#RPGaDAY2021 Day 7 Inspiration

Going with another alternate word today.

Day 7 Inspiration

Every so often I get asked what sort of things inspire me.  I usually half-jokingly say 70s metal, cheesy horror movies, and comics.

Only half-jokingly because there is a not-so-small amount of material in my bibliography of published material and blog posts that are exactly all of that.

Presently I am re-watching Star Trek Enterprise with my wife. We only saw bits and pieces of it when it was new, our kids were babies then, and keeping up on TV was not our main priority. 

So Enterprise takes place before The Original Series, thus the ship feels a little "low tech" and everything has a frontier feel to it.  While I am enjoying it for its own merits I am getting a ton of ideas for my two Star Trek campaigns; BlackStar and Mercy.  Season 1 deals with the Temporal Cold War and the Temporal Accords, which comes up later in Star Trek Discovery.  This is also putting back into the mood for a combined Star Trek/Doctor Who game which means FASA rules.  BUT inspiration aside I don't want to start YET another Trek game. I haven't even gotten the ones I am planning off the ground.

SO...maybe I can add some of these ideas to Mercy, BlackStar is a bit full as is.  Maybe I can add a character from the 31st century on my medical starship.  But why is he/she there?   Maybe I'll leave that to the player.  

Getting back to music for a bit, there is a song that has some solid Trek connotations to it.

One of my all-time favorite songs by the band Queen is '39.  Written by the guitarist, and Ph.D. in Astrophysics, Brian May.   The song deals with 20 astronauts that leave Earth on a one-year-long mission. One of the astronauts says goodbye to his wife and daughter, but due to the time dilation effects of moving near the speed of light, it is many, many years later when they return.  While he is "older but a year" his daughter is a grandmother now.   In the song, they had discovered a new world.

I have often thought it would be possible that later warp drive ships would run into older, slower relativistic ships with a crew that had left Earth decades if not a century before.  You see this played out really well in Arthur C. Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth.   It was one of my favorite books of his and I loved the idea of "gritty" space travel and one very removed from the notion of warp drives.

Now we have seen visitors from the past in Trek before, TNG's first season episode "The Neutral Zone" has frozen humans from the late 20th century, the second season "The Emissary" with frozen Klingons, and the awkwardly named "The 37's" from Star Trek Voyager's second season with humans from 1937 found on a planet in the Delta Quadrant some 70k light-years from Earth. 

This would be an adventure for Mercy.  The starship Mercy gets a distress beacon from a ship that left Earth in 2139, just prior to the wide adoption of warp drive. Yeah, there are cargo ships that can go warp 1.8 or so, but most ships are going to be sleeper ships. Mercy, being Mercy, goes in to investigate and discovers a crew from 156 years ago.  Likely the ship, I might call the Arthur C. Clark, was headed to a planet that is now claimed by the Klingons, or Romulans, or some other species.  

I'll need to ponder this one a little more. In any case, I guess I'll keep looking for inspiration.