As always, I end my Hugo posts for the year with my takes on what won. Although, this year they haven't released the full stats yet, so it's possible I'll do another once we get the nominating data, and I can tell to what extent deserving finalists were robbed... or to what extent we were spared even worse finalists! I have also been thinking of bringing back my post on "No Award" that I did a couple times. We'll see!
Last year, I wrote that "[n]ext year's
Worldcon is the U.S., so an evening ceremony will actually be in the
evening, making it a lot easier for me to tune in." What I had forgotten about is that Worldcon would be in Seattle, so an 8:30 ceremony would be at 11:30. I didn't make it! I did, however, wake up at 5:00am because one of my kids crawled into bed with me and I couldn't get back to sleep, so I immediately checked my phone for the results, and texted my friend who was a finalist... not thinking about the fact that for him it was 2:00am at that point... and it had probably been a very long night! I did pull up the livestream that day, but I just jumped around until I found the bit where Jordan gave his speech.
So what did I think of the results? How did they compared to my own votes? I will say, I did really like the fancy graphs they included in the stats packet to demonstrate how the instant runoff works in ranked choice voting. They haven't released, however, the runs for placements lower than first yet, so I don't know how anything I ranked first ultimately fared.
I ranked this second, and actually predicted it would win: "my guess is Tainted Cup, which I think was a very solid book and
thus the kind of book a lot of people might rank in second, allowing it
to win on transfers." Well, I was right that it won, but if you look at the data, it had a commanding lead from the beginning, which it held onto throughout, so I was wrong about what the reason would be. My beloved Ministry of Time got the fifth-most amount of first-round votes... but it's hardly surprising. What did surprise me is there wasn't more of a direct relationship between the two finalists by Adrian Tchaikovsky; when his Service Model was eliminated, the votes did not all transfer to Alien Clay.
Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised by the Hugo electorate. My prediction was that "something I ranked below 'No Award' will win Best Novella"! The Tusks of Extinction, though, had a small lead from the first round that it continually built upon via transfers, even though usually some other work got more transfers every time something was eliminated. Particularly, it picked up a lot of transfers from The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (this makes sense, because that was the other actually good finalist). In the last round, the elimination of The Butcher of the Forest gave more transfers to What Feasts at Night than Tusks, but this wasn't enough to put What Feasts over the edge.
I found Best Novelette weak this year, and I predicted "Kritzer or Pinsker will win Best Novelette, with an outside chance that it's Leckie"... and yes, it was Kritzer! Thus I'm not too disappointed even though these creepypasta-style stories by Kritzer and Pinsker that keep getting nominated aren't really my bag.
"Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole"
???
Oof. Interestingly, both "Stitched to Skin" and "Omelas Hole" got 279 first-place votes in the first round... but as lower-ranked finalists were eliminated, "Omelas Hole" picked up noticeably fewer transfers almost every time. Evidently it was quite polarizing! I'll be very curious to see where it places once the runs for second through sixth place are released. I'm also curious about Kowal's "Marginalia," which received the third-most amount of first-place votes, but was eliminated sooner than you might expect.
Finally, a work of actual quality wins Best Graphic Story! This basically crushed it, with a commanding lead it never lost. The Deep Dark was eliminated last, so clearly the voters had some sense this year.
I did not imagine this! I predicted my friend Jordan would lose to one of the works about the Hugo Awards themselves, but instead he won!! I'm thanked in the Acknowledgements to this book, so it's basically like I won a Hugo, of course. (Where's my rocket???) If you look at the stats, Speculative Whiteness actually starts with the third-most votes in the first round, and indeed, one of the works about the Hugos themselves is in second (and briefly in first, during round two). But when the other "actually a book" finalist (Track Changes) is eliminated, Speculative Whiteness slides into the lead; "actually a book" voters for Best Related Work, unite! I didn't expect the YouTube video about the Star Wars hotel to do so well, though.
At least it wasn't Mad Max, I guess. My prediction that part two of Dune would not have the same oomph as part one was totally wrong. I will predict now that Dune, Part Three will win in 2027. Flow was robbed! (Actually, it did quite well.)
Last year, I wrote that, "Someday Star Trek will win again!" but I didn't think it would be this year. This felt more like a win for the cumulative quality of Lower Decks rather than its somewhat mediocre finale per se. I will need to update my post about the history of Star Trek at the Hugo Awards now!
My top two choices were the top two finalists! Nice! Interestingly, Heavenly Tyrant had more first-round votes than any other finalist, but picked up very little on transfers as other finalists were eliminated. It was in a very tight race with Sheine Lende until the very end!
As always, I had a good time even when reading bad books, and am thankful for the exposure to good work I otherwise would not have come across: this year that's Agatha All Along, "The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video," The Deep Dark, Flow, I Saw the TV Glow, The Ministry of Time, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, The Tainted Cup, "Three Faces of a Beheading," Track Changes, and The Tusks of Extinction. Some of these works I had heard of but probably never gotten around to; many I had never even heard of! In particular, I look forward to reading the sequel to The Tainted Cup when it hits paperback, and to reading more short fiction from Thomas Ha, Isabel J. Kim, and Arkady Martine.
Look forward to more posts about the 2025 awards, I think, once more data is available, and an update to my Star Trek and the Hugos post. But this is it for now!
Every year after I vote in the Hugo Awards, I read the oldest Hugo-winning novel I haven't previously read. This year, that brings me to the winner for 1967, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which I picked up some five years ago (after really enjoying Heinlein's previous winner, Double Star) but never got around to.
If you're a fan of classic print sf, this book probably doesn't need a lot of introduction; it's set in the twenty-first century, when Earth's moon is a penal colony. The inhabitants of the moon decide to declare independence, and the novel follows the course of this revolution, told from the first-person perspective of Mannie, a maintenance worker who has a special relationship with the computer that runs the moon, which he nicknames Mike.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
I haven't read as much Heinlein as some, but I've read enough to know he was very much interested in what the obligations of government were to the people, what the obligations of people were to the government, and what the obligations of people were to each other; that's the key question in his earlier Hugo winners, Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land (neither of which I read as part of this project because I read them in high school), for example. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress reads as the ultimate extension of this line of thought, its most thorough explanation. I know enough about Heinlein to know he doesn't necessarily endorse every idea promulgated here, but more that he liked to explore a question and come at it from different angles. In The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, Farah Mendlesohn says that the book reflects "both the degree to which Heinlein believed in the community..." (which certainly sets him apart from most would-be libertarians!) "...and the degree to which he was beginning to despair of the ability of Americans as individuals to understand their role in creating that community."
Like any Heinlein book, it's highly readable. Mannie is an affable narrator, and the characters are fun (so long as you can filter Wyoh through Heinlein's ideas about women, which admittedly not every reader is going to be able to do; I also enjoyed the role of Hazel, so I know I will get to read more about in The Rolling Stones, which I plan to read next). The lunar society is well thought out, which interesting worldbuilding, and I enjoyed the mechanics of the revolution being front and center. I once thought about doing a study of revolutionary violence in science fiction (I'm doubtful I ever will do this now), and this surely would have been front and center if I had.
