Just a quick entry for Auction of the Week, a little earlier than ususal. If you've been looking for this, I didn't want you to miss it:
STARFLEET VOYAGES
The Final Frontier holds Danger and Adventure for those who volunteer for STARFLEET VOYAGES!
A complete roleplaying system for interstellar adventure including a separate starship combat game with color counters.
Publisher Terra Games Company (1982), designed by Michael Scott (this copy signed by the designer!)
As briefly covered here in one of my first entries, Michael Scott Kurtick released this game, called Starfleet Voyages, which is esstentially the 4th and final version of Space Patrol. Which makes it sort of an 3rd version of Heritage's Star Trek: Adventure Gaming in the Final Frontier, and includes most of the same material but adds starship combat.
Despite it being a not-so-thinly-veiled unlicensed Star Trek game, I'd say it's arguably the best of his games in almost every respect. As any of them are notoriously difficult to find, this is a great opportunity to get your hands on one. Good luck!
Friday, March 13, 2009
Trek RPG Auction of the Week - 3/13/09
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Not-Trek
STARFLEET VOYAGES
Despite references to Klingons, the Romulan Star Empire, Gorn, Vulcans, disruptors, and the transporter... this is not Star Trek.
Starfleet Voyages includes rules for the Basic Game with a scenario called "The Shuttlecraft Crash", and an Advanced Game with a scenario called "The Slaver Ruins".
Despite the inclusion of these familiar scenarios, Starfleet Voyages is not Heritage's Star Trek: Adventure Gaming in the Final Frontier. For one thing, they've got the maps in the right order this time. And it's in a box that doesn't say "ⓒ Copyright Paramount Pictures Corporation" anywhere on it.
You get the idea. More at a much later time.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Heritage Models' Star Trek RPG - First Impressions
Welcome back. I'll start off with the first officially licensed Star Trek roleplaying game, Heritage Models' 1978 release of Star Trek: Adventure Gaming in the Final Frontier (STAGFF) by Michael Scott. Michael Scott is actually Michael Scott Kurtick, who co-authored Gamescience's 1977 releases Star Fleet Battle Manual wargame with Lou Zocchi and the Space Patrol RPG with Rockland Russo. Despite the use of the pen-name, the STAGFF rulebook does state that its rules are based on Space Patrol, and that the games can be used together. Kurtick would continue to revise and polish these rules over the years culminating with the 1982 Terra Games release of Starfleet Voyages. With the exception of STAGFF none of these were official Trek games per se, but its influence is obvious throughout, as we'll see throught the course of this blog.
In his 1982 Designer Notes (Space Gamer Issue#51) for the third iteration, Gamescience's Star Patrol, Kurtick talked about how Lou Zocchi had approached him in 1975 to create a "Star Trek D&D", and the potential pitfalls associated with it. In the end he and Russo decided to go broader, and Space Patrol was the result. But that was only the beginning, as he wrote:
"Soon after the publication of Space Patrol, I did get the chance to do a Star Trek role-playing game for Heritage, who had managed to acquire a license to do both games and figures. Star Trek: Adventure Gaming in the Final Frontier was essentially a clone of Space Patrol, concentrating on the elements of the Star Trek universe. The figures were poorly sculpted and the advertising campaign promised by Heritage never materialized. Paramount withdrew its license."
I'll return to the details of these other games in future updates, but that sets the stage of how STAGFF came to be published in 1978. There may be some truth to Kurtick's contention about publicity for the game. Looking back, I vaguely recall Heritage's 25mm Trek miniatures on the well-stocked shelves of my local game store at the time (Hobbyland North in Columbus, Ohio), but I never saw the rulebook (pictured above) there or at any other store, or at any of the science fiction conventions I attended at the time. I also can't find any advertisements in gaming magazines from the period, though I haven't combed through them extensively. Fortunately, someone invented a time-travel device called the internet, and I was able to obtain the game through the wonderful folks at Noble Knight Games.
Once I had STAGFF, I was almost afraid to open it. Some has been written about the game -- virtually none of it flattering -- on RPGnet and other gaming forums, and it even has an extensive entry in Wikipedia. I was prepared for the worst, especially in light of the primitive layout and typography typical of so many games at the time. The cardstock cover is certainly not very inspiring, though no worse than many Trek fanzines and game supplements of the period.
Imagine my surprise (go ahead, I'll wait) to find that the STAGFF rulebook is rather attractive, easy to read and at first glance appears to be fairly well-organized (although the "Index" at the back is really a Table of Contents, which should have been my first clue of trouble ahead). In fact, the layout reminds me very much of one of my favorite RPGs, Metagaming's 1980 The Fantasy Trip releases. It was certainly an improvement over the layout of Space Patrol.
The rules are divided into two sections: an 11 page Basic Game (4 pages of which are mostly tables and pre-defined character stats), and over 20 pages of Advanced Game rules and tables. There are virtually no graphics with the exception of two maps, confusingly listed as "Basic Game Scenario Map" and "Advanced Game Scenario Map". Confusing because the layout of the two maps is swapped and, further, the Advanced Game Scenario itself is placed back to back with the Basic Game Scenario before the Advanced Rules have even been detailed. Mr. Spock does not find the layout of the rules at all logical. He does, however, appreciate the inclusion of the blank 1/4" hex paper at the back, because I suspect we'll be wanting to create more interesting missions than those provided.
The Index details how the rules are broken down, and what is covered:
The first things that jump out are what is missing: Space Exploration. Starship Combat. The Enterprise itself. Even the UFP and the Prime Directive are only mentioned in passing ("You may have realized that the players of a scenario do not have to be Star Fleet crewmembers... Think how nice it would be sometime to be able to solve a problem technologically and not be hampered by the Prime Directive restricting your every action." ugh!).
The starship omissions struck me as the most unusual, and I wondered if it were perhaps due to some type of licensing limitation. I believe Lou Zocchi had already released his Star Fleet Battle Manual and miniatures at that point, but those appear to fall under that grey area of "under license from Franz Joseph Designs" and the Star Fleet Technical Manual. In addition STAGFF's parent, Space Patrol, suffered from the same weakness.
In the end it was likely considered unnecessary because (as the final section of the rulebook reminds us) the game's real purpose was to help sell Heritage's line of 25mm Star Trek miniatures, which I'll discuss soon. Before that, however, we'll go back a year and examine Space Patrol, its mechanics and Trek references in it that helped form Star Trek: Adventure Gaming in the Final Frontier. I'll return to STAGFF for a closer look at its rules and a playtest in the near future.
Friday, January 9, 2009
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!
