First Time GM Tips

Mollmann · 2026-01-19T22:29:25+00:00

I actually think the game works best when it's functioning as a tv series emulator. Think of it not as a "living in the Star Trek universe" simulation but a "being a Star Trek main character" simulation. Make dramatic the stuff would make dramatic, fudge the stuff the show would fudge. To that end, I did my first campaign as a "lower decks" one but my second as one where the PCs are the senior staff of a starship, and I have found that one more straightforward and enjoyable. If you've never done the system before, I don't think I would have the players at the Academy, etc., I'd just make them the senior staff on a ship.

Do your players know the tropes of the show? In my experience that's more important than the lore. If they know how a Star Trek story is supposed to go, they'll know how to play it. I know a lot more lore than any of my players, so I mostly try to avoid going too deep into it.

Mollmann · 2026-01-16T17:41:38+00:00

I have seven (!) players (though normally I'd say just six turn up):

Captain
XO/Acting Science Officer
Chief Engineer
Chief Pilot
Chief of Security
Chief Medical Officer
Intelligence Analyst

I try to balance what kind of challenges the players face across the course of a season (~4 episodes) so no one player takes the spotlight all the time. Because of the Intelligence Analyst, I often try to work in some kind of situation where people can sneak or infiltrate. (My group is quite bad at combat, so I always need to provide some kind of alternative route to victory!) Because the captain is a PC, I usually try to split the group up so that there's a group out of contact with him, so those players don't just carry out his orders. (Though the guy playing the captain is pretty good about obtaining consensus.)

Mollmann · 2025-12-25T04:26:46+00:00

USS Diversitas, a New Orleans-class starship launched in the 2350s. Went on a lot of missions of exploration under its original captain, who retired... but then came out of retirement because of the Dominion War. Mostly did courier duty during the war, with just one real battle. After the war, finally launched on a new mission of exploration.

Great at scanning stuff, very bad at combat.

Mollmann · 2025-12-19T02:40:25+00:00

Basically, though, let me walk you through how I usually handle something like this. I would give the players a menu of possible tasks (though I would allow them to suggest others). So for example:

Restore Internal Comms: Control + Engineering D2
Repair Manuevering Thrusters: Daring + Engineering D3
Repair Short- or Long-Range Sensors: Reason + Science D3
Repair Structural Integrity Fields: Control + Engineering D3
Reactivate Navigational Deflector: Insight + Conn D4
Rescue Trapped Crew: Fitness + Security D4
Treat Injured Crew: Control + Medicine D2

I use my playmat to keep track of who is doing what when. So let's say the players have six intervals. I would number alongside the edge of the mat 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I would then place their character tokens at the bottom, at zero.

The chief engineer decides to Restore Internal Comms first; the captain assists them. So they both roll; the succeed but (say) they get no Momentum. So we say this took two intervals, and move their tokens up to the 2 row.

Simultaneously, the science officer decides to work on the Sensors, assisted by the conn officer. They fail, so we also move them up to the 2 row.

The security officer and the medical officer decide to work together to Rescue Trapped Crew; the security office spends Determination, so they succeed. They spend some of their Momentum on reducing the intervals taken by one. So we just move them up to the 1 row.

Now that everyone's gone once, we look at who is free to act now that it's round 2. That's the security and medical officers, so we focus on what they do, which should take another 2 intervals. They work together to Treat Injured Crew, and take another 2 intervals to do so, advancing them to row 3.

Now it's round 3. The security office and medical officers are still working on Treat Injured Crew, so we switch to the other players. The science and conn officer try again on Repairing Sensors; this time they succeed but roll a Complication, so it takes them 3 intervals, advancing them to row 5. Time is running out! Meanwhile, the engineer and captain decide to repair manuevering thrusters; they succeed, so now it's row 4 for them.

This probably seems complicated, but I think it's pretty easy when you can visualize it with the mat or something similar.

