Science Fiction and Horror

This week I am working my way through a bunch of Sci-Fi/Horror movies.  I thought then that today would be a good day to see how I use both genres together.

Science Fiction and Horror have had a long-standing relationship.  Where horror stories are some of the first stories ever told, Science Fiction, or Science Romances, are newer.  

For me, and many others, the Modern Age of Science Fiction began with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus" in 1818.  While considered by many to be a Gothic Horror novel, it only has the trappings of a true Gothic Horror. The work is pure science fiction of a brilliant man, the titular Dr. Frankenstein, and his attempts using science to reanimate dead tissue resulting in the creation of his monster, who is NOT named Frankenstein. 

Like all good science fiction, it is far looking and attempts to tell us something about our society or morals.   Which is why when people ask "When did Sci-Fi become so woke?" I say "In 1818 when it was invented by a Regency-age, teenage feminist."  This was 10 years before Jules Verne, the so-called Father of Science Fiction was born and almost 50 years before H.G. Wells was born.

It would be disingenuous to ignore the horror elements of Frankenstein in favor of its Sci-Fi elements.  They go hand in hand.  The story was conceived from a nightmare, the same night that John Polidori gave us "The Vampyre."  

Almost a century later we would get another popular horror/Sci-Fi mix in H.G. Wells War of the Worlds. This give us the popular and potent combination of Sci-Fi, Horror, and Mars. 

Sci-Fi tends to organized into two large camps; the hopeful and the dystopian.  YES there is more, I am not talking about ALL of sci-fi right now.  But you make some clear demarcations alonge the line of Hope.

Star Trek for example tends to be on the side of hope.  Hope for what the future can bring and be.  Again "Woke" since 1966. Star Trek is about hope in the face of all sorts of diversity.  But what about hope in the face of fear?

"Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence."
 - Leonard 'Bones' McCoy, Star Trek (2009)

The goal of Star Trek: BlackStar very early on was the horrors of space.  Often times, especially in the TNG days, space travel was depicted as fun, and easy (ish), and the horrors were the ones we brought with us.  While that made for great TV in the 90s, I was still left wanting something more.  Star Treks Voyager and then Enterprise got back to the idea that space travel was not easy nor always fun.  BlackStar I hope delivers on the "in space no one can hear you scream" angle.  I opted for mythos monsters and settings with the idea that "in space the stars are always right."  Even though that was also the same time I was lamenting you can't just slap Cthulhu on something to make it sell.

Well. I am not "selling" anything with BlackStar save for my own home games. Still, I feel I owe it at least to myself not to "just slap Cthulhu onto Star Trek." 

On the flip side of this I have my Star Trek: Mercy.  Which is nothing if not about hope.  A Starfleet full of various species from across the Galaxy, even ones the Federation are not allies with, all working together to run a hospital ship to save lives. Not that I can't run into horror elements, that is not the goal here. 

I have, thanks to many of the October Horror Movie Challenges had the chance to watch some great Horror/Sci-fi.  I have also had the chance to read a lot of horror sci-fi over the years, but sadly nothing recently.

It is a topic that I would love to explore more in depth and find stories that are unique to this combined genre.   Much like how Sci-Fi lead me to Fantasy and Fantasty lead me to Dark Fantasy and Horror, Horror is bringing me full circle back to Sci-Fi.  

I think it would be fun to get back to some sci-fi games.  Even if I have to add horror to them. 

I am not sure where this is taking me, but I am looking forward to finding out.  Hopefully I'll have some more insights later this week.

The New Golden Age of Star Trek

I have often thought that I was not doing a horror/old-school/vampire/witch sort of blog I'd be doing a Star Trek one.  I am that obsessed.  Thankfully for me there already is a great blog that does Star Trek and Doctor and more; TARDIS Captain.

Even so, I can't help but be excited for all the great new Star Trek heading my way.

Here are the previews of all the upcoming Star Trek shows on Paramount+.

I am very excited!

#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.

