I ended my Star Trek Adventures roleplaying game campaign a few weeks ago. The main problem was that I found the Star Trek Adventures game unplayable.
Star Trek Adventures, published by Modiphius, seemed like a cool way to play a Star Trek game at first, but the more I ran it, the less it made sense. The way one completes tasks in the game requires the use of two 20-sided dice. A player adds the appropriate attribute number with their relevant skill number, plus or minus any situational modifiers, and rolls against that number. If they roll at or below that number on either of their dice, each of those rolls is considered a “success.” The gamemaster determines how many successes are required to complete the task and the players must be told that information ahead of time. There are myriad ways to add more dice, re-roll the dice, and achieve critical successes, to the point where it wouldn’t really matter if a player were asked to roll dice at all. This mechanic is good for storytelling, but it’s not great for the type of game where a chance for failure creates drama. Excess successes on the dice provide a game token called Momentum, which could add more dice in later tasks, decreasing even more any chance that the player characters would fail at anything. This begged the question on more than one occasion, “Why are we even rolling dice?”
The game wasn’t all bad. I thought that the “lifepath” method of creating one’s character was good. It reminded me of the FASA Star Trek RPG of the 80s. Having one’s character background inform the character stats adds a layer of depth to the characters that one can play. Another good idea from the game was that of having Supporting Characters for players to play when their main character wouldn’t necessarily be involved in the scenario. If you were playing a helm officer, for example, and the game was focused on the landing party going down to a planet, for example, you could jump in and play Ensign Redshirt. They wouldn’t have the in-depth background of your main character, but they could still play an important role, and maybe even sport a last name! At the very least, they could die a spectacular death, something that Main Characters weren’t supposed to do. The game rules actually mention “plot armor.”
The graphic design of the books was very attractive, but the rules themselves were badly organized. Sometimes you would be reading half a page in on something complicated, only to be interrupted by half a page of flavor text or quotes from one of the many Star Trek shows and movies. And they often weren’t even relevant to what you had been reading!
Another positive to the game was the idea that if you bought the books either directly from Modiphius or a bookseller or game store, they would send you a PDF of the book for free. And since many of the books had black pages with white letters, which is really hard on my eyes, it was a pleasant surprise to find that many of the PDFs had print-friendly versions with white backgrounds and black print. I am particularly pleased about this, because I have the PDFs from the game to use as background information, but now I am ready to sell all the books. I’ll be putting most of them up on Ebay this summer. I am going to keep the boxed starter set (to go with my FASA boxed set), the gamemaster screen, and the Tricorder set with its Original Series-themed rulebook, but the rest of it is going to go, hopefully to someone who will enjoy it more than I did.
“But wait,” you say. “Didn’t you spend a lot of money on your ship and the interiors?”
Yes, I did, but I don’t regret any of it. I will eventually get use out of them, either running an older Star Trek game like FASA, or another diceless game like I wrote about here. Or, I may just use it all to create continuing fan fiction stories and do occasional illustrations. Don’t worry, it won’t go to waste. But for now, I’m putting Star Trek Adventures away, back on the shelf.
“A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty, ‘Hi-Yo Silver!’ The Lone Ranger!”
Bam! Bam! Bam! Gunshots ring out.
“With his faithful Indian companion Tonto, the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains led the fight for law and order in the early Western United States. Nowhere in the pages of history can one find a greater champion of justice. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. From out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver! The Lone Ranger rides again!”
Now, imagine you’re a child in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression. There’s no such thing as television, your family can’t afford to go to the movies, and your only source of information is the cathedral-style radio that takes a place of honor in your living room. The words written above activated the imagination of boys and girls all over the country, as they preceded each episode of the Lone Ranger, starting on station WXYZ in Detroit, Michigan.
