GM, new to SciFI, help needed...

OK, after reading this board and asking a few questions I finally realized after dicking around with Traveller and other posing RPG's; what I really want to run is a Star Trek RPG.

I always dismissed CODA because I had such a bad experience with LOTR CODA, errata from hell, bad product support, it left a very bad taste in my mouth concerning Decipher.
Anyways, the years have passed and I don't care anymore.

I've DM'ed D&D ( every edition) and many other games like CoC and such but never SciFi. The open-ended nature of the genre always scares me away. So what I really need are some examples of adventures and campaigns, to show me the way so to speak.

CODA doesn't have this but LUG does so my dilemma seems to have finally resolved itself.

My questions are in regards to starting a successful campaign. I want to run a campaign like TOS or TNG not Voyager or DS9. It would be cool to have an episodic feel like the TV shows. So the 3 books that look the most promising are Price of Freedom, Planets of the UFP, and Planetary Adventures. Do you think these 3 products will help me in my newbish dilemma, teach me how to run a good Star Trek RPG?

Are there any other good starting Adventures to throw into the mix with these 3 products? Did Decipher ever actually publish any adventures? I have a bunch of the books now ( just missing the Narrator's Guide , in the mail) and I can't find any???


thanks for any help

There were a few official adventures by Decipher specifically for CODA Trek; you can find them on my support site (link is in my sig). There are also a host of adventures for the ICON system that are pretty easily converted over on Owen Oulton's excellent Memory ICON site.

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Originally Posted by PGoodman13

There were a few official adventures by Decipher specifically for CODA Trek; you can find them on my support site (link is in my sig). There are also a host of adventures for the ICON system that are pretty easily converted over on Owen Oulton's excellent Memory ICON site.

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Thanks, did you ever run any of the fan Adventures on the LUG site with CODA? Any good ones that stick out?

I think I might actually pull this off, I'll try it on my family first.;)

I haven't run any of the adventures on Owen's site, and I haven't run any of the ones on my site. I haven't run anything in ages, in fact; the bulk of my experience for several years has been on the other side of the screen (though I am looking to change that one of these days).

I've read most of them, and they're fairly solid overall. It would take a lot for me to run them because the bulk of them are 24th century, and I'm a 23rd century kind of guy, but conversion from ICON to CODA is fairly simple. Target Numbers are easy to do, since they use the same kind of scale (Simple, Challenging, etc); it's just the numbers that are different. The NPCs are a little tougher, but Don Mappin's ICON-to-CODA conversion guide (available on my site, somewhere near the top) makes that not terribly difficult.

For both of the ongoing Trek campaigns that I am running, I ran a mini-campaign at Starfleet Academy to give the players a chance to test out the rules and get comfortable with a new system without throwing them immediately into danger on a "real" mission. This also gave me an opportunity to see how well they work together and allowed the voice of the GM to be heard through the instructors who evaluated them, a sort of guiding-without-railroading model that seems to work well. It also allowed me to set up some campaign themes for when we fast-forwarded to their reunion aboard a starship 5 years after graduation.

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Originally Posted by K.G. Carlson

For both of the ongoing Trek campaigns that I am running, I ran a mini-campaign at Starfleet Academy to give the players a chance to test out the rules and get comfortable with a new system without throwing them immediately into danger on a "real" mission. This also gave me an opportunity to see how well they work together and allowed the voice of the GM to be heard through the instructors who evaluated them, a sort of guiding-without-railroading model that seems to work well. It also allowed me to set up some campaign themes for when we fast-forwarded to their reunion aboard a starship 5 years after graduation.

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That sounds cool, what did you use as a resource for Starfleet Academy? (what books) Is the mini-campaign something you homebrewed or took from a published adventure?

Did you do things like run a "simulator mission" so that they could try out the space combat ?

Well, my first group was set in the mid-23rd (their first post-graduation mission was for Robert April commanding a certain starship we all know). The second group was a little later that century, with V'ger's arrival at Earth during their senior year. I basically deleted the "Romulans as unknown" sub-plot and ran most of the same scenarios.

You guessed it, numerous starship combat simulations so they could get a feel for how things work without killing the crew. Also ran some personal combat training scenarios, phasers locked on stun (or for the earlier campaign, a laser tag set-up much like the MILES gear). I did sprinkle in some real dangers, during the repair training exercise mission to the solar monitoring station on Mercury I had them make checks for getting around in spacesuits with the potential for mishap and suit damage (first group was too sure-footed, thank goodness for NPC Mary Sues). I also had subplots with classmates or instructors being set-up as rivals for later in the respective campaigns. In the later 23rd group, one player is half Orion, so his villainous side of the family has been making some cameos to set-up another future campaign route.

