Juliet Jurot

by Lucas Thompson, Designer

16th June 2025

A big part of the goal of expanding Telepathy as a real skill in Second Edition is expanding its availability. I spent hours scouring Memory Alpha for references to telepathic (and telepathic-adjacent) abilities in Star Trek. Unfortunately, many of the telepathic aliens in Star Trek are monsters of the week. That's great for dilemmas, missions, and Non-Aligned personnel, but we also need affiliated personnel if we want Telepathy to be more than a gimmick skill.

So it was off to Memory Beta, the non-canon Trek wiki! There's some good stuff out there. Apparently, in Star Trek Online, the Klingon Empire conquers the Letheans - and there are multiple Letheans that are officers on Klingon ships. That's a rich mine of Telepathy personnel that I'm hoping we can delve into in the future, but not ideal for a one-off non-unique Klingon-affiliation Telepathy personnel.

That's when I encountered Juliet Jurot. She's a character from the Elite Force videogame, and they managed to cram an interesting backstory for her into a first-person shooter. She's a Betazoid Hazard Team member (a tactical assault team), which is an interesting contrast in itself. She's also the team medic, and was trained in medicine at the Vulcan Science Academy. Cool! She even sort of appears on-screen in Voyager in Counterpoint - but only from behind.

She checked all the boxes - interesting character, technically canon (with a lot of extra-canon background information), and would qualify as a non-unique Telepathy for a faction that doesn't have one. Well, okay, there was one box she didn't check: good image options. The shot from behind wouldn't do and, after watching hours of an Elite Force playthrough, the polygons that make up her model in that game are intense. I mean, I'm kind of fond of the polygons, but after consulting friends, family, and the entire department of Second Edition, it seems like I'm the only one.

What to do? One alternative I came up with was taking a background extra from Voyager, and photoshopping her appearance to look more like Juliet. I'm pretty happy with what I came up with, but several people pointed out that it's ethically questionable to take an image of an actual human actor and make it look like she played a role that she didn't actually play.

Fortunately, AI Art provided a third (fourth?) option: to take a screenshot from the game, and flesh that shot out into a more Human Betazoid-looking character. It took a little editing after Leonardo AI (thanks to Johnny Holeva, First Edition Art Director for the recommendation) did its thing, but I'm happy with the result (and so is the rest of the department of Second Edition.

That's not to say that AI Art is without ethical considerations. I do think it's important that using AI Art for this purpose is not taking a paying art job from an actual artist. No one is getting paid to make these cards, and we're also not making a profit from the use of this image of Juliet Jurot (or in general). It does still feel a little different to use AI Art to upgrade an image of a personnel than to make an image of a planet, but I think it's worth it to bring this interesting character to life in Second Edition.

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