A Review and Usage Guide for Star Trek Adventures: Captain’s Log
Introduction
Star Trek Adventures: Captain’s Log Solo Roleplaying Game is a remarkable addition to the world of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPG). Designed by the minds at Modiphius Entertainment, the game takes from their popular multiplayer “Star Trek Adventures (STA)” series of games and rolls much of the content into a single-player TTRPG experience. During my time playing the game, I have found that it consistently offers many unique and immersive experiences.
While playing, you can assume the role of an Admiral of a fleet of ships, Captain of a single ship, or cast yourself as any one of the numerous crewmembers. There is really no limit to how you play. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start off with what “Captain’s Log” is about and how it offers such a variable amount of game play.
Star Trek Adventure’s Captain’s Log was created for players who prefer solo role-playing games or for those who cannot find a game with others to join in on, so that these players can have a solo experience within the Star Trek universe using some of the core mechanics that Modiphius developed with its STA game.
In Star Trek Captain’s Log, players create, play, and chronicle their role-playing experiences. This is accomplished through narrative story writing; the player is placed in the role of a game master, player, and chronicler. They begin by creating various elements for the game using information from the Core Rule Book. In this case, the Captain’s Log itself. No supplemental books are required to play, but they can optionally enhance the experience should the player acquire them.
The book itself is a guide for creating a story for you to play with, creating characters, places, and things. You have two options: write your own story with your own choices or roll dice to randomize everything in your game world.
The player is not, however, limited to the rules in the book. It is more of a guide and is meant to provide advice as well as multiple matrices for which a player can roll a 20-sided dice to help with some of the more monotonous actions that need to be followed.
However, again, the book itself is a basic guide for creating a story for you to play with, creating characters, places, and things. It provides a substantial amount of lore and supplemental information that makes things easier to build upon. The same applies to the other books on STA.
Genesis
The character generation system itself is referred to in the STA as the Lifepath Creation, and in Captain’s Log, there are two methods to do so. You can either perform the character generation process by choosing what you want from the available stuff in the Core Rule book or randomize with dice rolls and numerous matrices, or you can perform “CREATION-IN-PLAY”. This method is best for when you want your main character to start as someone not so experienced. Captain’s Log, as aforementioned, can allow for this, so be an Ensign on their first day at the helm and let their adventures craft them into a more capable officer and veteran character. It’s an awesome idea because you can then bring them into a multiplayer game as a fully rounded character that you are familiar with when they are available.
How does this Lifepath Creation system work?
So, a simplified explanation is as follows: Let’s say the player wants to leave their character’s species to chance and rolls a 20-sided dice or d20. The roll’s result will then correspond to the number in the Core Book’s matrix for species, and voila! The player now has their species out of the way and can move onto the next part of the character generation process or can just keep rolling dice for more randomized results until they have a so-to-speak automatically generated character.
You’ll continue this process and its variations to get all the characters you want, that is, all the ships, stations, planets, and so on, until you have your in-game world set. Then, you refer to the simple mechanics in the Rule Book to play the game. But more on that in a later article. For now, let us focus on the overall picture. Narrative role playing is story writing, and the Rule Book and matrices are there to help you set up everything. You can from then on just write a story using all the elements the Rule Book helped you establish or Role-Play by playing a character and rolling the dice to see how things go. Did you successfully reroute the cascading eps conduit or will it blow up?
Engage
Your Adventure will likely begin with you writing a Captain’s Log, detailing where you are and what you’re doing. I like to break the story up by using Acts as milestones, such as Act I, II, and III, a practice used by Star Trek TV shows. Each Act is a new Captain’s log updating the major events with smaller events between the Acts recorded in Personal Logs. I’ll roll the events on the dice, and when all that’s done, I will put those results around the main story in past tense. Then, I update the Captain’s Log with the result of the Logs in the Acts.
Relying on how much detail you want to put into your story, it could be a very short story with you simply playing through the events and writing only what is necessary, or you can evolve an entire novel. You can create subplots. Does your character fancy another crewmate? Did they build up enough courage to let their feelings be known? Roll for success, 0-10 is a failure with less than five being disastrous, above 10 a success with over 15 being a great success. How did this affect your character? Will it be a stressful burden and cause problems for the ship later? The ship’s matter reclamation system is not working. Draw straws on who will fix it. You had gagh for the first time at a diplomatic function with the Klingons. Roll for if you managed to keep it down or if you caused an Interstellar Incident. That’s just some off the top of my head, and I still haven’t found the bottom of the idea well for this game.
Conclusion
STA Captain’s Log is an exciting and fun time for writers across the board, whether they want to write a little or a lot. It becomes a great resource and a fount of ideas that just keep coming. The dice create mystery and challenge in a game in which the writer normally has to plan all the outcomes in advance. The different ways of playing and the extraordinary value of the information in the book alone are worth admission.
It is also worth mentioning that Modiphius is conducting various test runs to find how to adapt all of their products with Captain’s Log, and so far, the results are promising with most of the products already compatible with it.
So, take my advice and give it a try. At worst, you’ll be left with a book containing heaps of Trek information. At best, it will transport you into the Trek Universe and is a giant step toward perhaps joining a group of other players.
WRITTEN BY DeWolfe
EDITED BY Jess - press@ufplanets.com
IMAGES SOURCED FROM startrek.com
