Justice League International Year One: Born Again (JL #1-6 / JLI #7-12)

I wouldn't have gotten into Justice League Europe if Bob Greenberger hadn't lost his job.

Back in the mid-2000s, I was in college and just getting into comic books; my main entry point was Star Trek and Star Wars, seeking stories I'd read about, but were not contained in the novels I'd been reading since childhood. At that time, Bob got fired from DC Comics and needed to raise money, fast, so he auctioned off his comics collection. I bid on a lot of stuff, mostly Star Trek (this is where my runs on Starfleet Academy and Early Voyages come from), but other stuff I'd heard of, too, like Green Lantern/Green Arrow (the 1980s prestige format reprints). In particular, there were two series I picked up just because the basic premises tickled my fancy: Alpha Flight and Justice League Europe. Canada's premiere superhero team! The Justice League... but in Europe! Something about the very American concept of superheroes being transposed into other countries very much amused and intrigued me.

I can't claim to be a big Alpha Flight fan (that will have to be another post someday), but I fell in love with Justice League Europe. Character-driven and funny, it's everything I want from an ongoing narrative, and it's thanks to JLE that Elongated Man is my favorite DC superhero. 

I hadn't known when buying it that JLE was a spin-off of Justice League International, or that it was intertwined with Justice League America, but I soon figured that out when I got to crossover events like The Teasdale Imperative and Breakdowns, which were largely incomprehensible because I was only getting half the story; even outside of that, this series clearly continued character threads begun in the earlier series. Additionally, JLE continued beyond what I had, just under another title: issues #51-68 were retitled Justice League International.

So I've long intended to read the whole of the JLI era, with both series intertwined and all the various side stories and spin-offs. To that end, about ten years ago I picked up Formerly Known as the Justice League, which collects the six-issue reunion miniseries of that name. 

The setup...
from Justice League vol. 1 #2

Well, it finally made it to the top of my reading list, so it's time to dive in. Since then, the core Giffen/DeMatteis run on the two titles has been collected in three hardcover omnibus volumes, and I'll definitely be reading those, but me being me, I'm making it even more complicated. 

I'll also be reading Justice League Task Force (which has been collected a little), Justice League Quarterly (early issues of which are in the JLI Omnibus volumes), and various other side stories and flashbacks set during this era. I won't end where the omnibuses end, but keep going, up until the point that JLI was cancelled, just before Zero Hour. (JLA kept going after that, but I won't.) Some of the post-Giffen/DeMatteis material has been collected, mostly issues of JLA in the Superman & Justice League America and Wonder Woman & Justice League America trades; I'll read single issues when I have no other option.

I'm mostly reading in the order things are collected in the JLI omnibus volumes, but I've made some adjustments based on the Cosmic Teams timeline. Here on this blog, I'll be writing them up in chunks of approximately twelve ongoing issues to a post. So, when it's just JLI, I'll cover a year's worth of stuff, but once JLE is added to the mix, I'll do two posts per year, and then once JLTF comes along, three.

So here's the first post. This covers issues #1-12 of the title originally known as Justice League, later Justice League International, plus the Justice League Annual, and two stories set during this era that were published later. 

...and the payoff.
from Justice League vol. 1 #2

"Born Again" / "Make War No More!" / "Meltdown" / "Winning Hand" / "Germ Warfare" / "Gray Life, Gray Dreams" / "Massacre in Gray" / "Justice League... International!", from Justice League vol. 1 #1-4 (May-Aug. 1987), Justice League Annual vol. 1 #1 (1987), Justice League vol. 1 #5-6 (Sept.-Oct. 1987), and Justice League International vol. 1 #7 (Nov. 1987); reprinted in Justice League International Omnibus, Volume 1 (2017)

plot & breakdowns by Keith Giffen; scripts by J. M. DeMatteis; pencils by Kevin Maguire and Bill Willingham; inks by Terry Austin, Al Gordon, and Dennis Janke, P. Craig Russell, Bill Wray, Robert Campanella, Bruce Patterson, & Dick Giordano

Like many ongoing titles, Justice League takes a bit to find its footing. I'm not saying it's bad—I'm just saying it's not what it would later become. The first four issues especially are pretty serious in terms of plot, with terrorists attacking the UN, looming nuclear meltdowns in Soviet Russia, people escaping dead worlds, and a fairly desperate fight between Booster Gold and the Royal Flush Gang. The comedy, such as it is, mostly comes from two things.

