It’s time to pack up your tricorders, head to the nearest transporter room, and get ready to explore Modiphius Entertainment’s latest expansion for Star Trek Adventures, the new “Strange New Worlds” Mission Compendium Volume 2 — their second book full of complete crew missions, taking your team from a civilization buried by an antediluvian ice age to an active research facility in the Cardassian Demilitarized Zone. 

Writing adventures to fit the Star Trek universe is always a challenge, as stories from the shows and movies we’re familiar with are often resolved with tightly scripted sequences of diplomacy and discovery rather than heavy combat mechanics that so many role playing games revolve around.

Writers and gamemasters have to find the balance among the problems that each member of the crew can tackle, ensuring that everyone has a chance to use their particular expertise at some point in the scenario. Not every medical crisis will present an opportunity for tactical crewmembers to engage with, and vice versa.

The best adventures in this collection do an excellent job offering facets for each senior officer to bring their skills to bear. For example, one mission has the crew investigating a distress call from the past, leading them to unravel a mystery surrounding a planet-wide extinction event by restoring defunct memory banks, fighting off hostile alien creatures, and investigating hazards both biological and sociological.

For some of the missions in Strange New Worlds, it’s essential to keep in mind the intended era of play. While each adventure can technically be adapted to fit any timeline from the various TV shows with minimal adjustment, a story about a murderous computer that you can talk to death or a fanciful amusement park planetoid works best if you picture them being in the tone of the Original Series.

Without buying into that premise, the logic behind certain antagonists or general plot conceits falls apart. This set dressing is reflected well in the commitment to certain Original Series tropes, like an overbearing NPC having odd authority over the crew and asserting their influence – something we saw in episodes like “The Trouble With Tribbles” or “The Deadly Years.”

It might leave a sour taste in your mouth if the same scenario was presented in the Next Generation era, but as long as the gamemaster gets support from their players upfront, the era-specific elements can greatly strengthen their sense of immersion.

The tendency to reuse plot elements is also, unfortunately, one of the weaker points present in the book. Though the framing situations and introductions are all unique, four of the nine adventures will have your intrepid crew asking the question, “Wait, is this place we’ve come to alive… again?” It could grow somewhat tiresome if you had the same group of players through all the scenarios, as their accumulated experience may lead them to do an end run on the plot that is otherwise hidden behind the prescribed tasks detailed in the book.

My two favorite scenarios all shared a classic hallmark of science fiction in their premises: What if this continued? They each re-imagine a creature or aspect of an alien race from somewhere in the history of the shows –  and expand upon them into a novel setting, examining the fallout as they run wild in a fresh environment.

They made me excited to uncover the events present on each page, hungrily scanning for where the story threads would lead. Each node of discovery presented concrete links to a logical next step in the investigation and exploration, and offered opportunities for the entire crew or away team to engage.

Some scenarios are more narrow in the skills they require, though. In true Star Trek fashion, plenty of seemingly simple snafus are confounded by ion storms and thick magnecite deposits – deep sensor scans are impossible, transporters are on the fritz!

Sending a small party in on a shuttle is the only path forward… but at least none of these offerings in Strange New Worlds suggest that you are the Only Ship In The Sector. One adventure seems designed to keep the action split between two different sets of players, oddly, with one group caught in a seemingly time-bound fight for their lives and another engaged in a more leisurely hunt for clues with extended scanning or diplomacy tasks.

It is scripted to be concluded in a way that will feel like a deus ex machina if things don’t run exactly according to the expected pace. Another adventure will have you wondering why the crew doesn’t immediately arrest the ‘secret’ villain, when they might as well twirl a giant mustache upon being introduced.

Once you get your head in the framework of a Star Trek episode, most of the missions feel very natural in the way that the setups progress to further investigations and conflict. There are relatively few times when you have to wrap your head around quirks that are peculiar to the Star Trek Adventures system, typically involving some of the less well-defined mechanics like Daring — performing any conceivable action in the most James T. Kirk-like fashion possible — or Command, which functions as a catchall for any social interaction).

An especially strange example is a Daring + Command task for physically moving an explosive device when the underused Security discipline might have had an opportunity to shine on its own. 

From a physical production standpoint, the book has a very stylish graphic design, featuring art elements that make each chapter feel unique to the intended era of play. Missions for The Next Generation have familiar LCARS layouts; the Enterprise adventure has crisp clean edges and stylish block fonts framed by chrome detailing and muted tones, where Original Series stories shine with a bright technicolor aesthetic on cutaway diagrams of shuttlecraft or warp output readouts that would look right at home on one of Scotty’s engineering monitors.

Some of the larger graphics splashed across these pages feel a bit like filler, though. They would perhaps have been better served by devoting more space to enlarged or additional illustrations for tactical zone maps or art pieces that depict key moments from the missions. 

Although the text is mostly pristine in terms of continuity and copy editing, there is one notable exception. The final mission, which is my personal favorite of the collection, lists the main antagonist with two different positions and three materially different spellings depending on where you look. This can easily cause confusion on a casual read-through as the gamemaster is trying to get a sense of the adventure’s flow.

With its nine new missions, Strange New Worlds gives gamemasters a broad set of tools with which to plumb the depths of Star Trek Adventures. The mysteries that await your crews can expand the frontiers of their exploration, with adventures taken whole or assimilated in parts to form new home-brewed scenarios.

Check out your friendly local game store or online at Modiphius’s website to pick up your copy of the second mission compendium, available now!