Star Trek Adventures: Playing "Nest in the Dark" (and Wrapping Up My Summer Mini-Campaign)

"Nest in the Dark" is one of the standalone Star Trek Advnetures missions that you can buy direct from Modiphius as a PDF for a few dollars, though I am pretty sure I got my copy from a Humble Bundle. I've been intrigued by this one for a long time—it's about the player ship encountering a sort of cosmic megastructure—and had once thought it could make a good "season finale" for my previous campaign. That campaign had the players chasing down the origins of alien signals, and I thought the "Matryoshka Brain" here would be good for that. That campaign fizzled out before we got to that point, but when my new campaign started up, I knew I wanted a finale with an emphasis on science and exploration, one that might feature some moral dilemmas, and one that would explore ideas of nonhuman consciousness—my players include Ph.D.s in psychology and neurochemistry, and the former even gave her character an interest in cybernetics.

Thus it became the fourth episode of...

"Captain’s Log, Stardate 53876.0. Starfleet Command has raised questions about my handling of the Haradin prisoners we left at Outpost SE-119, but that issue will have to wait. The Diversitas has returned to the Omega Draconis system in response to a distress call from Abyss Station. The black hole at the heart of the system is destabilizing—threatening to swallow up the station. The gravimetric fluctuations are rendering it difficult to transport personnel off the station…"

Planning the Mission

The big change I made here was, of course, to tie the mission into our mini-campaign, so I'll lay that out clearly here. In the first episode, the players found that a Haradin terrorist they'd met was actually an android when it collapsed; their investigations in the second showed it had a highly complex brain but relatively simple physical construction as well as a powerful transmitter, now burnt it. The second episode also saw them find that an unknown element used in its construction was also used in the alien facility orbiting the black hole Omega Draconis A*. They discovered that facility had been designed by mysterious ancient aliens they dubbed the "Engineers" but they were not able to find any images of them or other details about them. In the third episode, they discovered  the black hole was going haywire, negative impacts rippling across the sector.

So the idea was that the Engineers were a digital intelligence living in the Matryoshka Brain; a long time ago they had been responsible for building the Omega Draconis facility in order to calm the unstable black hole, but the players' unwitting actions in episode two meant the facility was no longer doing that—and they were going to need to track down the Engineers in order to get them to repair the facility. (In the mission as written, the Matryoshka is mobile and about to brush up against an inhabited system.) The Haradin android would turn out to be a member of the Engineer civilization on a mission of exploration, much like the players themselves, on a secret anthropological survey, as we've seen Starfleet itself do in episodes like "Who Watches the Watchers?"

My goal here was to do some Prime Directive stuff, but from the other side. What happens when the Federation is the one being "protected" from an advanced civilization? What happens when there's a disaster threatening the Federation, but those advanced civilizations could stop it... but won't? (as seen on screen in episodes like "Pen Pals" and "Homeward")

The big change, thus, was to rewrite the first act. I began with an in media res teaser, with the Diversitas evacuating Abyss Station, which was falling into the black hole:

• Each round, there was first a Control + Conn Task D3 for the ship to maintain position amid the gravimetric distortions. (If they fell out of position, it would be a D4 Task to return.)
• Transporting a batch of crew from the station was a Daring + Engineering Task D3. (They could transport more than once per round, but this would increase the difficulty.)
• Complications would mean that a random player was injured by a gravimetric fluctuation, or that a piece of equipment would fail; I could induce them on purpose with 2 Threat if I wanted.
• There were four groups of people to transport, and the players had four rounds to beam them all over.
  

I also added a new Act I, Scene 1 where the players would have to figure out some way to track down the Engineers.

Additionally, this was the first episode where my player Joel would be back after a six-week absence; his character Oliver Johnson had vanished into a time anomaly during the second episode. So I wrote in that he would reappear inside a spherical structure inside the Matryoshka Brain, having inadvertently been transmitted from the Omega Draconis facility to the Matryoshka Brain. This meant a scene where Oliver reappeared, and also I would have Joel play a support character until the players actually reconnected with him.

Other than that, I mostly followed the mission as written, just making the "Engineer" Mercury who the players meet be the same one who had been in the Haradin android. I also decided to play up on some stuff in the backstory of Alita, Forest's character; Alita has a brain injury she compensates for with a cybernetic implant of her own devising, and an interest in cybernetics as a character. So I decided I wanted something like Mercury ending up in Alita's body, with Alita either sharing it or herself downloaded into an android—that would of course depend on exactly what the players decided to do.

As always, I changed the episode title to make it more pretentious. "Angels in Your Angles" seemed like a nice one for summing up the idea of advanced beings residing in pure mathematics. There's been a pattern to these changes; if you know it, you might have the same taste in indie bands as me.