First, Keith Giffen's breakdowns, J. M. DeMatteis's scripts, and Kevin Maguire's pencils lean into the character interplay and highlight the differences between these various characters. To me, this is always the pleasure of a team book: the premises of, say, Batman and Booster Gold, make for fairly different approaches to superheroics, and it's just fun to have them butt up against each other here. In particular, Batman kind of becomes the cranky straight man to the other characters, as one of the only experienced JL members, and certainly the most serious... though not averse to cracking a joke on occasion. The other character who really stands out here is Guy Gardner, who's full-on in his boorish asshole characterization here. Captain Marvel is in his "holey moley" mode, which is fun too.

Second, as much as they put people in danger, there is a slight hint of comedy to the machinations of the League's mysterious benefactor, Maxwell Lord. Obviously being toyed with by forces beyond your comprehension can be frightening, but it can also be the set-up for some good jokes. So, the the first four issues are decent enough. The visual storytelling is top-notch, as it always is when Giffen is doing breakdowns or layouts. 

These are followed by Justice League Annual #1, which I thought was okay but a bit long-winded. Some of Ted "Blue Beetle" Kord's employees are infected by a mind-controlling virus, which spreads around the world; it's not really interesting enough to see a bunch of mind-controlled superheroes to justify the double-length story. And, unfortunately, the next story (the "Gray Man" one from JL #5-6) is also about mind-controlled superheroes. This is probably the weakest story in the whole book; I found the conflict about an ancient servant of the Lords of Order who rises up to bedevil Doctor Fate kind of long-winded and hard to care about. That said, JL #5 is the issue with the infamous "one punch" moment where Batman lays out Guy once and for all.

After this, the book was retitled from Justice League to Justice League International with issue #7; as you might imagine from the new title, this is also the story where the JL officially gets UN sanction. The Gray Man plot is wrapped up quickly, and the issue focuses on Lord manipulating the League and the press... but we also get some of the series's initial forays into more overt comedy, with Guy getting the bump on the head that turns him into an obnoxiously pleasant sap. On the other hand, there are nice moments of characterization, too, such as when J'onn "Martian Manhunter" J'onnz reflects on how the League itself is his home on Earth, the one place where he can be himself.

from JLA 80-Page Giant #1

"Mousebusters", from JLA 80-Page Giant #1 (July 1998); reprinted in Justice League International Omnibus, Volume 3 (2024)

script by Keith Giffen, pencils by Kevin Maguire, inks by Karl Story, colors by Gene D'Angelo, letters by Bob Lappan

This story was written a decade later, but takes place during JLI #7. Its first page retells the first page of issue #7, with Guy crawling under a console in the JL headquarters looking for a mouse and hitting his head. The rest of the short story involves the rest of the League, particularly Beetle and Booster, working to try to catch the mouse. (The issue implies the rest of its events follow immediately after the first page, but this can't be the case; most of the story's events must occur simultaneous to the events of pages 14 through 17 of JLI #7 based on the presence of the Martian Manhunter. A couple days pass according to "Mousebusters," which isn't what JLI #7 implies, but is possible.)

Anyway, it's a very short but funny story about some Booster/Beetle hijinks. At the time I read it, I felt it was more overtly comedic than anything we'd seen in the actual JL comics so far, but it's actually pretty much on the level of "Moving Day," the very next issue.

from Justice League International vol. 1 #8

"Moving Day" / "Old News" / "Seeing Red" / "Brief Encounter" / "Soul of the Machine" / "...Back at the Ranch..." / "Constructions!" / "Who Is Maxwell Lord?", from Justice League International vol. 1 #8-12 (Dec. 1987–Apr. 1988); reprinted in Justice League International Omnibus, Volume 1 (2017)

plot & breakdowns by Keith Giffen, scripts by J. M. DeMatteis, pencils by Kevin Maguire, inks by Al Gordon

The rest of the first year of JLI sets up the series's new status quo, involves the characters in the Millennium crossover, and wraps up the subplot about Maxwell Lord manipulating the League while something else manipulates Maxwell Lord. Issue #8, "Moving Day," is comics perfection as far as I'm concerned. No superheroics, just character interplay as the JLI moves into their new UN-provided "embassies" around the world. Lots of great jokes, like Booster trying to hit on women and Mister Miracle not realizing that every superhero headquarters has a roof up to landing a shuttle on it.

