Interlude: Star Fleet Grammas

Not only am I am avid miniature painter, but I also enjoy papercrafting for terrain and occasionally figure flats. Cardstock miniatures have never been more useful to me than in my quest for Star Trek gaming; the offerings out there for traditional miniatures simply don't meet my needs, and the customization frequently required is past my model conversion skills. But I can knock out a right job of someone else's work with the mods I need in GIMP, which is similar to Photoshop but free.

I am also an avid reader of the Cardboard Warriors forum. Really, it's where I get all of my flat Star Trek people. And, as is the case with all things Star Trek, Star Fleet Grammas started as a really bad idea. Really, it was a bad idea piggy-backed on another bad idea. Dave Okum, the artist responsible for most of the Star Trek people I use, once read a typo referring to the Gamma World game as "Gramma World" instead. And that led to an actual Gramma World game and the required set of paper Gramma World miniatures.

Which somehow led to Star Fleet Grammas. I did a little fiddling with my existing Star Fleet gals, mixed and matched with the Grammas, and before I knew it, I had a Star Fleet Gramma Command Team.

The problem, of course, is that it is no fun having a bunch of Star Fleet Grammas and nothing to do with them. I put together a nice little set of other Star Trek paper miniatures to go with them (but somehow didn't take pictures of them) and I also put together a set of Dave Okum's Space Octopods as an opposition force. Just right for all of your hentai granny tentacle fantasies!

The only thing I was lacking was rules! And that's where Nordic Weasel Games comes into to picture. In addition to Five Leagues From The Borderlands, there is also the Five Parsecs family of games using the same engine and as delightfully designed for solo play. The "Salvage Crew" expansion was almost what I was looking for, but the idea of a Star Fleet ship acting as an itinerant trading craft seemed somehow wrong. "Bug Hunt" had more of a military feel, but was very focussed on killing scary alien creatures, which is a much more narrow theme than I wanted for my Star Fleet Gramma games.

So I have decided to use the military-themed character/team generating and campaign rules from "Bug Hunt" and use the tabletop game setting and encounter generators for "Salvage Crew." Which will result in a Starfleet away team consisting of the Grammas and support (Redshirt security, science teams, etc.) exploring strange environments, interacting with the terrain, and maybe even fighting critters or Klingons. There are a few minor inconsistencies: "Salvage Crew" is about making money, which isn't quite right for the post-need Star Trek future, and "Bug Hunt" allows the building of large, powerful teams using influence earned in games. But I am confident these little issues will be easy to work out once I start playing.

Five Parsecs From Home and the supplements are available here.