Awesome. I would love to play in the ST universe. What era are you playing?
Lower Decks!
The first Mission specifically starts at: Stardate 59034.6 - January 13, 2382, Time: 15:05:45
It’s going to be a half-Maquis half-Starfleet ship.
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That fucking rules! What situation is bringing together Star fleet and Maquis on a single ship?
I’ve been running a grossly expanded version of Storm King’s Thunder in 5e for the past three years. While I haven’t tinkered much with the mechanics to make be more old school, lately I’ve started trying to incorporate more OSR principles into these sessions. I think this game is entering the final stretch but its really hard to judge.
I’ve been a player in a campaign set in Gus L.'s Crystal Frontier setting for around 5 months now. We are using a homebrewed version of OD&D. I also recently started playing in a new Valley of Flowers campaign with a heavily modified Black Hack.
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Recently finished running a short 2 month campaign of a “Calvinball” ruleset where all rules were decided upon as we went along. Soon may be playing in a Songbirds campaign. Probably won’t run anything until I can finish my Prismatic Wasteland ruleset’s beta draft.
I also ran and played in a real variety of games at a convention, which I wrote about on my substack 7 Play Reports in 500 Words or Less
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I haven’t played anything in the new year but I do hope to play a white box game in 2025
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I’m primarily running a Dolmenwood campaign that’s been ongoing for two years now. Occasionally, I take a break to run something different, like Mothership, Mausritter, or more recently, I tried Liminal Horror.
Last year, I also ran a mini Dolmenwood campaign for completely new players using Cairn. It was a huge success and confirmed my suspicion that I vastly prefer it over running OSE. Now, I’m waiting for the right opportunity to switch my main campaign to that system, hahaha.
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I’d love to read more about your experience of using Cairn to run Dolmenwood sometime. While thematically they seems like a match made in heaven, I’d be interested in hearing more about how you approached the conversion and what your players responded to.
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I would also love to hear more about this. I’ve toyed with the idea of running Dolmenwood with Cairn
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At some point on Discord I saw Yochai (IIRC) mention that Cairn was made to play Dolmenwood.
Right now I’m playing:
- ShadowDark, specifically JP Coovert’s Dragon Town. with a group of 9-13 year olds.
- An OD&D homebrew where I’m the newb. (I really am, only been doing this since Nov. 2023)
- Crown & Skull with a totally gonzo crew bent on wreaking havoc in high-brow society while proselytizing for the Church of the SubGenious.
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Just finished running a Mothership campaign (well, a 3 modules in a trenchcoat kind of campaign).
Currently running a Cloud Empress campaign (just finished the intro adventure and about to start hex crawling).
I’m a player in a PBP “Rise of the Blood Elms” game ran on a language learning through RPGs discord server.
And finally I have “big plans” to run some Cairn 2e again when the Dolmenwood physical books reach me, and probably some more Mothership when the recently crowdfunded modules materialize.
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I think this is what makes Mordheim and other narrative focused skirmish games so enjoyable. I rarely remember whether I won or lost, but I always have fun and will remember moments from the game that are just awesome.
Backstory backstory backstory… Here’s the quick version
The Maquis ship is being hunted by the Starfleet ship (the ship for our campaign) over some irrelevant Alpha quadrant politics, and then both suddenly find themselves trapped in a highly entropic version of subspace.
All characters blink, and half of their crew has died. Their power is dead, and a giant ship made out of negative subspace particles is headed towards them. They are on a timer, and need to break free, and only one ship can make it through.
This is all foreshadowing for the players eventually going through the Mothership module (probably halfway through the campaign): Dead Planet.
Players are going to have to figure out how to get their ship out of subspace (which they’ll do because it’s Star Trek), and then find themselves travelling through an unfamiliar region of space, Voyager-style.
The rest of the campaign is them going through non-STA modules, primarily OSR stuff. I have a wild episode planned for Delicious Morels(a Knave 2e module)
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I’m mainly stuck into Odd-likes (ItO, Cairn, Mythic Bastionland, Liminal Horror) and Borgs (Mork Borg, Cy_Borg, Death in Space). If we’re being pedantic, I’m NSR rather than OSR. I’m running my own Frankenstein Odd-like at the moment too.
Salvage Union is on my list as an NSR-ish mech game to get to the table properly soon.
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Currently running an OSE Science-Fantasy campaign in a Hollow World setting and getting ready to start a second OSE campaign with a dark fairytale/sword & sorcery motif.
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Wow. That sounds rad. I love the idea of running non-STA modules with a Star Trek Crew. How does that work mechanically? I’m not familiar with STA. Are you doing a lot of conversions to match the modules? I’d probably hand wave the source material in favor of what ever is easy for the system. How are you handling that?
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For the most part all I am going to need to do is create stat blocks
Narrative games, turns out, really good at ignoring rules for a lot of things. Traits, a mechanic in STA, do a lot of the heavy lifting that would otherwise be done by lengthy rules text. For example, I make a Strahd von Barovich stat blocks with the trait “Vampire”, and that means that everything about Vampires, is true about him. It provides mechanical benefits and drawbacks, as well as narrative limitations. So instead of having to come up with crazy vampire rules, I just call on the vampire trait and it’s allowed.
I’m planning on running Raveloft as a Halloween episode, most of the difficulty of that is going to be making stat blocks. Same with White Plume Mountain. Also running them in one session, which is what I’m trying to do for every episode.
For dead planet, the biggest difficulty is going to be making a 3-act structure from it. It’s a big module, so it will probably be a 2-parter. (Mr. Word. Fire!)
This is sort of a personal challenge to myself, but I think it’s doable. Plus, I wanted to make a blog series for the STA community on adapting modules from other games, since there are some really great ones that fit STA perfectly. For example, upon reading dead planet I immediately clocked it as something that was immediately star Trek. Weird science mumbo jumbo happening, which requires the players to encounter weird stuff to fix? Call it subspace, and you have Star Trek baby.
I don’t imagine every scenario I run is going to be a banger. Yet, I am pretty convinced I could adapt anything for this system at this point. I think the hardest to adapt of all of them is actually going to be Pound of Flesh, because I can’t use the whole thing, so I need to be really selective about what my PC’s visit to Prospero is about.
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In our IRL game, I’m running a Liminal Horror two-shot that I wrote to try to capture the sense of creepiness I felt around dusk in my neighborhood in Denver as a teen. I really love that place, and it was scary, too.
In my PBP game, I think we’re close to the end of a six-month Electric Bastionland game, again in a setting I wrote as a paean to M.R. James’ ghost stories. I don’t think it really worked as horror, but it’s been fun.
I’ve written a mini-campaign setting for Into the Odd and a one-shot for Cairn, and I’m hoping to get those to the table sometime soon.
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I run Mausritter mostly! It’s got very relaxed and cozy vibes compared to a lot of other OSR games. It’s also very easy to strip down and hack, and I’ve cut and added quite a bit so far.
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I feel like I don’t quite grasp the vibe of Songbirds. Do you know if you are playing a pre-written scenario or a conversion of something or a homebrewed adventure? If you do, mind sharing what it is? Maybe I need to read it again, but I still don’t feel like I have a good idea of what an adventure for Songbirds would look like.