Planet of the Week: Player's Guide

You’re the away team of the starship Endeavor Maru, the only Farfleet ship in this star cluster. You’re the initial group to land on each new planet, making first contact with aliens, investigating strange phenomena, and exploring. Can you draw strength from your inner conflict as you discover strange new planets?

Planet of the Week is a PbtA tabletop roleplaying game inspired by Star Trek but without the magical tech: no transporters, no replicators, no tractor beams.

Your character has five stats representing their capabilities: Diplomacy (DPL), Medical (MED), Operations (OPS), Science (SCI), and Tactics (TAC). Each stat has a value from 1 to 5, representing the base number of dice you can roll when using that stat. Skills let you turn misses into hits.

The basic moves include Investigation (SCI), Negotiation (DPL), Technical Solution (OPS), and Medic (MED). While combat is not a focus, alien creatures may pounce… or diplomacy may continue by other means. The combat moves (TAC) are Take Cover, Return Fire, Han Shot First, and Hand-to-Hand. Health starts out at 5, and you can’t roll more dice than your Health. 

Besides combat, other modules of moves include planetside moves, shipboard moves, and episode moves structured around sessions as TV episodes (Opening Credits, Commercial Break, Closing Credits, etc.).

Every character draws moves from both their specialty and their background. Specialties include Anthropologist, Counselor, Diplomat, Doctor, Engineer, Pilot, Scientist, Security, Translator, and Xenobiologist. Backgrounds include Android, Bioformer, Cross-cultural, Cyborg, Empath, Farfleet Brat, Merchant, Resistance Fighter, Space Boomer, Telepath, Terraformer, Uplifted, and Veteran.

Testimonials

• “I really like the variety you get with your character's abilities, getting to choose both a background and a specialty each with their own unique themes and moves, two different skills, and even a themed stat array. It felt like I was able to make a really interesting character with a variety of things to call upon during the game, instead of a one-trick pony.”
• “I loved the questions that we asked at the beginning during the Introduction. Provided some nice interparty cohesion from the start that makes it fun to build off of and roleplay from. I also enjoyed how successes let you choose from a set list of outcomes to move the fiction and game forward instead of it just being a threshold to be reached to allow your move to happen.”
• “I loved the amount of options for each move. It really felt like you had a choice of where to take the narrative based on how well you rolled. And it didn't make it feel like all the other options you didn't pick would be used against you, since there were so many. In general, I definitely think the game met the vibe expected from something called ‘Planet of the Week’!”
• “I love this f---ing game. A lot of laughs, strong characters, and great genre scenarios. Mastery of the genre is coming through, hitting all the high points of cultural misunderstandings, space anomalies, B stories….”

Ready to make first contact?

This is the 65-page Player's Guide. (If—and only if—you will be the GM, check out the GM's Guide.) [The text of both books is licensed under the Creative Commons.]