Trek RPG Blog Roundup

Blog entries of note related to Star Trek gaming:

- Adam's Barking Alien moves forward with his Gaming the Final Frontier series, with "Strange New World" on how to structure a Trek campaign, and notes that he'll be running a new campaign soon.
- On Monsters and Manuals, Noism ponders the eternal question, "Why are we satisfied with substandard Trek role playing games, dammit?"
- Review of the new Continuum Edition Star Trek Monopoly by yours truly coming up on Star Trek Games in the next day or so, along with a contest to win it (the game, not the website)!

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Homebrewed Star Trek RPG Adaptations (Part 2)

If there's anything more numerous than commercial adaptations of Star Trek as a role-playing game (Part 1 of this series), it's homebrewed versions and resources written by fans, doing it for themselves using their favorite system.

There's also a lot of them called Final Frontier (guilty as charged).

This is by no means a comprehensive list. In the last post, readers mentioned a homebrew based on R. Talsorian Games' Interlock system, I thought I'd read of one using Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing and I'm sure there are many that never got posted to the Internet at all. D6, Unisystem, Action!... after finding all of these, I suspect there have been nearly as many custom Star Trek games as there have been generic RPG systems.

If you're just interested in converting from a licensed system to one of your favorites, a good place to start is where Owen E. Oulton (of Memory Icon) created a System Conversion Table as part of his own Star Trek Universe campaign. It features guidelines on conversion between various game systems such as ICON (Last Unicorn Games' Trek RPG), FASA's Trek (2E), Traveller (various), GURPS, Star Wars (D6), GDW's "House Rules" system (as used in Twilight: 2000 and Traveller: The New Era) and Babylon 5 (Chameleon Eclectic's The Babylon Project RPG).

But if you're looking for complete conversions by a man who knows his stuff, then you should head directly to the site of the Original Final Frontiers, that of Bob Portnell, King of Star Trek Homebrews (my words, not his). Like me, Bob's love of adventure gaming goes back to The Fantasy Trip and, like me, is "one of the last of the Baby Boomers or the first of Gen X, depending on whose math you use" (his words, not mine). He has not only written extensively about RPGs, but went on to team up with Guy McLimore and Greg Poehlein (co-authors of FASA's Star Trek The Role Playing Game) to co-author the Simply Roleplaying! game as part of their MicroTactix Games endeavor in 1999.

And when it comes to writing Trek games, Bob's got 17 years under his belt so far. In addition to resources like Speed-Trek (notes for faster character creation in FASA's Trek RPG), Bob has written a number of Trek homebrews ("I've been writing Star Trek rules for so long, I can't stop!" he says). While he's working on finishing EZFudge Final Frontier, you can check out his PlainLabel Final Frontier for the Simply Roleplaying! system (core SR! rules free from DriveThruRPG).

Bob's also done two versions of Final Frontier for 3E versions of Steve Jackson Games' GURPS: GURPS Final Frontier (160k zip file with HTML and TXT), and the more compact Final Frontier (2.1 zip with PDFs) based on GURPS Lite, which is included. His GURPS page includes some other resources as well.

I have to say that I really like FF for GURPS Lite (and I'm not at all fond of full-blown GURPS). It's very self contained, well-written and produced, and it's the one version out of all these games that I talk about -- pro or home -- that I would grab for a pick up session or to introduce someone new to RPGs through Trek. Bob's great strength in all of these is that he focuses on the elements that are most like Trek on the screen, and he presents it succinctly. The rules never get in the way, but his approach is not that of narrative games. The tools he provides give players the ability to quickly learn then play a game in the Trek universe that balances cinematic with (not against) realism. That's a hell of an achievement for free games, and similar to the model we've seen executed with the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy series. I'm planning on interviewing Bob here in the near future.

Curiously, there's a number of other homebrews that have been based on the GURPS system over the years:

GURPS Trek - The Unauthorized Sourcebook was a popular homebrew for GURPS 2E from 1996; "Mr. B's" original pages (text file format) can be found here and elsewhere.

GURPS Star Trek (for GURPS 3E?) features pages of races, starships, equipment and campaign notes (note, however, that the links to the Online Character Generator are broken).

GURPS Trek at the Traditional Games Wiki (GURPS 4E) provides a lot of stats, but is unfinished and hasn't been updated in 2 years.

If GURPS isn't your thing, there's Spirit of the Final Frontier, based on Evil Hat's pulp adventure RPG Spirit of the Century, which is not to be confused with Spirit of the 24th Century which ran at a few cons, but is also based on the FateRPG system, which itself is based on Fudge... feel free to stop me at any time. And check out the separate Evil Hat Productions Wiki entry on "Pulp Characters from Books, Movies, etc".

Star Trek for the D20 System is an active Yahoo Group focused on (what else?) adapting the series for D20-based systems such as d20, d20 Modern, PD, True20 and more. There's a number of resources here, though only one completed set of rules which can also be found at...
TrekRPG.info, which hasn't been updated in awhile, but features conversion notes for the d20 System, a downloadable draft of d20 Warp, and links to a Traveller: The New Era adaptation called STrav 3 TNE (thanks to Jerry for the pointer).

