"You Are Lke SOOO Messed Up, Man..."

[Ronin84]

Hmmm....


How about they wander into a time loop somehow and there is no way for them to get themselves out they keep repeating their mistakes. Now the only way is for the new crew to break them out of the loop and in the ensuing solution the bridge crew is killed or some of them survive and you can have the crew mix....


I know this is larcenous from TNG but hey you brought up Airwolf.

[Dan Stack]

Not a freak shuttle accident, silly. A deliberate shuttle sabotage. But by whom? Section 31? The Dominion?

[Robert Lai]

Abuse the Law of Unintended Consequences ...

Admiral Janeway's trip in time brought Voyager home after seven years ...

... the USS Gambler receives the news ...

... and suddenly, ain't nobody on the bridge anyone recognizes. Of course, THEY don't know that. The Gambler is as it ever was.

Best of all, you don't have to explain a thing, 'cause it's not like Voyager is going back to the Delta Quadrant to fix an unverified temporal anomaly.

Technobabble if you want to be 'serious' about this.

Later, if you want, the cause can be determined to be something else, such as a localized quantum bi-axial confluence. (Localized = wherever the Gambler happened to be at the time. Quantum = quantum reality, quantum matrix ... alternate time streams. Bi-axial = two axis - picturing those timestreams as a double-helix.) Essentially, time twisted around itself in one spot, and then unknotted ... but a kink in the fabric of time remains nonetheless.

[Re'k]

I'm for the shuttle chase... but since player and major NPC deaths should be dramatic, you've got to make it something special.

The shuttle returns to find that the Gambler is not at its rendezvous point... it's acually on the other side of the system, pulling a disabled transport ship (a HUGE transport) out of a decaying orbit into a the anomaly of the week.

Seeing that the Gambler would be severely disadvantaged in combat at this point, the aggressor ship attacks. After lots of fun, dramatic, dire combat, the shuttle manages to sneak through a hole in the aggressor's shields, plants itself on the hull near a critical system, and self-destructs. (There was no way to beam the shuttle crew out, since lowering the Gambler's shields for transport would make it vulnerable to both the aggressor and the anomaly)

The aggressor is too wounded to continue combat... there will be better days to die, etc... and retreats. The Gambler successfully saves the transport, and both ships limp home, mourning the loss of their comrades.

Let us know how it turns out!

[Protius]

Build it up. Give them unsolvable odds, let them succeed by the skin of their teeth time and time again, and have something kill them that was there all along under their noses that they ignored throughout it. A shorting EPS manifold, a warp variance of .24 really causes a warp core breach, that sort of thing.

[StyroFoam Man]

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[Flamestrike]

Let's see here.... there's always the stray torpedo hit to the bridge, or we finally might get to see that foreward disruptor cannon that's mounted on the Vor'cha.

Perhaps the bridge crew gets reconstructed by alien nano-bots?

Or, you could have them do a faux-epic time-travel episode, only they do something that restructures Time Itself, resulting in the consequence that the bridge crew all end up
as farmers on backwater planets, and the 'replacement' characters have been the crew of the ship all along.

OR, the entire crew of the Gambler could just disappear without a trace, leaving the ship adrift, to be found by chance a year later. Thus the new crew could have to deal with the ship's new rep as a 'Marie Celeste'.



[This message has been edited by Flamestrike (edited 06-10-2001).]

[Michael Brinkhues]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">
OR, the entire crew of the Gambler could just disappear without a trace, leaving the ship adrift, to be found by chance a year later. Thus the new crew could have to deal with the ship's new rep as a 'Marie Celeste'.

</font>

Not adrift, found in a field after ten years. And the new captain has been looking for it all the time using an old Deneva.


Kill a crew in an interesting way.

1) Run "This is only a Test!!" (from Challenge) with them. Pitch them against Klingons/Bajorans/Amok running combat robots in a test scenario (weapons on stun only) then forget to tell the other side. Give them some warning (another team gets slagged) then have them fight for their lives.

2) Drop them into a parallel universe "a long time ago" and have them re-appear at the "Death Star test firing range" during an exercise in "hitting a mobile target"

3) Some virus slipped through the transporter and the first killed are the medics

4) Have StarFleet re-assign them to a ground command to "broaden their horizon". Give them desc jobs at the academie (study and push papers, no teaching). Wait for suicide

5) Send them of on a special mission as part of project "Pathfinder".

