The latest STA 2e release, the Exploration Guide, is huge with so many different options in it. In a nutshell this is a book about building out the galaxy for your Star Trek Adventures game and I’m a big fan of these sorts of books, starting with the World Builder’s Guidebook from the days of AD&D. You may have already watched the Continuing Conversations episode on this book so now come along for my own deep dive.

New Game Mechanics

Before we get into the sections on building a setting, there are some great new rules starting with new character options. There are two new Career Paths, the Independent Archeologist and the Outpost Scientist. These two civilian paths continue to expand what characters can be played using Star Trek Adventures 2e, as well as giving the GM new options for creating Supporting Characters and NPCs. There is also a new table of Career Events which are fairly focused on exploration and travel, giving you ready character connections to the contents of this book.

A host of new talents from options like Go to Ground and True North that help with exploration to ones like Swift and Persistent that set the character up for away missions. Mostly, though, the talents here are great but there’s a clear reason why these talents are grouped together. They could all be in the core rulebook except that it’s already written, but still I’m glad they’re here! Similarly with the section on Keeping Secrets, making a background detail mechanically relevant by having it be a secret value your secret talent. There’s rules and limitations as well as advice for when and how to reveal a secret character aspect, but in all this is a section that’s not that related to exploration and just generally a great thing to have.

There are additional Awards and Honors related to exploration and an expansion of Observational Tasks and a new mechanic of Forming Hypotheses to gain a new trait and advance your character’s understanding. An excellent section on Exploration provides several different ways for a GM to structure it from individual challenges and extended tasks. A survey mission gets a lot more interesting this way and the crew can fulfill Starfleet’s mission in new ways.

Sector Generation

Throughout the Star Trek franchise, the term “sector” has always been a specific unit of space: as big as you need it to be. If you check through even official materials you will find multiple definitions of a sector, although all of them agree they are cubic regions that divide up the galaxy into more manageable blocks. The Exploration Guide establishes that a sector is a cube 20 light years on a side (although it can’t be all right angles to fit a circular galaxy, so questions remain) and in the section of space where Earth (Sector 001) is found that means a sector contains around 32 star systems. There are many famous sectors in Star Trek media from Sector 001 as the core of the  Federation and the Hekaras Sector where subspace degradation due to warp travel was discovered. I’m going to be designing a sector called the Connacht Sector to demonstrate things here.

When designing your own sector you start by rolling for the number of Notable Systems. For the Connacht Sector, I get five notable sectors which puts it right at the middle of the range presented. Next up you see if the sector has any Sector Phenomena which are around as well, such as nebulae, novae, black holes, or radiation. Most of these also affect the notable systems result since having these things in play makes it both harder to fit everything on a map and more likely that a stellar system is swallowed up by something destructive. Not every sector has something like this, of course, so only if you roll a 1 on a d20 do you include one. As fate would have it I did get a 1 for the Connacht Sector and a second roll tells me this is a Class IV Ion storm which doesn’t affect the notable systems count but will make it hard to navigate this region of space!

Next it’s time to look at Stellar Density, which seems like it should come before notable systems but nevermind that. The design here seems to be to generate a value (system count) and then modify it as you go, rather than go through the system’s character narratively and then do a complicated calculation at the end. Regardless, there are seven different types of densities with some pretty extreme changes to the Notable Systems value. There’s no rolling here, you decide what sort of sector you’re looking at, and just for fun I’m going to decide that the Connacht Sector is near the core of a galactic arm so it has an additional notable system (up to 6). There’s also a good calculation here to establish how many total (not just notable) star systems are in this sector if that is ever relevant.

The next step is to come up with the Name of the Sector, including some helpful notes on canon names and how varied they are, but in our case we’ve already named it. That brings us to the step of very brass tacks, Assigning System Locations within the sector. This is where we see the choice of 20 light years on a side earlier since you can just roll 3d20 to find the coordinates of the systems in x, y, and z space. So consider the first notable system I’m naming in this sector, the Sylvan System, which according to my dice will be nine light years from the bottom, seven from the back, and seven from the side. Fairly in the middle!

