☞ Prologue – A Banner First Raised Among the Stars ☜
“It’s like a finger pointing a way to the stars…”
There are banners that are woven not from cloth, but from memory—stitched in threads of fellowship, embroidered in the luminous script of game logs, and unfurled across the great, imagined firmament of fellowship.
Long before the Order of Vulgarian Knights stood sentinel at the gates of forgotten realms, its founders had already sojourned upon other frontiers—aboard stately Constitution-class starships, and through the flickering corridors of pixel-born installations. We were Rocketpunks. We were Klingons. We were captains and cadets in a dozen digital flotillas. And always, we were constructing something grand.
Our lineage delves deep into the dark matter of fandom. More than forty winters past, some among our number first clasped the dice of the venerable Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game by FASA. In time, other systems joined the library of our play: Last Unicorn, Decipher, and many a homemade hybrid stitched with loving care. Starfleet, in its way, never wholly released its hold upon our hearts. Nor we upon it.
Some ten years gone, we were reunited in the aether of Star Trek Online, where we charted anew the stars beneath the banner of the 8th Fleet (Mobile). Here, in the fusion of episodic narrative, character, and command, many of the bonds that define us still were tempered and forged.
A few years thereafter, we turned our eyes toward a more enduring enterprise: to construct a lasting haven for our particular brand of imagination within the isles of Japan. At first, we sought accord with others: FLEET 31 welcomed us as the USS Kaohsiung; we made parley with Starfleet International, IFT, Sol Sector Command, and Star Trek: The Fleet. Each encounter taught us something—of camaraderie, of compromise, of the quiet trials that test the soul of any endeavor.
Some lessons were dearly bought. Others, bittersweet. A few, resplendent. All, foundational.
Thus it was, in the fullness of time, that we raised our own ensign: the Rocketpunk Space Patrol. It was no act of rebellion, but of refinement—a vessel we might truly name our own. One wherein every soul, uniformed or no, had a place at the console.
It was not our final form. Yet it was our first great declaration:
We are here to play together, not pass inspection.
The Order of Vulgarian Knights would emerge later, hewn from the same spirit of creativity, community, and narrative wonder that once lit our warp trails. But before the crows rose into myth, before Gothic crests and gilded grimoires, we were already entwined by something older than time: a shared vision.
And that, too, is a kind of stardust.