Sure, Klingons, Romulans and all are fun. But does anyone have one of the minor races play a large role – particularly as adversaries – in their campaigns? Tellarians? Corvallans? Sheliak? Acamarian Gatherers?
Part of the appeal of the infrequently-seen aliens in the Trek universe is that there’s a lot of freedom to create goals and motivations, but the downside is that there’s often not a ton of canon to draw on for inspiration.
How have you fleshed out these scenarios to make the encounters more three-dimensional? What are some of your cool ideas for these races?
Heck, I kinda consider Romulans to be a minor race myself. They were only in 2 episodes in TOS. Maybe a handful in TNG/DS9, I don’t remember exactly. I feel like they should have been on par with Klingons as a threat to the UFP, but ended up being treated as some kind of ignored family member. And when they had their entire senate assasinated in that one movie, and then their entire planet blown up in that other movie, goodness gracious its like they wanted to ignore that they ever existed and just wanted some mad driven revenge aliens but didn’t want to make new aliens so they tacked that onto romulans. Especially since they took the one “gimmick” romulans had, cloaking technology, and basically made klingons be the threat that uses this tech. Exceedingly wasted potential with the romulans, considering their relation to vulcans. But I really feel like they didn’t know what to do with them to make a satisfying story.
But um, back on track. The campaign I was going to run, but which is currently not happening because I can’t get people to schedule time to actually play, was going to be a patrol frigate ship on the federation border, so plenty of oppertunity for skirmishes and minor invasions near the border and shipping lanes for whoever I wanted to put them next to any given time. I like the idea of borrowing races from other IP, since its all just sit-at-home kinda game play anyways. I was going to have kzinti raiders, orion pirates, maybe some E.T. aliens, gray alien “asgardians”, Cybermen, etc.
Actually, they’ve been in a lot more than that - 2 TOS movies, around half of the Klingon-oriented TNG episodes (Sela!), plus various adversarial plots, quite a few DS9 episodes in the Dominion War, several Voyager episodes, and regular adversaries in the 4th season of ENT - Tomalok remains one of my favourite recurring characters (I want to see him, Martok and Garak in a group story…). For a race that’s explicitly hiding for most of Federation history, they don’t do too badly! I think you’re right about the Klingons nicking all their plot hooks though - I think STIII’s abortive Romulan subplot has a lot to answer for…
Rather fond of Kzinti & Orions myself and I’ve also experimented with the elusive Rigellians. It’s a good point though, I’ve not done much with the smaller names - usually I wind up with human or Orion colonists!
I really like the Anticans and the Selay from TNG “Lonely Among Us”. I’m not sure what I will do with them, but I think they are members of the Federation now in my timeline but there is still conflict.
Also I will bring the Barzan back into relevancy because an accident will stabilize the endpoint of the Barzan wormhole and it will serve as a gateway to new adventures in season 3 of my series.