Playing Star Trek in RPG systems

#1

While watching “Star Trek: Picard” last night, I was thinking about Rich Rogers’ “Star Wars Saturdays” and wondering about doing the same thing for Star Trek.

I’ve always liked Star Wars, but my true love in fandom has always been Star Trek.

What are some different RPGs that would be good to hack to tell various kinds of stories in the Star Trek universe?

Some that I thought of…

  • Apocalypse Warp: Play as the people in and around Zephrym Cochrane’s hardhold as he tries to build a functioning warp drive. Scrounge for supplies and fight off raiders in the post-Eugenics War wasteland on late 21st century Earth.

  • Trophy Dark: The Dead Cube: A group of latinum-motivated scoundrels and mercenaries loot an apparently-disabled Borg ship. What could posdibly go wrong?

  • Comrades: Free Bajor! A cell of Bajoran freedom fighters plot revolution against their Cardassian overlords.

  • Alienhearts: Starfleet Academy

  • Psi Run: Androids on the run from both Federation officials and the Romulan secret police.

Any other ideas?

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#2

I have an PBTA hack I’m working on that is supposed to simulate TV Sci-fi serials. I’ve ran about every franchise in it, and I’m actually doing a Star Trek: Picard By The Apocalypse game at a con in a few months! It works well and has all the archetypes you’d need, plus some really simple ship combat rules that use the same set of basic moves as the ground game.

Apocalypse Warp sounds rad.

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#3

Isn’t Lasers and Feelings built just for this?

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#4

I don’t think it is, really. It’s a slick system, but not very deep, and not well suited for campaign play. It has a really interesting perspective on sci-fi shows but only captures a slice of it.

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#5

Unless I am misunderstanding the OP (Happens to me a lot lately) the idea is not to find one game “suitable for campaign play” and play it a lot, but rather to find a bunch of different games that aren’t “obviously” Star Trek and run Star Trek related material in them?

I don’t have any suggestions right now though, my creative is not powered up.

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#6

Oh, wow, there are many possibilities!

(This is where I pause to note that the current officially-licensed game, Star Trek Adventures, is actually pretty great, if crunchier than what we generally tackle on The Gauntlet. It’s totally what I’d play if I wanted any sort of extended campaign that felt like any of the ongoing series.)

I love the Trophy Dark idea. The other Borg thing you could do story game-style would be to hack Zombie World to play on a colony world that was already partially assimilated.

Star-Crossed suggests playing a passionate starship captain and logially-minded science officer right there on the box.

A thorough hack of Band of Blades for the Dominion War?

It’d be super-easy to skin Our Last Best Hope for saving some planet from gravimetric disruption or it star going supernova or whatever.

You could just add the serial numbers back on to Hearts Blazing for a fun evening of basically making up short fan-fic episodes of the show.

All the Klingon succession stuff is my own personal least favorite part of the show, but it’d be pretty easy to outline a frame for The Chancellor (King) is Dead and have plenty of batleth-swinging fun.

Misspent Youth for Mirror Universe Terran Empire teens. Imagine the ‘psych exams’ at that version of Starfleet Academy…

Man, now I want to spin up that ongoing STA campaign more than ever.

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#7

Scum & Villainy could work for something around DS9 maybe?

#8

I would consider Uncharted Worlds for any space cowboy / Ferengi trading, Lazers and Feelings for a loose Vulcan versus opposites clone Vulcan scenario. I would use ViewScream for a potential kobayashi maru scenario.

1 Like
#9

One game that seems like an obvious choice for darker, planetary stories is Jason Morningstar’s Durance.

Grey Ranks (also by the same author) could be used for some kind of tragic rebellion story, which some parts of the Star Trek galaxy/history deal with often.

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#10

@Paul_T - Oooh. Durance in a Star Trek episode where they are on an unstable planet and need to be evacuated. I would LOVE to do a game of Durance where there is a concrete goal by the authorities and the underground- like ‘The Ensigns of Command’

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#11

I still haven’t played the current Star Trek Adventures RPG yet, although by all accounts it looks great.

I have played both Last Unicorn Games’ Star Trek: The Next Generation RPG from the late '90s, and FASA’a Star Trek: The Role-Playing Game from the '80s. The former was a really good game system, while the latter was… not.

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#12

I was thinking for a while of using the Leverage RPG for a Star Trek game where the PCs are technoliberationists, going around introducing new technologies to undeveloped planets, curing diseases and eliminating hunger in violation of the Prime Directive.

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#13

I just got a copy of the old FASA Star Trek in the mail today via a Chain of Generosity.

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#14

Bundle of Holding is running a Star Trek Adventures bundle sale at the moment.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/StarTrek

(Alas, I’ve already blown my April RPG budget and can’t take advantage of it lest my wife get very cross with me…)

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#15

I’ve often had a thought that you might run a very particular style of Star Trek using PARANOIA — a “red-shirts-always-die”-style taken to something of an extreme. The command staff are the indifferent upper-Security Clearance, the armour-touting security guards of the early movie era are the GREEN Clearance Vultures, the “Computer” is something like a mash-up of the worst sorts of iterations from The Original Series, especially where the Daystrom Institute tried out their new Battle Computer Upgrade (TOS, “The Ultimate Computer”).

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#16

If you haven’t, definitely check out the game Shitty Ensigns, it’s got this vibe going on.

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#17

Given where Star trek Discovery is at the moment, Legacy, Life amongst the ruin amid the shattered remains of the Federation after “the burn”

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#18

In 1983 FASA created Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game. It’s not narrative based, but rather a a 2D10 skill based system. I imagine it’s something like Classic Traveller or CoC and was generally considered pretty good. It has a ton of adventures written for it

Goblinoid Games produced a retro-clone Starships & Spacemen which I’ve played, and it was pretty alright, simple enough rules.

Lastly if you’re wanting space horror I can’t recommend Mothership enough.

1 Like
#19

I played a bit of the FASA ST:RPG back in the late '80s/early’90s when I was in college. It may have been the case of a less-than-capable GM, but I really didn’t care for the system. That said, it was 30 years ago, and I don’t remember exactly what I didn’t like about it. It might warrant a second look if I ever run across a copy at a decent price.

#20

For my home group, I’ve been noodling on running a Star Trek: TNG game in Fate Condensed using the Fate Space Toolkit as a guide. This may well be our next campaign after our Brindlewood Bay campaign wraps.

That said: I know Lowell has been working on a pared-down version of Mophidius’ Star Trek Adventures and I’d love to take a gander on what he’s done with the system!