Submitted by Al Spader
Hi, all. This is AmirAl checking in with a review of a new Mission Brief by Michael Dismuke called “It Takes a Village” from the Star Trek Adventures Utopia Planitia Starfleet Sourcebook.
Let me start off by saying that I was a player in this mission and was super excited because when a GM says “Don’t read the last ten pages of the book”, it means something awesome is brewing with that content.
The mission starts with an archaeological dig—which is awesome because I feel it isn’t done enough in Trek—on a planet whose people died out long ago. I wasn’t planetside as I was the first officer and had control of the ship, but the player characters were engrossed in all the fascinating artifacts that were there; they even brought a few back to the ship to study.
Therein was the major problem as we will discuss shortly. The characters who brought artifacts back began to disappear as a bizarre anomaly consumed the ship. This anomaly spread as the engineers and scientists tried to determine what had happened.
Meanwhile, the characters who were in the anomaly began sharing a shared vision of a world—one that our ship had turned into. I won’t go into more detail here, as this world could vary by GM; which is one of the amazing things about mission briefs.
After mounting a rescue mission, the scientists and engineers discovered the root of the anomaly—a species that disguises itself as ancient artifacts in order to propagate. Once this was solved and the anomaly collapsed, the very idea of this species shook the very heart of the ship and left the crew divided on what to do.
The funniest part of this mission for me was the fact that, when my character isn’t in a scene, I try to avoid reading what is happening (we do play-by-post on Discord). My character had to lead based on instinct alone and that pushed him as far as he has ever been pushed.
All in all, this brief was amazingly unique and kept us guessing as to what we needed to do next. One thing I would like to point out is that this mission has some psychic shenanigans so make sure you discuss this with your group first. Make sure they are comfortable with a distorted sense of reality. If they are, you will have a blast!
(To see our entire play report, see Star Trek Pioneer, Season 5, Episode 1: “It Takes a Village”.)
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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