Saturday 27 April 2019

Central Collection: All my Star Trek Adventures stuff

With the death of Google Plus, most of my public contributions to Star Trek Adventures ain't public no more. And even my own players may not have kept track of all the links they ought to be able to check. I know one or two of my items were linked on the Resources Wiki, but I thought it might be helpful to someone (even if it's only me) to make a post here, linking everything I've made for this rules system. I'll update this post as I come up with new stuff.

I've divided it mainly between general rules stuff, and stuff that is specifically for my personal campaign groups (collectively titled Star Trek: Explorations). My own players should treat the latter as potentially spoilery. Other GMs may steal whatever ideas they like from it, and if you as a player know your own GM might use some of this material, then perhaps you'd like to follow the guidance I give my players too.

*My own players: Assume everything below is GM-only content, unless marked with an Asterix. Open un-Asterixed links with caution, if you must open them at all.


General Resources

Stuff that could have some use in anyone's Star Trek Adventures campaign, regardless of setting or era.

List of all known Star Trek adventures - Definitely GM Only! My spreadsheet listing every Star Trek adventure I could find, from all official systems and a few unofficial ones. Contains many Spoilers!

Maps & Legends - My unofficial, but pretty extensive setting expansion to include Star Trek: Picard, and anything else that falls within the period from 2380 to 2400. Currently on version 3, including bits from season 1 of Star Trek: Lower Decks.

Adventure: Flora & Fauna - A medical/exploration away mission to a planet with some unusual biology. Includes an appendix on how it can be adapted for my Explorations campaign setting. (And for comparison, I dug out the old LUGTrek version from 2005.)

Adventure: Ghost in the Shuttlebay - A crewmember keeps seeing someone in the shuttlebay. Someone who died years ago.

Adventure: The Sorceror's Apprentice - Introductory adventure written specifically to introduce the PIC setting and rules from Maps & Legends.

Adventure: Twisting With Shadows - Written for an aborted adventure-writing contest run jointly by Star Trek Adventures and Star Trek Online, I suspect mine may have been the only submission. Anyway, here it is, a sort of seedy underworld thing to do with pirates and weapon smugglers, in the STO setting.

Adventure supplement: 'World With a Bluer Sun' calculator -  A spreadsheet for imperfectly estimating how much a thing might affect the player characters, in the published adventure 'World with a Bluer Sun'. Saying any more would spoil the plot. If you're running that adventure, you'll figure it out. If not, it's no concern of yours anyway.

Campaign Ideas list - A bunch of hooks I have for different styles of campaign that could be played in future. Some of these could possibly also be shrunk down to single-session adventures, instead of full campaigns.

Character Creation Guide (general version) - A walkthrough of all the major steps of character generation, including some fluff, and including Species added in the Beta Quadrant book, and one or two smaller sources.

Critter: Tribble (NPC) - The very first thing I ever created with the STA rules, just to get a feel for them. Coo coo coo.

Critter: Gormagander (NPC/ship) - House rules for the species of space whales (who look more squiddy to me). As space-dwelling creatures, their stats use the starship format.

Dice-free Rules for Promotion & Reputation - House rules to replace those in the core rule book for handling rank promotions and reputation changes without having to rely on the randomness of dice.

Equipment Guide - A combined list of all the items of gear listed in the official rule books, sorted by type, with their available era, costs, and reference page.

Expanded Transporter Rules - Extra house rules for using the transporter. I still consider this an experimental work in progress.

NCC Registry Number Picker - For years, it bugged me that I could never be sure if I was picking  appropriate registry numbers for my invented Starfleet vessels, and I've previously blogged about exactly that. This spreadsheet condenses everything I've researched on that infuriating, illogical system, and offers simply an indication of what NCC numbers most likely first appeared in a given year. It still needs some improvement and updating, but this should be fine for most uses.

Power Effects table - Summary of all rules effects that add or subtract from the ship's Power.

Random Encounter Tables - Rough guidelines for random starship encounters. More of a quick hook generator than a full encounter builder.

