LUG lessons for Star Trek Adventures

LUG lessons for Star Trek Adventures

One of the highlights of 2016 for me was finishing a 12-session Star Trek campaign using the Icon System developed by Last Unicorn Games. As the campaign neared its close, news broke that Modiphius was developing the first new officially licensed Star Trek tabletop rpg in over a decade. Even better, the developer plans to open up a free playtest, which will give all of us a good idea of how Modiphius will adapt its 2d20 system to the Final Frontier.

So, in this season of transitions, with a LUG Trek campaign completed and a brand-new system on the horizon, it’s an auspicious time to reflect on the campaign-that-was. Modiphius can learn a lot from LUG Trek but should also take care to avoid some of the unwieldy mistakes made in previous iterations of the game.

Lesson 1:  Keep LUG’s emphasis on making each session an “episode.” 

Tabletop rpgs carry a lot of baggage associated with how you tell stories. Crack open nearly any volume on how to be a game master, and you’ll likely run across advice on balancing “encounter difficulty” and how dole out “experience points” appropriately. Those gaming conventions carry little meaning to Star Trek storytelling, and LUG did a tremendous job of replacing those terms with discussions of scenes and acts, concepts much more in keeping with how Star Trek unfolds on television and movies screens.

Modiphius would do well to follow in LUG’s footsteps in encouraging GMs to try to create the sense that each player is participating in an episode of Star Trek. It sounds simple, but it requires a lot of gamers to jettison some of the tropes that have congealed around tabletop rpgs over the decades.

So what does this look like at the table?

I broke down each session of my most recent Star Trek campaign into three acts. I didn’t do this in a film-school or scriptwriter sort of way.  Rather, I simply jotted down a scene or two that establishes a conflict in the first act, takes an interesting turn in the second act and then winds up with a climax and falling action in the third act. So my session prep was basically jotting down a few ideas on three notecards. I found that this was just enough to give me a map of the story while still opening up possibilities for improvisation.

On the other hand, I found that it was pretty much always a waste of time to consider “gamey’ concepts such as encounter challenge and combat difficulty. Level-appropriate combat doesn’t warrant consideration in Star Trek. Instead, replace that mindset with “drama-appropriate” challenges. That is, what sort of challenges create the most compelling drama?

I hope Modiphius carries that mindset over from previous iterations of Star Trek rpgs.

Lesson 2:  Keep character generation flavorful but craft a more elegant skill system

LUG Trek features a TON of skills, and many of them come with several specializations. That requires a lot of writing when players are filling out their character sheets. And the default LUG character sheets don’t offer enough space for all the skills you’re likely to rack up during character generation.

The good news is that the detailed skills system allows you to create hyper-competent PCs that feel like they belong on the bridge of a starship. The bad news is that it’s often too unwieldy to wade through all the options. I would urge Modiphius to find a way to simplify the skill system while maintaining the ability to craft characters with the appropriate intelligence and abilities of trained Starfleet officers.

How do you balance those factors? I suspect the trick lies in slashing the number of skills available and making them more broadly usable. That way, PCs remain every bit as competent as we’d expect, but our hands won’t start to cramp up when we fill out our character sheets.

Lesson 3:  Make combat short and narrative-driven

Star Trek often relies on action scenes and combat to tell exciting adventure stories on the final frontier. So a Star Trek rpg absolutely should feature robust action and combat rules. But, while action is certainly an important ingredient, it’s far from the only one that makes Star Trek such a delicious soufflé.

Think of how much screen time Star Trek has devoted to action scenes versus how much time the franchise devotes to scenes that hinge on sharp dialogue, drama or characters wrestling with difficult decisions. A session of a Star Trek rpg should reflect those story-telling principles.

I would also encourage Modiphius to meld the action and combat mechanics with narrative. Previous Modiphius games have done so, utilizing the company’s 2d20 system to lend action scenes a ‘cinematic’ quality. Modiphius has already announced plans to use a modified version of the 2d20 system for Star Trek Adventures. I only hope they do so in a way that feels in keeping with traditional Star Trek flavor.

Finally, I want to address starship combat, another essential aspect of Star Trek storytelling that LUG got wrong.  When it comes to ship-to-ship engagements, game designers need to stress speed and ease of use when crafting mechanics. I can’t stress that enough.

In the campaign that I recently wrapped up, I largely avoided large-scale starship combat simply because it takes so long and ends up feeling repetitive using the Icon System.  A more cinematic style, as 2d20 purports to be, would improve that aspect of the game immensely.  I don’t want to have to teach ops or engineering officers to track energy units or power output. That’s boring and a waste of precious gaming time. Rather, focus on the dynamic aspects of starship combat that we see on screen:  evasive maneuvers, phasers, disruptors, photon (or quantum) torpedoes, consoles exploding and deck plates quaking. Stopping the action to worry about making sure the lateral or long-range sensors are powered this round takes away from what the characters are feeling and experiencing.

In the end, I really enjoyed the LUG campaign that I ran this year. I had a blast playing around in the Star Trek universe, and I think my players did too. But, as the campaign wore on, I found myself growing more frustrated with some of LUG Trek’s more cumbersome mechanical features. For instance, I usually love creating NPCs, but having to fill out those character sheets became a daunting task. 

I’m confident Modiphius will improve on many of those trouble spots. I can’t wait to playtest Star Trek Adventures!

Captain's Log: Ep. 3, 'Simulations'

Here's a quick summary of the third session of the Star Trek tabletop rpg campaign I'm currently running. You can find the summary of the previous episode here.


The Fearless warped back to Starbase 39-Sierra for a full debriefing with Fleet Admiral Elsa Kiel. During the two-day return voyage, Dr. Vasor, Lt. Pus and Lt. Cmdr. Aliok managed to repair the torn psyche of Tyrion through the therapeutic use of a bridged mind meld. With Tyrion’s sanity restored, she revealed that former Senator Pardek is the new director of the Tal Shiar. When Tyrion contacted Pardek several weeks ago for help as her psychological conditioning unraveled, Pardek summarily discontinued her mission, essentially cutting her off from any official Romulan help. Tyrion has vowed vengeance and is seeking to return to Romulus to kill Pardek for abandoning her in her time of need.

