot. Hope you enjoy it!

One Shot to the Heart

Stay Frosty, Forneus Research Base Review

Zero Prep

It’s the dream, wouldn’t you say, dear reader? Pick up and play. Many claim it, few deliver. One thing I’ll say about this Stay Frosty adventure, and, to be fair, any Stay Frosty adventure I’ve read (which isn’t many,) is that you can pick it up and play it with pretty much no preparation. I mean, that goes for Stay Frosty to a certain extent too. I discovered that when I reviewed the game itself last October.

The cover of Stay Frosty Remastered by Casey Garske. Space Marines fighting aliens/demons — Stay Frosty Remastered

But, of course, zero prep is not all you might want from an adventure. In fact, for some GMs, prep is as much fun as play. So what else has Andrew Walter’s Forneus Research Base got going for it?

Well, Tom, Isaac and I played it over the space of three sessions recently. In fact, we just finished it the other night. I have thoughts.

Action

There’s no fucking around with Stay Frosty, no long opening scene to allow for introductions of our characters, just a short summary for the PCs, of what they’re doing out there in space and an immediate crash landing at the eponymous Research Base. Oh, the crash landing was caused by black ooze exploding from the controls of their shuttle btw.

As I stated, there is a short read-aloud piece of text at the start. It explains that the PCs are private marines, employed by the United Universal Corporation to check in on its research colonies. As they are doing this, they are forced to crash land.

As I said, Stay Frosty is not really interested in your PCs feelings, unless they involve terror or going apeshit. At no point is anyone encouraged to take a moment to express their concern for their fellow marines or, for that matter, the colonists they were supposedly there to protect. This is a DOOM simulator. The PCs are there to shoot shotguns and blow up demons. And Forneus Research Base is all action from the get-go.

The Frostiness Tracker goes from Warm to Ice Cold — Frostiness Tracker

As soon as they emerged from the wreckage, the PCs realised they were not going to be able to take off again without significant work on the shuttle, so they decided to make their way to the base. Meanwhile, I’m rolling the Danger Die every time they move from one location to another, take a look around or stop to think, as intended by the rules. The Danger Die works a bit like a random encounter table. You roll a d6 and the result will give you one of the following:

Encounter and Stress – i.e. roll on the relevant encounter table. Forneus has one table for the moon’s surface and one for inside the base. Stress is added to the PCs to build Tension. Tension also equals Frostiness. They higher the Frostiness level the better as it gives PCs bonuses like advantage on initiative and even extra attacks. But Tension can also explode. See below for more on that.
In dangerous areas, Encounter, otherwise, Environment – Forneus has its own Environment table also. But this didn’t come up too often, to be honest.
Environment – as above
Stress – see point 1
Entropy – for some reason, I rolled this one a lot and it had no effect. It’s only relevant if the PCs are using a thing constantly that has its own Supply die. For instance, if they are using Combat Drugs or Fuel when they’re driving a vehicle. The idea is that when Entropy is rolled, the Supply Die for that thing goes down to the next lowest die size. But whenever this was rolled, they had nothing to decrease.
TENSION EXPLODES! – Only rolled this once. The idea here is that when this comes up, the PCs make a Willpower Save. If they succeed, they get to reduce their Tension by one. If they fail though, they take Tension x level damage and reduce their Tension to 1. Then they roll on the Going Apeshit table if their HP are reduced to 0 by the damage. The effects of this can be anything from getting Advantage on damage rolls but constantly rolling your Ammo Die (like a Supply Die for your weapons,) to Last Stand: going down mano-a-mano with your enemies. I actually adjudicated this mechanic incorrectly at the table. I didn’t allow them the Willpower Save, I just rolled the Tension damage and gave it to every PC. Also, this damage is not supposed to be applied to attribute scores when all HP are gone, as normal damage is. Only one PC had to roll on the Going Apeshit table. She ran for her goddamn life and they had to manacle her to the ATV to stop her.

