Beyond The Final Frontier – Submissions

Our esteemed Gandalf of Borg, after shepherding ten issues of Beyond the Final Frontier and thousands and thousands (okay, almost fifty) of issues of Hall of Fire to fruition, has decided he needs a break. He's passing duties for both magazines on, and I've taken up the bulky, rodinium mantle of editor for Beyond the Final Frontier, the unofficial Star Trek RPG webzine.

Issue 10 is out now. That means Issue 11 needs to be filled, and we at BTFF want to provide a place for as much new, useful CODA material as possible.

IMPORTANT UPDATE
As usual, real life intervenes. Now that I'm sitting on something other than boxes, however, I can turn my attention back to the zine. BTFF11 is now slated for a mid-Fall release. The nominal deadline for final drafts is now late September or early October, so talk to me now about your submission ideas.

What we're looking for in the new issue:

Episodes
The most important part. We're aiming for two to three adventures each issue, depending on length. These should be fully-developed adventures, capable of being played out of the box.

Starships
We want both full starship stats with descriptions and new systems to use.

Aliens and Creatures
We also want new alien life forms for Crew to encounter–or be. We want alien civilizations for player characters, adversaries or plot elements, species of creatures, or individual narrator characters, all with notes on using them in episodes.

Worlds
We're looking for strange new planets–and other times, alternate universes, pocket dimensions and weirder places–for the Crew to visit, along with notes on how narrators can use them in their episodes.

Operations
Under this heading are new skills, traits, professional abilities and personal equipment for characters to use.

Narration
Articles on narrating the game–finding ideas for episodes, advice, tools for efficiency or enhancing mood, narrative techniques or variations and thoughts on narrating the Star Trek RPG.

PM me here if you want to discuss submission ideas.

Good hunting.

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Previous issues of Beyond the Final Frontier can be found here. Issue 10 coming soon.
Previous issues of Hall of Fire, the LotR CODA webzine can be found at HallofFire.org.

Good luck producing it all TMK! If you need a hand let me know. I will have a think if there's anything I can include for a submission, but my trek-imagination runs dry at the moment :)

Well, we never did end up putting the 4 species (and their assorted background stuff) I created back in the day, in the embryonic ICON Alien sourcebook that never quite got off the ground...

Any specific format, or just follow the stuff Decipher did for their CODA books? Do you want it in Word, or...?

The rewrite could take some doing (I'm great at fluff, not so hot at statting), but I'd love to have something in there.

Exciting news! I wish I can help but I don't have the talent to loan. I'll see what I can come up with though and I'll submit it. See ya!

Important update, see above.

Another update!

Is this still live or is there no interest in doing an issue 11? I'd be happy to help out if there's still anything going on with it.

As usual, it's taking the back seat to paying jobs. However, ETA is sometime in the next month.

If you have any submissions you'd like to send along, please do!

Where, oh where have I heard THAT before?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by selek

Where, oh where have I heard THAT before?

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Last month.

LOL. Are there any particular submission guidelines? (ie file formats etc.) I poked around and couldn't find any. I'm getting some of my adventure notes into a fleshed out and printable format.

Text submissions should be in .rtf. Adventures should be playtested before submission, and everything should be written with an eye toward providing utilities that can be plugged directly into games.

Thanks. I'm gunning to have the adventure done by the end of the week for your perusal.

Really enjoyed this E-zine. I was curious to whatever happened to issue 11?

Hows the progress on issue 11? Was this abandoned or whats up with it?

I recently spoke privately with TDK, and he tells me there is an important announcement coming soon.

Per his advice to me, you should hold onto your submissions and prepared work- changes (I don't know any specifics) are coming.

I've submitted a lot of material to BTFF over the years, and I'm still willing to help keep this endeavor alive.

Besides- it's almost Groundhog Day.

If TDK comes out and sees his shadow, we get five more editions of BTFF!!

Last sunday I narrated 'Blood & Honor - A Klingon Saga' from BTFF issue 9 for a group of 5 newcomers to the game at a Star Trek fan gathering in the Netherlands.

Here are a couple of shots of us playing this scenario (it was a sunny day, so we took the table outside);
http://www.federation.nl/gallery/thu...b_DSC03293.JPG http://www.federation.nl/gallery/thu...b_DSC03294.JPG

Most memorable gaming moments:
- I inserted a confrontation with the Enterprise-B responding to the colony of Cha’esq's distress signal as well, and they all laughed when I showed them a picture of John Harriman. :D
- I informed the engineer that his repair check would take half an hour, after which he informed his captain it'd take him at least two days.
- I gave the Orion pirate a stun baton as a weapon, and taunted the Klingon player that he'd be stunned for 15 minutes. The player replied "We shall see!", and I rolled “*ZAP!*, you awaken after exactly 15 minutes.”

They saved the children and all came out as heroes at the end, and I had a lot of fun narrating for Klingons for a change.
At the next fan gathering at the end of May I plan on narrating part two 'The Raid' from BTFF issue 10.

Not to toot my own horn, but it absolutely breaks my heart to hear of people using my scenarios and having a good time.:mad::D;):p

Quote:

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Originally Posted by First of Two

Well, we never did end up putting the 4 species (and their assorted background stuff) I created back in the day, in the embryonic ICON Alien sourcebook that never quite got off the ground...

Any specific format, or just follow the stuff Decipher did for their CODA books? Do you want it in Word, or...?

The rewrite could take some doing (I'm great at fluff, not so hot at statting), but I'd love to have something in there.

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If you haven't done this already, we'd love to have some of this material. Send it as an RTF file, and just generally follow the format used in the Decipher books.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ILikePike

LOL. Are there any particular submission guidelines? (ie file formats etc.) I poked around and couldn't find any. I'm getting some of my adventure notes into a fleshed out and printable format.

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There is a set of submission guidelines being hammered on at the moment. In the meantime, looking at how Selek's adventures are formatted can't hurt for general structure.

Adventures, though, are very much needed.

I think it behooves me to thank selek, just because he was the one guy who actually kept sending me material :)

I have open, in another window, the final proof for BTFF Volume 2, Issue 1. I've found a couple of very minor booboos, and Tomcat's fixing those. Once I have the final version, and I'm back on my main PC, the issue will be uploaded. The biggest technical problem I have is that I'm wrapping up a move, and that always makes things more difficult than they need to be.

Oh, and trust me...your patience will be rewarded. The issue is BEAUTIFUL!

Great. Looking forward to that! :)

Submission packet #8 should be in your Inbox by tomorrow afternoon, so you'll have plenty to work on going forward.

I'm definitely looking forward to BTFF 2-1.

Hurry, hurry, hurry!

Anyway we could get a new issue together with all the submissions on the website? Adapting star trek online and running JJ Abrahams games?

The website is definitely back from the dead. I could definitely use some more material, though. I'm especially in need of adventures; that's the area that could definitely use the most help, I think. The 22nd century is especially under-represented there (though it could use some help in other areas, too).

If you have any star systems, planets, or critters, we could use those, too.