My Dream Product

[Renny]

Ok, i've come up with my dream product for the Star Trek game.

I'd call it the ship pack and the idea is it would be the complete starship resource for players and narrators. Each pack would detail completely a particular ship, be it Federation, Klingon, Romulan or whatever. The Federation pack could be, for example, USS Hood and would detail the Constitution class USS Hood.

For starters, you'd have detailed write ups for the major characters on the ship, senior officers, personalities and so on. Then, you'd describe in broad terms the average engineer, the average security guard etc so that the crew would be available to you in as much detail as possible. A crew breakdown would also be useful. Obviously the narrator could then substitute his own crew into the approriate positions and voila, a complete starship crew.

Next you detail the ship fully. Full stats for the ship would be a given, along with some nice pictures, schematics etc. Stats and descriptions of the locations aboard ship which would be useful in a campaign, bridge, engineering, crew quarters etc. I see this pack as being a bit like a Fantasy City supplement, but the Trek equivalent.

Then you have a detailed history of the ship, with many of the obligatory adventure hooks built in so you can replay the famous events in the ship's history and spin them off into new adventures.

Round off the package with a couple of sheets of full colour cardboard hero type figures representing the personalities detailed above, along with generic starfleet types, and some fold out maps of the bridge, engineering, corridor sections etc to use with the cardboard figures and there you have it.

What do the rest of you think ?

Renny

[Lt Cmdr Matt]

Its a great idea, I doubt it will see the light of day though. As a Narrator, I am always looking for more information for NPCs and ships.

[Renny]

You're right, I doubt such a product would ever actually happen but the more I think about it, the more I think it's doable.
The great thing is that it would have a lot of utility as the floor plans could easily be used to represent other ships, stations etc. Cardboard figures are always useful, and have the benefit of not needing painting. And you'd have a nice supply of pregen characters at hand. Especially if you were to do a klingon ship, a romulan ship and others in the same style. It's also not a product which has been produced for any other incarnation of the game which can't be a bad thing.

Renny

[Dan Gurden]

But you have forgotton, the 100% biggest bonus of all...

This is a project that any of us can undertake. In fact if each of us were to take one of our game ships (or simply pick a ship and write a treatment of it), then have a few of us PDF it and make it available to all...

Suddenly we have a huge resource of many ships available, either in ICON or CODA...

Hell, in my case, the vast majority of this is already available from me with the USS Venture online material, history, name lineage, schematics, location diagrams, game stats, technical details and senior crew and NPC's all there...

[PGoodman13]

This is an interesting notion. I've been playing around in my head with the notion of a Star Trek: Razor's Edge "sourcebook" to outline my died-aborning campaign. I've already got a couple of NPCs done up, and I have the basic stats for the ship and an idea for the station. Hmmmmm....

[Renny]

You're right, Dan.

What got me thinking about this was an urge to resurrect a project of mine which I originally worked on around 1987 for the FASA system, what I called my crew list for the USS BonHomme Richard, Constitution class refit. I statted out all of the ship's officers, and named each and every member of her crew.
I started work on customising deck plans to fit in with my ideas for the ship and drafted a fairly detailed history of the ship up to that point with a friend of mine.
Just recently I had the urge to turn out a more professional looking document in pdf format, and that got me thinking about what would happen if Decipher could turn out such a product.
But i'd love to see what other narrators could produce as well.
It would make a great resource.

Renny

[KillerWhale]

Hey, funny you should say that, I have the very same project for the USS Ascendant right after E.S.O. is done

[Lt Cmdr Matt]

I almost did a sourcebook like that, but I have another couple of large projects to do, and Trek is dead to me right now.

[Kirok]

also, alot of the components or info for a ship packs would have to be created only ONCE - a lot of things would be usable for other ships: crew, schematics and layouts and the like...The trick would be setting up the product to take advantage of this fact, and finding a way to make it economical from a printing standpoint.

this goes for doing it ourselves, too. Were such a project to take off, different people could work up different aspects, and a lot of that would have to be doen only once.

man, I'm diggin' this....

[Sarge]

I don't have nearly enough free time to take part in this, but I'd pay good money for the finished product.

[Antonsb214]

Well, for a Constitution-class ship, I have my FASA deckplans and "Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise." As far as NPCs go, I suppose a little program could be written up that would generate NPC's depending on choices made by the narrator... I had one for LUG somewhere. And "cardboard hero" type minis would really come in handy, I think some were planned for the new GURPS powered Prime Directive game.
Well back to deckplans, I could really just use deckplans of generic portions of ships; corridors, sickbay, brig, bridge, etc.
Corridors tend to look alike from one ship to the next... except on Galaxy class ships.

[Owen E Oulton]

"Corridors tend to look alike from one ship to the next... except on Galaxy class ships"

Funny, corridors on all TNG ships (especially the Galaxy Class) look a helluva lot like 85-year-old Constitution Class (refit) ships... Same sets, new carpet and paint.

[Cut]

I like the idea very much. There has been something like this with the old West End Games "Star Wars" RPG. There they turned out a campaign setting, starting with a box set. The adventure was based on a modiefied corellian corvette. The box came complete with NPCs, deckplans and different recognation materials and background for the sector their journey took place in. It was called the DarkStryder campaign. It told a closed story ark. There were three (or four) more softcover books released, in the course of the last one the adventure ended. I thought it to be the number one Star Wars package/setting.

But I have to confess I've always been very inclined toward box-sets. I think they have a special "feeling" about them :-)
I have both of LUGTreksRPG boxes (favouring the "Way of D'era"box) and hope there will be DecTek boxes as well.

So the idea Renny had in mind is doable and has been done. But I think we have to wait until all the backup sourcebooks and materials have been written and published before this specialesed products might be produced.

I find the idea intriguing, of putting something out together. There are the Galaxy class blueprint available. So one could start with them...

Regards, Nico