What would the benefits of running a game per the thread title, post Enterprise, Pre The Original Series? The picture of the NCC 1000 has inspired me, and it's been a while since I ran a Star Trek game.
Printable View
What would the benefits of running a game per the thread title, post Enterprise, Pre The Original Series? The picture of the NCC 1000 has inspired me, and it's been a while since I ran a Star Trek game.
I guess it depends on wether you are including Enterprise in your game. Either way it gives you a huge free hand as their is little "cannon" for the period. So no worries about stepping on cannon and allows you too introduce pretty much any ship or race you want as a backdrop. Now for some (like me) that kind of openness is a bit daunting but for others it would be freeing.
Somewhere in my notes from when I was making article ideas for BTFF is some stuff about long-term adversaries for an Early Fed series:
• The Rigelian Trade League as the 'big not-quite-violent bad' formed in response to the founding of the Federation. The Rigelians, the Coridans, the Ithenites, the Denobulans and other background guys are in the Coalition of Planets, but aren't founding members of the Federation. Why? Well, the Federation is founded on ideals of equality and regard for member's citizens' rights. If the Rigeligans or the Ithenites are more economically-minded and reliant on labour exploitation or are ruled by plutocrats, aristocrats (or are simply corrupt), they might not like certain demands on their cultures that the Federation makes. So they band together and send out ships to battle the Federation for cultural and economic supremacy in this region of space, but without violent conquest. And remember, this is before the Prime Directive, so if a Rigelian mining colony is using indentured labour (only technically not slavery) and the indentured are divided on whether they want the practice to stop (because some might desire the possibility of having their own indentured servants one day) then a Federation ship showing up and using force to free the servants who ask them for help is legal but causes tons of complications.
Admittedly that's a pretty cerebral problem for PCs, so if you want to shoot things then:
• Andorian renegades allied with the Orion Syndicates as an 'enemy within;' on the edge of Fed space the Syndicates are still powerful and increasingly united against Federation encroachment. Not only supplying labour and material (at cut-rate exploitation-based prices) to the Rigelian Trade League, but also harbouring advanced ill-understood technologies from the ancient Orion Empires, the Syndicates and their pirates and smugglers are going to attract Federation 'police actions' in the wild Borderlands. The Andorian clans opposed to 'bending the knee to the Vulcans and their lackeys' travelled along trade routes to Syndicate-controlled boltholes, from where they plan terrorist actions against the Federation.
• Breakdowns in tons of local governments. Oh, hey, turns out that the Romulans weren't just infiltrating Vulcan, but totalitarian planetary governments across the Beta Quadrant. Tandar Prime and Keto-Enol are only the first world-states reverting to civil war. Before the Prime Directive, local starship captains might end up trying to restore order by replacing one totalitarian government with one imposed from orbit. This goes as well as you can think, but it's a very different game if you just hand your players a planet and ask, "What do you do?"
Funnily enough, Pocket just started up a novel series called Rise of the Federation that covers the early days of the Federation through the POV of the Enterprise characters. The story's split between two starship crews (Endeavour, captained by T'Pol, and Pioneer, captained by Malcolm Reed), Archer working the halls of power as Starfleet's Chief of Staff, and Trip Tucker's espionage escapades within Section 31 (yes, they retconned Trip's death in the books).
The author, Christopher L. Bennett, even went so far as to sketch new Starfleet uniforms: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mBR9BRg8qS...et+uniform.jpg
I'm running TWO campaigns in this era, so clearly I'm having a good time!
Mine's a little closer to the end of this era; Kirk and Spock are junior officers working their way up the ranks, Pike commands the Enterprise for more than 10 minutes...you know, common sense stuff!
I worked in the FASA Four Year supplement to these campaigns, which seems really cool in the light of that new Axanar film project.
I like correlating the different insignia to different parent-orgs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mac417
I like the uniforms with the following caveat. Security should be part of Operations. The gray uniform, being formerly MACOs, should be the old Starfleet Marines. Lots of fans think that Security are Marines. That's a US-ism, in that Marine stationed on ships are seconded to Security unless doing "Marine business". Marines are Naval Infantry, Security are Naval Police. Two entirely different jobs. Look at the disastrous incident with the Canadian army in Somalia (caution, real-world history intruding here - DO NOT LET THIS BECOME A POLITICAL THREAD!!!) when DND decided to make the Canadian Airborne Regiment resonsible for security in Mogadishu instead of sending Military Police company. True, there were other things that led up to the incident, but that was the main root problem. Security/Cops need a vastly different mind-set from combat troops.
I was going to use the uniforms that were used on the USS Kelvin, before the Narada showed up and changed the timeline. Because in my opinion all the way up to the Kelvin encountering the Narada is part of the original continuity.
memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_%282230s%29
Ship is going to be the NCC 1005 USS Jesuit, Bonaventure Class.
I like this. Thans for the link.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mac417
Some other ideas
1st contact with some member race of the Federation, the 4 years war, founding of colonies.
This is the early days of the Federation, why not settling disputes between member worlds? Vulcan & Andoria have alot of back history.
Mason, are you interested in a Series set just after the founding of the Federation (c.2160s), end of the 22nd/beginning of 23rd century (c.2199), or early mid-23rd century (c.2220s)?
mactavish out.
Daedalus class
I haven't run a post-ENT campaign...yet. But it's on the cards some time.
One thing I'll be doing is retconning the Daedelus class to actually be a production variant of the modified NX-class, the one Doug Drexler put together with a secondary hull (below). Yes, I realise this violates established canon, but I simply cannot bear the look of the canonical Daedelus.
I'd much prefer this (and we have most of the deckplans, thanks to Waxing Moon).
Attachment 1722
Have to say I dig the redesign myself. The Rise of the Federation books I mentioned above actually establish that the Drexler NX refit went into production after the Earth-Romulan War as the newly-dubbed Columbia class... the last surviving NX class ship (apart from Enterprise, which was too structurally damaged to resume service after the war and was decommissioned as a museum ship) was reclassified as the first of the new Columbia-class ships and all NX-class ships in development would be built as Columbia-class vessels, essentially retiring the NXs. They also established the practice of using the NCC prefix for registry numbers.
The Columbia-class Endeavour (NCC-06), which T'Pol commands, is on the cover of the latest RotF book: http://treklit.blogspot.com/2014/04/tower-of-babel.html
Here's the starship and uniforms
Funny story: the original model doesn't have an underside, because they guy was like, "Ehn, I know what angle I'm showing, I don't got to built the rest."
I really love that design though. Along with the Excelsior, BoP and Oberth it really shows the benefits of a 3d-early approach.
It's so funny to read that someone else was considering retconning the Daedalus-class out in favor of the redesigned NX-class. I seriously considered that as well until I saw the post- Romulan War Enterprise novels...
Of course, if the Columbia-class is made of the refitted NX-class vessels, that still leaves me with a problem: I hate the Daedalus-class. I think it looks stupid, and - from a design perspective - it makes no sense (i.e. saucer vs. sphere). Who else uses a spherical section like that? Nobody.
So, I want to replace the Daedalus-class with something else, but not just anything. Frankly, I am not sure that I think the Daedalus-class should follow the path laid out by Earth Starfleet beginning with the NX-class [refit, at least]: saucer section attached to an engineering hull, preferably with two sweeping warp nacelles.
I was considering something more like the Oberth-class as a intermediate step between the Columbia-class and the others that followed after. The Oberth-class diverges somewhat, but still has the saucer section that I think most Starfleet vessels should have.
Of course, I have been gone a long time, so maybe I don't know what the heck I'm talking about anymore! ;)
mactavish out.