New Star Trek Games... No RPG

TrekMovie.com today posted an article about the mass of licensed Trek junk merchandise about to be dumped upon the unsuspecting public in anticipation of JJ Abrams' Star Trek movie. Oh dear, it looks like The Phantom Menace all over again (hint: wait two years... folks on eBay won't be able to give it away!).

Not surprising is the sheer amount of licenses issued solely to Trek tabletop gaming: more Trek Monopoly, UNO, the Scene It DVD boardgame, a trivia game, Scrabble and -- of course -- Star Trek Magic 8 Ball (FTW?!?!). Okay, I guess that is surprising after all.

What else is surprising? No Star Trek Roleplaying Game, for either the classic series or the new movie universe. Decipher lost the license a little over a year ago and at the moment no one has the license. A little bird over on theRPGSite Forums says that inquiries have, in fact, recently been made but apparently CBS Consumer Products is not interested at this time.

Which is very sad, and makes Mr. Spock cry. It's no secret that Decipher and Last Unicorn Games faced two big problems when doing their respective versions of a Trek RPG. One, neither company was very good at running its business, regardless of the burdens of the Trek license. Two, both were releasing Trek RPGs at a time of "Trek Burnout". When even fans were turning their backs on the shows and films coming out of Paramount, it's hard to imagine the associated merchandise doing much better. Admittedly I've never seen the books of any of these companies, but I'd find it hard to imagine that FASA was able to do Trek for such a long time and with a wealth of material if they weren't doing so as a going concern.

Different times, of course, and there are some who question whether or not Star Trek is even suitable for tabletop roleplaying in this day and age. That seems to be a debate that comes up every once in awhile over on RPGnet and other places. My opinion: given the right timing, the right business approach and a well-developed game, there's no reason that a Star Trek RPG couldn't be a critical and popular success all over again.

In the meantime, we can always continue with what's already out there, and even "roll our own" for our favorite RPG system (see my 2MB preview version of Final Frontier, the Trek adaptation for the Thousand Suns RPG that I've been working on lately). I have to admit, though, that there would be nothing like strolling into my FLGS and finding a brand spanking new official "Star Trek RPG Core Rules" game on the shelf and a rack of minis right next to it.

There's always hope. And until then, there's Star Trek Magic 8 Ball.