The third release for Star Trek Adventures is The 23rd Century Campaign Guide. This one (as with the new Species Sourcebook) kinda crept up on me. One thing Modiphius is doing well — and that Free League has been seriously falling down on with it’s Blade Runner and Alen lines — is dropping pre-orders once their material is ready to go…not making you wait a year for them to get it cleared by their licensors. Kudos to Jim Johnson for managing this line extremely well.

The guide provides a nice overview of the entire century — not just the events of Discovery through the old show movies. The chapters give a political and technological overview of the pre-Disco era (starting from the end of the Enterprise era), and they also focus a few pages on how each of the major polities are affected — the Federation, the Klingon and Romulan empires, the Cardassian Union, and the Orion Syndicate. The chapters are broken into the pre-Discovery period, the Disco/Strange New Worlds period, the Old Series, and the movie period. For those who have only a passing knowledge of the setting (especially the pre-Discovery and the original movies), this a fast entry into the 23rd Century. There is also a latter chapter on creating characters specific to the era, including suggested focuses, traits, and values. For those GMs with players who are unfamiliar with these period settings, this can help create characters consistent to the goings-on around them. It also ties neatly with the first chapter, which provides new lifepath options for having grown up on a species homeworld different from your own, a new civilian profession (free trader), and specific high-impact events from the various shows and movies. Was your character present for the V’Ger incident, or at the Khitomer Accords? Now you can have that as a specific event in character creation. The first chapter also has updated rules on scars, fatigue, and trauma borrowed from  The Federation-Klingon War sourcebook for first edition. A final chapter gives tips for plotting adventures during the various series’ settings.

Artwork remains solidly good to very good, and Paolo Puggioni’s cover deserves a special shout-out. There’s a frontpiece on the inside over with the various uniforms of the period — much of it cribbed from other earlies books in the first and second editions, and the backpiece has a timeline for the “Prime” and “Terran” (read Mirror) Universes, as well as the execrable J.J. Abrams “Kelvan” timeline.

So, is it worth it? At 129 pages, $60 might be a bit hefty if you’re a confirmed Trekkie or just hit up the Memory Alpha site for information. I’m not certain how much use I’ll get out of this, but it is a good-looking book and well made, with plenty of useable game mechanics and ideas to launch off of. If cost is a problem and you don’t mind using the cheaper PDFs for reference — that’s definitely worth it.

The copyright for 2d20 system is Modiphius, 2019. STAR TREK and related marks and logos are trademarks of CBS Studios inc. All Rights Reserved and no infringement is intended.