Okay, on my trek through Pride Month this month, can I possibly manage another geeky-nerdy-RPG/TTRPG post that intersects between Pride Month and said nerdery?
Pretty sure I can, and this time I’m going to beam up said recommendations, because I’m going to recommend titles today from people I game with in my Star Trek Adventures gaming groups.
That’s right, I said groups. Plural. Around two years ago, I floated the idea on Facebook asking if anyone I knew would be interested in playing Star Trek Adventures (from Modiphius) and something incredibly happened: eleven people said yes. Or, I guess, they said “aye.” You get what I mean. It struck me that since this was during the pandemic and isolation and I’d be using Zoom, I could just… accept everyone. So I asked them to make characters, and something pretty awesome happened: there were enough people who wanted to play Trill characters that I ended up making one of the groups the crew of the USS Curzon, the first officially majority-Trill starship in Starfleet, circa mid-2371. The other group were a more mixed group, and I had the Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide to work with, and they chose to be on board the USS Bellerophon, an Intrepid-class starship exploring a new frontier.
You know what happens when you grab two groups of (almost entirely) authors and put together a gaming group?
Magic. Magic happens. Or, well, in Star Trek, it’s science that happens, but we all know that riff about any sufficiently advanced technology yadda, yadda…
From My Gaming Group to Your Reading List
First, let’s start with Jeffrey Ricker, who is a name you’ve definitely heard around here before if you’ve been here long. On the USS Bellerophon, Jeffrey plays Lieutenant Andal Stadi, a Betazoid security officer (and yes, that surname does mean his sister vanished on board USS Voyager). He’s not your touchy-feely Betazoid so much as he’s a “radical honesty” Betazoid who is already tired of putting up with other people’s self-delusions, let alone outright lies, and he’s one heck of a crack shot with a phaser.
(Seriously, this one time in-game he took down so many Romulans with one area-effect stun. Truly magical.)
Since we’re talking a character who is so very done, let’s talk The Final Decree. I suggest this title because (a) the main character is also of the so very done mentality, and in this case, it’s because he needs his husband to freaking sign the divorce papers already (because he’s planning to re-marry); and also (b) this is a space adventure to go get those divorce papers signed. Ricker’s humour is set on stunning here, and I love this novella so very much.
Bill’s impending marriage to Nelson Wolff could unite two of the most powerful industrial families on Terra Beta. The only problem: Bill’s already married. In his rebellious youth, he took up with Travis, a smuggler and all-around scoundrel, and wound up tying the knot. When he walked away from that life, though, he left some loose ends. Like a marriage certificate.
Now, to get his estranged husband to sign off on the divorce decree, he’ll have to travel to a backwater world hundreds of light years away. When he gets there, he encounters a planetary blockade, instigated by one of his family’s unscrupulous business rivals, as part of an interstellar power play over an unprecedented energy source.
Bill will need all the help he can get to make it to the altar in one piece.
Next up, I’m going to go back to actual TTRPG writing with the phenomenal Steve Kenson. On the USS Curzon, Steve plays Lieutenant Evet Xon, a joined Trill who didn’t want to be joined. See, Evet Xon used to be Evet Toller, and he didn’t even grow up on Trill, but on Risa, where his hippy(-ish) Trill parents ran an inn and he… didn’t much want to run an inn. He joined Starfleet as a science officer, and his background on Risa did shape him into an up and coming A&A Officer of note, albeit one who didn’t often take a lot of chances. Then an accident happened on a small mining ship owned by a joined Trill named Kuthon Xon, Evet was the only choice when the Xon symbiont needed saving and… now Evet Xon is learning what it’s like to have multiple lifetimes of memories and feelings at hand.
At least he got promoted. He’s the chief science officer of the USS Curzon, and currently he’s learning how being the boss doesn’t often mean smooth sailing.
Now, if you know TTRPG gaming well, you’ve likely come across Steve Kenson’s name any number of times before, but today I’m going to point you in the direction of Green Ronin, and in specific the setting book for Freedom City, in the Mutants & Masterminds TTRPG setting. I’ve made it no secret how much I’ve loved Mutants & Masterminds—and I have a third author group who’ve been playing an M&M game—but I can’t tell you how incredibly welcomed I felt reading through M&M books and the incidental queerness just existing throughout the pages of the books.
The reason I choose Freedom City in particular is because it built on the years and years of Mutants & Masterminds lore, advancing the clock from the 1st and 2nd editions and shifting to the here-and-now (well, it came out in 2018, so maybe now it’s safer to say the there-and-then?) and updating so many beloved characters, or passing legacies forward—trans heroines, openly gay members of the main superhero group, mentions of the local queer village, queer villains—it was a comic book world, sure, but it was one that inherently included folk like me. And huzzah for that.
With the Mutants & Masterminds RPG you have the power to become a hero. Freedom City gives you the world’s most renowned city of heroes to rescue from the forces of evil! Called “the greatest superhero setting ever,” the award-winning Freedom City is a fully realized and detailed metropolis that can serve as a home base for your heroes or just one of the many places they visit while saving the world of Earth-Prime from disaster. Your heroes can fight the forces of SHADOW, puzzle out the schemes of the Labyrinth, and defeat the alien invaders Syzygy and the Meta-Grue.
With dozens of foes and hundreds of locations, Freedom City gives you everything you need to run an exciting Mutants & Masterminds campaign. Use it on its own or in conjunction with Emerald City and the Atlas of Earth-Prime for world-spanning action!
And there you have it. A second Tuesday I managed to keep things geeky as heck for Pride Month. How about you—got gaming queerness you want to share with me? Please do!
'Nathan Burgoine 