I'm very pleased with this. For a long time, I had to make do with the old Star Trek Roleplaying Game from FASA Corporation, scrounging what source material I could to kluge together a campaign. Fortunately, Last Unicorn Games has produced a beautiful product which does an excellent job of capturing the feel of the Next Generation. The book uses primarily color photo stills from the television series, though there are some illustrations which are generally very good. I've been running a Next Generation campaign with a group of six players for the past few months, and generally the system has worked smoothly. The game uses a number of six-sided dice, one of which serves as a "Drama Die", a generator for Dramatic Successes or Failures. There was some confusion as to how attributes and skills worked (roll the attribute number of dice, add the level of the skill to the high roll), and the book is a little scattered in relating some of this information. The skills themselves tend to be very open fields, in order to reflect the ST:TNG tendency of characters who seem to know at least a little about a whole lot of things. The system is simple, but even more importantly, the writers seem to really understand what makes ST:TNG different from the other Star Trek settings (in terms of themes, mood, and so on). Last Unicorn has been producing a large line of products for this game which are generally of high quality, and they have been working with Paramount to make sure everything is accurate (or as accurate as you can get with a weekly television show). The main drawback that comes to mind is that LUGTrek takes the position that players should play lower-ranking characters instead of the command crew of a starship. This is reflected in the rulebook's included adventure, "Shakedown Cruise", but I found it simple enough to adapt to an all-PC command crew. LUG's other published adventures for this game allow for the possibility of PC captains and such, and thus far, there are no printed adventures which force your players to play the characters from the show (thus putting LUG one step ahead of FASA). In summary, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in running a Next Generation campaign. Last Unicorn is doing some excellent work here!