WOTC's Alternity still lives on the web, and Scott Metz posted his notes about adapting Trek to the system.

Star Trek: Savage Worlds (1.6MB zip file) adapts Trek for Pinnacle Entertainment Group's Savage Worlds RPG, and features a character sheet, edges, weapons and equipment (requires MS Excel). Groknard reader steveraceuk is in the process of taking it a step further at his Savage Star Trek wiki.

Epoch is a wholly original homebrew system by Jonathan Clarke that's closely based on Star Trek, and focuses less on technology and more on a cinematic feel. It uses a D6 dice-pool system, and even provides guidelines for starship combat.

COSMIQUEST! The Very Final Regurgitation is a Risus-based parody of Star Trek by Guy Hoyle with a small set of guidelines for charcater cliches, technology and adventure seeds. There was another Risus-based Trek parody by "Dr Rotwang" (of the blog I Waste The Buddha With My Crossbow), but it's long gone and he doesn't seem to mind, but has posted some new ideas (that still verge on parody).

Speaking of parodies, I should mention Twerps Twek based TWERPS, "The World's Easiest Role Playing System" by Jeff and 'Manda Dee. Twerps Twek (Campaign Module 7) was by Jon Hancock and Niels Erickson and published by Gamescience in the early 90s. To sum up, it came with "the complete stat" for classic NPCs such as Yeoman Randy Jan and Loquacious of the Bore. This was a commercial product (check eBay or Noble Knight Games) so perhaps doesn't belong here, but I was going to have to mention it in this blog sometime. Mission accomplished.

Another "commercial homebrew" has been announced, this time as "Trek with the serial-numbers-filed-off" for Mongoose's Traveller. Gareth-Michael Skarka of Adamant Entertainment has said that he's working on Final Frontier: The Unauthorized Sourcebook to the World's Most Popular SF TV Franchise, described as a "set of rules and guidelines that will allow you to play races such as the Logical Psions, face off against Swarthy Aggressors, enter careers which represent the various service devisions within the Fleet, and boldly go across the galaxy using space-warp FTL engines." This I'd like to see because I've yet to see a Trek adaptation for Classic Traveller, and CT and MGT are pretty close.

Perhaps the most recent and disturbing homebrew is based on WOTC's D&D4E. Although I can see the appeal of a cross-genre "phasers vs. magic" style adventure, the conversion only provides stats for four characters: Kirk (Leader), Spock (Controller), McCoy (Defender) and Sulu (Striker). Furthermore, the powers are all combat oriented (i.e., the At-Will "Vulcan Nerve Pinch"), making Dungeons & Dragons: Final Frontier not very Trekish at all, and a rather foolish endeavor.

Finally (probably not!), there's my own totally non-commercial please-don't-sue-me venture, Thousand Suns: Final Frontier (35 pages, 1.7MB zipped PDF). It's only a preview version from December '08, but I've come a long way since "The Universe Trip" edition of 1981. Still, I'm not sure where I'm going to go with this. Since starting this blog, I'm asking myself, "Does the community really need another RPG based on Star Trek? Especially a homebrew focused on TOS? Especially called Final Frontier??"

Probably not. But I can't help but think that when the new film comes out, some people are going to turn their eyes back to Star Trek and think, "Hell, yeah, I want to play that!" And I love the idea of a Trek game based on Thousand Suns, one that takes place in a period not so constrained by the dreaded "Trek canon", where the future is wide open.

Perhaps, I'm thinking, I should be looking forward as much as I'm looking back...

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ADDENDUM #1: I completely forgot one that's the most current of all -- Federal Space (link to wiki). Federal Space is a unique group project started by some folks on RPG.net, and is described as "a decidedly non-canonical spin on the familiar Star Trek universe, refracted through a lens of harder science and (hopefully) more consistent worldbuilding... it's Star Trek: Stand Alone Complex, or Star Trek run at GURPS TL10 (hard science path) instead of TL12 (with superscience), or a pacifistic version of Star Fleet Battles, or simply 'Star Trek with hats.'"

Not my cup of tea, but still, it belongs here more than TWERPS Twek.

ADDENDUM #2: Jerry (below) mentions the FASA Trek Sourcebook for Hero System (5th ed.), at the Star Hero Fandom website, which also includes TNG Hero for the TNG/DS9 era. Very extensive work and templates for Hero Designer software.

ADDENDUM #3: Probably my last update (4/8/09) as this could go on forever, far longer than anyone will actually look at this post! Mike Berkey has composed some rulesets called Where No Man Has Gone Before based on the TOS setting. This is an exceptionally cool document and full of great ideas and random tables (examples: "First Beam In Location", "
Random Interior Set Generator") useful to anyone interested in Trek RPGs, regardless of system. Version 2.0 is the most recent, and based on the Microlite20 system. Version 1.0 is more heavily drawn from d20Modern. Seriously, check it out now, it's a really fun read.

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