Jim Johnson has been working on Star Trek properties since at least 2004 with three stories in three different Strange New Worlds collections and more recently as a project manager for Mõdiphiüs, pronounced Moe-diphius, not Mod-iphius as I said for the first half of the video until I was correctly corrected.  I was able to speak to him due to some introductions by Derek Tyler Attico, and I think is going to open up another group of writers to talk to about their involvement in Trek and has even given me a few ideas for future content on Twitch.

We open the talk with me drooling over his Blue Bricks Defiant he has on a shelf behind him, then swap a couple “million dollar ideas” that are sure to have us in the two comma club soon enough.  We move on to have a great discussion on how exceptionally friendly everyone is on the creative side of Trek books and how willing they are to help people out with interviews and games and how lucky we are to be involved in the fandom.

What prompted me to post this interview before Shore Leave is Kelli Fitzpatrick is bringing the new second edition core books with her to the show.  Up to this point, I’ve been blissfully unfamiliar with IRL RPG games, as most of my RPG experiences are PC based with minimal human interactions.  The second edition is officially launching at GenCon, but those of us at Shore Leave are going to get to see it a week early.

As a newcomer to the RPG space, I had to ask, what exactly is a second edition and how does it effect the content that’s been previously released?  Jim gives a great breakdown of the hows and whys, and essentially the original game was good but they had a ton of content come out since the original core book came out, so some tinkering was in order to make it all align better.

There’s a conversation on how different reviews for literary books are from RPG books, the project management methodologies of Mõdiphiüs, the process of choosing authors for the books, and how content is approved by Paramount.

We wrap things up by mentioning that Mõdiphiüs is currently running a 50% off sale on both the US and UK sites, the second edition is up for preorder, and there’s going to be a starter kit that’s going to be a great entry point to the game system for people like me that are intimidated by those big gorgeous books.

Mõdiphiüs can be found on Facebook and Discord.

Jim Johnson can found on his personal website, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.