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Star Trek Adventures RPG
Star Trek Adventures The Command Division Supplemental Rulebook
MAKE IT SO,
NUMBER ONE
COMMAND A STARSHIP. A HUNDRED DECISIONS A DAY,
HUNDREDS OF LIVES, STAKED ON YOU MAKING EVERY
ONE OF THEM RIGHT. - COMMODORE STONE
The Command Division supplemental rulebook provides Gamemasters and Players with a wealth of new material for use in Star Trek Adventures for characters in the command division. The Command Division supplemental rulebook includes:
■ Detailed description of the
command division, including its role
in Starfleet, the various branches
within the command division, the
role of Fleet Operations, life as a
command division cadet, and details
on starship operations.
■ Expanded 2d20 Social Conflict rules,
enhancing social encounters and
galactic diplomacy.
■ More than 20 additional starships
and support craft to command and
pilot, including the NX, Nebula,
Sovereign, and Steamrunner classes,
as well as many shuttle types and
the indomitable Work Bee!
■ An expanded list of Talents and
Focuses for command and conn
characters.
■ Advice on creating command
division focused plot components
for your missions to test the mettle
of your captain and flight controller.
■ New rules on running Admiralty-level
campaigns that let you command
entire fleets, as well as information
on commanding starbases.
■ Detailed descriptions and game
statistics for a range of Command
and Conn focused NPCs and
Supporting Characters.
This book requires the Star Trek Adventures core rulebook to use.
NUMBER ONE
COMMAND A STARSHIP. A HUNDRED DECISIONS A DAY,
HUNDREDS OF LIVES, STAKED ON YOU MAKING EVERY
ONE OF THEM RIGHT. - COMMODORE STONE
The Command Division supplemental rulebook provides Gamemasters and Players with a wealth of new material for use in Star Trek Adventures for characters in the command division. The Command Division supplemental rulebook includes:
■ Detailed description of the
command division, including its role
in Starfleet, the various branches
within the command division, the
role of Fleet Operations, life as a
command division cadet, and details
on starship operations.
■ Expanded 2d20 Social Conflict rules,
enhancing social encounters and
galactic diplomacy.
■ More than 20 additional starships
and support craft to command and
pilot, including the NX, Nebula,
Sovereign, and Steamrunner classes,
as well as many shuttle types and
the indomitable Work Bee!
■ An expanded list of Talents and
Focuses for command and conn
characters.
■ Advice on creating command
division focused plot components
for your missions to test the mettle
of your captain and flight controller.
■ New rules on running Admiralty-level
campaigns that let you command
entire fleets, as well as information
on commanding starbases.
■ Detailed descriptions and game
statistics for a range of Command
and Conn focused NPCs and
Supporting Characters.
This book requires the Star Trek Adventures core rulebook to use.
122 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2018
2 people are currently reading
27 people want to read
About the author
Jim Johnson
23 books26 followersJim Johnson was born about the same time Apollo XII landed on the moon (and has always been kinda spacy) and shares a birthday with the Kindle. He is the author of the Pistols and Pyramids weird western series and the Potomac Shadows urban fantasy series. He's also written a bunch of other stuff in and around the SFF genres and pen and paper RPGs. He's currently the project manager and line editor for Modiphius's Star Trek Adventures RPG and project manager for the Fallout RPG.
In rare moments when he's not writing or publishing, Jim plays board games and card games, and makes a brilliant bowl of popcorn. You can learn more about him and his writing at www.SCRIBEINETI.com.
In rare moments when he's not writing or publishing, Jim plays board games and card games, and makes a brilliant bowl of popcorn. You can learn more about him and his writing at www.SCRIBEINETI.com.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 21, 2023
As luck would have it this book popped up on my list.
I think that’s good actually because if I hate it as much as I hate the Operations Division book I’m also reading then I’ll be glad to have finished it and not look forward to something that’s just going to be crap.
I’m still pissed that I wasted money on hard-copy rather than reading the PDFs to find out what junk they were.
For what it’s worth, I’m not hating this book as much as I hate the Operations Division book.
But saying this book is better isn’t saying a whole lot.
While I think the infodump on Fleet Operations is mostly useless I do appreciate that (page 16) they mention that back in the TOS days this is superfluous.
The chapter on The Prime Directive interests me. I’ve always had the opinion that from Next Generation onward the writers had no honest idea what the hell the Prime Directive was or how it should be interpreted. A quick Google search will tell you that I’m not alone on this.
