Leaving stuff out

[badger2305]

More heresy:

I'm not fond of the Ferengi, conceptually speaking. A race of completely conniving capitalists is one-dimensional (and yes, I know that many races in ST are relatively one-dimensional). Part of it is that I'm a bit "old-school" - I thought the Orions were supposed to be the not very trustworthy traders in the ST universe.

And then there are chronology questions - I'm not sure I agree with all the things done in ST:Enterprise to rewrite continuity - if there really is such a thing in ST. And frankly, there are some ST novels (e.g. The Final Reflection by John M. Ford) with explanations or ideas I prefer to what's been on TV.

So I am thinking about leaving the Ferengi out of my game. Anybody done anything else like this? Either in terms of some element of the background, or changing the chronology?

[black campbellq]

I kept the Ferengi, but went for a more moderate view of them. Insteady of being sneaky, grubbing perverts as shown in TNG, etc. I have that as the UFP propaganda about them. The Ferengi are more modelled on the 18th/19th C capitalist who recognizes the importance of being an honest broker. You can't cheat your customers if you want them to come back. You provide the best quality and service feasable. Ethics are important. Essentially, the Ferengi we've seen on screen are the junk bondsmen of the Ferengi Alliance.

The Orions I use as a more freewheeling piratical kind of capitalism, the kind from the '80s.

AS for chronology changes, etc: Voyager went in to the Delta Quadrant and was never heard from again. ST:V never happened. Anytime game canon conflicts with show/movie canon, campaign wins. (It's an alternate reality or some such...)

The new campaign I may run is set in the TMP period. The big change...no transporter. I've always hated the idea: the power and data constraints would be enormous and it's too easy an out for characters in trouble. I much prefer the shuttlecraft route, which also lends a more Napoleonic sea flavor...got to go ashore, take the gig...

[Sea Tyger]

As far as taking the Ferengi out of the game, personally, I'd say just don't use them. You don't have to change canon and remove them entirely, just don't bother to include them in your adventures.

The only things I don't use for my Star Trek campaign are the events of Star Trek V, as Gene considered them apocryphal. Aside from that, I try to reconcile everything as they happened in the series and movies.

Of course, I don't go into the Delta Quadrant, so I usually ignore most of what happened on Voyager, but that's only because the PCs aren't there, and I won't ever send them there.

[Tobian]

The only thing I really leave out of my games is the dearth of technology that Voyager brought back with them. but the reasoning is simple for this: Most of it is incomplete and or has been classified as top secret, so the vast majority of Starfleet does not know of it's existence; while Starfleet engineers pour over it, backwards engineering it and build it into Starships not due for release for 20 years. At some point Transwarp may make an appearance in my game, but, with the old banged up ship my players use, I severelly doubt that it wouldn't fall to pieces with the shearing stresses in such a conduit!

I agree with Sea Tyger on trying to include as much of Canon as possible, but just because it exists, doesn't mean it ever shows up: On DS9 the Ferengi are quite evident, because it's allot closer to their home system, in your series you may be closer to the Orion held systems; Since both species would be in competition, as trading houses, you would unlikelly run in to any but the odd sole trader carving himself out a niche and hoping to slip under the radar of the Orions. Any species can be easilly written out of your game in this manner; Klingons are rarelly found ouside of their houses, so unless it's a Diplomat or an extremelly rare scientist or trader, you're not likelly to encounter them, unless you visit Klingon space.

To be honest I see Ferengi as filling a seperate niche from Orions during the 24th century; Because of the rapid expansion of the Federation and affiliated bodies (such as the Klingon Empire, who hate the Orions anyway) most of the traditional Orion operations, such as slavery, were crushed under the weight of the Federation moral imperitive, but not just that, the Federation brought universal wealth, replicator technology and meets the basic needs of most of it's citizens, which largelly killed allot of the traditional markets available to them: This of course would have brought sweeping changes to that corner of the universe to everyone. However this opened up a vast opertunity for illegal subtances, underground traficking and operating under the noses of the Federation, and making vast profits BECAUSE the Federation is wealthy. Hence the Orions went underground and formed the loose associations, secret societies, and the Orion Syndicate (which tend to view as being the original orion houses, but now undergorund, so fairly impossible to catch as a whole.. much like gangsters in the 20's, kill one lot and another one expands to fill it's place).

