Submitted by Patrick Goodman
September saw the release of one of the most anticipated Star Trek Adventures products in the line’s five-year history: the Utopia Planitia Starfleet Sourcebook. The fans, myself among them, have been clamoring for a starship book since the first book came out in 2017, and Modiphius more than delivered. As has become his custom, project manager Jim Johnson had his team of writers give us far more than we had anticipated.
I’m not here to review the whole book; there have been many reviews of the book already, and I don’t think I could tell you much that hasn’t been said already. What I am here to do, however, is to laud a small piece of the rules included in the book, something that I wasn’t really expecting to find.
One of the rulesets included in Utopia Planitia is the system that starship expert Aaron Pollyea uses to create the spaceframes that he’s created over the game’s history. I feared that it would be daunting, but it turns out to be a remarkably easy-to-use system. It’s fairly quick work to make your own spaceframe that’s comparable to existing, published starships. Most importantly to me, the system produces ships that feel right.
Part of the reasoning behind including this system was to enable players to include ships in their games that Modiphius hasn’t produced, or can’t include because of rights issues or such. Among those are ships produced for the old FASA Star Trek RPG, long-time fan favorites. One of my favorite FASA ships was the Remora-class escort, so this was the ship that I decided to build on my first run-through of this system. I’ve included it here so you can see how you think it translates from one system to another.
It’s a system I’ll be using a lot going forward. Give it a shot; I think a lot of you will be using it, too.
Continuing Mission has done so much to support STA that Modiphius wants to give some love back, and so we are pleased to offer this discount code, CMISSION01, which is a 10% off coupon for the STA Starter Set and usable on both the Modiphius UK site and the Modiphius US site.
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