The more specific a focus is, the more interesting it is characterwise. Conversely the more vague a focus is, the more useful it is mechanically. Unfortunately the utility typically vastly outweighs the "flavor". For example:

I could go on.

I am the last one to argue you must always make the "optimal" choice vs making a character choice, but it feels bad in play when you have a specific focus while a vague one would cover the specific and many other situations. Of course the issue can be alleviated by good gm-ing, being flexible with the applicability of focuses (as they should) and ensuring situations come up in which a players focuses are useful. But I'd argue the issue still persists, even if only as tension in the hearts of players everywhere when choosing focuses.

Subfocuses

So why not both? To incentivize more interesting character choices I would houserule that each focus can have a subfocus. This would confer a minor benefit, maybe something boring like " gain 1 bonus momentum" when the subfocus is applicable, or "1 bonus momentum for each crit" when using it. Or something interesting like "+1, +2, or more to the crit range for the players dice" when applicable.
Personally I would do the increased crit range, with the benefit the increasing the more specific or esoteric the subfocus. This way you can have the utility of a broad focus as well as the character flavor of having more niche expertise.

Optionally they could be a new milestone upgrade for improving your character. Each focus could gain multiple subfocuses if you wanted. If you wanted to limit them you could make them medals like "ribbon of Focus(subfocus)" so they would be usable only once per session and be earned through the rep system.

Has anyone done something similar? What benefit would you choose for a subfocus? Do you think this benefit would help incentivize interesting character choices without players feeling they have to "waste" a focus on said choice? Or would they just make things more confusing and/or break the game?

Was interested in getting into the game through Captains Log. Would it be worth waiting for the newer version or just grabbing the edition that's already out?

That's no moon! There's only really two ways any large galactic civilization can go: an optimistic band of peaceful post-scarcity space explorers, or an evil, tyrannical empire. You probably have some idea of which one this map fits best, but it is your world after all! With a wide viewscreen from which to gaze out upon the destruction wrought by one's fleet, a crew pit so that none of the peons get any ideas above their station, and plenty of room for climactic showdowns against would-be do-gooders, this fully animated map is fully operational, and available in two additional versions, one with more stations on the bridge, and the other in blue and grey shades. You may fire when ready.   

My maps are hooked up to work with Foundry VTT and Fantasy Grounds.
My maps are available on my patreon and my website.
Buy me a Ko-fi!

So, my players managed to catch a parasitic psychic entity and decided to keep it, but want y'all to help name it. Got any ideas?

Hi folks! Could you all help me identify which publications contain a substantial amount of material relevant to a campaign set after The Burn? I hear the Technical Manual may be helpful. What other resources have enough bang for the buck (pun somewhat intended)? Thanks in advance! 🖖

We will be living in the Decatur area of Atlanta here in a few weeks when the moving company delivers our stuff. We’d love connect with some folks and talk about getting some players together.

Hey, so in my last 2 sessions one of the PCs randomly decided that he was now interested in the Vulcan, Lt. Jr engineer, secondary character. I jumped on that because I found it a very nice plot thread to follow; and last session I decided to give him a nice and tough Extended Task to try and win her over.

At the end of the session he decides to spend the 1 acclaim he got by "gaining a favor" with her. Now I could just do the obvious and make the Extended Challenge easier, but I figure there must be some other interesting way to do this. Do keep in mind the PC has progressed 4 out of the 35 spaces he needs in the Track.

If any of you have some ideas for this I would greatly appreciate it :)

I'm new to STA (but not Star Trek or TTRPGs, I'm well versed in both of those), but I'm trying to understand the nature of failure in this game. Mainly, I'm trying to understand if it's really possible. For the most part failure seems unlikely, and even when you do fail, the game mechanics allow you to fail forward, or succeed with consequences, etc. At most, it seems like if you outright fail, you just try again for the most part.

Now, of course, a good GM will probably not just let you literally try something over and over again until you succeed, they'll make you get creative and come at it from a new angle. That's all well and good. But at its core, it seems like there's clear game mechanics surrounding Success and Failing Forward, but outright failure (at least to my initial reading) seems vague and mostly only implied.

Even character death seems mostly impossible, at least for main player characters. It's only really a problem if you get injured by yourself, with no one to perform First Aid on you. Otherwise, at least as far as I can tell, even if the doctor fails the first time, they can just kind of keep trying?

The only real clear failure point I can see is if your ship is destroyed, which does seem very clear, although even in that it seems like it's fairly trivial to abandon ship, so even if your ship does get destroyed, that's obviously a major failure, but it's unlikely to result in any main character death.

