Nanites

[Doug Taylor]

If some of you venture over to the Narrator's Ready Room, you may have seen some of this post before, as I posted there originally to get ideas for using nanites. In fact, one person there made the excellent idea to check an episode of the show, and based on that I found TNG 3x01 "Evolution", which should help.

For my next adventure, when a little stuck for ideas, I reviewed some recent notes and found that one of my players (our devious and clever Cardassian Ops Officer) has been studying the use of nanites, as a means of defense against the Borg (who we recently ran into). Here's what he wrote:

Veroz is going to start working on a set of Anti-Borg Nanites. He will also look at other applications for Nanites.
1. Ship communication and manipulation of systems away from a station
2. Enhanced mental abilities
3. Healing
4. Weapon use locked to genetic pattern of owner
5. Systems invasion, electronic lock picking, computer hacking, image manipulation of security systems
6. Systems self repair
7. Protection from other nanite invasion or invasion of microscopic entities
8. Note this will be a ongoing side project not taking up all of his free time. He will start a computer search on existing information

As the saying goes "sometimes this stuff just writes itself!"

I think I'll do a story about these nanites getting out of control, which should give a serious challenge to the group.

Feel free to pitch ideas and input on what kind of nastiness these nanites could inflict upon our ship and her crew!

Also (and the reason I'm reposting this here in the CODA section), I'd love to have some ideas for HOW to make things challenging. What skill tests (besides System Operation, which I imagine will be severely disabled or completely inoperable) should the crew have to make? How about penalties or negative modifiers?

[Dan Gurden]

TBH I am rather concerned with;
2. Enhanced mental abilities
3. Healing
4. Weapon use locked to genetic pattern of owner

These are going to be body invasive nanites... And if you want to get really nasty THOSE are the ones that will very quickly give you a zombie horror movie. I suspect that these would require some medical team input and thus more chance that someon will stop along the way and point out that these 3 are all standard Borg functions and border on Genetic Manipulation too...

Of course as a long-time Cyberpunk player, heres a nice one that I used. The nanites get out of control due to a vague perameter (usually something along the lines of 'make things netter'... Get him to write out the nanite directives and see where he goes and what leeway that gives you to creattively misinterpret, either that of have section 31 hack in and add a hidden directive or something)... Once they get out of control and start producing their own nanites under their own programming nanites Version 2.0 is going to be next to impossible to stop, thus you get a ticking clock to work against.

Body invasive nanites can trigger mutations at best or turn the infected into their agents once things get really dicey and would be nigh on unstoppable without a large EM pulse (or equivalent spatial phenomenom)

[The Tatterdemalion King]

TBH I am rather concerned with;
2. Enhanced mental abilities

Obviously prohibited by anti-engineering laws. How do you think the engineering is accomplished? Whether the recombinant virus is silicate or carbon based shouldn't matter.

3. Healing

I'm at a loss to exactly that would entail. Some sort of nanite skin resealer?

4. Weapon use locked to genetic pattern of owner

So your players are planning... genocide?

[Doug Taylor]

Great ideas, Dan! I will most definitely be using some of them!

TK, as to what it indended with those things, my guess would be:

- For healing, probably something along the lines of internal regeneration, as the nanites heal damaged cells and such. Probably similar to what we saw with the Borg nanoprobes.

- For the weapon lock item, I'm guessing he meant similar to what's been devised for modern usage, only using nanites to recognize a particular biological user rather than fingerprints. So if somebody else picked up one's weapon, they wouldn't be able to use it (the weapon would 'recognize' only the owner/user).

Thanks again for the feedback!

[The Tatterdemalion King]

- For healing, probably something along the lines of internal regeneration, as the nanites heal damaged cells and such. Probably similar to what we saw with the Borg nanoprobes.

So would they be replacing the function of the damaged cells? I mean, it's easy to handwave it as a technobabble potion of healing, but if they're trying to deliberately improve on the already-superscientific Federation tech, they should probably be called upon to explain what they want to do better than, say, accelerated regrowth of damaged body tissue.

- For the weapon lock item, I'm guessing he meant similar to what's been devised for modern usage, only using nanites to recognize a particular biological user rather than fingerprints. So if somebody else picked up one's weapon, they wouldn't be able to use it (the weapon would 'recognize' only the owner/user).

The Tech Manual says you can lock phasers to the user's distinct piezoelectric signature already.

[C5]

Healing nanites.... do you watch Doctor Who ?
There is a very creepy (if completely over the top) example of healing nanites gone wrong in that series. Not very Trekish (unless you are aiming for a zombie feel, as Dan said above),, but the main idea (basically the nanites had not quite understood what was human DNA or not and how they were supposed to fix people) could be kept as a non-villainous example of nanites gone wrong.

[Dan Gurden]

Healing nanites.... do you watch Doctor Who ?
There is a very creepy (if completely over the top) example of healing nanites gone wrong in that series. Not very Trekish (unless you are aiming for a zombie feel, as Dan said above),, but the main idea (basically the nanites had not quite understood what was human DNA or not and how they were supposed to fix people) could be kept as a non-villainous example of nanites gone wrong.

Are you my mummy?

(Good call!)

[Doug Taylor]

Great stuff! For now I'm sending a few inoccuous questions the player's way via email. Heh, heh, heh...

[Doug Taylor]

Here's what the player replied via email.

First, my email to him:

So regarding the nanites, Veroz is attempting to do an awful lot with them. A few questions:

1) Is he running any of it by an other "experts", such as from Medical or Engineering?

2) Where exactly is he doing most of his experimentation or lab work?

3) How specifically is he attempting to do anything with them in regards to mental abilities?

And his responses:

1) Yes he is utilizing the experts from both Medical and Engineering. He will bounce ideas off folks from other disciplines to get out of the Box thoughts.

2) He will use the Holideck for a lot and create simulations to safely research the information before taking it to the experts and borrowing lab/engineering space.

3) He is curious how they enable enhanced communication amongst the Borg. He would look to see if it is possible to enhance his own abilities then have the nanites filter out of his system

Over the last day or so I've been mulling the use of a Bajoran crewmember (Veroz is a Cardassian, after all) who might want to end his career early, perhaps by activating some of the non-functional nanites.

I don't know if anybody has ever introduced the Flaw of "Enemy" (or "Rival") this way (without the player selecting it), but it seems to me - if I do this - I should offer the player the ability to take a free Edge (and add this Flaw).

[Doug Taylor]

I cross-posted this whole thread over on the CODA Trek Yahoo Group email list. One of the regulars there whipped up an amazing little document that is so cool that I wanted to share here. Some of you have heard Fugazi Grrl rave about her great GM and fellow players; well, this shows some of their brilliance!

Much thanks to Bess Knox and Tamanny Knox for their contribution, and I hope somebody else can get some use from their great work!