Star Trek musings, BlackStar and Mercy

Been in a bit of a creative rut when it comes to D&D and D&D-like games lately.  I get my best ideas when running and I have not been doing that in the morning due to the day job.

In the meantime, I have been thinking about my two Trek games BlackStar and Mercy.

For BlackStar I spent some money and had a 3D model designed for my ship, the USS Protector.  I got the STL file from the designer and had my youngest print them out on our resin printer.  The results?  Well, I have to say I am thrilled to death with them.

Looking now I see the blue resin one is a little hard to see.  The green resin one I painted with a light-gray/off-white "Corax White" from Citadel paints.

The painted/green resin/smallest is the largest size we can print with the ship length on the y axis.  The blue is the largest we can do with the ship length on the z axis.

I am actually pretty happy with both sizes to be honest.

You can see the blue resin one better here.  The front of the saucer section was where it was connected to the build plate.  Connor raised it by a couple of mm and it looks much better.  I gave that one to my friend Greg for his birthday and his own Trek game.

The blue resin also looks like it is the same scale as this little USS Reliant model I have. I also have an Enterprise A that is very nearly the same scale.

The smaller one matches the scale (nearly) of the Enterprise D model I have too. 

If I compare to this sizing, the Protector uses the same space frame as does the Ambassador Class Enterprise-C.

I said originally that the Protector was 700 meters, that looks like a typo to me.  I am now saying 600 meters, so still longer that than the Enterprise C.  Most of that is in the nacelles.

It's kinda cool to have my own little starships coming out of what is this century's version of the replicator.

Speaking of centuries.  I have been discussing my Mystoerth Timeline with some others and it is a little like sticking a square peg into a round hole.  But it is still nowhere near as bad as trying to get my Star Trek timeline to line up.   I am not talking about trying to figure out how to work things like Discovery and Axanar into the mix, I am talking about trying to figure out how Trek and real-world history can co-exist!

One of the bigger issues comes from the episode The Space Seed, the one that introduced Khan.  In the episode Khan was supposed to rise to power during the Eugenics Wars in the 1990s. He then left Earth on a DY-100 sleeper ship around 2018.  

uh...Ok.  Look. The Space Seed aired in 1967. No one at the time thought people would still be watching Trek in the 1990s, let alone new Star Treks on the air at that time. 

How do I fix this?  Thankfully I stumbled on a video that neatly solves this problem (and some others) for me.

Moving it all to 2090?  Well, that works out great for me to be honest.  But I might even fudge it a bit more and say it happened in 2067, 100 years after the episode aired. Though that is only 46 years from now!

We know that  Zefram Cochrane made his warp flight on April 4, 2063, but there had to be sleeper ships still in use.  It works. It is inelegant in a way, there are other dates I'll have to move, but for *my* Trek universe it is fine.

In any case, it might not even come up in my games, though I am sure Mercy will deal with something from the Eugenics Wars. It's just too fruitful of a playground not to do something with it. 

Character Creation Challenge: Star Trek Adventures

It's the start of May!  Let's begin the new month like I have been doing all year long so far with a new character.

My "soft" theme for May is going to be Sci-Fi games.  I am dedicating all month to it, but a good portion of the month to be sure.  So for this I am starting with a the character I played WAY back in the day under FASA Trek.   I wanted to pull out my FASA Trek rules I got as a gift, but I forgot how damn involved character creation was for that game!  So instead I am going to pull out the newer Star Trek Adventures from Modiphius.

Plus I like the Star Ship creation rules from Modiphius.

While I am still excited about the prospect of doing my BlackStar game set in the 2350s, right now it is my "Starfleet Doctors Without Borders" idea, Mercy, set in 2295 that has me excited today.

Plus I needed to work some of the details of the titular starship, the NCC-3001 USS Mercy.