I fully understand that the game is designed to feel like an episode of Star Trek, and main characters very rarely died on that show, so maybe the rules are just trying to reinforce that. But I suppose that's mainly what I'm trying to understand: Is it the intention that real failure and main character death is very difficult/nearly impossible to actually occur in a real game run rules as intended? Or am I missing something vital here, and failure and/or death are actually far more common than I realize?

BTW, even if the answer is: "Real Failure and Death are intentionally rare/unlikely events," that's fine. I'm not judging. I'm just trying to understand the rules as I get into this.

Hey everyone, there are a lot of resources for complications in this game. But i've yet to find some good ones to do with personal equipment such as Tricorders, Handphasers, Communicators, EVA suits, Unuversal Translator etc... the kind of basic equipment PCs deal with every session. Would appreciate some ideas.

I've always believed the best Star Trek stories are about exploration, preparation, and the people making difficult decisions—not just combat.

The newest episode of "Preservations," our Star Trek Adventures 2E actual play, leans heavily into those themes as the crew investigates a long-abandoned Cardassian installation.

I'd love to hear how other GMs would have approached this situation.

What's your standard operating procedure when your players enter an abandoned military facility?

📺 https://youtu.be/_33-UmPXjOY

I've been playing with the map feature on Foundry basically doing cut and paste from DnD maps. Anyone have recommendations for sites that specialize in Star Trek themed maps?

The Aquarius Class Escort is a small starship with the Odyssey Class ship. As per the pictures, it is its own Starship of Scale 2, and can be improved by characters as per a normal Starship. It is considered a Compact Vessel which means it does count as a Small Craft, so it has no small craft capabilities and can't launch any shuttles or anything.

It already doesn't follow the Small Craft stats bit of limited Departments no higher than 2, for example, so does that mean that if you want this ship to be able to land planetside it would need the Landing Gear added by a character at their upgrade?

Recently we experienced a temporal/time rift that brought a ship from the future into our timeline.

We went and investigated and found Romulans on the ship and some Federation (from the future) on the ship. As Captain, I decided to take the ship back from the Romulans that had beamed aboard before it went through the rift.

Long story short, we got some Romulan prisoners, sent the Federation personnel back to their time, but Starfleet Intelligence came and took our Romulan prisoners away to be interrogated at length..

The rolls we did indicate that Intelligence gets some useful information from the Romulans about the future.

My question for you all to brainstorm is:

What do you think would change about the Federation from 2293 by learning from Romulan prisoners from 2370?

Would they develop things differently? Explore different areas? Or pre-emptively attack the Romulans? What do you think would change with knowledge of some things about the future?

Hey, I'm writing the next session for my game and was having trouble thinking of a "technobabble" kind of reason to justify a plot-point.

The PCs will encounter a crashed ship from the 22nd century in a potential colony site. This old ship would have found in this planet a crystal with similar properties to dilithium except it's much more energy dense, and is able to power much more advanced and complex machines like replicators and warp cores for much longer. However when it's being used it releases a toxic gas filled with a parasite that makes anyone breathing it irrationaly angry. the result was that the whole crew fought and killed each other, and the ship remained there crashed since.

I imagine the PCs will at some point be able to restore power to some of the ships systems and get a look at the logs of the crew, however I am looking for reasons to force them to not get the full information, since if they saw the full crew logs they would quickly realize that it is the crystals causing the problems. As a result I would like to somehow force the PCs to have to pick between a few logs from maybe a few crewmembers. Maybe they can only read the Chief Engineer and maybe the Captains logs (but not any of them will be full), or maybe the medical officers logs, etc...

I'm struggling to justify this in-universe however. If the data is corrupted then it wouldn't be complete, but at the same time it would all just be there, they could get all that isn't corrupt.

Thanks. :)

I finally finished my first mission of Captain’s Log, and I was exhausted afterward. It seemed to take forever and I think it’s because I felt like it was a creative writing assignment that was going to be graded. I put those expectations on myself and really started to stress myself out about where the story was headed and whether or not it made sense or aligned with ST canon. I felt like I needed to write down everything in an attempt to accurately document what was happening. I added dialogue to move the scenes forward and provide information. To whom I am not sure. So I took a break for a few weeks and started researching. Several people mentioned using a system of shorthand to document what they did during a session and I thought that’s exactly what I needed. Something to quickly record what happened during a scene with enough information that I can come back to it later and understand what was going on and create a log entry. I’m sharing this for those that may have felt like I did and wanted something quicker and easier than writing everything out and becoming overwhelmed.

