When it launched a few years ago, Modiphus’ Star Trek Adventures roleplaying game gave fans a ruleset for boldly going as their very own crew of Federation officers, managing their own ship, going on away missions, and exploring the galaxy. But its latest expansion isn’t about giving Federation characters more things to do: it’s about flipping the game’s script entirely.
This week Modiphus announced their latest addition to the Star Trek Adventures range: this time, not one of the sourcebooks like past titles about adventuring in each quadrant of the Trek galaxy, but a brand new core title of rules for playing the game. Specifically, playing as warriors of the Klingon Empire.
Star Trek Adventures‘ main core rulebook, released back in 2017, already let you play as Klingons, of course. But it was primarily focused on casting players as officers within the Federation ” you picked a division from Starfleet’s departmental subcategories, you were part of a Starfleet crew. Creating an entirely new core rulebook doesn’t just give Modiphus to update and clarify the rules first released three years ago, doing so means the Klingons themselves can be presented as an entirely different way of approaching Adventures‘ mechanics.
The Klingons, of course, have always had a radically different culture to the Federation, whether they’ve been foe, friend, or uneasy ally over the centuries. Relationships between crews on ships are different, their approach to conflict resolution and diplomacy is different. Their attitude to life itself is different. Providing a tweaked ruleset, or at the very least a way to approach Adventure‘s prior rules ” no doubt running a campaign aboard a Klingon vessel will have a different tone and pace to one aboard a Starfleet one ” makes sense.
But beyond providing an update to the rules (that will benefit Adventures players even if they don’t run a Klingon campaign), the Klingon Core Rulebook will come packed with background reading for players looking to make Klingon characters, examining everything from Klingon conflicts across the centuries, to faith, to the myriad roles in Klingon ship crews. It’ll also provide story hooks for any campaigns groups want to run as Klingons, protecting border colonies, facing threats like the Dominion or the Borg from a Klingon perspective, or simply navigating the honorbound culture of the Empire.
The Star Trek Adventures Klingon Empire Core Rulebook is currently set to release sometime in the spring, and is available to pre-order now in both physical and PDF formats ” pre-ordering the former will get you the latter included, and pre-ordering either now nets you a brief preview of the book to download while you wait for it to come out. Beats endlessly practicing all those Qapla’s you’ll be crying out when you play.