How Star Trek Adventures Brought Lower Decks to Tabletop Roleplaying (Exclusive)
Star Trek: Lower Decks comes to the Star Trek Adventures RPG, Modiphius Entertainment's acclaimed roleplaying game, via the Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide. Paired with the Star Trek Adventures Core Rulebook, the Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide offers game masters everything they need to send their players on Star Trek: Lower Decks-style adventures and campaigns in the final frontier, both in terms of the types of challenges they face and the tone of the storytelling. Jim Johnson, Line Editor and Project Manager on Star Trek Adventures told ComicBook.com how eager he and his team were to bring Star Trek: Lower Decks to the game practically from the moment the Star Trek Universe's first animated comedy debuted on Paramount+.
"The conversation really started when Lower Decks first aired," Johnson says. "We had already been four years into doing Star Trek Adventures at that point. We didn't have the Lower Decks license yet. Lower Decks came out. We watched it, obviously, just independently, thought it was amazing. We're like, 'Okay, when can we start?'"
But adapting Star Trek: Lower Decks' signature brand of Star Trek storytelling posed unique challenges for the Star Trek Adventures team. The TTPRG had previously focused on the straightforward sci-fi adventures that the Star Trek franchise is known for with different sourcebooks and supplementary materials detailing how to set those adventures in the Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, or Star Trek: Discovery eras.
But what sets Lower Decks apart isn't a particular place on the Star Trek timeline but its signature humor that draws on all of Star Trek history for its punchlines. Bringing that to the table required a new approach. "There are certain things you can do and certain things you can't do, but to tell someone, 'Go be funny,' oh gosh, it's really hard to do," Johnson explains. "In the book, we provide guidance on how to bring that tone in and how to hit the science fiction tropes and how to fit humor possibilities into it."
Because of this, the Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide has a universality that may surprise some readers. Having gotten to look over a copy of the 240-page hardcover book full of frames from the show and new artwork in its style, its section on Star Trek tropes, detailing various interstellar phenomena a crew might encounter in a Star Trek story, feels like it could be applied to any sci-fi game. The advice on bringing humor to the table is similarly helpful for any situation where the gamemaster hoping to elicit some laughs.
"There's plenty of stuff in this Lower Decks book that could be ported into anything like Traveller or Firefly, or even if somebody wanted to run an Orville game," Johnson says. 'There's no reason you couldn't fully lift sections out of Lower Decks and some of our other products and use it in your games, especially this Lower Decks book."
That universality applies within the Star Trek Adventures ecosystem, as the Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide contains tools and information for any Star Trek Adventures campaign, even if the playgroup isn't looking for a more comedic campaign. "The book isn't just about [Star Trek: Lower Decks]," Johnson emphasizes. "This is about the lower decks experience for Starfleet and for other polities, that whole lower decks experience in general. If you're an up-and-coming officer, there's loads of advice in this book that will be useful to you no matter what kind of campaign you're running."
He continues, "There's a load of advice in the book about support operations. If a first-line ship comes in and does something awful and horrific and then they're off to their next adventure the following week, a support team comes in to smooth things over and do the diplomatic negotiations. There's a wealth of advice in the book about that whole support arm of things, and that's something we haven't really touched on in other books and should provide game masters and players with a whole new universe of opportunities for storytelling. If they don't want to do a traditional exploration game, they could do this whole support type of role that you see on the show and bring that into their game as well, whether it's Starfleet or Klingons or whatever other polities they want to play."
One aspect of the Star Trek: Lower Campaign Guide drawn distinctly from Star Trek's lore is its new playable character alien species. Star Trek: Lower Decks offered the designers the opportunity to provide mechanics for eight Star Trek aliens that are new and old, including the fearsome Gorn, the antagonistic Pakleds, and my personal favorite, the Cetaceans, who are, essentially, space dolphins, all of which can become player characters. With Star Trek: Lower Decks' bend toward humor, players may feel encouraged to take on an eccentric alien persona, like the Tamarians, who speak only in metaphor, or the Exocomps, who are sentient drone-like robots.
"I have no idea if there are players out there who would actually want to play an Exocomp or actually want to play a Tamarian, but why not?" Johnson says. "There's so many. I mean, IDIC is what Star Trek's all about, right? Infinite Diversity, Infinite Combinations. So we're like, 'Let's do this.'"
The Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide doesn't stop at playable alien beings. In addition to providing stat blocks for such recognizable Star Trek aliens as Armus and the mugato, the book includes a section called "The Menagerie" with rules for gamemasters to create their new alien beasts and creatures from unfamiliar worlds.
"For the first time in Star Trek Adventures, we created a full system for creating your own creatures," Johnson tells us. "I think Lower Decks did an amazing job of doing world-building in the sense where you go to a new planet and there's this strange, exotic creature that you think is going to just utterly destroy you, but it turns out to be a spider-cow. It looks like a horrible, scary Shelob-like creature, but it's actually just a very tame, docile spider-cow. They love to subvert those expectations. And that's a classic comedy trope, make something look horrible, but actually be very gentle or make something very gentle be just absolutely horrific. You play with those expectations."
He continues, "So we created a whole system of how you can create your own creatures with a lot of options and add to them. And I'm really excited about that. Because I really want to see what players and game masters do with it and what kind of crazy amazing creatures they add to their own Star Trek canon. Because that's something historically we haven't really been able to fit into a book yet. And it felt like Lower Decks was the right one, partly because of what we've seen on the show to date is there are all these amazingly weird creatures that they're creating for the episodes. Why not give players and game masters that tool? You want to go create an amazingly weird creature? Here's a rule set, here's some guidance on how to do that, go have fun and make it amazing."
The Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide opens with an introduction from Star Trek: Lower Decks creator Mike McMahan and concludes with a three-part mini-campaign focused on junior officers that can be set during any era of play or within any polity. The Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide is available to pre-order now and is expected to ship in August.
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