Star Trek Adventures: Playing "A World with a Bluer Sun"

After "Biological Clock," I knew I wanted my Star Trek Adventures game to have a few more standalone episodes, but I didn't have a strong opinion as to what those actually would be. So I made a list of all the ones accessible to me and literally picked one with RANDOM.ORG! (Well, kind of. When I do this, I do "reroll" if it means we'll have back-to-back missions that are somewhat similar. Like, I wouldn't want two Prime Directive–focused episodes in a row.) Doing this brought me to a mission from the These Are the Voyages compilation...

“Captain’s Log, Stardate 48276.1. After our harrowing ordeal in the microverse, we’ve put in at a neutral Haradin space facility so that both ship and crew can recover. In the interim, I’ve recused myself from command, and the ship is being run in rotation by the lower deck shift supervisors. It will be good experience for them before we resume our journey… beyond the Rim of the Starlight!”

Episode 7: "Never Again to See a Blue Sunrise"

(based on "A World with a Bluer Sun" by Marco Rafalá)

Planning the Mission

the unnamed planet orbiting the wormhole
(stock art, I think)

The premise of this one is that the players find a crashed Starfleet shuttle on an alien planet; they then discover the shuttle came from a century-old Starfleet vessel trapped in a wormhole, though thanks to time dilation, the shuttle crashed just six years ago and the ship has only been in the wormhole for two. Because of the death of the captain, the crew has divided into three paranoid, warring factions, mostly around departmental lines. This was easy to fit into my campaign setting: I made the wormhole responsible for carrying the USS Atlantis beyond the Rim of the Starlight.

That said, the scenario as written is set in the original series era, and the Atlantis is an NX-class ship from the Enterprise era, specifically from the time of the Earth-Romulan war. I decided to move the Atlantis's era up in parallel with my campaign's era. Specifically, I made the Atlantis a Walker-class starship (like the Shenzhou from Discovery), and the time period it had come from became the Klingon war seen in Discovery season one. I had a couple different reasons; one was that I am pretty sure no one in my group has seen Enterprise, but a few have seen Disco (season one at least). Another was that things on the Atlantis are very paranoid and dark, and that seemed a good fit for Starfleet in Disco season one. Enhancing that, in the scenario as written, the Atlantis crew is concerned about Romulan infiltration, but in Disco season one, the Klingons infiltrate Starfleet with a surgically disguised agent, so fear of infiltrators would be justified. On top of all this, I have a nice Eaglemoss model of the Shenzhou!

I also tweaked the time dilation some: two years seemed an awful long time given how bloodthirsty everyone was. So I had the shuttle crash be three years ago, and the Atlantis's time in the wormhole six months.

USS Atlantis in the wormhole
(Star Trek: Discovery screen capture)

This one worried me a bit going in. Every mission we'd done thus far had just a couple NPCs. This one has three factions on the Atlantis, each of which is represented by two named NPCs. I put a bunch of work into reorganizing what each faction believed about what was happening on the Atlantis, partially to streamline it, and partially to make it something I believed in more, and thus felt I could play. I wanted every faction to be kind of right and kind of wrong. In the scenario as written, some of it is very beyond the pale, with things like the science officer kidnapping people to perform lethal experiments on them! I wasn't convinced. What I ended up coming up with:

• The Engineering faction thinks there's a Klingon infiltrator on the ship, and that it is almost certainly the head of the Command faction. If Atlantis returns to Earth without purging the Klingon, it could run rampant in Starfleet Headquarters. This faction wants to find and kill the “Klingon” — and if half the Atlantis crew must be sacrificed in the process, then so be it. This is war.
• The Command faction thinks there is an alien, not of Klingon origin, but some kind of malevolent force brought by the wormhole, and they can’t let it go free. It is their duty to destroy the alien before it destroys them. Should it reach an Earth colony or other populated area, millions could die. They think the chief engineer is probably the alien, hence (they think) the reason the engineers mutinied against the first officer's authority after the captain died.
  