The Game: Star Trek Adventures (and some FASA Trek)

Star Trek Adventures has a lot going for it right now including a ton of material out there, support by the publisher and the rules don't have me reaching for the Tylenol.   At the same time there is a nice feel of continuity here.  I do feel like I could play any era of Trek I wanted and these rules would cover me.  Plus the Modiphius Trek has the advantage of me being able to add some material from John Carter of Mars and Dune if I later choose.  

If my only game was BlackStar then I'd add in some of the material from their new Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 be done with it.   But Mercy needs something a little different and I am going to borrow heavily from FASA Star Trek on this one. BTW the 2d20 Achtung! Cthulhu looks amazing. I am going to grab it the moment I can.

FASA Trek had a more ship combat emphasis than Modiphius Trek does.  I think for my Star Trek Mercy game that will be important.  Not that the Mercy is going to fly into combat with phasers hot, but more like they will be needed in situations where there is plenty combat happening.  I am toying with the idea of the Orion Syndicate as the big bads, but no idea just yet.  

I do know that the captain of the Mercy will be a promoted FASA Trek Character.

The Character: Cmdr. Scott Elders, MD

Scott Elders was the CMO of the USS Andromeda, the last ship I used in FASA Trek all the way back in the later 1980s.  My game play covered the time between the TOS Movies and the TNG TV series.  So that is the time I like to think of him in. 

For Mercy he has been promoted to Commander and is now the "Captain" of his own ship, the newly christened USS Mercy, NCC 3001.  Second ship in the Asclepius Class medical starships.  Something of a cross between the Daedalus Class and the Olympic Class.  The ship is designed to be a state of the art (for 2295) medical transport and emergency response. 

Though I guess given the time the registry would be more like 25xx or something.

Before I get to the ship here is her Commander.

I do like these character sheets.

The Ship: USS Mercy

The Mercy is a new ship. But unlike the Protector, she is built on tried and true technologies. 

Not a bad little ship.  

I'll do some more tinkering, but I like how these both are coming together.

Now I just need to kitbash or 3D print a Mercy starship!

Links

• New Year, New Character Posts
• Star Trek: Mercy
• Star Trek: BlackStar
• Star Trek Character/Starship Generator
• Memory Alpha Federation Starship Registry

Star Trek: Mercy and BlackStar Characters

One thing I wanted to accomplish with the recent Character Creation Challenge was to create characters that I could use in my War of the Witch Queens campaign AND get ideas for a multiverse of witches.

But that is not the only thing I wanted from it.

I also wanted to see the differences between various Star Trek-like systems in order to find good NPC for my BlackStar and Star Trek: Mercy games.

Of course, my main source is going to be the challenge founder Carl Stark at Tardis Captain's blog (and of course his Star Trek RPG page). 

• FASA Trek
• Frontier Space
• Star Trek Adventures
• Far Trek
• Star Trek RPG (Last Unicorn)
• FASA Doctor Who
• Prime Directive
• Star Trek RPG (Decipher)
• Starships & Spacemen
  
• Where No Man Has Gone Before

Reading through all of these (and it has been great!) I am more convinced now that my Star Trek Mercy game needs to be a FASA Trek game while BlackStar can be something else; most likely Star Trek Adventures.

Star Trek: Mercy

As I have mentioned previously Star Trek Mercy will take place aboard a Federation Hospital Ship.  Its mission is a bit like Doctors Without Borders; they fly into dangerous situations with the goal of helping.  While it is a Federation/Starfleet ship I am going to open up character choices to any and all Star Trek races.  So humans, Vulcans, Andorians will be expected, but also Romulans, Klingons, Deltans, even Gorn, and Orions if someone can give me a good reason.  These crew will not be members of Starfleet, they still belong to their respective worlds, but I also have to, want to, work within canon.  

For this, a few guidelines are needed.  No Klingon Starfleet officers. Worf was the first and the Federation and the Klingon Empire are at a period of cooled tensions.  They are not allies per see, but they are also not shooting at each other.  We know from the TNG episode "The Neutral Zone" that Romulans have not had any relations with the Federation since the Tomed Incident of 2311.  There is still a Romulan Ambassador on Earth in 2293.  That gives me 18 years' worth of gameplay.

