RPGaDay 2019: 5 Space

…the Final Frontier…

I can’t help it; anytime I see the word in print, It’s William Shatner’s voice-over I hear in my head, every single time.

I grew up watching Star Trek…and didn't we all? During my Formative Gaming Years (or, if you will, the “FoGy”) I was interested in the Star Trek Role-Playing Game more than somewhat, especially coming off of Star Frontiers. After all, the potential of a game based on a group of fascinating and dynamic characters going off on space adventures seemed like a no-brainer…until you started taking the episodes apart.

You quickly realized that, as a player, if you weren’t Kirk, Spock, or McCoy, you were support staff, or God Forbid, cannon fodder. The solution was to create your own crew, and ship, and go have different adventures, but this was before The Next Generation, before all of the spin-offs, and the other games, and so on and so forth. All we had for a point of reference was Classic Trek. Hell, we didn’t even call it “classic.” It was just Star Trek. That’s old.

And it made the RPG something of a cipher. No one would agree to play Scottie because everyone wanted to play Kirk, but rolling up your own bridge crew and ship was, well, not nearly as cool. I think that has changed in the wake of a half-dozen Star Trek shows, each one a different flavor, and some great movies and more comics and a lot more examples of what the Federation means in the future. More stuff to hang your hat on, for sure.

The best thing about the FASA game was that they had access to the series bibles and put a lot of the information about the world (lots of stuff that wasn’t in any of the shows) into the game to help fill out the environment for the GM. If you were a Trekkie (or Trekker, or Trekkite) then you loved this game for all of the sneak peeks behind the curtain it gave you.

This was a dense game, folks. It incorporated (like FASA’s other games) the ability to beam down to the planet, get into a firefight, beam up to the ship, and then slug it out in space with photon torpedoes and submarine style warfare. The boxed set came with ship schematics. Schematics.

Grape Nuts aren’t as crunchy as the Star Trek RPG. And I discovered, as did so many others, that as much as I liked Star Trek, I didn’t need to like it quite THAT much. The only game I ever played was an introductory scenario that my friend Larry ran to demonstrate the game for me. I liked it, but I could see that there was a whole other world I could have been pulled into if I committed to the game, and so I remain fascinated by the FASA game and slightly repulsed, as well.