I have long, long thought to myself what a fantastic show it would be to track the crew of a Klingon ship taking on the kinds of problems that crop up in the Star Trek universe - I was not aware that this book had been created when I saw it on a shelf in my FLGS so I grabbed it up gleefully.
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The 2d20 system was one I had heard of - seen that it had Conan, Star Trek, John Carter and a few other well known settings released - but I had not read into it or figured it out. Another member of my local game group raves about 2d20 Star Trek so I figued there was something to it. The 2d20 system takes a little getting used to with its to-and-fro trading of the threat/momentum meta-currency but it is a good vehicle for facilitating games that strongly resemble Star Trek episodes.Setting wise, this was a slam dunk, I'm a 'Next Generation' kid, Picard is my captain, and we got some great Klingon episodes from that and DS9 - I knew enough going in that I was coming to this with 'tell me how to run the setting' not looking for much on the setting itself.
First impression of the look and feel, it is a chunky book, good cover, nice colour-scheme through-out, two ribbons which makes it feel really ritzy. Inside front cover is a Klingon language map of the Empire, inside the back cover is a map with readable names and a zoom out to include the Romulans and Federation. Reading through it a bit more and it is pretty good - I have some quibbles with how things are ogranised, I had some confused flipping about trying to figure some stuff out, but pretty darn good for all the stuff packed in here.
I managed to even get this to table as part of my 'forever DM support group' and it was a good time even with it being my first time running the system and the first time many of them were encountering the setting and system.
So what is all this stuff you get in the book?
8 pages of Intro
60 pages of Klingon Empire
16 pages of Core Rules
58 pages of Reporting for Battle
16 pages of Weapons and Technology
16 pages of Conflict
82 pages of To Command the Stars
42 pages of Game Mastering
22 pages of For the Glory of the Empire
54 pages of Allies and Adversaries
8 pages of Introductory Adventure
4 pages of Language
4 pages of Index
3 pages of Character Sheets
Going through this chunk by chunk
Intro - starts assuming you have some familiarity with RPGs; introducing the book as a self-contained revision to Star Trek Adventures. Having said that, you do then get a double page spread that walks you through all you need from players to dice, then a play example and a guide to the structure of the book.
Klingon Empire (15% of the book) - here you get the setting - galactic overview, history, culture, politics, the great houses, the military and worlds and locations. Good stuff in here, giving plenty to work with except for the slightly light worlds and locations section.
I think the most useful thing in there is the insight that Klingons pursue passion, if you are Klingon, pick your North Star, your thing that you are governed by. For many of the Klingons encountered in space that will be honor and glory and so on because those are the ones who seek out honor and glory among the stars. But there are people who are guided by their passion which is as a craftsman or scientist and these are the folk who build the ships and keep the world running.
That was a nice little circle that needed to be squared to explain how does Klingon society even work?
Core Rules (4% of the book) was my first impact with the 2d20 system and the signature meta currency that is momentum where you can bank extra successes for future dice to roll in challenges. Beneath that you have a relatively familiar set of attributes and traits for a characters strengths and weaknesses with a novelty in that you will tend to combine two for any give test or challenge.
I like the momentum system in general as you can build it up through a session working your way through the smaller stuff to get to the big finale - very much like a Star Trek episode is structured.
What is also nice from a GM side of things is that failures or players pushing your luck gives you dice in a threat pool which you can then draw on for complications or to make your adversaries a bit more survivable.
Overall I like the system. I like the push your luck little element to it. I like how it lets you manage your approach to a thing of like sort of build up to the big thing, get some momentum in and then go. I like that momentum saps away as you go on so you need to keep trying things and succeeding to keep up your momentum for when you need it. The system wise interesting, I'd like it. I think it's a good fit for something Star Trek-esque
Reporting for Battle (15% of the book) covers character creation both for main and supporting characters. There is a helpful seven step flow chart with starts with Species and runs through Environment of origin, Caste, Training, Career, Character Events and then finishes the character. Each of these steps has a range of options which also gives a view into Klingon worlds and culture.
The last ten pages of the section give the tools to create your own house, with this being a thing that a party can do as a shared background.
Weapons and Technology (4% of the book) - the gear; all the disruptor pistols and ba'atleths, armour and tech you would expect to find lying around.