Unfortunately, as the novel goes on, I found it gets duller. It struck me about halfway through that The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was a variant of a novel I'd read before—or rather, a novel I'd read before was a variant on it—Ursula K. Le Guin's The Disposessed, which is also about an anarchist revolution on a resource-deprived lunar colony of a largely capitalist planet. Not in the sense that Le Guin ripped off Heinlein or anything, but in the sense that it seems to me Le Guin was clearly in dialogue with Heinlein. (I'm not the first person to make this connection, of course; there's a 1994 SFS article by Donna Glee Williams with the great line, "The similarities are impressive. Why then does Heinlein's book inspire some readers to run out, buy a gun, and vote Republican, while Le Guin's book opposes it (non-violently, of course) on every point?") The most noteworthy comparison to me was that, in Le Guin's book, everything is hard. Hard because of the realities of life on a hardscrabble satellite of course (and Le Guin even makes things easier for her anarchists by giving Anarres a breathable atmosphere), but also hard because taking political ideals and putting them into practice is never easy for any number of reasons: faults of logic, contingency, aspects of human nature.
In MIHM, though, nothing is hard, because you have Mike, the supercomputer who always knows the answer. Though some would argue the role is also distributed to the professor, Mike is probably the most extreme example I can imagine of Heinlein's "competent man," the person who can figure out anything and make it happen. You are never in doubt the revolution will succeed, because you soon come to realize that Mike will have the solution to every problem. To me, it feels like an admission that making a new society is very difficult, but instead of making that the topic of the novel, as Le Guin did, Heinlein elides it by having Mike solve every problem. So though MIHM remains readable throughout, because Heinlein is a strong writer, the book kind of got boring as it progressed.
Heinlein won the Best Novel Hugo Award four times, and this was the last of them. He would be a finalist three more times, though, in 1974 (Time Enough for Love), 1983 (Friday), and 1985 (Job). Of those, I've read Friday, and while it just predates when I took up book-blogging, so I have no review of it, I remember finding it overly long, aimless, and self-indulgent; Mendlesohn says that Moon is a Harsh Mistress is "short, sharp and punchy, the very last of Heinlein's novels to be so." In a phenomenon we continue to see in the present day, once a writer gets onto the Hugo ballot a few times, they often continue to recur on it even once they've passed the point where they're doing anything Hugo-worthy.
I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus
other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: The Rolling Stones by Robert A. Heinlein
Inkers: Michael Bair, Barry Kitson, Mark Propst, John Stokes
Colorist: Pat Garrahy
Letterers: Ken Lopez
Like the previous installment of this series (see below), this one covers a story that is arguably pretty tangential to the Blackhawks. But I couldn't see how I wouldn't like this book, so I really wanted an excuse to buy it and read it sooner rather than later.
This book comes from a (somewhat odd, in retrospect) period of DC history where Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman were not founding members of the Justice League, thanks to various changes in continuity introduced following Crisis on Infinite Earths. Thus, the main characters are the Flash (Barry Allen), Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Black Canary (Dinah Laurel Lance), Aquaman, and the Martian Manhunter. The story chronicles the first year of the JLA, picking up from them fighting off an alien invasion. They organize as a group, face various crises, discover that the alien invasion they fought off is not quite over, try (and fail) to recruit Superman, and learn about each other and themselves and how to work as a team.
I loved it. This is, as far as I am concerned, perfect superhero comics. This should be of little surprise to anyone familiar with the other work of the creative team; Mark Waid is, in my opinion, one of the all-time greats, able to unite continuity with characterization in really compelling ways. I haven't read much by his frequent collaborator Brian Augustyn, but Waid sings his praises in the intro, so clearly they are simpatico. Definitely also simpatico is Barry Kitson; Kitson came out of the UK comics scene (specifically, of course, Transformers), but really won himself over to me with his amazing five-year run on L.E.G.I.O.N., where he went from pencilling the title to plotting it and then scripting it. That was, I believe, where he first worked with Waid, who scripted the title for a year. After JLA: Year One, the two would work together on the excellent Legion of Super-Heroes "threeboot".
I understand why Batman and Wonder Woman couldn't be founding members of the JLA in the post-Crisis continuity—Batman was supposedly an "urban legend" in the post–Batman: Year One comics, which would hardly be true if he was giving Justice League press conferences, and George Pérez's Wonder Woman reboot moved her origins up to the present day—and I can also see why the editors of the Superman titles might not want him in the JLA in the present day—presumably they didn't want his actions in that book to constrain what they were doing in theirs—but it's not clear to me why Superman couldn't have been a past member of the JLA. But I guess it worked out; I don't think this story would have been anywhere near as good if these five characters were outclassed by a hero of Superman's power and narrative significance. from JLA: Year One #7 (art by Barry Kitson & Michael Bair)
When I was a young comics fan, I used to make fun of Aquaman. This book made me feel bad for that. from JLA: Year One #3 (art by Barry Kitson)
All of this is to say, I think this creative team was entirely on the same page, and what was on that page is beautiful. I like my superhero comics to be character-driven and fun, and this is undoubtedly both. One of the benefits of this odd team is that they have a lot of good hooks for characterization, especially early in their superheroic careers. Aquaman is trying to adjust to living on the surface world, where he feels like an alien of sorts; I liked the idea that he mumbles compared to people from the surface because of how sound propagates more loudly underwater.
I think Hal is probably the one who gets the fewest character moments, actually, but he's fine, even if the playboy thing is laid on a bit thick. (I do, however, think the decision to call Tom Kalmaku "Pie" was not really any better than "Pieface" surely.)
Black Canary is a real highlight of the book, which as a Dinah Laurel Lance stan I very much appreciated. Post-Crisis, Black Canary was split into two characters: Dinah Drake (later Dinah Drake Lance), who was the Justice Society's Black Canary, and Dinah Laurel Lance, her daughter. But in most of the comics I've read, this is a fact of backstory, not something dealt with in the narrative; one of the benefits of going back to Black Canary's origin is actually seeing how she relates to her mother. The elder Dinah wants to mold the younger into her own image, but the younger Dinah must find her own path. There is a lot of good JSA stuff in the book; Dinah is often comparing her new colleagues to the heroes she grew up alongside, but also she discovers that those heroes weren't so perfect, as Waid and Augustyn make good use of the revelation from Starman that the elder Dinah had an affair with Ted Knight, the original Starman.
Honestly, I was a bit skeptical about going back over this ground, but the story did a great job with it. from JLA: Year One #4 (art by Barry Kitson & Michael Bair)
I think Barry Allen's thread is less involved than either Black Canary's or Martian Manhunter's, but Waid and Augustyn and Kitson do well by him. (Which I guess makes sense, as they cowrote an acclaimed and long run on The Flash, even if it was about Wally West.)
Reading this book made me think I really must get around to reading some actual Martian Manhunter comics someday. from JLA: Year One #1 (art by Barry Kitson)
The other real highlight is Martian Manhunter, even more of an outsider than Aquaman, but also able to pass thanks to his shapeshifting and telepathy. His discomfort at seeing the way his teammates treat the aliens they fight, his need to better understand them that goes places that violate their privacy, his belief that they and humanity can do better, they're all very well done.
What really makes the characterization sing, though, is the interactions. There are lots of moments between them all: John and Aquaman, Hal and Barry, Barry and Dinah, and so on, all the permutations you can think of, perfectly rendered. This is a team of people, in their highs and their lows; you understand why the team (briefly) turns on Martian Manhunter, but the moment where he needs to tune himself telepathically into an alien device, and the whole team comes together to help him do it is a genuine punch-the-air moment, I loved it.
