The new Star Trek Adventures Players Guide has rules for creating civilian PCs – characters who aren’t in Starfleet. This includes characters like Quark, Odo and Jake Sisko.
What this offers is a chance to run a campaign where there’s a mixture of Starfleet and civilian characters, like you find on Deep Space Nine. Like Deep Space Nine, you can run a campaign set on a space station.
The first thing that needs to be decided is who runs the space station. Does a planetary body’s representatives rule? Is it Starfleet? The Klingon Empire? This sets the mood and even the tone. A station of bureaucrats from a local planet who dislike Starfleet and are trying to discredit their efforts will have a different feel than an orderly station which Starfleet commands.
The next thing to decide is who the rulers of the roost are. Some GMs will choose to have the Commander and Chief of Operations role handed to the PCs. Other GMs might create NPC commanders and have the PCs serve under them. The latter is good for a campaign, including fresh-faced recruits just getting their feet wet and learning the ropes. In these campaigns, the NPC commanders serve as the mission-givers and determine the broad strokes of the campaign.
Other GMs will have the PCs as the command staff. This gives them the agency to determine the main direction the campaign heads. However, with command comes obligation to the station. These characters won’t be available to go on every away mission. For these circumstances, the stories need to come to their characters. Visiting groups of aliens bring their own intrigues and mysteries to the station. Antagonists of these visitors come to the station and might end up as antagonists to the PCs. It’s up to the command staff to keep everyone safe.
When I talk about the movers and shakers of the station, I’m not just referring to the people with rank. Businessmen and residents can serve as key characters (PC or NPC) who always get involved in the action. Garak and Quark fit this bill.
In the Lord of the Rings RPG by Decipher, there was a class you could choose for your PC where you were an innkeeper. Your inn gains magical qualities, but the catch is your character can’t leave the inn for prolonged periods of time. In other words, no adventures for them. The book even went so far as to discourage players from selecting this class. In Star Trek, playing a bar owner doesn’t have to mean sitting out all the adventures. The bar owner could be involved in various intrigues, like Quark, being a lightning rod to adventures. The bar owner could have a history of political affiliation or even espionage. Look at Rick from Casablanca for inspiration to play a character like this.
There needs to be some player effort to involve non-Starfleet characters to go along on the adventure. If the player keeps saying his character is too busy running the bar to volunteer for any mission, he shouldn’t be surprised if his character is denied opportunity to be in the spotlight. However, adventures should require the skill sets of the civilian characters, causing them to be recruited (sometimes not gently as with Commander Sisko) to join the away team.
Civilian characters mixed with Starfleet characters can create an exciting and rewarding space station campaign.