It always seemed to me to be pretty obvious. “Zero Tolerance for Assholes”. If a pre-warp civilization is being exploited, you are not ‘restricted’ in anyway from preventing it and helping this civilization.
It’s a subjective standard because it has to be.
It’ll be interesting to see what a book biased toward the Next Generation thinks of it.
The first “what if” is a fairly interesting Prime Directive question and a suitable puzzle.
The second AND third “what if”’s are complete horseshit. They’ve both got nothing to do with the Prime Directive in any way whatsoever. There’s not even a question.
The third one is just as stupid. Should you let bad guys you see exploiting a pre-warp civilization just go ahead and do it? IS THAT REALLY THE QUESTION?!
The fourth one is a little more of puzzle, but ultimately stupid because it supposes that you have already screwed up and broken the prime directive. So what should you do now? Well, duh, do the minimum required to fix the Prime Directive, even if it means crewmembers deaths. Again, not that hard to figure out.
Interesting that this book suggests that there are four duty watches: Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. Other Star Trek books I’ve read suggest three duty watches.
So you work for 6 hours and then are off for 6 more hours and sleep for 12? Seems weird. I wonder where this idea came from. I’m certainly not counting this as any more ‘official’ than anything else — and it may in fact be something that changed over the ‘centuries’ — but I’d be interested in knowing more details.
I like some of the ideas here though.
• A Level 3 diagnostic shall be conducted on all shipboard systems during every Gamma watch. The results will be provided to the executive officer, who gives a summary to the captain by 0500 every day.
• The bridge shall be fully staffed during all duty watches.
FINALLY! Some idea of what The players actually DO on board ship! Raising this book to 2 stars if nothing else!
More useful and game-able information in The form of watches and The ‘Officers Day’ example! Thank you!
Of course now we get a few pages of how to play an “Admiralty Campaign”. “This is idea fodder for some Players, but uninteresting to others.”
And yet for all The Star Trek TV shows there’s NEVER been one focused on The Admiralty. I wonder why?
Next is “Command in Play”. Star Trek Adventures does not have a set of talents or skills. Instead, they use The Star Trek divisions - Command, Con, Engineering, Security, Science, Medicine. So, since these are so vague as to be meaningless, we have this section which says ‘Here’s what this might mean at each level of ability (1-5)’. It goes on to describe what you might be like if you’re second highest Discipline is one of The others.
Next is Command Focuses. Focuses are more or less skills for STA. Some of them seem more like talents too. I’m mixed on these. Without a definite purpose for them they are a rather grab-baggy bunch that doesn’t seem to provide more options as provide things that should have been there in The character generation rules at The beginning! And again, they have no particular mechanics attached them except “whatever you can stop The game and argue with your GM about before The game can continue…”.
Now come Command Talents. These at least benefit from having game mechanics attached to them. It’s presumably The reason these ‘splat-books’ exist, so you can sell these to more players.
I’m not really against The concept, but it seems just as shallow here as it does in every other game that does this. Sure, you’re probably thinking that EVERY game does this and that’s probably true, but BACK IN MY DAY….!
Once again we get more character creation advice. If you have THIS score you might be like THIS!
Who The heck is The audience for this kind of drivel, which is essentially a repeat of The material in The Core Rulebook.
I’ll give a good news/bad new comment on The “Federation Vessels” section of The book. First of all, what they heck is it doing in this book? It’s just a pointless filler that could be in ANY book. Second, The ship ‘statistics’ if you can call them that - and you shouldn’t - are so shallow as to be meaningless. On The good news side, they too give a good variety of Federation vessels, if that’s your thing.
And if you thought The Federation Starships chapter was useless filler how about Federation Small Craft description of every shuttle in Star Trek? More useless crap that has nothing to do with The “Command Division”. They really are playing us for suckers aren’t they?
Nothing shows that more than The next chapter being “Command Department Storylines”. You know, really obvious ideas hand-waved for you to turn into a plot! Thanks for nothing.
The Social Conflicts chapter could make all The rest of The junk in this book worth it. Social rules are hard, and as The Using Traits introduction demonstrates The STA Traits and Values system being vague, undefined and changeable at whim, are a lousy mechanic for trying to build actual rules off of. But if they can pull it off, they can make The book worth its price.
A quick review of The Social Conflict rules from The core rulebook confirm that as written they are functionally useless. Consisting of not much more than Make an Opposed Task check, figure out The difficulty for yourself.
