If you make up your own characters, you'll be fine. The general idea is to tell our own stories without using people from the shows. I know we all want to write that episode where Kirk and Spock finally kiss.... but seriously folks, yes there are a few ways around, mind you, I may use one or two of them in the future. But on the whole I think it's more fun to make up the stories anyway. I have my own recurring characters and plotlines and if you do it right, they can be just as compelling as those in the shows.

Ew....
(Double "Ew" for OLD Kirk and Spock!)
See my avatar's face?
I can't believe you just invoked the ultimate fanfic heaver...

Can we make spoofs?

For example can I make a tongue and cheek episode about Larry Cotter and his friends Henry Grambler and Shawna Beezley as they work their way through Starfleet Academy?

No one regulates the actor thing, Worf appears in an episode.

They actually had a spotlight on a mission portraying Q!
That is legal how?

You're right, it is poorly policed.

However, as I understand it, while using an actor's likeness is illegal, portraying the character is not illegal. So you can use Worf, as long as it doesn't look like Michael Dorn. You can use Q, as long as it doesn't look like John DeLancie. And if your Q is not the Q, so much the better.

Deciding whether a game character looks enough like a person for there to be a EULA violation... is kind of a grey area. Given how Cryptic's character creator works, it is possible, though difficult, to create a character that looks substantially like an actor.

You know, we should have had some of the authors who were at Star Trek Las Vegas approach the actors and see if we could get permission to use their likenesses in our missions Though I suppose CBS probably would not appreciate that sort of end run.

Is that perhaps covered in the agreement that allows Michael Dorn's likeness to be used during some of the actual KDF missions?

Was that John de Lancie Q, or Q Junior (the one who sends you back to Wolf 359 in one of the Featured Episodes)?



I think for the most part my Foundry mission shouldn't run into any trouble with canon characters, except for one thing: I plan to have a log entry by a character we saw one time on TNG be read. It will be explicitly stated that ______, captain of the ______ originally dictated this log.

However--I have a computer system that is reading the entry back to your character because in-story, the original audio file was corrupted due to problems with that ship's computer core.

Am I OK since I am not showing the character's face or allowing the player to interact directly with that individual?

I *can* rewrite the story if I must to give that log entry to someone else, or delete it entirely, but I would prefer not to, since I think the tie to that episode will give the mission a little more of an impact on the player.

I'm pretty sure what you're doing is fine

I'd say Worf is fine because they include him as a pop-up contact for KDF Foundry missions. At LEAST Worf as he appears in-game. Pop-up contacts have to be manually added by Cryptic so there's at LEAST an implicit suggestion there that Worf is considered to be wearing "full makeup."

So my understanding is that you could use any character from Star trek movies or film as long as they do not resemble the actor who played them? Would I be safe with say a young Jean Luc Piccard with hair? Or a Worf who had no forhead ridges and didnt look like Michael Dorn? Or a mutated James T. Kirk?

yes people have done this before. sometimes it doesn't work out though when the player goes "what the heck that doesn't look like worf at all" and just detracts from the mission.