Trek Untold - Star Trek: Adventures, Interview With Jim Johnson

Trek Untold – Star Trek: Adventures, Interview With Jim Johnson

Roleplaying games have a long history with the Star Trek franchise, and in this episode, we learn about the current incarnation of it, “Star Trek: Adventures.”

During the pandemic, a lot of folks dove deep into gaming whether it was video games or traditional board games folks found new ways to spend their time and escape reality for at least just a little while I started playing dungeon the dragons for the first time ever with some friends and I am still on that campaign right now in fact and having a whole lot of fun doing it.

In the early 80s their first role-playing game was released by the prolific company known as FASA, today Modiphius entertainment produces Star Trek: Adventures which has been heralded as the best Star Trek RPG to date but as a relative noob to the world of role-playing games and also a lover of all things Trek I wanted to learn more about this game and see if it’s something that I might be into in my research that led me down the road to meeting this week’s guest Jim Johnson

Jim is the project manager at Modiphius Entertainment and oversees the Star Trek: Adventures role-playing game thankfully he’s also a lifelong Trekkie and equally a lifetime expert in role-playing games so in this episode we’re going to learn not only all about Jim and discover how he went from scribbling notes on a character sheet as a kid to shaping one of the most expansive Star Trek games ever.

Star Trek Adventures RPG from Modiphius Entertainment
Star Trek Adventures RPG from Modiphius Entertainment
Jims History

As do with all my guests here and Jim, what’s your earliest memory of Star Trek?

“Oh boy my earliest memory of star trek has to be in the mid-70s I was just a little kid and uh I had a little teeny tiny three-inch black and white portable television that had one of the old uh metal aerials that you could fold out and uh and put up and it was actually in New York I was living on Governor’s Island at the time and if the weather was just right and the sky was clear and I aimed that aerial in just the right direction I could pick up a really grainy black and white uh rerun of the original series so me and my friends would play um a landing party in the uh on the playground right we would pretend we’re you know Kirk And Spock And McCoy and we’d run around and play on the playground.”

Now did you do a lot of writing as a kid is that something you wanted to go into, Did you know you wanted to be a writer when you grew up?

Up uh no not really when I went to start going to college I took a couple of creative writing classes and surprisingly did really good or you know got good remarks on them and I just kept pursuing it you know seriously as I continued on through college. And then into a professional career um and then getting into like uh you know uh fiction writing and freelance writing and just went on from there.

Star Trek Adventures – The Command Division Sourcebook
Star Trek Adventures – The Command Division Sourcebook
Table Top Gaming

Were you a big tabletop gamer or a Dungeons Dragons player growing up, when did any of that stuff come into your life?

“Yeah that was uh man that had to be early 80s I think the first RPG I can remember playing was d and d the old red box um I think I think it must have been 81 or 82 buying that and like that was the amazing thing with my friends it’s like ooh what are we gonna do with this and the old uh the old I think gosh I think they were yellow character sheets I remember going to toys r us back when toys r us was a thing and Toys R Us sold the hardcover um like Fiend Folio and Monster Manual and Monster Manual 2.

And like you can buy that stuff at a Toys R Us which was you know unreal as things you know as time has gone on but uh yeah it was the red box DnD was my introduction into the hobby, uh and then from there pretty rapidly my friend friends found um we got into star frontiers and we got into marvel superheroes and boot hill and then we kind of like moved out our Gamma World I think a little bit um and then we got out of TSR because like I mean TSR was the company at the time right it was like it was TSR and everybody else and then just you know to continue to play different games over the years from there uh but yeah certainly DnD was the was the gateway”

So did you do a lot of freelance writing for fantasy did you do a lot of stuff for sci-fi I mean as you’re coming up in the industry what kind of stuff are you working on?

“Uh well you know what what’s interesting with the industry is uh I um I was doing freelance writing and fiction writing mostly in the late 90s or very early 2000s just trying to like because I was like yeah I was fresh out of college and just like okay what do I do now you know.

