Adventure Seeds

[Perrryyy]

Originally posted by J T
Great idea!

Is it an original idea or a rip off of another story (If so what)?

Just a guess, but it looks like a Phantom of the Opera ripoff.

[StyroFoam Man]

This message has been removed on request by the
poster

[Michael Barratt]

Title: The Measure of a Mind
Setting: Planetside/Medical Conference/Starbase
Era: Any

Good for a solo player episode, or for a "getaway" ep where the other characters tag along when the Doctor goes to a medical conference*, everything begins as planned, and the conference is underway. One doctor, a pretty young woman with a rather stern and acidic demeanour, outshines a doctor or two in the same seminars as the PC Doctor, while the other crew are off enjoying themselves or the like.

Strange militaristic people who are out of place on a resort planet, the other crew start to notice these soldiers trying to "fit in" (ie: they're undercover).

The woman doctor is a fugitive. From a non-federation world, she is actually a clone of a male doctor who did some genetic tampering with his clone (among which was to change her gender, sharpen her wits, etc). On that world, however, genetic experiments are considered non-sentient, and she has no rights, is considered the property of the doctor who created her - who, you guessed it, is as the conference and has hired those mercenary soldier types to get her back into custody.

She'll ask the Federation Doctor crewmember for help, and the moral dilemma will kick in for the crew: just because her planet says she's not a sentient, should they help arrest her, or help her get away? (Or some other third option they'd undoubtedly come up with that derails your plans)?

As a plot complication, she has a medical idea that might save the life of a terminal patient in the medical facility, but if captured, she won't get to use her proceedure, and an innocent cute little child will die an agonizing and slow death. How's that for a tug on the heartstrings... makes a nice tension-packed climax if she's operating on the child when the mercenaries finally catch up with her...

The Doc

* You'd think Starfleet would assign a Defiant class ship to keep doctors safe when they try to go on vacation, they always end up kidnapped by someone...

[Michael Barratt]

Title: Vision
Era: Any
Setting: Starship

Begin this episode with something mundane, like the mapping of a star system where a trinary star with an orbiting nebulous cloud of anomalous matter/gas. The matter/stuff is putting out an odd radiation, but the shields manage to cut most of it off.

While studying, have the crewman you most often associate with being the strongest mentally or the most "pigheaded" start to have minor mental glitches. They turned the wrong way in the corridor, or they meant to go one way, and ended up somewhere else. Or they think they see Crewman X, but they're talking to Crewman Y. Oops.

Then, make it a little worse. Visual hallucinations that are starting to border on more than distracting. At the same time, start hitting some of the rest of your crew with the more mild effects. The Doc should be involved by this point, and the doc will discover that the energy radiation might contain a low-level psionic resonance/disturbance, and might be the cause of this problem. Indeed, except for the first person affected, the disturbance eases off, and ends, when the ship moves away from the system.

The first individual affected now begins to see alien shadows among the crewmembers sometimes, odd round-ish shaped creatures, which seem to be stalking the other crewmen, and are nearly omnipresent. He feels an odd pain in his head, and especially sees the aliens around the various telepathic crewmen on board.

Things get worse for our intrepid crewman, and soon the visions are nightmarish. The "things" are all over the place, coming at him, and even though the crew aren't nearby the system, things are starting to get wierd again among the crew that listen to the crewman: the reemergence of the strange visual hallucinations. Particularly strong-willed individuals start to notice the dark shadowy roundish aliens.

So then a full investigation/lockdown/alienhunt begins, and proof is found of an alien ship that must have been hiding in the rings. They're either using some sort of energy weapon or are a telepathic species, and the crew now start to work out a plan to strengthen shields and blast the ship. After some technobabble tension, they blast the ship, and it retreats... Everyone recovers. Everyone is happy.

In his quarters later that night the Crewman's visions redouble, and the blurred round entities are back, attacking in full force. Fighting them off isn't possible, they don't seem to be physically present, and he should undoubtedly freak out, major. The crew examine him and see that he has suffered permanent brain damage as a result of the radiation and/or alien projections.

