Modiphius’ Star Trek Adventures

Late last week, Modiphius released links to preorder their new Star Trek roleplaying game, Star Trek Adventures. Visually, it looks cool, perhaps up there with Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars RPGs, a series of game books that does a lot of things right. The cover of the collector’s edition is a very interesting angle of The Next Generation’s Enterprise’s main hull, rendered by the same people that provided the 3d model for the Star Trek: TNG Remastered series. The cover of the regular edition is original artwork — an illustration! ((Aside: When we worked on Firefly, we had illustrations for the covers. We heard from the distributors that they would not sell unless we had photos of the crew instead of illustrations — a claim I always thought of as full of crap. It’s great to see that a game based on an existing IP is going forward with an illustrative cover.)) The one spread we have of the interior also features an illustration of Picard’s Enterprise being harried by Romulan ships (and the announcement comes with another illustration of a starship battle!). This leads me to believe they’re going full-on illustration with the game rather than just using stills from existing movies and television shows ((Firefly chiefly did that to save money on production costs.))

But that spread — I’d like to take a few minutes and write down what I really like about it and what I see in the layout.

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#RPGaDAY2015, Day 5: Most Recent RPG Purchase

See? I was going to answer this at the bottom of the Last Year, Day 4 post, but the question is asked again this year as its own topic.

So, what was the last RPG I purchased?

Oh, man, what was the last roleplaying game I purchased? Geez.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I haven’t really been playing RPGs, and those that I have been playing are older games. If I go with the most recent accessory, oddly, it would be a set of dice to play FFG’s Age of Rebellion! I picked those up about two weeks ago, because I really like the boost/setback dice concept. ((Plus I was going to borrow that for a homebrew superhero game to play with the girl.)) It’s crazy innovative and a great way for GMs to quickly come up with plausible rulings in the game. Shooting a blaster at a bad guy that’s tussling with one of your friends? Crap, I don’t know the official rule for “firing into melee combat”. Hey, just toss in a setback die. ((And later, you look up the actual rule: you’re supposed to boost one of the difficulty dice. Oh well, you were pretty close and the player sweated a bit.))

I don’t seem to buy games right now. But that’s because I’m doing so much RPG layout work, most of what I want to get, I’m the one working on it.

You know, I’m going to have to go back to Kickstarter, but I really haven’t purchased games there, I’ve backed games. Sometimes they’ll give me a PDF or physical book in thanks, but let’s see…

Bulldogs! Fate Core Edition, I only threw in a buck because I’ll be laying that out, but that hasn’t been delivered, and I don’t think I really purchased anything other than access to the backers-only updates. Same with Blades in the Dark (well, I’m not laying that out): it’s not due to be delivered for several months and I really got that to get access to John Harper’s .indd files, not the actual game. Feng Shui 2? Yeah, I guess I’ll go with that.

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fs2So Feng Shui 2: Action Movie Roleplaying Game is done by Atlas Games and Hal Mangold did the layout on this book, and that’s why I backed it to get the PDF. The bad thing about this is Feng Shui is a game whose subject just doesn’t interest me at all. ((For gaming, I’ll point out. I don’t particularly care for the genre as a thing to play, but the movies? Yeah. They’re pretty cool.)) Given a chance between playing this and another game, I’d probably pick the other game. But the book is so beautiful. So skillfully laid out. It’s one of the best graphically-designed games of the past year.

Tell you what, gentle reader. You’ve read 1000 words about the layout of FFG’s Age of Rebellion earlier today. I’m not going to go into the layout of Feng Shui 2 right now — I’ll go into it in another post once #RPGaDAY2015 is over — but what I’ll leave you with is a promise: if you like books that are masterfully laid out, either of the two books in today’s post are well worth looking over.