The Ferengi, however, are slightly different in this respect. The axiom associated with them was 'Caveat Emptor' -"Buyer beware" I.e. they try and fleece unsuspecting customers and are very hard nosed businessmen, but, with extremelly cunning exceptions, such as Quark, they generally run legal operations, with an emphasis stressed on what you can get away with, bending the law not outright breaking it. Their ships are large and powerful, but obvious. Orions... in the 24th century: No one even knows how they get around, they do everything secretivelly! That is not to say Ferengi don't run gun-runing operations or Orions don't run entirelly legitimate operations (though likelly fronts ), but as a rule the Ferengi operate on the fringes of the Federation, so they need to be less subtle, whereas the Orions run inside the Federation, much of their core territory is now well within Federation space!

[The Tatterdemalion King]

Quark was the Nagus's son-in-law, but he was still chomping at the bit to become a grunt-level member of the Orion Syndicate. That's got to tell you something.

[Dan Gurden]

Quark was the Nagus's son-in-law, but he was still chomping at the bit to become a grunt-level member of the Orion Syndicate. That's got to tell you something.

Yes, but as we never saw an Orion with any connection to the Syndicate, and the DS9 episodes dealing with the syndicate were nowhere near Orion either, I just apply that as a name of a Criminal Organisation rather than anything o do with the Orion Traders and Pirates (at least outside of it birth as an organisation).

This is of course personal opinion, but then thats what this conversation is all about.

[black campbellq]

Yes, but as we never saw an Orion with any connection to the Syndicate, and the DS9 episodes dealing with the syndicate were nowhere near Orion either, I just apply that as a name of a Criminal Organisation rather than anything o do with the Orion Traders and Pirates (at least outside of it birth as an organisation).

This is of course personal opinion, but then thats what this conversation is all about.

True...you never do see an Orion with the Syndicate in the DS9 stuff...

[Tobian]

It's quite correct, but I tend to view it as implying the Orions are simply at the top of the food chain, pulling the strings. All we saw on the show were the low level stooges at the lower rungs of the ladder

[Owen E Oulton]

And as we saw on Enterprise, it's really the women pulling the strings behind the scenes... How many of these guys have green Orion "girlfriends?" I'll bet you the ban on slavery put a serious crimp in their cover.

[RaconteurX]

I am more of a mind that 'Orion Syndicate' merely means an association of Orion businesses or individuals formed to engage in a specific enterprise or promote a common interest, or authorized to undertake a duty or transact specific business... the word 'syndicate', in the English language, is synonmous with 'consortium'. Consider, if you will, the Orions as the ultimate extension of the 'multinational' (zaibatsu, for all you otaku) which remains such a popular SF trope (although the idiom saw its defining moments in the cyberpunk movement). Syndicates form in order to garner influence for its constituents beyond the resources of any one member. It does not have to be illegal; the Orions simply know, by virtue of having been around for a very long, long time, how to peddle influence on scales outside the means of most civilizations. They are masters of connecting consumer with producer, and skimming a tidy profit off the top for themselves... capitalists so far in advance of the Ferengi as to be laughable.

But then, I never was partial to short, big-eared lechers who all seem to have gotten their noses from some sort of insane genetic relationship to Karl Malden.

[Owen E Oulton]

I rather suspect the writers of DS9 were thinking more of "The Synidicate," a cooperative effort between the Mafia and the Jewish and Irish crime mobs in the 1940's and 1950's, rather more than, say, United Features Syndicate. I mean, the first "Orion Syndicate" member we saw could've been an extra in A Piece of the Action...

Anyway, getting back to the heart of the matter, I'm firmly of the opinion that simply not dealing with things you don't like in canon is by far preferable to saying they don't exist/never happened. I regard canon,with all its warts, as the common ground we all have. To say X,Y and Z didn't happen simply confuses the issue. Canon is the "official record" - it's what's in the history books.

[badger2305]

I'm firmly of the opinion that simply not dealing with things you don't like in canon is by far preferable to saying they don't exist/never happened. I regard canon,with all its warts, as the common ground we all have. To say X,Y and Z didn't happen simply confuses the issue. Canon is the "official record" - it's what's in the history books.

That's interesting that you say that.

ST has such a long history of revisioned/reimagined background that "canon" is a word I'm not sure I would apply to it.

Things to ponder:

• There's a whole raft of ST fiction books out there, and I am absolutely certain that they do not all agree with one another. So you can say, "The Final Reflection" is considered "canon" for my campaign, but you really cannot say, "all ST novels are canon."
• Even reference works do not agree with one another. "Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise" is an example (IIRC) of something that doesn't fit very well - and the Franz Joseph design stuff is also dodgy (even if it is the basis for SFB, PR, etc.).
• Even televised episodes do not always agree. "Zefram Cochrane" is from Alpha Centauri in TOS, while he becomes a survivor of the Eugenics Wars (more or less) in the movies. (And later handwaving about "how it all" fits misses the fact that it is obvious that the later version is a complete revision of the earlier version.