(I only just realised I was calling this the Doom Die the whole way through our game. Oops.)

The Danger Die is the mechanic that really keeps things interesting in Stay Frosty. Many of the locations in the Forneus Research Base, for instance, have no pre-written encounters or much of interest at all, so the random encounters, environmental hazards and ratcheting Tension from the Danger Die are doing a lot of the work. This works fairly successfully but I found I was rolling up Encounters a lot, since a third of the possible Danger Die results give you one most of the time, and after a certain event in Forneus, you actually get Encounters on a roll of 1 to 3. So the marines were drifting from one Encounter to another with only cursory exploration in between.

At least the variety of enemies is suitably gristly, demonic and fun. You have the obvious demons, like the Black Leathery Imps, that used poison to make their enemies fire on each other. Then you have the basic cultists who just have guns, the mutated cultists who have been transformed to allow them to fly with their fiendish lord Xithrabla through the cosmos, sucking from his hellish teats and the Centiservitor who is a cultist combined with a centipede with a plasma cannon in its chest. On top of that you have the real horrors like the Cadaverous Persecutor, a giant cyborg corpse with a rocket launcher, and the Fledgeling Pest (The Final Boss,) a sickening, enormous baby’s head with a partially exposed brain and a vicious bite.

The Mutated Cultist has an eye where his torso should be — Mutant Cultist

The Centiservitor is a mashup of a human and a giant centipede with a plasma cannon in its chest. — Mutant Cultist

We found the lower level encounters were essentially just target practice. Since we only had two players, I gave them each three marines and decided to treat it a bit like a funnel. I think this was too many for this adventure. Four would have been a bit more balanced. The main reason I think this is because of the initiative roll in Stay Frosty. Whoever makes a successful Dexterity check gets to go before the enemy in this game. This generally meant that a significant portion of the six characters got to act before the demons and cultists. There were enough weapons between the marines that could do blast damage (flamers, grenades etc.) that they could wipe out the opposition before they ever got a shot off. It felt too easy at times. But, it also seemed to accurately emulate the feeling of playing a video game like Doom. At one point they were crossing a bridge over a chasm and being swarmed by imps and cultists. There were 26 opponents and the party defeated them in two rounds, just mowing them down in waves of gunfire and explosions. In only the second encounter, they came up against a group of six foaming cultists, one of whom was holding a grenade in each hand and standing near a leaky fuel tank. One well-placed shot from the grenade launcher took out the whole bunch with a mushroom cloud left in their wake. These moments felt hilarious, exhilarating and hilarious.

But when it comes to the more challenging opponents like the Centiservitor, the Cadaverous Persecutor and the Fledgeling Pest, I can’t stress how important it is to use the Powerful Opponents mechanic in Stay Frosty. That rule states that when there is a disparity on either side of a fight, the side with fewer Hit Dice, should subtract the difference between their HD and their Opponents’s HD from their attack rolls. For example, when my PCs were facing the Fledgeling Pest at the end of the adventure, the 1 HD/Level 1 marines had to subtract 3 from every one of their attacks against it because it had 4 HD. This meant that they were not able to overwhelm it by sheer numbers in the first round or two. Many shots that might have hit, did not, because of this nicely scaling rule. However, when they were up against the Centiservitor, I forgot to apply the Powerful Opponents rule and they slaughtered it before it ever got a chance to fire off its cool weapon.

