To Boldly Joke Where No Campaign Has Joked Before
STAR TREK ADVENTURES: LOWER DECKS CAMPAIGN GUIDE
Designer: Various | Publisher: Modiphius
Even in its most serious moments - the court cases, the interstellar wars, the philosophising -Star Trek has only been a hair’s breadth away from silliness. This new supplement for Star Trek Adventures is for those tables that want to straddle that line and take a more earthy look at the far-flung future, imagining what happens to the people who keep the starship ticking over when the bridge crew are off saving the galaxy.
The book is, naturally, based on the animated Lower Decks series. As such, it’s easy to make an assumption when looking at the title, artwork and relaxed tone that this is only going to appeal to die-hard Lower Decks fans. In reality, however, the book offers three distinct benefits to readers.
The first of these is pretty obvious; it’s a guide for running campaigns that play out a lot like The Lower Decks. This means introducing humour to the typically rather self-serious world of Starfleet, as well as a pile of rules for the gear and species seen in the series. This part of the book is slick and great fun to read, ideal if you’re either: A) Planning to run games filled with wacky comedy or B) Resigned to the fact that your table is physically incapable of going three hours without making a fart joke.
Beyond this, however, the book is also a sneaky guide to the Star Trek galaxy in the late 24th century - the hazy years after Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space 9 have wrapped up, but before the complete upheaval of Picard. There are brief explanations of how the major powers settled in after the Dominion War and the final Next Gen movies. While this isn’t a huge part of the book, it’s invaluable if you’re looking to set your campaign in a galaxy that’s familiar to avid watchers, but where you don’t have to worry about crashing into canon events.
The final major prong on the Lower Decks Campaign Guide’s fork is its guide to running through a campaign where the player characters aren’t the bridge crew, but rather the relatively ordinary Starfleet schmoes. This part provides plenty of information on junior officer experience, including daily life, procedures, career development and all the other things that you have to worry about when you aren’t already captain of a Galaxyclass starship.
This won’t be for everyone, but it’s a fascinating way of playing a Star Trek game. Indeed, in many ways, it pulls the playing experience closer to the typical zero-to-hero RPG progression.
In addition to all of this, the guide also includes new lifepath options for player characters. This includes eight new playable species, all of which take advantage of the book’s light-hearted tone by mining the more eccentric fringes of Trek lore. If your players have ever wanted to strap a Starfleet uniform onto a Cetacean (a space dolphin), Gorn (a space lizard), or Exocomp (a sentient Roomba), this is definitely the book you’re looking for. If you’re feeling really masochistic, you could even let one of your players take on the role of a Tamarian - an alien species that can only communicate through metaphor.
While you probably need to have seen Lower Decks to get the most out of the book, there’s still plenty of material here for GMs and players with only a passing familiarity with the series. It’s great for any group that wants to switch up their Star Trek Adventures experience by playing a more junior team of characters. At the same time, it’s also an invaluable resource for anybody wanting to explore the wackier elements that have always been bubbling away in the background since Star Trek hit screens some 50 years ago.
RICHARD JANSEN-PARKES
WE SAY
A wonderful tour through Starfleet’s sillier side.
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED SPELLJAMMER – ADVENTURES IN SPACE...
Look, when they did sci-fi in the 70s things got weird. Try to embrace it!