Hello, I run a Star Trek rpg and I am a little stuck on ideas for my next episode/adventure. I have already done both the Diplomacy episode and the Prime Directive episode, so I thought I would do a Science episode next. Any ideas?
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Hello, I run a Star Trek rpg and I am a little stuck on ideas for my next episode/adventure. I have already done both the Diplomacy episode and the Prime Directive episode, so I thought I would do a Science episode next. Any ideas?
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First of all, take a look at S. John Ross's chapter on exploration from the unpublished sourcebook on the subject.
Secondly, are you thinking of a puzzle like "Clues" or "Time Squared" or an impersonal force like "Disaster" or the B-plot of "Lessons"?
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I am open to any ideas at this point. I just know I want it to be more of a Science and Exploration episode than anything else. Learning something new, most likely identifying a new lifeform (if they succeed).
Just yesterday afternoon I started playing around with the idea of them being called to investigate a system that has never been examined closely. It will have around 10 planets and each of them have rings or are gas giants. Once they get in the system and start investigating the people on the ship start literally falling apart. Then, once they get close to a planet the gas or rings will start to try to envelop the ship. Basically, the whole system is having an allergic reaction to the ship and its in habitats. Their main goal will be to escape and survive, their secondary goal will be to understand that it is alive. If they do really well they could even learn to communicate with the system.
Thoughts?
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Well, that's a good start. Are the planets would be individual life-forms, or organs or branches of the same life-form? Do you want to do a callback to either 'The Immunity Syndrome,' 'One of Our Planets Is Missing,' or 'The Cloud'?
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The adventures I am trying to run for my group I want to be similar to previous adventures, but still be new. The main thing I want to do is capture the feel of star trek. I also want them to make choices that they feel are important and will change future events, not just focus on them fighting things and nothing really changing.Originally Posted by The Tatterdemalion King
I am thinking of each planet, and the star (or multiple stars), being a type of "organ" for the whole being that is the Star System. It acts very slow, since it is a star system. Things will be normal at first, then people will start getting really sick and eventually they will find out that the planet they are investigating is attacking the ship. They can try to fight it, investigate, communicate, whatever. I am hoping they do learn that the system itself is alive and a very slow moving type of organism that can be communicated with.
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Okay, here's some suggestions off the top of my head:
As a sort of 'starter challenge' to get them into the system without necessarily focusing on just the system, they have to rescue a star-charting ship in orbit around an inner planet, or retrieve the data from a probe trapped in the upper atmosphere of a planet. This gives them something to do and focus on while the forces of the system act on them and the ship.
The ship or probe they need to rescue got damaged because of the system's immune system reaction. This gives them clues to the progression of the immune system response, and something to compare what happens to their ship against. You could also throw in records of similar phenomena in Starfleet or Klingon records.
Initial weirdness for the crew to note includes the number or size or arrangement of the planets in the system not matching Starfleet records. This points to the planets in the system being something they should pay attention to, but not necessarily making it obvious what's going on.
*If the system is a life-form, it's got to eat and exchange nutrients, it's got to reproduce, and it's got to self-regulate. Theoretically, the evidence of each of those things should be visible to the PCs once they start to look.
For food, I'd stick close to terrestrial life: the planets are actually eating the sun or suns in the system, draining it of energy, which they then convert into mass and energy through technobabbly processes. Instead of just draining it, though, maybe it also 'fertilizes' the sun somehow, maybe by drawing in extra material to add to the stellar fusion process? (That's beyond my knowledge of astrophysics really.)
For them to self-regulate and exchange nutrients, I suggest taking the technobabble route and placing the planet's 'veins' and 'nerves' in subspace. Deep inside each of the planets, subspace domains not unlike those used in transporters are generated which then beam nutrients or signals between each of the organ-planets. This is where the ships start endangering the system-being: the subspace eddies created by the starship's warp drives, even out of warp, mess with the system-being's nerves and digestion, stimulating an immune-system response.
For reproduction, maybe the system-being is growing a 'seed' near the star which it will hurl outward towards another star system. This seed is probably either a weird grown planet without recognizable geography or tectonic processes, or a non-organic planet wrapped in a sort of embryonic system-being 'yolk' and being accelerated into faster and faster orbits until it reaches the necessary velocity to break free.
So for immune system reactions, we have: subspace shockwaves (trying to expel the foreign matter), energy discharges and badlands-like plasma storms popping up (a fever trying to kill the intruding organism), and maybe even antibodies coming out of the planet-organs (or materializing through the transporters!) to glom onto the ship and destroy it.
If it were me, I'd probably keep the system-being from being intelligent, both to keep the players from feeling like they have to punish the planet or that it's hostile, and to emphasize the alienness of being inside this huge thinga giant tree has a different kind of grandeur than an elephant. That said, establishing how to get the thing to react to them on 'friendly' terms is a very Star Trek thing to do, so that's something that should factor in.
So here's a couple solutions they could come up with, off the top of my head: Turning off their warp core and letting the thing expel them, trying to spoof their subspace signature to match the system-being's own to trick the immune system into not recognizing the ship, or using ship systems to cut their way through like a scalpel and then stitch the system-being up on the way out.
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Thank you for the great ideas. I had already thought up some of these, but others you have really opened up a big door that they can have fun with. I had thought of them finding a ship from an unknown race that was slowly getting "eaten" in a planets high atmosphere. I was thinking this would be a good chance to give them little hints to a new species or group that would be a main adversary later.
The reproduction angle I hadn't even thought of, even though it makes so much sense.
I also like the idea of the planets not being where they should be, as a little hint that this system doesn't work as a normal system does.
I was originally going to have it be sentient, so that they might find a way to communicate with it on a basic level and it would let them leave.
I also had an idea that the immune system would react to whenever the ship activated one of its more complicated functions and find a way to block that action from happening again. It can prevent a warp field from forming once it detects a warp core. Once they use transporters to go to the other ship it will react and prevent teleporters from working again and they will have to be picked up by a shuttle. Each time it is a little hint that things aren't right.
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It might be fun to derive the process by which the system-being shuts off ship systems from the way leukocytes surround and engulf invading bacteria or fungi, particularly if the crew is encountering multiple types of space-leukocytes that seem to be specifically calibrated to damped the offending ship systems.
Are you going to record this session too?
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That is the plan. Our session is tomorrow and the turnaround time is about a month. I am interested to see what the players do.
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Here is the link for part 1 of this story.
http://burneverythinggaming.podbean....yx-vessel-pt1/
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Ha, yes. I am happy they dropped the idea that she was Bajoran and just went with human instead. Basically same character though.
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