So what kind of game am I running?

So what kind of game am I running?

That’s a great question, and I’m so glad you asked. I wouldn’t have put together two entire blog posts about the Last Unicorn Games Star Trek rpg unless I planned on actually running a game and putting the system through its paces on the table.

At the time of this writing, I’m four episodes into a Star Trek:  The Next Generation campaign set in the year 2380 aboard the Excelsior-class USS Fearless.  I’ve got five PCs who are playing the pre-generated characters from LUG’s TNG core book, and I kicked the campaign off with a modified version of the adventure also included in the book.

I’m shooting for a tone heavy on political intrigue, murky ethical dilemmas and character arcs. If I do it right, it should feel a lot like if Deep Space 9 had taken place on a starship.  That said, I definitely intend to throw in a heaping helping of strange new worlds and big sci-fi concepts to keep things firmly rooted in Star Trek’s optimistic view of the future.

Here’s the status quo for my crew:  Following the events of the film Star Trek Nemesis, during which the Romulan government was crippled by Shinzon’s coup, Starfleet has assigned the Fearless to patrol the Arteline Sector along the Romulan Neutral Zone. The chaos roiling Romulan space has put the entire Alpha Quadrant on high alert, and the Fearless has a front-row seat to all the drama.

The Fearless, herself, is an aging vessel. Her deck plates rattle when she goes to warp, and her finicky engines run on patience and ingenuity as much as antimatter.  Yet she’s a vessel with a proud history, serving valiantly during the Dominion War and virtually every other major Starfleet conflict of the last five decades. 

To form the political backdrop for the campaign, I’ve cannibalized a bunch of ideas from Nemesis, from various LUG source books and from a few handpicked Star Trek novels. Sometime soon, I’ll put together a dossier outlining some particulars of the Romulan political situation. It might be of interest to someone out there in internet land. But, even if it’s not, it would be helpful for me to have that information spelled out and clear in my own brain.

My decision to go with a post-Nemesis era series allows us to forge ahead without much concern for violating on-screen canon. The Fearless is free to participate in quadrant-shaping events without any possibility of stepping on the toes of the TV episodes or films. And, as I said in my first post, even if Nemesis leaves something to be desired as a movie, its aftermath sets up an intriguing status quo that I want to explore.

I think it’s safe to say my gaming group is having a good time so far. They’ve gotten into some mischief with the Tal Shiar along the Neutral Zone, and they’ve unearthed a powerful Iconian artificial intelligence known as Conduit. They’ve flirted with Orion dancers and haggled with shady Ferengi merchants. Next episode, they’ll search for a Romulan Bird of Prey that went missing near a massive black hole.

You know, all the normal stuff people do on the Final Frontier.