Omega Draconis A*
(image of Sagittarius A* from New Scientist)

Playing the Mission

The mission took three sessions to play, basically one per act. It took a bit of scheduling, but I made sure all our regular players were there for final session. For the two absences, I once again invoked the anatid space flu.

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

Good turnout from the "main cast," though, mean that this was the only episode to feature no sessions involving our back-up recurring character, Toren as Tronnen, the ship's counselor.

The teaser I had planned turned out to be quite exciting. When they designed the ship back during our session 0, the players chose a lot of Talents that made it good at stuff involving sensors and science, but episodes 1 and 2 had largely taken place off the ship, so here they really got to make use of those Talents. On top of that, Kenyon's engineer character, Nevan, has a lot of engineering Talents that work best on the ship, but had done little on the ship, so again, he got to make use of that stuff. But as much as they did a good job, they also rolled a bunch of Complications, so I was exploding consoles and causing transporter shorts and all kinds of good stuff that kept the tension on.

My plan for Act I, Scene 2 was very vague, honestly one of the vaguest I had ever written:

• Players will need to come up with some kind of plan, ideally one that pushes them in the direction of searching out the origin of the “Engineers.” They are the ones who might have the technology to re-stabilize the black hole.
• The main benefit they would have is that the crew of Abyss Station has spent the last six weeks poring over what data they could retrieve from the remains of the alien facility. Crew can analyze this with the facilities on the Diversitas.
• Other ideas: tracing where the alien transmitters feed to; talking to the Ithik, who might have some kind of lead.
• Whatever they find, it points them toward the heart of the Ekuemene sector, an area with less stellar density than can be found elsewhere.

So I told the players, you need to figure something out, and then just leaned back to see what would happen.

They knocked it out of the park! I was so delighted. The players went through a bunch of different theories and ideas, weaving together a number of different strands and details from across the campaign. (One of the benefits of playing weekly, as opposed to monthly like in my old campaign, is that concepts sewn twelve sessions prior are much easier to keep in mind!) At one point, Debi actually totally put together exactly what was going on in terms of backstory—but I couldn't react, I had to let them figure it out for themselves, so they had no idea! It was just one of several theories proposed.

Eventually they decided there were three things they wanted to do:

1. Return to the alien facility and see if it had any data they could recover after all.
2. Study the black hole to see if there was any hint to collapsing it.
3. Get in touch with the Ithik.

My only real intervention was asking them who was going to do what. They decided that Nevan and Faraday would do task #1, T'Cant and Anthor #2, and Rucot #3; meanwhile, Loonin would have to get the Diversitas back into orbit and maintain it amid the gravitational fluctuations.

the alien facility in the Omega Draconis system
(from a game called Planetary Annihilation)

It was just so fun to watch them spitball and theorize and plan, it was like watching a real conference room scene from TNG. My players have really embraced the STA system and how it works, and how to do problem solving within it, really thinking like a real Starfleer crew. It was so fun!

The actual tasks went pretty well, too, and I responded as GM by making sure each was able to pick up some useful information. On the alien facility, they were able to find traces of the deleted information, that with the help of what Rucot got from the Ithik, they were able to recover; by analyzing the black hole itself, they were able to discover that stopping this black hole was beyond the power of Federation science. Calling back to the Ithik, by the way, was so much fun. I established that they were just playing lots of games, infuriating the Federation bureaucrats really earnestly working on resettling them. The members of the Cult of the Deathbringer in particular were just excited to be allowed to finally have fun, and were getting drunk all the time. Rucot promised to send them some kanar for their help. If we play another campaign (more on that later), I'll have to see if I can work them back in somehow.

Act II of the episode takes the player ship to the actual Matryoshka Brain; the mission as written gives a Task the players can perform to figure out what it is, but Joel and Austin recognized it as a "Dyson swarm" just from their own knowledge, so I rolled with that. Similarly, there are a number of mathematical Tasks the characters can undertake... but hey, if you play at a table with a bunch of STEM Ph.D.s, including one actually in math, and they can recognize a sequence of prime numbers or the Fibonacci sequence perfectly fine, thank you!

In the mission as written, the players beam over to a duplicate of their own ship, and one of the crew gets trapped in a bubble as a final test. I tweaked this as a way of reintroducing Joel's character of Oliver to the proceedings; having vanished from time back in episode 2, he appeared inside a sphere here in episode 4 aboard the duplicate Diversitas... and he was almost out of air. This lead into an Extended Task to free him; basically the players have to solve a logic puzzle before the bubble runs out of oxygen.

Nevan has a Talent that makes him very good at Extended Tasks, and he rolled extremely well on his very first attempt, generating enough Work to almost complete the Extended Task on the first round! I hadn't spent very much Threat yet, so I dropped a ton of it at this point (I think five or six!), each point of Threat spent eliminating one point of Work.