Awww... from JLA: Year One #12 (art by Barry Kitson & Michael Bair)
Beyond that, the book is just fun and inventive, taking those old Silver Age stories and filtering them through a modern perspective without being either overly nostalgic or cynical. (Weird to think, actually, that this book is now thirty years old, which is about how old the original Justice League stuff was when this was written.) We see Vandal Savage, we see the Doom Patrol, we see Snapper Carr, we get cameos from Oliver Queen and Maxwell Lord. At the end of the book, the invading aliens trap every superhero on Earth in a prison, which gives the JLA its chance to shine—but also means that once the JLA liberates the others, we get glimpses of all the superheroes of the Earth at this time. (In some cases, I suspect the continuity timing doesn't add up, but who cares.) I found that each issue of this series just flew by, perfect superhero comics.
Lots of characters in this image who should be dead! from JLA: Year One #2 (art by Barry Kitson)
As for the Blackhawks? Well, I'm saving a discussion of their post-Crisis continuity for a future post, but this story very much doesn't seem to care about it, nor does it even sit very well with their Silver Age continuity. Their role in the story is small but significant. In an early issue, we see them in their 1970s red-and-green uniforms, and Blackhawk suggests they need to update with the times. But then in a later issue, they're all in their superhero gear from the "Junk-Heap Heroes" era (see item #6 in the list below), and they decide they all look ridiculous and go back to how they were. Additionally, Blackhawk Island is the site of the prison where the aliens put the Earth's superheroes.
You might see this as massaging how their superheroic career could fit into their new post-Crisis history... except that all the characters who got killed off during the Rick Burchett run (see #10 and 11) are there! Additionally, so is Lady Blackhawk, but we were told in Guy Gardner (see #12) that she was plucked out of time at some point in the past and brought to the present thanks to the Crisis in Time. But this isn't a complaint or anything, just observations. The joke about how they look terrible as superheroes is probably worth everything else! (It is shooting fish in a barrel, though.)
Chuck's face just screams, "Blackhawk, you promised me this outfit looked cool." from JLA: Year One #8 (art by Barry Kitson & Michael Bair)
This is the thirteenth in a series of posts about the Blackhawks. The
next installment covers Guns of the Dragon. Previous installments are listed below:
My seven-year-old is a fiend for DC Comics, and it's been making me nostalgic for the way I was introduced to a lot of DC characters, the DC Animated Universe. So I started thinking about trying to get them to watch it with me... which of course meant I wanted to work out a proper order!
Lots of people have made timelines, of course, but the problem with timelines is that there were two series set in the future compared to the others, but watching those at the end doesn't make sense; the assumption of the series is that when Terry from Batman Beyond pops up in Justice League or Static Shock, you know who the character is because you've already seen Batman Beyond. I suppose one could watch in a strict broadcast order, then, but that seemed to have its own downsides; I wanted something that captured more of a chronological flow, where you were moving back and forth between shows that happened simultaneously instead of watching in big chunks as seasons aired.
So here's my attempt:
The first tab shows the broad-strokes organization; the second gives you an episode-by-episode breakdown. Similarly, I'll give a broad-stroke explanation here, and then drill down into the details.
Broad-Strokes Organization
The episodes of Batman: The Animated Series are notoriously confusingly ordered, either as produced or as broadcast. I used this Reddit thread as a guide to a totally new order, with some small tweaks based on the comments. I timed Superman: The Animated Series relative to it and The New Batman Adventures, such that the two crossovers between the two characters ("World's Finest" and "The Demon Reborn") lined up correctly.
Once both shows come to an end, they are replaced by Batman Beyond, Justice League (later Justice League Unlimited), and Static Shock, so at the same time you are following the Justice League and Static in the present, you are following the new Batman in the future; thus when he pops up in both shows, you know who he is. Finally, there's the other DCAU future-set show, the Batman Beyond spin-off The Zeta Project; I timed this to start when Zeta first appears on Batman Beyond and wrap up around the same time JLU ends.
There are obviously some times when there are big gaps between when things aired: for example, B:TAS finished airing Nov. 1994, while New Batman Adventures didn't start until Sept. 1997. Similarly, there was a big gap between when NBA and S:TAS ended (Jan. 1999 and Feb. 2000, respectively) and when Justice League started (Nov. 2001), where just Batman Beyond and Static Shock aired. But in all of these cases, I just had things carry through as continuously as I could.
Detailed Organization
Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures
I used Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures as the organizing spine of the first half of the timeline. I added in the Batman-adjacent DCAU movies based on the Reddit thread above:
Mask of the Phantasm between "Prophecy of Doom" and "Night of the Ninja"
SubZero between B:TAS and NBA
Mystery of the Batwoman after "Sins of the Father"
This gave me 105 installments of Batman, which I numbered sequentially. (I did accidentally leave out "Two-Face, Part II," so it got added in as 15.50. I hope I didn't miss out anything else!)
Justice League and Justice League Unlimited
The two Justice League–focused shows ran the longest of everything that came after B:TAS and NBA, so I used them as the organizing spine of what was left. The regular stories were thus numbered 106 to 167 on my list. Then, at the end we got:
168. Justice League vs. the Fatal Five: released years later, supposedly in continuity with the DCAU, after the end of JLU
169. "Epilogue": the season two finale of JLU, but entirely set in the future timeline of Batman Beyond and designed to function as a coda to the whole DCAU
There's also a Batman & Harley Quinn movie that takes place between seasons of JLU, so I numbered it 154.50.
Superman: The Animated Series
This began during the gap between B:TAS and NBA, and continued in parallel with NBA. S:TAS and NBA crossed over in the S:TAS story "World's Finest," which is set before "Sins of the Father" (80.00), the first episode of NBA. I thus numbered "World's Finest" as 80.50. I decided that prior to that, I'd like it if the shows just pretty much alternated, so I numbered all the preceding stories of S:TAS backwards from there: the one immediately before "World's Finest" ("Father's Day") would be 79.50, the one before that ("Ghost in the Machine") 78.50, and so on. Working backwards, this gets you to the series premiere, "The Last Son of Krypton," as 56.50, so basically, fifty-six B:TAS stories in, you begin alternating the two shows up until you get to the crossover.
The next key story was "The Demon Reborn," which is another crossover with NBA. This story sees Batman and Superman teaming up, and so many place it simultaneously with the NBA episode "Girls' Night Out" (97.00), where Superman and Batman are away on a mission. So I numbered "The Demon Reborn" as 97.50. In between "World's Finest" and "The Demon Reborn," I just distributed stories evenly, which came out to intervals of 0.89. So mostly alternating between NBA and S:TAS, but sometimes you'd get two S:TAS stories between stories of NBA.
That left just one S:TAS episode, the series finale "Legacy." I decided to make both NBA and S:TAS wrap up at about the same time, and thus numbered it 104.50, placing it before the last episode of NBA, "Mad Love" (105.00). This creates a decent gap between the last two S:TAS episodes, but that actually reflects how they were broadcast, months apart.
Static Shock
Static Shock started out totally standalone, but ended up crossing over with the wider DCAU a few times. The first of these is "The Big Leagues," a crossover with NBA, which probably goes after the end of that show according to the fine folks on Reddit.
There are then two Justice League crossovers, "A League of Their Own" and "Fallen Heroes." These both need to go before the Justice League episode "Starcrossed" (130.00), before the league was reorganized as the Justice League Unlimited. So I numbered "Fallen Heroes" as 129.50.
I then decided that I'd like Static Shock to pretty much just start when S:TAS came to an end, so that there wouldn't be a point after the end of S:TAS before the debuts of the other shows where you were only watching NBA. Thus I numbered its first episode, "Shock to the System" as 98.50, picking up right off from S:TAS's "The Demon Reborn" at 97.50.
