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Welcome to Star Trek: Relic

09:41, 28th March 2024 (GMT+0)

Star Trek: Relic

Greetings one and all! I'm Owen E. Oulton, your guide to adventure in the final frontier. I began gaming in March of 1980 and GMing in September of that same year with Traveller and The Fantasy Trip. In 1982, FASA Corporation released its Star Trek, the Role Playing Game. I immediately bought it and began running the adventures of the starship Excalibur NCC-1705 (refit). The ship had been rebuilt to the same design as the Enterprise refit after being nearly destroyed in the TOS episode The Ultimate Computer. I used the FASA rules through the 1980's and into the early 1990's before, FASA having lost the Trek licence, I switched to a modified version of GDW's House Rules (Twilight 2000/Dark Conspiracy) which I used for another 10 years. When Last Unicorn Games brought out its Star Trek the Next Generation Core Rule Book, I snapped it up and have never looked back. I was invited by Ross Isaacs to write a Klingon adventure fo GenCon the year that LUG went under, but it never got used as written (I have heard unofficially that they ran a mash-up of it with another adventure, but have never been able to confirm it). I signed up for the playtest of Decipher's CODA rules, but they triggered by aversion to class'n'level games and I never ran anything using it.

I first created my Star Trek: Relic campaign in Y2K, basing it on the Next Generation episode Relics with the Dyson Sphere where Captain Picard and crew rescued Captain Montgomery Scott from 75 years of transporter stasis. I've always liked the concept of a Dyson Sphere, so I decided to postulate that a few years later Starfleet had established a base in the Sphere and was exploring it. The idea was that there would be a squadron of Danube class runabouts assigned to Dyson Base, as this would allow me to use small gaming groups of 3 to 4 characters. Each crew would ideally have a Lieutenant in command with two Lieutenants (junior grade) and an Ensign. The Lieutenant would be the Flight Control Officer (Command), one of the Lt(jg)'s would be the Science Officer with the Ensign as Junior Science Officer, and the Engineer would be the other Lt(jg). depending on the players' preferences, either the Engineer or Science Officer could be the senior officer as desired, and if needed the Ensign could be bumped up to a Lt(jg). This would allow for a defined "party leader" if their play style tended that way, but with a fairly flat playing field...

The game uses the Last Unicorn Games' ICON system rules, a dice-pool style D6 based game with a drama die (sort of but not quite like WEG's D6 system) with a lifepath style character creation and an  attribute and skill-based set of game mechanics. I have introduced a few house rules to tweak a few flaws in the rules. Characters would have 2 or 3 tours of duty under their belts (0 or 1 for Ensigns). Each team (minimum of 2 PCs per team) would be assigned to a runabout, which they would get to name (following the established tradition of being named after Earth rivers) with GM's approval. Canon runabouts from TNG or DS9 are not available, nor are the Thames or the Lena, both of which have PC crews from the face-to-face campaign (here used as background NPCs).

Species allowed are virtually any Federation species, Klingon exchange officers or (by arrangement) non-Federation specialists. Players wishing to play Vulcans or Klingons must submit a character proposal and establish a knowledge of how to play the species. All other players may merely submit character proposals. Original species or those from other games (like Vargr from Traveller or Yazirians or Dralasites from Star Frontiers0 will be considered - just ask.