Random Starfleet Starships - A random generator that I've put WAAAAAY too much time into. It's always bugged me that so many Starfleet starship names are obviously named by 20th century Americans, with none of the ample variety we should see from the interstellar collection of cultures and languages across the Federation. In my own games, I like to dig for more varied and interesting sources of names for ships, but I still didn't feel like I was getting it right with just ad hoc last-minute searches. I thought an easy solution would be to pre-generate a list of good names, and while I was at it, also put in a random picker. It wasn't too much harder to incorporate my random registry number picker (above) to add more detail to each random starship name. Most recently, I've adjusted it further so that only names relevant to existing Federation members are used, based on the year chosen to work out an appropriate registry number. I've drawn on both Alpha and Beta canon to populate the name's list, but the GM of each game should have final say in what names are appropriate enough. Most of the Earth names were drawn from Wikipedia, often from topical lists. So far, I've gathered over 4000 names. And all of this, just to name one single ship at a time.

Solar System Maker - Random generation tables for creating astronomically realistic(ish) stars and their planets.

Spaceframe: Asia class - House rules for making starships of the ENT/TOS-era Asia class, as borrowed from Starfleet Museum. Created as a spare for the Explorations campaign, but not yet used at all.

Spaceframe: Gagarin class - House rules for making starships of the ENT/TOS-era Gagarin class, as borrowed from Starfleet Museum.

Spaceframe: Moskva class - House rules for making starships of the ENT/TOS-era Moskva class, as borrowed from Starfleet Museum.

Spaceframe: Paris class - House rules for making starships of the ENT/TOS-era Paris class, as borrowed from Starfleet Museum.

Spaceframe: Suurok class - House rules for making starships of the Vulcan ENT-era Suurok class.

Starship: The Phoenix - House rules for the first Earth warp vessel, as seen in First Contact.

Spaceframe: Kaplan F17 Speed Freighter class - House rules for the type of light cargo ship seen in Picard, as La Sirena. (Insert mention of Talent for multiple holo-crew here.)

Species Stats Table - A thing that's going to be turned into something more complete, similar to the Starship Stats Table. For now, it's a list of all official and fan-made Species rules stuff, together with my attempt at working out when everyone joined the Federation and Starfleet, and when they first started appearing at all.

Species: Rigellian - House rules for making player characters of the Rigellian species. Cobbles together bits and pieces from the many confused possible versions of this species (or group of species, depending who you ask), into something I felt was at least fun to play as. This has since become supplanted by the official Rigellian species in the Beta Quadrant book.

Starship Crew Breakdown Table - House rule, linking Modiphius starship Mission Profiles with the crew departmental percentage splits from the Last Unicorn Spacedock rules. For a ship of a given Mission Profile, divide its total number of crew into departments per the given percentage. Each department can then be further divided by the rank category of its crewmembers. Assumes a total crew of close to 100, so some manual adjustment may be needed for very small and very large crews.

Starship Random Names Tables - Guidelines for coming up with a healthy variety of Federation starship names.

Starship Scale Table - House rule, expanding on the Scale table on page 215 of the core rule book. I was pretty sure Modiphius had made theirs by adapting the old Last Unicorn Size table, especially the version given in the Spacedock rules, so I decided to see if I could work out the logic behind it, and present it in a more precise way, to help classify new spaceframes I was making.

Starship Stats Table - Summary list of all starship spaceframes and specific named vessels from all of the official rulebooks (including some minor spoilers for published adventures), plus many of the unofficial fan ones. Also includes a tool (the copypasta shipyard) for quickly throwing stats together per the ship design rules. I've also included known canon warp speed limits, and my own version of the Scale table.

Valuematic 3000 - A walkthrough for creating a Value that will hopefully be more fun and useful to play, and to GM.

Warp Tables (public version) - Includes a more detailed version of the warp speed table on page 205 of the core rule book, as well as a speed-distance-time calculator, and a list of known canon starship warp speeds (all Alpha canon, with one or two Beta canon examples, in grey, thrown in where I felt they were helpful for getting the big picture). All three of these tables include three different measures of speed: the ENT/TOS "Cochrane" scale of warp speed, the TNG "Eugene" scale of warp speed, and simple multiples of c (speed of light), made equivalent using semi-canon formulae. If anyone can figure out how to fully reverse the TNG formula, to solve for W from a known c in all cases, I'd appreciate it.

Campaign Resources (Star Trek: Explorations)
Explorations is a multi-group shared sandbox-style campaign setting, set in the early 2200s, halfway between the ENT and TOS eras. It is centered on one region, Sector 21, which is frontier space at that time, though by TNG it would be pretty central within Federation space. Most of our content from actual play is hidden in our Roll20 game for now, but below are the basic starting elements we began from at the start of 2018, plus a selection of useful house rules and other components. (I'd also like to point out that I don't much like the bland blue-on-black computer UI seen in ENT, DISCO, and on the USS Kelvin. LCARS is much more interesting and fun to me, but I've stuck with the older blue-black look for a lot of my campaign handouts.)