Conflict (4% of the book) covers combat and social contests. The interesting thing to me is how deadly the weaponry is - not quite instantly lethal but if a dude gets up in your face with a ba'atleth and he's any good at all, you're going to have a very, very bad day in short order. And you are not highly survivable - you can take some shots, and you'll go down and maybe the rest of your team will patch you back together with ridiculous future science but the rest of the gang needs to win without you for that. I thought that was apt as in the TV shows people get shot with disruptors, they glow, then you see their bones, then they disintegrate - shots should hit hard.
To Command the Stars (21% of the book) here you get all your fantastic Klingon ships - Bird's of Prey and the like. The ship is a big part of any party so this section is meaty. There is a six step workflow that starts with setting a time range then choosing a hull, any mods and any refits. There are lots of space-frames from the whole time range which combined with 'mission profiles' and refits give lots of choice. Building the ship will be a chunky session zero activity if you let the players do it.
Next is a big block of planetary adventure support - different types of stars and planets, anomalies and hazards for both ground and space. We get guidance on running the kind of 'research the hazard' play that often happens in this universe and a whole block of pre-made ships for potential non-Klingon encounters and adversaries.
Game Mastering (11% of the book) coming in a little late, to my mind, with some explanations to terms that I was puzzling over getting explained here from page 259 - pretty deep in - but derived from this being a late-arriving core book to the 2d20 line and some background knowledge being assumed. We get character creation guidlines for PCs and NPCs and threaded through all of this how to use threat as a DM. There are some mission, campaign and planet creation help too. All told a decent section, covering a lot of useful stuff for a DM, though I found myself flipping around for certain often-referenced tables so definitely one for sticky-tags if you bring it to table.
For the Glory of the Empire (6% of the book) on how to run a Klingon focussed campaign and how to differentiate it from a standard Star Trek one, including a dozen 'mission briefs' - effectively 'adventure on a page'.
The main campaign builder gives a half-dozen play styles a quarter page each covering the roles of a party as bridge crew, boarding parties, explorer, coloniser or fighting border conflicts.
Then we get a plot/adventure builder that follows a three pillar structure of Doq, SuD amd qol'om - social interaction, scientific/investigative and physical challenges. Each gets 6-7 plot components and a table to randomize them to build
I like the mission brief format a lot - you get a handful of major beats, some minor beats, NPCs and a concluding scene plus some guidance on how to plug it into a campaign. 12 of these plus the starter adventure, even assuming you crush each one in a session, gives you a good block of material to get started with.
Allies and Adversaries (14% of the book) - NPCs of Klingon or other origin to help or hinder players as well as a selection of beasties for variety.
Introductory Adventure (2% of the book) provides a good template adventure, laying out the structure and signposting the rolls required against whatever specific attributes in a nice easy to follow manner. The structure of it all was neat I thought, with some temporal wierdness, tense exploration and a good fight for a finale.
For the session I ran as a system test - a dry run with the in-house testing team to check I knew how the mechanics worked - it rapidly becoming apparent that starships are huge ability multipliers and melee combat will get you killed pronto if you go up against someone better than you because ranged combat you shoot and hit or miss but melee comes with counterstrikes which will ruin your day.
The 'real' session I ran went pretty well, decent use of the momentum dice, managed to run the whole thing to a satisfying conclusion. I took the quick-start adventure to the table rather than the one in the book because it felt a bit more conceptually accessible to folk coming to the system and setting cold as an exploration-led adventure. One thing that amused me was that I sat down with a table of other forever DMs and only one of them had a handle on what Klingons were - for the others 'tall angry dwarves' gave people enough to get with the vibe but it really made me realise that fandom overlap is less than I thought.
Closing with the Appendices - the Language section is for advanced students, good detail but dense. The Index is solid and the Character Sheets are good but you are better off going to one of the many fan sites and downloading ship-specific pdfs or character sheets to avoid the risk of damaging your book photocopying.
All told, a solid book, lots of stuff in it and great potential for interesting campaigns. I have a minor gripe in that I instantly found there were a couple of tables I was always going back to that were split throughout the book - easily fixed with photocopies and the inside of a DM screen. I could see a great beer-and-pretzels group running this for raucous laughs or a more serious table getting down in the weeds of what make the difference between Klingon and Federation approaches to things.
If you set off to really lean into this then a very chunky session zero would be spent setting up characters, figuring out relationships, creating your shared house and then building your ship. By the time you had finished that you would likely have a very coherent and put together party.
For other reviews see Reviews from R'lyeh, Continuing Mission, Strange Assembly or Mephit James Blog.
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