Astley, giving you up.

I’m normally a die-hard for fluff in my roleplaying and war gaming books, but, frankly, certain settings just don’t need much fluff to be included in the game books.

There’s hundreds of books detailing the Trek universe, everything from “fictional non-fiction” like the various Tech Manuals and Encyclopedias, to the millions of novels, comics, audio-dramas, and (obviously) five decades worth of television and movies.

*Snort* I was actually responding more to Lilfut than to you, but your comment inspired me to use that reaction gif, and I was afraid the context would be lost if I posted it as a direct reply to the OP.

I’ve seen the ad that image is taken from, but I’ve never seen it used as a meme before.

It makes little linguistic sense, agreed, but I still consider that episodes to be one of the masterpieces of allegorical Trek.

Agreed. It’s also not likely that there is a huge number of potential groups out there that would be 100 percent Trek rookies.

https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a19a332fff11fc69fa35714c9f51648517c4ce7db6c142556cc90c2ba833b28a.jpg

You want memes? I’ll give you a meme: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2d9a9862494e0d8914c7d71f9c72ce66307339f5ade768694cc730b295956a9a.gif

Seriously, there’s just soooo many things wrong with the concept of a species that can *only* communicate in idioms. It doesn’t just break verisimilitude, it smashes it into tiny pieces and then stomps on the pieces before setting fire to them.

I think it is fair to say that there is some assumption that the reader is a star trek fan, but no need to be an expert.

I found the book very readable, more so than most core rulebooks.

I’ll add that the setting is mostly covered in an “in-character” way that assumes some knowledge. The main text in the setting chapters is framed as a briefing to a newly-minted captain, and is often supplemented with sidebar “historical documents” (logs, intercepted transmissions, intelligence reports, and so on). It’s more fun for me than a dry, third-person narrative, but it would seem choppy and disjointed if I didn’t know the background already.

Each published species comes with a selection of two (sometimes three) species-specific Talents; that would be the hardest part of homebrewing, but the core book does have mechanical guidelines for NPC Talents that could easily be used with some added flavor text.

In general, homebrewing of any kind (species, ships) is pretty easy. There are already large numbers of homebrewed species out there, although I haven’t seen anyone try the Tamarians yet.