Welcome to the game notes for our Star Trek campaign. The aim is to provide a diary of the experience from a player’s perspective. The notes will follow a similar structure each time discussing the session itself as well as thoughts on the next sessions and things the players discussed post-session.
The Setup
This is a Star Trek campaign that ‘sort of’ takes place in the Kelvin timeline immediately after Star Trek Beyond. Temporally it IS the Kelvin timeline I only say ‘sort of’ as I’m pretty sure it’s sort of an amalgamation in everyone’s heads between Strange New Worlds, Discovery season two and the Kelvin films.
Basically the modern interpretation of The Original Series era.
In the parlance of today, it is a private game and is homebrew, so basically just a regular old role-playing experience. It’s played online via Roll20.
We’re using Fate Accelerated rather than Star Trek Adventures to run the game. Why is that? It’s simply because Fate Accelerated has a much lower ‘effort cost’ in terms of setting up and running it online. I think most of the players really like Star Trek Adventures, including myself, but I tend to agree Fate Accelerated makes life easier on the GM without much being lost.
The sections
The pre-game
This is literally the first encounter with the campaign so the whole pre-game is virgin territory. I will say this: I was really looking forward to it for a number of reasons.
Being on the same page. The game is being run by Neil ‘Vodkashok‘ Gow and while I am sure there are differences in how we approach games in many ways that really matter we are exactly on the same page. This means it’s highly likely the game will be run, and set-up and have certain expectations about it that create a space in which I am just used to going for it and moments coming upon that facilitate that along with the associated back and forth.
Aspects, man. I love Aspects. I adore them. I like how they work in the game. I love how they express the deeper ‘aspect’ of what’s going on in the fiction. The creative process of establishing who your protagonist is and what their story potentially is through establishing the character’s aspects is my favourite character creation process. I think like a writer so this all makes sense.
I love Star Trek. I really like Star Trek and I think it is great in a role-playing game format. It takes the right group to lean into it but if you do it really delivers. The promise of this game and the very positive feedback on Star Trek: Picard promises a period of interesting Star Trek times!
So, yeah, the pre-game can be summed up by me really looking forward to it.
Key points
The key points (primarily from the GM’s session summary):-
- The crew of the USS Guardian arrived at Yorktown Station
- Briefed from Commodore Paris re: need to navigate the Necro Cloud Nebula
- Set off into the Nebula, after some showboating by Ensign Matrix
- Placed four beacons to navigate the nebula in the future
- Emerged from the nebula to find a solar system had been destroyed
- Boarded a derelict space hauler after reading a life sign
- Discovered drained bodies, evidence of wormhole energy and a being in stasis
- After beaming the body to Guardian, encountered an unknown bio-metallic species
- Defeated it, and beamed it and the away team back to Guardian
- Beacon begins transmitting the Dominion warning, and then the ship explodes
We got quite a bit in!
The session
We are the Dominion. we will add your genetic distinctiveness to our own. Your genome will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile
The Dominion Beacon
This was the tried and tested create characters and go straight into actual play approach. It was literally a shakedown session.
Event wise it was interesting discovering the immediate environment beyond the nebula and that we’d obviously emerged into either recent events or a still-unfolding situation. Star Trek games often present some challenges in terms of information transfer, especially when trying to simulate the show’s way of imparting complex bollocks that actually mean something without the power of the script telling the participants how to act on it. I think this was navigated well. You get into the habit of receiving the information, asking a few quick clarification questions, and then being able to act on it.
I enjoyed learning about the other two characters and the compel SamOVail applied to Ensign Matrix during the away mission was particularly inspiring, changing the whole scene up, adding to the character and increasing the danger level. It added an emotional element to what could have been a scene-setting short period of actual play. Everything was so new and still taking shape I must admit I didn’t probably respond to it as well as I could have as a participant in the scene immediately after it.
You’ve also got to love the chaos of the first session in a new campaign. I’m sure the other players observed it in other ways but I know I totally had a different image of Yorktown station in my head. I was imagining it as a space station you sort of undocked and pulled away from. I’ve since watched Star Trek Beyond again and it’s a veritable space-based New York with 2 million inhabitants! I know I also started establishing events as if we were not in space suits in the hauler just due to the onslaught of processing effort it takes with a new game, new characters, getting back into a system and whatever else.
Fun times.
The post-game
I love this session zero shift into actual play. First sessions of actual play have a certain creative chaos as everyone tries to find their character, and understand the premise and feel of the game that is forming so they can add to it in the fabric of the experience. It truly does create something that is a bit partly formed but full of promise. Good groups know this is happening and lean into the learning experience and are consciously and subconsciously moving the shared creative space into something more stable and better formed.
Like a shared writers’ room playing out in the moment. There is a unique experience when it happens and it was definitely happening in this case. At least it was in my head.
The whole set-up of establishing our own ‘history’ from the point of the Kelvin universe third film is inspired and really works. It’s already throwing up ‘who knows what is happening’ elements with some weird combination of a genetic big and The Dominion! The Dominions message actually being delivered via a recording through Roll20 was also pretty cool.
We did briefly discuss before we finalised characters if we wanted a PC captain or an NPC captain. I know I’d designed my character so that she was rapidly promoted but could have happily stopped at any rank with a bit of substance. It was drifting to an NPC captain, I thought just due to a feeling no one wanted to be it, so I went for it. I tend to think the game loses something if you don’t, but opinions do differ on that.
Stars and Wishes
At the end of each session, we can list stars (things to keep doing) and wishes (things we want to see).
Regrettably, I’ve written this after the first full session and I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things we discussed as I know I raised something and I can’t remember what it was. So what’s here is the one thing I do remember.
We did discuss reverting back to Fate Accelerated names for the approaches because the ones taken from Star Trek Adventures are sort of approaches but sort of not. They’re actually meant to be combined with another element in Star Trek Adventures. Ultimately, we decided to stick with them. I think this will shake out as we progress.
Plans for the next session
Figure out what the hell is going on? Write a Captain’s Log assuming we follow what I think will be the expected format for that.
I may also have a look at my Aspects. I always fall into a certain trap with Aspects in that I tend to go for ones with big fictional themes and not with ones that are easier to self-compel on a regular basis. I know why I do this, I’m working on them as an expression of the character’s premise and the story they exist to tell rather than a ‘pattern of actions and expressions’. Either is a fine approach but you’re probably best with a mixture of the two types.