I stated in my first post on this that 2295 would be a good year to set this in.  Seems like I was on to something.  I can even use the Plasma Plague of 2294 as the first mission of the Mercy. We even get a Stardate for it, 38235.3, though that date can't really work for 2294, it doesn't even work well for The Original Series Stardates. That date gives you Wed Feb 24 2360 for TNG and Tue Oct 28 2279 for TOS. Might need to use the FASA Trek Stardate calculations to make this one work!

Also since this is FASA Trek I can borrow some ideas from The Next Generation Officer's Manual.  In particular, the notion that there were a bunch of different uniforms in use. Gives me an excuse to use the ones I want.  These would be new here and old by the time the USS Protector and the Mystic-class ships roll out.

I am going to need a new ship design too.

What would also be nice is to work in some Original Series Apocrphya into my game; Saavik being half-Vulcan/half-Romulan, Chekov working for Starfleet Intelligence and a touring Chess Master (loosing to the Betazoids), Scotty as a Professor of Engineering at Starfleet Academy before getting lost near a Dyson Sphere in 2294, Sulu as the Captain of the Excelsior and Harriman as Captain of the Enterprise B. Uhura as Demora Sulu's Godmother. I would also like to find out more about Lt. Elise McKennah, played by Michele Specht in Star Trek Continues.

McCoy becoming an admiral, Spock continuing his role as Federation Ambassador, and Kirk disappearing on the Enterprise B. Though those are not really disputed. 

I like this idea since it is also the first Trek game my Star Trek loving wife has mentioned she would like to play.

BlackStar: Mercy and Other Random Trek Ideas

A lot going on at my day job.  This social distancing has us busy as hell revise a number of our courses. Well, nothing like job-security I guess.

Going through my various Trek RPGs and collecting various ideas that may, or may not fit in with my BlackStar campaign.

Star Trek: Mercy
This idea came about by watching the hospital ships come into New York, and Beverly Crusher-Picars's ship the USS Pasteur in "All Good Things."  I was going through my new FASA Star Trek boxed set and was thinking about my first Trek character, Dr. Scott Elders, the CMO of the USS Andromeda.

I thought a good Post-Enterprise (2151), Pre-TOS (2265) era game might focus on the USS Mercy, a Federation Hospital Ship.  It has the authorization to go into other parts of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants to provide medical assistance.  I was also thinking it could doctors of dozens of different species.  If I set it between 2151 and 2265 it gives me an excuse to use a character that has been mentioned in my games, but never actually seen, Fleet Admiral Lucille Ball, Commander of Starfleet Operations.

How Lucille Ball Helped Star Trek Become a Cultural Icon

In any case, she is part of my Trek-universe history. So just as Admiral Nyota Uhura is a central figure to my BlackStar game, Admiral Ball is to Star Trek: Mercy.

I am partial to a Daedalus or Olympic-class style ship, with the extra space in the "saucer" section dedicated to hospital beds and medical care facilities.  Maybe I would have something a little more advanced than the Daedalus-class (2196), but not quite the Olympic-class (2395).

It is tempting to split the difference and set it in 2295.  That would put it firmly into the Enterprise-B time.  Again, appealing for just for the newness of it.  Among other things, it gives me a Captain Nyota Uhura, a Cmdr. Chekov is part of Starfleet Intelligence and an Admiral McCoy.
I might also get a Captain Demora Sulu.

This is also a good time because this is the time period I set my original Ghost Ship adventure.
Maybe I could do a Mercy one-shot to set up Ghost Ship later on!

Star Trek: Federation News Network
This came from a couple of different places.  First, going back to the Star Trek Generations and the new Picard series, both featured news reporters in the Trek universe.  I really liked that idea and thought it might be fun to have some other points of view than just Starfleet officers.
Secondly, I am working as a mentor for a high school senior.  She is writing her own Trek story and the central character is a reporter.

That is all I have at the moment, but it could be something I could add to any game.