Star Trek Adventures: Playing "Convoy SE-119"

"Convoy SE-119" is another installment of the "Living Campaign," a set of free Star Trek Adventures given away on the Modiphius web site. When my first STA campaign fizzled out in the middle of "A Plague of Arias," I had planned on using it as our very next episode—in fact, I had gotten as far as writing the entire thing up!

So I was eager to actually get to use the work I had put into it. Additionally, I felt its combat focus would be a nice contrast to the more exploration- and science-heavy missions that made up the rest of the campaign. During our "session zero" my one player who carried over from my first campaign to my second, Claire, opined that one thing she hadn't liked about the first was that it took place in a region of space cut off from the Federation, and thus hadn't featured very many familiar Star Trek aliens like the Klingons. Well, "Convoy SE-119" had Klingons galore.

Thus it became the third episode of...

"Captain’s Log, Stardate 53897.6. After a month of routine charting of stellar formations, the Diversitas has finished a short refit at Deep Space 10. We haven’t been assigned our new mission yet, but we are scheduled to depart tomorrow. The crew is enjoying a day off before we receive our new orders…"

Planning the Mission

The premise of this mission as written is that the Klingons are setting up an outpost in the Shackleton Expanse, and the player ship joins a Klingon vessel in escorting a Klingon convoy carrying materials. This was an easy fit for my campaign. I had it so that the Klingons had abandoned an outpost in the Ekumene sector years ago so they could concentrate on the Klingon-Cardassian War; now that the Dominion War was over, the Klingons were looking to reactivate it. The convoy escort is needed because Orion pirates have been harassing shipping in the Shackleton Expanse.

I'm coming to like the Living Campaign missions because they're often a little less detailed and... I don't know, fussy, than some of the other prewritten STA missions. Thus, the work you do as the DM is more about fleshing out what's there than changing what's there. I don't think I changed a lot here.

the convoy travels through the Ekumene sector
(unless otherwise specified, all art is from The Klingon Empire Core Rulebook)

My two big changes were probably this. One, I tied the mission into the ongoing campaign a bit. In the original, like I said, there are Orion pirates; I did my usual thing and made them into Haradin pirates. When I wrote this up for my original STA campaign, I had the idea that the reason the pirates had gotten more bold recently was because they had just been taken over by Tulana Vulko, the Orion pirate who served as the antagonist of "A Plague of Arias." 

Here, I (almost at the last minute) had the idea that the pirates would now be under the command of General Zotabia, the Haradin villain of the campaign's first mission, "Hard Rock Catastrophe." Having escaped from prison, he was now organizing unaffiliated groups of Haradin into pirates... but why? I also wanted to highlight some worldbuilding ideas relating to the Haradin I'd had in my head since my first campaign but never had cause to use.

chaos on the bridge of the IKS MupwI'

Additionally, the mission as written features danger from gravimetric fluctuations; I knew my fourth episode was going to return to the black hole from the second ("Abyss Station"), which would be undergoing expansion; I set that up by making the gravimetric fluctuations be the consequences of what had happened in the second episode, rippling throughout the sector via subspace. (And thus leading to a nice cliffhanger where the crew receives a distress signal from Abyss Station.)

The other change was to add Extended Consequences to a sequence where the convoy is stranded and pirates are coming closer. This seemed like a natural fit (but the technique was added to STA after "Convoy SE-119" was written). I put them into turn-based mode (each player could undertake one Task or assist in a Task per round) with these parameters:

• This is an Extended Consequences scene, with Work Track 20 and magnitude 4.
• Four setbacks:
• Setback #1: A Haradin pirate fleet is detected at extreme sensor range.
• Setback #2: A gravimetric spear damages an additional transport in the convoy, which will need to be evacuated.
• Setback #3: The pirate fleet detects the convoy and begins heading toward it.
• Setback #4: The pirate fleet arrives.
• Every failed Task or complication results in the rolling of 6 Challenge Dice. The GM can also opt to roll by paying 2 Threat to create a Complication. [Only do this if things seem to be going really well for the players, or if they are purposefully giving you Threat.]

The last change I made was more minor, and mostly dictated by practical logistics. I like to use my Eaglemoss models for things like space combat... and I only had two Eaglemoss models suitable for being unaffiliated pirate ships, since by and large I only collected Starfleet ships. So General Zotabia's ship became a "Merchantman" (seen most prominently in Star Trek III) and the other pirate ship an old Class-J freighter (seen in the original series episode "Mudd's Women" and mentioned in "The Menagerie"), purchased at surplus by the pirates.

And, of course, I changed the episode title to be more pretentious, to "Stinks of Slumber and Disaster." This meant the convoy name would probably not come up at all, so I made "SE-119" the name of the outpost the Klingons were going to reactivate. (It only occurs to me now that "SE" probably stands for "Shackleton Expanse"! Oh well.)

Playing the Mission

The mission ended up taking just two three-hour sessions to play, our shortest of the campaign. Illnesses and trips meant that its first installment featured just four players; I dealt with this narratively by saying half the senior staff was sick with the anatid space flu.