My main complaint when it comes to the action in this adventure is that the Fledgeling Pest, labelled as the Final Boss, is quite avoidable. It is described as being attached to a wall by its very flesh in one of the Hangars, which have been converted to perform devilish rituals. But there is no reason for them to go to the Hangars in the adventure. I made one up, of course, to try and get them there. One of the NPCs they met told them there could be a working shuttle in one of them. This did lead them to the Hangars, but as soon as they got there, Tension Exploded and one of their number went running off across the moon’s surface so they hopped in the ATVs they had just found and booked it after her. After that, they decided to leg it as well. Since they had the ATVs, they were better able to make it back to their own shuttle. I had to think on my feet here or they were going to miss out on the best couple of encounters of the whole adventure. So, first, I had the Demon Arms (also restricted to the hangars) appear out of a hellish portal in the ground ahead of one of the ATVs, grabbing the driver and causing the vehicle to flip over. The mouth in the hand of one of the arms devoured one of the party but they won out. Then they moved on again and just as they were about to reach their shuttle the giant demonic archway (also found in the hangars) appeared in the air before them, with the Fledgeling Pest emerging out of it to attack them along with a few of its cultists. This was a genuinely tough fight and resulted in the death of a couple more party members. I might have just let them make it to the shuttle, I suppose, but I didn’t want to deprive the players of the Final Boss.

Non-action

Of course, it wasn’t all action. There was some exploration. This is done in a point-crawl style as you can see by the map here.

The Forneus Research base point-crawl map. — Point-crawl Map

The descriptions of the locations in the adventure are pretty bare-bones. At times, I found I wanted a bit more. For instance, the Systems, Generator & Atmosphere area is supposed to be enormous and encapsulates everything from winding, labyrinthine machine rooms to massive bridges spanning deep chasms. To be honest, these feel like they should be separate, individual locations. Another point about this area in particular is that we’re told that the communications can be turned back on and full computer bank access can be gained here, but not what that might achieve. I had no idea what the computer banks might tell them and I had no idea who they might communicate with off-world. That’s a lot to leave in the lap of a GM, especially when the rest of this adventure is pretty much zero-prep, as I mentioned before.

Apollo

Actually, it is really hard for the PCs to get much information about what has happened here. Even the few living, rational NPCs they meet had no way of knowing what happened on the base, since one was a prisoner and had been kept out of the loop the whole time, one was in a coma and one was a talking chimp, named Apollo, who was in stasis the whole time. It would have been more interesting if at least one of these guys had the full story for the marines. I should have improvised that, in hindsight. Of course, the PCs did recruit both Apollo, the chimp, and Jamal, the prisoner, gave them guns and got them shooting, so that was fun.

Conclusion

I ran this, as I mentioned above, for two players with three PCs each. I think this was a mistake. I mean, once they had recruited the NPCs, they had a squad of eight and they were just mulching the hostiles at every turn, until the very end. Four PCs would have been about right to make it a challenge. Also, I thought I might be able to run it as a one-shot, but that was highly unrealistic. It took three sessions in all, and they did not explore any more than about half the locations.

If I had to do it over again, I might have seeded some of the locations or NPCs with a bit more information on the background of the adventure, but I would still keep preparation time to near zero.

All in all, it was a fun, exploding demon sort of romp as an adventure and a system that we all enjoyed, although I expected Tension to Explode more often.

DCC Day 2026

Collections

It’s been a long time since I collected anything. I used to collect comics, although it wasn’t a conscious choice to build a collection. I just bought 2000AD every week and didn’t throw it out as that seemed rude. Those comics went the way of all things for one reason or another, and any comics I bought after that were digital. I even gave up on that when Amazon bought Comixology and ruined it as a service. I used to have a small collection of DVDs and Blurays. Still have a lot of them in the attic, actually. But with the advent of streaming services, I don’t purchase too many of those anymore.

RPGs, though… When I got back into playing them around 2014/2015, I was only playing 4E because I had the books. Then I decided to see what this whole 5E thing was about. That quickly ballooned out of all sense. Frustration with that brought me to discover indie RPGs starting with Spire and then everything that Rowan, Rook and Decard ever produced. That’s when things started to really get out of hand. Now I seem to never have quite enough shelf space. Every time I buy a new set of book shelves, I fill them immediately and then a new kickstarter fulfilment or three arrives.