Meanwhile, T’Thetrik administered a truth serum to the Psellan the crew captured on Mount Soverin and learned that he is actually Tovik, a Tal Shiar agent known by the codename Proteus. Tovik admitted that the Tal Shiar is interested in recovering Iconian technology for military use.  He also suggested that Conduit may be trying to reach the Eye of Vendris, a large black hole deep in Romulan Space.

Captain Eldred, after a lengthy conversation with the crew, decided to turn over to Starfleet Intelligence the Tal Shiar agents captured on Psellus III. But Lt. McClure warned that Commander DeLeo, the chief intelligence officer on Starbase 39-Sierra, may be a member of Section 31, prompting Eldred to decide to keep Tyrion’s presence on the Fearless a secret.

Upon arrival at Starbase 39-Sierra, the Fearless was ordered to engage in a battle simulation with the USS Venture, a Galaxy-class Starfleet vessel commanded by Captain Elliot Gannon. Before the simulated battle, Skavrin, a first cousin of Jak vin Karka, arrived on the Fearless, demanding that Jak return to their home colony on Landis VI to marry a man from a rival political faction. Commander DeLeo also contacted Lt. McClure asking pointedly if Captain Eldred left anything important out of her report. DeLeo seemed to imply that McClure owed something to “the organization” and made reference to something called Mjolnir.

The Fearless and Venture engaged in their war game, exchanging phaser fire and photon torpedoes for several minutes before McClure and Lt. Korudos beamed over to the Venture in an attempt to sabotage their opponent’s main computer core. McClure scaled a turbolift shaft to reach the computer core but failed to hack into the mainframe before he was apprehended by the Venture’s security team.

With both ships badly damaged, the Fearless came about at maximum impulse, nearly skimming the top of the Venture’s saucer section in a gutsy feat of piloting. T’Thetrik locked all weapons on the Venture. But as Pus established a sensor lock, he made a surprising discovery. Internal sensors had detected an intruder in the Fearless’s brig.

The Eye of Vendris

The last session went so well that I decided to try something I've never done before and type up my prep notes into a fully formed module. If you happen to be running a Star Trek rpg campaign, feel free to take this text and adapt it to your own game.

For more info on the particulars of my campaign, read this.  I hereby present "The Eye of Vendris."

Introduction
This adventure presents a sci-fi-flavored sandbox for a Federation starship to explore and is written to fit circumstances arising from the author’s home game, which uses the Icon System from the Star Trek rpg created by Last Unicorn Games. The text assumes the crew has had prior dealings with an Iconian artificial intelligence known as Conduit and that the crew has been invited into Romulan space to investigate the threat.

However, it wouldn’t take very much work on the part of the narrator to adapt the material if those two hooks don’t apply to your particular campaign. 

Simply move the Eye of Vendris to a sector of space that fits your game, and replace the Romulan ships and characters with a more appropriate species. It’s your game, after all.

Just keep in mind that the thrill of the adventure arises from exploring an unusual star system that contains both natural wonders and deadly dangers.

With the themes of exploration and discovery at the core of the adventure, narrators should feel free to change any of the details as they see fit.

Summary
An Iconian artificial intelligence known as Conduit has taken over a small archaeology outpost on a dead planet near the Eye of Vendris, a black hole that makes up part of a dead binary star system. Conduit killed the Romulan archaeologists who tried to resist her and disabled a Romulan warbird sent to investigate the incursion.

Now, Conduit has asked specifically for the USS Fearless, the Starfleet vessel that discovered and revived her a week ago, to join her on Vendris Corva II.

When the Fearless arrives, Conduit asks for the crew’s help to find an ancient Iconian artifact in the debris field that surrounds the Eye of Vendris. Locating the artifact will allow her to reopen an Iconian gateway and rejoin her people, who disappeared from the galaxy 200,000 years ago.

Will the crew help Conduit and brave the unknowns of the Eye of Vendris? Or will they make a daring attempt to resist the immensely powerful artificial intelligence and risk falling victim to the same fate as the doomed Romulan research team?

The Setting
The adventure takes place in a binary star system deep in Romulan space.  Half of the region is composed of the Vendris Corva system, which is a star orbited by seven dead planets. The Romulans have established a domed archaeological outpost on Vendris Corva II to excavate ancient Iconian artifacts. The remaining planets in the system are barren.

The Eye of Vendris, a powerful black hole, forms the other half of the binary system. A massive debris field encircles the black hole, providing evidence that a solar system once existed there but was destroyed in some cataclysmic event.

A tether formed by stellar material from the Vendris Corva star connects the two halves of the binary system. The Eye of Vendris possesses such powerful gravimetric force that it attracts mass from the Vendris Corva star, forming a breathtaking strand of silver energy that constantly links the star to the black hole.  

NOTE TO NARRATORS:  A prudent crew likely would proceed directly to Conduit’s last known location on Vendris Corva II at the start of the adventure, but make it clear to the PCs that they are free to explore the binary system in whatever order they choose. This is a sandbox adventure, and narrators should give their players as much choice as possible in how they explore the setting. The encounters detailed in the following sections can occur in any order.

Exploring The Vendris Corva System
The system contains a star (Vendris Corva) and seven planets, all of which are lifeless chunks of rock that lack atmosphere. A successful sensors test could determine that at least some of the planets once boasted an atmosphere and perhaps even supported life, but the system has been devoid of life for at least 200,000 years.

The only planet of note is Vendris Corva II, where the Romulans have established a domed archaeological outpost to study Iconian ruins located there. As the crew nears Vendris Corva II, scans indicate no life signs in the archaeological facility. The artificial atmosphere has been vented into space, and there are no heat signatures. Sensors, however, do pick up the presence of a Federation shuttle parked on the planet’s surface adjacent to the dome.

No shields or screens appear to prevent transport, so it’s likely the crew will send an away team to investigate the facility. Because the dome’s atmosphere has been vented, the away team will need to wear environmental suits.

Under the dome
The archaeological facility consists of a large circular area of several acres enclosed in a transparent dome. The Romulan research team constructed a central building for living quarters and laboratory equipment, which is surrounded by exposed rock where the digging took place. If the away team beams down inside the dome but not directly inside the laboratory building, they discover an eerily quiet scene. 

Deep shadows shroud the dig site, and the artificial lights placed throughout the facility are dark. Various tools and equipment lie scattered throughout the dig site.