If you're looking for something official to base Academy adventures off of, LUG did put out a Starfleet Academy boxed set; its in the 24th so there wasn't much for me to use per se but if thats where your campaign is set you might want to check it out.

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Originally Posted by K.G. Carlson

Well, my first group was set in the mid-23rd (their first post-graduation mission was for Robert April commanding a certain starship we all know). The second group was a little later that century, with V'ger's arrival at Earth during their senior year. I basically deleted the "Romulans as unknown" sub-plot and ran most of the same scenarios.

You guessed it, numerous starship combat simulations so they could get a feel for how things work without killing the crew. Also ran some personal combat training scenarios, phasers locked on stun (or for the earlier campaign, a laser tag set-up much like the MILES gear). I did sprinkle in some real dangers, during the repair training exercise mission to the solar monitoring station on Mercury I had them make checks for getting around in spacesuits with the potential for mishap and suit damage (first group was too sure-footed, thank goodness for NPC Mary Sues). I also had subplots with classmates or instructors being set-up as rivals for later in the respective campaigns. In the later 23rd group, one player is half Orion, so his villainous side of the family has been making some cameos to set-up another future campaign route.

If you're looking for something official to base Academy adventures off of, LUG did put out a Starfleet Academy boxed set; its in the 24th so there wasn't much for me to use per se but if thats where your campaign is set you might want to check it out.

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Sorry about my ignorance but what scenarios are you referring to here? From a show, movies or RPG book?

Thanks

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Originally Posted by Blustar

Sorry about my ignorance but what scenarios are you referring to here? From a show, movies or RPG book?

Thanks

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In the original TOS continuity, no one in the Federation had seen a Romulan until James T. Kirk and the Enterprise encounter the cloaked bird of prey in the first season. There was the whole Cold War paranoia aspect of Crewman #5's reaction to the striking resemblance of Mr. Spock to the enemy. I forget the name of the episode but I think it was "Balance of Terror" (the inherent dangers of posting at 2 AM mean I am a little fuzzy on details).

So for instance, one of the Academy encounters involves the cadets babysitting a drydock facility near a nebula in the heart of Federation territory that was overrun during the Earth-Romulus War. While doing a sensor sweep they discover a derelict adrift in the nebula. They must then make one of the vessels undergoing repair spaceworthy enough to enter the nebula in pursuit of their "Flying Dutchman." So to preserve continuity, of course they find no bodies of Romulans (a couple Reman corpses for effect though) and a citation in the cadets' files for their startling discovery before Starfleet Intelligence sweeps everything under the rug.

Their first adventure aboard a starship is the maiden voyage of the Enterprise under Robert April, her first captain as established in the Star Trek animated series. This adventure is loosely modeled on the ST novel "Final Frontier" by Diane Carey (not the feature film of the same name). Without going all spoiler on you, after the events of that adventure the player characters have gotten a glimpse of the enemy a few decades too early (sworn to secrecy of course by SI), averted a war and made a wary ally of Field Primus T'Cael of the Romulan Star Empire.

We run a campaign some might consider jumbled, but it works pretty good for my group. Of course we've been at it in one incarnation or another for a long time. Since 1992.

We started with FASA and after a bit of work we were able to convert our characters and I think some of them actually work a lot better in CODA.

We have two campaigns - TNG (actually, set after the Dominion War - 2386 - but TNG style), and TOS. The TOS series centers around the USS Expedition. The TNGesque is based on Starbase Magellan, and we have two ships in that era as well. The Legacy & Cavalier.

The TOS era game is on break now after a tough mission in which the Intel liaison tried to kill the XO. Starbase Magellan is in the middle of transferring a dangerous prisoner bound for Rura Penthe. A shuttle team from the Cavalier is currently trapped on a dangerous planet in a situation similar to The Galileo Seven. And the Legacy just finished a mission in which they saved a planet's contaminated water supply by tapping the subterranean water of their moon.

I think you made the right choice going with CODA for a Trek game. We're really enjoying it. And, if I may, in defense of the Lord of the Rings game, the second printing of the Core Book does clear up a lot of the errata. And it has a wonderful magic system.