One thing I wanted to accomplish with the recent Character Creation Challenge was to create characters that I could use in my War of the Witch Queens campaign AND get ideas for a multiverse of witches.
But that is not the only thing I wanted from it.
I also wanted to see the differences between various Star Trek-like systems in order to find good NPC for my BlackStar and Star Trek: Mercy games.
Of course, my main source is going to be the challenge founder Carl Stark at Tardis Captain's blog (and of course his Star Trek RPG page).
- FASA Trek
- Frontier Space
- Star Trek Adventures
- Far Trek
- Star Trek RPG (Last Unicorn)
- FASA Doctor Who
- Prime Directive
- Star Trek RPG (Decipher)
- Starships & Spacemen
- Where No Man Has Gone Before
Reading through all of these (and it has been great!) I am more convinced now that my Star Trek Mercy game needs to be a FASA Trek game while BlackStar can be something else; most likely Star Trek Adventures.
Star Trek: Mercy
As I have mentioned previously Star Trek Mercy will take place aboard a Federation Hospital Ship. Its mission is a bit like Doctors Without Borders; they fly into dangerous situations with the goal of helping. While it is a Federation/Starfleet ship I am going to open up character choices to any and all Star Trek races. So humans, Vulcans, Andorians will be expected, but also Romulans, Klingons, Deltans, even Gorn, and Orions if someone can give me a good reason. These crew will not be members of Starfleet, they still belong to their respective worlds, but I also have to, want to, work within canon.
For this, a few guidelines are needed. No Klingon Starfleet officers. Worf was the first and the Federation and the Klingon Empire are at a period of cooled tensions. They are not allies per see, but they are also not shooting at each other. We know from the TNG episode "The Neutral Zone" that Romulans have not had any relations with the Federation since the Tomed Incident of 2311. There is still a Romulan Ambassador on Earth in 2293. That gives me 18 years' worth of gameplay.
I stated in my first post on this that 2295 would be a good year to set this in. Seems like I was on to something. I can even use the Plasma Plague of 2294 as the first mission of the Mercy. We even get a Stardate for it, 38235.3, though that date can't really work for 2294, it doesn't even work well for The Original Series Stardates. That date gives you Wed Feb 24 2360 for TNG and Tue Oct 28 2279 for TOS. Might need to use the FASA Trek Stardate calculations to make this one work!
Also since this is FASA Trek I can borrow some ideas from The Next Generation Officer's Manual. In particular, the notion that there were a bunch of different uniforms in use. Gives me an excuse to use the ones I want. These would be new here and old by the time the USS Protector and the Mystic-class ships roll out.
I am going to need a new ship design too.
What would also be nice is to work in some Original Series Apocrphya into my game; Saavik being half-Vulcan/half-Romulan, Chekov working for Starfleet Intelligence and a touring Chess Master (loosing to the Betazoids), Scotty as a Professor of Engineering at Starfleet Academy before getting lost near a Dyson Sphere in 2294, Sulu as the Captain of the Excelsior and Harriman as Captain of the Enterprise B. Uhura as Demora Sulu's Godmother. I would also like to find out more about Lt. Elise McKennah, played by Michele Specht in Star Trek Continues.
McCoy becoming an admiral, Spock continuing his role as Federation Ambassador, and Kirk disappearing on the Enterprise B. Though those are not really disputed.
I like this idea since it is also the first Trek game my Star Trek loving wife has mentioned she would like to play.