About the Star Trek: Syndicate Setting

Overheard at Quark's Bar, Deep Space Nine, stardate unknown

"The Federation says there's no money. Try telling that to the man collecting the debt."

Star Trek: Syndicate is a fan-made supplement for Star Trek Adventures 2nd Edition that takes the familiar machinery of the STA experience and points it somewhere it doesn't usually go — the gritty, morally compromised underside of the 24th century. Play as smugglers, information brokers, reformed criminals, or deniable operatives. Navigate a universe where Federation ideals are real, admirable, and frequently inconvenient.

This entry covers what the supplement is, where it came from, and what kind of stories it was designed to enable. It does not cover the mechanical specifics of how the game is modified — that discussion lives in About this Supplement's Relationship to STA 2e. The sociological case for why organised crime persists in a post-scarcity civilisation is in About Crime in the Federation. The six campaign genre tones that shape each style of play are examined in About the Flairs. This entry is the overview: the answer to "what are we actually doing here, and why?"

This supplement requires STA 2e

📖 Star Trek: Syndicate is not a standalone game. You need the Star Trek Adventures 2nd Edition Core Rulebook from Modiphius Entertainment to play. Syndicate modifies, extends, and occasionally replaces STA mechanics — it does not reproduce them.

The Honest Origin Story

Most supplements come with a philosophical manifesto. This one started with two people failing to agree on a campaign pitch.

The GM wanted a Star Trek campaign. The players wanted to play criminals in an underworld setting. After a brief and undignified negotiation, both sides got what they wanted, a homebrew mod was born, and the result is what you're reading now.

That collision of impulses — Federation idealism versus underworld pragmatism — turned out to be more generative than either premise on its own. Playing straight Star Trek Adventures means inhabiting a moral framework the setting provides for you. Playing a generic crime game means the moral framework is largely absent, or decorative. Playing Syndicate means the moral framework is present, robust, genuinely compelling — and entirely outside the airlock you just jumped through to avoid a Starfleet warrant.

The supplement was built around a single sentence that eventually became its tagline: "This isn't about boldly going — it's about carefully going, watching your back, and deciding just how far you're willing to compromise your principles for survival, profit, or the greater good." Every design decision since has been a test against that sentence. If a mechanic didn't create that specific tension — the careful navigation, the watching, the compromise — it didn't earn its place.

Why the Federation's Idealism Is the Point

Here is the design insight that separates Syndicate from a generic crime game with Star Trek wallpaper: the Federation's idealism is real, in this setting. It is not a lie. It is not a propaganda front. It is not secretly rotten underneath. The post-scarcity civilisation, the commitment to diplomacy, the genuine aspiration toward a better humanity — all of that is true, and most of the people in Starfleet genuinely believe it and try to live it.

That is precisely what makes operating outside it interesting.

If the Federation were corrupt top to bottom, working in the criminal underworld would be morally straightforward — you'd be the only honest people in the room. The moral complexity evaporates. What makes the Syndicate premise work is that the characters have stepped away from something that largely functions. They have their reasons. Those reasons may be good, or bad, or both at once — but the thing they've left behind is not secretly as bad as where they've ended up. They know it. The Federation knows it. The latinum doesn't care.

This is what Deep Space Nine understood, and what most other Trek series did not need to dramatise: the light casts long shadows precisely because it is real light. Quark is not heroic despite his relationship to Federation values; his character exists entirely in the tension with them. Section 31 is not an interesting villain because it's powerful — it's interesting because it does real harm in service of something it genuinely believes. The Mirror Universe is, in the end, the least interesting version of moral darkness in Trek precisely because it just inverts the premise. There is nothing to push against.

Syndicate campaigns live in that tension. The Federation's best qualities are the standard against which every compromise is measured — and the reason every compromise costs something.

Trek's Dark Corners: The Source Material

The setting draws on a specific vein of canonical Trek that has always been there, even when the franchise wasn't entirely sure what to do with it.