The Romulan archaeologists laid out the dig site in a grid structure, gradually excavating the gray rock one layer at a time. It’s clear they took care to conduct their work in a meticulous and exact manner. Examining the dig site reveals little of value.  Most of the digging turned up ancient Iconian foundations, but the buildings that once stood here disappeared long ago. Additionally, it looks like any valuable Iconian artifacts were either taken into the laboratory building or transported back to Romulus.

A grisly scene awaits the crew as they approach the central laboratory complex. The six Romulan archaeologists who worked on the site lie dead near the main hatch, which is wide open. The archaeologists’ eyes bulge and their mouths hang wide open, looks of terror frozen on their faces. A tricorder scan confirms what the crew probably suspects:  the Romulans died from exposure to the vacuum. They died weeks ago, but their corpses are well preserved.

Inside the complex
The hatch leads to an open airlock, which grants the away team access to the interior of the building. Inside the complex, the away team finds more eerie silence. Life support is no longer operating, and the scientific equipment has been powered down. A tricorder scan will pick up some sort of power supply in the very center of the complex, which appears to be an administrative office with sensor and communications technology.

To get there, however, the crew will have to pass through some darkened labs and living quarters. Someone seems to have removed any important Iconian artifacts from the labs, but the personal effects in the living quarters appear untouched. 

SECRET:  If the crew rummages through the belongings in the living quarters, they discover a PADD-like device that appears to have some sort of security lockout installed. A challenging computer test unlocks the padd’s data and reveals that one of the archeaologist was actually a Tal Shiar agent named Valtath, assigned to monitor the dig for Pardek, the director of the Tal Shiar. The padd contains intelligence updates on the political situation on Romulus. Valtath appears to have been particularly concerned with the upcoming release of a Reman political prisoner named Galamek. According to the most recent Tal Shiar intelligence, Galamek has set up a headquarters in an abandoned dilithium mine deep inside the interior of Remus. He’s made no official statements, but the Tal Shiar suspects that he’s organizing a Reman separatist movement that aims to establish a new Reman homeworld outside of Romulan space.

At the very center of the complex, the away team will find a small administrative center. This room contains controls for a modest sensor array and communications equipment that allowed the archaeologists to communicate with Romulus. Conduit awaits the crew here. She has rigged an Iconian artifact, presumably unearthed by the archaeologists, to power the outpost’s sensor array and boost its range and gain. The artifact looks like a pulsing blue globe with Iconian script etched into its solid surface.

Conduit has the appearance of a small humanoid girl, about the age of 10. Her face appears expressionless, and her eyes look cold and completely black. As the away team enters the administrative room, Conduit turns to observe them but quickly returns to her work with the sensor array.

Roleplaying Conduit
Conduit is an artificial intelligence created by the Iconians 200,000 years ago as a weapon in a war with an unknown foe. Iconians often used computer viruses as a means of crippling the technologies employed by their enemies (as depicted in the TNG episode ‘Contagion’), and Conduit’s creators outfitted her with a combination of technological and telepathic capabilities. Essentially, she possesses the ability to infect hostile technology with computer viruses that allow her to take control via telepathy.

The Iconians constructed her but never brought her online. Instead, they abandoned the facility where she was built shortly before their entire race disappeared from the historical record. After being awakened recently, Conduit has instinctively returned to this ancient Iconian facility in an attempt to find her people.

She speaks in a mechanical monotone and seems to have little empathy for the other intelligent beings she’s encountered. Conduit experiences emotions, but she has no idea how to process them. This might cause her to stutter or display a facial tic if the away team makes any sort of emotional appeal to her. Conduit’s programming compels her to reunite with the Iconians, and she refers to anyone or anything that presents an obstacle as ‘the enemy.’

In fact, Conduit may calmly recount to the away team how the Romulan archaeologists resisted her takeover of the outpost. In response, she locked them out of the administration room, vented the atmosphere from the dome and blew open the airlocks. The violent decompression blasted the Romulans out of the facility, where they died of exposure.

She explains that the black hole referred to as the ‘Eye of Vendris’ formed after the ancient Iconians used an enhanced version of their gateway technology to transform a star into a portal leading to a pocket dimension. The Iconians, tired of war and conflict in the Milky Way, decided that complete isolation from other species would free them to pursue cultural perfection. Conduit intends to reopen the gateway and rejoin the Iconians in their pocket dimension, and she asks for the help of the Fearless crew.

The Romulan archaeologists recovered the energy storage orb that Conduit is currently using to power the outpost’s sensors. To open the gateway again, she’ll need a matching orb that has gone missing somewhere near the Eye of Vendris. She says that she can sense its proximity, but its exact location is veiled from her. If the Fearless can locate the matching energy orb, Conduit will reopen the portal. If the crew refuses to help her, she’ll simply use her computer virus technology to send the Fearless, and any other ships that make the mistake of getting too close, into the gravimetric maelstrom of the Eye of Vendris.

Player choice
This module assumes the crew will do Conduit’s bidding and help her find the missing power storage orb. They may resist Conduit, however. If they can come up with a clever way around Conduit’s powerful telepathic and technological capabilities, let it play out.

Conduit does have a weakness that a sharp crew may exploit. Although she can read minds and perhaps even cause mental pain to her enemies if she wishes, her physical capabilities fall far short of her mental capacity. An attempt to physically overwhelm her or render her unconscious may succeed.  In such a scenario, Conduit would try to turn any technology present against her accosters. For instance, she might suddenly beam back aboard her shuttle and escape. Or she might cause a PC’s phaser to suddenly begin to overload.

Exploring the Eye of Vendris
The binary system that contains the Eye of Vendris contains several strange phenomena that could create interesting encounters for the crew of the Fearless as they explore the area.

Stellar material
The powerful gravitational pull of the Eye of Vendris rips away stellar material from the Vendris Corva star. This material forms a tether of raw energy that connects the star with the black hole as they orbit one another. A sensor scan of the tether will turn up six large space-bound creatures that appear to feed off the stellar matter. If the Fearless approaches the creatures for a closer look, they’ll leave the tether behind and try to attach themselves to the ship. These creatures resemble giant worms, and they travel at a maximum of .3c. If they successfully attach themselves to hull of the ship, they begin draining its power. The crew can escape the creatures simply by moving away at high impulse or any warp speed. They can also attack the creatures with weapons, but that will almost certainly kill these surprisingly fragile creatures.