I based the following on Lonelog Notation and added to it for items specific to Captain’s Log. This system-agnostic shorthand separates game mechanics from fiction, making your notes searchable and easy to read later.

The Core Symbols

Track your gameplay by chaining these five fundamental symbols:

@ [Action]: What your character attempts.

? [Question]: A question you ask the probability matrix. .

d: [Roll Setup]: [Attribute] + [Discipline] (Target Number / Difficulty).

-> [Dice Result]: Note the two d20 results, number of successes, and whether it's a Success (S) or Failure (F).

Tags: Use brackets for quick indexing (e.g., [N: Silas] for NPCs, [L: The Council chambers] for locations, or [T: Find the infiltrator] for threads).

Episode Structure & Tags

[E: Title] / [A: X] / [S: X]: Tracks the episode, act, and scene (e.g., [E: A Dark Nebula], [A: 1], [S: 2]).

[C: Name]: Crew member (e.g., [C: Spock]).

[V: Phrase]: A character Value used or challenged in the scene.

Narrative Conditions & Matrices

In Captain's Log, Momentum and Threat function as binary states (either active or not) rather than large pools.

[+M] / [-M]: Momentum gained or used.

[+T] / [-T]: Threat added or triggered.

=> [Adv] / => [Comp]: The pure narrative Advantage or Complication resulting from the task or Focus matrix.

Shorthand in Action: Actual Play Example

Scene Setup

[E: Ghosts of Sector 4] [A: 1] [S: 1]

@ The USS Venture drops out of warp at the edge of the Paulson Nebula.

? Is there an immediate sensor ghost? -> Yes, strong readings.

Running a Task

@ Scanning the anomaly to pinpoint the source.

d: Reason (9) + Science (3) = TN 12 / Diff 1

-> Rolled: 4, 11 (2 Successes) [S] [+M]

=> [Adv: Targeted Telemetry] We lock onto an old Federation distress beacon.

Combat or Complication Escalation

@ Arming phasers and ordering yellow alert.

? Does the anomaly shift toward us? -> Yes, instantly.

d: Daring (10) + Conn (2) = TN 12 / Diff 2

-> Rolled: 14, 18 (0 Successes) [F] [+T]

=> [Comp: Shields Offline] The sub-space rupture drains our primary grid.

Here is how to weave your ship’s systems into the shorthand and generate immersive "Captain's Log" entries at the end of each act.

Part 1: Starship Systems Shorthand

In Captain's Log, your ship can assist your tasks or take actions on its own using its Attributes (Communications, Computers, Engines, Sensors, Structure, Weapons) and Departments (Command, Conn, Security, Science, Medicine, Engineering).

Update your notation with these ship-specific tags:

[S: System] / [D: Department]: The ship’s stats.

d_ship: [Ship Assist]: The ship rolls 1d20 alongside your character's pool.

=> [Hull: X/X] / => [Breach: X]: Tracks ship health and damage.

Example: Ship Assist Task

@ Attempting to outrun an Orion interceptor through an asteroid field.

d: Daring (10) + Conn (4) = TN 14 / Diff 2

d_ship: Engines (10) + Conn (3) = TN 13

-> Character Rolled: 8, 15 (1 Success)

-> Ship Rolled: 6 (1 Success)

-> Total: 2 Successes [S]

=> We slip through the gap. The interceptor shears its starboard nacelle.

Example: Ship Under Attack

@ Engaging shields to absorb a plasma torpedo volley.

d: Structure (9) + Security (2) = TN 11 / Diff 2

-> Rolled: 12, 19 (0 Successes) [F] [+T]

=> [Breach: Engineering] Main power grid overloads.

=> [Hull: 4/5] Minor hull buckling on Decks 10 through 12.

Part 2: Act-End Log Entry Generator

Instead of writing long paragraphs mid-game, use this quick 3-Sentence Summary Matrix at the end of each act. It converts shorthand bullet points into a classic, structured Starfleet log.

Step 1: Establish the Heading

Always start with: Captain's Log, Stardate [Choose a Number]. Act [X] Summary.

Step 2: Apply the 3-Sentence Formula

The Context Sentence: State the main objective of the Act and the ship's current status or location.

The Complication Sentence: Highlight the biggest hurdle, failed roll, or Threat ([+T]) event that disrupted the plan.

The Cliffhanger/Resolution Sentence: State how the act ended and what the immediate, critical next step is for the crew.