• The Sciences faction thinks there is no infiltrator on the Atlantis, seeing this belief as an extension of the militarist mindset that had infected Starfleet during the Federation-Klingon War; they resent the co-opting of their research by the war programme, and see what is happening on the Atlantis as an extension of that. The chief science officer thinks, though, that the object that created the wormhole is a Klingon weapon; the chief medical officer thinks it's not Klingons but unknown aliens, and that these aliens are broadcasting radiation to make the Atlantis crew paranoid. (The science officer does murder someone still, a subordinate who is going to prove she's wrong about the wormhole object being Klingon.)
  

To help the players track who was who, I actually used screenshots of Disco background characters to represent each named NPC, so they would have a visual reference. I also almost always do some gender-tweaking to the characters. On top of that, the whole Atlantis senior staff in the scenario as written was human, because the ship comes from before the Federation; I initially made the first officer Mallory into a Zaranite named Camalov, but then I realized I should make her into an Osnullus, since that species appears on Disco, and thus I could depict her in the right uniform.

If it's helpful to you, here are my Atlantis crew mock-ups:

Other than that, my main change (thanks to a post on Reddit) was to streamline the mission a bit by removing a tribunal scene that would have scene a lot of NPCs arguing with one another. I changed it to the head of the Command faction just using a bogus test to "prove" the chief engineer was the infiltrator, no calling of witnesses or anything.

USS Atlantis transporter room
(art from These Are the Voyages)

Lastly, I did change the title. I doubt my players would have noticed or cared, but the "A World with..." construction felt too similar to our opening story arc's "A World Beyond the Starlight." After toying around with various ideas ("To Seek a Bluer Sun" was one, which I ended up using as the title of Act III), I ultimately used a sidebar title from the mission description, one that seemed pretentious enough to fit into my preferred style for Star Trek episode titles! (To make it work, though, one needs to make sure they read that sidebar aloud, especially its final line: "...I am never again to see the blue sunrise of home." If you don't do that, blue suns are never actually mentioned in the story!)

Playing the Mission

For this mission, I had six players. Five were continuing on from "Biological Clock":

• Hayley as Liana Carver, human science officer
• Cari as Jor Lena, Bajoran security officer
• Andy as Gurg bim Vurg, Tellarite medical officer
• Céline as Seleya, Vulcan engineer
• Keith as Vivik, Arkarian pilot

We were also rejoined by one who had been in episodes 3 and 4, but then taken a hiatus from the group:

• Claire as Mooria Loonin, Trill command officer
  

Claire had never gotten to command an away mission in her two episodes, and Céline and Keith were too recent to have commanded, either. The episode actually has two away missions, so I put Keith in charge of the first (a quick excursion to the planet's surface) and Claire the second (the trip to the Atlantis in Acts II-III). Loonin has a couple different Values about command being co-operative, so putting her in charge of a situation that had deteriorated so badly seemed apt.

USS Atlantis deck plans
(Star Trek: Discovery screen capture)

It took us two-and-a-half sessions of three hours each to play through the whole thing. The first session, the half one, covered the first two scenes of Act I, plus the teaser I had written, which is where the players first investigate the planet and its crashed shuttle. Some of the Reddit reports I read noted that some early parts of the mission seem like red herrings, and thankfully my players didn't spend too much time on those.

The second session covered Act I, Scene 3 and then most of Act II. This has the crew taking stock of the wormhole, and then beaming over to the Atlantis. At one point, Hayley had to step out of the room just before she needed to do something, which gave the other players extra time to brainstorm what she could do. The mission-as-written suggests that the player ship could attempt to destroy the object they find in the wormhole. This didn't even occur to my players, but they progressed from wondering if they could use a tractor beam to pull the Atlantis out to coming up with a plan involving using a probe as a relay to create communications with the Atlantis. Great plan... unfortunately, they rolled badly and the probe was destroyed by the gravity in the wormhole! I always like it when they do some good Star Trek–style brainstorming. They also had the good idea to bring an advanced communications device, more powerful than a comm badge, along, and there was definitely a point where I let them talk to their own ship that I wouldn't have, if they didn't have it.

