Welcome!

"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!

But wait! There's more.....