I first heard those words when I was around nine years old in 1974, at my Uncle Mike’s house, listening to the very first episode of The Lone Ranger on his reel-to-reel tape machine. I had watched The Lone Ranger TV show with my dad when I was younger, but I’d never heard of a radio drama before. I listened intently, enthralled with the voices and sound effects, and I could almost see the drama unfold in my mind.
When the Lone Ranger was over, he played “The War of the Worlds,” the famous radio broadcast produced by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater on the Air. Based on the novel by H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds played out like it was an actual alien invasion being reported on the radio. And that was all it took. I was hooked for life. I hoped that someday I could get ahold of recordings like that for myself.
Though we didn’t have the Internet back then, I kept my eye out for any reference to radio shows. And sure enough, on the back of of box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, I saw it.
Superman Radio Show ad from Kellogg’s Corn Flakes
There was a SUPERMAN radio show?? I could hardly believe my eyes. How had I not known of this? Looking back, of course, it’s easy to know why. We didn’t have the Internet, and how else would the topic even come up? Not in conversation around my house, that’s for sure. But I wanted to know what the Superman radio show was like. There was no way I was ever going to get any of the records. $1.50 might as well have been a million dollars to me back then, and I knew my stepfather wouldn’t allow it anyway.
As I got older, I found out more about Old-Time Radio, or OTR. There were dozens of shows, thousands and thousands of episodes of radio drama, comedy, news, and more. Occasionally, I would run across a tape of them and I would buy them whenever I saw them. The Shadow was one of the more common and easily obtained shows. I was familiar with The Shadow because he had teamed up with Batman once in the comics, but the Shadow of OTR was an entirely different character.
Batman #259, guest-starring The Shadow
The Shadow of OTR was dressed normally, one would presume, as he went about town as Lamont Cranston, turning invisible when he became The Shadow. He didn’t carry a gun normally, although there were times when he would resort to using a pistol. He certainly never ran around with a pair of .45 automatics. But getting past all that, The Shadow on radio was simply a treat. The whole idea of a character who turns invisible is pretty easy to convey when you can’t see the hero at all!
Then there were those great Power Records, which combined a large format comic book with an audio drama. Remember those? Featured here is a Star Trek book and record set that I used to have with cover art by Neal Adams. I used to get these whenever I could, especially when they came out with one for the Six Million Dollar Man. There’s a guy who has a whole blog about just these items!
It wasn’t until I was in high school that I really got a healthy dose of radio drama. That was when our local NPR station started broadcasting the Star Wars radio show. What’s that? You didn’t know there was such a thing? Oh, yes. I hurried home each night to listen to it on radio in 1981. It took the Star Wars story and expanded it, filling in gaps where the movie had been edited. There was the usual clumsy expository dialogue that radio has to use to paint the images in your mind, but it used the original sound effects and some actors from the movie, including Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels. The actors who replaced the originals were no slouches, either. Brock Peters took the place of James Earl Jones, for example. You’d be surprised how good it really was, especially since they used John Williams’s Oscar-winning score.
My interest in old-time radio and radio dramas waned in my college years. There just wasn’t anything going on in my world. But when the Batman craze of 1989 came along, a couple of different items came to my attention and sparked my imagination. First, there were some cassette tapes adapting comic book stories that came out. The associated comic books came with them, and the tapes served to add an audio soundtrack. The first one I bought was an adaptation of the Untold Legends of the Batman. It was like the old Power Records, but there was no album cover.
As the next decade progressed, DC, Marvel, and even Disney kept putting out audio dramas. Stories like “Superman Lives!” as well as the “Complete Knightfall Saga,” along with the Rocketeer were all adapted to audio dramas. Later on, we would even see one for “Kingdom Come.” But the real fun came in 1994, when the theatrical version of “The Shadow” was released.
