Margin of Profit

Star Trek Module

Review by Aaron Allston

Written by J Andrew Keith
FASA Corporation PO. Box 6930, Chicago, IL, 60680
Released: October, 1984
Catalog No, 2209
Price: $7.00
Complexity: Intermediate
Solitaire Suitability: None

Margin of Profit is an adventure for FASA's Star Trek: The Role-Playing Gaine. However, it's not a Star Fleet adventure. Based instead on the Star Trek supplement Trader Captains and Merchant Princes, 6 actually a merchant adventure set in the Star Trek universe.

The adventure comes as an 81/2 x 11 inch, 48-page booklet, contained in a folding slipcover. The slipcover is of the same approximate sort as you saw on the first of Mayfair RoleAias, and bears the same art as the cover of the rule book.

That cover art, incidentally, is the worst feature of this adventure, and I think I'll start with it. I can ignore merely inferior art, and so I haven't commented on artist Mitch O'Connelk dubious contributions to previous Star Trek prodticts. But if you ever want to curdle milk in minutes, simply set it in front of the cover to Margin of Profit. Incidentally, FASA didn't improve matters by printing the supplement title in red, the Star Trek logo in yellow, and the FASA logo in white; all three washed out, especially the latter two, which are almost unreadable.

In the actual adventure, the player- characters (PCs) are commissioned to carry shipments of dilithium off Coriclan, a backwater mining planet. Unfortunately, hijackers have started hitting the other dilithium carriers pretty hard, stealing shipments, killing witnesses, and in general depressing the economy The PCs aren't going to make it off-planet alive and with their cargo if they don't solve the mystery of who is doing the hijacking and stop the people involved.

I liked Margin of Profit. It required some thought, some action, some skill use. It provided for a lot of role-playing, some street excitement, and space combat. When played through, you're left with a world/campaign setting, new ships, a barrel full of fully fleshed-out non-player character (NPQ writeups, and so forth. In short, its not only eminently playable but you will also have a lot of reusable material when you're finished.

Organization of the adventure is more than adequate. Keith follows one of the formats I like best: brief plot synopsis, extended plot writeup, maps, character sheets, and final Gamemaster (GM) notes, all neatly laid out and organized, with a Table of Contents to boot. The maps, as usual, are superior FASA maps.

Oddly enough, Margin of Profit felt a lot like a Traveller adventure. Perhaps it's not so odd, considering the number of Travellerg scenarios the Keiths have done, and the fact that a Star Trek adventure without Star Fleet feels substantially different from the usual offerings in the series. In fact, if you substitute a bit of Traveller history and species, do Travellers writeups of all the ships provided, then you could have an adventure for that game instead. I doubt that FASA's agreement with Paramount would allow them to provide stats for competing games, but a cooperative deal (such as the one enjoyed by Hero Games, Chaosium, and Blade where adventures published by one company contain character stats and game mechanics for all of them) would be very nice for the buyers of future adventures based on Trader Captains and Merchant Princes.

I enthusiastically recommend Margin of Profit to buyers if they play Star Trek and at least have Trader Captains and Merchant Princes. Perhaps we'll get lucky and FASA will give it a new cover for its next edition.

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