"Seeing Red" and "Soul of the Machine" focus on battling the Manhunters; part of the premise of Millennium is that characters from every book would be revealed as evil alien Manhunters, but unfortunately the character picked here is Rocket Red, who literally joined the team one issue earlier, so it's not much of a shock reveal! In "Soul of the Machine," the League is suddenly in space (I did read Millennium, but over a decade ago, so my memory is foggy); I was surprised to actually enjoy the appearance of Gnort, the nepo baby Green Lantern. In the past, I have found the a little bit of the character to be far too much, but I guess it shouldn't be much of a surprise that Giffen, DeMatteis, and Maguire would handle him better than their many imitators.

To be honest, I found a lot of the reveals about Maxwell Lord pretty confusing, but I did kind of feel like the creative team was trying to wrap up this plot sooner rather than later so it wouldn't drag on too long.

There are also some backup stories here; in particular, we see the UN shutting down the Global Guardians, which had been their sanctioned superhero team before the JLI (as established in Infinity, Inc.)... but which never had America or Russia as participants. These stories are okay on their own but will end up having several different ramifications for the main series.

from Justice League America Annual #9

"In 30 Seconds", from Justice League America Annual #9 (1995)
written by Gerard Jones, pencilled by Jeff Parker, inked by John Nyberg, lettered by Clem Robins, colored by Gene D'Angelo

Lastly, I read this "Year One" annual from 1995. Unlike "Mousebusters," it's not collected in any of the JLI omnibuses (they seem to have only gone for retroactive-continuity JLI stories when they were created by members of the original creative team), so I had to hunt down the single issue. 1995's "Year One" annuals were all set (as you might imagine) during the first year of their characters' superheroic careers; this one actually takes place between pages of JLI #12. 

Basically, it further complicates the already complicated story about Maxwell Lord and Metron by having Metron accidentally boom tube the JLI to New Genesis, where they have to stop the machine intelligence that was controlling Max (here called "Kilg%re," though that hasn't been established in the actual JLI stories yet) from exerting its control over New Genesis and Apokolips. In Earth time, the whole trip takes just thirty seconds, between panels of JLI #12, hence the title... though much of the story retells the Max-focused scenes from JLI #12 over again, which must take more than thirty seconds. I found the retelling pretty unnecessary (though writer Gerard Jones adds some wrinkles which I think must be setting up some ongoing plot from 1995), and I honestly didn't really understand a lot of the turns in the New Genesis/Apokolips plot.

I usually enjoy Jeff Parker's writing, but I think this is my first time seeing his art, which I think is overall good, but what I am discovering about many of the people trying to imitate the JLI style is that they go for "comedic" in the art itself, which is something Kevin Maguire himself doesn't do. He just goes for character-focused and realistic, and lets the comedy emerge naturally from that.

This is the first in a series of posts about Justice League International. The next covers issues #13-21 of JLI. 

Black Panther: Two Thousand Seasons by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Daniel Acuña, et al.

The previous installment of The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda ended with T'Challa finally getting his memory back; the third and penultimate sees him reestablishing (first) contact with and (then) transportation to "Wakanda Prime" (e.g., the original Wakanda on Earth). We get to see T'Challa interact with his supporting cast again; we discover more about the origins of "Intergalactic Wakanda" and about how T'Challa ended up there; and the emperor of the empire is seemingly defeated... but secretly continues to lurk in the background.

Who among us hasn't forgotten we're a supergenius?
from Black Panther vol. 7 #15

I was hoping that this installment would see the story kick into gear, but overall, it's pretty slow; reflecting back over it, I realized that very little had actually happened across the first five issues. (The sixth is a flashback establishing how T'Challa first came to the Intergalactic Empire and ended up a mind-wiped slave.) It's nice to get some answers, but mostly it seems to be moving pieces into position rather than telling its own story. I suspect that, once again, Ta-Nehisi Coates has bitten off more than he can chew, and whatever remains of this story will not be able to satisfactorily tie up all the interesting themes and ideas he has introduced.

