Like with our previous episode (see complete list at the bottom of this entry), I had a slot I had no particular plans for. I picked one at random from my list of published adventures; this ended up being an episode of the "Living Campaign."
The Living Campaign was an undertaking where Modiphius would post Star Trek Adventures episodes to their website monthly-ish, telling a continuing story that gaming groups could play along with, from 2017 to 2019. This resulted in sixteen missions you can download from free from the Modiphius. A set of write-ups on Reddit resulted in me adding four that sounded particularly interesting to my list of possibilities when I first assembled it, and the one that came up this time was "Decision Point."
As I dug into it, I could see how it would fit into our campaign, and so it became the next episode of...
“Captain’s Log, Stardate 48299.9. After our recent travails in the micro-verse and with the Atlantis wormhole, the Ayrton is in need of an overhaul at a Federation starbase. However, Outpost 8B has ordered us to search for SS Hypatia, a civilian science vessel exploring beyond the Rim of the Starlight that has been missing for six weeks. Eighteen hours ago, we picked up a plasma trail, likely from a damaged ship, in a system marked as the Orgun system on the Haradin charts of this region. We are about two hours out. I have recently learned the crew of the Hypatia has a personal connection to a member of my own crew…”
Episode 8: "Stare Decisis"
(based on "Decision Point" by Ian Lemke)
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Orgun II (foreground) and Orgun III
(Internet wallpaper, original source unknown)
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Planning the Mission
The premise of this mission is that the player vessel finds a crashed Federation science ship on a pre-warp planet. The planet is geologically unstable, and will explode in a matter of weeks. The civilian scientists have decided to help the planet's inhabitants evacuate to a sister planet... but not only is this a Prime Directive violation, the sister planet has a sapient species of its own, at a lower level of technology.
As originally designed, it has five scenes:
- investigate from orbit, scope out the crashed ship
- meet the native species and locate the missing scientists
- crawl through a mountain cave in search of mysterious power readings
- discover ancient alien equipment that can help stabilize the planet and fix it
- talk about the Prime Directive issues
It seemed like a good framework, but it also felt a bit hollow. I wasn't convinced there was enough for my usual 5-6 players to do, especially in scenes #3-4. It's very linear. And the end is kind of an anticlimax; really, the big focus of play is on scene 4, and then in scene 5, the players make their choice, and the episode just ends. I also took on a point from a review I read of the mission (maybe this one or this one from RPGNet, or a comment on one; I can't find the specific comment if so) that the endangered species (the Lormeans) are barely in the adventure, and thus kind of hard for the players to empathize with.
On the other hand, it was a good fit for my ongoing story. One of the things my players' ship is searching for is a race of "pyramid aliens" who millennia ago battled the mind-control fungus they fought in their first five episodes; they hadn't encountered any sign of either for a while, so it seemed like a good time for a return to that plot. In the mission as written, ancient aliens moved the planet's orbit and the machinery designed to compensate for the geological stress this caused is breaking down. I just made those ancient aliens the pyramid aliens, and added the idea that they moved it to battle the fungus (the fungal spores don't survive long outside a host if it's too hot, so they moved the planet closer to the sun to impede its spread). This gave an impressive new dimension to the powers of the pyramid aliens!
So I decided to go with the mission, just flesh it out a bit. I had the Lormeans request the away team come and inspect the facilities where they were building the evacuation fleet, so that in scene 3, I could parallel a couple crewmembers doing this while the rest crawled through the cave. A tremor would then force the away team to help the Lormeans in this facility. The Living Campaign missions (unlike the ones published in hard copy I've largely been doing until now) don't come with art, and when flipping through the Core Rulebook to see if it had any pictures could use, I found a picture of a volcano threatening a village. It's clearly a Federation colony, but it immediately gave me an idea for a parallel encounter for scene #4: while half of the away team worked to repair the ancient equipment, the other would help evacuate a group of Lormean villagers threatened by a volcano. This would give the players more of a connection to the Lormeans, and highlight the dilemma a bit: why was it okay to save these specific villagers, but not their whole society?
Here's my write-up for those two side scenes:
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the crashed SS Hypatia
(Star Trek: Voyager screen capture)
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The mission also suggests that one of the scientists have a connection to a player. I made one an old mentor for Ensign Carver, my science officer. I wanted him to push her (and thus the players) in the opposite direction of wherever their stance on the moral dilemma seemed to be going. I know a couple of my players, as real people, find the Prime Directive morally unjustified, and I suspected they would lean in favor of helping the Lormeans. (It was funny to read comments from other GMs who had the exact opposite situation!) So my plan was to use him to push reasons the crew should not help the Lormeans evacuate to the other planet; as a botanist, he saw them as an "invasive" and worried what kind of effect they might have on the native species, both literally and more metaphorically.
