Tips for running the Star Trek Adventures quickstart scenario

A couple weekends ago, I ran a pickup session of Star Trek Adventures at my local gaming store, Mayhem Comics and Games. Three players rsvp’d for the session ahead of time, but only two showed up to play. I’d hoped to get at least three PC’s, but we pressed ahead with two, and it worked just fine.

I wanted to present the new players with a quintessential Star Trek experience, so I decided to run “Signals,” the introductory adventure included in the free Star Trek Adventures Quickstart. I also considered “Rescue at Xerxes,” the adventure included in the core rulebook, but “Signals” felt more Star Trek to me for two reasons. First, “Signals” starts out on an actual starship, though it doesn’t specify which one. “Xerxes,” on the other hand, begins after a crash landing in a runabout and nothing in the adventure takes place aboard a starship. The second factor that pushed me toward “Signals” was its use of Romulans as the antagonists, another recognizable Star Trek element.

So “Signals” features some quintessential Star Trek ingredients while also introducing many of the core mechanics of the game through a variety of encounters that include exploration, combat and role playing. It’s also simple enough in its design and implementation that gamemasters should be able to run it with minimal prep. Sounds like a perfect introduction, right?

Well, almost.

“Signals” weighs in at only seven pages. That means it won’t take gamemasters long to prep the adventure, but that also means some helpful details probably got left out of the text in the name of keeping the word count low.

For instance, there’s no synopsis or background at the start of the adventure, just a list of things you’ll need to play the game. I believe wholeheartedly that a summary at the beginning of the adventure helps gamemasters map out the arc of the story and aids with comprehension and memory. The adventure also leaves out key details surrounding an alien obelisk discovered recently by a mining colony on the planet Seku VI. The obelisk acts as the macguffin that moves much of the story, but the text asks the gamemaster to fill in the details of who built it and what it does. It’s fine to push gamemasters to customize published adventures for their own games, but I think a quickstart guide shouldn’t pose questions that it doesn’t have answers to.

So here, in no particular order, are a couple of tweaks I incorporated into the adventure when I ran it last weekend.

First off, a proper synopsis:

“Signals” presents a Starfleet away team with a mystery it must solve in order to render aid to a small mining colony and prevent a valuable alien artifact from falling under Romulan control. The adventure begins when the Player Characters’ starship is ordered into the Carina Nebula to locate a missing runabout, the USS Susquehanna. The Susquehanna disappeared after registering an unknown alien power discharge coming from the planet Seku VI inside the nebula.

Investigating Seku VI will require the Player Characters to send an away team to the planet’s surface where the Characters will run into a hostile team of Romulans, also searching for the alien technology. The away team will learn that the Susquehanna sent two crewmen to the planet’s surface who died in a transporter accident caused by surging electromagnetic interference rippling from the alien power source. A Romulan scoutship arrived in orbit, and the Susquehanna retreated into the nebula. The scoutship then succumbed to the same electromagnetic interference and crash-landed on the planet, leaving several survivors bent on securing the alien technology.

The Player Characters will track the source of the electromagnetic interference to an unregistered non-Federation mining colony near the source of the strange power discharge. If the Player Characters convince the miners of their peaceful intent, the colony’s leader will take them to a chamber in the underground mines where workers recently uncovered an ancient alien obelisk emitting powerful bursts of electromagnetic interference. The Player Characters must unlock the obelisk’s secrets while fending off one last offensive from the Romulans to ensure this powerful technology remains out of enemy hands.

The adventure also casts the mining colony as led by a human named Ero Drallen. Featuring a human mining colony misses an opportunity to emphasize for the Player Characters that they’re a long way from home, charting an unknown region of space. So I replaced the humans in the mining colony with a homebrewed alien race I call the Nelbinar, who send out mining teams to distant worlds looking for exotic materials with which they can build engineering marvels on their homeworld. If I get a chance in my campaign, I might make Nelbinar mining crews a recurring feature in the Shackleton Expanse and maybe even feature an entire episode on the Nelbinar homeworld.

If I get a chance, I’ll post a full writeup of the Nelbinar and the role I foresee for them in the Shackleton Expanse.

So there you have it. I think “Signals” is an easy-to-run adventure that successfully introduces the basic gameplay mechanics of Star Trek Adventures to players and gamemasters. With a couple slight modifications, including a summary at the beginning and a more exotic species overseeing the mining colony, it’s a pretty solid entry point.  And it’s free, so what have you got to lose?