In particular, T'Challa is wrestling with his sense of responsibility toward the Intergalactic Empire. It is going around committing crimes in the name of his country. Does he need to stop it? The story indicates this is complicated by the fact that, since he left, Wakanda has entered its first period of prosperity and peace in a long time. Dare he disrupt this? That's an interesting idea, but it's one I found hard to buy into, because we haven't actually seen this new, supposedly peaceful Wakanda. The main Black Panther series hasn't shown us Wakanda Prime for a dozen issues; our visits to Wakanda in the parallel Shuri miniseries didn't indicate that things were going that well. If this dilemma is going to drive the rest of this series, we need more reason to believe in it.

from Black Panther vol. 7 #18

There are nice touches, though. I thought the character stuff between T'Challa and Storm was probably handled better than at any previous time in Coates's run, particularly in the last issue here, where they discuss the invisibility of oppression to those who benefit from it. The reunion between T'Challa and his mother and sister was also well done. I think Daniel Acuña's art continues to improve; there are some real killer action sequences here. On the other hand, I am pretty unexcited to see that the villains of A Nation under Our Feet are making a reappearance.

So overall, this continues to be the best storyline of Coates's run on Black Panther, but it also doesn't read like the best comic someone could have written about these concepts and ideas. 

The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, Book 3: Two Thousand Seasons originally appeared in issues #13-18 of Black Panther vol. 7 (Aug. 2019–Jan. 2020). The story was written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, illustrated by Daniel Acuña (#13-17) and Chris Sprouse (#18), inked by Karl Story (#18), colored by Marcio Menyz (#18), lettered by Joe Sabino, and edited by Wil Moss.

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Reading Roundup Year in Review 2024/25

I first started tracking my reading when I went away to college in 2007. Thus, my "reading year" starts about the same time the school year does, and so every September, I crunch the numbers on last year's reading.

Last year, I pointed out that since becoming a parent, my number of books per year had been fairly steady (except for the pandemic year)... this year proved that false!

114 books makes this my worst year since I began tracking other than the pandemic year. I had some very bad months in there: only 5 in October, just 3 in February! If both of those had been, say, 11 (which was my average the other ten months of the year), I would have finished at the much more respectable 128. Alas!

SERIES/GENRE/AUTHOR	# OF BOOKS	BOOKS/ MONTH	% OF ALL BOOKS
Star Trek†	15	1.3	13.2%
Doctor Who*†	12	1.0	10.5%
Star Wars	1	0.1	0.9%
Media Tie-In Subtotal	28	2.3	24.6%
Oz	11	0.9	9.6%
Lois McMaster Bujold	2	0.2	1.8%
Robert A. Heinlein	2	0.2	1.8%
Other Science Fiction & Fantasy	32	2.7	28.1%
General SF&F Subtotal	47	3.9	41.2%
Marvel Universe Comics	3	0.3	2.6%
Legion of Super-Heroes	2	0.2	1.8%
Other DC Universe Comics	3	0.3	2.6%
Other Comics†	5	0.4	4.4%
Comics Subtotal	13	1.1	11.4%
Victorian Literature	1	0.1	0.9%
Other Literature	3	0.3	2.6%
General Literature Subtotal	4	0.3	3.5%
Pelican History of England	9	0.8	7.9%
Other Nonfiction	13	1.0	11.0%
Nonfiction Subtotal	22	1.8	18.9%

* Comic books relating to series or authors that are predominantly not comics I don't count under my "Comics" category, but under the main designation.
† Nonfiction about a particular author or series is included with that series, not the "Nonfiction" category.

I read a lot more nonfiction this year; the trade-off for that seems to have been that I read fewer comics. Given how much longer it takes to read a single nonfiction book than a single comic collection, no wonder my numbers were down! 

As you can see here, that's the most nonfiction I've read in a single year since I read for my Ph.D. exams! Other than that, though, things seem pretty stable the last few years.

