Star Trek Adventures: Playing "Hard Rock Catastrophe"

For my new Star Trek Adventures campaign's first episode, I cast about a bit to find a suitable one. I wanted one that showed off the full parameters of the system and that emphasized teamwork and nonviolent solutions—but ideally wasn't too complicated for a group of people where only one had played STA before. I solicited some recommendations online but nothing really struck me too much; I eventually settled upon "Hard Rock Catastrophe," a standalone mission by Christopher L. Bennett. You can buy it via the Modiphius site or DriveThruRPG, but I think I got my copy in an STA Humble Bundle.

Thus I had the first episode of...

"Captain’s Log, Stardate 53872.6. I have officially assumed command of the USS Diversitas. For my first mission, Starfleet has assigned us to the Ekumene sector to chart unknown stellar formations. On the fringes of Federation space, the Ekumene sector is home to various nonaligned colony worlds, Federation scientific outposts, and a number of uncontacted prewarp civilizations. One year on from the end of the Dominion War, it is still clearly an adjustment for the crew, both to exploration, and to having a Cardassian captain…"

Planning the Mission

The premise of "Hard Rock Catastrophe" is that the player ship is summoned to a Saurian colony, where cities are being menaced by giant "Rock Beasts." It's a riff on kaiju movies like Godzilla, though the Rock Beasts themselves originate from "Mudd's Passion," an episode of the 1970s Star Trek cartoon. What the players eventually learn is that the Rock Beasts are being manipulated by a radical environmentalist group called "Destroy All Cities" (DAC), using pheromones.

As usual, I made a few changes to the design of the episode. I decided that to keep things simple, I didn't want players beaming up and down to the planet a lot, so I decided it would have a "trinimbic layer" that inhibited transporters. (This somewhat stupidly named phenomenon originates in the Voyager episode "The '37s.") Once I decided up on this, it seemed like the colony would naturally depend on a space elevator—and once I decided upon that, I realized there was an inevitable awesome climax the episode would have to have, defending the space elevator from a final all-out assault of the Rock Beasts.

The scenario has a fun structure and plot, but like some prewritten STA scenarios, the details of the scenario as written do not totally match up with the mechanics of the game. For example, there's a bit that says, "This makes the capture of Kilexian an Opposed Task from two directions, though the Players are unaware of their opposition from T’Rumiak" (p. 11), but an "Opposed Task" is a very specific thing in terms of the game of which this is not an example. I also found some of the writing assumed you were keeping track of some very fiddly stuff in some scenes, which I kept simpler, and I'm not sure some of the discussion of the timing in Act II, Scene 3 actually makes any sense.

a Rock Beast attacks
(screen capture from "Mudd's Passion")

I also worked in a few Extended Tasks—something that is for me, a key game mechanic of STA. Specifically, the chase of Kilexian in Act II, Scene 2 really seemed like it would benefit from one. This is what I came up with:

• This is an extended task with a Work track of 18, a Magnitude of 3, and a Resistance equal to the Conn of the opponent (3). Base Difficulty is 3. Kilexian should also have a chance to escape, say, if he manages to elude the players for N*2 Rounds (where N=number of players in pursuit).
• These should be Security or Conn Tasks, but what they are is up to the Players depending on what actions they take. Don’t allow the same action to be taken more than once.
• Rolling a complication means the player character has to try to stop from falling, which is Security or Conn + Fitness D2. If a character falls, they are out for one round.

As usual, I reworked some stuff to fit into my own lore. In my previous campaign, my go-to generic-species-of-the-week had been the Haradin, who have never been seen in Star Trek, but mentioned in three stories. Basically, if the module called for some kind of alien and it didn't matter who they were, I made them into Haradin so that over time some consistency and worldbuilding would accumulate. (I think this just happened twice; the players saved some Haradin from alien fungus in "We Are Not Ourselves" and encountered Haradin refugees in "Signals." If they'd ever gotten to "Convoy SE-119," the space pirates would have been Haradin.)

In "Hard Rock Catastrophe," the colony is Saurian, a species I am sure none on my players care about or remember, so I made them into Haradin. This also meant changing "Destroy All Cities" into "Return to Harad" (RTH), but basically it would be the same group. I found "Rikyu," the name of the planet, kind of ungainly, so I changed it to "Ryuku," after a real island chain I often appropriate into RPGs.

space elevator orbital terminus
(all space elevator art by Jordan William Hughes,
from Dazed Digital)

Additionally, the scenario as written has a lot of references to "Mudd's Passion," which I'm sure none of my players have ever watched, so I didn't mention that the Enterprise or Spock had been involved when the characters researched the previous appearances of the Rock Beasts; I just said they had been seen a century prior and it was known they communicated with pheromones.

I also tied it into my ongoing story arc for the mini-season, but I'll talk more about that in future entries.

Lastly, I as always changed the episode title to be more pretentious, in my preferred style for Star Trek episode titles. The Patagons are a race of mythical giants from South America according to European explorer; for something to be in parallax means it looks different from different perspectives. From one perspective, the giants in this story were hostile creatures; from another, they were victims.