If the Fearless begins the adventure by exploring Vendris Corva II, it might make sense for the ship to encounter the space worms next as it travels toward the Eye of Vendris. This makes sense spatially and it also foreshadows a later part of the adventure.

The Valdore
When Conduit took over the Vendris Corva II facility, Romulan Star Command dispatched the warbird Valdore to investigate the situation and retake the dig site. With a simple wave of her hand, however, Conduit disabled the Valdore’s engines and sent it slowly drifting toward the Eye of Vendris’s event horizon. The subspace interference from the black hole has prevented Commander Donatra, the warbird’s CO, from communicating with Romulus.

Donatra dispatched a shuttle to call for help, but the the region’s powerful gravimetric shearing tore the small craft apart shortly after launch. Left with few options, Donatra has decided to wait for help to arrive. She’s worked with Captain Riker of the USS Titan before, and she has little trouble accepting help from a Starfleet vessel.

The Fearless most likely will have to use its tractor beam to pull the Valdore clear of the Eye of Vendris and Conduit’s influence. Because of the region’s gravimetric interference, the tactical officer will have to work closely with engineering to boost the gain of the tractor beam while taking care not to pull the Valdore’s hull beyond its tolerances. This requires a combined test of 8 or 9. In this case, a failed test doesn’t mean the Valdore is lost to the black hole. Rather, a low test result means the stress caused by the opposing gravimetric forces and the tractor beam result in damage to the warbird. A critical failure, such as a 1 on the drama die, may result in deaths among the Valdore’s crew. In any event, the crew eventually will tow the Valdore to a safe distance from the black hole.

This situation also presents an opportunity to role play. Donatra is grateful for the help and honest with the Starfleet crew. Her first officer, Suran, however, presents a different sort of interaction. Suran is an expert on Federation politics, and he may pump members of the crew for information, given the chance. But crafty or persuasive PCs may be able to turn the tables on Suran and get him to admit that he’s pushing for Donatra to openly challenge Praetor Tal’aura. Suran has helped Donatra secure an entire century of ships, and he believes her coalition could emerge victorious from a civil war with Tal’aura and her loyalists.

In any case, once the Valdore is out of immediate danger, Donatra orders her ship to a safe distance from the Eye of Vendris. The warbird will remain in the vicinity to monitor events, but Donatra wants to avoid attracting Conduit’s ire again.

 The debris field
A massive field of planetary debris rings the event horizon of the Eye of Vendris, the only remaining evidence of the solar system that once existed here. As the Fearless explores the debris, sensors pick up energy signatures consistent with the Iconian energy storage orb. But the intermittent readings appear to move slowly among the debris.

Tracing the readings to their source leads to a grotesque site. Curled up among a particularly dense field of rocky debris, a giant space worm that dwarfs the starship by several orders of magnitude feeds on stellar and planetary material. The massive worm methodically twists and squirms its way through the debris field, sucking the surrounding planetary fragments into a slimy mouth-like orifice at one end of its body. Sensor readings taken near the space worm reveal that the energy storage orb is inside the creature’s digestive tract.

The crew can extract the orb in several ways. They could simply use the ship’s phasers to slice into the worm, but this would almost certainly kill it. Alternatively, they could send a shuttle into its maw and retrieve the orb through skillful piloting and transporter use. Finally, they can use the deflector dish or phasers to radiate energy similar to what the creature is ingesting but at a different power frequency, thus ‘souring the milk.’ This solution is similar to one used by Geordia LaForge and Leah Brahms in the TNG episode ‘Galaxy’s Child’ to get a space-borne creature to detach from the Enterprise’s hull. Doing so will cause the creature to regurgitate the contents of its digestive system, allowing the Fearless to swoop in and beam away the orb.

The finale
Conduit immediately senses the presence of the energy storage orb once it’s freed from the giant space worm. She immediately connects the newly discovered orb with the one she possesses on Vendris Corva II, and all hell breaks loose. The Eye of Vendris crackles with brilliant waves of energy, and the great Iconian gateway opens once again.  The gravimetric forces that once plagued the region intensify and drag the Fearless toward the gateway with unimaginable force.

Allow the conn officer officer to attempt a challenging ships systems (flight control) test if they wish to keep the Fearless from getting swept into the gateway along with the planetary debris in the area. If the test is a success, the officer’s quick wits and skillful piloting steer the ship to safety.

If the test is a failure, the Fearless is sucked into the gateway and everything goes completely black. Suddenly, the bridge crew awakens in a vast, dark chamber.  The walls and floor are invisible to the eye, but what’s above their heads immediately catches their attention.

CONSIDER READING ALOUD TO THE PLAYERS:  Bathed in dazzling silver starlight, the entire Milky Way galaxy churns above your head, forming an awe-inspiring canopy to a seemingly limitless chamber with no visible walls or floor. You sense that if you reached up your hand, the galaxy would yield to your touch like a ceiling of mist. Standing at a distance of several dozen yards from you, directly below the center of the galaxy’s spiraling mass, you notice Conduit and another figure. The stranger’s face is shrouded in shadow, but you get no sense of threat or menace.

The figure is an Iconian, and he thanks the crew for returning Conduit to her people. He answers any questions they may have about why the Iconians chose total isolation as a solution to unremitting war. Finally, as a reward for their efforts, he offers to open a gateway for the crew and their ship leading to any point in the galaxy of their choosing.

Award your crew with a baseline of three experience points for completing the adventure, along with an appropriate allotment of renown.

Captain's Log: Ep 2: 'Old Icons'

Here's a quick summary of the second session of the Star Trek tabletop rpg campaign I'm currently running. You can find the summary of the previous episode here.

The Fearless traveled to Psellus III, where they had reason to believe a Tal Shiar operative known as Proteus was staging some kind secret operation. Upon beaming down to the Psellan capital city, word of their arrival spread quickly. A faction of Romulan sympathizers set off a pair of billitrium explosives in the crowded plaza adjacent to the main government administration building, an act of terrorism to protest what they viewed as Federation meddling in Psellan affairs.

