Star Trek Adventures: Playing "The Siege of Starbase Epsilon-12"... on Christmas!

This summer, when I was running my Star Trek Adventures campaign, I was also watching season two of Strange New Worlds. (Me to my wife: "'I fly the ship' is clearly Ortegas's Value.") When I got to the episode "Under the Cloak of War," I went, "I want to do that!" Specifically, "Under the Cloak of War" is a flashback about what a couple characters did during the Federation-Klingon War before the series started; it has a much different tone to the rest of SNW.

My STA campaign was set after the Dominion War, but the backstories my players had put together established that some of the had served on the ship during the war, with a slightly different crew. So could I do an episode set during the Dominion War? And make it super grim and very depressing? But the problem I had was that I can only fit four episodes into a summer campaign; if I saved this idea for a hypothetical campaign next summer, would I want to make one of my four episodes a flashback?

An answer arrived when, during the last session of the campaign, one of my players suggested a winter break reunion. That seemed like the perfect opportunity for a one-off story, especially given that not everyone from the summer would be available to play this time out.

So I reached out to my players and determined I had enough interested to run it. Thus I had to find a suitable mission! I wanted something set during a war, something grim, but also something with not very much space combat, since it's the one aspect of STA that has never clicked for me. And, to be honest, I didn't want a whole lot of ground combat either; I wanted it to still be Star Trekky and let my players show off their diverse skills.

I reached out on the STA facebook group and someone pointed me at The Federation-Klingon War Tactical Campaign, a sourcebook on how to run a whole campaign set during Discovery's first season. I read through the missions until coming to "The Siege of Starbase Epsilon-12" and it clicked for me immediately. [When I played the mission and wrote this up, I didn't know who wrote the scenario, but I've subsequently learned it was Alison Cybe.] A little bit of combat, but lots of other good use of STA mechanics, something for every one to do... and so grim the mission opens with a note to read your players about how sometimes people die and you can't do anything about it! So I had the basis for...

"Captain’s Log, Stardate 51963.1. The Diversitas has been assigned to transport a special tactical team to its new assignment on the Cardassian front. Our ship’s doctor, security chief, and pilot are currently off ship on detached duty, which is unfortunate, as I understand that the tactical team’s ordnance expert and surgeon both served with our own Mooria Loonin before the war.
     "As the war enters its ninth month, I find the crew’s spirits particularly low. Even with the Romulans joining the Allies, we are fighting a defensive war that seems to be progressing nowhere, the Dominion chipping away at Federation territory one system, one planet, at a time. Though the Diversitas has been spared any frontline actions thus far, everyone on the crew knows someone who has been touched by the conflict. The mood has been brought even lower due to the fact that, for our human crew anyway, on Earth, today would be Christmas Eve. I am told some crew have decided to hold a small celebration in the ship’s bar."

Planning the Mission

Science Station Eldorado Omega under attack
(from the Federation-Klingon War Tactical Campaign;
I don't think my players noticed that they're Klingon ships)

The premise of "The Siege of Starbase Epsilon-12" is that the player ship receives a message sending it to a science outpost under attack from the Klingons. The first act is getting there and battling the Klingons, chasing them off. 

The second act is the heart of the mission: the players need to evacuate 600 scientists from the station... but they can only beam 20 every thirty minutes... and in eight hours, the Klingons will return. On top of this, 15 scientists will die every thirty minutes from their injuries... and 50 will die every thirty minutes from a radiation leak in the station's reactor! The players have a lot of stuff to do: saving lives, fixing reactors, repairing the station (if you fix the docking arm and/or station transporters, you can increase the rate of evacuation), and so on. 

Jem'Hadar attack ships
(image courtesy Daystrom Institute Technical Library)

On top of this, there's a number of timed incidents, such as a series of plasma fires, or the discovery that a torpedo has buried itself in the station infrastructure. You can also, as GM, spend Threat to do things like injure players, break things they already fixed, or even reveal that a Klingon commando is hidden on the station.

All of this was very adaptable to the Dominion War setting; I just made the initial enemies Jem'Hadar instead of Klingons, and had the reinforcements who come at the end be Cardassians. The only weak part of the mission as written is that the third part is another space battle; going into our first session, I left that part blank, figuring I'd decide on a third act once I saw how the first two went! Other than this, I don't think I made many changes.

Commander L'San
(from the Alpha Quadrant Sourcebook)

As always, I made some cosmetic reskinnings. "Starbase Epsilon-12" became "Science Station Eldorado Omega"; the moon the station orbited (did it have a name? I don't remember) became Matamoras IV-C. The station commander, L'San, is a Vulcan woman... but we'd done a science station commanded by a Vulcan woman back in "Abyss Station" (and I wanted her to cameo here), so I made L'San into an Aurelian man.

Also, as I planned the mission, I got the idea that we wouldn't just be playing around Christmas, but that it ought to be Christmas, so I set the whole mission on December 24-25, 2374... worst Christmas ever! I named all the acts after Christmas carols, and the scenes after lyrics from them:

1. If We Make It through December
1. Got Plans to Be in a Warmer Town
2. I Shiver When I See the Falling Snow
2. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
1. Let Nothing You Dismay
2. To Save Us All from Satan's Power
3. Tidings of Comfort and Joy
3. Soul Cakes
1. The Dogs at Your Front Door
2. Any Good Thing to Make Us All Merry
   

Jem'Hadar torpedo embedded in station infrastructure
(screen capture from DS9: "Starship Down")

(And, as always, I changed the name of the episode to be more pretentious.)

