Hello there, this is my first post
I am building a ST campaign and I need some help. Lemme tell you a little about it first so everyone is singing from the same songsheet:
I call it "Star Trek, the Dark Age", it's non-canon as all get out and here's how it goes:
Quantum Slipstream drive was perfected and widespread by the middle of the 25th Century and everyone loved it so. Unfortunately there was a problem.
There is an incredibly powerful race that lives outside our dimension that makes the anti-borg species look like pouty adolescents. For reasons I have not yet determined they DESPISE QS drives. Their widespread use causes a terrible pogrom to occur as these angry, hateful beings come walking into our reality and shredding everything they can. I mean they rip the ST universe apart as you and I know it. Nobody can stand up to them. Even portions of the Q continuum try to help and they can't get anywhere because while these beings aren't TECHNICALLY more powerful than the Q (they can't snap their fingers and re-arrange reality) they are also more or less immune to that ability (the best way to describe it is to liken it to the Yu-uzhan Vong's ability to ignore the force in the Star Wars universe). So disturbed are the Q by this race's ability to shrug them off that they leave for somewhere else to do some very heavy thinking - sealing the known galaxy's fate.
The Federation, the Klingon Empire, the Breen, the Gorn, what's left of the Cardassian Union, the Tholian Empire, the Dominion, the Ferengi alliance - hell even the Borg are rent asunder as cohesive political/influential entities. Some races are destroyed altogether. The galaxy's average tech level is ratcheted back between 300 and 500 years.
Now fast-forward 300 years.
Off in the far corner of the Alpha Quadrant, near the edge of what was once Federation Space, closer to the galactic core, is a little planet a lot like Earth but not quite as big. They were tossed backwards when the pogrom happened and have lost touch with much of their history. Indeed they currently have no knowledge that they were once a Federation colony - or that there ever was a Federation for that matter. Their technology has only managed to come back to early 1970's levels, but (after having survived a world war which would have occurred around the late 1950's if we used our own timeline here on earth) one nation is trying very hard to get into space with their own "NASA" program. In fact they already got into space and now have their eyes on the moon.
The player characters begin as astronauts in that rather large (by comparison to Apollo 11) capsule (I have five players) atop that huge chemical rocket.
They idea is that they are going for that first moon-shot. But, instead of Apollo 11, they are gonna live the nightmare of Apollo 13. Halfway to the moon, a catastrophe occurs and it's one of those ones where everyone tries everything and then they look at each other, shake each other's hands and say "It was a pleasure and an honor man."
But, fate isn't done with these dudes yet.
Just as they are about to finish those last strains of Major Tom, they dematerialize one by one...and rematerialize elsewhere...
You see, way back in the day, Starfleet thought it would be a great idea, rather than decomission the U.S.S. Noble (a starship of the same class as the Enterprise seen in the new JJ Abrams Star Trek rebootage) and stick it in a scrapyard, they would instead plop it down in the LaGrange point between the planet and its moon and turn it into a museum. The museum was to be curated by a wise El-Aurian. And there is an El-Aurian there. He may even have been wise at one point. But he got front row seats to the apocalypse and has spent the last 300 years dealing with a combination of post traumatic stress disorder and horrible loneliness. It was he who beamed them out of the capsule. The PLAN was to beam them back to their world. He was just beaming them to the ship as an interrim step. Unfortunately the transporter farted and died before he could complete the transfer...
And now the PC's and their little world have a working (albeit obsolete) starship. One that their world can do what it likes with. Well, the vote is to study the thing for five years and then launch it (with the PC's at the helm of course) to see what's out there. Brand new everything, free form everything. I think it's gonna rock. I can't wait to show them the Klingon warrior-monks who emerged to try and keep the peace 150 years earlier, or the Vulcans who cast the teachings of Surak aside, called themselves an Imperium and now seek to conquer all of known space - after first all but wiping out the Klingon monks. I can't wait to figure out what I'll do with all the ST conventions, how I'll twist and up-end them. But this is not my problem.
See, the CODA ST game sort of divides the world into two types of people - Starship Crew and everyone else. This is kind of problematic and I need your advice on what to do.
See, the PC's are all starting as astronauts, since there is no "astronaut" profession, the nearest two that will fit are Soldier (because some Nasa astronauts in the early days came from the US Navy and Air Force) and Scientist (most Nasa astronauts these days are lettered scientists - many are Phd's).
Problem is, if I leave them in those classes, will they be competent enough to run a Starship? I don't want them to be too competent to begin with. Five years of study or no, this is all very new to them. But eventually it makes sense that they should be able to do "starship stuff". SO what do I do? I am tempted to just run the moon-shot free-form and then have them make Starship Officers except that Scientist and Soldier are competent professions.
I'm really stuck here. What would you do?
Thanks for your help guys.
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Originally Posted by Tomcat