The crew investigated the attacks and found that Romulan sympathies on Psellus III ran deep and dated back roughly 200 years to a time when the world was a Romulan client state.  But the Romulan motive to maintain a covert presence on the backward, polluted planet remained a mystery.

The Fearless crew managed to trace pro-Romulan pirate radio transmissions to a seemingly desolate mountaintop. They beamed an away team to the location and found a handful of Romulans and a Psellan maintaining some sort of archaeological dig inside a cave near the mountain’s peak.

The crew stunned the Romulan agents in a firefight and investigated the archaeological site. As Dr. Vasor approached the cave, a telepathic voice intruded into her thoughts. At the same time, a portal in the center of the cave chamber’s floor that the Romulans couldn’t manage to unlock opened for the Starfleet officers.

Most of the away team descended a spiral staircase to find a humanoid child, a girl with mechanical eyes calling herself ‘Conduit,’ awaiting them. Jak vin Karka decided to remain in the upper chamber to go through the Romulans’ computer files to see what they were doing on Mount Soverin. She found a wealth of archaeological data and academic journals related to the ancient Iconians.

Conduit seemed to take little interest in the away team, telling them that she had to ‘get home.’ She displayed an ability to control the away team’s equipment, including their phasers and tricorders. She appeared to command a shuttlecraft to leave the Fearless. Conduit beamed up to the shuttle and warped away in the direction of the Neutral Zone. At the same time, she temporarily disabled the engines aboard the Fearless to keep the crew from following her.

The Politics of the Romulan Star Empire

This post is a brief analysis of the major players in Romulan politics following Shinzon’s attempt to overthrow the government. The Romulan transition of power forms one of the major plots threads of the campaign and provides much of the backdrop for the overall mood of the game.

I’ve cobbled this post together from several sources including Nemesis, LUG sourcebooks and a few hand-picked novels such as the first book in the Titan series. Consistent with LUG’s ‘Way of D’era’ supplement, my take on the Romulans is that politics pervades their society. No one is free from the influence of the Senate, the Tal Shiar and the Star Navy. But politics is clearly a dangerous game on Romulus, and the best players pursue power ruthlessly. Treachery and paranoia abound.

The PCs may discover the following information during our next session on an encrypted padd belonging to a dead Tal Shiar agent. But even if I decide against giving the entire briefing to the party, it’s good to have this information written down and clear in my own mind.

The following political briefing is considered classified to anyone who is not authorized to review content generated by the Tal Shiar internal analysis division. Unauthorized viewing of this material is a grave violation of Romulan Star Code.

Romulan politics remains in a state of flux following the Shinzon crisis. The following figures likely will decide the future of the Romulan Star Empire and her peoples.

Praetor Tal’aura
Tal’aura, a former member of the Romulan Senate, assumed the praetorship in early 2380 after conspiring with Shinzon in his coup to overthrow Romulus. Tal’aura seized the praetorship amid the power vacuum that followed Shinzon’s defeat and the massacre of nearly the entire Senate.

It’s common knowledge among the Romulan political class that Tal’aura was the one who set off the thalaron weapon that wiped out the Senate. Accordingly, Tal’aura inspires more fear than admiration from the citizenry. The Romulan Senate continues its deliberations with a provisional membership, but little progress has been made to set an election date for permanent members. Much of that hesitance derives from Tal’aura’s refusal to endorse elections and the reluctance of provisional senators to pursue initiatives without her express consent. After all, her previous use of thalaron weaponry – a volatile source of radiation outlawed in the Federation – indicates a willingness to cross any ethical or moral boundary to maintain her grip on power.

Tal’aura relies on the advice and expertise of Centurion Tomalak, the commander of the powerful Praetorian Guard forces. Tal’aura and Tomalak maintain a united front in public, but Tal Shiar operatives surmise that Tomalak may aspire to the praetorship himself.

Commander Donatra
Commander Donatra, a scion of the powerful Cassus family, commands the warbird IRW Valdore. She aided Shinzon in his coup but later fought against him when he revealed his plan to destroy Earth using a massive thalaron weapon.

Donatra achieved the rank of commander at a relatively young age after serving several tours of duty aboard warbirds patrolling the Federation Neutral Zone, during which time she gained expertise in cloaking technology and Federation starship tactics.

Her father, Rorrer Cassus, was also a warbird commander and former centurion in the Star Navy before he turned to politics and became a senator. Cassus disappeared in the early 2370s shortly after he began openly campaigning for a seat on the Romulan Continuing Committee. At the time, Donatra believed Hiren, Cassus’s chief rival for the open seat, was responsible for her father’s disappearance, though she could never prove it. When Hiren ascended to the praetorship in 2379, Donatra decided to exact her revenge by backing Shinzon’s coup.  

Donatra’s warbird, the IRW Valdore, is the flagship of the Century Cassus, a fleet of around 100 ships under the command of officers with connections to the Cassus family. Hers is one of only a handful of prominent Romulan families to command the loyalty of such a formidable force. This gives her some leverage over Tal’aura, though the Tal Shiar believes Donatra is resistant to becoming embroiled in further political treachery.

Commander Suran
Suran is a commander in the Romulan Star Navy and a long-time political advisor to the Cassus family. He served as a diplomat for several decades and traveled to Earth and Vulcan where he gained expertise on Federation affairs. His insight into galactic affairs caught the attention of Centurion Rorrer Cassus, and Suran became his main intergalactic policy advisor when Cassus ran for the Senate.

Following Cassus’s disappearance, Suran helped guide Donatra’s career until she assumed command the IRW Valodre. Suran and Donatra supported Shinzon’s coup in an effort to oust Praetor Hiren, who may have orchestrated Cassus’s disappearance.  Suran is privately pushing Donatra to push for open elections and to challenge Tal’aura for the praetorship. Donatra so far has resisted Suran’s urging.

Pardek
Pardek, a former senator, is the current director of the Tal Shiar. As a politician, Pardek forged a reputation for populism and reform, but his maverick legislative efforts often angered the elite Romulan establishment, leaving him marginalized and ineffective in the halls of power.

Pardek reinvigorated his career when he cooperated with Romulan security to expose members of the underground unification movement who sought to bring together the Romulan and Vulcan peoples. In doing so, Pardek betrayed Federation Ambassador Spock and crossed paths with Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the commanding officer of the USS Enterprise.

