Iconic TTRPG Dungeons & Dragons provides players with a unique opportunity to combine their storytelling efforts and spin unforgettable yarns in which the player characters come face to face with fantastic creatures, sinister plots, exciting new allies and unforgettable villains. At its core, D&D is a fantasy lover's dream, combining sword and sorcery in a familiar, high fantasy world setting, but over the years, game masters and players alike have found ways to adapt the system to other world settings.
Luke Aeschleman and Hugh Thompson worked with a team of enthusiastic contributors to put together an extensive homebrew 5e campaign setting in the Mass Effect universe. Exploring both the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, which have been core game locations within the Mass Effect franchise, players of Mass Effect 5e can rise into the stars and visit strange new planets, investigate eerie distress signals and even enter into a six-hundred-year cryosleep to travel between the two galaxies.
In Mass Effect 5e, the Dungeon Master becomes a Galaxy Master (or GM) and begins creating missions for the players to explore or solve in standard D&D fashion. Though the GM creates the missions that launch a campaign, it's up to the players to work through clues and prompts, at times taking the small threads offered by the GM and running with them to build an intense and exciting story together in space.
The creators added fifteen player races from the established, familiar races within the Mass Effect universe, including Humans, Angara, Asari, Batarian, Drell, Geth, and Turian, to name a few. Following the classes offered in the video game, players can choose from six unique classes: Adept, Engineer, Infiltrator, Sentinel, Soldier and Vanguard.
Each class grants players a wide variety of unique powers, including tech prowess, combat specialties, and Mass Effect's very own brand of magic: Biotics.
The homebrew system also determines player statistics based on the standard 5e attributes. Things like Wisdom, Strength, Intelligence, Charisma, Dexterity and Constitution determine how effective the players' class roles and game rolls are as they move throughout the galaxy and make encounters with potential allies and enemies.
Both the players and the GM roll a variety of polyhedral dice while creating characters and enemies and playing through active parts of the narrative to determine the outcome of their actions the same way they would in a standard D&D campaign. For example, if a player decided to blast through a blocked mine entryway, the GM would tell them to roll to discover how much damage their blaster does and whether or not the party can navigate through the opening without further action.
While developing this galactic homebrew system, the creators took everything into account, including information, weaponry, enemies, encounters, and systems from both galaxy settings previously explored within the Mass Effect universe.
There is currently a roleplaying game system by Paizo, the creators of Pathfinder, called Starfinder, which is a great system to explore with players who want to take their fantastic adventures beyond dragon-infested lands and into the stars, but only in a world setting like Mass Effect can one find Blue Suns Mercenary gangs, Reapers, rogue Geth, and more inter-species politics than Commander Shepard could ever shake a Collector Particle Beam at.