When the Alec Baldwin movie came out, the radio shows made a huge comeback. A company called Radio Spirits started releasing audio cassettes and CDs of the old radio shows and I bought several sets of them. Then with the advent of the mp3 file format and the Internet, old-time radio was everywhere. Streaming sites popped up, and suddenly the world of old-time radio was no longer restricted to small gatherings with tape exchanges. Suddenly you could buy hundreds of episodes of long-forgotten shows on CD for pennies and listen to them on a computer.
I finally got to hear Superman on radio, and I was not disappointed. It quickly became my favorite radio show. The episodes were short, but in its heyday, it was on five days a week! I can only imagine what it would have been like to run home after school to catch the latest episode. Superman didn’t go up against the menagerie of villains from his comic book, but often the bad guys were gangsters, racketeers, and kidnappers. My favorite episodes, though, were the ones where he went up against racists and fascists, like the Knights of the White Carnation or the Clan of the Fiery Cross. It was quite progressive, especially for the 1940s. The only drawback to listening to old Superman shows is my inability to try Kellogg’s PEP cereal. “P-E-P! The sunshine cereal!” I wonder what it tasted like.
When the deluge of OTR programs began, I started doing research on this. My limited exposure to War of the Worlds, the Lone Ranger, the Shadow, and Superman, suddenly expanded. I started listening to Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, The Saint, The Whistler, Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, Dragnet, Gunsmoke, The Green Hornet, and more. I found books on the subject, and read the history. The more I learned, the more I loved it. I started making connections
One of Jack Benny’s supporting cast was lecherous bandleader Phil Harris, a bawdy southerner who constantly kept Benny, whom he called “Jackson,” on his toes. The first time I heard the voice, I just about jumped out of my chair. It was Baloo the Bear from Disney’s “The Jungle Book!” Not only was the voice the same, but the character was very much the same, a jazzy, hedonistic fun-loving guy who could sing scat. Amazing! Then, when listening to another episode, the unmistakable tones of Mel Blanc appeared in a voice similar to Speedy Gonzales. Then it hit me. The mice in “The Mouse that Jack Built,” a 1959 Warner Brothers cartoon, were the characters from this same Jack Benny radio program! When I saw the cartoon as a kid, I had no idea that Jack Benny was a radio star!
On the Fred Allen show, I caught Foghorn Leghorn in the form of Senator Claghorn. Then the floodgates came open. Many cartoons, whether on television or feature films, featured radio performers of old, many doing the same characters or voices that they were famous for decades before. Even “The New Adventures of Superman,” the 1966 Filmation cartoon, starred Clayton “Bud” Collyer as Superman, with Joan Alexander as Lois Lane. Narrator Jackson Beck, whose voice I know you would recognize, since he was active in voice acting for an incredible 73 years, was brought back to narrate Superman.
It wasn’t only voices and characters that were brought back for cartoons. When Mr. Whoopee’s closet would open on Tennessee Tuxedo and everything would fall out, I thought it was hilarious. Imagine my surprise when I was listening to Fibber McGee and Molly from decades before and heard the same thing happen!
Just a few years ago, I was rummaging through stuff in my basement and found cassette recordings of a role-playing game session from 1988. As I thought more about it, I realized just what we were doing. The gamemaster describes the action and plays the part of the characters not portrayed by the players. The players describe their action verbally and act out their characters’ roles, often using voices not their own. We’re not dressing up and acting things out (like LARPers do), but we are doing radio drama. There are a few static images and figures on a map to keep track of where everyone is, but otherwise everything is done by voice and description. They called radio “The Theater of the Mind.” I think it’s still alive and well. It’s just taken a new form.
But if you’re just interested in pure radio, it’s more popular now than it has been since the Golden Age of Radio. With the popularity of podcasts (radio, if you think about it), there are some that talk exclusively about OTR. It’s on Spotify; it’s even on YouTube. Old-Time Radio is everywhere!
Update, 1/25/2023:
I grabbed all four of the Superman radio records on Ebay for $21!