While not exactly a home run, it does in fact give more details to social rolls that I can imagine would be VERY useful in a game. I’m going to use some of The ideas myself, so that’s as good a praise as a game supplement can get. It’s actually getting to 3 stars here.
But of course, it’s mostly hand-wavey “well this is what could happen maybe…”. With no mechanical support or advice whatsoever.
For example “Cold War Ceasefire”. Wouldn’t it be GREAT to see how to run that in a Star Trek game?!? Do you think you get that answer here? Nope. Two paragraphs, nothing gamble.
And then thing about The “Legal Proceedings” section is that it starts with The sentence “Courts-martial and other hearings are occasionally necessary in Starfleet.” It then goes on to describe it “In broad terms..”. WE’VE ACTUALLY SEEN COURTS-MARTIALS IN STAR TREK! You can literally tell us EXACTLY how can run a courts-martial in a Star Trek game?!! So we don’t have to re-watch these multiple episodes if we want to run one. But of course they don’t because….???
Even “Trade Deals” for which there have been DOZENS of workable science fiction systems written, is merely described with a hand-wave. So tools for running social conflict in The game where they are MOST needed. Zilch.
The Awards and Commendations chapter might get this book to 3 stars. It details how much Reputation can be spent to acquire a particular award and of course, The conditions for winning an award. Now this is actually gameable material! Well done.
The next chapter is “Fleet Actions”. This is a page and a half of quick-and-dirty rules for a large number of ships. This is not at all Star Trek to me and if it was I’d just use a set of miniature rules to resolve it.
Because how exciting are The results of a massive fleet action that is reduced to a dice off?
The “Starfleet Command” chapter has 3 TNG NPC and stats for Robert April (Commodore). “Diplomats and Delegates” adds more NPCs, including Sarek, Curzon Dax and Lwaxana Troi. I’ll let you decide The value of these NPCs. Then there are generic NPCs. Diplomat, Attache and Negotiator.
The rest of The NPC stats are Pathfinder Specialist, Academy Instructor Cadet, JAG Officer, Diplomatic Aide, EVA Specialist, Junior Bridge Officer, Legal Counsel and Shuttle Pilot.
So, for your money The most useful things are The Diagnostic Tests, The flimsy Social Conflict rules and The Awards & Decorations (though keep in many there are only a few of them). Not worthless by any means, but definitely thin gruel.
I’ll generously give this 3 stars for three more than nothing.
Would I recommend it? Only the PDF if it’s on sale.
I think that’s good actually because if I hate it as much as I hate the Operations Division book I’m also reading then I’ll be glad to have finished it and not look forward to something that’s just going to be crap.
I’m still pissed that I wasted money on hard-copy rather than reading the PDFs to find out what junk they were.
For what it’s worth, I’m not hating this book as much as I hate the Operations Division book.
But saying this book is better isn’t saying a whole lot.
While I think the infodump on Fleet Operations is mostly useless I do appreciate that (page 16) they mention that back in the TOS days this is superfluous.
The chapter on The Prime Directive interests me. I’ve always had the opinion that from Next Generation onward the writers had no honest idea what the hell the Prime Directive was or how it should be interpreted. A quick Google search will tell you that I’m not alone on this.
It always seemed to me to be pretty obvious. “Zero Tolerance for Assholes”. If a pre-warp civilization is being exploited, you are not ‘restricted’ in anyway from preventing it and helping this civilization.
It’s a subjective standard because it has to be.
It’ll be interesting to see what a book biased toward the Next Generation thinks of it.
The first “what if” is a fairly interesting Prime Directive question and a suitable puzzle.
The second AND third “what if”’s are complete horseshit. They’ve both got nothing to do with the Prime Directive in any way whatsoever. There’s not even a question.
The third one is just as stupid. Should you let bad guys you see exploiting a pre-warp civilization just go ahead and do it? IS THAT REALLY THE QUESTION?!
The fourth one is a little more of puzzle, but ultimately stupid because it supposes that you have already screwed up and broken the prime directive. So what should you do now? Well, duh, do the minimum required to fix the Prime Directive, even if it means crewmembers deaths. Again, not that hard to figure out.
Interesting that this book suggests that there are four duty watches: Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. Other Star Trek books I’ve read suggest three duty watches.
So you work for 6 hours and then are off for 6 more hours and sleep for 12? Seems weird. I wonder where this idea came from. I’m certainly not counting this as any more ‘official’ than anything else — and it may in fact be something that changed over the ‘centuries’ — but I’d be interested in knowing more details.