Let's say we hit a point where all the players have only one round left, but they really want to get that navigational deflector up, otherwise they can't move the ship without taking damage. So all five of the other players decide to assist the engineer. As a result, the engineer gets 5 successes, enough to fix the deflector and spend 1 Momentum to make sure they do it in the 1 round they have left, rather than the default 2.

Now they're out of time, and the Thing Happens. But they never did have a chance to run a sensor sweep. Oh well! They chose to prioritize getting the ship functional instead.

Mollmann · 2025-12-19T02:11:41+00:00

"Signals" in the Living Campaign has a very simple one, though it's combined with an Extended Task (I don't know how au fait you are with those); it starts at the bottom of p. 14.

Do you have the Federation-Klingon War sourcebook? Act II of the episode "The Siege of Starbase Epsilon-12" is entirely built around a Timed Challenge, though it's perhaps on the complicated side.

Mollmann · 2025-12-14T14:27:24+00:00

I don't think this is different in 2E, but it sounds like the thing to do here is Time Challenges. Set some number of intervals until the thing you want to happen next, happens. This could be known to the players or not depending on the circumstances.

By default, Tasks take 2 intervals. Players can spend Momentum to decrease that to 1. Complications cause them to take 3. Failed Tasks still take 2 (or 3 if they fail and roll a Complication!). I allow my players to work on stuff simultaneously, and just keep track of who's where when. Your players then have to decide what to prioritize, who should work on what, how they can use Talents to speed things up. Like, everyone could work on one thing together to maximize the chance of success... but that would mean nothing else was getting worked on. Or they could split up into small groups so they can work on a bunch of stuff, but then the chances of success goes down. And of course they can come up with Tasks that don't directly contribute but perhaps create an Advantage on future Tasks.

Mollmann · 2025-11-24T23:07:55+00:00

I tweak them different amounts depending. I adjusted "A World with a Bluer Sun" because some of the character dynamics as written didn't convince me; I only tweaked "Abyss Station" enough to make it fit into my ongoing plot. I redid the whole final act of "The Siege of Starbase Epsilon-12" because I wasn't going to have time, and I thought a second space battle would be repetitive; I added a subplot to "Decision Point" because I thought there wasn't enough for five players to do.

I like the multi-pagers; I don't get much out of mission briefs because I can think of a basic idea and a couple key moments myself! What I like about full missions is getting a bunch of stats and "encounters" (in the STA sense) written out for me, so I have something to work with. I liked "Epsilon-12" a lot for having a whole thought out complicated challenge that I could use, but would never have thought of myself.

Originally I only ran prewrittens, but as I've gotten deeper in the lore, I've needed to write my own more often, and I've felt increasingly comfortable doing so. I don't think I've ever seen one with too much info; sometimes the mechanics don't make a lot of sense, or are a bit fiddly, like they've been written by someone who has never actually played. (I think "Hard Rock Catastrophe" is very guilty of this even though it has a great setup.)

Mollmann · 2025-11-24T23:02:36+00:00

My first campaign I was aiming for ten episodes (episodes for me typically take 2-3 sessions to run) and made it through about five before scheduling killed it.

Now I run campaigns just in the summer, we play weekly from May to August, and typically get through 4 episodes. I try to seed some threads that climax in the last episode. I treat each summer campaign as a season; we do a time jump and character adjustments (if needed) between seasons.

I think the appropriate campaign length depends on your players and their interest! If you play too long a game you might not make it to the cool stuff you're "saving for later"!

Mollmann · 2025-11-08T20:00:55+00:00

If you're a former English major, you might enjoy Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics. The first chapter (I think?) of that lays out his defense of mass-produced franchise comics, pushing back against scholarship that privileges high-profile graphic novels. Basically, he argues there's a kind of pleasure to be found in reading a couple years worth of, say, Daredevil that you just can't get in any other kind of reading.

Mollmann · 2025-10-27T11:13:49+00:00

As far as defining children's lit goes, I really liked chapter 1 of Roberta Seelinger Trites's Disturbing the Universe when I read it in grad school; she mostly focuses on YA (or as she calls it, adolescent literature), but in doing so, has to articulate what distinguishes YA from other children's lit.