Playing the Mission

As I said in my original post for this sequence, I have seven or eight (!) regular players. The episode ended up taking four three-hour sessions. This is how they broke down in terms of attendance:

space elevator travel capsules descending

• Ryan as Rucot, captain (sessions 1-4)
• Debi as T'Cant, first officer (1, 3-4)
• Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer (1, 3)
• Claire as Mooria Loonin, pilot (1, 4)
• Austin as Frector, security chief (1-4)
• Forest as Alita Faraday, medical officer (1-4)
• Joel as Oliver Johnson, science officer (1-4)
• Toren as Tronnen, counselor (2)

The first session basically covered the first act. I did a teaser first where the new captain of the Diversitas, Rucot, set up an event for his new senior staff got acquainted. Rucot being a Cardassian, this was a stress test on the holodeck! So I gave each player a Difficulty 2 Task to perform on their own. (For example, for Loonin, "You are in a crashing shuttle; pulling it out of a dive will be a Conn + Control Task Difficulty 2.") This had the double effect of letting the players get used to rolling for Tasks. Alas, Loonin was the only one to fail! Most of them succeeded, building up a little pool of Momentum.

In the first scene, the players need to stop a Rock Beast from orbit. The mission as written suggests using transporters (not an option given my introduction of the trinimbic layer), phasers (to distract or scare the creature), or the tractor beam. The tractor beam is the idea that occurred to my players; I required first a Daring + Conn Task to get the ship into position, and then a Control + Security Task to lock onto the creature. Loonin used Determination (she has the Value "Love Critters") and knocked it out of the park on the Conn Task. Unfortunately, on a Task to sustain the tractor beam, they rolled a Complication, so the tractor beam did work... but when they deactivated it, the tractor emitter burnt out. (This turned out to be a good narrative reason for some characters to sit out session 2; they were supervising repairs.)

space elevator travel capsule descending

The teaser and first scene took almost two hours, I think, with a lot of explaining the system, and a lot of thinking up bunches of different plans before committing to one. The second and third scenes took just an hour and went pretty easily, though the players attached a lot of significance to the governor of Ryuku asking them to come down to the planet before she would talk to them, meaning I ended up developing a strand about political instability on the fly.

In Act II, I had them do scenes 1 and 2 simultaneously: while one group of players (Rucot, Frector, Faraday) went to track down a smuggler who might have brought the Rock Beasts to Ryuku, another (Oliver, Tronen) went to analyze the Rock Beasts in the wild for clues. The Extended Task for the former seemed to go pretty well, though I made it way too easy in that I gave them way too much time. They had six rounds and got it done in two!

The players in the Rock Beast strand rolled complications; I had it be that (as suggested) the pheromones would make them angry. This was okay; it seemed to me they didn't totally know how to roleplay it, and I probably should have made more of it from a mechanical standpoint. (The logical thing, in retrospect, would be to add to the difficulty of Tasks involving Reason or Control. Oh well.)

space elevator planetary terminus

The players then reunited for the third scene, which we didn't get all the way through, so we picked it up at the beginning of the third session. Going into the third session, I was hopeful this would be the last, but I don't know why I thought that could possibly be the case given the third act involves two big action scenes, and we hadn't even finished the second! I worked another Extended Task into the this scene when we started the third session; while the away team worked on planting bombs to drop a cliff on the Rock Beasts, Nevan and T'Cant on the ship worked to repair the tractor beam as a backup.

There are basically two suspects for who is working with Return to Harad, General Zotabia the defense minister and Doctor K'Manehai the science minister; my players were totally suspicious of Zotabia, especially when he's really into a plan to obliterate the Rock Beasts by blowing up a key dam. I probably should have done more to make K'Manehai suspicious! The players slipped a warning to the governor during the dam scene.

Most of our third session was given over to Act III, Scene 1, which is a player assault on the RTH base. That this would take two hours seems inevitable in retrospect, given it involved six players, and it was their first ever turn-based action scene. They did a good job; there was a lot of what you want in STA, clever problem solving instead of just fighting. Nevan, for example, hacked the base doors so they couldn't be attacked without warning. At the end of the scene, T'Cant did a Vulcan mind meld to find the secrets of RTH and really unlocked quite a lot.

the cliffside city of New Akleyro, from Act II, Scene 2
(from the Financial Times)

Ultimately, taking four sessions was a blessing, because this mean that the final scene of the episode (I ended up cutting Act III, Scene 2 on the fly) could be one big action-focused session. I drew out a map of the capital city of Ryuku. The six players had to stop four Rock Beasts from getting to the space elevator in the city's center. Back during the first session, the players had had the idea to bring some portable force fields down; during this scene, they proved clutch, blocking off city streets. Since this was Loonin's first session since the first, I had her stay on the ship, operating the tractor beam to try to slow down Rock Beasts.

Players are always thinking—they concluded that if the Rock Beasts were attacking the space elevator, there had to be something in the base of the space elevator generating pheromones to summon them. "Uh, yes, of course," I said. Thus a lot of the action revolved around finding this device and moving it somewhere else. Overall, I think things were really well balanced in this encounter, with just one Rock Beast getting all the way to the elevator and injuring a player before the ship grabbed that Rock Beast with the tractor beam and tossing it down the street! Again, the players were able to all use their various abilities in concert really well.

Overall, I found this a fun one to play, even if the details of the scenario's mechanics are occasionally a bit fiddly. It has some good combat and some good science mysteries. I think the big disappointment was that there's little room for that Star Trek staple of diplomacy; my players kept trying to reason with their opponents, but they are all fanatics who can't be reasoned with!

Star Trek: Ekumene:

1. "Patagon in Parallax"
2. "A Terrible Autonomy"