The qaptaQ - Founding an Order

The scene: A Star Trek convention in an older hotel not really set up for a commercial convention. The dealers room is set up on a large mezzanine with an escalator running up through its center taking away floor space. Along one side of this open area are several small meeting rooms that are not being used (officially) by the convention. One such room has been claimed by a local Klingon group. It is kept intentionally dark, and because no one has the gumption to enforce the smoking ban on Klingons, the room is also very Smokey.

Walking into the room you are faced with a few tables, two to the sides and two in front of you. One is set up in the traditional fan table style with flyers and applications. The rest are set up with displays of uniforms and weapons. Past the two tables in front of you is an area that is vaguely temple like. There are banners hanging on the far wall, a row of chairs under the banners, and a komerex stella shaped table in the center. There are more chairs arranged in a rough circle facing the other chairs and the table. The table is small but crowded with an array of items. There are at least three incense burners going and if you get close enough you will find all have different competing scents.

The back part of the room is full of Klingons and others milling around. Every so often someone else will arrive and will add more items to the already crowded table. As this happens, low grumbles can be heard among protests that “it” is growing again. Sometimes someone will get up and speak in a kind of random oratory, then sit down again. Then someone stands up, he is sort of dressed as a Klingon but doesn’t physically look like a Klingon. He takes one of the incense burners, a brass one that can hang from a chain, and a book and starts to read. It is apparently a ceremony of some type, but few are paying attention, life seems to go on around him. He walks to the front half of the room, and to the door. He turns to face into the room and keeps reading. Once in a while he makes a great show of swinging the incense around at the door frame.

Then the unspeakable happens. A child walks up, he is young for a fan but old enough to know what a Klingon is. He asks his mother if he can go inside. She pulls him back and tells him no, that is the room where “those devil people” are. They are bad people, we don’t go there. They walk away. Although that woman will never know it, her words were a wakeup call, to the Klingon doing the ceremony. In a few short sentences she summed up all that was wrong with local Klingon fandom. Although nothing momentous happened that day, the discussions that followed among a few of the Klingon club members lead to the formation of a purely fictional role play fraternal order for Klingons, that would come to be known as the qaptaQ.

There were other factors, some of which probably indirectly lead to the characterization of Klingons as “devil people”. Namely the Altar like table that was filled with unexplained weaponry, a jaw bone, a hammer, some type of small purple puppet, and of course the competing incense. What she may or may not have scene was the end of day ceremonial council gathering. Presided over by an ununiformed man who called himself a Klingon god. A long haired guy in a heavy metal T-Shirt that said he was the Emperor and various uniformed Klingons. Speakers held aloft the hammer as they spoke, and at various times people would add in various neo-pagan practices if they didn’t take too long. There were Klingon names assigned to things, but they were just masks like the ones that made humans into Klingons for a day.

So what was wrong with any of this? The intrusion of real life religion into Klingon fandom dilutes and distorts both the religion and the fandom. It tends to, as in the case of the mother and son, distance and exclude potential fans of other religions from the opportunity to share in the fandom. All this would be bad enough if it were any single religion, but when it is a mishmash of many and then peppered with various other bits, from fraternities and lodges to military orders, it can be overwhelming.
This was also at a time when there had not been much mention of Klingon religion in any canon sources. FASA had said it didn’t exist and paramount had yet to decide on the Klingons needing to be saved by the secular federation. So any visual representation of such things was utterly foreign to the casual observer. There were indications of course, the death howl, the code of honor, and the Black Fleet. Pawns and Symbols introduced us to the Durgath, a dragon like god worshiped by some Klingons, and a planet where local religion required the females to remain veiled. The casual fan didn’t read the novels or the RPG’s and even then it required some research and restrained creativity to sort through.

Out of this landscape came the qaptaQ. From its beginnings it was intended to be a club within a club, but that quickly changed to an independent club. The focus was on Klingon religion, with a strong relationship to live action role playing. There were many sources, some of which are regrettably lost to the sands of time, others are known (by design) only to the founding members. There was a concerted effort to use multiple sources and not to just copy and single religion. However the main goal always was and always will be to maintain a Klingon standard. New words have to be made sometimes to give name to things, but they are always made with an eye towards tlhIngan Hol.

One of the main bodies of work has always been the ceremonies. While there are many available, the one that was most requested was the Klingon wedding. The qaptaQ wrote one long before DS9 ever thought of their episode, so ours does not resemble theirs at all. For started ours is longer. It was requested so much, that a moratorium was needed, as the qaptaQ risked becoming those Klingon wedding guys. Sadly the other one that gets used is the Klingon Memorial service. I guess this is what happens as fans get older. The others are seldom requested anymore. Part of this is that much of Klingon fandom no longer role plays like it once did.

As Trek canon has changed, there is of course, the chance that things backed up by canon, no longer hold that status, but there is always a historical source for what we create. The most notable effect this has had on the club is with the gods. When the qaptaQ first started out there was a list made of Klingon gods. At that time we had only seen the Fek'lhr, and the jury is still out on his status. Kang of course was quoted as saying the Klingons have no devil. FASA said Klingons could not even conceive of a higher being than themselves. So the story was created of the qaptaQ vanquishing the gods. Years later Worf would be quoted as saying that the Klingons killed their gods. Yet Klingons revere Emperor Kahless as a near godlike being. So there is much still much confusion.

An independent club based on a non military concept but trying to exist within a warrior culture is an uphill battle. One factor that came out of the environment and time the qaptaQ was started was that initially there were no dual memberships allowed. This was at best problematic, and lead to a military division being briefly started and later dying out. Klingon civilian life is not the subject of many reference works, but it is remarkably better than it once was. Many of the role play concepts developed for the qaptaQ do not conflict with military service but are not an easy fit with other clubs. As with any intellectual property, there is a real life need to maintain control, and thus the club has never tried to spread out from its regional origins. The region, however, is no longer the hotbed of fandom it once was. This is of course does not make for a very komerex existence.

The internet has changed the face of fandom, and especially Klingon fandom. Clubs that were once local or regional are now international. The qaptaQ was one of the first clubs with a solid web presence. The original website, hosted on the now defunct geocities, attracted more international interest than it did in this country. There were interested people in Japan, Germany and even a bootleg website that translated the clubs site into Italian. There was even some plagiarism from the site as a less than honorable individual claimed authorship of our works. That matter was settled honorably with the leadership of another club. The new site bigger, and somewhat flashier, and has attracted far less interest. The qaptaQ maintains an active web presence on various forums and networking sites, which is what has lead to this blog. Such offers the best of local, regional and even international exposure.