I then distributed the Static Shock stories between those two episodes evenly, which meant they occurred at intervals of 0.76. So between NBA stories (and later, Justice League stories), you'd typically have one or two episodes of Static Shock. Doing this gave "The Big Leagues" a placement of 108.33, so after the NBA finale (105.00), which was right, and "A League of Their Own" a placement of 120.43, so again, in the right spot.
After Static Shock came to an end, the character appeared in the JLU story "The Once and Future Thing" (142.00). So I set the last episode of Static Shock ("Power Outage") as 141.50, and distributed all the episodes between "Fallen Heroes" and "Power Outage" evenly at intervals of 1.33.
Batman Beyond
In terms of broadcast sequence, Batman Beyond picked right up from the end of NBA, so I set its first episode, "Rebirth," shortly after NBA's final episode (105.00) at 106.50. Batman Beyond had forty-nine stories, plus a movie, Return of the Joker. There is a Static Shock episode where he travels to the future and meets the future Batman, "Future Shock" (127.23). The DCAU wiki suggests that Return of the Joker must take place before "Future Shock," so I numbered Return of the Joker as 126.85.
That meant I simply distributed all Batman Beyond stories evenly between those two points, at intervals of 0.42. So you are watching quite a lot of Batman Beyond in between episodes of the Justice League and Static Shock.
The Zeta Project
The last thing to place was the other DCAU future-set show, The Zeta Project. Zeta first appeared in the Batman Beyond episode "Zeta" (117.30). There actually was a decent-sized broadcast gap between Zeta's first appearance in Batman Beyond and their own show debuting, but I decided it was more satisfying to pick up right away, and thus set the first episode of Zeta Project ("The Accomplice") at 117.51. Zeta Project crossed over with Batman Beyond again in the episode "Shadows," which the DCAU wiki says occurs after the Batman Beyond episode "Countdown" (126.44), so I set "Shadows" as 126.65. I then distributed the intervening episodes at even intervals of 1.31.
Lastly, I decided it would make sense to wrap up Zeta Project before the future-set episode of JLU, "Epilogue" (169.00), so I set its series finale ("The Wrong Morph") to 167.50. I then distributed the episodes in between "Shadows" and "The Wrong Morph" evenly at intervals of 2.40.
Epilogue
I think that's everything! In practice, this gets you the following periods:
fifty-six sequential stories from Batman: The Animated Series
alternating stories from Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series
(roughly) alternating stories from New Batman Adventures and Superman: The Animated Series
(roughly) alternating stories from New Batman Adventures and Static Shock
lots of Batman Beyond, with interspersed stories from Static Shock and Justice League
lots of Batman Beyond, with interspersed stories from Static Shock and Justice League and the occasional episode of Zeta Project (four shows at once!)
(roughly) alternating stories from Static Shock and Justice League Unlimited, with occasional episodes of Zeta Project
Justice League Unlimited, with occasional episodes of Zeta Project
The caveat here is, of course, I haven't watched it this way! And it's been a long time since I've watched any of this; if you have any advice or corrections, I'd love to hear them.
late 2386 It's so... big! This is the first Destiny-era book to come out after quite a long hiatus, the previous one being almost a year and a half prior (Titan: Fortune of War). Goodbye mass market paperbacks, hello trades! I think this is also the first to make references to Discovery;
Georgiou is included among a list of famous explorers. It's also an
important last—this is the last-ever use of the (not my favorite) Rotis Serif TNG logo. (Thank goodness.)
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Available Light by Dayton Ward
Other than that, though, it half feels like business as usual. This book
essentially has two totally separate plotlines. One is very familiar;
this is our fourth Dayton Ward–penned exploring-the-Odyssean-Pass-after-The Fall novel, and so you'll know the vibe by now. The Enterprise
comes across an interesting situation, there's some conflict, T'Ryssa
Chen is in it a lot, Taurik is there. Ward is good at coming up with
premises that feel like lost TNG episodes; in this one, the Enterprise and a group of scavengers come upon a derelict spaceship that seems like it ought to have a lot of people aboard... but where are they? There are some clever concepts here and interesting spins on Star Trek technology.
As I have with almost all of these books, I found myself thinking about how I would adapt it to serve as a Star Trek Adventures
scenario, which is always a good sign. (I say this a lot, but if my
current campaign gets a third season, I think I will actually do it.)
I don't think there's anything bad about these four books per se,
but they have felt a bit... stasis-y. Like, all the characters are
present and correct, but there's not the vibe you got back at the height
of the Deep Space Ninerelaunch or in the early days of New Frontier and Titan,
that you were watching these characters evolve and grow. It almost
reads like a tie-in to a tv show that doesn't exist, like all the
characters have to be maintained as they are. Worf does Worf things, La
Forge does La Forge things, T'Ryssa Chen does T'Ryssa Chen things,
Joanna Faur continues to exist, Beverly isn't in it except as Picard's
wife. I don't think I would say I disliked any of the post-FallTNG novels on their own merits, but unfortunately I do feel like the best one was the first, Armageddon's Arrow; it had a sense that we were moving forward and going somewhere that ended up missing from Headlong Flight, Hearts and Minds, and this book.
The other half of the book is the fallout from Section 31: Control, which is really the fallout from A Time to Heal,
a book that came out fifteen years prior! Section 31's existence is now
public, but along with this, so is Picard's role in the coup that
deposed President Min Zife. This half has its own two halves. In one, we
see what's going on back on Earth: how are the politicians and the
people dealing with all the revelations about S31, particularly that
everything that everything the Federation has ever accomplished in its
utopia-building was really the result of unsanctioned black ops? Mostly
this is told from the perspective of Philippa Louvois (of "Measure of a
Man" fame), now Federation Attorney General, as she begins carrying out
investigations and prosecutions. It's fine; I did have the feeling that
maybe the revelations of Control were a bit too big to
realistically be accommodated into a tie-in book series at all, much
less as a B-plot. The Federation has had yet another existential shock
but I just don't think you can adequately deal with that and maintain
the status quo needed for this to also be a series of books about
people having fun space adventures. At this point, is it even realistic
that the Federation continues to function? Akaar gives like five
different speeches about how human choices do matter but they all feel a bit hollow.
I'm not sure about a couple choices here, like one where a trained
Starfleet officer turns into a cold-blooded killer trying to get Admiral
Ross because her husband died due to a Section 31 op. Also what's up
with all the characters' insistence that Ross was a key player in S31? To
the extent that an organization like S31 has formal members, I never had
the sense that he was one; I certainly didn't feel like he was guiding
policy. He was more just a guy the real players knew they could count on
to throw things their way when needed.
The other half of this half is the personal fallout for Picard himself.
This I found profoundly disappointing. What is the reaction of every key
character finding out that Picard had a role in the illegal takedown of
a democratically elected leader. Basically everyone shrugs and says,
"oh well sometimes you just have to do a coup i guess." I could
buy this of some characters (I can certainly imagine it of Worf, a man
who previously killed a democratically elected leader)... but everyone? No one
is upset to learn that the principled Jean-Luc Picard totally abandoned
his principles? Not Beverly, not La Forge, not T'Ryssa, not Will Riker?
I found this disappointing because 1) so much for Federation ideals,
and 2) it seems a bizarre dramatic choice. This thing happens that could
totally upend your characters' relationships, and you basically just
ignore it?