Pardek discovered he had an affinity for the more clandestine workings of Romulan government and parleyed his newfound political capital into the directorship of the Tal Shiar. In that position, he has boosted resources dedicated to recovering ancient Iconian technology, which Pardek believes will give the Romulan Star Empire an insurmountable edge in the Alpha Quadrant’s continual arms race.

Galamek
Among the first orders given by Shinzon during his brief yet eventful tenure as praetor was to free all Reman political prisoners being held on Romulus. One of those newly freed prisoners was Galamek, a Reman soldier who saw extensive action during the Dominion War and later agitated for Reman autonomy. The Tal Shiar believes Galamek returned to Remus and has begun consolidating power, but he has made no public statements or appearances since Shinzon’s rebellion ended. 

The “Reman question” ranks among the most pressing concerns under consideration by the Provisional Senate, but the legislative body has reached no consensus. Travel between Romulus and Remus has stopped, and all work in the dilithium mines on Remus’s dark side has ceased.  The sharp decline in dilithium refinement has slowed the already fragile Romulan economy.

The Reman question is further complicated by around 200 Romulan military personnel who have gone missing in the Reman dilithium mines. These soldiers formerly oversaw the dilithium mines but have not been heard from since the Shinzon crisis erupted. The Tal Shiar believes at least some of those Romulans are still alive on Remus, either taken captive by Remans or fighting for their lives.

Captain Riker, the Federation’s appointed observer monitoring the political transition, has made it a top priority to ascertain the status of the missing Romulans, but the Remans have not responded to his requests for information.

The Unification Underground
A small movement has taken root on Romulus that seeks to reunify the Romulan people with their Vulcan cousins. Federation Ambassador Spock secretly traveled to Romulus in 2368 to meet with then-Senator Pardek about nurturing the unification underground. Pardek betrayed Spock as part of a plot to conquer Vulcan, but the plan failed when Captain Picard and Data came to Spock’s aid. Picard asked Spock to return with him to Federation space, but Spock chose to remain on Romulus to continue his work toward reunification.

The movement has remained underground in the years since then, and Spock has not been heard from in over a decade. The leaders of the unification movement are said to meet in the vast caverns beneath the Romulan capital city, but the Tal Shiar has been unable to apprehend Spock and destroy the movement. Federation President Nanietta Bacco has publicly stated that Spock is no longer an active ambassador and that he no longer enjoys any official diplomatic title in the United Federation of Planets or Starfleet.

Quick Inspiration

I came up with an entire Star Trek rpg adventure in about 45 minutes this week, and, to be honest, I’m feeling kinda proud of myself.

Here’s what happened:  I put some serious prep time into an episode that had been developing in the back of my mind since the first session of my current campaign. It’s got exploration of wondrous locales, a neat villain and what I hope will be a satisfying sci-fi twist in the final act.

But then two of the five members of my gaming group suddenly had scheduling conflicts pop up the day we were supposed to play. So I had two choices.  I could go ahead with the episode I’d originally planned, albeit with two fewer PCs than usual. Or I could quickly design a totally new adventure tailored for the three PCs who would still be present, thus allowing me to save the original adventure for when the crew is at full strength.

With about 45 minutes to spare during my lunch break, I decided to try to come up with something totally new. But I didn’t have any idea on how to proceed. Then I remembered how Matt Click, who runs the excellent YouTube channel A Fistful of Dice, drew inspiration from random Magic:  The Gathering cards.  I decided to do something similar but with Memory Alpha, perhaps the single most useful Star Trek resource on the web.

I started with the concept of the plant-based sentient beings that inhabit Arteline IV, as detailed in LUG’s ‘A Fragile Peace’ campaign supplement. The idea of intelligent plants has tickled my fancy for some time, but I hadn’t had a chance to work them into my campaign yet, so I decided that this new episode would involve them somehow. But that was all I had. The rest of the episode was a completely blank slate.

So, to fill in some of the blanks, I started clicking the ‘random page’ button on Memory Alpha until something caught my eye. I landed on the entry titled “Unnamed Ennis,” a background character from the DS9 episode ‘Battle Lines’ who was condemned to fight for eternity on a penal moon. It occurred to me that a penal facility where the inmates serve unending sentences would present an interesting sci-fi concept that could also double as a chance for some social commentary on the prison-industrial complex in the United States. 

I kept clicking on the random page button some more and found an entry on orbital gliders, and suddenly I had my idea for an action-packed climax. The PCs would get stranded in a strange prison and the only means of escape would require them to fly to safety on primitive gliders.  After that, it was just a matter of filling in the details.

I decided that Arteline society prohibited capital punishment. Instead, the Artelines utilize deep-space prison barges that resemble enormous greenhouses built and maintained by a private company that contracts with the planetary government. Corrections officers would inject condemned prisoners with an enzyme that basically robs them of their sentience and reverts them into what we Earthlings consider normal plants. The inmates, essentially, become permanent elements of the greenhouse ecosystem, never to return to Arteline society.

The crew will visit one of the prisons when a radical anti-corporate activist shows up and frees the prisoners, who have been reduced to mindless swamp-thing atrocities due to the correctional enzyme. The only means of getting back to the prison’s control room is by flying a set of gliders through the massive, domed structure. But doing so will make them easy targets for the newly freed convicts.

That’s just a bare outline. I’ve fleshed it out with a couple in-depth encounters and decision points that will hopefully force the PCs to think about the ethical ramifications of their role in the story. Still, not bad considering the story came out of nowhere with little time to prepare.

But, as a sad post-script to my story, a third member of my gaming group canceled because of a snowstorm, just as I was putting the finishing touches on the episode. That meant we wouldn’t have a quorum for the session, so the whole thing got scrapped.

For a moment, I was frustrated because my GM heroics were all for naught. But I quickly shrugged it off. Now, I have a complete episode in the can and waiting for me whenever I need it.

Thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear your methods for preparing a game session on short notice. Please feel free to leave a comment below!

Captain's Log: Ep. 1 'Judge, Jury, Executioner'

I've decided to title my session recaps "Captain's Log," for obvious reasons. This series of blog posts will summarize the events of each individual gaming session in my campaign and maybe offer an insight or two along the way.

