Editing Star Trek (section)

= Setting =
Here's the Cliff's Notes on ''Star Trek''. A couple of general warnings; firstly, ''Star Trek'' likes to ''really'' take its "racial themes" bits just a little too far. Second, despite this, it's rare for an entire race to be completely irredeemable the way many fictional aliens are: there are heroic and sympathetic characters from nearly every race listed below, able to put more-positive spins on their racial themes. Thirdly, aside from very occasional appearances by [[H.P. Lovecraft|aliens who are so bizarre that humankind can barely comprehend them]], all of the aliens look like dudes with rubber masks on (because they are). In real life, this was because there was no budget for anything else, but in-universe it's been explained by some kind of [[Old Ones|Precursor]] race who seeded all of the planets with their broadly humanoid DNA, and every race evolved slightly differently from there. There isn't much [[fluff]] on what these precursors were like, and some of it was contradictory, and Gene Roddenberry didn't like the idea (although he still had to work with the rubber forehead stuff). The good news for fa/tg/uys who like [[homebrew]] is that this makes it fairly easy to write [[d20 system]] rules for all of the races - after all, most ''D&D'' races are just humans with rubber masks on...

== A Composite Creation ==
This is a general note that one should consider: Star Trek was created in pretty much the opposite way as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien worked out a bunch of linguistic stuff and general history of Arda in his spare time over the course of years, then decided to use that as the basis for some stories that he eventually gave to some publishers which in the end sold quite well. 

Roddenberry, by contrast, pitched a very broad general idea (it's the future, things are good, we got some guys on a ship exploring space; a "wagon train to the stars") to the networks and eventually Lucy from ''I Love Lucy'' made it happen. Roddenberry then worked with a variety of writers and actors (and some later on in later series) who added to this rough skeleton of an idea in a process that would continue on to this day. 

This is not to knock either approach, but both have their advantages and disadvantages. In regards to Star Trek, a franchise that's been going on for more than half a century and was a conflict-of-the-week show for most of that, there were numerous people at the helm and many of them had often contradictory ideas about what should be done with nobody to tell them no, meaning that [[Black Library|the canon is a fucking mess and much of it is something people prefer to forget]]. In general fans and <s>writers</s> fans with a paycheck have spent a whole lot of time trying to straighten things out, and much of the lore is basically a [https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Portal:Main rough consensus of what people like and what fits in with it]. Later series got more systematic about this, but there are still points of contention and a lot of flat out contradictions due to its scattershot nature.