Star Trek Adventures has finally hit the shelves. You can check out our review of the game here, but if you already know about it and are excited we have some news for you. While at Gencon this year, I got to sit down with Chris Birch of Modiphius to talk about what comes next for Star Trek Adventures.
This interview has been lightly edited for grammar and readability.
Nerd Union: So, in addition to the living campaign, what future content can we expect to see from Star Trek? Like, will we have another source book for different things?
Chris Birch: Yep, yep. So we’ve got the These are the Voyages, Volume 1, which is a big completion of adventures, like missions of the week. There will be another one of those, Volume 2, next year with lots of guest writers, and we have the command book coming out next, The Command Division, which is the command, operations, sciences then. It’s sort of a combination GM and player material, so its a lifepath focused on command characters. Advice on what do you do when you’re in command, and for the GM how do you make the command team, the command based characters have the best time. And then also it’s got loads of ships, which is always good.
And then the Operations book is advice for both sides again, more gear, more weapons, its got the stripped back RPG rules for miniatures, so you can lay games on the tile sets that we’re doing. Then it also has some stuff on Section 31, and all the special forces and stuff
And then the sciences book has got the same lifepath advice for the science team. So then it has this enormous section on big things like V’Ger and Q, like the big strange things entities and war machines, time travel, and the other things that happen in the Star Trek universe. So those are sort of your big base supplements. Then you’ve got your Quadrant books — four of them, funny enough — so the base quadrant is going to be the first one, so it goes through more playable Starfleet race, more playable non-Starfleet races, places, organizations, and races, all set around 2371, so it’s written from this particular point in time. The Dominion War is about to happen, so everything’s about to kick off.
NU: Fantastic period to get that stuff started.
CB: Yeah, nothing stops you from going, “Yeah I wanna play DS9, or I wanna play Voyager, or I wanna go right back to where Enterprise just starts, you know, or Original Series. You know there’s a Constitution and a Miranda shipping the core book, and there’s the older Klingon ships, so nothing’s stopping you from playing that. We are just setting the story around that time.
NU: With Discovery coming out, do you plan on licensing that as well?
CB: They don’t want to do it yet because they want to establish their storyline before someone else starts writing in it. They love licensees getting involved in creating content. We created Narendra Station based on “Yesterdays Enterprise.” We’ve got the Shackleton Expanse as our part of the canon. So, they’re really up for that, but, you know, until they’ve established the world, I don’t think they’ll want to stuff.
NU: So are they considering all this stuff official canon now?
CB: No, nothing … it has to be in a TV show or film to be “official” canon
NU: Well. Just checking.
CB: Otherwise it has to be Memory Beta material. So we’re alongside novels and books and video games and stuff, so it’s you know you can see its the least canon, but you know it hasn’t really happened unless it’s in a TV show.
NU: I was just curious with Star Wars having taken that step where everything is canon, I was curious. Well, with Star Trek being out and released into the world, what is your proudest thing about it? Like, what are you proud of about that?
CB: I’m proud of the fact that it’s a different approach to Star Trek. That it’s much more about the people. Cause Star Trek is never about the guns and the ships —I mean it is about the ship, like the Enterprise. Star Wars, I’m also a big fan, is about the Rebellion and the Empire and the star destroyers and TIE fighters and blaster pistols and X-Wings and all of that, whereas Star Trek is about relationships between people on the ship, and the dilemmas and things and trials you go through. So I felt that we’d done a really good job on communicating that. Like, the timeline is usually quite dry, like “This stardate this happened, and this stardate this happened,” and what we’ve done is we’ve placed the whole thing in sidebars where it’s a Romulan agent reporting back on this event, a Klingon ship captain reporting on this event in their words, in their opinions, not the kind of textbook general reference. So, it’s a lot more insightful and I think it’s a really good approach to talking about Star Trek, cause it’s been done three times very well and there’s no point doing that again.
The core rulebook of Star Trek Adventures is available for sale in both print and PDF formats. These are the Voyages, Vol. 1 is also available in PDF as well. The print version is due to ship soon. The resin miniatures are also available, and they really do look fantastic. Check out www.modiphius.com/star-trek for the latest info. We will also keep you posted.
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