A Captain of His Times

My character in the campaign was Michael T Drake III, captain of the wartime USS Vanguard (NCC-72317), a modified variant of the Saber-class starship (known in our campaign as the Ranger-subclass). This vessel saw two years of the toughest combat as part of Saber Wing 77, commanded by Commodore Erika Benteen and Captain Drake was very much a product of his times. Having suffered nearly crippling losses in the time before and the earliest phases of the war, Starfleet found it necessary to rapidly promote younger officers to more responsible positions and Drake was one of them. Given his acting captaincy while in his late twenties, by the end of the war in 2375, Drake was a seasoned veteran. Shortly after the war, with the decommissioning of his wartime command, Drake received a permanent promotion to captain and command of a new Vanguard (NCC-91000), a much larger ship. Our campaign dealt with the events of 2376 and well over half the episodes were based on the older ship. As Frank would describe it to me, serving on that small, overgunned and frightfully overworked vessel was something akin to the feeling one gets when watching Das Boot, a movie which depicts the harrowing life aboard a German submarine during the Second World War. Having watched the miniseries Band of Brothers, I felt that the actor Damian Lewis was best suited to my concept of Captain Drake, were he to be cast in flesh and blood. I won't go into a detailed biography of the character, but suffice it to say that this young man had been through two years of hell and had seen three quarters of his graduating class from Starfleet Academy killed in action. The officer that emerged from the war and how he dealt with the postwar situation was my focus as a player. As a final note, I would like to credit and thank Ambessalion at the Star Trek Photomanipulation Archive (http://stpma.net/index.php) for his fine rendering of Damian Lewis as my character.

The Campaign Itself

I won't be going into excruciating detail about the campaign here (I hope), but first and foremost I wish to say that it is the brainchild of my longtime friend, Frank Frey, based on a life long love of Star Trek and his perspective as a military veteran. We are both fans of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine television series and wanted to play a Trek based role playing game derived from it. Frank had obtained and studied a little gem called The Fires of Armageddon, a sourcebook for the Last Unicorn Games (LUG) Star Trek RPG. The gritty universe of societies recovering slowly in the aftermath of a devastating war and the situations in which characters who had been through that grueling experience might find themselves appealed very much to Frank and to me as well. Even though we used a different set of rules by Decipher as the basis of our campaign, we found Fires to be an excellent expansion of the canon information presented in the television series and one that took on the issues that would face people in the aftermath of the war head on. The campaign that emerged was one of considerable dramatic impact and I strongly feel that the best of our "episodes" were fully worthy of being made into Trek movies in their own right. This is a feeling, I'm sure many RPG players feel the same about the campaigns they have developed or played in. Yet, despite the overall grimness of the setting and the serious issues our characters faced, we never lost a sense of wonder or humor along the way. I was happy to be a part of this campaign and proud to have made, in my own fashion, a small contribution to it at times. Thank you to Frank for the campaign and thank you to my fellow players for all the great moments you provided.

The Vanguard

The USS Vanguard (NCC-91000) is the ship featured in the last Star Trek role playing game, in which I was involved. For the purposes of that campaign, she was the lead ship of a new class of strike cruisers known as the Vanguard-class (or V-class for short). Observant Trekkers will note the image we selected is that of the Achilles-class featured in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dominion Wars computer game (Gizmo Games, and published by Simon & Schuster Interactive). The game master who developed our role playing campaign, chose the look of this class as that best suited to his concept of a class of purpose built, combat oriented vessels based on the experiences Starfleet suffered at the hands of the Borg and later the Dominion in the period 2367 and 2375. As such we wanted a ship that at first glance fit into established Starfleet design parameters and yet was clearly meant to be a warship. The adapted design fit our needs precisely and we humbly thank the original developers of the class for this brilliant look. Along with the ship itself, is the feel our narrator (game master) intended for the campaign, and I shall discuss this in future posts.