Let’s get ready to Mashup! (And remember, there’s an new game meme announcement list — get your gaming memes piping hot.)
Today we’re going to take another SF classic and subject it to our evil whims. Your target du jour is Star Trek, and we’re not talking any of that revisionist stuff. No Enterprise, no Next Generation, no Deep Space Nine. We’re doing Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and the five year journey. Or the movies, cause hey, everyone loves Ricardo.
The core characters of Star Trek were officers in charge of an exploration mission. They were often caught between duty and humanity; I wouldn’t give Star Trek the same props I give Horatio Hornblower, but Roddenberry knew what drove his conflicts. I think there are some interesting possibilities for mashing.
My choice of game is gonna be Shadowrun, not for any particularly thematic reason except that I like the setting. It’s corny, but it’s fun. In this campaign, we’ll deviate from canon and decide that something terrible has happened to Western Europe. Britain is still Britain, and the Scandanavian countries are more or less intact, but something happened to France and Germany and Spain and now most of the continent is terra incognita.
One side effect, of course, is that communication into and out of Europe is messed up. Sometimes it works; sometimes it fails. Sometimes (although the rest of the world probably doesn’t realize this) something hijacks the communication and pretends to be to one side or the other.
The PCs have a mission. Explore, reestablish contact, figure out what happened, and come back alive. You could break from Shadowrun altogether and have the PCs be actual competent operatives, but I sort of think it’d be more fun to make up shadowrunners who got caught and have this one chance to get their sentences commuted. Of course, that’s less Star Trek, so I guess it’s government agents after all.
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GURPS Swashbuckler (or the old Swashbuckler game, or even 7th Sea if you adjusted their world maps/globe, or would be just about ideal for this – send a boat off to the Far East (or the gameworld equivalent thereof), since the rush to colonize the Far East gives plenty of opportunities for the occasional appearance of sleek menacing rival boats from competing kingdoms as Klingon/Romulan analogs, and mysterious unmet-by-the-heroes’-nation Asian ports as the strange planets full of bizarre social rules and ‘they look kinda like us, just colored differently’ aliens. Plus you can have Kirk try to sleep with every single Asian babe he meets.
Pursuant of nothing, this week’s Monday Mashup is Star Trek. Not Star Trek: The Next Generation, not Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and not Star Trek: Enterprise. Just pure Star Trek. For this week’s mashup, I pick, for no good…
What about using the Call of Cthulhu system to have the PC’s exploring the Dreamlands? The surreal nature of the dreamlands can provide lots in the way of potential alien encounters, and it could be that they were exploring some new world just opened up by a cult’s magical ritual gone not-quite-right.
Closer to the original genre, I also think of Stargate – and John Tynes was one time commissioned to start writing a game based on it, but West End went bankrupt before he was more than about 30k words in.
Boot Hill, or something westerny. Keeps things pretty pure to the original concept, and you can have Spaniards as Romulans and Apache as Klingon stand-ins. Kirk & McCoy are of course big east coast Whiteys, Spock is their Comanche guide.
Too bad you ruled out DS9 – that would be classic D&D baby! The party is in charge of a castle at the edge of the Empire, and the Big Nasty Necromancers are comin’ in! Shaky forced allegiances with the Orcish Kingdom and the dragons swooping out of the sky at the last minute of the climactic battle to save the day!
Exploring the Dreamlands! That’s superb. I like Boot Hill, too.
We’ll do DS9 somewhere down the line.
Bryant’s mashup this week is Star Trek. Not Next Generation. No DS9. Voyager need not apply. And Enterprise is out, too. Just the original……
hese are the voyages of the Riverboat Enterprise, its five year mission to explore strange new lands, to seek out new species and new civilisations, to go where no man has gone before.
This week, Bryant’s half of the Mashup is Star Trek. That’s the original series only, not Next Generation, Deep Space…
Time for a Monday Mashup. This is an old one from several weeks ago: Star Trek. That’s the original show…
Kyle Janison
kjanison@hotmail.com
There’s a great new astrobiology blog, run by newspaper editor Rob Bignell, at http://alienlifeblog.blogspot.com/. It includes roundups of the latest news from the various scientific fields that form astrobiology, but more interestingly includes a daily analysis of how a different original series’ alien might have evolved. So far, he