New Star Trek series has a name familiar to roleplayers

A trailer has been released for the new Star Trek series, which now has a name “Discovery”. And if you think that name sounds familiar, there’s a Star Trek roleplaying game called Discovery as part of the Star Trek Borderlands community. Here’s what their Discovery looks like:

Borderlands’ USS Discovery roleplaying game is about the first Discovery-class starship, which is exploring the Delta quadrant.

It’s unclear yet what time-period the new Discovery TV series will be set, but it’ll be in the Prime universe (as opposed to the “Kelvin” universe of the newer Star Trek movies), which means it could be set after Voyager, or set between Enterprise and the original series. The ship registration NCC 1031 seems to hint that this is a ship registered before the Enterprise (NCC 1701), so it could be the earliest series we’ve seen.

Here’s the teaser trailer:

The design of the ship actually bears a striking resemblance to the Enterprise concept art created for “Phase II”, a proposed continuation of the original series, set after the original films.

The grimey look of the logo is a stark difference to the usual clean, smooth logos of every other Star Trek series, could this hint to a less optimistic, more grim universe? Perhaps in the future the Federation has gone all “Brexit” and disbanded, creating more of an apocalyptic Mad Max feel? That doesn’t sound very Star Trekky, but might create an interesting galaxy a bit like Firefly’s ‘Verse, where there’s a rich/poor divide, with the ruling class at the center of the solar system, and the outer planets more of a lawless frontier. Could that work?

Also there’s a theory that the design of the ship looks part Klingon, which was mentioned by Chris Kentlea on Twitter.

If you’re interested in Borderlands’ USS Discovery, here’s their website – https://sites.google.com/site/borderlandsdiscovery/