Star Trek Adventures
My first serious attempt at GMing
I’ve been playing TTRPGs for years and have always wanted to get into GMing - making my own adventures gives me the same creative buzz as writing novels does.
I’ve tried it several times but it never worked out very well, for various reasons. I’m not terribly good (or at least not very quick) at learning rules and I often tried to do too much too fast. But about two years ago a friend of mine had been taking a look at Star Trek Adventures by Modiphius Entertainment and suggested I give it a try. His reasoning was that while I would need to get used to the rules, at least I wouldn’t need to learn anything about the setting, seeing as how we are both huge trekkies. We decided to give the Starter Campaign from Modiphius a try and, barring some early hiccups that are inevitable when starting out a brand new system, it went really well.
I’ve been GMing a campaign for about two years now, and I am having an absolute blast. Our campaign takes place in the year 2380 (that’s about fifteen years after the start of Star Trek: The Next Generation) and is set in the Gamma Quadrant, the part of space where the Dominion, the main antagonist of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine hails from.
Our crew are on the USS Pioneer, sister ship of the titular starship from Star Trek: Voyager and have been tasked to help Starfleet explore this previously hostile part of the galaxy.
Throughout their journey so far they’ve gotten stuck in a game (a sequel mission to the infamous DS9 episode “All the Way Home”), thwarted a terrorist plot on Lafayette Station, placed second in a ceremonial race around a solar system, met an extradimensional being (I mean, obviously they did - it’s Star Trek!) and fought their way into a supposedly uninhabitated solar system filled with memory-erasing radiation. Most of these scenarios I wrote myself, although one was partially based on a pre-written scenario in an expansion book to the game and another was the scenario “The Quadrupole Quandary” by Michael Dismuke which I recommend.
Below you’ll find one of the scenarios I’ve written and GMed, called “Crash Course”. Of all the ones I’ve written and played so far, this one seemed the most approriate as a stand-alone mission, and relies on nothing that is inherent to our particular campaign. It also doesn’t rely on any of the expansions or the more complicated rules in STA, there’s no ship combat which I found to be a little trickier to get my head around (althought Modiphius has done a good job simplifying it in the 2nd Edition), no extended tasks or gated challenges etc.
It is therefore, I hope, a straight-forward but classic-feeling Trek adventure. Feel free to use it and let me know if you enjoyed it.
https://www.asjupiterturns.com/s/Crash-Course-Star-Trek-Adventures-Standalone-Mission