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What's Inside the Star Trek™ RPG Player's Guide?

by Kathy McCracken (webmaster@decipher.com)
Web Writer

For over 35 years, Star Trek fans have watched and re-watched the hundreds of episodes of Star Trek, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, and the nine movies based on Gene Roddenberry's remarkable universe, and imagined themselves participating in those adventures. With the Star Trek Roleplaying Game, you can create your own character and recreate the events of the Star Trek universe (they might turn out quite differently!) or create your own new adventures.

The Basics

The Star Trek Roleplaying Game launches in April 2002 with the Player's Guide, a 250-page, full-color, hardcover book, with 14 chapters and an appendix packed with everything you need to create a character and start playing the game. Character creation, gameplay rules, and background information are drawn from all eras of Star Trek from "classic Trek" through Voyager.

The Star Trek Roleplaying Game uses the Coda System, developed by Decipher's RPG Studio for all of their roleplaying games (including The Lord of the Rings™ RPG). Although each RPG will have some unique rules of its own (reflecting the considerable differences between, for example, the wizard's staffs of Middle-earth and the phasers of the Star Trek universe), anyone who learns how to play the Star Trek RPG will easily be able to pick up The Lord of the Rings RPG in no time.

What's Inside?

A brief introductory section that explains a few basics about Star Trek and roleplaying in general, and includes a glossary of RPG terms, is followed by Chapter One's synopsis of the history and key events from each of the Star Trek series, as well as a sampling of "adventures" experienced by the crews to spark your imagination for creating your own. Of course, many players will already be familiar with one or more of the series, but for those who aren't, this provides a useful overview – and even die-hard Trekkers will appreciate these memory-jogging summaries.

Each series is portrayed as having a different mood and core "theme." The ground-breaking original series, with its "frontier" feel, was at heart a story of expansion of the human race and the Federation. The Next Generation devoted more time to diplomatic and humanitarian missions in a more extensively explored universe. By the time of the "grittier" Deep Space Nine, the focus was on moral, social, and political questions, the Dominion war, and shifting alliances. Voyager returned to the exploration theme, with its ship out of contact with Starfleet and forced to make decisions with few guidelines relevant to their unusual situation.

The adventures experienced by the characters in these series ranged from themes of exploration, discovery of new civilizations and life-forms, and diplomatic endeavors to personal development, frontier justice, trade, and the "hero's journey."

Character Creation

The next seven chapters cover the extremely flexible, detailed process of creating a character. Generally, you will build your character by selecting a species and profession and adding skills, traits, and attributes from the extensive "development packages" supplied. If you're new to roleplaying or just want to streamline the process, you can use the fast-track method, starting with one of the six supplied "archetypes" – ready-made characters that you can personalize to your taste. At the other extreme, you can go for a complete custom job, developing your character along whatever lines you like. If you've always wanted to play a greedy, dull-witted Vulcan/Betazoid merchant entrepreneur who was raised by aliens on Tau Alpha C and is highly skilled in Biochemistry and Armed Combat, now's your chance.

You'll start by choosing your character's species and profession. One chapter gives detailed species descriptions for ten of the major Star Trek species, from Bajoran through Vulcan. Much more than a physical description, you'll find typical personality traits, background information about their homeworld and culture, naming practices and typical names, favored professions, and special abilities. You can even create a mixed-species character with appropriate abilities from each. The next chapter provides nine professions for you to choose from, based on the kinds of roles seen in Star Trek, from Starship Officers to Diplomats, Mystics, and Rogues. A character's profession determines his or her favored attributes (for example, Intellect for a Merchant) and reactions (a Soldier favors Quickness), as well as certain fundamental professional abilities which influence the skills they start the game with.

This basic character is fleshed out by choosing personal and professional development "packages" that give you a background (such as colony upbringing) and a particular professional role (e.g., Bureaucrat), and allow you to choose from skills and "edges" appropriate to your chosen profession and species. If none of the supplied packages sound just right, you are free to create your own.

The other four chapters in this section discuss attributes (Strength, Intellect, Agility, Vitality, Presence, and Perception), dozens of skills, character traits (both "edges" which give your character advantages, and "flaws" which penalize the character in some way), and characteristics (such as Personality, Age, Reactions, and Courage).

Attributes may be selected randomly (with dice rolls) or by a "pick" method; starting skills and edges (and sometimes flaws) are selected from your chosen development packages. Characteristics are (initially) largely determined by the rules and the character's other features – for example, each character begins with a pool of 3 Courage (possibly modified by their species or profession), and their Health rating depends on their Vitality and Strength. All of these features may change during the course of the game, as you age, gain experience, are injured, or acquire technology.

Each chapter explains how to acquire and use your character's features, how the different features interact, how to make skill tests, and much more.

Player Resources

The final six chapters cover Advancement, Equipment, Starships, Adventuring, The Galaxy, and The Federation.

As you complete adventures, your Narrator will award you experience points, based on your performance during the mission, which allow you to upgrade your attributes and traits or learn new skills. After meeting certain prerequisites, you can adopt an elite profession, becoming a specialist in your current profession (a Diplomat might become an Ambassador) or making a career switch (moving from one branch of Starfleet to another, for example). The Advancement chapter lays out the rules for advancing with experience points and describes the elite professions, their prerequisites, and associated professional skills.

The Equipment chapter describes the types of available equipment and its capabilities and tells you how you can acquire it (purchased with latinum or assigned to Starfleet personnel). The Starship chapter, in contrast, is simply an informational chapter describing ship systems and presenting data sheets for several ships; game rules governing ship operations and ship combat will be included in the Narrator's Guide.

Adventuring provides some general guidance in selecting a general theme for your "voyage," from Action and Danger to Message and Morality; choosing a setting (the swashbuckling Original Series or the thoughtful Next Generation?); building a crew from a group of player characters; and helping the Narrator by playing your role and maintaining the mood of the game.

The Galaxy and The Federation provide a wealth of history and background information to use in building your stories. The Galaxy is a galactic timeline filled with key events such as when each species developed warp travel, critical wars and battles, and important first contacts; while The Federation discusses the function and structure of the United Federation of Planets and its military/exploratory arm, Starfleet. You'll find it invaluable to have all this information in one place for reference.

Finally, the Appendix covers the nitty-gritty of a roleplaying game – the rules for taking actions, including movement, fatigue, combat, injury, and healing.

Boldly Go...

The Player's Guide includes everything you need to get started in the Star Trek Roleplaying Game, from an "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations" approach to character creation, to extensive backstory resources, to a concise set of action rules. Future supplements will supply even more information for creating new adventures, additional species and professions, and many more details from the Star Trek universe – enough to keep you boldly going where no one has gone before, for a long, long time!

April 10, 2002