Children of the Night

[ghosty]

Its Halloween so its time to dust off the old horror story episode...

Anyway, I was thinking of using classic monsters for this year's All Hallow's Eve episode. The Call of Cuthulu monsters are just too bad ass to use year in year out...

My first thought would of course be vampires...but Vamps in space...a bit overdone and how do they survive in an enviroment where the sun always shines...

Werewolves could be interesting...imagine a werewolf who lives on the moon...its a full moon every day for him...

Zombie/Ghoul...a zombie/ghoul infestation of a colony world forces the PCs to fight them off with limited phaser power and no ship overhead to give support.

Then there's the mad slasher...Wolf in the Fold II?

Anyone got any other ideas?

[Karg]

How about using the "Space Vampires" from that movie "Lifeforce" They were Energy Drainers and i don't think the Sun affected them.

Victims required to drain others life force or be destroyed in 24 hrs IIRC.

Good Movie, Go rent it

BTW Patrick Stewart was in it.

Karg

[Azar Kel]

There is a very malevolent force that would be perfect for a Halloween type thing. It is an entity known as the Shaden and the Shaden's Vax. I'll give you the background and if you like it run with it.
Starfleet sends the PC's ship to investigate an odd fluctuation of subspace in a distant sector(our game was in the Gamma Quadrant) Upon arriving at said destination the crew encounters a large, as yet unencountered ship that immediately opens fire on the good guys. As the crew returns fire(all attempts at communication are ignored) sensors detect a strange bio-matter creeping its way around the ship that isn't repairing the ship but acting as its hull. (The bio-matter is actually the Shaden), another ship comes and destroys the bad guys and hail crew identifiing themselves as the Vaelorians.
Long story short, the Vaelorians fled from their universe as it was completely consumed by the Shaden. The Shaden devours everything it touches, even people, but the people become servants of the Shaden. Kind of a Borg like assimilation but all biological. The Vaelorians are running like mad trying to escape the Shaden which seem to personally hunt down the Vaelorians.
The Shaden is, in truth, a simple organism much like an amobea, but on a much larger scale, it is hunting down the Vaelorians for no other reason that wherever they go, there is more food for the Shaden. The Shaden are, again in truth, a cross between Azathoth (Call of Cuthulu) and a little Star Trek science-fiction it combines the horror of Culthulu with the ability to make things right in the end. As it happened in our game a resident Vulcan PC mind melded with the Shaden and it understood restraint and co-operation.

Hope the little story strikes someone's fancy.

[Michael Barratt]

Borrowing from Koontz and Barclay's Protomorphosis Syndrome: A colony to which the ship is delivering supplies is doing medical research, among many other things. They think they could delete genetic defects in grown adults by using a retrovirus that carries DNA strand material. Basically, you infect the sick with the DNA of the healthy, and the virus then dies out. It was doing well in research stages, until the virus basically stopped dying out, and then got out of containment.

It's a slow process, but the various animal lifeforms of the planet are sharing bits and pieces of DNA, usually in similar manners. Humans on the planet are being infected with the DNA of predator wolf-like critters that are native to the planet, and feline predator critters are getting smarter and smarter thanks to a dose of human DNA. Birds are growing violent, and so forth. Basically, they're beaming down into a nightmare colony.

ALas, the colony medical personnel were the worst - and first - affected, and they like what they've become. Almost a tribal society among themselves now, or a pack, they've forcefully infected the colony governor, and now they run the place behind the scenes, as they conduct even more genetic switching to make the "rush" better.

From humanoids with yellow back-lit eyes, to being chased by intelligent predators, to feeling something strange happening in their own bodies, this should raise a goose bump or three.

And gosh, they can't beam back until they find a cure...

The Doc