I’ve been working on a setting and campaign that is a sort of deconstruction/reconstruction of Star Trek. Let the players be the bridge crew on a starship with a vague mission of exploration and see how they fare. “But Ensign,” you ask “why not just run a Star Trek game?” and it’s a fair question. I’ve got a few reasons.

First, I don’t want to have the players burdened by the vast amount of Star Trek lore, especially players who know a lot about Star Trek themselves. I don’t want players to be thinking about the game in terms of whether or not what they’re doing fits the lore, or being limited by what they think is consistent with Star Trek. A new universe, even if it’s similar in tone, is going to be different enough in the details that it should allow players and GM to do whatever we want without the baggage.

Second, Star Trek works fine for narrative works, but it’s harder to translate into an open-ended, persistent TTRPG experience because of problems with internal consistency. There’s no official Star Trek map, because everything is as close or far away as it needs to be to serve the narrative, and everything moves at the speed of plot. Technology works in wildly different ways depending on the episode or series. Sometimes the technology doesn’t work at all because of plot reasons. Some technologies, like the holodeck or the universal translator, don’t even have a clear explanation of how they work, and exist almost purely to facilitate the writing.

I’d like there to be an actual map, with fixed locations, and relationships based on those locations. I’m not looking to simulate the galaxy or try and create the whole interstellar society from first principles, I just want the players to exist in a world that they can see and understand. Similarly, I want the technology to be internally consistent so that players understand what it can and can’t do, and what to expect. It’s fine if it’s all jabberwocky from a realism perspective as long as the rules and boundaries are clearly defined.

Last, trying to create a plausible post-scarcity society similar to the Federation is giving me an excuse to learn more about economic planning and cybernetics. I’d like the political economy of the pseudo-Federation to be based on essentially cybernetic socialism, with decentralized planning and participatory democracy. The players won’t have to interact with that part much, as I’d like to abstract that part out to a degree, but it’s helping to inform how such a society would function. The Federation is a nice idea, but it suffers from being too idealistic and ambiguous about details. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to describe a similar society with more theoretical grounding, as opposed to “everyone just sort of gets along because we’re all good sports.”

Otherwise, I want to keep to the core themes. Peaceful exploration, humanism, finding creative solutions to unique problems, technobabble, boldly going, and so on. I also like that Star Trek always has a Big Bad of the moment, and I’d like to keep that going, with the possibility that the players can play a role in defeating it (before introducing a new one).

Star Trek works as an ongoing franchise because the universe is extremely large and anything can happen, which is what you want for a player-led TTRPG campaign. I’d like to flesh out a small corner of a similar universe, give it some flavor of its own, and then expand on it as we go if the players are enjoying it.