Star Trek Adventures: Playing "The Gravity of the Crime"

"The Gravity of the Crime" is a standalone Star Trek Adventures scenario that you can buy as a PDF; I got it in one of the various STA Humble Bundles. It's a combination of murder mystery and Prime Directive scenario; basically, your players have to solve an apparent murder on a prewarp planet because one of the murder victims was a Starfleet officer doing covert observation—but you both need to work with local law enforcement without revealing to them that you're from space!

I've long thought it sounded interesting, and it seemed particularly suited to the build of one of my players, Austin, who plays Frector, who was the ship's Ferengi chief of security last season and is now its Intelligence analyst. If I had been able to run five adventures last summer, it would have been the fifth; failing that, I knew I wanted to do it this summer. I ended up slotting it in as our third episode.

As usual, I'll break my episode discussion up into two parts, first how I set it up, and second how it went; I added a B-plot, but that was pretty separate from the A-plot, so I'll discuss that on its own in a third section.

"Captain’s Log, Stardate 53955.2. We have been ordered to assist a Federation observation team on the planet Kalmur, a pre-contact world whose inhabitants are in the early stages of developing warp drive. One member of the observation team is missing, presumed dead after a fatal accident in the research facility. Our mission is to investigate the accident and aid in recovering any identifiable alien remains. As always, our highest priority will be to preserve the Prime Directive and ensure our presence on Kalmur does not disrupt its culture’s natural development.
     "Starfleet observation teams understand the stakes better than anyone – which is what makes the presence of an observer at the site of a fatal accident so troubling. Was it merely a coincidence – or something more?"

Planning the Mission

generic Kalmuri

Overall, this is an episode where I made few changes; mostly I just took the PDF and tried to break it up in my own notes in a way that I would find more intuitive. The structure of the opening act is pretty set: the away team beams down to where the Starfleet observation team is based, and talks to them to get the details on the accident/possible murder. Then they go to the laboratory where the accident happened and meet some of the characters involved. The act ends with a Kalmuri police detective, Inspector Lanox, turning up and figuring out that the away team must basically be from space and confronting them. The players must then figure out how to work with her without violating the Prime Directive.

Since it's a murder mystery, though, the middle of the episode has a lot of possibilities, and there's not really an order it needs to be done: the players can scan stuff, talk to suspects, get attacked by mobsters, and so on. So I tried to structure my notes to make all this information easier to keep track of. 

The one thing I would say is odd about the mission as written is that it's very light on suggested Tasks! So I added a few. First, before the away team beamed down, I added Tasks for the ship's doctor to do the surgery to make them look like Kalmuri, as well as a Task for everyone to undertake a psychological adjustment to changing species; failing this would cause them to trip up in some later scene. 

Doctor Sifa Jezen

Second I took the stuff the away team figures out by interrogating the suspects, and broke it up into information that:

• they would get for free, without having to ask questions.
• they would get easily, doing Difficulty 1 or 2 Tasks.
• they would have to really work for, with D4 or 5 Tasks.

My default assumption was these would mostly be Security + Presence Tasks, but I was prepared to countenance counterarguments from the players—if someone was trying to physically intimidate a witness, for example, it could be Security + Fitness, or if using medical or psychological knowledge, Medicine + Presence, or so on. I found this really helpful, so that I didn't have to be generating Task ideas on the fly.

The other thing is, this episode has a lot of NPCs. Which makes sense, it's a murder mystery, and you can't have a murder mystery without a lot of suspects, and without a bunch of tangled relationships. Aside from Inspector Lanox, there are five significant living NPCs (three Kalmuri, two Federation anthropologists), and three dead ones of significance. Experience has taught me that the players do better if they have images to associate with NPCs, to visually prompt their memories, so I used ChatGPT to make some images of the Kalmuri and other NPCs. (I only did the living characters, not the dead ones.) I've included those throughout this post.

Inspector Lanox

Finally, I of course changed the episode title to be more pretentious (I think it has a good "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid" vibe).

Playing the Mission

I have seven regular players, plus one who steps in if we're below six. Of our three sessions, the first was just a half (the first half was the ending of the previous episode). This is how it broke down:

• Ryan as Rucot, captain (sessions 2-3)
• Debi as T'Cant, first officer/science officer (1, 3)
• Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer (2-3)
• Claire as Mooria Salmang, pilot (3)
• Cari as Jor Lena, security officer (1-2) 
• Austin as Frector, Intelligence analyst (1, 3)
• Andy as Gurg bim Vurg, medical officer (1-2)
• Toren as Tronnen, counselor (2) 

I only just noticed that this was an episode where literally none of my players were present for the whole thing! I kept Rucot, Nevan, and Mooria on the ship for the B-plot, so the planetside characters were T'Cant, Jor, Frector, Gurg, and Tronnen.