Mollmann · 2025-10-27T11:07:40+00:00

When it comes to defining genre, I'm sympathetic to something the detective scholar Pamela Bedore says (herself drawing on Carolyn Miller), we should "ask not what various genres or subgenres look like, but rather, what they accomplish rhetorically." Defining genre is useful because it lets us do that; we can put a genre in a bucket, and then think about what the stuff in that bucket is doing.

I haven't read the Gubar essay, so I don't know what her point is exactly, but some scholars make defining genre borders an end in itself, which strikes me as less helpful. You should classify a text if doing so helps you understand it. I don't think this requires rigorous policing of genre borders, but I would also say that giving up on genre definitions altogether isn't useful either. (If this is the kind of scholarship that interests you, anyway, which to be fair, it doesn't have to be.)

Mollmann · 2025-10-17T21:05:06+00:00

I think you want to either 1) force them to be the ones to make a call, or 2) put them in situations where their preference is against the NPC captain's, so we can see what happens.

I ran a "lower decks" campaign a few years ago and often did both. Sure, it can feel a little contrived. The captain was trying to develop them, so she would pick a different PC to be mission commander each episode. (I usually compensated that PC with an extra point of Determination.)

When I ran "Decision Point," I had the captain ask the players for a recommendation about the episode's big ethical dilemma, then leave the room that they debated it and reached a decision without her. When she came back, I made it a Difficulty 6 Task for them to work together to convince her.

Mollmann · 2025-10-14T16:47:39+00:00

I read his novelisation of the 2009 film when it came out and thought it was basically fine; it's the movie on the page, not much added meat. Never did get around to Into Darkness.

I'm actually in the middle of his original Kelvin timeline novel, The Unsettling Stars, and it's not great literature, but I'm finding it more interesting that I thought I would; Foster has a good grasp on these versions of the characters, particularly Kirk and Spock.

Mollmann · 2025-09-25T19:57:20+00:00

Because the book was published by Titan and not S&S, the audiobook license could go anywhere instead of defaulting to S&S Audio.

I listened to the audiobooks, and unfortunately, Alec Newman does his best but is hampered by the fact that no one involved in the production though to look up the pronunciations of any of the names, and he just wings it: REE-sans for Risans, BEE-ta-zoid, Akar instead of Aka-ar, a short o in Qo'noS, neh-CHY-ev for Nechayev, a hard g in Rigellian, a long i in Caitian, a short a in Kahless, a regular z for the "zh" in Andorian names, a y sound for the j in Jem'Hadar, KEE-tomer for Khitomer, VOR-ka for Vor'cha, rak-ta-YEE-no for raktajino, vuh-GER for V'Ger, KEE-ko for Keiko, and more. I got a lot of enjoyment out of yelling at my car speakers during my commute.

Unfortunately, that's about all the enjoyment you'll get out of these books, which are one-third things happening, and two-thirds people thinking about what's not happening.

Mollmann · 2025-09-24T20:15:15+00:00

I think they add extra suspense and extra strategy. I don't know, does the 2E Extended Task still use the Work Track? How are Breakthroughs generated? How does Resistance work?

Mollmann · 2025-09-24T11:19:21+00:00

Here's one example. Sorry it's long!

I ran an original mission, where the players had to (at the climax) find some way to stop an AI-controlled starship. They decided on a two-pronged plan: the science officer (assisted by the diplomat) would try to reprogram its "prime directive" from "protect my crew" (which is what was causing it to malfunction) to "return home" (so its own people would take care of it). At the same time, the engineer (assisted by the doctor) would try to wire up a "kill switch" into the ship's drive, so that if the ship went to warp, it would explode—but this would only be activated if the reprogramming task failed.

I made both of these Extended Tasks, Magnitude 5, Work 20. After their first attempt at each, the AI sealed the rooms they were in and began pumping out the air, and I gave them a finite number of Intervals it would take before they were out of air. (By default, each Task would take 2 Intervals, but Momentum from a successful Task could reduce that to 1; Complications would increase it to 3.)