With my newfound wealth, I was able to buy Justice League of America #143 at its new price of sixty cents, but then the money started burning a hole in my pocket the next Sunday after church, even with no new issue of JLA to buy. First, I had to buy some BBs. I had received a Daisy BB gun for Christmas from my mother, and an ample supply of BBs to last quite a while. Fortunately, the same general store that carried my comic books also had tubes of ammunition. At 50 cents each, that gave me an alternative when there were no comics I wanted.
I had taken hunter safety in sixth grade, and already knew how to handle actual firearms safely, so a BB gun was good practice for me, even though I had fired real guns by this time already.
When I wasn’t out shooting up the woods with BBs, I was still reading and drawing all the time. And now that I wasn’t restricted in enjoying superheroes, I started making up my own characters, and even combining superheroes with Star Trek-like ships that I created. After all, the Legion of Super-Heroes had their own cruiser that looked like a cross between the Enterprise and a Klingon ship. It clearly borrowed quite a bit from Star Trek.
The Legion Cruiser
When the next Sunday came along and I still had money to burn, I did something that was near-unthinkable. I spent a dollar on a comic book. A whole dollar! It was crazy, but the Neal Adams cover beckoned to me.
World’s Finest #245
Batman and Superman fighting Martians? Eighty pages? I had to have it! I hadn’t seen stories with the Martian Manhunter since I was a little boy, reading Justice League of America. This is why covers are so important. They sell comic books! Sadly, the interior art left me a little cold. There’s nothing wrong at all about Curt Swan’s art. Nothing at all. But he wasn’t Neal Adams. However, there was a logo for the Martian Manhunter which I thought was one of the coolest logos I’d ever seen.
That wasn’t the story that caught my attention the most, though. That was the Black Canary story later in the book. My 12-year-old eyes were drawn immediately to the circular panel.
I think this was the first time I had ever really considered a woman taking her clothes off, let alone a woman superhero, and it made me feel strange. I couldn’t name the feeling or describe it in words at that time, so I just tried to shrug it off and finish reading the comic. But for some reason, I kept coming back that page to stare at it. How many people can name the day when puberty first hit them hard? For me, it was Sunday, March 20, 1977.
Jeff Chamberlain stood in the newly-completed Spacedock observation lounge, watching the U.S.S. Enterprise float into its designated mooring bay. The Federation starship, under the command of Captain James T. Kirk, had just returned from its five-year mission, the only Constitution class starship of the original 12 to do so. As Chamberlain’s practiced eye assessed the condition of the ship, he smiled and shook his head in disbelief. Jeff’s father had been one of the engineers that had designed and built Enterprise almost 20 years before, and Jeff was no stranger to starship design himself. What he saw was nearly a literal Ship of Theseus. He doubted if there were more than 20% of the ship’s original parts left intact. Both warp nacelles and pylons had been replaced. The shuttlecraft bay doors were new. The navigational deflector dish, he knew, had been damaged and replaced at least twice. The sensor suite, hull plating on the primary hull, both had sustained critical damage over the last 60 months. Enterprise had left damaged parts and debris scattered halfway across the quadrant. Chamberlain gave Kirk credit, though. He had brought his ship back and was the only starship captain to succeed at that.
But that was the past, Chamberlain thought, as he turned away from the new transparent aluminum alloy window. It was the very recent past, but the past, nonetheless. He had spent the last three months studying the logs detailing the collective demises of the Constellation, the Intrepid, the Exeter, the Yorktown, the Potemkin, and the rest, poring over every detail, every crew death, including those killed from the surviving Enterprise. Space exploration was a dangerous business. Extraterrestrial viruses, giant psychic single-celled organisms, and doomsday machines abound, not to mention the quadrant’s notorious bad actors, alien, and human alike. Jeff had done his homework, and he was ready. By the time the station’s docking clamps grasped the Enterprise, concluding the final moments of its mission, Captain Jeff Chamberlain was turning the control handle in the turbolift, heading up to his command, the U.S.S. Challenger, berthed 100 meters above.
