Star Trek: Andromeda

I've seen this sort of idea posted before, but I figured I'd reintroduce it.

AslanC and I were chatting about my campaign in the making. One of the ideas we talked about a lot, but which I don't think I'll be using (sorry Aslan ;) - though it is a great idea, hence this posting) is an Andromeda-Trek.

I'm not sure which of these are my idea and which are from Aslan - this is just the seed of an idea.

The premise is the Federation has fallen. The Romulans have uncovered the little con-job Sisko pulled on them in "In the Pale Moonlight". I've always been a big believer that Trek shows us those who compromise their ideals always pay a price.

The Federation winds up falling to the massive Romulan assault. The Vulcans and Romulans reunify. However, they can't stay a cohesive empire and shatter into lots of smaller houses - like the Nietzscheans.

The Klingons become a bit like the Magog - think Marauder/holy dudes. One idea I have is they behave a lot like Klingons of the Enterprise-era - more like Vikings than conquerers.

The Ferengi would love life in this period.

So it's something like 300 years in the future. The glorious Galaxy, Sovereign, etc. type starships are a distant memory.

Save for one, some big ship (maybe even Enterprise) has somehow survived and is now in this dark future. The PCs are the crew of this ship - possibly a few of the crew are from the 24th century. Maybe some want to bring back the Federation, others want to carve out an empire. The first adventure can be a battle for control of the starship. Other PCs can be from this era - perhaps part of a salvage team.

One key is that despite the power of the starship, they have but a skeleton crew - perhaps just the PCs. Automation is fine for everything working fine, but it quickly becomes a nightmare. Who do you trust on your ship? :D

Exploration is still a key in this type of game - what has happened to the galaxy? But so is the ideal of Star Trek - somehow showing how knowledge and peace are the answer. Bringing back the ideal of the Federation. Somehow bringing back the Federation, showing that it was more than a dream.

(As for why I'm not going with this, mainly because it is very divergent - my new game, if it all goes well, will be deliberately designed to be something of a "back to basics" Star Trek campaign - get away from the Dominion War, the Borg, etc. and back to the core of Star Trek. But I personally think it is an awesome idea and wanted to share it.)

I like. :)

One question that had me curious. Why not use the Magog as the Borg? Or maybe the Calderians as the Borg?

I wanna be assimiliated! :D

I like it. I'm just putting the ideas down as they come into my head. So they may not be completely coherent.

Are you thinking of a time-lost crew. Some how frozen in cryo-freeze until they are accidentally revived.

I would use the Enterprise as the PC ship. Firstly, to those who remember the Federation, the Enterprise is the key vessel in the history, for many it had become the symbol of the Federation. To the Klingons and Romulans it is the bogeyman, the one ship that had thwarted their plans and ambitions for two centuries, capturing and using it would be a strategic coup.

I just had a thought, could the only survivor of the 24th century be Data. He can sub for both Dylan Hunt and Rommie...maybe he downloaded his entire memory into the Enterprise's computer core and is the ship's persona.

Interesting ideas. Not really sure that a Trek game without the Federation could work, but I'd be interested to hear how it goes, if you do run it.

What's your definition of the "core of Star Trek?"

(Ghosty, you might want to edit your post to remove or reword that Nemesis spoiler. I don't think everyone here knows what's going to happen.) :)

I started something like this a while back. Attempting to stop a Borg battle fleet by igniting a nebula, a Sovereign-Class starship inadvertantly opens a temporal rift to the future - three hundred years more or less. There, the crew learn that they failed - the Borg assimilated Earth and the Federation splintered. The Borg couldn't consolidate their gains though - Species 8472 attacked en mass. When they were gone, the Borg were no more (except for a remnant I intended to surprise the players with...), but the Alpha Quadrant was a mess. Ex-Fed members had become isolationist apart from limited trading. Some had starships, but none larger than an Intrepid-Class ship - the Andorians were the toughest militarily, but had regressed to a hostile state. The easiest options for finding allies were the more pacificist Fed members - the Betazoids and the Vulcans (although the Isolationist Movement had really made strides on Vulcan in the intervening 300 years...).

The problem here is that Trek has much simpler time travel than Andromeda (unless your name happens to be Trance Gemini...), so the players might just slingshot back and prevent the Fall...

I think using the BORG so casually is what made them weak in Voyager.

Imnagine not even seeing a BORG until half a season or a full season into this type of campaign?

My usggestion for how they get trapped was something like a "double layered static warp shell". IE: Something that removes the ship from being in the normal time frame, but maybe hides it as well?

The big debate is whether or not decendants of the original crew have been running around between the two layers for 300 years?

I had planned on doing this to my Lexington crew, but the best laid plans and all that.

The point is they have to pass the 300 years somehow, so that they cannot just go back in time and fix everything without breaking the Temporal Prime Directive.

In fact you can tie it all togther. They try, 29th Century guys stop them and warn them that if they undo it, then they destory the future. Their efforts are what rebuilds the Federation into what it will become.

Doesn't say they will succeed, just that their actions have impact.

Another thing is that can the PCs actually fix "history".

We're not talking about a single event leading to the fall. Its not like Yesterday's Enterprise where one event had severe reprecussions. THe Fall must come about by a combination of events which push the tide of history so much so that changing one event would not change anything. Supervening events would just overtake whatever changes the PCs make.

Sure and they would also have to go back and either prevent the Romulans from learning about the decption or prevent the decption.

One might forec them to comit murder.

The other might force them to allow the Dominion War to play out differently.

Rough choices.

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Originally posted by AslanC
Sure and they would also have to go back and either prevent the Romulans from learning about the decption or prevent the decption.

One might forec them to comit murder.

The other might force them to allow the Dominion War to play out differently.

Rough choices.

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Murder who. Probably a personage so important that it would provoke the Romulans anyway.

If they prevent the events of Pale Moonlight, then the Romulans would have stayed out of the Dominion War or worst get infiltrated by the Dominion and enter the war as a Dominion ally. Without the Romulans its likely that the Fed-Klingon alliance would not win the Dominion War and the fall of the Federation would result...

You also have to remember the concept of the inevitability of history. Chances are no time traveller could prevent the Fall of the Roman Empire or stop the Vietnam War from happening because the tidal force of history would prevent it.

The usual Trek time travel episode usually revolves around changing a mistake or an aberration in history. If the Fall of the Federation was inevitable given the historical situation, then it would come. Change one thing and another thing takes its place.

eg. You could kill Adolf Hitler at birth but historical conditions would suggest another power hungry dictator would have seized power in Germany in the 1930s which would lead to war. A somewhat different WWII but essentially the pressures of history created by the Treaty of Versailles and the American refusal to join the League of Nations would push the world to war. The personalities might change, but it would come.

Which is all great deterants to them simply avoiding your adventure and trying to go back in time and prevent this new present they are in :)

The idea is to not have them jsut slingshot aorund the nearest sun and change the past ;)

BTW, how have ou been, missed you around here :)

Okay we're thinking on the same wavelength. Par for the course I'll say.

Truth is the topics for discussion have been extremely boring as of late so I've not posted very much.

I like the idea of Data showing up. It also opens up possibilities for Q & Guinan. Maybe a Q-like being in league with the Romulans? Or is that too much like the original?

I'm another that thinks this is a neat idea.

As far as stopping your PCs going back in time and 'fixing' things, just ensure that the events that lead to the fall are so complex and there are so many differrent events that all tie together that it just isn't possible.

Plus, given the lack of hard data on exactly what happened, it would be impossible to determine what they'd need to do to fix things anyway. Think Annorax in Year of Hell :D

Basically, they have no possible way of fixing it via time travel. Too much has happened, and too much is unknown.

Q will show up anywhere. He's an eternal menace.

I'd not use Guinan simply because I doubt El-Aurians would live that long...but then again, who knows. Perhaps a descendant...

Well, considering that Guinan's father is almost 700 years old (TNG, Rascals), we know they live quite a while. Guinan herself is well over 500 years old (she left home to observe Earth when she was young enough that her father worried about her, way back in the early 1890's). She has not visibly aged in all that time, and she when she mentioned her father's age she seemed to be implying that it wasn't a particularly advanced age for an El-Aurian. On the other hand, she may just have good genes, since Dr. Soran was somewhat younger than her but looked older (by Human standards, anyway).

Soran led something of a rougher life, though, and that might have contributed to his more advanced age appearance.

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Originally posted by AslanC
Which is all great deterants to them simply avoiding your adventure and trying to go back in time and prevent this new present they are in :)

The idea is to not have them jsut slingshot aorund the nearest sun and change the past ;)

BTW, how have ou been, missed you around here :)

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Remember that Andormeda episode where the crew thought they could stop the Battle of the Horsehead Nebula and save the Systems Commonwealth only to find that their intervention was required only to ensure that "history" as they knew it came true. That's how I'll resolve any attempts by PCs to monkey around with time travel.

