“Obviously, somewhere in the past the timeline skewed down into this tangent…”
-Dr. Emmett L. Brown
J.J. Abrams 2009 Star Trek reboot was more than a simple retelling of the stories of the crew of the Enterprise, but a radical deviation from what longtime fans of the series and movies knew in the form of an alternate timeline that alters the course of destiny for not just the crew, but the galaxy itself and culminated in the destruction of the Vulcan home world!
From there, the future continued to unfold in a drastically different fashion, resulting in a very different encounter with the man who became James Kirk’s most dangerous enemy. In a plot that almost destroyed not only the enterprise, but the Federation itself, by plunging it into war with the Klingon Empire, Kirk would have paid the ultimate price if it wasn’t for the efforts of both Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy.
While many fans of the original series and movies are split in their support of the new movies, I find the new adventures of the starship Enterprise exciting and the idea of following this alternate timeline intriguing; so much so, that I pitched an idea to my gaming group for the Star Trek RPG by Last Unicorn, that I’d like to share with you all now.
Continuing with the new timeline introduced with the current movies, I wondered what life would be like for the crew of the Enterprise under the command of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Though we all have yet to witness how events in the third movie will shape the events in the future, by the time of the second series, it may normalize enough to allow the events of TNG to play out largely unaltered.
At the end of the first Star Trek movie, Nero’s ship was consumed by the red matter singularity. The same type of event hurled Nero and Spock through time and for the purposes of this campaign setting the same thing happened again, only this time Nero’s ship is propelled into the future into the moment when a new Enterprise, Captained by William Riker, is racing to catch up to the Borg vessel before it reaches Earth.
The sudden appearance of the debris caused by Nero’s ship causes incredible damage! While Data manages to safely sever Pickard’s connection to the Borg, the distraction and damage renders them unable to end the Borg threat. Other Borg vessels soon arrive and The Federation is locked into a long and destructive war with their greatest enemy to date!
I decided to set the campaign 20 years after the end of the war with the Borg. The Federation survives in name only with a limited number of ships and very few Federation space stations surviving. Contact with the rest of the galaxy was limited and now that the threat is over, it will be the job of the new crew of the Enterprise to reestablish contact with any survivors.
The premise seems to be dystopian, but I think that would be a mistake; I still want to capture the message of Star Trek which has got to be about the power and unbreakable spirit of humanity. Mankind has lost their home, but not their hope. The setting should allow players and GMs to be able to cast any species in whatever roles they desire, a setting where former friends and allies can change roles, where players’ actions can alter our known assumptions of the final frontier. Mankind’s future hangs in the balance, will this be Earth’s greatest generation, or it’s last?
Alex Montoya
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