We’ve made it to Day 7 of the RPGaDAY 2025 Challenge with the prompt of “Journey”. Once again, I’ve been reading other blogs and social media posts to see what inspires me, but I kept coming back to a conversation I had a long time ago.
Now a warning before I post this. I’m not making any legal claims, nor am I about to lawyer up and try to take any legal action. I have no way to prove what I’m about to post, nor do I think that I’m the only person who came up with the idea. When it comes to storytelling, there are only a limited number of plot-lines that are out there. What is different is how those plots are told in the medium they are presented.
I was talking with a friend at the “gaming clubhouse” which was a geek hangout near the Comics Utah store in Salt Lake City. The year was 1993 and we were talking about Star Trek roleplaying scenarios. At the time, only the FASA Star Trek RPG had been released (a lot of us didn’t know about the Star Trek: Adventure Gaming in the Final Frontier books) and my friend didn’t think there were very many challenging plots left to run in a Star Trek RPG. I disagreed and offered to come up with a campaign right on the spot.
I then presented an idea where a Starfleet crew would find themselves in a perilous situation where their resources would become limited. It would take a long time for them to recover because they were trapped on the far side of the galaxy. Some phenomena or plot device had thrown them to the other side of the galaxy we inhabit, and it would take a long time to return to Federation space. The journey would have been the campaign to get back home.
Now if this sounds familiar, later in 1995 the newly formed UPN network premiered Star Trek: Voyager on January 16th. I didn’t know how they were going to get this lonely starship across the galaxy. I also didn’t know that they would also be trapped with various civilians and Federation rebels known as the Maquis, which gave the show some internal conflict. But the basic plot was the same that I had come up with just a few years earlier. I was quite excited to see how the crew of the USS Voyager would make it home.
So, in a roleplaying game campaign, a long journey could be the entire story arc. What was the reason for the journey? Are they getting to somewhere, or trying to return from a distant location? Is this place familiar to the players, or are they facing the unknown? It doesn’t have to be a destination from this plain of existence. I could see a campaign where players from a certain timeframe get stuck in a pocket universe with NPCs from different timeframes or alternate universes all trying to escape. Greed and desperation may make for points of conflict when different factions are trapped together.
This is why we play roleplaying games. Where will this journey set up by the GM, but shaped by the players actions take all of us in this shared storytelling experience?
Do you have a memory of a past RPG event that is related to the term Journey? Tell me about it. This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com with any comments.