Star Trek Rpg Narrator 39;s Guide Pdf

[Carmina Piette]

Goto [ Index ]The Star Trek Narrator's Guide is the gamemaster's guide to the Star Trek RPG. Covering everything from how to gamemaster to starship construction and combat to how to design new races, the book has the problem of covering a vast number of areas in a limited number of pages. With one exception, the book does an amazing job of detailing everything it tries to cover.

Chapter 1: Series Concept & Chapter 2: Establishing the Series I'm covering these two chapters together because they both focus on the same thing, namely designing the campaign in which your players are going to be adventuring in. They're well-written chapters, though experienced GMs may not find all that much (if any) new ideas here. Still, for those new or somewhat-experienced in the area of gamemastering there will probably be a wealth of information here for them to draw on.

Chapter 3: Establishing the Series This chapter also covers GM-related information on building a campaign, but I felt it worthy of separate mention from the first two chapters. This chapter goes into great detail on how to envision a campaign as a season from a television show, along with how to view the weekly gaming sessions as part of a TV series. I've seen several licensed games that have tried to use this idea---most recently the Buffy RPG---and this is by far the best explanation of how to use that concept that I've seen in an RPG. My hat is off to the writers for this chapter, for even as a GM whose had well over a decade of GM'ing under his belt I found many new ideas here.

Chapter 4: Building Episodes This chapters explains how to build a game scenario, breaking it down into scenes, and showing what presumably will be the format of any scenarios Decipher releases for the game. Also covered are story types and advanced methods of storytelling. Any game company that plans to publish "How to roleplay/be a better GM" in their supplements would do well to read this chapter and the previous one, for an idea of how such articles should REALLY be written: White Wolf take note.

Chapter 6: CODA Rules CODA is the title given to the rules system used in both this game and Decipher's Lord of the Ring game. I note this because I could not find any explanation of the term CODA in this book, and had to learn what it stood for from a poster here at rpg.net. This section has pretty much all the same information on game rules found in the Player's Guide Appendix, along with some new information. I felt the information was better laid out in this book, however. You will still need to read the Player's Guide to run the game.

Chapter 7: Starship Operations Whereas the Player's Guide gave the reader detailed, but non-game stated info on spacecraft, this chapter of the Narrator's Guide gives us the rules nitty-gritty to be able to use starships in our games.

The overview begins with the basics of starships (Propulsion, Shield Systems, etc.) along with covering the cool exceptions to the rules that so often show up in the Star Trek series, such as varying phaser frequency to cut through shields, or using phasers to stun individuals on a planet, or self-destructing the ship...I think you get the idea. This is all nicely done, with my only problem with this section being with the handling of the effects of being transported into a solid object. For some reason having such a thing happen to you only drops you to the Near-Death Health level, rather than flat-out killing you. As I seem to remember it being mentioned as always being fatal on the Star Trek series, plus the fact the authors have no problems with weapons doing one-hit instant kills, it seemed very odd for them to reduce the danger from a transporter accident.

Starship combat is covered next. The system is easily playable, with a note to the reader that a more complex starship combat game is/will be sold by Decipher. While not as simple as, say, the first edition of GURPS Space, the combat system for starships found here is great fun and easy to understand. You may become a bit confused as you read this chapter, as a few things are mentioned/discussed which are not explained until later portions of the book; fortunately this only happens in a handful of instances, unlike in the ST Player's Guide.

One thing I found very nice about the rules system is that all ships get only two actions per combat round. I'd feared each area of the ship (weapons system, engineering, etc) would get a # of actions based upon the number its members normally had, leading to all sorts of confusion. Luckily, that is not the case.

The only problematic thing I discovered was in the ship damage effects table. Depending on the roll on a chart, a crewmember at a specific station can be stunned in a battle. There's no mention if they can make a Stamina Reaction test to resist this, and the stun lasts for several game minutes. Most battles only last a few turns (at least in cases of one-on-one ship combat) so it's entirely possible a player's character could be knocked out by a lucky shot and forced to sit out a crucial combat. If that PC is the only one with good skills for the area of the ship he operates, this can be a serious problem.