The book ends with Picard deciding to be accountable for his decision
and return to Earth, which I appreciate, but it feels pretty random; I
wish it had been a natural outgrowth of the way something from this
storyline intersected with the A-plot.
Continuity Notes:
We get a little recap of Phillipa Louvois's
career on p. 43 that tells us she left Starfleet after "Measure of a
Man," then came back later, than left again. Is this a reference to
something? I don't see any likely candidates on Memory Beta, but it seems like a pretty random detail otherwise.
Other Notes:
I didn't totally buy that Nechayev would go
on the run. She comes across as principled to me, not
self-serving—they're just not great principles!
Ward does this thing I'm of two minds about, which is he's always diligently establishing members of the Enterprise-E
crew. I like that the book does this thing that's hard to do on tv,
make it clear that the crew consists of people who aren't main
characters. But on the other hand, most of them are just names on the
page; they don't have personalities or anything, just names (always
human, which is a little boring, though I'm guessing they're mostly
Tuckerizations) and jobs. Sometimes, though, he's a little too
diligent about it; it'll be like, "so-and-so was being covered by the
beta shift Engineering supervisor so-and-so, but she was on the away
team, so she was being covered by the gamma shift supervisor."
(At one point, Šmrhová leaves the bridge to get a rest, but she comes
back before as soon as something interesting happens but we're still
told who covers for her while she's gone.) It's like that bit from Parks and Rec about NPR hosts all substituting for each other.
Gratuitous Recap Watch: We get a recap
of "Paradise Lost" (pp. 51-2), which I can see the relevance of, but
goes into an awful lot of detail for some reason, with characters
wondering whatever happened to Admiral Leyton, but I don't know why.
Also recapped for seemingly little purpose: "The Best of Both Worlds"
(p. 213) and Headlong Flight (p. 287).
The final volume of the Pelican History of England was published in 1965, covering 1914 to 1963; I read that edition many years ago. In 1981, it was updated to cover through 1979, but since author David Thomson died in 1970, one of his former students, Geoffrey Warner, did the update. According to his preface, Warner didn't update Thomson's text very much; instead, he just added two chapters to the end to cover the last fifteen years. The result is somewhat odd, because it takes what was already one of the longest Pelican Histories and makes it even longer—even though it covers the shortest span of time!
I'll say more about the overall design of the series in a future post, but I did think this book had more detail than earlier ones... which wasn't always warranted. Whereas previous volumes would not really go into detail about the movement of foreign wars, this one does. I think probably this is partially because it has the space to do, but also because its author lived through the events in question (Thomson would have been in his thirties during World War II), so they seemed important to him. Additionally, there's more blow-by-blow detail on the politicking and the parties; again, I suspect the dual reason of 1) available space, and 2) recency bias. To me, though, this made the book less effective; the best Pelican Histories (such as Thomson's own volume 8) have given a bird's-eye view of the era in question, but here I felt a bit bogged down in the identities of specific cabinet ministers. (The other consequence of recency is that he's more likely to assume readers already know what something is than other contributors to the series, which I guess is fair enough, but I would have appreciated an explanation of what the "coupon election" was!)
The Pelican History of England: 9. England in the Twentieth Century (1914-79) by David Thomson with Geoffrey Warner
Second edition published: 1981 Originally published: 1965 First edition previously read: August 2013 Acquired and reread: July 2025
The other thing that makes this volume unusual is that it's the only one to be written by a repeat author. Thus, unsurprisingly, Thomson continues the emphasis of his previous volume, focusing on how the government became increasingly invested in the management of society through a variety of means. Though as I said above I did think we got a bit too much detail about specific ministries, Thomson does ably show how the two major political parties, and the succession of prime ministers, attempted to regulate the economy and elevate the welfare of the citizenry in ways that were sometimes surprisingly similar and sometimes very different. By the 1950s, "British society now presupposed full employment, economic growth, mass consumption, and therefore mass advertising" but "[u]like the Welfare State, it cared little about inequalities of wealth" (260).
For example, he points out that what used to be called "departments," "boards," and "offices" largely became "ministries" after the Great War: "The change implied a new theory of government, in which politicians and their 'departments' of expert administrators jointly shaped and pursued policies" (64). The world wars were also significant in that the pyramid-shaped power structures introduced during wartime became a guiding principle for the organization of government after (219). Of particular importance was the growth of education, which expanded significantly across successive generations in the first half of the century: "The national system of education kept pace with – though perhaps several paces behind – the development of modern Britain: its advance helped, in turn, to make possible the next phase of growth" (189).
Fun fact I learned from this book: H. G. Wells was supposedly the first
person to ever use the term "leftism" in print (116). Unfortunately,
Thomson gives a date for this (1927)... but not a citation! I think this
may have been in his lecture Democracy under Revision, which was
published that year by the Hogarth Press, but in a quick online search,
it seems like the text isn't available online. Alas, a Google Books
search for "leftism" with the date filter set to terminate at 1926
brings up a number of hits, mostly from communist periodicals, so it
seems to be untrue. One gets the feeling that Thomson himself is a
liberal if not a leftist, but often disappointed with the actual
execution of leftist policies in practice. There is a funny bit where he
cites a book read at the first meeting of the Left Book Club in 1936:
"Describing future possibilities of artificial insemination, the author
exclaimed: 'How many women, in an enlightened community devoid of
superstitious taboos and of sex slavery, would be eager and proud to
bear and rear a child of Lenin or of Darwin!' Fortunately some of its
successors were more realistic" (163). I'll have to see if I can work
that into my book chapter on left-wing use of Darwinism somewhere.
I was struck by how Thomson described prime ministers Ramsey MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin in the 1930s: "Like a sedate and leisurely firm of comfortable family solicitors, they conducted the business affairs of Great Britain and the Commonwealth with mild, unhurried manners, facing no issue until it was claimant, seeking no decision until it was overdue. [...] History may come, more and more, to see them as Tweedledum and Tweedledee – presiding jointly over British national life in one of its peculiarly unheroic periods" (141). I don't know enough about the reception of British prime ministers to know if this actually came about!
There is a little but not a lot of discussion of the changing social mores of the twentieth century, though I found what there was to be quite interestingly framed; I sort of sensed a young person sneering at how his elders saw as controversial things he had not seen as controversial at all: "one marvels at how restricted they were in their modernity, how lacking in robust dissipations. Even there wildness was brittle, their cult of self-indulgence as synthetic as the cocktails at their interminable parties, or the jazz played in the night-clubs. [...] It was not long before they got tired of themselves" (87). C'mon, David, just how boring were your parents, really?
We see a combination of Thomson's critique of the left and his issues with twentieth-century social mores when he claims that "[t]o all those who, before the war, had
held the materialist view that crime was caused largely by slums,
poverty, and bad economic conditions, it was disconcerting to discover
that the Welfare State brought a steep rise in crime," especially among teenagers, whose incomes had risen the most! (276) "The conclusion seemed to be that crime is determined not by material conditions alone, but by the whole social environment, including such intangible factors as the ethical standards and values prevalent in society as a whole, the personal and collective anxieties to which men were subjected, and even the effectiveness of humanistic or religious teaching about human relationships" (276-7). If Thomson mentions him, I didn't catch it, but it seems very much not a coincidence that Thomson supports this point by citing statistics from 1959-61 and that Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in 1962.
In volume 8, Thomson discussed the monarchy a bit; surprisingly, there's less discussion of the abdication crisis than you might expect, but I found what Thomson said about Edward VIII's father, George VI, charming: "He had perhaps, as his successor remarked, waged 'a private war with the twentieth century', but his very old-fashionedness had been his strength" (151).