Playing the Mission

Of my players from the summer, four were able to play in this one-off. Of those four, two had characters established as being on the USS Diversitas during the Dominion War:

• Debi as T'Cant, first officer
  
• Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer

The Diveristas had a different captain, security chief, science officer, and medical officer during the war, so my usual captain (Ryan) and usual security chief (Austin) would have to play different characters; I suggested they switch it up and play different roles, too, which they embraced. That gave me:

• Austin as Stojan Mayer, captain
• Ryan as Phalnox Drin, science officer

Admiral Ross: "Merry Christmas, captain."
(I'm not sure what episode this screen capture is from)

I also reached out to two players from my original campaign who I liked playing with a lot. They hadn't wanted the three-month weekly commitment of my summer campaign, but were excited to join in on this smaller commitment... and even agreed to reprise their characters! They had been fresh-faced ensigns in 2371, so things were perfect for them to be a little bit further along in 2374. I made them members of special tactical squad being transported by the Diversitas:

• Cari as Jor Lena, ordnance expert
• Andrew as Gurg bim Vurg, surgeon

I encouraged the players to lean into the Christmas stuff, and they got into it; our "teaser" was a depressing ship's Christmas party interrupted by orders from Admiral Ross sending the Diversitas to Eldorado Omega.

Jem'Hadar battlecruiser
(image courtesy Ex Astris Scientia)

Playing the first act, though, confirmed to me that either 1) space combat in STA is terrible, or 2) I am totally misunderstanding it. It's basically impossible for my players to win! Even if they score, say, seven Damage, that gets eaten up by the Resistance the enemy vessels have... which then in turn gets eaten up by shields, meaning it takes forever to score any meaningful damage. And it takes a bunch of Breaches to destroy a ship. So I fudged it, but tried to do so consistently: first shields are taken down, then it gets eaten up by Resistance; if the players get a couple Breaches, the enemy ship is destroyed.

Thankfully, anyway, my characters got creative; they made a holographic image of their ship and remote-controlled torpedoes to come out of it, distracting one of the Jem'Hadar ships. Once they disabled one of the ships, they tractor beamed it into a second, causing the third to flee. This took up basically the whole first session. At one point, they lost all their shields, but some good rolling by Kenyon brought them completely back up. By the end of the first session, though, I definitely didn't want to do another space battle for act three. I came up with an idea for a space chase and a mechanic to implement it.

I had estimated that act two would take up the entirety of the second session... after three hours of actual play, we had got through four of its eight hours! The mission as written requires a lot of decision-making about who should do what when, so it proved pretty time-consuming, especially as my players got to grips with their options. In session three, they finished act two in just under two hours, and thus we had just over an hour for my space chase! So I did it in a pretty simplified way.

Overall, I think act two was very effective. I used glass gems to represent the station personnel, each representing five. As they beamed from station to ship, I moved them from one jar to another; as they died, I dropped them into a pile labeled dead! The game mat I used to track who was doing which task that took how much time (very important).

battling a Jem'Hadar commando
(from the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook)

The players did good jobs thinking through who should do what task; Andy as Gurg focused on healing, of course (any interval where no one succeeds at a certain Medicine task, fifteen people die), and refused to leave that task to work on others despite the captain's orders, a good Value-based moment I gave him extra Determination for. Austin taking a Talent making the captain good at time management turned out to be critical, shaving lots of time off some of the longer tasks.

I did spend four Threat to introduce a Jem'Hadar commando... who immediately got KO'd by the science officer! But Ryan had deliberately (because of the wartime theme) built a science officer to also be good at fighting, complete with focus in MMA. And unfortunately I had no Threat to make the Jem'Hadar roll better. I had thought about trying to kill off his character because he was the one who could die, but now I'm into Ryan's idea that after the war, Drin gave up his Starfleet career to become an Orion pit fighter as "the Dominion Dominator"! 

Just pretend this is a New Orleans-class ship and that there's no wormhole.
(from the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook)

Going into the last session, I thought it would set the tone to get the players to read out personal logs, so I incentivized this by offering an extra point of Determination to every player who wrote one up and read it at the session's beginning. Five of the six players did this, and I really enjoyed the logs... but that did mean going into the last session the group had eleven points of Determination available to it! They got pretty low on Momentum; had they not had all that Determination, I probably could have forced them to give me more Threat and made things a bit harder. But I liked the log thing, and I think in future campaigns I might ask one player to do it per session.

Lots of people did die... (140 I think), but few who could have actually been saved, I think; the players did save most everyone they could have, and they were creative and thoughtful in their application of Star Trek–style thinking to the problems they were facing. Maybe just having six players made it too easy? Third act aside, I found the scenario a strong one, and a good one for what I wanted; my players reported enjoying it.

Science Station Eldorado Omega
(this is a starbase design used on Discovery/Strange New Worlds
...but I flipped it upside down to match the battle image above!)

During the first session, Ryan got AI to write and perform a sea shanty–style Christmas carol about our battle: I found it pretty amazing. You can hear it here; my favorite line is, "And Jor Lena, she was laughing, her console aglow, / 'Let’s deck their halls with torpedoes, ho-ho!'"

Star Trek: Ekumene:

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

Specials:

1. "Hear All the Bombs Fade Away"