DCC has been a major contributor to my collection woes. I have backed a number of Goodman Games crowd-funders in the last couple of years, including the recently arrived Dungeon Denizens II, Terror from the Underdeep (a 5E set, but still Goodman Games) and Caverns of Thracia. Also, there are just so many adventures, taken on their own, mere booklets, a few pages. But its hard to buy just one…

The cover of Dungeon Crawl Classics Caverns of Thracia. :arge face of a savage fighter in a bronze helm, lizard man in the background, Minotaur with axe and shield in the foreground. — DCC Caverns of Thracia

Anyway, back to the Caverns of Thracia. The kickstarter was to produce a book that included both the original Judges’ Guild mega-dungeon adventure by Jennell Jaquays and the newly realised version for DCC (or 5E.) It came with a bunch of add-ons like fold-out maps, a handout booklet, a GM screen and a few side adventures that were set in the same general area as the main one. So, I have been thinking recently, especially as I retread old ground in the Editioning, that I should be using some of these books! I thoroughly enjoy DCC but I have only ever run two funnel adventures and a 1st level one. So, I decided to take one of those side adventures from my Caverns of Thracia haul and run it for DCC Day 2026, which just passed on July 18th.

Beneath the Isle of the Serpents

Beneath the Isle of Serpents inside cover illustration shows a band of adventurers filing down a narrow corridor with a warrior in front, a Wizard in the middle and a hypnotised Dwarf in the rear, attacking the Wizard. They are being attacked by a Serpent man who looks a lot like a Lizard man if I'm being honest about it. — Hypnotise!

I settled on DCC # 109 Beneath the Isle of the Serpents by Bob Brinkman as a suitably evocative scenario that would showcase a pretty cool dungeon and could easily be finished in two sessions. I have already learned that, no matter how short a DCC adventure is, you are not likely to finish it in one session without severely editing it or via TPK. Turns out I had more lessons to learn.

We started the adventure in montage. My players, just two for this DCC Day, had a couple of PCs each. One of these was a Wizard, and one of the adventure hooks is that the Wizard’s patron calls in one of the many favours owed them. Hilda’s patron Ydd’grrl, demanded that she and her friends deal with the burgeoning evil beneath the Isle of the Serpents on the Starry Archipelago. So they trekked across the continent, traveling largely by map. They got to a fishing village on the mainland closest to the Isle of the Serpents and then a fisherman, named Kamay, offered to take them where they wanted to go. No-one else would…

Map of the Starry Archipelago. A number of green islands dotted acorss a blue sea. — Starry Archipelago: its fun to say. Try it!

Kamay dropped them off at the black sand beach on the south of the island. Here they faced the terror that was a Giant Devil Crab. They largely had the measure of this thing, but when it hit, it hit hard. After a couple of rounds where they battered away at its devilish shell, one of its claw attacks impaled Hilda, killing her instantly. Kinda, I mean, we fucked up here. It has been about ten months since we last played with these characters so we forgot how they worked. It looked like our Hilda had 15 HP, but we all thought that must be some mistake for a level 1 Wizard, right? Wrong, it was only after the session, when Hilda’s player, Tom, was trying to figure out where the 15 came from that they realised it was one of the benefits she got from her familiar! So, when I ruled that she couldn’t have had so many HP, and must have been killed by the 8 devil claw damage, I killed her without due process or any real legal basis. Some Judge! Anyway, once we knew what had happened, we ret-conned the death. Instead, she awoke amidst the devastation of the devil crab, stripped of all her belongings by her fellows, and badly injured. “Fuck this,” she thought, and went back to the boat.

While she was “dead/unconscious” however, I asked Tom to roll up a new PC using purplesorceror.com as I was worried about the ability of the party to survive the dungeon when there were just three of them. Tom rolled up Glagrill, a Dwarf who they’d all forgotten was asleep in the hold of Kamay’s fishing boat the whole time.

The Island

The map of the isle of Serpents. It is vaguely oblong with a volcano with a face in the middle. No hexes. — No hexes here.

