Star Trek Adventures: "The Word for Word Is Word": A Fan-Written 1E Adventure!

One of the benefits of the Star Trek Adventures format is that it accommodates absences easily. "Oh, he didn't beam down this week." "Oh, she's away at a space conference." "Oh, they've got the anatid space flu." And then next week they can be back! Much more flexible than D&D, where you need to explain why the guy who was in the dungeon with you last week suddenly isn't this week. (Or, more likely, he's suddenly not there.) So mostly I don't worry about absences and my group plays every week unless I can't make it, and people's characters pop in and out, but we can work it in easily.

But my group is in the middle of a mission that actually touches on all their characters pretty substantially, and a couple players were going to miss the last session of the episode. It felt weird to play it without them. So I decided to pause and do a side story. Originally, based on who was going to be present, I was going to make it a flashback, but then I realized someone was going to play who hadn't played last summer, meaning it had to be a flash-forward. Hopefully the current episode (more on this in a future post) ends as expected.

Anyway, this means that I needed a one-session mission. All published missions run three or possibly two sessions in my experience... so I was going to have to write it myself!

"Captain’s Log, Stardate 53912.6. I have left the Diversitas under the command of Chief Engineer Nevan Jones while it studies a previously unknown magnetar. I am currently travelling via runabout with a subset of my senior staff to a colony on the planet Maxia Beta VIII. There, we will assist in setting up a Federation medical aid program. The journey will take several days, but after our recent intense missions, I am looking forward to some time relaxing with my crew…"

Planning the Mission

archaeological research transport at warp

In my two previous STA campaigns, I have never written my own episodes—I relied exclusively on published modules, even if I substantially modified them sometimes. This summer, I find myself having to write my own for the first time in four years of running STA! But I have kept a file on my computer of ideas for adventures, many of them ripped off from books I have read. One that has stayed prominent in my memory for a long time is the idea of an AI-piloted research vessel kidnapping the player characters so that they would rescue its missing crew. This was inspired by the premise of the Murderbot novel Network Effect by Martha Wells; in fact, when I just went back to my original review of the novel, I see that I wrote that I "liked the hook of how Asshole Research Transport returned; indeed, I liked it so much that I think I will steal it for the Star Trek RPG I am DMing." It took some time, but I finally did it!

Clearly it would begin with a runabout being kidnapped... but what else? Bits of it fell into place pretty quickly once I began thinking about it: there'd have to be some kind of journey to where the vanished crew were. This would have to be inside a mountain to explain why the research transport couldn't just beam its crew back. Mountain journeys mean caves, and caves mean having to escape a collapsing tunnel. All good.

But the other thing I wanted was some kind of open-ended dilemma at the end. I realized I could get this if the players discovered that 1) the transport's lost crew was dead, and 2) they had been for some time—so the players were not its first kidnap victims. What to do about this seemingly sentient menace? They can't just leave it roaming around the galaxy kidnapping people!

This would give me a nice three-scene structure: 1) get kidnapped / explore transport, 2) move through caves, and 3) face dilemma, which seemed doable in a three-hour session. 

archaeological research transport interior

Lastly, I wanted an episode title from a They Might Be Giants song (don't ask), and I decided to go with "The Word for Word Is Word," a lyric from "Thinking Machine"—the song title seemed quite appropriate! But why would this episode title make sense? (I don't know why this bothered me; no one has ever asked me why, say, "Patagon in Parallax" was called that.) I decided to have this phrase be something the transport's AI displayed on a screen when it decoded Federation Standard, and thus to use adapted versions of the song's other nonsense lyrics as messages the players would find on the ship.

So here it is! This is a slightly cleaned up post-play version, adding some things based on what came up in action, and removing the specific references to characters and ship from my current campaign. Anyone who wants to run or adapt it is welcome to do so. And let me know if you do!

