Costumes

I'm assuming that you know what most of the characters would wear etc and are capable of letting your guests know. Often the uniforms can be hired from costume stores. You will have seen our costumes in the various photos from my party scattered on these pages.

One easy way to whip up a uniform, if you can do very simple hand sewing, is to buy a long sleeved t-shirt or stretch top in the appropriate colour and sew the black bits on (cut them out from a cheap black t-shirt). That's what I did (& our Dr Crusher) & it doesn't look too bad. Team that with a pair of black leggings or trousers and you're there! I found little gold buttons and sewed them to the collar for the pips.

The New Characters

Dr Alexandra Navarre - There is a lot of room for creativity in costume for the person who gets this role. She can do almost anything! Dr Navarre is an afficionado of 20th Century Earth culture so she might like to wear some present day clothing perhaps teamed with something a little more exotic. A leather or denim jacket perhaps. Dr Navarre is also known as a sensuous & exotic creature so something voluptuous or revealing would not be out of place either. Check out the photos of Dr Navarre at my party if you want some inspiration.

Cpt Forster R'ancoeur - The red Starfleet uniform is probably the most appropriate costume for this character.

Setting

The party is set in the Conference Room on the Enterprise. Here are some tips on how I turned our very ordinary dining room into something a little more atmospheric. Unfortunately none of the photos of my party give a very good idea of how the room looked.

Our room had a set of large sliding glass doors, with vertical blinds at one end. We purchased a large piece of black plastic from the hardware store and then stuck those glow-in-the dark stars (about 1 and a half packets if my memory is correct) all over it. We then simply taped this over the glass doors but behind the drapes. We left the lights on it until just before the party started to get the stars all “aglow”. When the guests entered the room we drew back the curtains to view the "space vista" outside. It worked really well. You could do something similar with any windows or large areas of wall in your room.

For lighting we used 4 or 5 flurorescent tube desk lamps and placed them on the floor along the walls with the tubes pointing upward. This produced a nice effect, maybe more like Ten Forward but it was light enough to eat & read. We also used two frosted drinking goblets on the table filled halfway with water and a little floating candle inside.

Our colour scheme was blue, mustard & black (well, that happens to be the colour of all our crockery). I simply used a cheap black double bed sheet as a table cloth and put a few odd ornaments on the table as well as a pile of artfully scattered blue glass beads. We set the computer up at the head of the table so that it could be seen by everyone. I also put place tags at each setting so guests knew where to sit.

I also used our front room for the initial stages of the party (H'ors doevres & cocktails, reading the first part of the dossiers & listening to my tape of Cpt R'anceour's logs). I tried to make the room look more stark than it normally does, put a few odd ornaments around and kept it dimly lit. In fact, you can do a lot with dim lighting!

I also coerced my brother (Mr Data) into making a nice LED lit “control panel” to stick on our front door. It didn't actually do anything except flicker its LEDs but it impressed the hell out of everyone when they arrived (& allayed any concerns they may have had about arriving on the wrong doorstep in full Trek regalia!)

I also stuck up a few of photocopied & enlarged Starfleet insignias on various doors inside the house (especially the USS Enterprise bathroom/toilet!)

Musical Accompaniment

If you have, or can afford to invest in one of the ST:TNG CDs around this will provide good background music, though I guess any ambient electronic music would also do well.

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The Cast (character descriptions & photos of my guests)

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OK, you know the drill! Star Trek: The Next Generation and most of the characters in this game are copyright to Paramount Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended!

Linda Jeffery /host2.htm / linda@psy.uwa.edu.au