Solo gaming offers itself as a solution to one of the pressure points in the hobby. It can be hard to find a Dungeon Master and scary to step up and try it yourself. When the pandemic shook apart gaming groups, many players turned to solo games to keep their imaginations in shape. While most of the games built in this space have been indie in nature, Modiphius set tongues wagging when it announced an adaptation of Star Trek Adventures for solo play called Captain’s Log. I was very excited to get a review copy even if I had to agonize over which of the four covers I wanted on my hard copy. (Picard. That was the first Star Trek I loved.) Does the game pull off a rip roaring Star Trek tale without a Game Master? Let’s play to find out.
Lead writer Michael Dismuke and his design team distill the 2d20 down to its very basic components for Captain’s Log. No six sided effect die, no talents, not ranked successes or management of momentum and threat tokens. Set the target number based on the character’s approach and skill, roll 2d20 and hope one of them rolls equal to or under the number. Momentum and threat instead become something similar to inspiration in D&D 5e. You either have it or you don’t. Spending momentum makes this easier for your character with rerolls or creating positive traits, while getting rid of threat means the both dice must hit on the next roll. Stories are generated by rolling through a massive section of charts that generate story prompts based on random rolls and the successes and failures of the player.
For folks who may have bounced off of the full version of Star Trek Adventures, this slimmed down version might be worth checking out. While solo play is the main thrust of the book, there are also rules discussions in here for cooperative play where everyone creates a character and plays as well as guided play which is the more traditional GM/player style table.
This book is stuffed full of options. Despite being called Captain’s Log, there are options to play Starfleet officers of any rank, non-Starfleet spacefarers and even a riff on the rules that debuted in Klingon Empire. There are times when this book feels a bit like a greatest hits album showing off all the things the game line has accomplished in the six years its been around. Fans who might be put off at this point from buying into a sprawling stack of books (excellent as those may be) will find a lot of ideas in this single tome. Though fans who already have most of the Star Trek books should be aware that there is some recycled content in this book. There is some excellent discussion about what makes Star Trek stand out in the science-fiction genre and how to make a game feel like the show. These are the same sections seen in the Player’s Guide and Gamemaster Guide from last year. It’s great advice but some fans might be upset at buying it all again to get to the new content.
Beyond that, the book still provides utility for folks who are already using Star Trek Adventures and don’t want to convert their game to the rules presented here. (Yes, there are rules for turning characters from this book into full-fledged Star Trek Adventures characters and vice versa.) The most obvious option is using this as a way to deal with scheduling issues. One player can’t make a session everyone else can? Send their engineer off to a warp field theory conference and incorporate any consequences from that story. Players struggling to get together because of real life? Set up an admiralty campaign where everyone plays a captain and then schedule a regular video call where everyone can talk about their adventures in character and bounce story ideas off each other out of character. The charts are also useful as a massive idea generator for Game Masters. Everything from technobabble to plot twists and alien names are here for the taking.
Captain’s Log offers an excellent resource to explore the world of Star Trek on your own while also providing Game Masters with an overflowing bin of Tribbles. Ideas, sorry, I meant ideas.