I like some of the ideas here though.
• A Level 3 diagnostic shall be conducted on all shipboard systems during every Gamma watch. The results will be provided to the executive officer, who gives a summary to the captain by 0500 every day.
• The bridge shall be fully staffed during all duty watches.
FINALLY! Some idea of what The players actually DO on board ship! Raising this book to 2 stars if nothing else!
More useful and game-able information in The form of watches and The ‘Officers Day’ example! Thank you!
Of course now we get a few pages of how to play an “Admiralty Campaign”. “This is idea fodder for some Players, but uninteresting to others.”
And yet for all The Star Trek TV shows there’s NEVER been one focused on The Admiralty. I wonder why?
Next is “Command in Play”. Star Trek Adventures does not have a set of talents or skills. Instead, they use The Star Trek divisions - Command, Con, Engineering, Security, Science, Medicine. So, since these are so vague as to be meaningless, we have this section which says ‘Here’s what this might mean at each level of ability (1-5)’. It goes on to describe what you might be like if you’re second highest Discipline is one of The others.
Next is Command Focuses. Focuses are more or less skills for STA. Some of them seem more like talents too. I’m mixed on these. Without a definite purpose for them they are a rather grab-baggy bunch that doesn’t seem to provide more options as provide things that should have been there in The character generation rules at The beginning! And again, they have no particular mechanics attached them except “whatever you can stop The game and argue with your GM about before The game can continue…”.
Now come Command Talents. These at least benefit from having game mechanics attached to them. It’s presumably The reason these ‘splat-books’ exist, so you can sell these to more players.
I’m not really against The concept, but it seems just as shallow here as it does in every other game that does this. Sure, you’re probably thinking that EVERY game does this and that’s probably true, but BACK IN MY DAY….!
Once again we get more character creation advice. If you have THIS score you might be like THIS!
Who The heck is The audience for this kind of drivel, which is essentially a repeat of The material in The Core Rulebook.
I’ll give a good news/bad new comment on The “Federation Vessels” section of The book. First of all, what they heck is it doing in this book? It’s just a pointless filler that could be in ANY book. Second, The ship ‘statistics’ if you can call them that - and you shouldn’t - are so shallow as to be meaningless. On The good news side, they too give a good variety of Federation vessels, if that’s your thing.
And if you thought The Federation Starships chapter was useless filler how about Federation Small Craft description of every shuttle in Star Trek? More useless crap that has nothing to do with The “Command Division”. They really are playing us for suckers aren’t they?
Nothing shows that more than The next chapter being “Command Department Storylines”. You know, really obvious ideas hand-waved for you to turn into a plot! Thanks for nothing.
The Social Conflicts chapter could make all The rest of The junk in this book worth it. Social rules are hard, and as The Using Traits introduction demonstrates The STA Traits and Values system being vague, undefined and changeable at whim, are a lousy mechanic for trying to build actual rules off of. But if they can pull it off, they can make The book worth its price.
A quick review of The Social Conflict rules from The core rulebook confirm that as written they are functionally useless. Consisting of not much more than Make an Opposed Task check, figure out The difficulty for yourself.
While not exactly a home run, it does in fact give more details to social rolls that I can imagine would be VERY useful in a game. I’m going to use some of The ideas myself, so that’s as good a praise as a game supplement can get. It’s actually getting to 3 stars here.
But of course, it’s mostly hand-wavey “well this is what could happen maybe…”. With no mechanical support or advice whatsoever.
For example “Cold War Ceasefire”. Wouldn’t it be GREAT to see how to run that in a Star Trek game?!? Do you think you get that answer here? Nope. Two paragraphs, nothing gamble.
And then thing about The “Legal Proceedings” section is that it starts with The sentence “Courts-martial and other hearings are occasionally necessary in Starfleet.” It then goes on to describe it “In broad terms..”. WE’VE ACTUALLY SEEN COURTS-MARTIALS IN STAR TREK! You can literally tell us EXACTLY how can run a courts-martial in a Star Trek game?!! So we don’t have to re-watch these multiple episodes if we want to run one. But of course they don’t because….???
Even “Trade Deals” for which there have been DOZENS of workable science fiction systems written, is merely described with a hand-wave. So tools for running social conflict in The game where they are MOST needed. Zilch.
The Awards and Commendations chapter might get this book to 3 stars. It details how much Reputation can be spent to acquire a particular award and of course, The conditions for winning an award. Now this is actually gameable material! Well done.