Those are stats I crunch myself; here are ones I used LibraryThing to generate. I make different choices between how I enter books on LibraryThing vs. in my personal files, so the total number of books will be slightly different. Here's how my books break down by original publication date:

Here's their breakdowns by author. (Note that these are about authors, not books by authors, if you see the distinction.) First, what countries did my authors originate from:

The ratios are roughly in line with previous years; usually over half of my authors are U.S., with about third from the U.K., and then a smattering from other countries. (The "not set" is Michael Kelahan, who edited an anthology I read, and about whom I can literally find no information. I kind of suspect he may be a house name.)

Next, did I read books by living or dead authors:

My ratio of dead authors was slightly higher than normal, I think mostly because all eight authors of The Pelican History of England were dead. There were two authors I could find no data on in this regard: Kelahan again and Gilbert M. Sprague, who wrote an Oz book I read to my kids. (My guess is that Sprague is dead, but given I found multiple obituaries for people named Gilbert M. Sprague, I can't prove which one, if any, is the Oz author.) The "Not a Person" is James S.A. Corey, writer of The Expanse. (LibraryThing says that a group of people is not a person, which I guess is technically correct.)

And here's by gender:

I'd be curious to see how this differs by category; I suspect that if you removed tie-in books, my gender breakdown would be a lot more equal. (The "n/a" is once again James S.A. Corey.)

One statistic I enjoy a lot on LibraryThing is a breakdown of what you read by pages. This is imperfect: I only enter page counts for paginated books, and many comics and ebooks have no page numbers, and of course page numbers don't perfectly correspond to word counts. Also, multi-author books like anthologies and comic book collections can only be attributed to one person. But still, I find it interesting. Here's my top authors by pages read:

There is no author I like more than David Mack, evidently. What I find noteworthy are the two authors who landed in my top ten on the basis of a single book: Charles Dickens and Howard Zinn.

My tagging on books gives you a sense of genre and series and other attributes:

Clearly, science fiction dominates. Last year, fantasy was very close to sf, but this year there is a marked difference, and nonfiction just edges out fantasy. I read quite a bit of Star Trek, of course, and much more history than I normally do.

Finally, here's how many book are on my "To be read" list:

I was on a good track, but that slight upward curve is concerning!

You can compare this to previous years if you're interested: 2007/08, 2008/09, 2009/10, 2011/12, 2012/13, 2014/15, 2015/16, 2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19, 2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24. (I didn't do ones for 2010/11 and 2013/14.)

David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2006)

This is a book of my wife's that I semirandomly picked off her shelf to read. I picked it because of a combination of 1) the topic was of interest to me (I am, after all, supposedly a Victorianist who studies science), 2) she has spoken in the past of enjoying David Quammen's work a lot (plus I know him as a frequent contributor to Radiolab), and 3) David Quammen went to my high school (albeit some four decades before me).

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution
by David Quammen

Originally published: 2006
Read: August 2025

The book is kind of a biography of Charles Darwin, but not in the birth-to-death sense; rather, it focuses in on a particular period of Darwin's life, and a particular aspect of his life during that time. Basically, David Quammen's central question is this: Darwin first mentally formulated the idea of evolution by natural selection shortly after the voyage of the Beagle, which was from 1831 to 1836, but he did not publish On the Origin of Species until 1859. Why? What caused him to delay so long, and what caused him to finally get off his butt and communicate his big idea?

I found the book highly readable, blowing through it in a day. Quammen gives good insight into Darwin's research and the scientific context for it; we get good information about what people believed leading up to Darwin, and how Darwin thought through the observations he made on the Beagle trip—and why what was going on might make him reluctant to rush into publication. Quammen provides some good explications of the Origin itself; I think the book does a good job articulating its intervention and format to the nonspecialist reader.

I've never read a biography of Darwin cover to cover (I have dipped in and out of Janet Browne's magisterial two-volume one as needed), so many bits of Darwin's life here were new to me. I knew about his marriage, but little about his children, particularly the one who (we can claim from this vantage point) may have have Downs. Most interesting, though, was Quammen's coverage of Alfred Russell Wallace, who independently came up with the idea of natural selection. I knew that story only vaguely: that Wallace came up with the idea, Darwin got wind of it, they jointly published, and then Darwin rushed to write the Origin to get his idea in print. I hadn't known anything about Wallace's tough early life, the difficulties he encountered on his own voyages of scientific discovery (the ship he was on caught fire and sank!), or especially how Darwin got wind of Wallace's discovery, or how the joint publication came about. Wallace actually knew nothing of the joint publication; Darwin's allies put the paper together and had it read while Wallace was out of the country (and Darwin himself wasn't even present for the reading).