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

I was a bit worried about only having four players, but this ended up allowing more space for some good role-playing. As suggested in the mission as written, I had things begin in the bar on the space station. I asked my players who would likely to be spending their last night of freedom there, and that was Tronnen (the Klingon counselor) and T'Cant (the Vulcan XO). This was perfect, because I wanted the Klingons to get into a dispute with the Starfleet crew, and I was fairly certain Tronnen would rise to the bait. The Diversitas having a Cardassian captain (on exchange) was a great hook for conflict; the players overheard the Klingons ranting about how the Federation was acting as though it had lost the war, purposefully "subjugating" itself to the Cardassians. Despite admonitions from T'Cant, Tronnen told the Klingons to quiet down; the lead Klingon, Akul, ended up challenging Tronnen to a duel. To my delight, Toren decided his character would choose the form of a dance-off! Tronnen beat Akul (T'Cant's focus in Art being clutch on the assist), leading to humiliation, and Akul declaring, “You have not heard the last of Akul, son of Jartokk!”

The next scene began with Rucot and T'Cant attending a briefing with the CO of Deep Space 10, and their players did a good job of playing up the comedy of T'Cant telling Rucot what had happened in the bar the previous night. I really wanted to lean into the fact that Rucot is a Cardassian in this episode, which we hadn't really done, so I had the CO of DS10 commit a lot of microaggressions toward him.  One of the real fun things about the episode became the way that Rucot and T'Cant would work together to manage Captain Akul's prejudice against the Cardassians.

engineering on a Klingon freighter

The other big character thing I layered into the episode was that the engineer, Nevan, is half-Betazoid—the product of a one-night stand, and thus he has no training in his empathic powers. Since he mostly sticks to his engines, he's not hit too hard by emotion... but here he had to repair a Klingon vessel and got hit by a wave of extreme emotions once he boarded it! I made all Tasks on a Klingon ship +1 Difficulty for him until the issue was resolved. This made a nice character arc across the course of the episode. Eventually, he had the idea to mentally conceptualize the Klingon cacophony as a song, and thus integrate it into his own understanding of music (Nevan sings sea shanties to relax).

Overall, I would say this one played out pretty straightforwardly. In the Extended Consequences, they triggered the first three Setbacks with bad rolls; I purposefully dropped two Threat  at the right point so that the first session ended with the arrival of the pirates.

In the second session, we did my first-ever space combat... I have been totally avoiding it in ten previous episodes as an STA GM! I tried to not go too deep into the complexities; I didn't give each individual Haradin fighters moves, telling the players, "If things are going well for you, assume they are going well for everyone; if things go badly for you, assume they are going badly for everyone." I also emphasized that the point of space combat in Star Trek is rarely pounding the other ship into submission, but coming up with some kind of clever solution.

the convoy in battle!

The players did great! With some trapped on a Klingon freighter, the rest (now recovered from the anatid space flu) came up with a plan. When I told them the one Haradin vessel was a surplus Federation ship, they suggested they use prefix codes against it. I didn't let them do this... but since it was a Federation ship, they were able to use its schematics to determine that its baffle plate was a weak point. Loonin at helm lined up a shot, Frector at weapons made it, and they disabled the engines of the Class-J freighter. Then they took it under their tractor beam; at that point, the Klingon battlecruiser finally joined the battle, and the other pirates fled to fight another day.

I did kind of lose track of the enemy ships during the battle; I think there was one round I forgot to give any of them actions! There's a lot to keep track of in this context. But I do think it was probably challenging enough as is, and next time I can do better.

The characters got to interrogate the pirates, which was good for Frector's player; Frector has a Talent that helps her in social conflict against people susceptible to bribery... but all their opponents in the first two episodes were fanatics, rock monsters, or robots! But she was able to find out a lot about the Haradin pirates... though much of what they discovered confused rather than clarified.

Overall, this was a fun one. I think the players enjoyed the different kinds of challenges it threw at them, and the stuff they did with the Klingons especially, the challenge of managing Akul's ego. I look forward to seeing if the stuff with the Haradin pirates has any repercussions down the line.

Outpost SE-119
(from Star Trek Online, via Memory Beta)

At the very end, they helped the Klingons settle into Outpost SE-119. The Klingons threw a party, and I asked what each character would do. Rucot learned that he had won the grudging respect of Captain Akul ("I used to think the only good Cardassian was a dead Cardassian, but perhaps there is one good one!"), and gave him a present: the captured Class-J freighter.

"What of its crew?" I asked.

"Oh, I hand them over, too."

"You give a bunch of prisoners to the Klingons!?"

"Well, I'm a Cardassian. They're guilty; they deserve to be punished."

Nothing makes a DM cackle internally like a player making a totally in-character choice that will have ramifications down the line...

Star Trek: Ekumene:

1. "Patagon in Parallax"
2. "A Terrible Autonomy"
3. "Stinks of Slumber and Disaster"
4. "Angels in Your Angles"