Allow me to mention – once again – that, while fantasy is without question the genre of RPG I've spent the most time refereeing and playing, science fiction is where my heart truly lies. I sometimes think I was a fan of sci-fi from birth, because so many of my earliest memories revolve around rocket ships, aliens, and space exploration. Given that I can still vividly recall watching the handshake in space during the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, this shouldn't come as a surprise. Even so, I think it's important to put what follows in some context, if only to paint a better picture of the kinds of Dragon articles that captured my imagination as a young man.
"These are the voyages of the Ginny's Delight ..." by Dale L. Kemper appeared in the Areas Section of issue #96 (April 1985). A short article, consisting of probably less than a single page of text, a technical diagram, and a set of deckplans, I nevertheless got a great deal of use out of it. There are a number of reasons why this was the case, the most obvious being that the article provided new material for use with FASA's licensed Star Trek roleplaying game, a favorite of mine at the time. I was always happy to see new content for that game, especially content that was immediately useable.
That's very important to me. Then as now, I loved reading about new ideas and rules for any RPGs I enjoyed, but what really fired me up were articles whose ideas and rules filled an obvious void or otherwise gave me stuff that I needed (or felt I needed). Speculative articles or "think pieces," as we might call them today, were fun, of course, but too often they felt unmoored from play, as if the author spent more time thinking about playing than actually doing so. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, but useable material will always win out over the theoretical.
In this particular case, the useable material was the titular Ginny's Delight, a custom-built 48 meter-long, 8000-ton merchantman intended as an "adventure-class" vessel for use by up to four independent traders in the Star Trek universe. Being a fan of FASA's Trader Captains and Merchant Princes supplement, this was catnip to me. At the time, I had already had some success running short, parallel Star Trek campaigns focused on non-Starfleet characters and wanted more. Because FASA was slow to provide such material, I welcomed anything more I could find.
The Ginny's Delight is small and comparatively fast, completely lacking in deflector shields but packing a photon torpedo mount that is unusual in a vessel of this size. It's also been streamlined to make atmospheric landings possible, something that's rather uncommon among the starships of the Star Trek setting. However, it makes it ideal for a small group of freelance rogues and ne'er-do-wells hoping to turn a few credits in the rough and tumble corners of the galaxy. That the article also included deckplans suitable for use with cardboard counters or miniatures only made the article even more appealing to me.
Like so many things, I had lots of plans to make use of the material in this article, but barely did so. The independent characters of my campaign already had their own ship and were quite fond of it, so there was no way they'd "trade up" to the Ginny's Delight. I eventually created a Tellarite trader and his crew who were intended to be rivals to the characters. Their ship was a variant of the one described in the article, but they only appeared once before the campaign ceased. Alas! Rereading this article brought back many fond memories of the far-off days when Star Trek was something that still inspired me and that's not a bad thing at all.
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