Playing the Mission

For this episode, I had four of my regulars, plus our pinchhitter, who joins us whenever we're below the full six:

• Ryan as Rucot, captain
• Debi as T'Cant, science officer
• Claire as Mooria Salmang, pilot
• Andy as Gurg bim Vurg, chief medical officer
• Toren as Tronnen, counselor 

Overall, it went good... despite some historically bad rolls! Debi, unfortunately, rolled a 19 and a 20 on some pretty simple Task early one, one I had intended to generate Momentum. She used Determination to reroll and failed again, still netting a Complication. She got her Determination back with her Veteran Talent, and attempted one more time. This wouldn't be the first bad roll. But overall, the players investigated why their runabout was inoperative effectively; I had written a suggested technical solution in my notes, but Toren came up with their own, which was rewiring equipment to bypass the transtator. I said they couldn't do this to the whole runabout (it would take hours) but did let them do it with a tricorder, and later a comm badge.

dangerous cave

I displayed the messages from the transport AI on my laptop, using PowerPoint to make them appear one letter at a time in a glowing green computer font. What I hadn't realized (but should have) is that the players would attach a lot of significance to these messages! I had intended them as interesting flavor, but they were trying to decode them, taking notes, and so on. As a result, they didn't do a lot of exploration of the vessel... but that was fine, one of my paths to making contact with the AI was speeding up the process of language assimilation.

They of course decided to help the AI, even if they were a bit apprehensive about the way they were being manhandled and manipulated by it. 

As always, it took slightly longer than I anticipated; instead of lasting about an hour, the first scene was more like seventy-five minutes. So I decided to keep the focus of the second scene strictly on the cave crawling sequence, avoiding any other dangers I had contemplated. Claire failed on the roll to find an efficient path through the mountain, so I added one Zone to my Extended Consequence challenge of getting through a collapsing cave. 

This seemed to go pretty well: good Fitness scores were what the players needed... and good Fitness scores are what only one of them had. They contemplated various options, but ended up decided to go with Gurg giving everyone an adrenaline shot. I treated this mechanically by letting everyone roll three d20s on Fitness Tasks (I think this is how the Talent Augmented Ability works, but I didn't actually look it up), but increasing the complication range to 18-20. Tronnen made it across the tunnel pretty quickly, and thanks to some very lucky rolling, Rucot wasn't far behind. Gurg and T'Cant, unfortunately, were. When the players rolled Complications, I added an extra challenge die to my five at the end of the round.

a member of the People, a coleopteran alien species

Lucky for the players, I rolled kind of badly on my first couple goes. I did have a big Threat pool... but I was conscious of the fact that we might run out of time if I made it too challenging! They ended up making it through by the end of the fourth round. Overall, I think it was an effective challenge, and I wish I'd spent some more Threat to knock some of them out.

The discovery that the archaeologists had been dead for a year was met with suitable surprise, though they were torn as to whether it was translation error or some kind of weird time phenomenon. (I didn't anticipate the latter but surely should have.) They contemplated going into the ruined city to find what killed the archaeologists, but ended up decided against it. Phew! In other circumstances I might have been okay with it... but I only had twenty minutes left!

They were nervous about telling the AI what had happened, and tried to document it as well as possible, taking detailed scans, bringing some data slates they found, and even lugging one People body back to prove that they really were killed by wild animals.

The dilemma was maybe less of a dilemma than I had hoped, but then again, we had little time left. Someone did suggest destroying the transport with microtorpedoes, but what I hadn't anticipated is that my usually utilitarian Cardassian captain, Rucot, is trying to be more thoughtful thanks to the events underway in the episode we has paused to play this one! So he played it safe. The characters decided on covertly beaming a beacon aboard the transport to track its movements, staying at the planet to see if it came back, and informing Starfleet.

ruins of a People city, deep within a mountain

I did ask what they might recommend to Starfleet once they had a larger ship at their disposal. (The Diversitas could surely abandon its magnetar mission to assist.) They suggested disabling its engines, and then sending an expedition back to its Home to tell them what had happened. Again, if I wasn't doing a one-session one-shot, I think playing out the Diversitas versus the transport would have been interesting. I felt kind of sad for the AI!

But overall I really like how it went, and I think I might run it again as an introductory adventure for another group this summer. 

The images in this post were all generated by ChatGPT following my prompts, and you are welcome to use them if you run this adventure.

Star Trek: Ekumene:

1. "Patagon in Parallax"
2. "A Terrible Autonomy"
3. "Stinks of Slumber and Disaster"
4. "Angels in Your Angles"
5. "A Thousand Miles from Day or Night" 

Specials:

1. "Hear All the Bombs Fade Away"
2. "The Word for Word Is Word"