FASA Star Trek

Fairly recently, I've taken an interest in exploring options for Star Trek gaming. I've been inspired - Netflixing the old Original Series, as well as the more recent ST: Enterprise series that stars Scott Bakula. The early era of ST has always appealed to me - I was never much a fanboy of Next Generation, DS9, or Voyager.

10 years ago, I owned Last Unicorn Games' Original Series rpg. And, while it looked shiny and was a great resource for setting detail, the system seemed pretty lackluster. I managed to run one session of it, and the system felt very average. (That campaign/adventure self-destructed when one player decided to get drunk and be disruptive. That's surely not a fault of LUG's rpg - but it put any further plans to run ST on hold, indefinitely).

A few years later, I'd heard of the Star Trek rpg from Decipher, but I never picked it up. At that time, I was too focused on running Call of Cthulhu, and the occassional d20 game, to explore Trek gaming. I'd heard that the system was an improvement over the LUG version, but that it was horribly disorganized.

A couple weeks ago, I started looking back into options for ST gaming. I browsed a few forum threads, read a few blogs and fansites, and took in the pluses and minuses of different game systems for running Trek. I started getting intrigued by what I'd heard of the original ST rpg, produced back in the early 80s by FASA. FASA Trek used a d100 system, with a rather tactical, and deadly, combat system - and it had a range of options when it came to starship combat. At that point, I decided to set some money aside and track down a copy of the boxed set in as good a condition as I could find. (Thank you, Noble Knight, for having a copy in really damn good - unpunched - condition).

The Deluxe 2nd edition boxed set of FASA Trek is loaded with all kinds of goodies: 3 books dedicated to the rpg-play; a detailed tactical combat simulator sourcebook; a black hexmap and loads of cardboard starship counters; Klingon and Federation starship recognition manuals. This game is packed full of great content. I've only spent a few hours digging through the rpg content at this point - I wanted to get a grasp of the system before delving into tactical starship combat. And, I was surprised to find a pretty damn solid d100 system inside. Sure, it's rather old school, and gives some decided advantages to Vulcans, but task resolution is quite intuitive, and its lifepath method of chargen is inspired. (It reminds you a little of Traveller, except with less randomness). The combat/conflict system is pretty involved - using action points to handle movement, as well as timing, attacking, defending, and reactions. But, it's really no more complex than what I've seen in d20, or 4e, or other tactically-minded rpgs.

If I manage to run Star Trek in the next year or 2, I'd definitely use FASA Trek to do it. It seems intuitive to run, and could probably be easily tweaked/house-ruled with parts of BRP, if necessary. In fact, FASA ST may have an influence on future BRP campaigns that I run.