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Review of Strange New Worlds - Mission Compendium Vol. 2
Blurb from the publisher: 'Let's see what's out there.
'It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross, but it's not for the timid.' - Q
Strange New Worlds: Mission Compendium Vol. 2 presents nine ready-to-play, standalone missions for Star Trek Adventures. This book arms Gamemasters with new stories designed to stretch the boundaries of what is known and to challenge Player Characters as they engage in Starfleet's mandate to explore.
- Solve the mystery of a viral plauge among a population of aliens who constructed a mammoth artificial ring around their planet;
- Explore an ancient doomsday seed vault on a barren, ice-covered world;
- Investigate strange events occurring in and around a massive ancient 'skyhook', gathering resources from a gas giant;
- Determine how two separate species might have been caught together in an extinction-level event;
- Visit a strange disc made of hyperdense matter and attempt to survive the wholesome and lethal diversions it offers;
- Defuse a potentially violent situation on a neutral pilgrimage world;
- Encounter a renegade Ferengi on a planet with a living, sentient ocean;
- Respond to a distress signal from a doomed Vulcan expeditionary team;
- Determine why a research facility in the Cardassian Demilitarized Zone has suddenly fallen silent.
This book requires the Star Trek Adventures Core Rulebook to use.'
What you get: Your EUR 36,13 or equivalent will buy you the 138-page hardcover Strange New Worlds - Mission Compendium Vol. 2, an adventure collection for the Star Trek Adventures game line, along with its pdf edition.
The pdf version alone costs EUR 17,98. It is comprised of two different pdf files: one identical to the physical version, and a printer-friendly version which doesn't opt for black backgrounds.
Spoiler warning: As much as I am not going to describe, let alone detail the adventures, parts of the scenarios might be revealed while discussing the strong and less strong points of the book. If you intend to participate in any of these adventures as a player, stop reading now.
Contents: Strange New Worlds is composed of nine adventures, each having a length from 14 to 16 pages. I will be very surprised if a group cannot finish any of these adventures in two sessions or less. The adventures belong to three different Star Trek eras: Enterprise (A Cure Worse Than the Disease), the Original Series (Plato's Cave, Drawing Deeply from the Well, No Good Deed, The Whole of the Law), and the Next Generation (Footfall, A Cry from the Void, Darkness, The Angstrom Operation). Each scenario is divided in three acts, while the scenario's conclusion brings everything together and suggests possible endings and abstract follow ups. The presentation differs from era to era. The TNG adventures are presented in the usual LCARS display, Enterprise opts for what I call the Windows 3 approach, while TOS goes for its usual disco standards. With only minimal work the adventures can be adapted to work for any of the three main Star Trek eras (namely ENT, TOS and TNG),
The electronic format is searchable and bookmarked, going down to Acts within each adventure, but not as low as Scenes or Encounters. Images can be extracted in order to be either shown or printed out as hand-outs. The table of contents has live links.
The strong points: My main complaint with These Are The Voyages - Mission Compendium Vol. 1, the first adventure collection for Star Trek Adventures, was that the adventures weren't distinguished and didn't feel like Trek. That is not the case here; the adventures are so Trek your players would recognize them even if you played them under a different system in a different setting. There is exploration, philosophical questions, encounters with bewildering life forms, as well as potential conflict with well-known adversaries. The impact of certain episodes can be immediately perceived; four of the adventures center around sentient beings getting hurt without the Federation realizing in time that there is something sentient about them... ...which is pretty much a reframing of TOS's The Devil in the Dark, as well as Encounter at Farpoint, TNG's first episode. The tone changes from episode to episode. The alien parasites of TNG: Conspiracy, the closest Star Trek has come to emulate Alien or The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, appear once again. Not everything is as grim however, even when things extremely dangerous. Drawing Deeply From the Well emanates this hellish, dystopian feeling backed up with technology created long before the Federation even existed.
I don't need to state that, this being Trek, diplomacy and clever role-playing ultimately win the day even when brute force is required. The adventures are mostly linear; the more the players explore the background, the more they immerse themselves into their logic. This however does not mean that they are static or that they can't provide new challenges. The Whole of the Law for example will see the GM playing a game with a split party from the beginning until the very end of the adventure. The scenarios are sufficiently distinct. There are the mandatory 'everybody wins' resolutions if the characters are clever enough to figure out their logic, painful affairs however also exist like Plato's Cave. Fail your secondary objective and you will understand what I mean. Creating a campaign out of all these scenarios and playing them out with the same characters in each era can be extremely rewarding.
Once again I enjoyed how the 2d20 rules mesh with the challenges the players will face. STA cannot be played as a progress of skill checks, even though it continues to be relatively diverse in what it requires. The use of narrative tools breathes life into these adventures, especially if the players are not ardent Trekkies and are not accustomed to the adventures' concepts. Dilemmas are meaningful; the adventures can have severe repercussions on your campaign, depending on whether you are prepared to follow up on them. Even though each adventure's suggestions for a follow up are minimal (and there really should have been more meat there), a dedicated GM can easily fertilize some of them. You really want to do that; your players will never get a Wrath of Khan experience if you don't run its Space Seed equivalent to set the tone.
I enjoyed both how all the adventures can be adapted to any era, what is even more impressive however is that each adventure's default era fits it just right. The idea of an artificial unknown pleasure planet-like structure where anything goes is much more TOS than it is TNG, which is more famous for controlled, well-known, Risa-like planets. Both the adventure's name as well as the planet's are directly influenced by Aleister Crowley's esoteric spiritual philosophy. This kind of exploration is way more in tune with the 1960s than with the 1990s.
