Dark Trek Returns

Ever since J.J. Abrams took the Star Trek franchise and revitalised it through the most recent movies, I have been itching to run some games in the setting.

When a couple of friends also started to engage me with requests to run a one-off Star Trek game, I found myself thinking about how I might do it.

Your Trek May Differ

If there's one thing that Abrams has reminded us it's that our Trek can differ from the franchise.

It's a lot of fun to take the setting, key characters, tech, ships and species of Trek. It's even more fun when you're not bound by the official canon of events.

My idea is to set my Dark Trek campaign sometime around the birth of the Federation, as the "Enterprise" series ends and the movies begin. Running one-off, high-stakes and very high-octane stories which move forward through the early era of the Federation would be very cool. What would be even cooler is if the players were aware that "Your Trek May Differ".

Do the player's provoke a war with the Klingons? So be it. Let's play it out.

Or do they damage the fledgling alliance of worlds that is the new Federation? Let's work out the consequences in play.

What I want is for the players to feel that every decision they make can have potentially big consequences. This is, after all, what Trek is all about: heroic characters who make decisions that affect the galaxy.

Booting a System

My only barrier right now (other than finding time and a group to play it) is in deciding which narrative-style game I want to run with. I've narrowed it down to two: HeroQuest2 and Cortex Plus. The latter is probably going to win.

Narrative, you say? Yes.

At heart, I'm a gamer-simulationist. I've played Trek with FASA, GURPS and d20. The truth, however, is that TV and movie properties feel better within the framework of a narrative engine. Things have to "feel" right... and that means that the "reality" of the setting is actually beholden to the "believability" of cinematics, not hard science.

I'm taken with using the Cortex System Hacker's Guide... a good dose of Cortex Action blended with some of the new Firefly RPG stuff... and a few tweaks of my own. Unless I get lazy and just bust out the much simpler to run HeroQuest2.

Anyone for Dark Trek? I might just have to see about having that one-off game after all.

Game on!

Rediscovering Glorantha

The cover of the current edition of the book.

The first RPG that I ever read and played was the boxed edition of RuneQuest, upon which box was the image of a female warrior having her shield torn asunder by the teeth of a large lizard-like creature. This is an image that, for me, was formative in my learning to roleplay. It was also, of course, an image from Glorantha.

Glorantha is the mythic fantasy world of Greg Stafford which was largely associated with the RuneQuest brand. Of course, all these years on, Glorantha is now under license to Moon Design Publications and supported by both the new edition of RuneQuest (which I still need to finish reading) and HeroQuest.

It is in this latter form that I have re-discovered my love for place.

Inspirational

Glorantha is, to but it simply, inspiring. As fantasy settings go it is the only one besides Middle-earth that is as fully realised and completely believable. It is a raw and visceral world, a mythical world... a place of many wonders.

Glorantha is also so detailed that, for me at least, it always seemed too much work to understand it. Until now.

The mood and style of the world, with its weird Ducks and Apple Lane, has been (I now realise) a large part of the inspiration for my own dark world of Mykovnia.

So what?

Well... it's been a long time since I allowed myself the time and bother to read another fantasy setting. Yet, reading the excellent 'Sartar' sourcebook from Moon Design, I've felt myself drawn back into the wondrous world that is Glorantha.

There is something about the idea of creating a hero from scratch, including designing their clan, using narrative tools such as HeroQuest's excellent Sartar questionnaire, that really peaks my interest.

The sheer richness of the narrative, the inclusion of a ready-made campaign arc, and the overwhelming depth of a setting that has been around gaming circles since 1966 is just... intoxicating.

I'd dearly love to either run or (even better, perhaps) play in a Gloranthan saga. I'm just so glad that I've taken the shrink-wrap off those books I bought two or so years ago and finally read them. I'm also excited by the new Kickstarter for the Guide to Glorantha!

Game on!

HeroQuesting?

Continuing to read HeroQuest this week, I have become very enamoured of the idea of playing it. As a narrative RPG it seems very flexible and adaptable, fitting for any setting imaginable.

What is of particular interest, however, is how much the lack of complex detail in the rules spurs the mind towards creativity.

The very lack of a specific way of doing magick, for example, drives the creative juices to want to fill the void. With no set spells and powers to distract I have found myself intrigued to design my own way of doing things. And even then, it's only a few keywords and a framework to write up.

Even though I am actively running the Rolemaster playtest campaign with my regular group, and that is a very positive experience right now, this foray into the completely opposite style of play is intriguing.

What am I doing with it? In short, just what I suggested I would last week.

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