[lonnarin]

I like Abrams' work on Lost, but honestly I am opposed to any more Trek prequels after the flop known as Enterprise. Matt Damon also has NO place on the screen of a Trek movie, unless he's willing to spend 4-7 years of his life doing a series on television 1st.

What the Trek franchises NEEDS is to finally break away from the Starfleet idealism and make a series about a Klingon ship. After so many Doe-eyed Laforges, Wesley Crushers, Harry Kims and Malcoms, the moral superiority and naivity of Starfleet is beginning to make me ill. We need a Klingon pirate vessel with a master orator capable of soul-sparking monologues, a captain Ahab shakespearian anti-hero who doesn't always do the 'right' thing, but at least does so with his own personal honor and style. Somebody who was exhiled by the Klingon Empire, his house fallen and who has no choice but to set out on his own as a privateer.

Furthermore, there haven't been any decent ALIENS since the original series, bar Species 8472 of Voyager. In the Original Series we had Horta, Salt Sucking Dopplegangers, toxic oozes, tribbles, omnipotent Q-like entities... the sky was the limit. Then we hit the Next Generation and ever since have endured nothing but political struggles between humanoids with nose ridges, pointy ears or bum scales. The Trek franchise should take a cue from Farscape and get a Jim Henson-like creatures shop, or at least a decent CGI crew. If I don't see a klingon Targ on the bridge as a pet, they aren't trying hard enough.

Bring back the GORN! I want my series to have the main engineer a Gorn, and scenes in the midst of battle where enemies try to transport in and take engineering, just to have their arms ripped off and eaten alive. I'd also want him so prideful that he refuses to use the Universal Translator, so all of his dialogue is hisses and shrieks while Lucas-era subtitles crawl across the screen. The cybernetic technology available to the series should also have improved following the Borg invasion, not just silly visors and mechanical hearts... I want to see Klingon amputees with jacked up hydrolics plowing through enemies, hidden compartment, microchips, cerebral enhancement, etc. I imagine the "Science Officer" of my series to be an exhiled Starfleet Medical officer who studied the borg and was kicked out for dangerous self-augmentation. Make him brilliant, cold, cunning, twitchy and machiavellian... no longer truly human, and no more loyal to the captain than his circumstances need him to be. With a cybernetic link to the ship's computer, he'd be the resident expert on everything, much to the captain's ire.

The series sells itself once you add Worf as an antagonist... chasing the vessel down out of law & duty, and the captain having too much pride to surrender peacefully, but too much honor to kill him.

Oh yeah, I'm currently converting Shadowrun 4's ruleset to a customized Star Trek PnP campaign and playtesting it with Pooser, Az-Ptol and Pelordeas of my Orlando crew. This is because I have downloaded the current RPG set for TNG->Voyager and have been unimpressed by their ruleset. Shadowrun's perfect for it though... full flexibility, no "classes", and instant death can occur on ANY weapon if you hit just the right spot. Now if only I could get Paramount and Wiz Kids at the same table... it's been iffy since the FASA walkout. The current Trek RPG feels like some producer in Paramount hired his nephew to write up a disaster piece, just to spite Roddenberry's memory.