The next chapter is “Fleet Actions”. This is a page and a half of quick-and-dirty rules for a large number of ships. This is not at all Star Trek to me and if it was I’d just use a set of miniature rules to resolve it.
Because how exciting are The results of a massive fleet action that is reduced to a dice off?
The “Starfleet Command” chapter has 3 TNG NPC and stats for Robert April (Commodore). “Diplomats and Delegates” adds more NPCs, including Sarek, Curzon Dax and Lwaxana Troi. I’ll let you decide The value of these NPCs. Then there are generic NPCs. Diplomat, Attache and Negotiator.
The rest of The NPC stats are Pathfinder Specialist, Academy Instructor Cadet, JAG Officer, Diplomatic Aide, EVA Specialist, Junior Bridge Officer, Legal Counsel and Shuttle Pilot.
So, for your money The most useful things are The Diagnostic Tests, The flimsy Social Conflict rules and The Awards & Decorations (though keep in many there are only a few of them). Not worthless by any means, but definitely thin gruel.
I’ll generously give this 3 stars for three more than nothing.
Would I recommend it? Only the PDF if it’s on sale.
June 9, 2020
Very nice sourcebook for the Star Trek Adventures RPG. I especially enjoyed the new talents en fousses for Command and Conn crewmembers. The Starbase rules are also a great addition to the game. The boom features fantastic art. There were a lot of typos in this book though. More time should've gone to proofreading.
July 26, 2023
The second best of the three division supplements, flesh out command and Conn. While the command and admiralty part is great, the Conn part is a touch lackluster, not really managing to descrine the good parts of the station.
If you have Utopia Planitia, take note of the overlap in content regarding starships: they are all repeated there. This reduces the value somewhat.
If you have Utopia Planitia, take note of the overlap in content regarding starships: they are all repeated there. This reduces the value somewhat.
March 21, 2018
Another great rulebook for a great system. The writers include fiction and references to epidodes/movies throughout that makes for a fun and interesting read.
May 6, 2021
Mildly interesting
September 15, 2023
I liked this supplement more than I liked the Beta Quadrant supplement, and I think it came down to the crunch existing in a large enough portion of the book, but also aimed better at serving the narrative better. The expanded talents in this sourcebook tend to be more specific than those found in the core rulebook, as do most of the example focuses, but lend themselves to more specific characterization—"Call out Targets," for example, would be a dream-fit for a tactically minded XO—and the descriptive options for the various command and conn groups within Starfleet sparked a few ideas, so even the fluff hit better for me with my campaign considerations.
I also appreciated more ships—Huzzah for the Nebula, Ambassador, Steamrunner, and Sabre, among others—though I do wish they listed a crew complement. I'm not intending to hit the time periods of Enterprise or TOS, but fans of those eras will also find a nice range of ships there, too. Also? A full rundown of shuttlecraft.
There are also some "randomized plot framework" seeds that I haven't tried yet, but look like they'll be decent at sparking ideas, and the expanded crunch for social conflicts seemed interesting, and I appreciated the examples of the extended social conflict task using a plot from DS9. And, finally, the NPCs are solid, useful, and a nice addition to the narrator's coffers for pulling out of a hat when needed.
Once again, though, my major complaint is 100% the layout/formatting of these books. Coloured-ink on black background is such a bad choice, despite "looking cool." When it's dark amber or the dark purple, in italics? It's even worse. I'm really glad this is a PDF, so I can zoom—but I really, really wish there were versions available with black-ink on white background.
I also appreciated more ships—Huzzah for the Nebula, Ambassador, Steamrunner, and Sabre, among others—though I do wish they listed a crew complement. I'm not intending to hit the time periods of Enterprise or TOS, but fans of those eras will also find a nice range of ships there, too. Also? A full rundown of shuttlecraft.
There are also some "randomized plot framework" seeds that I haven't tried yet, but look like they'll be decent at sparking ideas, and the expanded crunch for social conflicts seemed interesting, and I appreciated the examples of the extended social conflict task using a plot from DS9. And, finally, the NPCs are solid, useful, and a nice addition to the narrator's coffers for pulling out of a hat when needed.
Once again, though, my major complaint is 100% the layout/formatting of these books. Coloured-ink on black background is such a bad choice, despite "looking cool." When it's dark amber or the dark purple, in italics? It's even worse. I'm really glad this is a PDF, so I can zoom—but I really, really wish there were versions available with black-ink on white background.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews