Sub-plots

Okay, here's the deal. I've been GMing a lot of Spycraft & D&D. Normally I have loads of adventure ideas but my group are pressing me to play Star Trek (odd as only one's a Trekkie).
I need a couple of sub-plots for my campaign as I have a main idea for the pilot but can't think of much to go alongside.
Here's the brief:
Federation/Romulan colony in the neutral zone made during the peace treaty between the two and owned originally by the Ktarians. There are huge cubic incan temple structures the colony is built on top of and a huge forest at the bottom. Giant crystalline mantis-like creatures have turned the captain into the trigger for a massive interstellar weapon that can destroy things with a thought.
I'm running this as two campaigns, Upper & Lower decks. The Upper decks pilot was in Icon and was the last game we played with it.
We started Coda using the Lower Decks as a pilot as the group loved my cadet campaign with a real "saved by the bell in space and without the crap writing" feeling.
My current plotline is that a rogue Q has decided she needs a holiday and the one place even the omnipotent don't want to look is the group's colony. She wants to have fun with the group but if the captain or anyone else finds out then she'll teleport the colony to the borg homeworld or something. Alas, she also wants a laugh and the group are covering up everything she's doing to the colony so their uptight Zaldan commander won't tear them off a strip.
So that's the current plot, but does anyone else have ideas for sub-plots or are there any places I can look for little adventures/plot hooks for lower decks characters based on stations?
Thanks for any help.
Charlie E/N

Sub-plots are usually just side stories...usually focusing on the individual character's personal lives or relate to a pet peeve or sthick (sp?).

One of the PCs is a self taught "expert" on espionage and he suspects that the local Romulan merchant is a Tal'Shiar agent...well its mostly a red herring (or so the other PCs believe)...so the PC spends most of his free time trying to prove the merchant is a spy (sort of like Bashir and Garak in the early seasons of DS9).


Another idea is a love triangle between two PCs. That is usually worth a few laughs...two PCs going after the same guy/girl...trying to out compete each other for affection...fun.

Vices are usually also a good sub-plot. One of the PCs becomes addicted to Dom-Jot or Dabo and is loosing badly and refuses to admit he's got a problem...

Quote:

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Giant crystalline mantis-like creatures have turned the captain into the trigger for a massive interstellar weapon that can destroy things with a thought

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I assume your PC's are going to try tos stop these things, so give one of them a phobia of insects, and have him/her try to hide it but become a gibbering wreck at the first sight of them. A fear-frozen officer in the middle of a crucial mission would be kind of interesting.

They've already seen the mantis-things once. When they went to report to the captain they saw her speaking to them in her office, the mantises (?) saw them and in a blink vanished.

Sounds like good ideas so far, I also forgot a couple of celebrity appearances: the Excalibur dropped the ensigns off and the ambassador is a clone of Captain Pike when he was healthy (I was thinking of having Pike & Calhoun playing golf off the top of one of the temple tops.

Oh, by the way, one of my group is good at 3d artwork and is planning on using my map of the colony to build a 3d model of it. Once he's done I'll try and submit it to the site. It'd make an interesting-looking colony for people to visit.

Charlie E/N