So one of the things that I’ve been wanting to do with this blog is produce fan-made roleplaying game material for various systems. While the publisher of a game based off an intellectual property may be locked into the confines of the contract, fans can homebrew from any source. Sometimes even pulling elements from different sources to create a final product.
Today’s entry was a join effort between myself and longtime friend, Roger Taylor. We’ve both been fans of Star Trek and various roleplaying games. We have played campaigns using the Decipher Star Trek RPG rules. Several months ago Roger was sending me some of his hombrewed material for Star Trek Adventures by Modiphius for review. I mentioned that I was really interested in an enemy race that GMs could throw at their players called The Tarn. This reptilian race came from William R Forstchen’s 1999 Star Trek: The Next Generation novel, The Forgotten War. While the plot to the novel was simple, it did introduce the Tarn Empire. The way they were described in the book really enthralled me with their concepts of honor and social interaction. So Roger found his copy of the novel and dived back into it to see what interested me. He did most of the heavy lifting with the RPG numbers. I sent him all of the Memory-Beta (the fan Wiki for licensed Star Trek products) entries I had put together on the Tarn, which Roger then polished up for the PDF file listed below. I pulled various quotes from the book that was used for the suggested Tarn values.
Prior to all of this, I had spent quite some time looking for images of a science-fiction reptilian warriors that was not the Gorn. There were a ton of fantasy reptilian warrior images, but very little from the sci-fi side of the coin that spoke to me. Finally, the Starfinder RPG was released by Paizo that introduced the Vesk. Eventually several fan produced images were produced and the one above by Rebecca Wu fitted my mental image of the Tarn race. If gamemasters pulled any Vesk image from the internet, it could be used to visually represent the race to players.
Here is the PDF with Roger’s polishing and notes.
Besides Star Trek Adventures, I’d like to generate RPG stats for the other systems that are out there (FASA, LUG, Decipher and more). Also while talking with fellow Treknologists on the Star Trek Starship Tactical Combat System Online Database and Archive forums, an artist took the descriptions of a Tarn starship from the novel and generated an artistic representation of the vessel. I plan to generate game statistics for this vessel as well. Watch for future blog posts.
Many thanks to Roger for pushing through the novel (it could have used another pass by an editor) and had a few continuity holes that could have been caught) and for dealing with my excitement for this project. And thank you to Rebecca Wu for the wonderful image I pilfered off of the interwebs. I’m amazed by artists who bring these visions to life.
Gamemasters, let me know if you end up springing the Tarn on your players. How did the sessions go?