Lots of good nuggets in here, which Quammen does a good job of contextualizing in both Darwin's life and nineteenth-century biological science more broadly. Holds up to me as a specialist reader, but I suspect would be a perfectly fine read for the nonspecialist as well. 

Marvel Action: Black Panther by Kyle Baker, Juan Samu, Vita Ayala, Arianna Florean, et al.

Marvel Action: Black Panther is a six-issue miniseries; I think the idea of the "Marvel Action" line is that it's made up of continuity-light stories aimed at younger readers. (I previously read a Marvel Action story featuring Elsa Bloodstone.) The League of Comic Geeks website tells me it's set on "Earth-18157," though most of the details (particularly its depiction of Shuri) seemed pretty consistent with the main Marvel universe as of The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, aside from the fact that T'Challa isn't in space; I wonder if it could fit in somewhere after that storyline is resolved.

from Marvel Action: Black Panther #3

Anyway, this is really two separate three-issue stories. The first, by Kyle Baker and Juan Samu, is about T'Challa and Shuri dealing with increasing amounts of bad weather around Wakanda. I found it a little too light to be interesting, and not very much tapping into the things that make Black Panther comics interesting; it mostly focuses on generic superheroics. Some things happen fairly quickly in a way that I found frustrating, and the villain seemed to gain too much ground too quickly to be plausible. (It must be hard to write stories where someone can plausibly take on a king on a regular basis, to be fair.) I found the humor pretty cheeseball and forced.

from Marvel Action: Black Panther #4

The second story, by Vita Ayala (who wrote a two-issue fill-in on Shuri) and Arianna Florean (who I predominantly know as a colorist on Titan's Doctor Who comics, but who also drew the diary extracts for the tenth Doctor's companion Gabby), is more three one-shots with some gentle links; as T'Challa and Shuri prepare for a scientific conference in Wakanda (nicely tying into what Nnedi Okorafor was doing in Shuri), T'Challa must first undergo a Wakandan tradition where he lives as a laborer for a day, and then Shuri learns a lesson about traditional Wakandan folkways versus science, before the story culminates in the conference itself. 

The stories do a good job of being rooted in ideas specific to Black Panther and Wakanda: what makes for a good king, how to accommodate tradition alongside new discoveries, why it's important to share your success with others. T'Challa having to work as a common laborer and deciding to single-handedly take on corruption was great; so was Shuri teaming up with a warthog to collect traditional medicines. The humor is light but effective; I particularly felt like Ayala and Florean had a good handle on Shuri. I'd gladly see more Black Panther work from them.

Marvel Action: Black Panther originally appeared in six issues (Apr.-June 2019). The stories were written by Kyle Baker (#1-3) and Vita Ayala (#4-6), illustrated by Juan Samu (#1-3) and Arianna Florean with Mario Del Pennino (#4-6), colored by David Garcia Cruz (#1-3) and Mattia Iacono with Sara Martinelli (#4-6), lettered by Tom B. Long (#1-2, 4) and Shawn Lee (#3, 5-6), and edited by Denton J. Tipton.

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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.

Hugos Side-Step: Between Planets / Starman Jones / The Star Beast by Robert A. Heinlein

In order to read The Rolling Stones (1952), I picked up To the Stars, one of four hardcover volumes from the Science Fiction Book Club collecting the Heinlein juveniles (they have not really been kept in print). Of course, this meant that I then went on to read the other three books collected in the volume: Between Planets (1951), Starman Jones (1953), and The Star Beast (1954).

To the Stars: Between Planets / The Rolling Stones / Starman Jones / The Star Beast
by Robert A. Heinlein

Collection published: 2004
Novels originally published: 1951-54
Acquired and read: August 2025

I was glad I did, because in particular, I really enjoyed Between Planets and Starman Jones. I like a good bildungsroman, and these are indeed good ones. Between Planets is about a young man named Don Harvey who is born in space to scientist parents from Earth and Venus; he spent some time on Venus as a child, and is now attending boarding school on Earth while his parents do scientific work on Mars, but he feels no particular allegiance to any planet. (Hence, one of the meanings of the book's title.) The book begins when war is about to break out between Earth and Venus, and Don must get off Earth before his Venus-born status makes too much trouble for him; his goal is to join his parents on Mars, but he is thwarted at every turn, and finds himself not really belonging anywhere.