I was very amused at how easily I could find my completely non-canon Sector 21 stars in a map from 50 years later.


GM's Starter Pack - All the stuff I'd created for myself at the time that the campaign began, packaged for other GMs to borrow from. Includes setting info and maps, extra Species rules for Aenar (by David Gibson) and Rigellians, extra Spaceframe rules for the Asia, Gagarin, Moskva and Paris classes, and premade starship stats for the USS Delhi, USS Jemison and USS Johannesburg (our three player starships).

Map of Sector 21 in the Federation, circa 2208 - My best estimate of how my Sector 21 fits into the galactic map (red box), and what the extent of the UFP is during this period (space marked in blue). It's intentionally much more spindly than the vast UFP that the 24th century map presents.

Panda Span map - The full extent of the nebula, beyond the part that's within Sector 21.

Handout: Interior layout of Starship Wehikore - I wanted to replace the Atlantis from the published adventure "A World with a Bluer Sun", as Earth's smaller Intrepid class felt more interesting to me, and also closer in scale and purpose to the USS Jemison, so there was a better narrative link. But then I had no good sense of the interior layout of the ship, so I made up my own.

Handout: 400 years of astronomy records of the Panda Span nebula - Images of this region of space, as recorded from Tellar Prime since 1800.

Handout: Observed subspace flux and Handout: Map of subspace observations - Final versions of the list of all subspace field measurements taken by the Starfleet vessels in the sector, over the course of about a year, and the map that marks their positions. Also includes separate list of equivalent measurements taken at Kontunel. My players spent a year analysing this to try and figure out the hidden pattern behind it, and got pretty close, so I'll be interested to see if other GMs or anyone else can work it out, without the benefit of me explaining any of it. Ask if you really want to know.

Sector 21 major worlds images - Portrait set of most of the major planets the players visited during 2018/2208. I've got various other maps and images of these planets, and others, but it would take a long time to gather them all. (Still missing: Brissid, Duboz and Silik 6.)

Suliban faction chart - Showing how the Suliban factions from canon and of my own invention are related to each other. We got very, very little canon background on them in ENT, and even the subsequent novels have barely mentioned them, so I haven't had that much to build on.

Player Intro - Brief introductory booklet for players starting this campaign.

Player Map - The starting version of the player's map of Sector 21, as it stood at the beginning of 2208.

3D starmap coordinates - Simple text file, intended for use with Plot3DValues v1.15. Unlabelled and without neblua, but I still find it nifty.

Character Creation Guide (Explorations version) - Same as the general purpose public version, but streamlined and repainted to be specific to my era and setting.

Class C shuttlepod -  The little sublight crew shuttle my players mainly rely on. The image is taken from a John Eaves preliminary design that wasn't used, but I liked how it implies a shared design lineage from the earlier ENT shuttlepods. (It wasn't until over a year later that DISCO finally named its own shuttles as Class C too, which is an unfortunate coincidence. I had assumed they'd go with Class E, a generation before the Class F of TOS, but oh well.)

Class D shuttle - The larger, rarer warp shuttles that our campaign seldom uses. The image is from an unused Matt Jefferies preliminary design for the Class F.

Starship: Trade Station Kruh - The starship stats for the Tellarite merchants' space station in orbit above Starbase 21. Its image is copied from a Tellarite trade station seen in ENT, which was itself a reuse of a model of Cardassian station from DS9.

Handout: Missing Starships - Silly little thing I made to frame some story elements together with similar canon stuff.

Handout: News: Suessor elected president - A random factoid I borrowed from the FASA roleplaying, just because it fit our timeline and added some more detail to things.

Probe Design Rules - House rules for a complicated ad hoc build of a long-distance warp probe. Borrows ideas from the Last Unicorn Spacedock rules. Never used, because the Jemison players felt they had left it too late to begin, for the specific purpose they had at the time.

Species: Zenian survivor - House rules for making player characters of the Zenian species. I threw this together after the crew of the Jemison found their group of survivors on Thuln. It seemed like a fun option to make available for any future character creation.

Warp Tables (Explorations version) - Same as the public version, but with our campaign-specific starships included (in red).

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