The art fits the franchise well. The inner covers feature the incredible image of USS Repulse fighting the lava squid in the Battle of Hell's mouth; a pity no adventure is written around that, no matter that it is part of Memory Beta (i.e. non canonical content) and not Memory Alpha. The cover is not bad, even though it doesn't radiate Trek as potently as I would have liked.
The pdf is done exactly the way it should be. It is clean and easy to read, not to mention easy to print. Modiphius understands that not everybody can print books with dark backgrounds and graciously provides a printer friendly version. Much appreciated!
The weak points: The Federation is really inept at understanding what is life and what isn't, with four episodes evolving around that. I don't mind, yet you can't have a single concept running through 44,45% of your material. Some of the concept's implementations are better than others. I am rather surprised by the politically correct approach examined as one possible ending for Footfall (where the characters discover that a planet is a super-sentience but not 'god' as numerous religions believe). The conclusion actually discusses the possibility of Federation officers lying about finding god in order to appease the religious looneys. That is totally uncharacteristic of Trek. The series might be about spirituality at times with half successful overtures into the religious with the Prophets plot-line in DS9, yet it never pandered to religiousness. I am not sure why it would try to do so here, even if this is one of many possible outcomes. In any event, this persistence on the well-explored concept of what life is, will likely create both in-game and out-of-game issues. In-game, after the first such encounter, the Federation would have logically established a protocol whereupon life is searched for by unconventional means. Even worse, when the same characters fall upon the same premise while exploring the universe, they would be fools not to examine that first, and there goes the premise of the remaining scenarios in the same era. Setting characters aside, is it even fun for players to replay the same story under a different wrapping? Don't look to surprised when somebody complains in the lines of 'what kind of a life form will we discover this time?' It is a valid criticism.
What one sees as a strong point another might cringe at. Thelema and The Whole of the Law (preceded by 'Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be') might feel goofy for some. Certain scenarios are more scripted than others. The Whole of the Law is a prime example. Even though it doesn't derail into the grand tchoo tchoo in space, unless the actions of each different group come out as impeccably well-timed its resolution might be unsatisfactory and heavy-handed. Prepare well for this adventure, and physically split your group if you can afford it. It is likely to work better, even though it will create a lot of downtime.
Star Trek Adventures has certain issue when it comes to hiding the system and bringing role-playing into the forefront. The GM needs to prompt the players about the combos of what they need to roll, especially if these combos feel more esoteric than they should have. There are a couple of instances where the suggested skills didn't feel particularly pertinent (or diversified) and where a more heavy-handed GM approach was needed. Yet, that is also needed when the players run out of 2d20's meta-currencies and have no control over the plot. It is one thing to die in a blaze of glory, even in Trek, and another to ignominiously wither away. This systematic interference from the GM's side should be well-balanced and masked, as if touching things with a glove, lest the players feel that they are losing agency. They are there to resolve the scenario themselves, not to respond to prompts.
There are certain pieces of art (or rather graphics linked to the book's layout) which keep me wanting. They try to look like old-style monitors, the surreal imagery depicted on TOS' screens, or even meaningful graphics, their net worth however is zero. If these images were substituted by either useful images which convey the tone of the adventure or by usable maps things would have been vastly improved. I had serious trouble visualizing the design of the enormous alien structure in Drawing Deeply From The Well, and there is not a single image to help me when it comes to its enormous ramscoops. Map-wise the product is painfully underarmed, and we all know what that means: more work for the GM. As I have said many times, the more easily the GM visualizes things, the more convincingly he can transmit information to his players. In many instances here he needs to create it first.
We all know that Trek's advanced technology is in effect a plot device, at times however this is hammered too violently upon the players. The scanners, transporters or what have you should fail to work only once every now and then. If that happens too often (and indeed, more than 10% is too often, since nobody would put such unreliable technology on a space ship), one is effectively writing the world out of the scenario he is purportedly playing. Idem for what happens after an adventure. I did not expect a campaign, seeing however how serious the aftermath of each adventure is, I am not convinced however about this skin-deep approach fitting the RPG as well as it did the TV series.
I am also not fully convinced by the transition from act to act, and from what happens between the scenes. These should have been further elaborated. A role-playing game is by definition an active form of entertainment. What can be inferred in a TV show doesn't necessarily work in this medium.
LCARS, again! The good news is that this atrocious layout that pointlessly wastes space and makes everything harder to read is now limited only to the adventures dealing with TNG. It might be my eyes playing tricks or basic human psychology, yet this layout is much more clumsy, and probably supports less words per page than the one used in the Enterprise and TOS eras. Isn't it time to unceremoniously dump it?
V'Tol, T'Vol, we all know it's the same guy. This, and another few typos made it to the book. Thankfully they are not as harmful as the dreaded neural parasites.
I would have really enjoyed the pdf to go down to Scene level in the table of contents, in order to find things more easily. That, however is not a biggie.
Conclusion: More Trek than ever, the adventures in Strange New Worlds are definitely an improvement over the ones in These Are The Voyages. Don't mind their small size and the fact that you will need to work on them well in advance. Depending on the TLC that you show them and the intensity with which you play them, in a few year's time you might become uncertain about whether they were official Star Trek episodes or a part of your game.
For more info on Strange New Worlds - Mission Compendium Vol. 2 visit the Modiphius Entertainment website at http://www.modiphius.com.
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