Michael


StarFleet regrets to inform the public that the loss of USS Voyager during a mission into the Badlands has been confirmed today. Parts of the ship have been found by USS Agamemnon. San Franzisko, Terra, 18/April

[Polanski]

Assimilate them ...
(without your Voyager easy way of de-assimilating thing)

Then put a new crew against the same borg cube and put the fear of borg back where it belongs.

Commander A.Polanski

[This message has been edited by Polanski (edited 06-11-2001).]

[StyroFoam Man]

This message has been removed on request by the
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[Captain Blake]

Darn boss interupted me before I could finish. To answer the first question:

Um, use the shuttle accident.

The shuttle is traveling back to the Gambler when it's attacked by That Darn Fish (tm). Gulp. They're gone. End of Story. You can drag this out as long as you want, with various escape attempts. But in the end, the Fish gets them.

If you want a "Happy Ending", go this way. Have the shuttle swallowed, but a freak reaction with the new "Isostatic" SIF causes a negative reaction with the Borg Sphere the Fish ate last time, causing the Fish to implode.

Or, if you're looking for a way to recover the characters later, transition to E space where our "Heroes" live in the belly of the fish like Jonah in the whale, until they and the Fish can figure a way back to our universe. Of cource, all the Players know is that the Fish imploded. You can have them pop back into our universe whenever you want to bring back Gambler Classic instead of Gambler Next Gen.

BTW: I'd start the game with at the Funeral of the Captain, where I'd introduce the new characters, and then tell the tale by flashback. Try to end the session on the Fish implosion. If at all possible.

_____
(OT) RE: the Borg. This is a lesson I've learned after 20 years of super-hero gaming: Sometimes, you just have to let the villains die and never ever come back. What was once the greatest villian of all time, touching on our primal fear of the machine taking over our lives, is a laughable joke, turned into a little colony of ants (including a Queen) for Janeway to step on, and it's now time to get a new idea and create a new villain.

The only way I can see to get around this is to rule all of Voyager non-Canon, and maybe part of ST: First Blood, er um, Contact, sorry, where they started to be insects rather than machines.

My point is this: If the villain never ever dies, or goes away never to be seen again, then the players never have a real victory. It's good to keep them interested by giving them at least little victory once in a while. That doesn't happen if the villain doesn't stay dead.

JMO and X, of cource, YMMV.

Alex

[This message has been edited by Captain Blake (edited 06-11-2001).]

[Polanski]

Well, I just started a ST campaign and the Borg are back. The campaign takes place in 2382 and this time there are 4 Borg cubes in proximaty of Deep Space 5, I simply told my players that no one really know what Voyager got up to in Delta Quadrant and that you still need a decent task force to face one cube. Of course the three other cubes simply jump in through transwarp and suprise the task force.

I think that ST has some great villans it is just we need imagination to use them properly. Civil wars, separatists groups or god-like entities who simply consider humanoid life as a background noise can be a great subjects.

Commander A.Polanski

[This message has been edited by Polanski (edited 06-11-2001).]

[StyroFoam Man]

This message has been removed on request by the
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[Captain Blake]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Polanski:
I think that ST has some great villans it is just we need imagination to use them properly. Civil wars, separatists groups or god-like entities who simply consider humanoid life as a background noise can be a great subjects.
</font>

I agree with you 100% Commander Polanski.

Now, on to you Styro.

As someone who had to evacuate a lab because someone put a beaker of ether on a shelf outside the fume hood, there are many things that can cause an evacuation. (Darned fireball was 1 foot high off the floor covering the entire floor. But I digress again)

But an Iconian computer virus attack might be good. After all, if you're using the Elbonian stuff created earlier, then the Elbonians wiped out the Iconians, right. So, the Iconians created a nasty "Doomsday Virus" when they realized that they were going down. The Virus was put inside the Gambler somehow when the Elbonians came to help.

Two possiblities spring immediately to mind.

1) Virus fools everyone into thinking the ship is going to explode, and everyone evacuates. Kinda trite, if you ask me.

2) The Virus converts all the transporter/replicator systems to gateways and beams everyone off into deep space. The few survivors launch in escape pods (the only thing that still works) to try and rescue everyone, where they are all eaten by That Darn Fish (tm). The Elbonians have moved beyond that level of technology, so the Virus never affected them, BTW. Oh, yeah, the Virus shuts down and burns out after it doesn't detect life signs. It's the Iconian equivalent of a Neutron Bomb. Kill the people, leave the stuff.

Hope any of this is usable.

Alex

[StyroFoam Man]

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