Director Maklet

In the first session, Frector, Jor, Gurg, and T'Cant beamed down to the planet to investigate. Unfortuantely, Frector failed the roll to psychologically acclimate. The first couple scenes went basically as stated in the mission, with them talking to outpost team and then heading to the Kalmuri research institute, where they begin to get a sense of what is going on. Sometimes, though, my players are a bit too perceptive: a key part of the mystery is that when the "gravity torus" experiment is being run in the Kalmuri gravity lab, the experiment of another investigator (an antigravity plate) is leaning against the wall... but if the players think things through, they will realize it ought to have been sucked into the gravity torus. I think both Debi and Austin noticed this right away, which could very much give the whole game away pretty quickly!

I had Inspector Lanox turn up in the lab; she asks the players to accompany her to her office. The mission as written suggests you then jump ahead to her office and establish the players failed to convince her they really were from another country in between scenes. This seemed a bit railroady, so I played it out, having her ask them how they liked their tea, and how people from their country liked their rice. They complained about this, but I maintained that no matter how well briefed they were, they didn't really have the time to know everything cultural she might ask them.

The players didn't admit they were from space, but also gave up denying they weren't, and decided to work with her without really making any clear statements about who they were. That was where the first session ended. Unfortunately I was in the awkward position that the two characters in the lab/Lanox's office were Frector and T'Cant... and Debi and Austin were both gone the next week! Narratively I covered this by having Frector have a panic attack on seeing their Kalmuri reflection in a mirror, and T'Cant mind-melding with her to stabilize her. The two returned to the ship, with Tronnen beaming down to replace them, and passing Lannox on to Jor and Gurg and Tronnen instead.

Meni Nelorn

For the second session, I gave my players cards with all the NPCs on them and bullet points of what they'd learned so far, with space for them to write more notes. This seemed to help a bit. 

Jor, Gurg, and Tronnen carried out the investigation, and kind of thankfully, did not seem to remember the significance of the gravity plate. Jor doesn't have great Presence + Security, but they did all right at uncovering information for the most part, especially with a couple key Determination spends. They tended to use up the Momentum pool a lot, but thankfully the players in the B-plot kept refilling it with their great rolls. They did some scans, interrogated the Kalmuri at the research facility, talk to the outpost scientists, and began to put a lot of pieces together.

One key aspect of the story is that the graduate student working at the lab, Meni Nelorn, has been sexually harassed by her advisor. (This gives her motive and opportunity to commit the crime, and also casts some suspicion on one of the Starfleet observers, Ensign T'Zheen.) I was worried about this plot point, but no one in my group wrote this on their "lines and veils" sheet from the beginning of the campaign, so I included it as written, but kept it very vague. It seemed to go over fine, thankfully, though as half of my players are science Ph.D.s, prompted some discussion of shitty advisors they had had. The players were very into the bit where T'Zheen intimidated Meni's harasser, and also really loved to hate the institute's director, who knew about the abuse but did nothing and had a gambling problem.

Ensign T'Zheen

The players had all of the information they needed, but struggled to make the last leap they needed to put it all together and identify the killer. They knew one of the murder victims, Lieutenant Li, was probably still alive, but fixated on the idea that he had escaped himself and was lying low, and so did things like crack open his personal logs and scan his quarters. I tried to nudge them in the right direction by having them find in his logs that he thought the actual murderer's experiment probably did work, and also giving them a clue that the prosthetic disguises decay over time, leaving a distinct chemical trail that they found in Li's quarters. (This was a slightly altered version of something from the book.) Unfortunately, when they divided the city up into thirds to search for the chemical trail, two of them failed, and the chemicals were not found in the tertile of the player who succeeded!

Finally, they went back to the lab and scanned the gravity plate, discovering the tetryons that showed it had been activated. By now they had all the pieces but still weren't sure what to do with them... but the second session was at an end.

Awkwardly, all three planetside players from session two were out for session three. Narratively, I said that Frector had made a full recovery, and so the captain sent Frector and T'Cant back to the planet, but asked the others to return, trying to minimize the number of people on the planet at a time. Frector's player decided to see if they could get the murderer to confess, hitting on a line very close to what's in the book, that she would want recognition for her device working, but could only get it if she confessed; he intimated the directorship of the institute was up for grabs now. This worked, and they wrapped up the case, rescuing Lieutenant Li and remanding the murderer to Kalmuri justice. Lanox ended by giving a nice speech that the players applauded for its hardboiled vibe.

Doctor Gur*

The last part of the story is that the players have to decide to report T'Zheen for what was technically a Prime Directive violation. They didn't want to see someone stopping sexual harassment get in trouble for it, but also Rucot is very careful these days to adhere to Starfleet regulations! (Ryan: "I don't want the next episode to be 'The Second Trial of Rucot.'") They settled on describing what she had done, and commending her morality, without mentioning that it was a possible Prime Directive issue either way.