Chapter 8: Rewards Covers how a Narrator should distribute experience points after an adventure. A flat 1,000 XP is handed out at the completion of an episode, regardless of its relative difficulty. This didn't sit well with some of my players, who had trouble accepting that defeating the Doomsday Weapon would have been worth just as much XP to the cast of the original Star Trek series as dealing with the Tribble infestation or the Salt Vampire. I like the system, as the way the episode award and other conditions for earning XP are written it's very easy for a Narrator to determine how much XP each PC should receive.

Chapter 9: Starships All you need to know about spacecraft in the Star Trek universe is here. To start with: Size matters! This is the most important trait for a craft, because in the ST game bigger is better. By that I mean that as the quality of a starship component increases (has better games stats) it takes up more space. This seemed a bit odd to me at first, since so often in Star Trek we're shown tiny devices which can do amazing things (like the tricorders and phasers, for example), but after a while I grew used to it.

Many systems for ships are also stated with the differences between the 23rd century versions and those found in the 24th century, which I thought a nice touch. Also neat is that a ship can have Merits and Flaws, just as a character can, to reflect special design changes made to it or to show it's been in a lot of battles. For example, a ship can have Ablative Armor (allowing it to take more damage) or it may have been in a lot of battles, resulting in its computers having a large store of combat dating, and giving bonuses to rolls in battle.

And, of course, several of the ships from the various Star Trek series are statted in this chapter. The Enterprise (both the OS and TNG versions), Voyager, the Defiant, and more are given game statistics. Curiously, the Hirogen Hunter ships are statted out in this section. I find that odd, since in neither this book nor in the Player's Guide are statistics given to the Hirogen themselves. Why Decipher gave us stats for a ship but not the race that uses it is a mystery to me.

One thing I should mention is that there's no list of cost in Federation Credits or other form of currency for building a ship. A minor thing, but one that can quickly come in play if your players capture a ship and decide to try and sell it.

Chapter 10: Space This section starts out with a brief look at the Milky Way galaxy and the known quadrants of space in the Star Trek universe. But the lion's share of this chapter is devoted to interstellar phenomena, ranging from black holes to wormholes. The coverage of what might be encountered in space is very detailed and well-written, drawing on many of the odd occurances that are a staple of space travel in the television series.

The remainder of the chapter includes a basic astrophysics lesson, coverage of space sections (along with design rules for them), planetary gravity and resources, and more. This area is just as nicely detailed as the interstellar phenomena section of the chapter, and was very enjoyable to read.

Chapter 11: Aliens This chapter explains how a Narrator can give game stats to a race he wishes to introduce into his campaign. A "pick system" is used with each bonus a new species receives worth a certain number of picks, as read off a chart given in this chapter. It should be noted that certain species introduced in the Player's Guide don't exactly add up if their examined under the rules in this chapter. The authors admit that some liberties were taken with the show races, to reflect all the various abilities that have been displayed in the various ST series. A "how-to" section is also included, covering the write-ups of a new race's homeworld, physical description, and the like.

Also in this chapter is a section on the design of a new civilization. I felt an odd sense of deja vu as I read it, as it reminded me greatly of the civilization design rules from FASA's old Doctor Who RPG.

Chapter 12: Creatures This chapter covers the generation of creatures. In one of the few flaws I found in this book (aside from the aforementioned flip-flopping), I found the authors reasoning behind what makes a species different from a creature to be very weak. More correctly, I found that their attempts to live up to their reasoning to be very weak.

According to the beginning of the chapter an entity's intelligence determines if it is classified as a creature or species. Fair enough, that's a concept I can respect. Then the author goes on to say that if an entity is intelligent enough to be considered a species, then use the rules of species, and if it's not intelligent enough to be a species, use the creature rules.

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