Lastly, I tweaked the fifth scene and added a sixth. Since my characters are all lower decks, the decision really isn't up to them, so scene 5 would end with them needing to convince the captain to do what they wanted. That would be the big climax of the episode, not fixing the equipment. Then, I didn't like that the players made the decision, and that was it, so I added a sixth scene where they would have to do what they decided: help the Lormeans, stop the Lormeans, whatever. Or, if they (say) wanted to help the Lormeans but failed to convince the captain, that would be their opportunity to do something like help them covertly. Whatever they chose, I wanted to see some consequences.
Oh, and like last time, I retitled it to be more pretentious. "Stare Decisis" is a legal term about precedent literally meaning "to stand by what is decided," and it was in the news at the time I wrote the mission because of Roe and Dobbs. It seemed apt: the crew would have to decide if they wanted to stand by what the civilian scientists had decided.
Playing the Mission
The episode's six scenes ended up breaking down into two three-hour sessions. I had five players during the first session:
- 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
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Lormean Central Headquarters
(commonly reproduced picture, original source unknown)
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And for the second, our sixth joined us:
- Claire as Mooria Loonin, Trill command officer
We have a good stable crew right now: Hayley, Cari, and Andy have been in every episode, and this was Céline and Keith's third in a row. This made Claire's fourth, though hers haven't been sequential.
Céline was my only player to never command a mission, so I put her in charge; I also felt a Vulcan would be less likely to make their decisions emotionally. I made Hayley the character with a personal connection to the Hypatia crew, since she was a scientist, and had a good backstory hook for it.
The first half, I would say, played pretty straightforwardly, which I think is typically the case with STA missions—as long as the rolls are good. In the first act or so, players typically just go around figuring out what is going on. My players investigated the crashed science vessel easily, talked to the Lormeans and scientists, and then headed off on their two separate ventures. I suggested as GM that two should go check out the assembly line, and three should go to the cave; I wasn't sure who would go where exactly, but Seleya and Vivik decided to check out the assembly line, leaving Carver, Jor, and Gurg to investigate the power readings. Seleya and Vivik had a good time dealing with the catastrophes I'd set up in the assembly plant, and made good use of their Focuses and Values; at one point, Vivik tossed the unconscious Lormean chief minister to someone else, and argued that this was an appropriate use of Conn! I allowed it. The cave stuff was not as exciting, to be honest.
The second session was where things picked up. I ran the two locations simultaneous to each other, and did turn order for them, like we were in combat: the players in the cave would all get to do their moves (a Task and a minor action) and the players dealing with the volcano the same. Whenever we went back to a location, I would spend some Threat to do something like drop a fireball or make a console explode, giving a good time element to things. The actions being simultaneous had positive repercussions: when the cave group got the geology stabilized, the volcano stopped spitting out fireballs. On the other hand, I wonder if I should have put an actual time limit for when the lava was going to hit the village: I always worry when I pick these things that I might make it so short there's no way for the players to succeed. But I guess I could always intentionally go slightly longer than I think the players need, and then spend Threat to tighten the time limit if it becomes clear the players are doing well. (And they could spend Momentum to expand it, I guess? Actually, I think this would be a good use of the Extended Consequences mechanic from the Gamemaster's Guide; I will have to give it a go in a future mission.) The players rolled very well, almost too well: they generated almost no Threat from complications, and even got (if I recall correctly) three natural "1"s!
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phosphorescent caves on Orgun II
(photograph from here)
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But overall, I think it really worked. Both groups were pretty strategic about their actions, and Gurg's player was torn because he wanted to investigate stuff (he has a Value about the pursuit of knowledge) but was needed to help with Carver's Tasks. I expected the players at the volcano to just try to evacuate the villagers onto a Lormean flyer, but they came up with a whole plan: Seleya transformed an engine component from the flyer into a bomb, and placed it so that it would expand a fissure to make it big enough to swallow up the lava flow. (This was apparently inspired by
Avatar: The Last Airbender!) I gave a series of actions they would have to perform to do this... and they succeeded, so they saved the village! I always like it when my players surprise me, and here they did so by going above and beyond in true Starfleet fashion.
After they solved the problems on the planet, the players beamed back up to the Ayrton to meet with the captain. (It was here that I added Claire's character back into the narrative; I
felt a bit bad that she had sat out so much, but there wasn't really a
way to get her character involved earlier. She seemed okay with this,
and did chime in with ideas during the planetary escapades.) The captain told them she wanted their input on the decision she needed to make. (My narrative justification for Loonin's presence was that the captain valued an opinion from
someone who knew the other players but didn't have firsthand experience with
the Lormeans, so they could be more objective.) The Ayrton's options were:
- actively aid the scientists in helping the Lormeans evacuate to Orgun III
- do nothing at all, letting the scientists proceed
- stop the scientists from helping the Lormeans
A couple NPCs laid out their take, and then the captain and other NPCs left the room to take care of something, giving the characters a chance to talk as a group about what their recommendation would be. I told them I wanted to have an in-character debate to the extent that was possible, and asked that they draw on their Values and backstories in thinking about what their answers would be. I then leaned back and let them at it. (Though I did chime in with clarifications and such occasionally.)
They knocked it out of the park!
It went on for over thirty minutes, and it was hard to get them to stop. A couple—most notably Carver, Jor, and Loonin—were in favor of helping the Lormeans resettle on Orgun III. Vivik feared that the Lormeans would become hostile to Orgun III's native sapient species, the Slithar, and wondered what could be done to stop that from happening. Carver wanted permission from the Slithar, but they were medieval-level and thus didn't have a centralized world government. Could an empty continent be found? Lots of idea were bandied about, both about what should happen and how it could be done.
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volcano threatening Lormean village
(from the Core Rulebook)
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Gurg's player drew on his Value of "Rigorous Debate" to disagree with the emerging consensus: this was a Prime Directive violation, and thus the right course of action was to remove all Federation technology and let the species die. (It's called the
Prime Directive for a reason he kept insisting.) Seleya's logical approach accorded with this, too. Gurg kept making an argument about the "settled law" of the Prime Directive, while Claire pointed out precedent from Prime Directive events in TOS and
TNG would favor intervention. So, a nice unintentional tie-in to the title I gave the episode! (Claire even mentioned
Roe/
Dobbs in her arguments, tying into the very thing that had inspired my name change.)
Eventually a fourth idea emerged: giving the Lormeans warp drive and other technologies that would let them construct an evacuation fleet that could leave their solar system, so they could settle an uninhabited Class-M planet instead. (It was even suggested they could go to Optera IV from "Biological Clock.") This Vivik was in favor of, swaying most of the group... but how could it be justified? The players came up with the argument that the Lormeans were already a post-warp society: their species had been interfered with by the pyramid aliens and the fungus, who must have gotten to the planet via FTL technology. Just as the Bajorans could be Federation members without having developed warp drive themselves, couldn't the Lormeans also receive aid from the Federation? If the pyramid aliens hadn't moved the planet, none of this would have happened at all.
They took a vote: it came out three-two in favor of the give-them-warp-drive plan. (Hayley had to go nurse our son, so she didn't get to vote, but she told me later she would have accorded with this plan.) Seleya reported the group's consensus to the captain, but she and Gurg both noted to the captain they disagreed with it.
Everyone shined in the debate, everyone had at least one great well-argued in-character moment, so I awarded everyone an extra point of Determination. (I always forget you can do this, but read something after we played the previous episode that reminded me.)
Knowing my players, I had expected them to want to help the Lormeans, and had noted in my mission notes that convincing the captain of this would be Difficulty 6 Task—the hardest Task they had ever encountered. But since the plan had escalated to "give them warp drive," I raised it to Difficulty 7! I then made an allowance for the quality of their "already-post-warp" argument and dropped it to D6 again. Seleya didn't want to make the argument herself, though, and not hearing it from the mission leader increased the difficulty (back to D7); Loonin suggested that she could make the argument as an unbiased observer, who hadn't met the Lormeans herself, and I took it back down (so, finally, D6). Claire bought a perfect D20 with Determination, more dice with a mixture of Momentum and Threat, and was aided by anyone who wanted to (so, Jor and Vivik). I did give Gurg and Seleya's players the options to work against the roll, but they declined, perhaps naturally. (Gurg, however, made a comment like, "I hope you've enjoyed your career, captain.")
They rolled, I think, seven success altogether! So the captain was convinced. But the
Ayrton had scheduled repairs coming up; the ship could only stay at Orgun II so long or arouse suspicion. They couldn't spend six months helping up until the moment the planet would explode. ("I'll have to file some very vague log entries," Captain Vizcaino murmured.)
This left us with not much time for the last scene (they kept on wanting to debate!), so I made it simple. I asked each player what they would do to help the evacuation effort, and then asked each of them to make an unassisted Difficulty 2 roll to do that. (They could be helped by the ship, though, if it made sense.) For example, Vivik said he would train the Lormean pilots, so I gave him a Presence + Conn Task. If they all succeeded, then the evacuation would go smoothly. Everyone agreed to help—even the naysayers, now that the captain had made her decision. Some used Determination, so they built up some Momentum; I wondered if I made it too easy and should have made them all Difficulty 3? Or I actually had a couple Threat tokens left; I should have increased the difficulty of a couple of the Tasks with that.
That said, though, they got a nice triumphant, if indeterminate ending. Are the Lormeans actually going to be okay? The Ayrton is on its way to Deep Space 8 for repairs and has no way of knowing for now... (Clear sequel hook here once six months have gone by in-universe.)
So overall, I think this one came out great. A couple of my players were very enthusiastic about it when it was done, and it totally felt like an actual episode of Star Trek when they had their debate. My players have made tricky calls before, but never before had they disagreed on one to this extent. Since we've gotten into "Season One," every episode has been strong, but this is definitely one that really shows off the potential of the game at its best.
Beyond the Rim of the Starlight:
- Opening Arc: A World Beyond the Starlight
- Season One
