This review is based on the PDF version of this sourcebook. While I have received Star Trek Adventures products from Modiphius in the past for review, I purchased the PDF for this product on my own and was not provided a review copy. I’ve also utilized the sourcebooks for the game system for campaign ideas in the past. I haven’t used any of the material in this product, but as I mentioned above, I’m very familiar with the core Star Trek Adventures game, having run it for over a year, and having played some of the organized play adventures.
While I knew my campaign would be over by the time it came out, I was still very interested to see what it finally looked like. I ran that campaign for a year, and near the end of that time, I heard about the future release of a Shackleton Expanse sourcebook. I liked a region of space between two stellar empires, with a built-in excuse to introduce weird spatial effects to nudge players in a particular direction or to cut off external help so that the crew needs to be the heroes that solve the problem in front of them. I liked the idea of a home base with joint Klingon/Federation operations. When I began running my Star Trek Adventures campaign, the Shackleton Expanse really appealed to me, even though there was only a sparse outline of the location in the books available at the time.
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The quadrant releases also served as de facto series sourcebooks, with the Gamma Quadrant book tying into Deep Space Nine, and the Delta Quadrant tying into Voyager. While the Expanse was referenced in the interconnected adventures released for the organized play campaign, the first year or so of Star Trek Adventures releases were based on Starfleet divisions (Command, Sciences, Operations) and on the quadrants of the galaxy (Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Gamma). The Star Trek Adventures core rulebook mentioned the region but didn’t go into great detail.
This region wasn’t canonically detailed and was specifically created for development in RPG products. Way back when Star Trek Adventures was ramping up, the organized play campaign that Modiphius started specifically mentioned the Shackleton Expanse, a region of space between the Klingon Empire and the Romulans.