Star Trek Aliens

The previous review of this book was pretty solid, but there are a few points that I think need to be made. First of all, the missing races such as the Regulans/Kaitians and the Grazerites were made available in the previous volume by the same company, book 3 Starfleet Operations Manual along with the Bolians, Centaurans, Tellarites, Tiburonese and Zaldans. I am leaning to the thought they opted to not duplicate all of the offerings in the alien book so that there would still be value to buying the Starfleet Operations Manual for expanded racial offerings; after all, the Andorians and Romulans were included in the Narrators Guide already as well. Regarding the Efrosians change of name; I'm inclined to think that was a choice of Paramont, not Decipher, just as the previous game under LUG was required to call the previously established Kaitians to Regulans. Anyway, back to the book. I loved it. The Betazoid section finally includes specific tenants of the Betazoid Code of Sentience (this was lacking in previous write ups); the section on the Q provided really fine ideas on how to use the Q in your on stories; the Klingon section included bits about thier societal structure that allows you to remember why they used to be the bad guys and wouldn't be accepted into the Federation even if they were inclined to join. Other TOS era offerings include the ever popular Gorn and Capellans, to name a few more; but almost *every* species included has a Use in Era blurb telling you what they might have been up for each major era (Enterprise / TOS-Movie/ TNG+).I think you will find it interesting even if you are not a fan of the Decipher system; those of you still playing LUG can easily reverse engineer them over, those playing Prime Directive powered by GURPS can likewise do the same; and if you don't game at all... well heck, it's still a pretty sweet source book; after all, the gaming supplements of today have to be gone over with a finer tooth comb than the Pocket Books as far as canon adherance and such go -- and frankly, the DS9 relaunch Andorians are painfully poor in comparison to the Andorians in the Decipher book which build off of the fabulous treatment in the LUG Among the Clans: Andorian Sourcebook of a few years back.