The adventure provides a really great random encounter table for those parties that decide to explore the island’s surface. Now, there’s a perfectly good, relatively recently forged path through the jungle that leads directly to the main dungeon entrance. If they take that path, they get to move full speed and forgo having to roll for any random encounters at all! so those PCs who avoid that are probably just paranoid. No good reason to do that, surely!

Now, I will say that while the encounter table is great, if a bit over the top for what is probably going to be a very minor aspect of the adventure, the text tells the Judge to roll for a random encounter every two hexes traveled by the party, but the island map ain’t got no hexes so you would need to kind of guess how far two hexes might be, I suppose.

The Dungeon

Anyway, my clever party took the safe option and went straight down the path and straight down the ancient, root-choked chimney to the buried temple to some chaos God. Here they discovered some indecipherable wall art, a room filled with rust-midges and a grate in the floor, below which those blessed with infravision could see barely living bodies of humans hanging by manacles from the sloping ceiling of what looked like a sluice. And that was the end of session 1.

Session 2 saw them descend the winding staircase out of that first chamber. They found it ill-suited to them, too narrow, with steps too long and too low, as though built for a very different type of body. Before long, they encountered an opening in the wall on one side. Our Dwarf, Glagrill, checked it over but made some noise in the process. So, when he made his way into the chamber beyond, he found two Serpent Men and one Cobra Sub-commander on their way to attack. Unfortunately, the narrowness of the doorway meant only one PC could stand in the front. The Sub-commander attempted to hypnotize the PC right behind the Dwarf, but Glagrill did his best to defend, and Helfgott, our Cleric, cast darkness to prevent any more hypnosis attacks. Three against four, this turned into a war of attrition, which is bad news for a band of 1st level characters. Eventually, the darkness failed and Magnolia, our Halfling, was hypnotized by the Cobra Sub-commander. She had no choice but to attack Helfgott. She critted and did an extra 2d6 damage on top of her normal weapon damage. Helfgott only had 3 HP. He was one of the longer lived PCs. Isaac had had him since Sailors on the Starless Sea. It was a tough way to go but the others looted his corpse and moved on after they killed the two guards. The Sub-commander had locked himself in his room in the back of these guard quarters. On their way through they found a pair of lucky dice, some coin and a barrel of human hands, feet and other bits.

Eventually, they decided to open the door and deal with their opponent. This time, Melmoth, Isaac’s Elf character was the one to suffer the hypnosis of the Cobra Sub-commander. He was forced to turn on his new associate, Glagrill. He critted… Glagrill, so new to the world, was sent out of it again in but a moment. The two remaining adventurers, taking no chances, fire-bombed the trapped Cobra Sub-commander to death and found a bunch of treasure in the ruin of his chamber.

Not even half way through this adventure and technically, three PCs down. This was the dice telling a story. I was rolling so well, I felt bad about it. Tom and Isaac had never rolled worse, except when they were under the Cobra Sub-commander’s sway and they critted. There was shock, sorrow and outrage on display at the table. Everyone was questioning their choices. We laughed and cried. This is why I play these games to be honest. Not to kill characters but to experience the extremes of those moments.

Conclusion

The Cover of the Special Edition of DCC RPG. it has a gold embossed demon skull complete with horns on the faux-leather black cover. — DCC RPG Demon Skull

Eventually they trudged back towards the beach, thinking to retreat. Meanwhile, Kamay the fisherman started lifting the anchor. Hilda asked where he thought he was going. He told her his business was done here. She sent him into a deep and magical sleep and made for shore where she reunited with her former companions. They decided one more try was in order.

DCC Day 2026 may be done, but the expedition Beneath the Isle of the Serpents is far from over, dear reader. Join me again soon, when I will complete my review of this deadly module.

