My original Star Trek campaign, run under the old FASA Star Trek, the Role Playing Game rules set, was the adventures of the USS Excalibur NCC-1705. Originally begun in 1982 when FASA debuted its game in the after-glow of The Wrath of Khan in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I ran it for a couple of years before relocating to the nation's capital of Ottawa, Ontario and began running it again. Soon after, I began gaming with a group of Engineering students at Carleton University; Bruce Playfair, David Isaacs, Steven Schneckenburger and Sergio Guillen. They eventually came to form the command crew of the ship. Sergio moved away but the other three along with Ken Goodfellow continued on for several years, through different iterations of the campaign, along with spinoffs. After several years, we all went our separate ways until early in the new millennium the group re-coalesced, this time with a newly released rules set by Last Unicorn Games, the ICON System. By then I'd become computer literate and wrote a web page for the game and put all the character sheets in electronic form on the laptop. No more lost characters!

The new campaign was called Star Trek: Relic and was a direct sequel to the Next Generation episode Relics, set in the Dyson Sphere. The new characters—M'rel (a Caitian), Seth Bern (a Bajoran) and Tal (a Tellarite)—Survived 20 years (!!) of continuous play, meeting (mostly) monthly and wound up saving the entire galaxy several times. Finally, I wrapped up all their character arcs and finished off the campaign with their winning the Federation Medal of Honour for thwarting an Iconian invasion of the Milky Way Galaxy.

That done, I decided it was time to take the campaign back to its 23^rd century roots and go back to the group's original characters in the year 2295: the era of the USS Excalibur-A and Commodore McCurrvey's, Captain Mercer's and Captain Thelev's continuing adventures with a new ship, the USS Odyssey NCC-2001 in a new campaign called Star Trek, a Space Odyssey (with apologies to Gene Roddenberry, Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrik).

The campaign is set in the year 2290. Bradron McCurrvey has just been promoted to Commodore, while Thelev and Khendron Mercer have both been promoted to Captains. McCurrvey, now 52, has been placed in overall mission command of the USS Odyssey, second ship of the Excelsior class, while Captain Thelev is the CO of the ship, taking over from Captain David Bowman. Captain Khendron Mercer is Thelev's XO, taking over the post from Commander Frank Poole. Major Korran Bilgebottom rejoins McCurrvey's crew as Commandant of the ship's Marine detachment.

The Odyssey has just finished a 4-year refit and has been equipped with the experimental Quantum Para-Dimensional Transport Device (colloquially known as the Silver Ball). Highly classified, the Silver Ball is rumoured to be a jump drive capable of propeling the ship through hyperspace (a theorised companion phenomenon to subspace).