Monday Mashup: Star Trek

Time for a Monday Mashup. This is an old one from more than a year ago: Star Trek. That's the original show with Kirk, Spock and McCoy, when the Klingons were bad guys, and phasers were set to kill. Seek out new civilisations, and boldly leave no infinitive unsplit!

To recap what Monday Mashup is about:

Every Monday, I pick a piece of popular media -- a book, a movie, a TV show, or even an album. You pick a roleplaying world and talk about how you'd combine the two.

Star Trek would work quite well in my current science-fantasy campaign world, Kalyr. For the games I've run, all the action has taken place in an area roughly the size of western Europe. Everything beyond this small region is unknown territory.

A bit of background. Kalyr is a post-collapse world. Once, there was a world-spanning advanced technological civilisation. A couple of thousand years ago, it collapsed into chaos after war and plague. Only a few pockets of civilisation survived, isolated from each other. The largest of these is the area in which all my games are set. It's culture has become conservative and inward looking, and coupled with a very low birthrate, they had no interest in exploring the rest of the world.

Until now.

It would be a spoiler for my ongoing game to say exactly who might sponsor the expedition or why. But the craft will be a massive airship, not just because the idea is cooler than an seagoing craft, but because it will be able to reach inland destinations. The instructions are simple. Travel the globe, find out who or what is out there, and report back.

What will they find? Just about anything. For a start, there will be other surviving pockets of civilisation, some reverted to primitive hunter/gatherer communities, others perhaps retaining more advanced 'lost' technology. Then there will be ruins, lost secrets of those communities that died out. What treasures might those ruins contain? Nearer to the borders of civilisation there will be more recent settlements, founded by runaway slaves. And finally, other stranger creatures who have settled remote areas and claimed it for their own. Many of these may well be hostile, and some might have access to technology more advanced than that of the PCs.

And the Klingons? Lets just say big orange furry things.