I wonder if I would have registered it if I hadn't been cued by the preface, but Geoffrey Warner's two chapters at the end are noticeably different, and I'm not just talking about the fact he breaks them up into fewer but longer sections than Thomson. While Warner maintains Thomson's focus on specific ministries and politicians and parties, he largely moves away from Thomson's focus on the "social state"; we get a lot more detail here about Britain's foreign policy during the era in question, especially issues surrounding decolonization and the Commonwealth. This is interesting but didn't really seem to be of a piece with the book I'd just read.
During my summer 2024 mini-campaign, I ran the prewritten STA mission "Abyss Station." One of the components of this story is an alien species called the Ithik; they initially seem to be a prewarp civilization, but when the players beam down to talk to them, they learn the Ithik know of other societies and civilizations. The Ithik are quite funny; they are obsessed with games and self-centered. They believe their planet to be the center of the universe, and themselves to be the most advanced civilization in the universe. Some of them even go so far as to claim they are the only civilization in the universe, and that all aliens are figments of their highly advanced imaginations. Despite having a population of only thousands, they have a huge government consisting of dozens of ministers and similarly, they have hundreds of religions.
What the players eventually learn is that the Ithik are artificial, incredibly advanced living machines; instead of mitochondria, they have tiny machines, and their DNA contains an artificial element. They were made by advanced aliens my players dubbed the "Engineers" to construct a moon-sized facility, and then left on a planet when they were done. Their planet is doomed, but the players have to convinced them to evacuate by playing games with them.
My players seemed to have fun with them, and during our fourth episode (when they needed to get more information on the alien facility the Engineers had built) called them up. On the fly, I established that the Federation was working to resettle them, but struggling because the Ithik weren't focusing on that, being too into all the incredible new experiences they were finding in the wider universe, particularly gin and tonics.
This scene cemented in me a desire to bring them back if my campaign got a second season. Once it did, I realized there was a suitable prewritten mission out there, "Game Night" from the Lower Decks Campaign Guide, where the players encounter the game-obsessed Wadi from the Deep Space Nine episode "Move Along Home." Its comedic focus would make a good contrast to the last few episodes I had done (which had featured apocalyptic threats, brutal warfare, and prisoner torture and Obsidian Order agents).
"Captain’s Log, Stardate 53950.1. A month into our renewed mission of exploration in the Ekumene sector, and the Diversitas has been summoned back to Deep Space 10 at the request of Consul Vrossaan. The upside to this is that a Federation mail tender has recently visited the station, allowing our crew to pick up some packages that have been shipped all the way out to the frontier…"
Planning the Mission
Wadi hologram (screen capture from DS9: "Move Along Home")
The premise of "Game Night" is that the player ship is assigned to transport a Wadi delegation. Knowing of the dangers of the Wadi love of games, the players need to hide every game on the ship and disable the holodecks. The Wadi, however, bring aboard one of their game boxes anyway. First the players are transported into the chula game from "Move Along Home"; once they escape that, it turned out that one game was missed, a copy of (what is not said to be but clearly is) Dungeons & Dragons. This causes the whole ship to be plunged into a D&D scenario that the players need to escape from.
Overall, it's a fun one, but I made some adjustments. Most obviously, I substituted the Ithik for the Wadi, though the technology the Ithik were using was still the Wadi game box from "Move Along Home"; the idea here was that following the Dominion War, some Wadi ships were among those that came through the wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant once normal travel was resumed. In the scenario as written, it's an NPC who has the D&D gamebook that gets missed, but I thought it would be more fun if it was a player, so before we ran it, I approached Kenyon who plays Nevan, and asked him if 1) he thought Nevan could be a D&D fan, and 2) if Nevan might be faintly embarrassed by it. He was game for it.
I also tightened up some aspects of the scenario as written; the crew needs to lock up all the games on the ship, but there's also a bit about them needing to lock up weird artifacts, which involves them finding out that someone on the ship has an alien sex candle from TNG's "Sub Rosa," and I felt like this seemed 1) not terribly relevant, 2) maybe going too much into an area I wasn't comfortable with, 3) taking too long to get to the meat of the episode, and 4) a callback to an episode my players might not even remember. Also, the scenario as written assumes the players are lower deckers, of course, but mine aren't, and thus it doesn't make as much sense for them to do a bunch of ridiculous tasks.
Allamaraine! (screen capture from DS9: "Move Along Home")
Act II of the scenario as written is all about the players being stuck in the chula game, but I feel like the fun thing in the scenario is the D&D riff, so I wanted to get there faster. So I also cut the chula game down a lot, to just a single encounter, so that Act I would end with D&D taking over the ship, not Act II. (The idea here being that, while the players were trapped in the chula game, the Ithik were ransacking the ship for games to connect to the Wadi box.)
Mostly I really liked the scenarios the mission has for D&D on the ship: orcs take over Engineering, a necromancer builds a tower in sickbay, and a dragon attacks the ship. The necromancer-in-sickbay challenge includes an Extended Task, but commits a mistake that an annoying number of prewritten STA scenarios do: the Extended Task has no limiting factor as written. Let me walk you through it in detail:
Navigating the spire, recovering the security chief, and finding a way to eject the necromancer from their body is an extended task (Magnitude 3, Difficulty 3, Work Track 15, Resistance 1). Three breakthroughs are required: identifying that phasic temporal energy influx would forcibly evict the necromancer entity from the security chief, completing an energy output device which can be attached to an emitter, and navigating the interior of the labyrinthine tower.
This is a perfectly fine setup, but the thing about Extended Tasks is that there has to be some kind of limiting factor, or they just don't make any sense. The difference between Extended Tasks and regular Tasks is that Extended Tasks need multiple attempts... but if the players are allowed to make infinite attempts, then there's no way they can ever fail!
a necromancer tower in sickbay (image rendered by ChatGPT)
There are lots of different ways you can handle this. One is to say that the Extended Task must be completed in a certain number of intervals, otherwise there's some kind of bad thing or other kind of external event that takes place. For example, in "Nest in the Dark" (see #4 in the episode list below) your players need to beat a logic puzzle before the air runs out for one of their crewmembers. You can otherwise set an Extended Task during an action scene. This is the case in "Signals," for example; the players need to disable the self-destruct sequence on an alien artifact, but are also being attacked by Romulans. The longer it takes them to do this, the more damage the Romulans can do.
I'm a big fan of just limiting the number of attempts the players can make. For example, in "Biological Clock," the players are trying to reconfigure a transporter component to use in a device, but as written it suffers from the "infinite attempts" problems. I added the stipulation that "this Extended Task may only be attempted 5 times before the phase coil resonator burns out" because it's a finicky component that can only take so much tweaking. That Extended Task required four breakthroughs, so it really only let them have one wasted attempt.
One other limitation I use sometimes is that each player can only contribute once. I used this for the climax to "A Thousand Miles from Day or Night"; the players were chasing an Obsidian Order agent, and each was allowed to do one thing. If they had all done something, and they hadn't completed the Extended Task, the guy would have just gotten away.