At this point, the CMO should clue in that something isn't right: the radiation shouldn't have done what it did, didn't seem to do it to anyone else, and out of the corner of his eyes, he notices elevated levels of neurotransmitters involved in telepathy - but looking directly into the display, the readings aren't there... The Aliens are back?

Here's what's actually going on: one of the telepathic crewman on the ship picked up a virus that is causing his telepathic abilities to project a kind of visual distortion. As more and more crewmembers picked up the virus, those telepathic have evolved this outgoing psychic static into a group hallucination. There was no alien ship, and no radiation from the gaseous nebula ever got through the shields. Basically, as the crew come up with hypotheses, their hypotheses are being integrated into the collective hallucination. The crew need to think straight long enough to find a way to block telepathic input - the reason the crewman is having such horrible visual hallucinations is that he's strong-willed enough to not be sucked all the way into the vision, which makes what he is experiencing (including large round "virus" representations) more in tune with reality than what the rest of the ship believes they are seeing. (Think of the one sane man in an insane Kingdom).

This one would be creepy, and based on the one 'insane' guy knowing he's not sick, he's just seeing things, finally convincing someone that there's telepathic incomming something, and then the rest cluing in and avoiding their own collective unconscious delusions and finding the cure to the virus, after nullifying it somehow...

What's fun about this is that whatever theories the crew come up with at your table, you integrate. If they think Romulans, Romulans shall show up, for example.

The Doc

[C5]

Hey, I very much like that one, Michael. I tend to like stories with Strange Things Going On Abord The Ship, and yours is nicely twisted
Plus, I love the idea of making players paranoid

[Michael Barratt]

Originally posted by C5
Hey, I very much like that one, Michael. I tend to like stories with Strange Things Going On Abord The Ship, and yours is nicely twisted
Plus, I love the idea of making players paranoid

*grins* Thank you. I like any episode that features a double-twist, and I figured an episode where they get to congratulate themselves on figuring out what happened - when they're wrong - might be fun.

The Doc

[Michael Barratt]

Title: Patient Zero
Era: Any
Setting: Starship

The crew come to a world where there two humanoid races have evolved. They live in a harmony, though the larger majority tend to be a bit condescending to the smaller group of humanoids (who are built a little smaller, a little weaker, and have a reallly soft and gentle disposition).

The larger majority are technologically advanced, have warp drive, and are new to the space scene. The smaller population have some technology, but tend to live in harmony on the edges of the civilization, though sometimes one species marries into the other. They cannot have cross-breed children without a great deal of medical intervention.

When the larger community gets hit by a mutating virus, and have been dying for years, approaching the millions, the crew could easily become involved. No matter the treatment the larger group try, nothing works for long, and the virus just shows up later, mutated again.

The cause is the smaller group: their immune system doesn't suffer from the virus at all - they pretty much fight it off in a day or two and suffer no symptoms at all. Unfortunately, every time they fight it off, the virus mutates in an attempt to hit them harder, and these mutated strains are what are killing the larger group.

How will the society react when they find out that merely containing - or killing - all of the smaller species would end their disease with their next "Cure"? Anarchy, death camps, isolation communities? S'up to you, but it'd be an interesting ride...

The Doc

[Michael Barratt]

Title: Shards
Era: Any
Setting: Starship

The ship is exploring a system where a comet is about do make a very close brush with a Class-M world, though not colliding, when a la Voyager's ep with the ship duplicating after passing through a subspace scission (I think that's what they called it), the crew finds that their ship is suddenly leaking antimatter off to nowhere, and losing power, fast. Proton bursts start to do what happened on the Voyager ep - one ship gets hit by some damage, but the first ship senses it, and shuts down the proton bursts in time to stop total destruction (though for kicks, kill off some of the duplicate characters). Making communication, they learn of the dilemma they're in - both ships are losing power, and things aren't going well for either of them.

Two solutions are known:

1. Blowin' up one of the ships, that'll work for sure, but uh, well, that sucks. Evac from one ship to the other messes up the atomic mass of the ship the people end up on and it'd blow up anyway. This shouldn't be a solution until the last possible moment.

