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Star Trek Roleplaying Game: Core Game Book
This is the Star Trek Roleplaying Game, a game of swashbuckling adventures, parallel histories, and saving the universe every week. You and your friends can take on those mythic roles aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise at the height of its five-year mission, or you can explore strange new worlds with characters of your own creation. Stride the sands of Vulcan, duel with alien intruders at the edge of the galaxy, stun Klingon agents with your trusty phaser, and marvel at the wonders of new life and new civilizations. The Star Trek Core Game Book gives you all the tools you need to revisit these legendary voyages. So grab your phaser, take the helm, and set your course for the second star on the right. This 288-page, full-color book A history and timeline of the Federation, with a map of Federation space and its neighbors in 2269, with location guides to Starfleet ships. 6 starbases, 17 planets, 11 alien races (not only the Klingons and Romulans, but the Gorn, the Medusans, the Horta, and the Tholians), 10 creatures (including the Denebian Slime Devils and Tribbles), and Klingon and Romulan supporting cast. The complete Icon System rules, including over 50 skills and over 80 custom traits, 7 species Templates, and 8 Starfleet Overlays to build your character -- and 7 ready-to-play, but fully-customizable, archetypes. Dozens of weapons and items of Star Trek technology, with 18 fully-statted ships (and a complete diagram of a Constitution-class starship and its bridge), plus complete rules for ship-to-ship combat. Scientific (and dramatic) guides for designing planets, new life, and new civilizations, along with a random planet generator. Tons of great ideas and advice for narrating your own Star Trek RPG episodes, including episode seeds, a complete starting adventure with ready-to-play characters, and a new frontier section of Federation space.
286 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
11 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 6, 2020
If you have read a lot of core rulebooks for various roleplaying games as I have, this book will be very familiar to you. As I said, it was a very familiar one to me. This particular game was organized in order to encourage people to play tabletop roleplaying games based on the Star Trek universe during various periods, and this book seeks to encourage the reader to engage in such games. Admittedly, compared to some core rulebooks, this one benefits from having a lot of material out there already but the book itself is not particularly interesting or entertaining compared to others of its kind. This is somewhat regrettable, because compared to many intellectual properties Star Trek has a lot to offer as far as gameplay is concerned. Some readers may have written their own episodes or come up with their own stories about the universe in which Star Trek is a part and that sort of creative and imaginative effort will help one to better understand and appreciate this game, although admittedly the authors seem to have leaned on the general appeal of the series themselves and not done a lot of work to make the specific book as entertaining and enjoyable as it could have been, and that is somewhat regrettable, sadly.
This book is a long one at more than 350 pages and it is divided into twelve chapters. The first chapter introduces the game and the Star Trek universe (1). After that the author discusses the history of the United Federation of Planets, which it presumes the players will be a part of (2), and also discusses the mission and purpose as well as the infrastructure and duties of the game (3). After that the author discusses basic operations (4) and reporting for duty (5), including the aspects of talents and character creation. The author discusses the final frontier (6), looking at new worlds, alien encounters, and scientific discoveries and how they affect gameplay. There is a chapter about social conflict and combat (7) as well as a discussion of the technology and equipment that can be found in the game based on what timeline one chooses to be in (8). There is a focus on starships, bases, colonies, and rules as well as alien vessels (9) and a discussion of the tasks involved with gamemastering as well (10). Finally, the book ends with a look at aliens and adversaries (11), a sample rescue mission at Xerxes for readers to follow (12) and then credits and an index.
I could see myself playing this game, and that is enough to give the book some praise, at least. In reading the book I thought of what it would be like, for example, to be on a supply run to a particular place and to find some notable artifacts that in turn led to a tense diplomatic encounter with another government that allowed for some high-stakes action without violence being involved. This game, though, appears to short-change that sort of effort given that it privileges a lot of fighting efforts and does not appear to want to think through what a campaign would be like in a more mundane world. As someone who thinks of logistics as being one of the more fundamental and frequently enjoyable aspects of space travel, and certainly among the most important to the survival of the universe and its people as a whole, I tend to think that it gifts too much of a short shift in many games, which privilege tactics and diplomacy to a lesser extent in particular at the expense of strategy and especially logistics. Still, at least this game universe allows for the creativity of the people playing and serving as gamemaster and that is perhaps enough to overcome some of the flaws in the approach of the book’s authors.
This book is a long one at more than 350 pages and it is divided into twelve chapters. The first chapter introduces the game and the Star Trek universe (1). After that the author discusses the history of the United Federation of Planets, which it presumes the players will be a part of (2), and also discusses the mission and purpose as well as the infrastructure and duties of the game (3). After that the author discusses basic operations (4) and reporting for duty (5), including the aspects of talents and character creation. The author discusses the final frontier (6), looking at new worlds, alien encounters, and scientific discoveries and how they affect gameplay. There is a chapter about social conflict and combat (7) as well as a discussion of the technology and equipment that can be found in the game based on what timeline one chooses to be in (8). There is a focus on starships, bases, colonies, and rules as well as alien vessels (9) and a discussion of the tasks involved with gamemastering as well (10). Finally, the book ends with a look at aliens and adversaries (11), a sample rescue mission at Xerxes for readers to follow (12) and then credits and an index.
I could see myself playing this game, and that is enough to give the book some praise, at least. In reading the book I thought of what it would be like, for example, to be on a supply run to a particular place and to find some notable artifacts that in turn led to a tense diplomatic encounter with another government that allowed for some high-stakes action without violence being involved. This game, though, appears to short-change that sort of effort given that it privileges a lot of fighting efforts and does not appear to want to think through what a campaign would be like in a more mundane world. As someone who thinks of logistics as being one of the more fundamental and frequently enjoyable aspects of space travel, and certainly among the most important to the survival of the universe and its people as a whole, I tend to think that it gifts too much of a short shift in many games, which privilege tactics and diplomacy to a lesser extent in particular at the expense of strategy and especially logistics. Still, at least this game universe allows for the creativity of the people playing and serving as gamemaster and that is perhaps enough to overcome some of the flaws in the approach of the book’s authors.
July 12, 2021
I have mixed feelings about this book, mainly towards those aspects that are strictly related to RPGs. As a sourcebook for the Star Trek universe, it is actually a very interesting reading (and it's clear tht the author loves and deeply cares for the original series). There's plenty of information about the history of the Federation, about its non-human members (even those that are rarely featured in the various TV series), about spaceships, about types of stars and planets, and several good ideas about how to prepare and actually play the game. However, the actual game system is both simple and unexciting, although the "dungeon master" (I simply have forgotten how it's called in this book) is encourage to reward roleplaying over dice throwing. Sadly, as a whole, this book didn't make me feel like spending a lot of time running a "classic" Star Trek campaign, instead of rewatching the TV series.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews