…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.