This is FASA’s Star Trek: The Role Playing Game (1983), the second Star Trek RPG (the first was a joint venture between Heritage Games and Gamescience in 1978 and the very first licensed RPG). I don’t have strong feelings about Trek in general, but this one still manages to be weird in surprising ways.

First, system and such. In the box you get a rulebook, three adventures, Enterprise deck plans and some wargame counters. A skill based system, it is kind of a simplified Traveller clone in a lot of ways, which makes sense, since FASA was making Traveller material for a while. Characters are defined by their service, accumulating skills and experience through tours of duty. The box assumes a career in the various branches of the Federation, but other products expand the potential histories, allowing players to come up through the Romulan and Klingon militaries. The Orions sourcebooks give you pirate backgrounds and there is a sourcebook for merchants, too. This is cool. Or you could just play the classic characters from the show, that’s fine too.

The action of the game is structured to mirror the action of the original TV series, with the party at the helm of the ship in various officer roles, visiting alien planets and solving problems. Due to the prevailing interests of the time, you can see the designers struggling to not make the whole thing devolve into a ship-to-ship wargame (which it eventually does in the second edition). To prevent this in the first edition, a system of combat was devised in which each character mans a positions on the bridge – the captain issues orders, the helmsman uses the weapon systems, someone (the Navigator maybe?) maintains shields. There are combat roles for everyone on down to the communications officer (they track casualties). This is an extremely cool way to manage space combat.  

Crap, out of room. I’ll wrap up by saying it is a bummer that 99% of the art is just black and white stills from the TV show.