In the immortal words of Gary Gygax, YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT. Thus my exploration of Star Trek tech and gaming naturally begins here.
Here is how stardate works in Star Trek, the original series, according to its Writers/Directors Guide:
Thus stardate works exactly like a datestring in real life computing. For example, in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, yesterday’s date is stored as 44850, and today is 44851. Noon today is 44851.5.
This is eminently simple to understand and practical for use in a game. For example, you can subtract 73,000 from an actual date string to arrive at a usable stardate, or add 73,000 to a stardate to arrive at an actual date string.
The Decimal
The “percentage point” may be good enough for a Captain’s Log, but rather less than practical for almost any other possible application. Nevertheless, I will illustrate how it works. Might come in handy.
About the Writer’s Guide
The Writers/Directors Guide I mentioned is sometimes known as the Guide or the Series Bible or similar. Most people have seen the final, Season 3 revision, because for many years Gene Roddenberry’s Lincoln Enterprises sold copies of it. Today it is all over the internet. Here is one downloadable scan.
Up Next
This is enough to go on if you want internal consistency within your campaign or story. However, you will also want consistency vis-à-vis original series events such as the Organian Treaty or the Tholian Web incident. I will explore this in a future post.
