The Guardian of Forever. Mirror Universe Trek. The Golden Age of Piracy. The Imperium’s research into the Guardian has destroyed the Enterprise and the Imperium. Righting the timeline requires braving the high seas and… flashing blades!

Yes, that’s right. I’m going to be running Flashing Blades again at North Texas this year. Details aren’t completely finalized; when they are, I’ll update this and link them here, but the North Texas RPG Con will be from Thursday, June 5 through Sunday, June 8. I’ll be running Flashing Blades: l’Entreprenante l’Entreprenante on the Wednesday before, June 4, during their pre-con-get-it-on. It worked well last year; Flashing Blades is a different kind of rpg and makes for a great con start.

Flashing Blades is a semi-adversarial game. It’s adversarial in the same way that the Musketeers and the Guards were: they enjoyed swashbuckling against each other, and were overjoyed to have such wonderful opponents to test their mettle against.

The basic idea in this year’s adventure is that half of the players will play 1705 Naval officers, and half will play Mirror Universe Trek officers. Potentially, the Star Trek officers will duel each other as often or more often than they duel anyone else! That, however, is entirely up to you.

I’ll be playing fast and loose with the Trek side. I’m an original series fan and, to a lesser extent, an animated series fan. That means that pretty much everything about the Guardian of Forever I’ll have taken from The City on the Edge of Forever and Yesteryear. And pretty much everything about the Mirror Universe I’ll have taken from Mirror, Mirror.

I know there’s a lot of post-original series expansion of the Mirror Universe. I know nothing of it other than things picked up second or third hand from other fans. The Mirror Universe is the evil goateed reflection of the Federation universe. The characters from it are characters that have been immersed in that evil. Some have accepted it, some haven’t, but all have chosen to live with it—they are, after all, still alive.

I’ll have pregenerated characters and an easy cheat sheet for handling duels.

If you want to partake in popular media for inspiration, the obvious choices are the books Cyrano de Bergerac, The Three Musketeers, and, while it is well out of period, Master and Commander. The movies based on these books are also well worth watching, especially the José Ferrer Cyrano.

The original series episodes Mirror Mirror and The City on the Edge of Forever, as well as the animated series episode Yesteryear are directly on topic.

The Golden Age of Piracy was well covered in the Golden Age of Pirate Movies. The first is the fascinating The Black Pirate from 1926, starring Douglas Fairbanks and Billie Dove. It’s a silent movie, and suffers from most of what ails silent movies. But it also has swashbuckling, a beautiful “princess”, surprise reveals, and walking the plank! Because it’s a silent movie, it doesn’t suffer from over-explanation. Just about everything needs to be put across by the delivery of the actors. Nothing can be explained by saying something out loud that would never be said in real life as later movies would do—and still do.

Slightly more modern pirate movies worth watching include:

• Captain Blood (1935/1685-1687; Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, Olivia de Havilland)
• The Black Swan (1942/1674; Tyrone Power, Maureen O’Hara)
• The Spanish Main (1945/Golden Age of Piracy; Paul Henreid, Maureen O’Hara)
• Anne of the Indies (1951/Golden Age of Piracy; Jean Peters, Louis Jourdan)
• Blackbeard, the Pirate (1952/1674; Robert Newton, Linda Darnell)
• Against All Flags (1952/1700; Errol Flynn, Maureen O’Hara)

I also highly recommend the off-period but nonetheless brilliant The Sea Hawk with Errol Flynn and Claude Rains. That’s right: watch two pirate movies and get two-thirds of the top three male cast members of Casablanca!

The future of the Imperium is in your hands—right next to your cutlass, dagger, and pistol.