Thought of a possibly interesting adventure idea...
Imagine a derelict ship, a big one, preferrably a Nebula, lost somewhere, to some race (Hirogens anyone)...
Think the Killing Game, Hirogens find the ship, take over the ship, and launch holographic battle after holographic battle from throughout the Quadrant (let's be more original than rehash those old Earth battles we already know by heart, what about the Andorian clan conflicts, the Vulcan Unification Campaigns, anything you can think of)
Now, here is the thing, none of the battle has happened during a period when any of these civilisations was Warp able, and they wouldn't know how the bloody systems onboard work, but something went wrong, and a group of holographic soldiers found a "breach" into enemy defenses... Then another one, and more and more and so on and so forth, until those left were a bunch of hirogens stuck in the middle of the ship, while the little relief the crew had, they used it to shoot down the Hirogen ship .
Due to survival instinct, no Hirogen wishes a Warp Core breach or anything, and haven't provoked one, although anyway the two or three who didn't die wouldn't reach it anyway, Main Engineering was sealed, but eventually a Jefferies Tube was shot down, and it is now a Rhiannsu bunker installation.
All the ship is divided between factions of holographic troops, who have bunkered a bunch of areas, about the only untouched area is the bridge (if a direct Phaser hit to the bridge could be considered as untouched), possibly four or five times as much as the original crew had onboard, too many systems are offline (including subspace communications), "hackers" from the various areas are beginning to manage their way into the Computer core after one month, and have fucked with the programs, placing blocks, firewalls and bugs.
Now, enter the players. Their ship can meet the ship, USS Skaelas (named after the Centauran Holo-Artist from the LUG books), by random luck, or can be sent there because they received an emergency communications probe from after the holograms began leaving the holodeck, sent by the engineers who manage to run from the Hirogens, and because this is a Starfleet ship, the information onboard must NOT fall into potentially inimical hands. Their main objective is to get to the Computer Core, and either get or destroy the data, finally, if they can, try to get the ship to self-destruct, or if they can, get it to the nearest yard. Lots of things are not working, others are dwindling, but fuel and food could still last for six months at full crew (and many years of this regime)...
Now what do you think of it, interesting, could be worked more, or you're a sick bastard and should be shot on the spot... Comments, Feedback...
Graciously presented from the disturbed minds of Brothers...
Rhiannsu might not know about warp, but they certainly know about aliens and interstellar travel. Your crew will likely make a beeline for Romulan help once they're found, so any NPCs for them should be worked out in detail.
It will be priority to get into the holodeck systems and change the program so that they don't have to fight. I assume they're fighting each other because it is all they are programmed to do?
This is going to be a major moral problem once everything is secure and the fighting has stopped. Can you kill all those people, especially if they've surpassed their programming.
Several potential problems with the scenario, not the least of which is that it requires the players to have seen the episode in question - If they have (or at least some of them have), no problem.
The second one is the question of whether holograms are necessarily sapient life forms - I don't agree that they are, except under specific circumstances - either they were designed from the ground up as sapient beings (like Data) or they have evolved (like the Voyager HoloDoc). The individual holographic entities are only programmes within the ship's computer - expert systems taken to the extreme, if you will.
Unless it can be demonstrated that the holographic programmes have indeed become sapient, this isn't an issue. You have to convince the PCs that they have become sapient, and thus every effort must be made to save them. Now, if you wish to toss in a few clues that this has happened... Say, for instance, that some of the original crew are still alive, and being sheltered by some of the holograms against their programming, then it becomes clear that they must be saved.
The Hirogen are less problematic. If they surrender, or can be captured, they live. If they cannot be captured, they go boom with the ship when the PCs use the self destruct. They are enemy soldiers in a war situation. No moral quandary here, at all, even in a Starfleet scenario.
Now, if the holograms (or, more spcifically, the programme subroutines) are considered sapient, there are a couple of ways to save them. One way is to construct a number of memory modules similar to the one Moriarty was stored in (to make this more of a problem, let's say that no more than a few holograms' programmes can be stored in one module) and take them along. Another might be to load the programmes into a secondary computer core, hook up a power souce, and eject the core for later retrieval.
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