Source	What It Contributes
The Orion Syndicate	Criminal organisations, smuggling networks, underworld politics, and the oldest name in organised crime this side of the Neutral Zone
Quark's Dilemmas	The tension between profit and conscience — the Ferengi as reluctant moral compass, arms dealing, and the question of where the line is
Deep Space Nine's Underbelly	Gritty station life, diverse alien criminals, noir atmosphere, and what actually happens when idealism meets a Bajoran border checkpoint
Section 31	Black ops, deniable assets, state-sanctioned harm, and "the ends justify the means" as an institutional position rather than a personal failing
The Mirror Universe	What moral inversion looks like as a structural premise — useful as context and contrast, less useful as a direct model
Complex Trek Politics	The Cardassian occupation, the Maquis resistance, colonial exploitation, and the grey spaces where legitimate grievance meets illegal method

If you want to calibrate the atmosphere before running a campaign, these episodes give you the flavour more efficiently than any briefing document. They reward rewatching with Syndicate in mind:

Episode	Why It Matters Here
Honor Among Thieves (DS9)	Smuggling, infiltration, loyalty under impossible pressure — the closest thing to a Syndicate campaign pilot that exists
Inquisition (DS9)	Section 31's logic made explicit; ambiguity about whether the threat is real is the whole point
The Wire (DS9)	Garak, limits, and the cost of operating outside every safety net simultaneously
Rules of Acquisition (DS9)	Quark's moral line, where it sits, and what it takes to find it
Crossover (DS9)	Mirror Universe as structural contrast — what this setting is not, and why
The Price (TNG)	Underworld economics at diplomatic scale
The Last Outpost (TNG)	The Syndicate's earliest canonical appearance; interesting now for how little it knew what it had

Beyond Trek: The Pop-Culture DNA

Syndicate was not built exclusively from Trek materials. The game's six campaign Flairs each carry a non-Trek genre template — a shorthand for the kind of story the table wants to tell. Ocean's Eleven for the Heist. Breaking Bad for the Descent. The Godfather for the Family. The Wire for the Streets.

These influences are not decoration. They are the tonal vocabulary the supplement uses to communicate atmosphere quickly between people who may have very different ideas about what "a crime campaign" means. Two players who both want to play criminals may be imagining completely different things — and "we're running a Descent flair campaign" resolves that ambiguity in three words.

The full treatment of what each Flair means tonally, what it asks of players and GMs, and how to choose one for your group is in About the Flairs.

Who This Is For (and Who It Isn't)

Syndicate is for tables that want moral complexity as a feature, not a bug. It is for players who are comfortable with characters who make genuinely bad decisions, who operate in grey areas, and who do not resolve every session with their principles intact. It is for GMs who are interested in running stories where the Federation represents an aspiration their characters have left behind, not a headquarters they're protecting.

It is not for tables looking for lighter Star Trek adventures with a criminal aesthetic. If the core appeal is "the crew does fun heist stuff but everyone's basically good people doing broadly fine things," Syndicate has the mechanics for that — the Heist flair can certainly be played light — but the supplement was not designed with that as its centre of gravity.

It is also not a grimdark exercise in suffering. The tone has room for dry wit, competent operators pulling off impossible jobs, and the genuine warmth that exists between people who have only each other to rely on. The Wire is a tragedy, but it is also frequently very funny. Breaking Bad is a horror story, but it is compulsively watchable. The darkness in Syndicate is meaningful because it is in contrast with something — the latent decency of the characters, the genuine goodness the Federation actually represents, the cost that compromise carries even when the compromise was the right call.

Before you begin

If you're unsure whether Syndicate is right for your table, the suggested starting point is the The Playbook: Session Zero. That guide walks through the conversation to have before the campaign starts — the one that determines whether this is the right game for this group, right now.

What This Does to the STA Experience

Star Trek Adventures 2nd Edition is built around a specific kind of story: crews of Starfleet officers navigating space with their values as a primary resource. The social mechanics, the ship mechanics, the mission structure — all of it assumes a table operating within Federation norms, with Federation backing, toward Federation ends.

Syndicate modifies that experience significantly but does not replace it wholesale. The core resolution mechanics — the dice pool, the momentum economy, the challenge structure — remain. What changes is the framing around them, the specific mechanics added to support the setting (Heat, Reputation, the Favor Bank, Contacts), and the mission structure, which is reoriented away from Starfleet objectives and toward the objectives of whoever is paying the crew this week.

The supplement also modifies character creation, adjusting available backgrounds and archetypes to suit characters who exist outside Starfleet. It introduces the Flair system to anchor campaign tone. And it adds procedures for the specific situations that come up in underworld play — debt collection, double-crosses, interrogation, operational security — that standard STA does not handle.

What it does not do is change the fundamental quality that makes STA worth modding in the first place: the setting is genuinely rich, the moral questions are genuinely interesting, and the universe is large enough to contain both the optimism of The Next Generation and the compromised realism of Deep Space Nine. Syndicate is an argument that the same system can do both.