I ran the first episode sometime during the late summer of 2015, but I don't recall the exact date. It was intended to be a one shot, but the players wanted to keep going. So we decided to plan a full campaign, which didn't get underway until November of 2015 due to scheduling conflicts and real life.

I based the first session on the adventure "Shakedown Cruise," which was included in LUG's Star Trek TNG core book. I modified the adventure at a few key points in an attempt to give my players more choice and to heighten the tension of the climax. I also sprinkled in some elements from "A Fragile Peace: The Neutral Zone Campaign" supplement book.

All five PCs started as lieutenants junior grade. The party includes Dr. Noxana Vasor, a Betazoid medical officer; Jak Vin Karka, a Tellarite engineer; Troy McClure, a human counselor/diplomatic officer; Pus, a Vulcan science officer; and T'yr Th'tetrek, an Andorian security officer. The campaign takes place just a few weeks after the events of Star Trek Nemesis in the Arteline Sector near the Romulan Neutral Zone.

So without further ado, here's the blow-by-blow recap:

A group of fresh-faced lieutenants arrived on Starbase 39-Sierra near the Romulan Neutral Zone, awaiting long-term assignment to the USS Fearless. While waiting for the Fearless to arrive, Lt. Pus, a Vulcan science officer, met with the starbase’s chief science officer to review some mysterious subspace sensor readings from a nearby black hole known as Collapsar 49.

Pus recognized the sensor readings as artificial transmissions sent from an unknown source into the black hole, which then directed the transmissions into Romulan Space. The Fearless was ordered by Fleet Admiral Elsa Kiel to investigate the source of those transmissions, a small Harrellian mining facility on a remote moon.

Meanwhile, Counselor Troy McClure was approached by Commander Matthew Deleo, the chief intelligence officer aboard the starbase. Deleo asked McClure to give him regular reports on any valuable intelligence the Fearless may encounter.

En route to the mining facility, engineering officer Jak vin Karka discovered that Lt. Cmdr. Aliok, the chief engineering officer, had improperly modified the aging vessel’s warp engines. The crew suspected Aliok may actually be a Tal Shiar spy and arranged for Dr. Noxana Vasor, a Betazoid, to surreptitiously scan him with her telepathic powers. Turns out, Aliok was not a spy and his modifications were an honest mistake.

Upon arriving at the moon, the Fearless away team found that the mining operation was actually a front for a Tal Shiar communications post. In addition to illegal Romulan communications technology, the Harellians also harbored a Tal Shiar operative named Tyrion, who appeared to be suffering some sort of psychological distress due to her mental conditioning.

The Harellians managed to erase most of the Tal Shiar communications sent through the facility, but the away team recovered a single message from Romulan space. The message directed the Harrellians to transport Tyrion to Psellus III, where she could receive medical help from a Tal Shiar operative referred to only by the code name “Proteus.”

Tyrion, in a brief state of lucidity, told Dr. Vasor that DeLeo is actually a Section 31 agent and would summarily execute her if she were turned over to Starfleet Intelligence. In an effort to buy the crew some time and protect Tyrion from her own insanity, Vasor put Tyrion into a state of suspended animation.

The Fearless then set course for Psellus III to find the Tal Shiar agent Proteus and end the Tal Shiar presence in the Arteline Sector.

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.

A review of LUG’s ICON system for Star Trek rpgs

Last Unicorn Games’ Star Trek rpg, first published in 1998, runs on an engine the designers called the ICON System. ICON brims with the sort of crunch and mechanics popular among tabletop rpgs during the late 1990s and early 2000s. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, nor does that disqualify the game from being any good.

But, in a gaming climate today that’s rife with “light” systems, I simply want to point out that this isn’t one of them. LUG’s Star Trek rpg packs some crunch and is very much a product of its time. One look at the standard character sheet, with its 24 blank slots for skills, should convince anyone that this game comes with a little bit of a learning curve. If it had been designed today, I suspect it would look quite different.

Don’t let that discourage you from giving it a shot, though, if you’re itching for a chance to play in the Star Trek multiverse. No modern game designer would describe LUG Trek as ‘light,” and ‘elegant’ probably doesn’t always apply either. But it’s greatest strength is that all that crunch was designed from the ground up to tell Star Trek stories. That lazer-like focus on creating a uniquely Trek platform pretty much saves the game and makes it a viable option today.

To paraphrase a different mega sci-fi franchise, ICON may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid.

LUG Trek strips away many of the conventions long associated with tabletop gaming that don’t really apply to how stories are told in Star Trek. Narrators (the term used for the GM) are encouraged from the start to do whatever they can to make players feel like they’re participating in an episode of Star Trek, not a session of D&D reskinned to look like Star Trek.

If everyone keeps that tenet in mind, a gaming group can have a blast with LUG Trek.

Character Creation -- Ugly Bags of Mostly Skills

The main criterion through which I view character generation in an rpg is whether the system allows for me to build a character that plays in a way that’s consistent with my original conception of the character. If I’m going to play Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, and I want to base my character on Conan or Aragorn or Elminster, does the character generation process allow me to churn out a character that captures that archetype? If the answer is yes, it’s probably a good character creation system. If not, you’re bound for frustration and disappointment.

Viewed through that lens, ICON does just fine. If you want to play a Vulcan science officer or a Betazoid doctor, you’ll end up with a character that has all the strengths, weaknesses and abilities you’d expect if that character appeared on an episode of Star Trek. You start with a race and then pick and overlay that acts much the same way as a class in D&D. You then pick packages that represent your character’s early life experience, education and previous tours of duty.

If you want a less Starfleet-focused campaign, there are options for raiders, merchants and spies in the DS9 core book and further options in the wide range of supplements Last Unicorn Games published while they had the Star Trek license.

So character generation succeeds in providing you with a pile of mechanics that approximate the kind of character you want to play. But the system takes a turn toward inelegance with the sheer number of skills each character will end up with. 

Starfleet characters are hyper-competent, so it stands to reason that a character in a Star Trek rpg would need a lot of skills. The standard character sheet in LUG’s Star Trek:  The Next Generation core book comes with 24 slots for skills, but that isn’t always enough for a new character. That’s a lot to keep track of, especially when each skill usually comes with a specialization. Filling out the character sheet becomes a chore, and remembering all the skills your character has is nearly impossible, at least in the first couple play sessions.

