Modiphius’ Exploration Guide for Star Trek Adventures (Second Edition) is a GM-forward toolbox aimed at one of the franchise’s core promises: exploration. Released as a full-colour 144-page supplement (PDF and hardcover/POD), the book is designed to help Keepers build sectors, star systems, planets and planetary terrains, and then populate them with story hooks, complications and unique details that make exploration feel purposeful. It is fully compatible with STA 2E (and broadly usable with 1E and Captain’s Log).
🗺️ What’s inside — the practical kit
Star Trek Adventures Exploration Guide is a practical, “how-to” compendium rather than a single canned campaign. The headline components are:
- A 14-step sector creation workflow that walks GMs from big picture (sector themes and notable systems) down to micro details (planetary features, local factions and adventure seeds). The book includes a helpful roadmap so you can follow the full procedure or skip to bite-sized steps when pressed for time.
- Tools for generating star systems and planets, plus nine distinct planetary terrain types (caves, deserts, forests, jungles, mountains, plains, swamps, tundra, water worlds) with terrain-specific generators and random tables. These tables give terrain elements, hazards, flora/fauna seeds and complication prompts that convert an environment into a playable scene.
- Player-facing options: two new career paths, ten new career events, twenty-one new talents, and five new awards/honors. There are also mechanical options for “secret values/traits” that can be revealed across a campaign to create mystery or narrative payoff.
- Random tables & hooks: generous collections designed to spark mission ideas, ecological oddities, alien artifacts, anomalous phenomena and story complications—useful both in prep and on the fly.
- Play aids & maps: some editions/postings mention a double-sided poster map (23rd/25th-century sector mapping) and abundant call-out boxes that distill guidance into GM-friendly checklists.
🚀 How it plays at the table
The Guide is pitched to sandbox Keepers who want their universe to feel authored and reactive. The sector workflow helps you design a sandbox with cohesion—political tensions, scientific anomalies, and factional interests that reward player investigation. The terrain generators convert a “type” (e.g., swamp) into concrete, encounterable elements (a sinkhole that reveals a fossilized arboreal city, or a bioluminescent fungus that masks a fungal intelligence). Because the tables are modular, you can craft a fully mapped system in several sessions of prep or roll up a planet in five minutes for a pick-up game.
For GMless moments and improvisation, the random tables are particularly useful: roll a hazard, a local faction goal, and a complication, then stitch them into a mission. For groups who enjoy hexcrawls or “expedition” play, the Guide’s discussion of travel cadence, resource checkpoints, and stakes is a solid reference. Early reviews praise the Guide’s ability to make exploration feel less like a checklist and more like an engine for narrative hooks.
✨ Strengths — why you’ll reach for this book
- Systematic sandbox building. The 14-step method is the standout: it gives structure to what can otherwise be messy worldbuilding.
- Practical random tables. Wide, varied and cross-referenced—ideal for improvisation or quick session prep.
- Player mechanical additions. New careers, talents and secret-trait options give players more hooks to tie into exploration-focused plots.
- Terrain depth. The nine terrain chapters are tuned to make environmental encounters feel distinctive rather than interchangeable.
⚠ Caveats & who should think twice
- Density for short campaigns. If you only run single-session, tightly scripted Starfleet mission adventures, much of the Guide’s sandbox tooling may sit unused. It’s best for ongoing campaigns where worldbuilding pays off.
- Overwhelm risk for new GMs. The same breadth that’s useful for veteran Keepers can be daunting for newcomers; the 14-step process helps, but there’s a learning curve in balancing tables and integrating factions.
- Some overlap with other supplements. If you already own a suite of STA 2E books (Toolkit, Technical Manual), there’s occasional functional overlap in mission-design advice—worth checking the TOC if you’re consolidating purchases.
🗡 Final verdict
The Exploration Guide is a focused, well-executed expansion for groups who want more than episodic mission beats from Star Trek Adventures. It turns exploration from “find the weird thing” into a replicable craft—sector design, planetary textures, and mission hooks that interlock and reward player curiosity. For sandbox Keepers, hexcrawl fans and groups who want to stitch together long-running campaigns that genuinely feel like frontier discovery, this is an excellent resource. For purely one-off or combat-heavy tables, it’s a luxury rather than a necessity.
If your game aspires to “boldly go” in a way that creates a living, discoverable frontier, Modiphius’ Exploration Guide gives you the maps, tables and methods to do it well.