...so as much as I would like to agree with you, I can't. "Canon" seems to me to be a cherished, hoped-for wish, but not a functional reality. And I freely admit that I'm a curmudgeon about it - I'm not always happy waiting for Paramount to come up with the latest, greatest new explanation for what's really going on in the ST universe. Sometimes I'd prefer to make it up on my own.

From a gaming perspective, GMs have to choose which explanations, background details, etc. actually are "real." From a perspective of "authorial control" (as writers have to use when they are writing ST novels), you have some freedom to do what you want. (And we have lots of writers of slash to thank for "violating" a strict constructionist view of canon, anyway. )

Rather than arguing about what's canon and what's not (we have the TML for that, I think), it seems to me that the real use for a sense of canon is to answer the question, "so does this feel like Star Trek ought to feel?" And if the answer is "yes" then go with it, even if it doesn't always agree with everything else out there. Seems to me that's an easier way of handling the question than anything more referential (reverential?).

(I suppose one could argue that since alternate timelines are known to exist in the ST universe, a "canon" explanation for your ST universe being different is that it is one of those alternate timelines. But that might be too much handwavium for some to handle....)

[AslanC]

Call me crazy but wasn't the original question of this thread...

"Anybody done anything else like this? Either in terms of some element of the background, or changing the chronology?"

Seems to me we are about to jump over that abyss into the canon vs non-canon fight. Now I don't know about you, but I am as fed up with that one as I am with the Yae/nae Starfleet Marines one or the Who's better? Kirk/Picard, etc...

As for changing canon, I do it liberally all the time.

One time I went so far as to do this... Feel free to look around, the neatest (and oddest) comment I ever got was that the uiforms looked like they were the Confederate version of the Movie Gen uniforms.

As for what I am doing now, as always whenever running a TNGish game, my canon changes are as follows...

1] Kirk dying in Generations? Never, he vanished after Star Trek VI. Hence Scotty was looking for him when he took out the Jenolan all those years ago.

2] A ship named Voyager vanished from the Badlands. End of story. Or is it? Certainly know one knows and as I plunder the DQ (not Dairy Queen) liberally, you can know it won't be the exact story of Voyager from TV if it ever gets resolved.

3] The Klingons always looked like that, end of story. It was good enough for Gene, it is good enough for me. In their past, they were the Okuda Klingons (savage and primal, with hyper religion it seems) then they slowly became the Ford Klingons (think Communist Russia vs Czar Russia) and after essentially losing the Cold War with the Federation, Khaless worship picked up steam and they have slid back that way. Imagine what they will do now that the Dominion War has shown them their empire has teeth!

4] Any and all canon from Star Trek TV shows, movies, books, video games, comic books, animated series, rpg timelines, etc... is fair game, so long as it adheres the the "sense of canon" (I like that one Badger!) that is my campaign.

5] I will bring in any race, technology, subplot or concept from another sci-fi (or not sci-fi) series, movie, comic, etc... that I like so long as it adheres to the "sense of canon" (I really like that one Badger, thanks for that ) that is my campaign.

In the end, so long as I am having fun and the players keep coming back for more (not all do), all is good

[spshu]

badger2305, only the TV shows and movies are consider canon, so any books are non-canon.

Even televised episodes do not always agree. "Zefrem Cochrane" is from Alpha Centauri in TOS, while he becomes a survivor of the Eugenics Wars (more or less) in the movies. (And later handwaving about "how it all" fits misses the fact that it is obvious that the later version is a complete revision of the earlier version.

There is a lot of fudge of the dates when event happened as we have gone past the dates for the Eugenes Wars. And why are you hand waving this as being a revision? True it has been a while since I have seen the episode, but I do not remember anything that would be contridictory with later material.

[spshu]

AslanC, I have previous looked at your Ultimate Star Trek website. Yes, it should be put up as an example of some one changing the canon for a Trek RPG game -- it is kind of interesting. It looks like you put alot of work into it with different uniforms, different events occuring. Not everyone can spend the time to do that -- figuring out how that effects future events, etc. If you can and then the game fizzles quickly, all that work would seem to go to waste. If it does go forward well enough, it seem like you would have to continue answer question about this or that changed event effects some other event or supposed know facts from the TV shows (now what was that change again). In such a case, it would seem that you would have to have an even greater grasp of canon then not using Ferengi as others have suggested.