Star and System Generation

So now that we have an idea of the overall sector, what do the individual star systems look like? We’ll narrow in on the Sylvan System to try this out but it follows similar patters to the sector generation with a series of tables. The first is to establish the Spectral Type of the star at the center of the system, following the types from the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram. It can get really into the weeds with less common stellar types (for a habitable system at least) and you can even end up with a Spatial Phenomenon at the center of the system surrounding the star! These could be stellar flares or gravity waves, or something pervasive like an ion storm or radiation.

For the Sylvan System, though, I got a dim Type-M2 V dwarf. You can roll or choose whether or not the system has Multiple Stars and I actually did get a companion star for the Sylvan System! I roll again for spectral type but I need it all to be below the main star’s values (since it’s the smaller companion). Since M is the lowest and V is the second lowest I’ll make it an M4 VI star. Two little reddish dwarfs circling each other…

Last up we roll for the Number of Planets in the system. This is a table with results from 1 to 11 (there are plenty of systems with no planets but the notable ones will have them) and you roll a d20 to determine. This is modified by spectral type and other characteristics. The Sylvan System, for example, is a Type-M star and is a binary system so that’s a total -4 to the roll. The overall result is a 5 which is enough for three planets here. Let’s see what they’re like!

Planet Generation

The first matter of interest for creating a stellar system is to determine the Location of Primary World in terms of orbital order. You roll a d20 and divide by 4 (round up) to get the order and for Sylvan Prime the results is two, so it’s the second planet from the two reddish suns in between Sylvan I and Sylvan III. This is fortuitous because in terms of the Classes of Worlds (using Star Trek’s system as outlined in the core rulebook) there’s an Inner Worlds table, a Primary Worlds table, and an Outer Worlds table. So I get to roll on all three!

Some dice rolls later and I can say that Sylvan I is a Class-I or a so-called “hot Jupiter,” while Sylvan Prime is a Class-K “adaptable” world resembling Mars. Lastly, Sylvan III is a Class-J gas giant like Jupiter. Interestingly it looks like a dusty, thin-atmosphere world nestled between two big giants! We’ll check on Number of Moons now for each of the worlds: Sylvan I has one moon (a Venus-like Class-N) and Sylvan III has two (two icy Class-C worlds with dead volcanoes), while Sylvan Prime has no moon. As far as Ring Systems, both the gas giants have rings but I would usually only check for the terrestrial Sylvan Prime if it had a bunch of moons. There are a few more tables to get very nitty gritty with planetary mass and

Planetary Biomes

The chapter on planetary biomes is organized into nine “subchapters,” each describing a type of biome and what might be found there. Obviously from an ecological perspective there’s a lot of nuance to what is found on a planet but luckily in the Star Trek universe things either look like the sandy hills near LA or a sound stage made up like caves!

In all seriousness, though, there’s a healthy collection of different biomes here: Cave Systems, Deserts, Forests, Jungles, Mountains and Hills, Plains, Swamps, Cold Biomes, and Water Biomes. They each have about 11 pages of material and the template gives you some guidance if you want to homebrew your own biomes to give specifics for fjords or salt flats or something else. Each of these biomes comes with environmental traits, relevant advantages and complications, random events tables, recommended viewing of Star Trek episodes featuring the biome, often some terrain-specific organisms, a story generator table or two, and terrain notes.

For instance, if you want to set your away mission in a forested area you can pull up the subchapter to help you out. Fire up “Qpid” from Star Trek: The Next Generation or “Into the Forest I Go” from Star Trek: Discovery for some inspiration and then check out the options here. Do you want it to be a tropical forest or alpine forest? Or maybe something stranger like a underwater forest of kelp, a lightless subterranean fungal forest, or strange forest of giant sponges? You can have your away team encounter dense undergrowth, a hidden cliff, or pits hidden under decomposing leaves. Use the random event table to throw a restful glade, pollen messing with equipment, or a sinkhole at the players, or roll for a completely invented story such as finding an anthropologist who was lost investigating burial mounds. You can create an advantage to Remember the Path or gain a complication of Mired in Mud, or start a B-plot with a latent plot hook.

Conclusion

There’s a lot of wonderful material in here developed by very talented people. The mechanics are of course brand new and while the rest builds off of what you have in the core rulebook it is both excellently written and already done for you! Could you write twenty advantages and twenty complications to use in desert terrain? Yeah maybe, but why should you when someone has already done that work? Likewise, you can just freestyle sectors and systems but the tools in here will get your imagination going and cut your prep time to a fraction of what it would otherwise be.