(One of the conceits of the mission-as-written is that the player ship is on low Power... but if there's a spot in the Core Rulebook that lays out how much Power different ship functions cost, I couldn't find it!)

bottom view of the Atlantis, focusing on bridge
(Star Trek: Discovery screen capture)

Once they were on the Atlantis, it became tricky: unlike any other STA episode I have run so far, the players have a lot of flexibility in terms of where they go and how they do things and what they do. The mission-as-written is filled with a lot of notes about what might happen where, so I was constantly flipping back and forth trying to keep track of everything. It was all doable, and I enjoyed it, but it was a far cry from very linear starter set! Giving them pictures of the NPCs really seemed to help, and I also used my play mat to write down some high-level notes about the various factions on the Atlantis.

The players did not intervene in the battle between the Command and Engineering factions that is going on when they beam in; they then fell in with the Engineering faction at first, before spending their time moving around the ship trying to persuade the factions to agree to a cease-fire so that they could work together to free the crew. In doing this, they try to piece together the mystery: Is there really an intruder on board? Is it Klingon or alien? I let them take their time at first, but when we started the third session, I spent some Threat to establish that the ship's structure was decaying rapidly. They decided to split up and pursue different avenues (something I usually encourage by giving the players extra Momentum): two went to fix the Atlantis's transporters, two to investigate the strange pod in the launch bay, and two to talk to the Command faction.

I found that the episode really kicked into gear in this last session. The players investigating the pod (Vivik and Gurg) did a good job; Gurg's player in particular followed one of his Values ("Pursuit and Sharing of Knowledge") and didn't attend the tribunal so that he could do extra scans for evidence of what life-form might have been on the pod.

Loonin and Jor had a good showdown with Commander Camalov. The tribunal scene was strong; Loonin and Jor had the idea to persuade Parish to let them say something to the assembled crew before Camalov could do her bogus test on Phillips, and Claire gave a truly excellent speech about Starfleet values and won everyone over. The players were flabbergasted when Camalov shot Phillips, and Phillips did nearly die, but things turned out okay there in the end. The mission-as-written has a lot of suggested Threat spends for this section, which was very helpful to me. It felt pretty tense to me throughout the last act, especially when Camalov returned to try to kill the real intruder.

Commander Camalov's office (former mess hall)
(Star Trek: Discovery screen capture)

I did find one thing I read on Reddit is true; bringing Kearney, the crash survivor, along to the Atlantis, does feel kind of pointless. She mostly just followed the players around. But I did make some use of her, in that her presence made it easier for the players to convince Parish, Kearney's old subordinate, to help them at one point. But, I hadn't encouraged the players to take her or anything; it had been entirely their own idea.

When the players first rescued Kearney, she noted that their uniforms were different, causing Jor to respond, "We're trying something different... do you like it?" As the characters moved around the Atlantis, I made every new group note this same thing, so a running gag soon developed... one Gurg undercut eventually by just blurting out, "It's the year 2371 now. Deal with it." From then on the two each said their version simultaneously. It all climaxed well when Jor, without Gurg, found herself having to begrudgingly lead with what had been his line. (I had this Reddit post in the back of my head, but my players made it work without any prodding.)

The players reported enjoying it. They like the mystery angle, and they liked flexibility they had in their approach, and they liked the sense of not really knowing what was going on and having to piece it together. So, I was a little worried about this one going it, but it ended up being a strong episode, and the final session in particular is probably my favorite single session thus far.

Beyond the Rim of the Starlight:

• Opening Arc: A World Beyond the Starlight
• Part I: "The Alcubierre"
• Part II: "The Rescue at Xerxes IV"
• Part III: "We Are Not Ourselves"
• Part IV: "The Pierced Veil"
• Epilogue: "Signals"
• Season One
• "Biological Clock"
• "Never Again to See a Blue Sunrise"
• "Stare Decisis"