Trek, Interrupted: The LUG Star Trek Roleplaying Game

Trek, Interrupted: The LUG Star Trek Roleplaying Game

Published by Jeffrey Harlan on January 12, 2019

A decade after the final supplement was released for FASA Corporation’s Star Trek: The Role Playing Game, Paramount awarded the license to produce a new Star Trek roleplaying game to Last Unicorn Games. Released in late 1998, the first installment of the new game was the Star Trek: The Next Generation Role Playing Game Core Book, followed over the next two years by the Star Trek Roleplaying Game Core Book and the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Roleplaying Game Core Book, as well as a number of supplements for each.

FASA’s Star Trek: The Role Playing Game: The First Seven-Year Trek

FASA’s Star Trek: The Role Playing Game: The First Seven-Year Trek

Published by Jeffrey Harlan on January 5, 2019

FASA Corporation was founded in 1980 by Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock III, who were friends and fellow gamers from the United States Merchant…

A Very Star Trek Christmas

A Very Star Trek Christmas

Published by Jeffrey Harlan on December 25, 2018

Christmas has long had a special place in Star Trek. Despite the overall secular depiction of humanity in the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries, the characters are still shown explicitly celebrating the holiday, though its religious aspects have been downplayed.

The first time that Christmas is mentioned in Star Trek is in the first season of the original series, in the episode “Dagger of the Mind.” While preparing to beam down to the Tantalus V penal colony, Kirk and McCoy are joined by Dr. Helen Noel, whose name is appropriately on-the-nose for the revelation that she and Kirk met at the Science Department Christmas party. Christmas would not be explicitly mentioned again until Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The altered reality of Star Trek

USS Enterprise (Star Trek Into Darkness)

The altered reality of Star Trek

Published by Jeffrey Harlan on January 27, 2016

In May 2009, the eleventh Star Trek feature film boldly went where no Trek had gone before: rebooting and reimagining the franchise, under the aegis of producer/director J.J. Abrams. The film paid homage to the previous Star Trek continuity via a time-travel plot that resulted in massive changes to history, and a new timeline, now only loosely connected to the original, was born.

A Look at Stardates

A Look at Stardates

Published by Jeffrey Harlan on July 24, 2012

Originally created in order to indicate that Star Trek was set in some undefined future era without actually having to say exactly when the series took place, stardates were little more than largely-random numbers at first. By the time Star Trek: The Next Generation aired, decades later, a more logical, consistent formula was created for stardates: 1000 “star-days” passed per year, which was indicated by the first two digits of the now-five-digit stardate (the better to indicate that nearly a century had passed since the original Star Trek series).

These are a few of my favorite things

These are a few of my favorite things

Published by Jeffrey Harlan on June 30, 2011

Oshkosh, Wisconsin. 1984. I’m six (“and a half!”) years old, and this is the year I would discover some seriously cool stuff: Transformers and G.I. Joe. While G.I. Joe had debuted two years earlier, and my older brother, Kevin, doubtless had some of the toys, I didn’t really notice that stuff until after I’d turned six. At this point, I was beginning to become one of the “big kids,” and my tastes in toys reflected that. The fact that, a year later in 1985, both toy lines would have TV shows – which were, really, little better than half-hour-long daily commercials for said toys – certainly aided in my discovery. That year also saw the release of a new cartoon in the U.S.: Robotech, and by 1986, I’d also discovered Voltron, another Japanese import. Add these to my existing love of the Star Wars toys, and I’m shocked my mother was able to refrain from causing physical harm to myself or my brother whenever we happened to pass a toy aisle when we’d go shopping.