Getting there is half the fun

I'm working on a "pilot" adventure whose goal is to introduce the players to their ship and their new characters. It's currently era-neutral as I work out the kinks in the setting.

What I'm picturing is the crew is assigned to a far-off frontier region. One the Federation has actually lost contact with, since a subspace relay beacon has stopped working.

On their way the crew is asked to take a look at the relay beacon and repair it. The crew arrives to find the beacon slightly damaged and they make repairs. However, it turns out to be a trap set by someone (new aliens? familiar adversaries) and fixing the beacon so that it transmits again will activate a cloaked minefield - with a mine damaging their ship pretty badly - such that they get boarded and must protect their ship. (If the characters look for cloaked ships then they might find the mines early, but I'm picturing a scan like that also activating the minefield, causing similar damage to their ship).

Since the purpose of the adventure is to familiarize the players with their characters and ship, I see some crawling through Jefferies tubes, getting emergency power up, rescuing crew members, coordinating repairs, and fighting boarders.

So what I'm looking for is a Trek-like hook to make it more than a "repel borders" space opera adventure.

There are two routes I'm thinking...
1) The boarders are not as hostile as they appear to be - they might be frightened by the Federation after a bad experience with the Romulans - or perhaps they are defending their territory.

2) Something else makes the adventure more interesting... A second set of aliens, a natural event, something unexpected set off by the mine, etc.

A Tholian "Territorial Annex" could be almost anywhere and unexpected. In my game Tholians are kinda Lovecraftian and the basis for their space travel is the use of relationships between angles ala "Dreams in the Witch House." From that perspective occupying a specific territory could be for anything from building a new hyperspatial bypass to opening a new dimension for colonization.

A Gorn faction that doesn't recognize the deal made on Cestus III is always fun. What does anyone really know about Gorn politics anyway? The Gorns that the Feds are touchy-feely with could just be the ones on that border of Federation space. Then again maybe this lot is just out for territorial aggrandizement.

Lately I've been toying with a lost colony of exiled smooth-forehead commie Klingons. Lost TOS-era Klingons have carved out a small empire in some galactic backwater. Perhaps their agents destroyed the beacon (or inadcertently destroyed it during their subjugation of a star system, not realizing that it was Federation. Now, your Klingon exchange officer has to come up with an explanation for his smooth faced kin.

You want new aliens. Aliens who want your ship -- mostly intact. To that end they don't use an explosive mine. Either the beacon itself is rigged or a "mine" is set to emit some kind of _insert technobabble_ burst that knocks out all ship's sensors. With sensors out, they won't be able to spot the problem. Meanwhile the aliens don't board, they just attach another device to the hull that starts bombarding the interior with deadly radiation, then back off. Until they all have strong enough symptom, the crew wouldn't know this since their internal sensors are out too. Even then, what're they going to do about it? The aliens' plan is simple -- disable sensors, kill occupants, clean ship, take ship.

Have more thoughts on this if it appeals.

How long has the region been isolated, and is it only colonies?

Always a backwater ignored by the Federation, they realized that they had to do something to help themselves. They also saw the Feds most likely wouldn't like that. Disabling the beacon gave them privacy, and setting up the minefield meant it wasn't going to be fixed anytime soon.

Safe in the thought that they could go their own way without the Federation knowing, and therefore not able to do anything about it, the colonies set to work.

The Crew now enters a region ranging from apathetic to outright hostile after decades, or possibly centuries, of being ignored.

It's only a rough idea for me at this stage, though it is beginning to crystalize. I've viewed the area as always something of a frontier, but ignored because of the Dominion War - indeed one of the ideas I'm coming up with is it being a cluster of colonies in the Gamma Quadrant.

From the implication in DS9 all of the colonies of any sort were bombarded to rubble by the jem Hadar. Even non Federation interests such as the Bajorans "They fought well for a religious people".

Of course that doesn't mean that the Bajorans didn't just hang on there like they always did during the occupation.

if you wanted to throw in a bit of extra hostility - there could also be a remnant of the Maquis still hiding out there. It would most likelly be in a set of systems coreward of the Idran end of the Wormhole, as far away as the Dominion as possible ! :D

Well, you could put the beacon in the middle of Federation space and use some minor race like the Orions(those green skinned pirates...) or the Kzintis, which could have put the minefield by themselves, or maybe the disabled beacon has drifted though space and appeared in the middle of a very old and forgotten minefield(maybe the Tkon Empira had cloking mines, or maybe the minefield is disguised as an asteoid field, like in that TNG espisode). When the repaired beacon makes a mine explode, maybe one of the nacelles disintegrates and the player's ship has to launch an SOS, and The Bad Guys(Tm) are the firsts to answer the call. I envision this scene as the battle beetween the millenium falcon and the tie fighters...lots of tiny ships trying to accoplate with the player's ship while each player controls a phaser emitter, which is enough to cripple a single enemy ship... all this while the medical and engineering characters rush for saving the ship's crew from radiation from the destroyed nacelle or trying desperately that power doesn't run out until a friendly vessel comes or...
Now this is a real brainstorming :rolleyes:

Actually played this adventure last Wednesday. In brief the characters were ambushed and boarded by the Breen after getting caught in a minefield.

The Breen were desperate to get power from the characters' ship. It turned out the Breen were suffering from power losses. As the adventure progressed, the characters learned the Breen had stolen eggs from a Stellar Phoenix, which dwelled in the corona of a star. One had hatched and the baby Phoenix had attached itself to the Breen warp core to get power.

In the climax, mama-Phoenix showed up to destroy the Breen ship. Mama-Phoenix got hurt by the minefield. However, our heroes counter-boarded the Breen vessel and freed the baby Phoenix and the eggs (enjoying the fun of ejecting the Breen warp core).. Mama was happy with this. Characters got to rack up a first contact with a new life form. The Breen surrendered and revealed the locations of the mines.

It is worth noting that this was our first Star Trek game since 2002. :D

2002??? that's a very long time...:(

Yeah, it felt great to be playing Trek again. Really needed the break, but my creative energies are definitely flowing again. :)