Star Trek: Those Old Scientists - An Episodic FATE Accelerated Campaign

Creating your character

We will create characters in your first session—it takes all of 5 minutes in FATE Accelerated—but please show up with some ideas in mind! Diversity is increasingly rapidly among Starfleet officers during this period. For decades, the founding members of the Federation—Earth, Vulcan, Tellar, and Andoria—have sent their bright-eyed children off to Starfleet Academy to learn the art of starfaring. Denobulans, Saurians, Edosians, Caitians, and Deltans have all served with distinction in Starfleet’s ranks, among numerous other folk from Federation and non-Federation planets alike. Rules are loose in this era: if you show up in San Francisco with good intentions, curiosity, and a willingness to follow orders and put in work, odds are you can become a Starfleet Officer in due course of time. Who are you? What is your background? What are your strengths, and what challenges do you struggle to overcome? What makes you unique? And why do you wish to travel the stars?

Preparing for the session

We'll use Zoom for video and audio—I'll send you the link once you've joined this game. Please have a least a microphone, though video is preferred as well; download the Zoom desktop app for best results. A quiet room and strong internet connection highly recommended. For gameplay, we'll be using the program Tabletop Simulator. It is a $20 download on Steam and allows for a physics based tabletop experience...that is to say, you can roll dice and it actually *feels* more or less like rolling dice. Character sheets, rules reference materials, maps, background music, and game visuals will all live in Tabletop Simulator. Please download and install before the first session if you don't already have it. I'll also provide a link to a mod to download once you've joined the game. Oh, and maybe watch a few episodes of Star Trek: the Original Series (or even Star Trek: the Animated Series) to get in the mood!

What Sam brings to the table

I'll bring a curated sequence of Star Trek missions—how they conclude is up to you!—along with associated maps, visuals, tokens, miniatures, and background music in a custom Tabletop Simulator environment. For every game, I bring a genuine excitement to find out *what happens next*—how the characters deal with the situations they're faced with.

How Sam creates a safe table

This game focuses on themes of discovery, responsibility, innovation, cultural exchange, peaceful conflict resolution, and outside-the-box problem solving. Stories will often be about not only how to solve a problem, but the ethical implications of the solution. Strong character choices highly encouraged. A working knowledge of Star Trek lore is useful, but not mandatory—"canon" is a pretty fast-and-loose concept in the earliest eras of Star Trek. Though Star Trek as a franchise originated in a regressive time in real-world history, this game holds fast to the Vulcan philosophy of "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations," embracing characters (and players) of all races, species, ages, belief systems, gender identities, physical and mental abilities, and sexual orientations. Hate will not be tolerated at this table. The rules of FATE Accelerated are very easy to teach and learn. We'll go over them at character creation, but you can also purchase the rulebook at a pay-what-you-want price here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/114902/Fate-Accelerated-Edition-o-A-Fate-Core-Build. Be aware that there will be some minor modifications to these rules, mostly renaming things to make them more Star Trek-y. Safety Tools: The X-Card. (Read about it here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SB0jsx34bWHZWbnNIVVuMjhDkrdFGo1_hSC2BWPlI3A/edit)