Trekking Through The Mirror, Darkly

Yesterday I watched the fabulous double-episode of Enterprise entitled, "Through A Mirror, Darkly".

This was the inspiration. I needed it. It needed me. We met and it was geek heaven.

My Dark Trek game needs to begin in the Mirror Universe. An alternate Mirror Universe, however. And then we're going to clash with an alternate Federation-Trek Universe.

Confused? Fabulous!

Mirrors

The original appeal, at least to me, of the Mirror Universe is that characters can act on their passions and selfish ambition. Just like in a regular D&D game.

But in Trek, you get to put passion and selfish ambition behind a phaser. On a starship. And fight Klingons!

Can you imagine how cool it would be? 

Player's could form alliances based around faction loyalty. Are you the Captain's man, or are you backing the First Officer's bid to assassinate her? Are you loyal to the Empire, or are you secretly a rebel looking for a chance to strike back at the Empress?

Let's set it some time after the Empress has taken power using the USS Defiant... yes, let's incorporate the imagery from the latest Trek movies but place it all in the hands of the Terran Empire! Is it time for the war between the Empire and the Klingons? I think so! 

All in our own alternate... where anything can happen. 

Our Mirror May Differ.

Federation-Trek?

Why not plan to incorporate antagonists from the pesky do-gooder Federation Mirror? But a Mirror to our alternate Mirror, methinks. That allows the latest Trek stuff to be rendered faithfully... and then twisted too. What if the war can span two dimensions too? Wouldn't that be cool?

The aim here is to introduce a really fun setting and then, through the interference of the Federation lot, show the players who the bad guys are... hold up a mirror, so to speak. 

We all enjoy the game where we get to fire phasers, beat up on weaker opponents, and take what we want... or at least, given the popularity of fantasy RPGs, that's how it seems to my eyes. This Dark Trek idea allows us to then throw stark light on that scenario... and reveal just how far we might have fallen.

Regular Trek games have too many limits to be fun - Prime Directive, for example. Mirror Trek throws all that out of the window and offers us unfettered play time with the cool shticks of the universe... without all the tedious moralising. Until the "good guys" show up from the Federation. And we waste 'em!

Game on!

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!

Dark Trek

Today I began to watch the one Star Trek series that I have, as yet, never really got my head around: Voyager.

Whilst viewing the spurious antics of Janeway's crew in the pilot twin-episode, Caretaker, I was once again reminded of the one-off idea we had a while ago for gaming Trek-style.

Dark Trek was born after the most recent Star Trek movie. The key inspiration was the idea that the Star Trek universe could contain multiple alternate realities... of which the latest movie is but one. From this humble idea sprang the one-off game played in 2009 within our own alternate Trek universe... and since then the idea has stuck.

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