"Explain yourself, Mr. Scott!"
So, what's this all about?
About two months ago, I started work on a conversion of the original Star Trek series for my favorite game of 2008, Rogue Games' Thousand Suns by James Maliszewski. When it comes to RPGs, Star Trek seems to be the place Where Everyone Has Gone Before, yet here we are in 2009 with no official licensed version. I began to wonder about all of the Trek RPGs I'd missed or skipped over the years, and started to do research. What worked? What didn't? What was really good and could be adopted into my project?
As I dug deeper into boxes in the closet and searches on the web, I started finding all sorts of things I'd never known before on the subject. I made one tremendous find earlier this week that, to my surprise, didn't seem to be documented virtually anywhere. At that point I realized that I needed to start writing this stuff down.
And what better way to do that than to create a blog around it? Sure, I could wiki it (and still might), but I'd rather have a discussion about it with readers... if any! I'll admit this blog is strongly inspired by James' Grognardia, which I've found to be a great way to reminisce about "the good old days" through adult eyes. My hope is that I'll learn even more about this subject through that discussion.
What to look forward to? Right now, my intention is to focus primarily on Star Trek RPGs -- both licensed and those with the serial numbers filed off -- from the 70s and early 80s. We'll start off with Star Trek: Adventure Gaming in the Final Frontier (Heritage, 1978) and its later expansion in Chaosium's Different Worlds magazine. There's a lot of interesting material that came out between that and Star Trek The Roleplaying Game (FASA, 1982). I haven't decided yet if I'll really go much beyond the 1st Edition of FASA's STRPG. By the time 2nd Edition came out, the game was a certified hit which changed both the industry and Trek itself. Its history, as well as that of the game material of Last Unicorn Games (1998) and Decipher (2002) is fairly well documented and still easily available, so chances are I'll only discuss them in passing or in the context of the older games.
Other material I'll be reviewing are the not-Treks, Space Patrol (Gamescience, 1977), Starships & Spacemen (FGU, 1978) and Starfleet Voyages (Terra Games, 1982). These were the systems that friends and I used back in the day to roleplay Trek, or at least to try.
Every once in awhile, I may take a break from purely RPG-related matters to talk about other types of games or related material such as one of the main inspirations to the genre, Franz Joseph's Star Fleet Technical Manual, the first Trek-ish wargame Star Fleet Battle Manual (Gamescience/Lou Zocchi, 1977), magazines from the period, generic supplements such as the Spacefarers Guide to Planets Sector One (Phoenix Enterprises, 1979), the mini-game Star Explorer (FGU, 1982) and even a look at a little known Japanese SF consim, Star Trek: The Invasion of Klingon Empire (Tsukuda Hobby, 1982). I probably won't be talking much about the Star Fleet Universe of Task Force and ADB, again because they're so well-documented elsewhere.
And to spice things up, I'll occasionally drop in images and the occasional topic related to the Star Trek 25mm figure miniatures of Heritage, Citadel and FASA, as they were often tied to the games themselves.
So I hope you'll find this entertaining, and hope you'll come back. Oh, and speaking of pictures, here's a peek at that "tremendous find" I mentioned earlier, from 1983... more to come!
Friday, January 9, 2009
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Copycat! :P
ReplyDeleteSeriously, as someone who has never been that big of a fan of Trek, I find this to be very interesting. I dig learning about the history of games, so this is perfect.
> Copycat! :P
ReplyDeleteHey, I asked him if I could call it Groknardia, but the sound of crickets chirping made me reconsider (rightly so).
Glad you're interested. I told my wife that if pubs like Space Gamer or Different Worlds still existed, I would have finally found something worth writing up and submitting. Typical me, 20 years late to the party.
Hopefully this will be an even better format because it's more accessible and as I certainly don't know it all, others will have a chance to fill in the blanks. Besides, RPGnet turned down my submission for the game pictured above, the rarest one of all. English-only club, apparently. hmmph.
Cool idea for a blog! Though I have been looking for good solid info on Fasa Trek, and ADB SF Universe Quasi Trek, and outside of the odd barely inhabited forum mostly comprised of people who already know most of the stuff, I haven't been able to find much information at all!
ReplyDeleteThanks! Originally I hadn't planned on going too much into FASA, but the more I look over it all again, the more I enjoy it and see its strengths. Besides, once I get this early pre-1983 history out of the way, there wouldn't be much to say if I didn't start digging into the FASA years. One thing that's really bee enlightening is to re-read old magazines from the time, like Space Gamer and Different Worlds.
ReplyDeleteIn the meantime, check out the links to the left, especially Xon Gaming. No discussion there other than in associated Yahoo groups (and even then, mostly about STC), but it has a wickedly complete history of everything that was released (and even not released) by FASA for their Star Trek RPG.
I had the FASA rules in the eighties and the STIII update book. I liked the character generation process but with all those skills it was a bit overly involved. I enjoyed making up Kirk etc using the proper generation process since the pre-generated version always looked a bit too cheesy. A quick look at Thousand Suns suggests it is a nice simple system - the biggest criticisms in the review were that the game world was under-developed and skill rolls were quite hard.
ReplyDeleteOne problem I can foresee with a Trek-based system that uses low dice rolls/skill ranks is that the pcs will largely be choosing navy as a base profession and you can end up with very similar characters. I fumbled around with a Heroquest variant (similar system with % dice) but found a similar problem.
It looks like they use the broad headers e.g Technical Science, Engineering etc that the later versions of Trek RPGs used to try and reduce the subdivisions. I've only read a review of the TS system rather than the rulebook. The hooks are a great idea but I wonder if you could also use something akin to the D&D 4e PHBII background system? You can choose a (set?) number of backgrounds but only gain one tangible static benefit - typically a +2 bonus to a skill or something similar from one of the backgrounds. However, the system is free-form so you can ask your DM to give you a +1 on a roll if your background would cover it. So Sulu's background could include his postings and hobbies: Helmsman, Physicist, Fencer, Botanist with a +2 to the skill rating associated with being a helmsman as his most iconic role and +1 to starship weapons or starship tactics, physical or space sciences involving physics, life sciences involving botany, and melee involving fencing.