In summation, the ICON character generation works and produces characters that feel very Trek. But you usually end up with unwieldy bags of mostly skills.

Action & Combat:  The great Trek conundrum

The ICON system utilizes a d6 system that grants a player a dice pool equal to a character’s attribute level and then adds skill levels as modifiers to the roll.  It’s pretty standard rpg stuff that should feel familiar to anyone who’s played a lot of tabletop games.

Combat, however, poses a different challenge in a Star Trek rpg than it does in a traditional fantasy rpg setting. The series, at least in the prime TNG universe, often favored character development and ethical dilemmas over cinematic and detailed action. To be sure, action and combat have their places in any Star Trek series, but I struggle to think of many episodes that depended entirely on action to tell a story.

Accordingly, I try to make combat move as quickly as possible in my Star Trek campaign. Maybe there are folks out there who disagree, but I feel strongly that if you’re spending a majority of your sessions on combat, you’re probably not recreating the feeling of an episode of Star Trek.

And that’s where I think the designers of ICON made some missteps by creating mechanics that actually slow combat down. For instance, the default rules recommend players roll initiative at the beginning of each round. I prefer to do it once and then follow that order through the entire combat (which I try not to let drag on much past three rounds at a maximum). Or, even better, sometimes I don’t even bother with initiative. I’ll ask the players what they want to do once it becomes clear that combat is about to break out. Then, I simply have the bad guys respond appropriately to whatever the PCs decide.

Another mechanic that slows down the flow of combat is dodging. If I’m interpreting the rules correctly, players can choose to dodge any time an adversary makes an attack against them. The rule adds another interruption that can bog down a fight.

Some folks might be tempted to complain that the combat rules are too lethal, especially when phasers or disruptors are involved. Those rules make a lot of sense to me, though. If a brawl with a handful of aggressive Klingons escalates to the point where disruptors are drawn, there ought to be a serious chance of a PC getting dropped.

But overall, the melee combat rules will seem fairly standard to most tabletop veterans, even if they play a bit slower than I’d like.  It’s the starship combat rules that offer a more interesting challenge.

The developers of the game clearly put a lot of thought into the starship combat. They set out to give each crewmember something meaningful to do every round while making each PC’s role modular enough that a gaming group doesn’t get penalized for not having every bridge position filled.  For instance, a science officer has to get a sensor lock on a target every round of combat. If they establish a good sensor lock, the tactical officer gets a bonus for any attacks they make during the round. But if you don’t have a science officer, no sweat. You can ignore that rule and it won’t impact the game much. You need someone to fly the ship, fire weapons and keep track of shield strength and structural points.  Any additional crew beyond that is gravy.

I can almost see the game designers sitting around a conference table hashing out just how they can give every player something fun to do during starship combat while simultaneously keeping the system flexible enough to work with smaller groups. In that sense, the ICON system succeeds, and my hat is off to the designers.

But, just like melee combat, starship battles play pretty slowly, at least in my experience. Starship combat is deep and crunchy and simulates what you see on the TV show in many ways. It’s even got rules for the Picard Maneuver.  The downside is that starship combat, more than any other component of the system, comes with a learning curve that makes it somewhat difficult to teach new players.

Conclusion

The Last Unicorn Games Star Trek rpg line drew on the talents of a lot of good tabletop designers, including Steve Long, S. John Ross and Ross Isaacs. It was clearly built from the ground up with a focus on telling Star Trek stories, and, because of that focus, remains a viable option for enthusiastic gaming groups looking to play in the Star Trek multiverse.  The system shows its age in a few areas, mostly in the unwieldy number of skills characters possess and in the combat rules. But it works.

Many of the supplements produced by Last Unicorn Games to support the system are excellent and contain a lot of imagination and story seeds. I plan on reviewing individual supplements right here on this blog in future installments. Most of the books can be found online for fairly cheap too. If you like rpgs and Star Trek, then ‘make it so.’ (Sorry not sorry)

Tabletop Star Trek: Let's see what's out there

For the first time in about a decade, I'm really excited by the prospect of running a tabletop rpg set in the world of Star Trek.  And I have a recent viewing of Star Trek Nemesis to thank.

Look, I’m not sure I’d recommend that anyone go back and watch Nemesis, but one of the few things the movie has going for it is that its ending sets up a new status quo in the Alpha Quadrant that can go a lot of different ways. The thalaron weapon destroyed nearly the entire Romulan Senate, leaving a power vacuum absolutely begging to be filled with all manner of shadowy power plays and Federation heroics.

Just thinking about it conjures images of cunning Tal Shiar spies, privileged senators from storied families, dutiful admirals in command of birds of prey and the underground reunification movement that wants to forge a new era of peace between Romulus and Vulcan. Caught in the middle are the Remans, former slaves of the empire who yearn for their own planet and the autonomy that goes with it.

And poor Captain Riker -- along with the crew of the newly commissioned USS Titan -- sets out to monitor this political maelstrom and, whenever possible, advance Federation interests (as established at the end of Nemesis).

Will the Romulan Star Empire fall into chaos and civil war, thus destabilizing the entire region? Or will the powers of the Alpha Quadrant establish a stronger alliance than ever and usher the Romulan people into a new era of freedom and political openness?

A bunch of Star Trek novels have addressed those very questions, and I’ve read and enjoyed a handful of them.  But, with news of a brand-new Star Trek series hitting the net this week, I’m itching to dust off my old Last Unicorn Games rpg materials and have my regular gaming group answer those questions for themselves.

I haven’t played in the Star Trek universe since I graduated from high school over a decade ago. My skills as a game master (or narrator, as the GM is called in the LUG system) have grown considerably in that time. And the gaming group I’ve fallen in with loves Trek and role plays exceedingly well.  Long story short, the pieces are there for a truly remarkable experience in the Final Frontier, and I’m chuffed to bits to begin the campaign and see what’s out there.

I intend to document that experience on this blog.  I’ll recap our sessions, which will begin on Nov. 16. I’ll also discuss some of my techniques as a narrator and the unique challenges presented by a tabletop rpg attempting to negotiate the Star Trek Universe. Finally, I plan to provide some mini reviews of the individual LUG Star Trek products, from the core books to the optional supplements to the adventure modules.

So, without further ado, let’s make it so…