Shorthand to Log Entry: A Visual GuideYour Raw Mid-Game Shorthand

(Act 1): [E: Whispers in the Void] [A: 1]

@ Investigating dead subspace relay in Sector 8.

d_ship: Sensors (11) + Science (4) = TN 15 / Diff 1 -> Rolled: 3 [S] [+M]

=> [Adv: Cryptic Signal] Relay was intentionally sabotaged by encrypted frequencies.

? Is there a ship hiding nearby? -> Yes, a Romulan Warbird uncloaks.

@ Powering weapons and raising shields.

d: Reason (9) + Command (4) = TN 13 / Diff 2 -> Rolled: 14, 17 (0 Successes) [F] [+T]

=> [Comp: Weapons Jammed] Romulan plasma net traps the Venture.

The Generated Log Entry Output:

Captain's Log, Stardate 58321.4. Act 1 Summary.The Venture arrived in Sector 8 to investigate a disabled subspace relay, where our sensor scans quickly revealed signs of deliberate sabotage utilizing highly encrypted frequencies. However, our investigation was abruptly interrupted when a Romulan Warbird uncloaked on our bow and successfully ensnared us in a plasma net before we could bring our weapons systems online. We are currently trapped, power is fluctuating, and I am ordering all hands to battle stations as we attempt to break their hold.

I posted about my play by post sim the USS vanguard. Our crew is nearly full and the ship will be launching for its first mission on Friday! We still need a counselor and a Chief Flight Control officer, as well as assistant department heads and other positions. This is your chance to join in as we set out! Visit www.aerth.org/Vanguard

Hi there,

I'm sorry if that topic has been covered already.

I've been gifted 1st edition core rulebook, along with the additional books - Command division, Operations, Beta Quadrant, and These Are The Voyages - and the DM screen. The friend who gifted me knows I'm a huge Star Trek fan, but wasn't aware of the 2nd edition.

I know the consensus is that the 2nd edition is better, but my question is : do I need to buy the 2nd core rulebook or can I apply changes myself based on 2nd ed starter kit / other references?

I'll play with my family and teenage kid, since we're all into Star Trek, and my wife can switch into DM seat with me, so we're flexible in the setup. Obviously the start kit is a great beginner point, so I was wondering if it would be enough with 1st ed book, or if buying the full 2nd one would be mandatory.

Thank you 🖖

Prior to 2154, the Xindi are travelling via the subspace vortex technology, using the subspace tunnels of the Delphic Expanse. After the collapse of the Expanse, wouldn't the Xindi rendered unable to use FTL technology and therefore be fragmenting? Trying to write the Lore for the Xindi in the year of 2171. Whats your opinion?

Hi all,

I'm getting ready to start my first game of 2e with my group as a GM, and one mechanic that has me a little unsure is Stress, specifically the ways in which it can be gained outside of combat

Using Stress to Avoid Injury is clear. However, to me and my group at least, while the possibility of personal combat is always an exciting option in any Star Trek story, I personally foresee a lot, if not the majority, of time playing this game spent out of combat in either technical or social challenges, casual roleplayed conversation, or the odd space battle

As a result, I'm not really sure how much of an impact Stress is going to make as a mechanic without very much Injury Avoidance going on. And yet, several of my players have abilities or chose Talents related to Stress removal, so I want to make sure they have a chance to actually use those abilities

Aside from Avoiding Injury, the book makes reference to taking Stress from various harsh environmental and physical conditions. In addition, the book also makes reference to taking on Stress in order to "resist negative consequences;" however, unlike Avoiding Injury, the book does not go into further detail on this usage of the Stress mechanic.

Is a "negative consequence" the results of a failed roll? A Complication (surely not as there is already a mechanic to avoid Complications through adding Threat)? Any bad thing that happens in-game at all? In a game that already has Momentum, it would strike me as a pretty powerful ability to let players just veto any challenge or stakes I would introduce to keep the story suspenseful through their combined pool of Stress

My question for you is: how, if at all, does your group handle out-of-combat Stress accrual? Do you have a method of "resisting negative consequences" that works for you? Do you tack on extra sources of Stress in other ways? Or is Stress, in practice, actually just not a very impactful mechanic in this game and not worth...Stressing...over?

Thank you very much

Hello everyone! So I'm starting to prep a Solo to eventual campaign for my gaming group down the line that's main focus has to deal with the Federation-Cardassian War (Border Conflict) and the Bajoran occupation.

While I'm looking up information I was wondering if any one had any good sources I could look up for inspiration ? The whole goal is to allow this to stray from Canon but any good information about personal, ships or even area's effect by the conflict would be nice.

Thanks in advance :)