Trying for crazy-awesome, but did I just manage crazy?
Okay, got a really strange idea for a campaign. Strange enough to make me want to actually learn to narrate a Star Trek game to begin with. Let me know what you think.
The plot revolves around pulling the rug out from under the players pretty early. Probably by the second or third session. Start by having them make characters in Next Gen era. A new crew on their maiden exploratory voyage.
Things start out more or less how you'd expect for a Trek adventure. Encounter a new life form and have some conflict with it, but the "main" plot is actually a red herring. The ship seems beset with strange temporal and spacial anomalies. Events happening out of order, doors lead to the wrong decks, stuff like that. Stranger still is that a handful of junior officers seem to know a lot more about what's going on then they'll say. In fact there seems to be a conspiracy going on.
Things escalate until the junior officers start trying to set off a series of explosions in the ship, in Morse code pattern. This further degrades the situation. It becomes more and more obvious that the events going on aren't actually real. They're on a holodeck. But the player characters aren't in a malfunctioning holodeck program, they are a malfunctioning holodeck program. The junior officers are the real people trapped inside with them. The Morse code explosion and other strange things they've been doing are attempts to communicate with people on the outside.
The actual year is 2486 (about seventy years after the events of the MMO), and they're part of a docu-drama on a Klingon ship. Mobile emitters exist, allowing them to get off the holodeck. How they go about this is still being decided, but holodeck malfunctions have been known to hack a starship pretty extensively.
The Borg invasion is over, but repelling them weakened the Federation enough that the Klingon empire took over. The Empire certainly isn't going to want to let a couple of renegade holograms run around, especially ones that think they're Federation officers.
Going through historical records they'll be able to find out what happened to "themselves" in their future/the past. They went on to become one of the legendary crews of the federation (IE the kind that get a TV show following them), hence even the Klingons having an interest in their "early adventures". They could learn about the things they would later accomplish. One went on to become an admiral, one an ambassador, one turned traitor and became one of the most notorious turncoats of the 24th century...
The players will be able to 'update' themselves to understand modern technology. For example their medicine skill remains the same, but now they know how to incorporate 25th century medical equipment.
From there on out the campaign's main focus is them trying to evade capture and possibly rescuing/reviving the Federation.
So anyway... That's more or less what I have planned so far. If I do decide to run this game it'll still be quite some time before it actually happens. I have to do a couple of small things like actually learn the system and such.