This turned out to make things incredibly tough indeed, because at that point Nevan began rolling very poorly, as did other players when they tried to take over the Extended Task. Typically this have been super-easy for my players... but finally I created one they struggled to complete! They did get there in the end, but man, I think both they and I were pretty stressed. But finally, they did succeed.

Like I said above, I wanted a Complication where something happened with Alita's brain, and the players gave me exactly that. Alita attempted to use her cybernetic implant to help transmit the consciousness of "Mercury" (a member of the Engineers) from a plate constituting the Dyson swarm into the Haradin android, but what happened is Mercury ended up in her body and she ended up in the android! I think this threw Forest for a loop a bit, but ended up resulting in some fun stuff. Alita, who wanted to understand cybernetics better, was able to get some detailed scans of her own consciousness operating in an android body. Forest had made delicious cinnamon rolls for our last session, and so we ended up with a series of jokes about how Mercury in Alita's body kept eating all kinds of food, especially cinnamon rolls.

The third session mostly centered around the players first communicating with Mercury, convincing Mercury to let them talk to the "Consensus," and then convincing the spokesbeing of the Consensus, "Zeus," to intervene to stop Omega Draconis A*. I set this up as a sort of Prime Directive dilemma in reverse. Building the facility to calm Omega Draconis had prevented a natural disaster—in letting the station stop operating, the argument of the Engineers was that they were restoring the "natural" state of the Ekumene sector. The players had to convince them that they ought to intervene, and they did a good job of coming up with some powerful arguments—particularly Claire as Loonin, who gave a good speech about the responsibilities and obligations toward life.

the "Matryoshka Brain"
(I can't figure out the original source of this image)

I particularly liked this, as my whole reason for calling the series (and thus the sector it takes place in) "Ekumene" is that it's ancient Greek for "the inhabited world," which gives us the modern word "ecumenical." But in a slightly less literal sense, it's the idea that the world is a unified place, that we all belong to and participate in. The action and the science is fun, but these are the ideas and ideals that make Star Trek work for me, and I was glad we got to focus on that in the last session.

I made this a Difficulty 6 Task... but I probably made it too easy in that I also let every single player contribute their own little piece to the Task, which meant they generated 10 Successes! I think I made it too easy; in retrospect I wonder if I should have let them succeed at the Difficulty 6 Task with only a normal number of assists, then spent Threat to introduce some kind of Complication, and then forced them to undergo a different incredibly difficult Task to finish. But these things are easy to think of later, and I am not always good at thinking in the moment.

The main situation resolved, the players swapped everyone back into the right body, and then the Diversitas left the influence of the Dyson swarm to discover 1) almost no time at all had passed, and 2) the black hole was totally normal and posed no threat. They also discovered, however, that Mercury had uploaded a copy of itself to the Diversitas computer—in a very fun moment, Nevan's player was finally able to use his Talent "I Know My Ship" to diagnose this, which he was always asking about but the circumstances were never right for the entire campaign!

So came the end of our last session and thus our campaign. But I would like to keep playing and I made sure to lay in some seeds for that. What's up with the Haradin has been a big ongoing thing, and the players had theorized there was some link between the Haradin and the Engineers; back in episode three, they had been flummoxed by the Haradin's confusion over how the players could not know where Harad was or why it had been invaded. Mercury, it turned out, had been an anthropologist studying the Haradin, so the Mercury program running on the Diversitas computers gave them this piece of information: "In their language, the word Harad means 'universe.'" Additionally, I think there's some good potential to see what happens with Alita's scans of the android. (The Engineers took the actual android body.)

And finally, like I said in my write-up of episode three, Captain Rucot made the somewhat dubious (in my mind, anyway) move of handing over a bunch prisoners to the Klingons. So I ended the episode and thus the whole mini-campaign by giving this on a slip of paper to T'Cant's player:

You have received new orders from Starfleet Command—you are to relieve Rucot of command and take him back to Deep Space 10 for questioning over his handling of the Haradin prisoners.

TO BE CONTINUED...

"You guys will all have to play again next summer to find out what happens next!" I declared.

Though I don't think I made perfect choices (in particular, I feel like the strand about Joel/Oliver ended up not mattering very much in either a character or plot sense), I enjoyed this final mission a lot. Good challenges, good focus on exploration, discovery, and diplomacy.

And I enjoyed the campaign a lot, too. I was a bit trepidatious about having a player captain (I did an NPC in my first campaign), but Ryan was great at playing the character appropriately. And all my players were great, really throwing themselves into the system, their characters, and the Star Trek ethos. Everyone brought something to the table, and even though we at times had seven(!) players, I don't think anyone was slighted. Overall, it was definitely one of the best gaming experiences I've had.

I meant to show this at the end... but I forgot!

At the end, when I suggested a campaign for next summer, Austin piped up—"maybe a quick set of sessions over winter break?" So I guess he liked it too!

Star Trek: Ekumene:

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