2. Realigning the phase variance of the two ships - but it's razor-edge mathematics, and damned hard to do. They should give this a try, and let them - but have it fail, and increase the phase discrepancy.

What they can do is "hitch a ride" off the comet - tractor themselves to it, and drift behind it, and once close enough to the planet, beam down the crew of one ship, and then blow that ship up. This should be the ultimate solution - and power then returns to the first ship. The people on the planet suffer a kind of "phase shock" as they're quite rudely punched into this space/time continuum, and many will need immediate medical attention, but most (if not all) of the duplicates will survive.

The idea being this: At the end of your session, most of the crew are left with duplicates, though some have died. It'd be interesting fallout, the Tom/Will Riker seed on a much larger scale, and with a canon source. I'm not quite brave enough to do this myself, though maybe with my smaller-ship campaign, the USS Sam Steele - duplicating 12 people shouldn't give me as big a migraine!

The Doc

[Robbert Raets]

Very nice! (though I doubt ghosty will be running this....)

[ghosty]

Originally posted by Robbert Raets
Very nice! (though I doubt ghosty will be running this....)

Why not...there are enough duplicates running around to crew a starship already...so what the hell, a few more won't hurt

[Michael Barratt]

Originally posted by Robbert Raets
Very nice! (though I doubt ghosty will be running this....)

Danke. If I could, I'd sit down and go through each and every episode of the various series and find a way to make a "follow-up" adventure of some kind... Ahh, when I win the lottery and have nothing but time...

The Doc

[C5]

Sooo... since we're talking about follow ups, here is one I came with when watching ST IV during XMas :

Title : Fixin' the Voyage Home
Era : TOS movies (just after STIV)
Type : Time-travel / parody
Setting : Starship

The ship is exploring some subspace phenomenon not far from the Terran system when they receive the distress call from Earth during the destruction the whale-seeking probe is bringing. However, they are soon trapped in a temporal anomaly, and can only witness what's happening - the damages the probe is bringing to Earth, and Kirk's time-jump to bring back some whales.
They manage to get free of the temporal anomaly, just in time to hear about The Bounty's return and crash under the Golden Gates.

But while the probe is leaving the system, the Crew realises that some things have changed - no big deal, but for instance some starships designs no longer exist, names of cities on Earth have changed, and so on. Kirk's trip to the past has changed the present (not drastically however), and the temporal anomaly they were trapped in has protected the Crew from the changes. The only other people who could be aware of these changes are the Bounty's Crew - but they have not noticed them since they are too busy being Court-martialed at the time.

The Crew should then jump back in time to fix the damages Kirk did to the timeline. What follows depends on the Narrator and the players : whether they know well ST IV or not ("Okay, I know Chekov left a phaser on the Enterprise, let's fetch it, then erase the formula of tranparent aluminium and it's done"), whether the Narrator wants to keep the light-headed tone of the movie or be more serious, and so on.

This could be a fun adventure to play with anyone who, like me, loved The Voyage Home, but found there was really too much liberties taken with the timeline. Could also be interesting for the people who hated the movie.

[ghosty]

If I remember correctly the guy Scotty gave the formula to was the person who historically developed transparent aluminium anyway so there was no pollution of the timeline or rather the pollution was necessary for the future to develop.

[C5]

Weell... from what I understood, McCoy asks Scotty if what he did didn't pollute the timeline, and Scotty asks in return why the guy couldn't have invented on his own. I don't think it was ever said that he did actually, but it is indeed a logical assumption (either Scotty gave the formula some years before it was invented or this is a time loop).
Then again, you can choose to think otherwise...

[Dan Gurden]

Sorry to bust in. But your both wrong.

When McCoy questions giving the formula to the manufacturer, inventing Transparent Aluminium ahead of the normal timeline. Scottys exact response is.

"How do we know he didn't."

So I guess both Scotty and McCoy were not huge history buffs...

Whether or not the plot revolves around changing this history point could (depending on the evil-ness of the narrator) change history for the worse... I know I would put humanity back a few hundred years by cancelling the launch of the Phoenix... he he he...

The Phaser however... thats a different matter.