Pyramid Pick: Star Trek Roleplaying Game Narrator's Toolkit

Pyramid Pick

Star Trek Roleplaying Game Narrator's Toolkit

Published by Last Unicorn Games

Written by S. John Ross

64 pages plus screen, $16.00

If you've been a Game Master for any length of time, you quickly become skeptical of the obligatory advice and suggestions included with most games on "How to Be a Successful GM." Such skepticism is well founded. Successful gamemastering is hard to teach -- it's something you just have to learn the hard way. Consequently, very few products designed specifically for the GM have ever appealed to me. My natural assumption is that they're for novice Game Masters who couldn't tell the difference between foreshadowing and flashbacks if his life depended on it.

Then along came Ken Hite's excellent Star Trek: The Next Generation Roleplaying Game Narrator's Toolkit. That product included some of the best GM's advice I'd ever read for a game. Now, I think I'm a pretty good GM (who doesn't?), but running a Star Trek episode is a little different than your average RPG scenario. Last Unicorn Games has adopted what might be called a "simulationist" approach to Star Trek. That is, LUG takes the television episodes as a model for how to construct scenarios. A successful Star Trek campaign will thus resemble a TV series in its essentials. Gamemastering such a game requires an approach that doesn't come naturally to everyone -- especially if they've spent too much time playing games with a different model of scenario construction.

If anything, . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: December 24, 1999

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