Trek! is a
tabletop semi-
cooperative
puzzle-solving
card game that takes place in
The Federation, which is
most definitely not the
United Federation of Planets.
* and in which players crew the
Enterprise.
* My project for
NaNoWriMo 2010 was to create fifty new cards by the end of November. I only made forty, but am in the process of finishing, and of cleaning up the ones I made. See them
here.
The game reached its full complement of (approximately) 170 cards
* Submission guidelines for
Steve Jackson Games notes a maxiumum run of 168 cards for a single game. All the
Munchkin main games (as opposed to the expansions) are 168 cards.
in 2005 and has since been (intermittantly) in a perpetual state ot retooling and playtesting. Since then, I've also been adding cards in what will be an expansion titled
Strange New Words.
A novel was started (and completed up to 50,000 words of terrible rough-draft prose) in
NaNoWriMo 2009. Characters were made. Ideas evolved. Now the world of
Trek! has a lot of interesting extraneous details. A completely different novel (possibly an anthology of short stories in the same
milieu) may be attempted in NaNoWriMo 2011 once I've accomplished more
World Building.
It's
Wagon Train to the Stars! It is
sometime in the middle of third millennium. Human beings have been a
star-faring species long enough to develop a
massive star-spanning empire then
fragment into
small regimes and once again coalesce into a
benevolent democracy that has exceeded in spirit and
style (if
not in size) the
splendor of its former glory.
The
Enterprise is not only the flagship of
the Fleet, but the setting for a
reality television series that is the largest and most broad reaching recruitment effort in the Federation. Crewmembers
* Players of the game are always referred to as Crewmembers.
not only have to manage the idiosyncracies of military life and learn to ignore the camerabots that hover about them all the time, but also have to contend with
Hollywood politics.
Survival tip: If you're
hot and naked on camera, and don't want to end up
Fanservice talk about
classified technology.
[[hottip:
The Captain:
: While much of the show is based on real events, some elements are added in for dramatic effect. One such is The Captain, not a veteran promoted through toil and merit, but a Shakespearean actor whose only job is to shine in front of the camera, as the head and heart of the ship. Usually The Captain takes his cues well from his handler (The Ship's Counselor), though his tendency to take dramatic license during delicate tactical or diplomatic operations and his taste for anyone anything female and attractive, even if not human.]]
Behind The Scenes
Originally, the game was intended to parodize
Star Trek, especially
the original series. Indeed, many nods to (and mockeries of) Trek elements are still featured throughout the game. But then, as per many creative processes, it developed into something of its own. Even the
proxies for the Klingon and Romulan empires (genericized to
Pirates and
Romans, respectively) have evolved into their own creatures.
[[hottip:
RPG sans GM:
: This idea emerged when a bunch of old RPG friends got together again (many of us had, since, gotten lives and scattered asunder across the globe), and we wanted to play something but no-one wanted to referee. In combination with my regular games of Munchkin in which many characters were just as cool (if not more so) than ones played in full-fledged rpgs, it occurred to me, what if the deck could run?.]]
[[hottip:
The Ensemble Model:
: My original choice to use a StarTrek-like diegetic framework was in contrast to the countless Hero's Journey stories that focus on...well... the hero. (Note that even The Captain, the Hero figure in the original formula, is not playable, nor able to, in this case, actually fullfil the heroic role) Star Trek TNG presented an early example of an Ensemble story, in which different characters could take the spotlight, but each was important to the functioning of the group. I continued, out of personal preference, however to borrow more from The Original Series for its Raygun Gothic atmosphere.]]
[[hottip:
Emergent Storytelling:
: Trek! uses a story-building model similar to those used in other engines of computational creativity regarding a story (or, in this case, an Episode) as a narrative of problem-solving efforts. An Episode begins with a mission after which plot complications are added, based on the Crew's collective progress in the game, all creating an extensive to-do list the Crewmembers must either fulfill, or address the consequences of failure.]]
[[hottip:
Social Science Fiction:
: Commonplace in the Star Trek paradigm is the Planet of Hats, usually a tour and examination of society-plus-[custom] or society-minus-[custom]. Examples in the original series were plentiful, such as society + limited warfare in A Taste of Armageddon[1] or society + enforced religious tradition in Return of the Archons[2]. This is a subset of that segment of Science Fiction that considers possible futures of society, especially of interest to me when we consider the ramifications of utopian imaginings today, such as societies in which present controversies are resolved, to one extreme or another).]]
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