GraphicConverter made it easy to print a large map on multiple sheets for taping together.

La Croisade Élevée (PDF File, 4.3 MB) marks the end of my Mirror Universe duology for Flashing Blades. This sequel to last year’s scenario was inspired by a throwaway act from one of the players in my home group at the end of playtesting l’Entreprenante l’Entreprenante.

I hadn’t planned to run two sessions of Trek’s Mirror Universe in Flashing Blades. The idea for the 2025 session was just to put Trek officers on the 1705 Enterprise at the moment it supposedly changed hands from the French to the English and set in motion the chain of naval ships that led to Star Trek’s NCC-1701. It was to be an interim game before running my Super Secret Flashing Blades project designed to be a more long-term game like the annual Daredevils Kolchak game I also run at North Texas.

But at the end of running the first draft of l’Entreprenante l’Entreprenante for my local group, one of the players tried to follow the Trek officers back to the Enterprise. And I immediately had flashbacks to Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade.

I knew I wasn’t going to finish my super-secret Flashing Blades project by June 2026, so I set to work on this adventure. Of course, I wasn’t going to call it The High Crusade. As with the first, non-Trek game and the first Trek game I chose to title it in bad French. The game became La Croisade Élevée.

The actual name that the French publisher of The High Crusade chose for Poul Anderson’s book is apparently Les croisés du cosmos, or “Cosmic Crusaders”. Which makes sense given the story—Anderson’s protagonists are crusaders, as I recall—but not for my game’s naval officers, of either era.

The only really hard part was getting the appropriate materials, mainly usable deck plans for the Enterprise. I found them on a Star Trek tribute set called Cygnus-X1.

On-site signup sheet at the table on Wednesday night.

C-X1 has a lot of different deck plans. Unsurprisingly, the best came from a semi-extinct game company, FASA Corporation. Most deck plans were busy and designed to be impressive and thus very unsuited for use as a gaming mat. The FASA plans were simple, two-color, with exactly the markers (if not the legends) needed for a gaming session.

FASA had the Trek license from 1982 through 1989. The deck plans are marked as copyright Paramount Pictures Corporation. I will echo the C-X1 caveat here:

The High Crusade is in no way associated with, nor endorsed by, Paramount Pictures and/or Viacom; Pocket Books and/or Simon & Schuster; their parents or their affiliates. “Star Trek” et al and any/all related names, marks and/or insignias are trademarks of Paramount Pictures. No infringement on the rights of Paramount Pictures or the authors/illustrators or publishers of the blueprints included within this adventure is intended.

I pieced together the deck plans to make a printable set, converting them from blueprints to black and white in the process. I marked deck 5 to suggest places where each officer might be quartered (this is especially important for Sulu’s quarters, even if he’s not one of the characters in question, for reasons that become apparent during the game). I attempted to use Trek canon for those, but some officers seemed to move about over the original series and some never had a specific location.

While I’d pieced together the maps to be able to include them in the 8-½ x 11 adventure sheets, I discovered, as I often do, that GraphicConverter has a then-unknown-to-me feature. It can print oversized images easily, correctly breaking them into multiple pages that can then be taped (or glued) together. It’s a wonderful piece of software.

One of the more serendipitous events during the game was when I was trying to fudge stairs on a starship to make sure that the players of the two sides could easily interact, when two of the Trek players, looking very closely at the map (they were playing Kirk and Scotty, both of whom are allowed full access even though the ship computers aren’t working) independently identified where the stairs were on the map.

I hadn’t seen the stairs on the letter-sized printouts I’d been using while writing the game. So, up to discovering them on the larger map I’d planned to finesse stairs or something like them during the game according to what turned out to be necessary.

I made no real changes to the Star Fleet add-on (PDF File, 24.4 KB) for Flashing Blades that I introduced in 2025. I have added genericized versions of some of the advantages and secrets, such as Kirk’s You talk too much. I did not add Don’t tell me the odds because that is very much limited to Kirk. Even if you were to run a Trek game with a different captain, they would require their own signature advantage, not Kirk’s.

Great gaming isn’t the only reason to come to North Texas. Saturday morning’s breakfast was a Steak and Egg It! from the Egg Stand.

Ditto with Chief Engineer Scott’s Focus advantage and especially Chekov’s Russians invented it, as well as a few others.

La Croisade Élevée (PDF File, 4.3 MB), as you may have already guessed, pits two groups of players against each other. Twenty-third century Mirror Universe Trek characters find themselves on a strangely abandoned and even more strangely disabled Enterprise. Eighteenth century French and/or English naval officers find themselves, well, it’s hard to tell. They thought they were going to a futuristic ship, but they’ve ended up in a park.

Since the Guardian of Time is involved, you can of course place either party wherever you want. The two locations I chose seemed appropriate for a four-hour one-off session at a con. But if you’re planning on running a longer game or a campaign, there will be different issues involved.

Beyond that, this is like the previous two Flashing Blades games I’ve run at North Texas: the player characters are put into a situation, and it’s up to them to navigate it. All you have to do as game master is remember that basic scenario and be flexible when they try weird ideas.

My Super-Secret Flashing Blades project will not be finished for 2027; my current plan for Wednesday 2027 is to run another game I’ve never played and have wanted to since the eighties, Creeks and Crawdads. But all that is a long time to go, and I may not then remember it.

In the meantime, download the adventure (PDF File, 4.3 MB), the Starfleet Academy supplement (PDF File, 24.4 KB), the character sheets (Zip file, 10.8 MB), and the extra maps and other handouts (Zip file, 2.1 MB) and enjoy Flashing Blades in Space!