As the turbolift door opened with a satisfying ssshhkt sound, Chamberlain tugged once each at his gold triple-braided sleeves, and greeted the dockmaster for what he hoped would be the last time for a long time.
“Nelson,” Chamberlain grunted to the chief.
“Captain Chamberlain, isn’t it exciting? Enterprise has returned,” Chief
Bruce Nelson replied. Nelson was a thin man, slightly older than Chamberlain, graying and balding at the same time. He had kind eyes and an affection for his pet cat that prevented him from serving on active duty aboard a starship. He was dressed in the red uniform shirt of the operations division.
Chamberlain was nonplussed. “Yes, everyone seems excited by it. In fact, it’s all anyone ever talks about these days. Take me over, please.”
“Aye, sir,” Nelson responded. “Bridge docking port or engineering?” Chamberlain gave Nelson a look that made the older man crack a smile. “I had to ask…sir.” In the 18 months that Chamberlain had been flying over to the nearly completed Challenger, he had not once chosen to dock behind the bridge of his command, nor had he chosen to use the transporter. “You’re going out…today, is it, sir?” Nelson inquired with a grin, rocking back and forth on his heels, knowing full well what the Spacedock schedule read.
Chamberlain’s grim visage finally broke. “You know it is,” he laughed.
The elder Nelson clapped Chamberlain on the back. “I do. And there’s never been a better man passed through those bay doors, I can assure you.”
Chamberlain ignored the compliment and as the shuttle pod pulled away from the dock, he gestured toward the front of the engineering hull. “Take me past the dish just one more time, would you please?”
Nelson sighed. “Again? Aye, sir. But you’ve done the math a thousand times. Chamberlain silenced him with another look, to which Nelson sighed, “Aye aye, sir.”
As Nelson piloted the pod around the bow of the secondary hull, Chamberlain regarded the deflector dish, which projected a beam of energy into space ahead of a starship, pushing aside any small debris that might strike the hull. Any impact at the high speeds at which the Challenger would be travelling could be fatal. The captain removed an engineer’s tricorder from his gear and slung the strap around his neck.
“You know, starship captains aren’t assigned engineering tricorders as standard gear, don’t you, sir?” Nelson teased.
“It’s a good thing I brought my own, then,” Jeff smirked. His tricorder was marked with his name, Chief Engineer Jeff Chamberlain, and bore the insignia of the U.S.S. Lexington. Chamberlain tamped down the memories that threatened to burst forth and focused on the task at hand as he flipped the lid open and started scanning. He had been concerned for months that the new, shorter pylon that supported the saucer section of Challenger would cause the deflector dish energy to bleed into the path of the planetary sensor array, the glowing dome at the bottom of the saucer. And for the 1,001st time, the math checked out. There would be no interference. He had requested a modified dish and a protective hood on the bow of the secondary hull just to prevent it, and it seemed to have worked. It had cost an extra two weeks fabricating the parts in Spacedock after Challenger had been towed from Tycho Starship Yards on Earth’s moon, but he had needed to be sure. Chamberlain snapped the tricorder shut and stashed it with his clothing.
“Satisfied?” Nelson smiled.
Chamberlain nodded. “Never more so. She’s ready.”
The chief piloted the shuttle pod down to the engineering hatch and backed in slowly. The connectors cycled around the circular docking ring in sequence, followed by an illuminated green light. “Barber poles,” uttered Nelson.
“Successful docking hasn’t been signaled with the alternating stripes of barber poles in 300 years and you know it,” teased Chamberlain.
“I know, sir, but some traditions ought not be forgotten. Besides, I knew you would know what I meant.”
The younger officer smiled as the hatch opened. “And now I have to greet over 200 kids who probably don’t remember it. Thanks for the lift, Nelson.”
“My pleasure, sir. And godspeed you on your voyage,” sighed the elder chief. “I hope to see you again.”