Inspired by the note in the description that this Extended Task had Resistance 1 and the visual that the necromancer was escaping up a tower, I came up with a new limited factor this time: after every attempt the players made, the Resistance would increase by 1, basically representing the idea that the necromancer was climbing the tower and getting further and further away from them, making it more difficult to track him down. So, Resistance 1, then 2, then 3, and so on. If it took them too many attempts, eventually the Resistance would be so high it would be impossible for them to accomplish any Work. Mostly I liked this but I think I inadvertently made it too hard (as I will discuss in more detail under Playing the Mission below). If I did something like this again, I'd start at Resistance 0, and work up from there.
This is a pretty long explanation of a pretty minor problem, so sorry! Overall, I liked "Game Night" as written a lot, and it made me a little nostalgic for the days of my own lower decks campaign; I think this one would have worked well there, and I would have been able to do more of it as written.
Having compressed Acts I and II into one, and turned Act III into Act II, what was Act III going to be? Well, going into the first session, I had no idea, but was confident I'd come up with something. I am getting more comfortable with this approach than I used to be!
And, of course, I made the episode title more pretentious. (It comes from a They Might Be Giants lyric: "When I get through this part, / will the next one be the same?" In this case, it's supposed to represent the players' frustration with the levels of the game, but it also describes the malaise the Ithik are experiencing.)
Playing the Mission
mail call on Deep Space 10 (image rendered by ChatGPT)
I have seven regular players, plus one who steps in if we're below six. It took two and a half sessions to get through the episode. This is how it broke down:
Ryan as Rucot, captain (session 1)
Debi as T'Cant, first officer/science officer (1-3)
Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer (1-2)
Claire as Mooria Salmang, pilot (1-2)
Cari as Jor Lena, security officer (1-3)
Austin as Frector, Intelligence analyst (1, 3)
Andy as Gurg bim Vurg, medical officer (2-3)
Toren as Tronnen, counselor (3)
I began the mission with the Diversitas at its home base of Deep Space 10, summoned to a meeting with Consul Vrossaan of the Federation Diplomatic Corps, an NPC the characters became acquainted with in the previous episode. I wanted to seed the idea that Nevan collected D&D gamebooks, so I began the episode with a mail call, and I turned it into a role-playing moment by having all the players imagine what kind of packages their characters might have receive (this I sent out in advance, so they could ponder a bit). This was pretty fun; this is what people came up with:
Rucot's parents had been trying to warn him about the Obsidian Order plot in the previous episode, but he had totally missed their hints; they sent him a note about listening to your parents, but also some isolinear rods featuring Cardassian music.
T'Cant, whose parents were Vulcan artists, sent her a Thomas Kinkade print.
Mooria got Trill books on telepathy and translation (two things her character is interested in), plus some gin (because I had the players review mission notes from their previous Ithink encounters, and she'd noted their interest in gin).
Jor received Bajoran tarot cards.
Frector (who is a Ferengi woman) received gold-pressed latinum from her brother, since he's always worried about her in the currency-less Federation.
Consul Vrossaan (image rendered by ChatGPT)
The characters were warned by Consul Vrossaan that the Federation Agency for Refugee Transition had gotten nowhere in resettling the Ithik, because Ithik just wanted to play games and drink. In frustration, they'd handed the Ithik off to the Diplomatic Corps, who had similarly gotten nowhere, who were thus handing them off to Starfleet, in the hopes that the Diversitas's rapport with the Ithik would let them succeed. The Diversitas's job was to show the Ithik some candidate planets for resettlement and get them to pick one. But, she stipulated—get rid of every game on your ship: "Turn the holodecks off, and tell the Ithik they’re broken or something. Get the 3-D chess set out of your ship’s bar. If there’s a dart board, recycle it. If someone has a board game in their quarters, box it up and seal it in the cargo bay. If an Ithik finds a game somewhere, they will start playing it and you will get absolutely nowhere. Oh, and no gin and tonics either!”
The players thus carried out the clean-up tasks in Act I; I enjoyed getting to roleplay the crusty old NCO who didn't trust Jor to safely stow away his family's prized chess set.
But my players surprised me during this act. One of the Mission Directives is "Ensure all dangerous artifacts onboard the ship are contained"; there was one thing about my own worldbuilding I had not totally thought through the implications of! The Ithik were created by the mysterious digital intelligences called the "Engineers," but back in episode 4, one of those intelligences, named "Mercury," had uploaded a copy of itself onto the Diversitas's computer. We hadn't done much with this yet, but the players were justifiably worried about what would happen if the Ithik essentially met their god! Somehow I hadn't even thought of this, so it was very gratifying to realize the players were thinking through the lore we'd built up. They went and talked to Mercury, who assured them it wanted nothing to do with the Ithik; it just wanted novelty, new experiences, the kind of stuff it wasn't getting as part of the Dyson swarm it called home.
The players clearly knew I was up to something with Kenyon/Nevan but happy to play along with it. At one point someone asked Kenyon if Nevan had anything to disclose, but he assured them he didn't in not very convincing terms.
the Diversitas's lounge ready for a reception (image rendered by ChatGPT)
The players surprised me again when, before the Ithik delegation came aboard, they brainstormed ways to interest the Ithik in picking a planet to resettle. I had just intended this as an adventure hook, but they took it seriously. They decided to make picking a planet to settle on into a game itself, a sort of Project Runway of planets. Members of the Ithik delegation would get assigned one of the four planets to develop, and each would be assigned some members of the crew to help them; Consul Vrossaan would be the neutral judge, picking for settlement whichever planet they developed the best proposal for.
Thus, when they meet the Ithik, who came aboard hoping to play more games (“Tell me, Rucot… what excitement do you have planned this time? I have read about your Cardassian strategy game kotra, but not yet found anyone to play me. Or where is your T’Cant—I would love to play her in kal-toh. Or Frector—let us play dabo!” Turns to Jor. “I do not know you or your species—what is your game of choice? If this universe be imaginary—and my Minister of Philosophy says the evidence for this mounts all the time—I must have quite the imagination, for I did not know of so many games! Do your human colleagues know of Settlers of Catan or Mind or Terraforming Mars or Twilight Imperium? Truly hours of delight!”) at a shipboard reception, the players pitched them this instead. I made it a D5 task to win over the Ithik but of course they succeeded.
The players had had fun with some of the absurd Ithik ministerial positions in their previous appearance, so I leaned into that even more this time. I brought back the Minister of Astronomy (blind, so cannot actually see anything) and the Minister of Philosophy (convinced that the Federation is but a figment of Ithik imagination), and added on the Minster of Dream Licensing (authorizes and deauthorizes dreaming), the Minster of Cosmic Indifference (issues monthly memos that read "The universe remains ambivalent. Carry on."), the Minster of the Aesthetic Sublime (once fined a mountain for being "too breathtaking without a permit"), and the Minister of Ministerial Administrations (responsible for adding more ministers to the government—never enough!). We got some good comedy out of this; I had told the players at the beginning of the episode that this one was going for a Lower Decks vibe, and they responded appropriately.
I had been a little worried the players might react and try to stop the Ithik when they produced the Wadi box, but thankfully, they let me do it all, and ended up in the game realm, along with Consul Vrossaan. (I found it useful to have her around, as basically a character who really could die.) When the girl popped up singing "Allamaraine, count to four, Allamaraine, then three more, Allamaraine, if you can see, Allamaraine, you’ll come with me!", thankfully a few of them recalled the episode, which I gave them a bonus for on a later roll. My players mostly have notoriously low Fitness scores, so the Fitness + Security Task you have to undertake in this part of the game proved quite taxing!
a dragon attacks the Diversitas (image rendered by ChatGPT)
Once the players beat the first challenge, I had them return to the ship's lounge, just as the Minister of Astronomy proudly ran into the room bearing the D&D sourcebook he found in Nevan's quarters, which the Ithik mayor connected to the Wadi box, causing the three D&D threats to attack the ship.
