Sure, but I’m not asking for that. I’m not expecting that every single option in the Alpha Quadrant be covered, or even most of them. There’s 53 years of Trek out there, and a huge amount of information available, so I’m on board with picking and choosing. My concern is in how it’s presented.
Yes, I could rewatch ‘Suddenly Human’ or just browse Memory Alpha to get information about the Talarians, and if I don’t feel like stating them up myself, I’m sure some Klingon jobbers will do in a pinch. That’s fine, but having the book present information essentially piecemeal is frustrating.
One thing I did notice today that I missed during my previous flipping through that got me excited is the Ferengi Ul’ess-class Mobile Cruiser. A scale 7 Ferengi ship! I’ve been saying for a while now that it makes no sense that Zekk tools around in a small shuttle with his single man servant when he could be out there in a massive jewel encrusted starship that has a ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ style trading floor on it, from which the Grand Nagus oversees the Ferengi Alliance’s financial empire.
I will definitely be using this bad boy in an adventure I’ve been planning.
We don’t have a license to create Discovery material, so have to be careful about what species we write up and how. Saurians will be an interesting write up when we get to it.
I wanted to include Gorn NPCs in Beta but didn’t have room. Putting it into Alpha seemed liked good fan service since there was an opportunity (and space in the book) to add it. It’s all a balancing act given the various budgets to work with. Hope y’all are generally happy with the content, and if not, we’ll try better next time. And whatever the case, thanks for supporting the game!
The Ferengi also have 4 wordings for the species trait… And aren’t the only ones. (Gorns, and a couple others). One would expect those to be straight Copy and Paste…
I don’t generally pay writers to cut and paste text from one book to another. Variations on a theme, in the best spirit of IDIC. No one species should be defined by one person’s trait definition, right?
I want to voice that I am generally happy and appreciate all the hard work you guys do! Have to admit, I’m already excited about Gamma and Delta quadrant, despite not having any idea when they’ll arrive. In the meantime, I am working on an Alpha Quadrant campaign around maquis and then leading into dominion war, so this was well-timed and much appreciated.
So yes, I’m sure many are happy (myself included). With that said, I’d also echo one criticism. Some of the species choices seem a bit random. I would have expected seeing playable Nausicaan stats before things like Arbazan or Arkarian. Additionally, Gorn might have fit in beta if some shifting was planned to have all Nausicaan info in Alpha (as opposed to the content included in Beta book). Again though, a great book and a great addition (I also appreciate the encounter seeds and the inclusion of Gorn NPCs, even if a bit misplaced).
Finally, though a bit off topic, I hope after Gamma/Delta books there are plans to also add more breadth to alpha and beta quadrant. Having two separate expansion books just full of ships/npcs/encounter seeds would be awesome and could fill in lots of gaps (one for Alpha/Beta and one for Gamma/Delta). Also, having one separate supplement that is just introducing a few dozen playable characters and some background about their worlds would be welcome.
And, since it’s too late to be concise…once again I will voice this: THANK YOU for another awesome supplement to work with.
I hope my criticism isn’t coming off as too harsh; this is genuinely one of my favourite games right now, so much so that I recently committed to GMing it a couple times a month at my local game store for people interested in trying out RPGs for the first time.
Didn’t occur to me that anyone would want to play a Nausicaan as a PC, heh. They’re not in Starfleet and have usually been portrayed as mercs and thugs. But hey, IDIC, right? Maybe someone wants to play the first Nausicaan in Starfleet or a Nausicaan PC who joins the crew akin to Neelix or Kes for some reason.
Nausicaans: trait text is in Alpha, go with +1 Fitness, +1 Daring, +1 Presence (or do something adventurous like +2 Fitness, +1 to one other attribute). Traits, pick two? Maybe two that might not normally be available to other species…Tellarite’s Sturdy from the core, Xindi-Reptilian’s Stun Resistance from the Beta book?
My hot take, anyway. No better than anyone else’s.
All good here. I take all criticism as constructive unless it’s obviously coming from some malicious place. I didn’t sense that here. We’re all gamers and want the best and more from our favorite games. I’m a big fan of a couple board games from certain companies that have terrible or non-existent customer service or online feedback, so I just try to do better and do good for my fellow Trek fans and gamers.
Cause if I wasn’t working on this game, I’d be all over it with comments like y’all.
The Federation didn’t technically make first contact with the Ferengi until the TNG episode, ‘The Last Outpost’.
Archer and the NX-01 were invaded by those pirates, but they scared them off so bad that the Ferengi didn’t start venturing towards what would be Federation space again until the 24th century. Picard also had an encounter with them when he lost the Stargazer, and the were mentioned as early as ‘Encounter at Farpoint’, as a civilization Starfleet was concerned about, but ‘The Last Outpost’ was the first time a Federation citizen and a Ferengi looked upon one another.
Are we talking about life craft options for Ferengi? If so, then Nog was the first in Starfleet, so it totally makes sense that they would be TNG only. Assuming a star fleet campaign.
I’m a little dissapointed by the lack of Suliban, as I feel this makes an ENT era game a bit difficult. Hoping that will be fixed by an era book at some point. Otherwise, seems to be fairly standard for one of the quadrant books, with some interesting stuff that I’m looking forward to sinking my teeth into
Since it sounds like there are things that don’t nesscarily make the grade to apper in a book, I’ve a suggestion for that. since some things might not make sense to apper in another source but people still might be intreasted. have you considered publishing PDF only “supplements” for some of this? particuclarly stuff that where written up already and cut for space.
this would allow you to do a write up and NPC stats for the talaran republic, give Tzenkathi starships. maybe Suliban, and whatever else you’d like to have done but couldn’t fit in page count. I’d happily buy any you can produce.
If the Tellarite have binary couples. A mother and a father.
And they only have one child. And the instant they have said child they’re moved to part time employment and dedicate themselves to being there for every single moment of the child’s life. And this lasts until the child moves out onto his own. (Presumably 16 to 25 years) And due to this Tellarites only have one child.
Doesn’t that mean that Tellerite population will be roughly halfed, every generation until it dwindles and disappears?
The block does say that they occasionally have two, but then spends two paragraphs talking about how it’s one and how ‘hard’ it is, and how much time it takes and what not. And the ‘occasional second child’ still isn’t going to get them up to even a stable population. It would still be declining. If not by 50% per generation, but still a steady decline.
For this scheme to not be a problem, the expected lifespan merely needs to be double the age of departure. If we make some minor assumption changes, we can make it much better for the society.
Options that can be sensible include…
age of departure is consistently 15 with departure to a residential educational facility. This puts the average age needed to be only 45
a significant rate of multiples. (EU sources note 4 nipples, so likey two young at a time is not uncommon; average litter size usually correlates to half nipples.
the society is post-population-crisis, and, excepting food, was post-labor or nearly so, and this is a ZPG policy.
In this case, I think the version in the rules was a careless error, and will assume litters of 2-3 the standard, one liter until adulthood, rather than 1 child, consistent with the older EU materials
Variations on a theme, in the best spirit of IDIC. No one species should be defined by one person’s trait definition, right? 