Blades in the Dark, Thoughts

Set-up

I made quite a big deal, last year, about the process of choosing an RPG to play. For months, I perused books and created characters to get a feel for a selection of games. Most of these games I would put squarely in the story game or, at least, narratively focused category. Blades in the Dark beat out Triangle Agency, Slugblaster, Wildsea and Deathmatch Island to name a few.

Once I had decided on Blades, I wrote a bunch of posts relating to the advice presented in Blades and its recent expansion, Deep Cuts. Reading the books and absorbing the advice helped to boost my enthusiasm for it.

We got into Blades well. We had a regular game every three weeks and we found a natural rhythm of having a score session followed by a downtime session. I had always planned to have only six sessions in our Season 1 of the game. This seemed like a reasonable amount of time for all of us to get a good taste for the game, the setting, the system, the characters and the crew.

We had our sixth session last week, so I thought I would take this opportunity to gather my thoughts, lay them out and examine them.

Up-sides

The scores; it’s what it’s all about. Even in the instances where I had no time to prepare and found myself recycling old ideas, we got really into the scores. The players seemed to enjoy the freedom of the narrative-first style that allowed them to fully describe an entire action scene rather than just rolling a die to see if they hit a guy. This bred inventiveness both in-score and out so that they pushed the envelope of what was possible even during downtime.

I enjoyed them because I found I had a curious amount of control over the proceedings. If we had a full session for the score, it was easy and fun to allow the PCs as much leeway and time to describe and indulge in their scenes. Conversely, if time was against us, I was able to push things to a conclusion with the flick of a narrative switch. I used clocks in every score, which will be no surprise to anyone, but, for me, it was remarkable. Looking back, I feel like I could have utilised them more often and to better effect. Almost every score involved just one clock representing the PCs goal and one representing the potential negative consequences. Especially in the final score, it would have been fun to introduce other clocks representing minor peripheral goals or dangers as well, but I didn’t think of it at the time so it didn’t happen. But, what I’m saying is that I like the use of clocks to track eventualities and possibilities. They are easy for everyone to understand and impress on all players the urgencies and exigencies of their situations.

Secondly, I loved the player-characters. The playbooks are iconic and the players loved to lean into them in fun and notable ways. I think the players all became attached to their characters in short order, which was essential since we had only six sessions. The crew became almost a character of its own, especially with its reliable cohort of thugs. I liked that the crew had a sense of ambition. They wanted to become the number one gang in Crow’s Foot, and by the end of the season, they had made significant headway towards that goal, defeating the Red Sashes in a war and capturing their leader. But they also each had their own motivations, religious or “scientific” or naval(?) I think the game itself has something to do with that, with stress and heat and reputation all conspiring to drive them in certain directions. But, I also know that my incredible group of players would build memorable characters no matter the influence of a ruleset so I don’t want to overstate that.

Thirdly, the setting. Duskwall is such an evocative setting. The eternal darkness, the ghostly hauntings, the leviathans and the empire. The nobility, the workers, the weird science and the gangs. It is rich and deep and you would be hard-pressed to fail to come up with interesting things to do in it. But it is not oppressive in its richness. We never felt as though we had to stick to some Akorosi canon. There is a freedom to create parts of the world that you would never get in, for instance, a published D&D setting. But, on the other hand, the books provide a wonderful assortment of factions, places, NPCs and items that can come in handy when you need something specific or general in a pinch. I was rarely left scrabbling for a needed detail. There was always something close to hand.

Up-hill Climb

Light shines down from above on a scoundrel running acorss the rooftops of Doskvol — Light shines down from above on a scoundrel running across the rooftops of Doskvol

But we had some significant issues in our six sessions. Now, some of these are entirely my fault. Some of them are a symptom of having only six sessions to become familiar with the game and some arose because we sometimes struggled to keep our sessions regular. But still, they were there so I’ve got to discuss them.