I had a day job but I  wanted to get some writing going and so I was doing the writing the short story sending them off to all the major markets at the time and um I  lost it was a big art I was also a big gamer right so I was trying to get into the game industry  somehow as a freelancer and I remember um when west end games had the license to do star wars  they did an, uh I think it was like a quarterly adventure journal that was a like a digest-sized book that  had adventures and characters and stuff in it and they had an open submission policy and I remember I remember putting a submission together and like slaving over this submission for like weeks and  when I finally got it to a place where I was like confident enough to mail it off”

Strange New Worlds V is the fifth edition of the Strange New Worlds anthology series, published by Pocket Books in 2002.
Strange New Worlds V is the fifth edition of the Strange New Worlds anthology series, published by Pocket Books in 2002.
Star Trek & Star Trek: Adventures

At what point In your career did you get your first chance to really work In Star Trek?

“So what was neat about Star Trek is um in the way who was this 90s was it as early as 96 I can’t remember no it must have been 97. Uh, Simon Schuster who has the license to do Star Trek novels right licensed Star Trek novels and short stories they decided to um do a short story contest called Strange New Worlds and what they wanted to do is they wanted to open that up to fans all around the all-around.

What they wanted to do is they wanted to kind of carry on the tradition from paramount where you know when Next Gen and DS9 and Voyager were on the air the producers of those shows wanted to open up their script submission um options to fans like if you were a fan and you thought you could write an episode of Star Trek you could write a spec script and mail it in and if it was good enough they would invite you into pitch um for stories and that’s how a lot of writers got their start you know including Ron D Moore and a whole bunch of others.

I got into the contest a little late because I like a friend of mine Kevin summers he got us he got a story uh into uh stranger worlds five and uh I was like well that’s awesome you know congratulations and by the time I realized that I had just missed the submission period for strange new world six but I started writing knowing that there was going to be the seventh one.

So I submitted some stories in for strange world seven and was fortunate enough that one of them got picked and published and then I went on to get one in nine and ten as well so I ended up writing three short stories for star trek uh and published in these anthologies.”

Star Trek Adventures - The Shackleton Expanse campaign
Star Trek Adventures – The Shackleton Expanse campaign

Right, so Jim let us jump into our Star Trek: Adventures talk how did writing Star Trek evolve into you now working with Modiphius Entertainment and eventually becoming the role that you’re in right now?

“That’s a great question so uh harkening back to um the lord of the rings RPG I was a freelance playtest coordinator on that, and it just worked out that one of the other playtest coordinators was Jason Doral.

After we finished our work on the lord of the rings game he continued to have a career and continues even today to have a career in the RPG industry where he works on a huge number of games he’s worked on all kinds of stuff over the years and he for a while there he was the Project Manager and line editor for Conan at Modiphius and he did a lot of work for them on Conan and one day because he and I, you know maintained a relationship you know professional relationship over the years just kind of keeping in touch with each other.

He emailed me he said hey Jim I think you need to put together your resume and your cv and send it to the folks at modiphius because modiphius just got the license to a really cool game that I think you’re going to like I can’t tell you what it is because you’re not under NDA yet but you need to send your contact information to the president and then he and then he signed off the email with live long and prosper which kind of like gave me the clue.”

If you like what you have read so far join me and Jim as we continue this discussion as we talk about Star Trek: Adventures and its new expansion The Shackleton Expanse…

Listen To The Newest Trek Untold

Watch The Newest Trek Untold Video Below

Visit Modiphius Entertainment to learn more about the game – https://www.modiphius.net/

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Trek Untold is a weekly podcast series that chats with character actors, stunt performers, behind-the-scenes crew and other people who are the contributors of the Star Trek universe whose names aren’t in the opening credits of the shows. Follow Trek Untold on FacebookTwitter, and Instagram to learn more about upcoming episodes, which are released every Thursday on all major audio platforms, and Sunday on Youtube in video form.

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