After the light, episodic nature of The Rolling Stones, I wasn't expecting how heavy this one could get. In an early chapter, before leaving Earth, Don meets up with a friend of his parents who can't speak freely but indicates something is up; they both get taken in by the Earth police, and when he asks to go back to his friend, the police grimly inform him that, alas, the friend died of a "heart attack" while in police custody! I didn't see that one coming! Unable to commit himself to any side, Don does his best to remain above it all while focusing on his goal of reuniting with his parents even while being sent to Venus. There are a number of excellent scenes as he struggles to stay afloat in the midst of all the political (and, later, military) chaos around him.

A bildungsroman is all about growth, about a protagonist who figures out how society works and how to place himself in it. That's definitely what we get here from Don, and Heinlein keeps it pretty nuanced. Don's virtue is that he doesn't get swept up in the fervor of either side, Earth or Venus, even when he enlists in the Venus military... but always being "between planets" isn't a virtue either. Don must learn to believe in something, otherwise, what's the point? The last couple chapters are perhaps a bit of an anticlimax, but the final decision that Don must make leading up to them is very well done. I liked this book a lot, and sped right through it in a way that wasn't true of The Rolling Stones.

So too did I enjoy and speed through Starman Jones. Like Between Planets, the book has a rougher edge that was missing from The Rolling Stones; its main character, Max, lives with his stepmother on a farm. His father is dead, and he's keeping his promise to take care of his stepmother and the farm... but what he really yearns for is space. When his stepmother remarries to a lout who intends to sell the farm. Max runs away from home, hoping to take his late uncle's place in the guild of astronavigators. Unable to do so, he falls in with a con artist who helps him join a spaceship crew under false pretenses.

Like Between Planets, it's a novel of growth, and like Between Planets, it's surprisingly nuanced. It would be easy, I think, to write a book where Max had to renounce the lies he had told; it would also be easy, I think, to write a novel where Max never did. What Heinlein does in Starman Jones, though, is to weave a middle course, where Max has to learn when a man must lie and when a man must tell the truth in order to do right by both himself and others around him. It's got a bit of a Rudyard Kipling Captains Courageous vibe to it, which I very much appreciated, though here it's not so much that shipborn service makes you into a better person, as it reveals the better person you were always meant to be.

Both books are solid 1950s science fiction: we have space dragons, telepathic speech, weird life-forms, lots of details about FTL methods that require people to do math in their heads (computer? what's a computer?), future space politics, and so on. Heinlein is good at this kind of thing, and I think the worldbuilding holds up in the sense that these futures (plausibly the same future, actually) feel lived and complete, even if we know a lot of elements of it would no longer come to pass now; I can imagine handing these books off to my own children in a few years.

Compared to these two, I found The Star Beast a disappointment. Between Planets and Starman Jones are both bildungsromans... but if Star Beast is supposed to be one, then Heinlein did a very bad job of it. Johnnie has an alien space pet that the local community finds to be a menace, and the government wants to get hold of, but he doesn't really make any interesting decisions or grow in any kind of way; he just obstinately refuses to let anyone have his pet, Lummie. It's his girl friend (and later, girlfriend) who makes all the smart decisions on his behalf, and it's a middle-aged Earth bureaucrat who otherwise does all of the book's problem solving. I liked Mr. Kiku, the bureaucrat, a lot... but I feel like you've messed up if the best character in your juvenile novel is a middle-aged bureaucrat! When Johnnie gets rewarded at the end, it's almost nonsensical, because he didn't do anything to deserve it, like Don or Max did, he hasn't grown in any kind of way. And his reward is so disproportionate compared to theirs, too! I really struggled with this one, to be honest, the worst of the four in the volume.

Quite possibly, my reading of classic Hugo winners and related works is long and complicated enough (current estimated date of completion: 2052, current number of installments remaining: 93)... but based on how much I enjoyed To the Stars, I've decided to add the three other SFBC omnibuses of Heinlein juveniles to it, though it might be a couple years before I work them in.

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 Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Four