Downtime was the biggest struggle for me. Now this was, perhaps, the part that I can take most responsibility for, but there are elements that we found just rubbed us up the wrong way. So, firstly, about half way through, I decided to start introducing downtime rules from Deep Cuts. I liked these alternate rules. They were largely diceless and gave the PCs a bunch of other things to spend Coin on. I thought they would speed things along a bit more, compared to the original downtime rules. But it introduced confusion more than anything else. Because we had had so little time to get used to the original rules, and I had an imperfect understanding of the Deep Cuts rules, we ended up often very confused about what was needed for any given downtime activity. We often ended up mixing the two rulesets into some unholy abomination that we could never remember at the next downtime. I wish now that I had started with the Deep Cuts rules and used them the whole way through. I think they are, comparatively, smoother and more interesting overall.

But the main issue I had with downtime was the idea of having a separate and overtly different phase of play. The fact that you need to use a completely different set of rules for it delineates it deliberately from the score. It slows things down, it deals with each PC so separately that they are largely on their own for long periods of the game. This meant that the only other person they were interacting with most of the time at the table during downtime was me. This is a significant increase in mental load for the GM. On top of that, each PC has a few notable NPCs and I was responsible for voicing, playing and inventing them almost from scratch. That’s a lot to remember and a lot to do at the table.

And, the mechanics themselves, to me, made this part of play feel like I was constantly explaining the rules of a board-game to the players. All those currencies and meta-currencies, Coin, Rep, XP, Heat, Wanted Level, Status, Stress. There is so much to keep track of and it often feels like shuffling tokens and cards around on a board. I am not a big player of board-games. Given a choice, I would choose an RPG any day. Combining the two in this manner did not endear the game to me. And all the sheets required to keep track of everything go to evidence exactly how much admin is involved in Blades in the Dark. Now, I understand that this is actually a positive for many people. It’s just not for me.

In general, I found that role-playing, as one might traditionally think of it, was difficult to work into sessions of such heavy admin. Even in the score sessions, there is little time for inter-character development, so focused is the whole crew on the goal of the thing. This is, perhaps, a symptom of the style of play I am used to. Generally, in OSR or more trad games, the players are often role-playing amongst themselves constantly and then with me, as the GM, whenever they need to interact with an NPC in the world. Blades requires the players to know what sort of scenes they might want to role-play, set them up with the GM and know when to end them as well. So, that might be our relative inexperience with this type of game showing. But, if I might be allowed to make a comparison, I never felt like this when playing Spire or Heart, which are hardly OSR or trad. It think they sit more firmly on the story-game side of the divide, but we never had any issue with fitting in role-play in our campaigns of those games. I think this is due to the fact there was so little admin in those games. They feel more streamlined to me. Not perfect, by any means, but, perhaps, more to my taste.

Everyone agreed the character sheets were an issue. This was more from the player side than from me. The design of the character sheets is too busy and the text is too small and the little boxes to fill in are fiddly. In general, there is far too much text on them, even though I know the idea is that the player has everything they need at their fingertips. Interestingly, one of the things some players said was that, even with the quantum equipment rule where you don’t have to mark a piece of gear until you say you’re using it, they found the item list restrictive. They would often look at that list when trying to figure out what to do with their turn. Too often, they could see nothing of use, and instead, just defaulted to the usual skirmish or shoot. I thought this was a very interesting observation, that the design of the character sheet or the item list, at least, conspired to stunt their creativity in the moment.

Up-shot

Now, like I said at the start of the last section, its possible that a lot of these negative views are due to the way I ran the game, the irregular nature of the sessions, the limited exposure to the game, but I think its equally possible that I bumped up against it because I have a particular preference for a different type of game.

I confess that most of my best and most memorable experiences with RPGs recently has been with the OSR. Mythic Bastionland, Mothership, Black Sword Hack, Old School D&D. I am rooted in old school play after all. But, then again, I have played other story-games, like Heart and Spire, like Trophy, Root and Dungeon World and I have enjoyed them immensely. I might be forced to come to the conclusion that Blades is just not for me…

I guess we’ll see when we go back for season 2 of the Death Knells.