Star Trek Alliance: Infinite Frontier is a fan-made campaign for the Star Trek Alliance tabletop miniatures game. Set after the end of the Dominion War – with Starfleet once again turning its eye towards exploration – players take on the role of a Federation Captain, assigned to a special Fleet Task Group given the mandate to explore, chart, study and catalogue the newly-discovered region known as The Verge.

Overlaying an element of exploration atop the heavily combat-focused core Alliance gameplay loop, Infinite Frontier is an open-ended campaign with no direct narrative thread leading players through from mission to mission. Instead, players start with a blank map and fill it in by rolling dice to discover points of interest, and then choose from a list of thematically-appropriate missions to play based on those points of interest they've discovered. Not all missions involve combat, with some based around helping those in need, or encountering unusual phenomena. Once the map has been filled out, players can either end the campaign, or tack a new map onto one edge and keep exploring – an Infinite Frontier, if you will.

Impetus

This isolated corner of the Star Trek universe is something my best friend and I came up with during lockdown in 2020, as a utopian escape from the anxiety and depression of which anyone who lived through that time will be intimately familiar. We wanted a smaller, lower-key setting without the massive galaxy-altering stakes that dominate modern Trek (ROBOT TENTACLES ARE TRYING TO WIPE OUT ALL ORGANIC LIFE IN THE GALAXY! ALL THE DILITIUM IN THE GALAXY HAS MYSTERIOUSLY EXPLODED! WE NEED TO STOP THIS NEGATIVE SPACE WEDGIE THAT'S TEARING ITS WAY THROUGH THE GALAXY!), so we decided to set it at the very edge of the galaxy – 13,000 lightyears away from everything else going on, and too far away to be directly impacted by any of it. Our desire to “live” more immersively in this world is actually what brought me to discover Star Trek Alliance – its cooperative nature being the main appeal, setting it apart from all the other options out there, along with the ability to create your own captain rather than play as an established character from the shows. So now, as a way of bringing it full-circle, I've adapted our little pocket of the universe into the game.