Port engineering hatch
Chamberlain nodded and turned to the intercom at the stern of the shuttlepod. “Chamberlain to Challenger. Permission to come aboard?”
The female voice on the other side of the intercom replied, “Permission granted, Captain.”
“Then open the pod bay doors, please, Hal.” The pod door did indeed slide open to reveal an attractive young woman with shoulder length dark hair on the Challenger side of the airlock. She was wearing the red uniform of the operations division. She was shaking her head. Chamberlain acted dismayed. “Lieutenant Bichel, please tell me you did not just roll your eyes at your captain from the other side of the hatch.”
The junior officer tried to stifle a smile and failed. “I’m afraid I can’t lie to you, sir. But that joke wasn’t funny the first time you told it back when I was at the academy. Welcome aboard, Captain.”
Captain Jeff Chamberlain
“Thank you, Hal,” Chamberlain responded with a warm smile. Her full first name was Hallie but she never used it. She was only Hallie when she was in trouble. He began to make his way toward turbolift three, when she stopped him. Her tricorder was beeping.
Lt. Hal Bichel
“Sir, one moment, please.” Chamberlain stopped.
“What is it, Lieutenant?”
“Are you carrying any unauthorized equipment on board?”
“No, why?” Chamberlain noticed that Bichel’s hand was on her hip near the grip of the type-2 phaser attached to her belt. She drew her weapon.
Fade to black.
“Space…the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Challenger. Its two-year mission: To answer the call when help is needed; to protect life and preserve the ideals of the United Federation of Planets; to boldly go where no one else would dare.”
On Sunday, January 30, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries premiered on TV. I could not wait for this show!
Reading was incredibly important to me during the abuse years. I had read every Hardy Boys book in the library of whichever elementary school I was attending, and it was my intention to read every last one of them. Yes, they were formulaic. Yes, they slightly unrealistic. Two teenage boys who not only had their own car, but owned their own speedboat (the Sleuth)? Talk about fantasy for a young boy! But read them I did. If we were going on a car trip with hours worth of driving, I always maxed out my library borrowing with two Hardy Boys books that I hadn’t read yet. And my backup book was the 1974 Guinness Book of World Records, which was one of my most prized possessions. It clocked in at 672 pages, and I didn’t have to worry if I stopped in the middle of reading it. I wasn’t going to lose the plot.
But here we were, seeing the Hardy Boys on TV? Wow! The first thing I remember is their hair. Parker Stevenson played dark-haired Frank, and pop star Shaun Cassidy played blond-haired Joe, the younger brother. But something was wrong. These boys had long, feathered hair.
Joe Hardy (Shaun Cassidy) and Frank Hardy (Parker Stevenson)
The Frank and Joe I knew didn’t have long hair like hippies! They were all-American boys!
Suddenly, I realized I sounded just like my stepfather, Steve. He had a firm rule about my hair. It was not allowed to touch the top of my ears. Keep in mind, this was the seventies. Are you kidding? My hair was kept shorter than Archie Bunker’s; shorter than Hawkeye Pierce’s; shorter than Barney Miller’s! That put a little seed into my brain that I thought I would try to sow later. I was going to ask my dad if I could grow my hair longer, so that it touched my ears. I felt like a conspirator.
When he said yes, I thought I was getting away with murder. I started asking for more crazy stuff. I asked if I could wear blue jeans and tennis shoes to school. He looked at me like my head had spun all the way around. “Of course you can!” I couldn’t take these things for granted, because previously, I had had to wear slacks and dress shoes. Tennis shoes were for gym class only, I can’t tell you how much fun it was wearing hand-me-down platform shoes out at recess.
The next day of school, Monday, January 31, I walked in like I owned the place. I had the 1977 equivalent of swag, with my informal pants and shoes. And I could almost feel my hair growing out already, and it was all thanks to Frank and Joe.
