Adapting Ideas : Blackhawk Down

[Kosst Amojan]

This whole idea came up when I was talking to some of the guys at work about Blackhawk Down. One of them had the movie laying on his desk because he had borrowed it. He hadn't seen it yet. Awesome flick, and an even better book. I often steal ideas from books, movies, TV, etc. like I'm sure you guys do. We have a wealth of material in front of us everyday to get adventure ideas from. So I started thinking, how could you adapt Blackhawk Down to the Trek universe? And then, to make it more exact, how could you adapt it to an adventure for your players?

I'm just hunting ideas now. Any suggestions are welcomed. The only thing I know for sure is I see the Rangers and Delta Force characters as Starfleet, of course. No idea where to go from there. I thought maybe some of you Narrators may have already adapted this movie to your game. Thanks.

[JALU3]

How about the Cardassian Union. The government is weak . . . and shattered. Expect alot of FMR surviving Guls to become warlords . . . there'll be a HUGE humanitarian demand on multiple systems . . . piracy and the blackmarket will flurish. And the occupying forces will have to coup with all of this.

The Former CU would become the Wild West of the Star Trek world!

[Polanski]

Well I have an idea ... but at the moment it is sitting on the shelf and to be released in the season 4 of my campaign.

As much as I would love to share this with you on the open forum I have to say that I am unable to. Some of my players are posters and readers of this fine establishemnt

Message me if you wish to hear more about it ...

[Cybrludite]

Big problem I see with doing a BHD scenario is the existance of transporters. THat one budget saving hand-wave causes more headaches than all the other bits of treknology combined...

[wolfe]

Well, a way around the transporters is the much used "atmospheric disturbance" of some sort..
the same disturbance could be the reason for the civil unrest (killing off plant life) and the reason of the formation of the various clans..

no transporter use means must use the shuttlecraft..
but that means you would have to have the population have some sort of weaponry that can bring a shuttlecraft down..

also the creative use of technobabble gadgits( or above mentioned disturbance) to dampen the sensors of the shuttles and ships in orbit,not to mention the tricorders.

there is another main difference in using this senario- our troops or the weapons on our helos never had a stun setting....
makes a bit a difference in the rules of engagement...well did at first anyway.......

OT: you have no idea how much i wish we had transporters when we were there in Mog town...

[Antonsb214]

To make this a more era-generic adventure idea, you can set this episode on any planet that has recently undergone a catastrophic event, natural or man-made, a side-effect of this event will be that transporters will not work without pattern enhancers (easier said than done, not easy to do with someone taking pot shots at you). So some "genius" at headquarters thinks that by capturing the head warlord, the rest will listen to "reason". So your guys go in on assault shuttles, hoppers, or whatever, then things begin to go wrong. The local starship support is called away to handle a brushfire somewhere else, the guy carrying the PEs stepped on a photon mine, and Murphy's Laws rule. The troops will start running out of power packs and rations (it was only a quick snatch and grab mission).
So the troops have to either hold up or try to fight their way out back to the planetary headquarters.
A couple of klicks is a long way when you're getting shot at.
This can be run with a platoon sized element. Get some good NCO NPCs and throw in a couple of green rookies for those dramatic "Red Shirt" moments.
You just have to come up with an alien world and culture to use as a background.

[Dan Stack]

Transporters become of limited use if your ship is destroyed. What about a Runabout being sent on a mission to drop some Starfleet personnel off? The Runabout is destroyed shortly after beam-down (or drop-off). Or a bigger ship in orbit is lost after being ambushed by a renegade vessel.