Do what I did, invite your friends over for your birthday party, tell them to wear Star Trek uniforms or their best approximation thereof, and to bring snacks!
That sounds like fun, how did it go? What kind of adventure did you run, and what era did you choose?
It was a blast! It was TOS era. Actually, I stated at one point that it was set 10 years after the events of “Friday’s Child,” but, I didn’t account for any of the movie changes, it was just basically more TOS. The players played Sulu, Harry Mudd, James T. Kirk, Uhura, Kevin Riley, Janice Rand, Jean Luc Picard, Mr. Spock, Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, Leonard “Bones” McCoy, and Pavel Chekov. Picard was the captain and Kirk was an admiral. It was useful to have two different players effecting orders, with this size group. All of the players showed up in uniform, or some approximation thereof, not necessarily relative to their character. Everyone knows different “Treks,” so, prior to the game I asked everyone to watch “The Naked Time” and “Friday’s Child” so we would all have a common frame of reference. Also, on the back of each character sheet, we wrote down a number of quotes from the character. I encouraged the players to pull out these quotes for dramatic or hilarious effect. I ran Hard Rock Catastrophe with some changes, the main one being that I also incorporated the “The Slaver Ruins” scenario from the original Star Trek RPG. I set the whole thing on Capella IV. I introduced Klingons into the scenario, too.
Hmm. I have a hard time seeing how the scenario as I presented it could work with a "tribal" civilization like the Capellans instead of a more high-tech, urban one.
What an intriguing combination of elements, @Falconer . The cast of characters sounds like an quite an interesting mix. The inclusion of Picard in with TOS characters gave me pause, but I have to commend you for being flexible about it. Your amalgamation of story-game elements into the Hard Rock Catastrophe scenario is particularly fascinating. I commend your creativity, and thank you for sharing the details about the game!
Well, I did upgrade the Capellans’ civilization. This was partly accounted for by advancing the timeline, and partly just assuming they had more going on than the two tents we saw on the Desilu sound stage. And I also changed the scenario in many ways. The most vivid scenes from the scenario, protecting settlements from monsters, work just fine with a lower-tech civilization. If I remember aright, my idea was that there was a stasis box on Capella IV, and the Klingons introduced the monster invasion as a way of distracting from their true mission, which was to get at that stasis box, which was located in some ruins which were held sacred to the Capellans, and around which they had build a large settlement.