I love Mutants & Masterminds, particularly the deep setting that Green Ronin has created for the game. Without a single comic book printed, they’ve managed to create a world that feels alive and has the weight of history to it. Likewise, the various product lines by Xion Studios are impressively imaginative and perfect resources for a campaign. Wanting to keep all this stuff straight, I made a spreadsheet that you might appreciate too!
In the new Star Trek Adventures game from Modiphius Entertainment, your crew will probably be spending as much time on away missions as they will onboard their starship. Previously, I went through the process of making your very own spaceframe and last week I laid out guidelines for making new adversaries. Today those two missions come together with guidelines for making new NPC ships to challenge your players.
Jade Colossus: Ruins of the Prior Worlds is the latest supplement for Numenera published by Monte Cook Games. It’s a different sort of game supplement, at least in part. The titular location, the Jade Colossus, is one big dungeon delve which is a very important addition to the game line as Monte Cook Games itself has published many of those for Numenera. The other part of the book, though, is what I’m more interested in: an engine for generating ruins from previous worlds. Come for a quick run-down of what each part is like.
The Star Trek Adventures rulebook comes with a good host of adversaries, but there’s always room for more. There are guidelines for making supporting characters in STA but none so far about making more adversaries. I tried to reverse engineer Modiphius’s strategies for making NPCs, and today I’m going to outline my guidelines for writing them.
While it’s not out for general consumption, Mutant: Mechatron was released to Kickstarter backers. This expansion for Mutant: Year Zero expands the world of the game but can also be played on its own. Like Mutant: Genelab Alpha, the expansion is into totally new territory and this time its robots!
Star Trek Adventures has a lot of great material in it but no game is beyond homebrew expansion. In fact, for me the better the game the more I want to write new material for it as well. Certainly, Modiphius has plenty of supplements planned so we’ll definitely see more but if you want to make more in the meantime where do you start? Allow me to offer some suggestions…
After reviewing a few adventures by Janek Sielicki for the Cypher System, I’m excited to start in on one for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition. The adventures, Finders Keepers, has an interesting premise: an epic story for 20th level characters that you could use as a starting adventure. That’s a tall order, let’s see if he can pull it off!
Eclipse Phase is one of my favorite games and their second edition is something I’m struggling to wait patiently for. As such, you can expect to see a lot of my thoughts in upcoming weeks on some parts of the setting that I’ve always wanted to expand. I’ll also have fully-written game resources for you later but these are just my initial thoughts. And today’s initial thoughts are about makin’ babies!
With all of my Dark Eras posts lately, I was excited to see that A Thousand Years of Night was finally released by Onyx Path. This book is about elder vampires, creatures that have lived for centuries and been smart, adaptable, and ruthless enough to resist the grind of time. Obviously, Dark Eras and Dark Eras Companion are excellent resources for vampiric elders, it even says so in the book’s introduction. On the other hand, it would be great to have a book that was more than just “here’s how to make super-deadly vampires!” and actually addressed the themes of the matter. Is this that book? Let’s see!
So, I definitely have plans for Star Trek Adventures and to that end I started making up my own quick cheat sheets for the game. As is my philosophy, any resource that’s handy for one GM would be handy for others as well! Check out these two documents and let me know if they help you in your STA game. If you have improvements that you’d like to see, I’m open to those as well!
Quick Reference Guide: A cheat sheet for players and GMs to help them get a handle on the system and jumpstart their campaigns.
Attribute-Discipline Guide: Charts for players and starships that show how the core book recommends combining Attributes and Disciplines (or Systems and Departments for ships).
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