Last Unicorn Games (or LUG) was a Pennsylvania based corporation with offices in Los Angeles, California. It was formed in 1994 by Christian Moore, Owen Seyler , Greg Ormand, and Bernie Cahill to publish the role playing game ARIA: Canticle of the Monomyth. In the following years, the company published the collectable card games (CCG) Heresy: Kingdom Come (1995), and Dune (1997).
Working with new employee Ross Isaacs, Moore and Seyler began the development of the "ICON" gaming system. This was a D6 dice based system where the player rolls a number of D6 equal to their attributes. Taking the results from only the highest die, the skill was added to the result and this total was compared to the difficulty set by the Game Master. A separate die was denoted as the Drama roll, with a result of either 1 or 6 determining the outcome as either very tragic (1) or very good (6) .
On May 21, 1998 Last Unicorn Games issued a press release announcing their acquisition of the rights to STAR TREK roleplaying games, miniatures, and live action games. The statement indicated that the company had signed a multi-year license agreement with Viacom Consumer Products, a division of Paramount Pictures for TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY intellectual properties.
ICON logo for STAR TREK games.
In August, 1998, Last Unicorn Games published their first Star Trek game. STAR TREK: The Next Generation Core Game Book, using the ICON gaming system, was followed by:
- STAR TREK: The Next Generation Narrator's Toolkit (1998)
- The Way of the Kohlinahr - The Vulcan Source Book (1998)
- The First Line - Starfleet Intelligence Handbook (1998)
- Price of Freedom - The United Federation of Planets Source Book (1999)
- The Way of D'era - The Romulan Star Empire Setting (1999)
- Starfleet Academy (1999)
- STAR TREK: The Next Generation Player's Guide (1999)
- STAR TREK: Deep Space Nine Roleplaying Game Core Game Book (1999)
- STAR TREK: Deep Space Nine Roleplaying Game Narrator's Toolkit (1999)
- STAR TREK (TOS) Roleplaying Game Core Game Book (1999)
- STAR TREK (TOS) Roleplaying Game Narrator's Toolkit (1999)
- STAR TREK: The Next Generation Planets of the UFP Source Book (1999)
- STAR TREK: The Next Generation Planetary Adventures - Vol 1 - Federation Space (1999)
- STAR TREK: The Next Generation Holodeck Adventures (1999)
- STAR TREK (TOS) Roleplaying Game - Among the Clans - The Andorians (1999)
LUG also released a customizable disk game, STAR TREK: Red Alert! in early 2000.
Due to financial troubles, Last Unicorn Games was sold to Wizards of the Coast in June 2000. The last RPG being developed at the time was DUNE: Chronicles of the Imperium (2000), which was subsequently published by WotC.
Wizards of the Coast soon lost the license to STAR TREK when Viacom / Paramount granted rights to Decipher, Inc. By March 2001, Decipher released a statement saying that they had hired the seven-person team comprising most of the former employees of Last Unicorn Games, including Moore. The former LUG team were assigned to the Decipher RPG and Miniature division where they would focus on the development of the STAR TREK RPG.
External link
- Last Unicorn Games article at Memory Alpha, the wiki for canon Star Trek.
- Christian Moore article at Wikipedia
- Owen Seyler article at Wikipedia
- "Decipher Nabs Last Unicorn Developers", ICv2, March 27, 2001
- Last Unicorn Games publication list article at Pen & Paper (Internet Archive link)
- Collection of Source Books from Last Unicorn Games (Internet Archive link)