Overall, the players seemed to enjoy the scenario, even if they also struggled with the number of characters and conflicting motivations—this may have been easier if we had longer sessions and/or a more consistent player line-up for those three weeks! They seemed to particularly like Inspector Lanox, who I performed with (an attempt at) a kind of laconic Southern accent. One of the downfalls of a scenario like this, I think, is that Lanox makes a bit impression in Act I, but does little in Act II because, even though she's present for the interrogations, you as GM don't want her to say too much because you want the players to drive the narrative there. But I think her last couple scenes in Act III made up for it. It's a fun, clever scenario, with a lot to offer. Like I said, we got it done in 2½ sessions, but that included the B-plot, so without that, I bet an experienced group could get it done in about six hours.

The B-Plot

I knew going into this mission that there probably wasn't enough to do planetside for more than three or four players, and thus I would need something I'd never done before in STA: the totally disconnected A/B-plot structure that dominated the 1990s shows. I spent some time brainstorming what this might be, with all sorts of ideas. One I got pretty far in on before deciding it was probably too comedic, and thus 1) redundant with doing a Lower Decks–style episode immediately prior, and 2) probably too much at odds with the tone of the A-plot.

Professor Orven Jadrel

I was thinking about the season finale, which would be the next episode, and deal with the mysterious Haradin my players are always encountering (see particularly episodes #1, 3, and 5 below in particular). It occurred to me that some aspects of finale would probably be simpler if the players were not simultaneously trying to understand the Haradin and trying to do what they would be doing in that episode.

So I came up with the idea that the B-plot in this episode would be the players rescuing a Haradin both friendlier and more well-informed than some of the others they'd met, and thus able to fill in any gaps in their knowledge. I came up with the premise of a Haradin history professor on his way back from an academic conference whose ship failed; when the players investigated, they would discover it had been sabotaged, giving them some insight into the dangerous political situation in Harad. Plus, as a group where five of them are professors based in Florida (and the other two are married to professors), I knew they would be super invested in the conflict of a professor under political threat for teaching the truth!

The B-plot began in session two, and things went well, as the Diversitas rescued the professor's ship; we alternated between Nevan fixing it and Rucot chatting with the professor, Orven Jadrel. Ryan as Rucot has been burning with questions about the Haradin, and peppered the poor guy with questions... but thankfully I had already worked out a lot about the Haradin in order to do the fourth episode! (I'll do a future post just about this, I think.) It went so well, my players got a little suspicious. Why was this guy popping up and answering all their questions?

"Return to Harad" campaign poster

I decided the best way to deal with this as GM was to twist the knife, to make them pay a price for his help. At the end of the second session, they offered Jadrel asylum; in the third, he had two conversations. First he went to the two players who grew up in the Federation, Mooria and Nevan, and asked them what that was like. They told him the benefits of growing up in a world where you could pursue knowledge without interference. He then asked how the Federation got there, especially how it got past those who (as Claire put it) see themselves as succeeding only if they are winning over others. They admitted it hadn't been easy, but they needed to fight. Jadrel then went to Rucot, a Cardassian trying to help his own world escape authoritarianism, and Rucot told him that it was indeed a struggle... but all he could do was keep fighting the fight. Jadrel then quoted the players' words back to them as he turned down their offer of asylum, saying he needed to go back to Harad and fight himself if Harad were to get any better.

I ripped off an Ursula Le Guin speech and put it in his mouth:

If I simply flee my clan-ship, leave Harad, then I am letting Zotabia and all those like him win. If there is a better world to come for the Haradin, it can only come if I am willing to fight for it. I will report the accident when I return my shuttle to the university, and we will see what follows after that. Perhaps I will be left to carry out my teaching and scholarship in peace… but I am not very hopeful. I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of those who can see alternatives to how we live now, who can see through our fear-stricken society. We will need those who can envision freedom. You have helped me do so.

And then I had him flying back home... possibly to his death! They did give him a communications device he could use to signal for help, and offered to put him in contact with political experts from the Federation who could give him advice on avoiding a society's slide into authoritarianism. Will that be enough? Well, they'll find out in the next episode. But I ended up feeling pretty good about the B-plot, it felt very genuinely Star Trek to me.

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" 
6. "When I Get through This Part…"
7. "Only Trying to Do Right in This Wicked World" 
8. "No Place in the Processional" 

Specials:

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

* Doctor Gur (who I renamed "Doctor Vor," since one of my player characters is a doctor named Gurg) is a Catullan. There's only one canonical appearance by a Catullan in Star Trek, but they look ridiculous! I toned her down a little bit, but did keep the grape tattoo on her forehead, even though I think Tongo Rad had one probably because he was a space hippie, not because he was a Catullan, because without that, there wasn't much distinctive about them if you got rid of the vibrant hair. On seeing my first attempt, my wife suggested I replace the grape with an orange, and I thought that was funny, so I rolled with it. I did try a variation where her hair was orange to match, but decided it was probably too much.