The Machineries Of Tarot

Fans of Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series, which starts with Ninefox Gambit, might like to know that the author has created an online Tarot card spread generator based on the world of the SF series.  Hopefully, Yoon will one day publish a deck of cards.

In the meantime, you can generate spreads here.

Everway fans should enjoy this. Just don't become like these factions.

The Azure Nebula Campaign II

Tonight was the fifth and final session of our Azure Nebula mini-campaign, so I can share the map I made for the adventure. The core of the nebula consists of a double layer of spacetime folds. It's quite mitochondrial really. Outside that double structure, the "dots" are a series of rather rude Klingon buoys warning ships away from this region of space.

You'll find the Azure Nebula in the Star Trek Adventures gamebook. It is right on the border of the Federation and the Klingon Empire, and also rather proximate to the Romulan Empire. If you're looking for a place for a Triangle Campaign, the space just "Northeast" of the Azure Nebula should work just fine!

The Azure Nebula is also a rather storied region of space. Enter at your peril; there's no telling what you'll find!

The Azure Nebula Campaign

We're four sessions into an Original Series mini-campaign using Modiphius' Star Trek Adventures.  I asked the players in our Thursday night group for the opportunity to run a short campaign, because I'll be running two scenarios at Con of the North in February. I ran three one-shots of STA in the Fall of 2017, and want to stay fresh with the mechanics, since the system has a little crunch.

The crew of the Larson-class starship U.S.S. Argument is tasked with serving on a technical test bed starship with a rudimentary cloaking device. The cloak is a prototype derived from the Romulan cloak recovered by the U.S.S. Enterprise during the Original Series TV episode "The Enterprise Incident".

First session was devoted to character creation, along with ship design and detailing the captain, which was a group effort. Captain Rex Tillerson secured his assignment as captain of the U.S.S. Argument purely through political connections. He has little in the way of traditional Starfleet competencies (and behind his back, the crew snickeringly refer to him as "Wrecks Everything", although the Captain does have Orion syndicate connections, and is something of a collector of rare artifacts and taxidermized aliens.

The crew successfully launched their vessel from Starbase, but the Chief Engineer almost immediately discovered many problems with the vessel, including an unreliable cloaking device, plasma power system issues, and possible, nay, definite sabotage.

The crew's mission is to test the cloak, and to survey the Azure Nebula, which is a region of space immediately adjacent to the Klingon Neutral Zone. Officially, no Starfleet vessels have previously entered the Azure Nebula, so a survey will fill an obvious gap in Federation starcharts and increase Federation knowledge and intelligence about the Klingon border.

As you can probably tell from the photo above, thanks to STA, I am finally putting to use some of my ancient FASA Star Trek RPG resources, including the Klingon D-7 blueprints on the right hand side of the photo, as well as the Federation and Klingon starship books, and John M. Ford's excellent Klingons sourcebook.

As of last week's session, the players are really getting the hang of the system, and are developing insights into the the range of things players can do with Determination, Momentum, and Talents. For example, one player encourage his teammates to roll for a Difficulty 0 task as a way to build up their Momentum pool.

We have one more session next week, but this set of characters can be used for one off adventures whenever the players decide they want to play another session!