This 1927 painting by Gordon Grant in the USS Constitution Museum depicts the USS Constitution. It’s very similar to what l’Entreprenante would look like.

I ran a second game of Flashing Blades at North Texas in June. It was a blast. The idea was that the crew of the mirror universe Star Trek from the Mirror, Mirror episode were stuck on a 1705 French warship (PDF File, 2.6 MB) until they could right the timeline to restore the Enterprise from whatever their own meddling in time had done to it.

Much as the Federation timeline crew had to do in City on the Edge of Forever. In fact, I incorporated that episode into the history of the Mirror Universe, but my fictional Mirror Universe crew had instead had to ensure peace activist Edith Keeler’s survival rather than her death.

I incorporated the High Seas supplement into the adventure, but I didn’t realize what that meant until I, fortunately, ran a test of the adventure with my local group. Given the backstabbing, power-hungry nature of the Mirror Universe crew I expected lots of sword fights, both between the Enterprise and l’Entreprenante crews and among the ambitious Enterprise crew.

In fact, the draw of this game was the ship combat. After running the first game locally, I added a simple ship-to-ship combat at the beginning of the game against a weaker ship as a likely possibility. This contrasts with a more dangerous ship-to-ship combat at the end of the game against a stronger ship. It also gives the players a handle on how ship combat works in Flashing Blades before the big fight at the end of the adventure.

This change also made the 18th century crew more active with respect to the 23rd century crew.

After the playtest I also modified one aspect of High Seas combat. High Seas provides five ship ranges: Far, Long, Medium, Short, and Close. This means that chases are over much too quickly. I added Too Far (which provides two ranges that are too far for firing cannon) as well as Medium Long and Medium Short. This gives more time for ship-to-ship volleys, especially where both ships are bearing down on each other.

I’ve updated the rules summary sheet (PDF File, 130.1 KB) to include a summary for High Seas ship-to-ship combat. This summary includes both the canonical ranges and my extended ranges.

Ship-to-ship combat in Flashing Blades is very simple; your range and your action (one of Evasion, Bear Down, and Circle) determines which cannon you can fire, whether front cannons, rear cannons, or broadsides. You can fire at either the rigging or the hull, which will affect how a ship is disabled and how useful it is if disabled. That’s pretty much it for combat, although, being an old-school game, there are calculations involved with determining damage done by a barrage of cannons.

As part of importing the Star Trek crew into the game, I have a few new options for player characters (PDF File, 23.2 KB). I added a new Starting Background, the Scholar. While I added the scholar for the Star Trek characters such as Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock, I treat this background as if it were from the seventeenth century. New skills have names as if from the seventeenth century, not the twenty-third.

While we know neither who painted this or what it is a painting of, it is likely very similar to what the Triton would have looked like.

There is one special skill for future characters, Archaic Rider. This not a skill in itself, it’s a skill that applies to other skills. A character with Archaic Rider can perform their modern skills even in archaic times or with archaic equipment. Thus, a Star Trek pilot who has Archaic Rider can also pilot a sailing ship. Without Archaic Rider, an anachronistic character is going to be lost trying to use old technology.

If you want to make Archaic Rider fit in more with the existing rules, you can make it like Literacy, that is, it must be applied separately to each specific skill.

The only skills I’ve added other than Archaic Rider are Engineering, Natural Philosophy, Physic (i.e., medicine—I’m a little surprised this wasn’t already in the rules, or at least in High Seas), and Signals. These are, you’ve probably noticed, the main characters of original Star Trek beyond the already existing Captaincy: Scotty, Spock, McCoy, and Uhura.

While the Scholar background is open to any character, I also added an additional guild open only to Federation characters: Starfleet Academy. There are two tracks to Starfleet Academy: a Civilian track (open to Scholars, Gentlemen, and Nobles) and a Military track (open to Marines, Soldiers, and Sailors). Marines and Sailors are new backgrounds from the High Seas supplement.

The crew of the Enterprise and l’Entreprenante are of course more experienced than starting characters; most of them are masters in some skill, such as being a master captain or a master pilot, or engineer, and so forth. One of the cool bits of Flashing Blades is how it handles improvement: beginners have to roll, and masters often do not. They’re masters, after all.

The adventure itself is little more than a situation. It describes three ships (including l’Entreprenante), the basic background of why the characters are there, and the pitfalls of time travel in the Star Trek universe.

It’s very open-ended, so if you end up running it you’ll definitely have to improvise a lot in response to what your players do. I actually expected more “trouble” from the Star Trek fans among the players at North Texas, but I also ended up getting a lot of Master and Commander fans at the game!

In retrospect this wasn’t surprising, but it meant some very fast thinking required on my part to react to the tactics imported from those books. I strongly recommend reading at least the first Master and Commander, and probably the first three, if you choose to run this adventure outside of your circle of friends. Presumably you already know whether your friends are going to lean to the Trek side or the age of sail side.

I’ve made four PDFs available: the adventure (PDF File, 2.6 MB), the updated rules summary (PDF File, 130.1 KB) (which includes the dueling aid), the new background and academy (PDF File, 23.2 KB), and the pregenerated player character archive (Zip file, 10.8 MB). The latter also includes a page of 4x6 Captain’s Cards that outline the stats on each of the three ships.

The Three Decks web site was very useful for looking up stats for ships of the era.