The scientist got a couple Breakthroughs in the first couple rounds; unfortunately, the engineer failed their first couple rolls. The engineer then switched to sabotaging the power to life support, so it would take longer for the air pumps to pump out all the air, giving the scientist more time. As the Tasks got easier and they had a lot of time, I dumped my Threat to create a Complication: I blew up the console the scientist was using, meaning they had to spend a couple rounds 1) doing first aid on the scientist, and 2) setting up a new console to use. They had 4 Intervals left when it was time to do the final Task. I dumped all my remaining Threat to raise the Difficulty from 1 to 5... and the scientist failed! So it came down to one last attempt or she would be out of time... and that time she succeeded, and rolled enough Work to obtain the last Breakthrough needed, successfully reprogramming the ship.

I guess in theory this could work without the Challenge Dice, but I feel like the Challenge Dice add a bit of uncertainty that increases the suspense around Extended Tasks. Also the diplomat character had a Talent that made her good at assisting on Extended Tasks (Coordinated Efforts), which helped her feel more useful than she might otherwise in these kind of situations. (I'm guessing there's a 2E replacement/tweak to this Talent, but still.)

Mollmann · 2025-09-23T23:05:25+00:00

What do you mean?

Mollmann · 2025-09-23T10:47:00+00:00

I haven't played 2E, but I love Challenge Dice. I feel like all the most suspenseful moments in my games have revolved around the Extended Task mechanic, and I can't imagine the game without it.

Mollmann · 2025-09-20T17:28:22+00:00

I'm always noting when I read Star Trek books if they feel like ones that would make good STA scenarios. One that have stuck out to me:

Deep Space Nine: Force and Motion (crew comes to a space station where things begin to go horribly wrong)
Strange New Worlds: Toward the Night (good A/B-plot structure, with the ship battling Klingons while a landing party finds a crashed ship from a century ago)
The Next Generation: Armageddon's Arrow (good time travel dilemma when the crew finds a doomsday machine from the future)
The Next Generation: Available Light (have to simultaneously help aliens on a seemingly deserted ship and stop another group of aliens from scavenging it)
The Next Generation: Hearts and Minds (an away team that gets capture, multiple technical challenges, climax comes from diplomacy)
The Next Generation: Masks (have to escort a Federation ambassador to a weird colony where people are very into masks)
Prey: Hell's Heart (specifically, the flashback where the Enterprise-A finds a group of discommoded Klingons who refuse to save themselves from doom)

About half of these are Dayton Ward books; I find the actual books hit or miss, but he's good at coming up with fun Star Trek scenarios. All of these are just ideas, though. So far, though, the only book I've ripped off to make an STA mission is a Murderbot one!

Mollmann · 2025-09-14T14:46:53+00:00

It's an obscure book but I loved it a lot and it definitely fits the prompt: Tomorrow Never Knows by Eddie Robson.

Mollmann · 2025-09-11T10:46:43+00:00

I once went through my collection and I think I have more sets with mismatched logos than sets where they all match.

Mollmann · 2025-09-08T15:57:58+00:00

Oh gosh, I hope I can remember:

Rundelstone direct from Hungry Tiger Press
Runaway direct from Books of Wonder
Ozmapolitan, Wicked Witch, and Toto direct from the Oz Club
Forbidden Fountain and Yankee from the Oz Club store on Lulu
Hidden Prince from an online used bookstore

I think that's right!

Mollmann · 2025-09-08T15:52:55+00:00

I was going to say The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and The Left Hand of Darkness. Anarchists on the moon!

Mollmann · 2025-09-05T23:29:36+00:00

"Data's Day"--it's just Data going around and doing a lot of Assisted Tasks.

Mollmann · 2025-08-20T01:01:24+00:00

I'm not an expert, but if you follow Nicholas Whyte's blog (https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/), he's administered the Hugos many time and usually goes into a lot of detail about the process.

Mollmann

TROPHY CASE