I said I cut it down, but I actually cut it down too much, because all of this left us almost an hour from the end of session one, but I'd only planned out Act I in detail. Thankfully, the players decided to get the Wadi box away from the mayor before they did anything else, and spent lots of time debating the best way to do this. Often I cut them off when they get into the weeds like this, but I was thankful for it this time! In the end, they decided to have Jor challenge the Ithik mayor to a game of darts, which also meant having to recover the dartboard from storage. Jor has a Focus in darts, so of course she won even though I spent 6 Threat to give the Ithik mayor three extra dice.
I knew Ryan and Austin wouldn't be present for the second session, so I covered this narratively. When the players scanned the Wadi box once it was in their possession, it reacted by causing Rucot, Frector, and Consul Vrossaan disappear in the flash of light. An embrassed Ithik mayor informed them that their tampering with the Wadi box had made it potentially lethal. “Not totally our fault, sorry. We don’t really understand this technology to be honest!”The Minister of Philosophy: “I don’t see why it matters—none of them are real anyway!”
Session two thus covered all of Act II (which I dubbed "Dungeons & Diversitas"). There are three problems; the players split up into two groups, so I cut back and forth between them. Jor and Mooria went to join Gurg in sickbay to battle the necromancer, while T'Cant and Nevan tried to retake Engineering.
an orc in Engineering (image rendered by ChatGPT, based a couple reference images I provided)
Gurg had antagonized the necromancer by demanding scientific explanations for his powers and criticizing his skull motif. The players had the smart idea to try to evacuate sickbay, but unfortunately failed the roll to do it. This meant that when Jor shot the necromancer, killing him instantly, his spirit just possessed one of the orderlies (dubbed "Ensign Brad") and teleported away. The Extended Task I think worked pretty well, but the players made some weak rolls at first, which made it harder than I intended; I think they failed to get a Breakthrough on their first Task, which really made it tough. Like I said above, if I do something like this again, I'll start at Resistance 0, not Resistance 1. But they made it there in the end!
The scenario as written has a couple ideas for how the players might handle the orcs, but Debi and Kenyon came up with their own, suggesting that if they impersonated the orc god Gruumsh and asked the orcs to build an altar, they could lure them all into one central space and trap them in a forcefield. But they needed gold to bait the trap, and the replicators were offline. Thankfully, the mail call at the top of the episode proved the perfect seed for this moment; with Frector trapped in the Wadi box, they had to break into her quarters, find her safe, and crack it open to use her gold-pressed latinum. This was good fun, Kenyon's real-world D&D knowledge bleeding over into Nevan's in-character D&D knowledge.
Those two crises taken care of, the characters united to go to the bridge and defeat the dragon. The scenario as written has them taking a purely lower-decks role for obvious reasons—while the senior staff battles, the characters need to realign the conn, reroute the weapons, and cycle the shields. I kept all this, but then added a final Conn Task for Mooria to line up a shot, and then a final Security Task for Jor to stun the dragon.
They then locked it into a tractor beam. The scenario as written specified that the necromancer and the orcs disappeared when defeated, but I had the dragon persist, which led into the third act. (Once again, they got there with a decent amount of time left.)
Wadi game box (image rendered by ChatGPT*)
As written, the episode ends with the players winning by defeating the D&D challenges. But I had a scan show that there was still an energy trace running from the dragon—though not to the Wadi box, but to the mayor. The problem here is that an RPG doesn't necessarily end the way a board game does; the mayor is still the DM and thus the game hasn't ended. When they went and talked to him, he just ranted about other quests he could send them on.
The climax was thus about coaxing the mayor away from his interest in games, which the players realized that he was using as a way of coping with the trauma the Ithik experienced from the one-two shock of their planet being destroyed, and learning they were artificial beings who had outlived their designed purpose. I made this a D5 Task; they went and talked to Mercury again, who gave them some advice about how it was learning to make its own purpose. This reduced the Difficulty to 4, and they succeeded. This, finally, deactivated the game, and returned Frector, Rucot, and Consul Vrossaan to reality.
That left us with just two scenes to play out in the final session. (I established that any players absent this week were simply busy repairing the ship.) I designed a game for the players to play against each other, where four teams consisting each of one player and two Ithik ministers (except one, which was two players and the mayor) would work on Extended Tasks simultaneously, representing them coming up with settlement plans for each of the four candidate planets. I was pretty proud of this; here is an edited version of one of my handouts:
The incentive for trying hard was that the player(s) whose team won would get an extra point of Determination for the next episode. I think the main downside of it was that players had to decide a lot of stuff right off, and that they had to roll a bunch of dice: for themselves, their assisting NPCs, and the ship. But they had fun, and threw themselves into it. Gurg rolled badly on the first round, but reacted appropriately in character, getting into an argument with his teammates that all enjoyed more than the actual game. Austin had the clever idea to have Frector roll by herself, and her assisting ministers to work by themselves, so he could get two Tasks done in a single round.
Jor and Tronnen (on a single team), Frector, and T'Cant all managed to get a fourth breakthrough during the third round; for a tiebreaker, I had each team do a presentation to Vrossaan about their planet, drawing on the stats given on their sheets, as a three-way Opposed Task. There was then a two-way tie between Frector and Jor/Tronnen, so I made it into an arm-wrestling contest that Frector won by spending a point of Determination. Our Klingon crewmember was suitably embarrassed at losing to a Ferengi woman! I think they were suitably touched that I made up a whole game for them based on their ideas from the first session.
We then had a brief coda that tied up some threads. It was nice that we ended an episode halfway through a session, because it meant we could let things breathe a little. (Usually we wrap up at 10pm, and everyone wants to get home!) Frector sent a strongly-worded memo to T'Cant about how dare the crew use her gold-pressed latinum, and then immediately felt embarrassed about her Ferengi greed peeking through, and so invited T'Cant to tea to apologize; Gurg went to Mercury but found himself rejected; Jor did a Bajoran tarot reading for the Ithik mayor. Tronnen hit the gym.
Overall, I enjoyed this one a lot. It's funny, and it was a surprisingly good fit for our own campaign. The D&D stuff and the Ithik was a hit with the players (Debi wrote a personal log from T'Cant's perspective complaining about the illogic of adults playing "make-believe" in these "role-playing games"). I am already brainstorming ways to bring back the Ithik if I get a third season!
I was particularly impressed by how much my players are embracing the details and spirit of the stories in ways I wasn't expecting. That's what makes these things worth doing!
* I was surprised to find no good images of the Wadi box on the Internet; they all show it from a distance in long shot. But on rewatching the episode myself, I realized that was because despite its importance to the story, it's never featured in close-up, weirdly. So I set about trying to get ChatGPT to render me one. This proved to be quite difficult, because it would often miss either that 1) the box has large bevels, that are almost small faces in themselves, or 2) that it's actually a rectangular prism, not a cube. After three different chat threads and lots of different kinds of prompting (including having ChatGPT take the intermediate step of making an orothographic projection, which it got right, and using that as a basis for a 3D image, which it still got wrong), I decided I was putting much more effort into this than it was worth, given literally none of my players would remember the correct dimensions or even vague appearance of the Wadi box, and I gave up on it, settling on this image as the closest I would get.
During my summer 2024 mini-campaign, I ran the prewritten STA mission "