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Originally posted by ghosty
Remember that Andormeda episode where the crew thought they could stop the Battle of the Horsehead Nebula and save the Systems Commonwealth only to find that their intervention was required only to ensure that "history" as they knew it came true. That's how I'll resolve any attempts by PCs to monkey around with time travel.

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You can have a lot of fun with plots like these - I ran a Champions game once where the players went back in time to stop something happening only to find that their actions caused it. You do need to be able to think on your feet when running this kind of ep though.

My thoughts on the whole thread (a wonderful idea similar to one I'd thought about myself :)):

The crew should be 50% 24th century, 50% 27th (or whatever). This has two effects - the first is culture clash - lots of nice Starfleet morals vs modern pragmatism arguments. The second is a built-in anti-time travel clause - half the PC's will cease to exist if history is changed - and should be very aware of it.

If you are still worried about time travel, you could ensure that there are plenty of reasons why the "slingshot effect" was abandoned (perhaps something similar to the Warp 5 limitation). Other temporal phenomena are hard to predict. Of course, the Guardian of Forever is a possibility - but where is it? Did Starfleet keep its location a secret? Perhaps it's gone missing (hint: plot hook :)).

Borg = Magog - this was the one thing I couldn't figure out from the Trek-Andromeda connection - thanks! So why hasn't the Alpha Quadrant been assimilated? My thought is that 'Pale Moonlight' took place after the Voyager had been lost and so the sequence runs roughly:

Voyager lost.

Sisko and Garak try to trick Romulans into war.

Romulans find out and refuse to help.

Dominion War fought to a standstill - Sisko/Prophets intervention closes wormhole, but Federation government collapses under economic strain.

Loss of PC ship.

Voyager thwarts Borg expansion into the Alpha Quadrant, but is lost in process. Borg take centuries to rebuild transwarp network.

300 years later - the PCs are back and the Borg are about to arrive. (Borg worldship anyone?)

Of course then you have to have a reformed Borg priest as a player character :p

I agree the Borg (or the 8472s) shouldn't be used casually. Unfortunately, I couldn't think of something that could seriously collapse all of the major powers in the area at once (you need to take out the Romulans and Klingons too, or at least fracture them so they're not a cohesive force - apart from the Magog, the most powerful group on Andromeda are the Neitszcheans, and they're a pretty fractious bunch).

Actually, I did have an idea for a virus that infects highly advanced tech. It destroys all the big, advanced ships, leaving the races to rebuild with TOS-era technology. Into this comes the super-duper Fed ship from the past (the virus has burnt itself out so it's not a threat to the PC's ship)...

Another thought, based on TOS. The Andromedans. At the time of the TOS episode, it took them 500 years to reach the Milky Way. That means 600 (more or less) years of technical advancement by a malevolent race in the Andromeda galaxy. They may be able to build artificial wormholes now. They could show up, and start fighting everybody, and winning. At least it could work as a Borg/Magog substitute. :)

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Originally posted by Capt.Hunter
Actually, I did have an idea for a virus that infects highly advanced tech. It destroys all the big, advanced ships, leaving the races to rebuild with TOS-era technology. Into this comes the super-duper Fed ship from the past (the virus has burnt itself out so it's not a threat to the PC's ship)...

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Sort of like Traveller: New Era, with the AI Virus.

Why are we trying to shoe horn the Trekverse into the Andromedaverse. I think the whole point is to strand a small crew of Starfleet officers in a dark future where their whole belief structure is completely destroyed. There's no need to put every element of Andromeda into it.

If you do that, then you might as well play a RPG in the Andromedaverse and not waste time trying to find parallels between the races in Andromeda and Trek.

I agree that the goal for such a game would be to use Andromeda as an inspiration, much like I've used elements of Call of Cthulhu for some of my Trek games.

There does reach a certain point where you are no longer being influenced but have rather transplanted. In which cases, it is probably better to use the original genre.

Perhaps nemesis starts a chain of events that lead to the demise of the Federation.
Lets say after (what is rumored to happen in Nemesis) the Klingons take advantage of the Romulans situation and attack and conquer them, the Federation offers humanitarian aid to the Romulans, The Klingons take offense to this (like in "all good things..." which eventually leads to conflict between the Federation and the Klingons which more or less wipe each other out...

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