Star Trek Adventures: Playing "Entropy's Demise" from These Are the Voyages

It's summer, which means it's time for me to get my Star Trek Adventures group back together! I reached out to everyone who participated last summer, and they were all willing to play again this summer. It's a really solid group of players at this point, so I was very happy to hear this.

I have seven players, which I know is a lot, but it's not very often that all seven are at the table, because we play weekly whether everyone can make it or not. Something I was keen to do this summer was push the role-playing element a bit more. My players aren't the kind for protracted in-character dialogue, but it did seem to me that I could be putting more pressure on Values in interesting ways. In the final episode of last summer's mini-campaign (see episode #8 in the list below), for example, the players were kind of pushed to perhaps do something undemocratic in the short term in order to help democracy in the long term... they did not, and everything worked out. What I am a bit curious about is putting the players in situations were sticking to their Values might either 1) cause inter-character conflict, or 2) cause conflict with Mission Directives.

To this end, one thing I wanted to do was split them up more. Last summer, I added a B-plot to the prewritten mission "The Gravity of the Crime" (see #7). I think this helped energize things a bit: two or three characters on the ship doing their own thing meant all the players got more to do. It also seemed to me that putting two characters off on their own could let them focus on their interactions a bit more as a duo, and let me find ways to put interesting pressures on them.

Outside of the character dynamics, I also wanted to continue our ongoing plotline about the Haradin and their growing nativist movement. I have an idea about where this might go by the end of the season, but we'll see. The players dealt a blow to that movement in the finale to last season, but the real world has shown us that this doesn't always mean something! So the idea I had was to explore some of the consequences the movement might have for the wider Haradin society. Specifically, inspired by some of the USAID stuff, I had the idea that the Haradin clan-ships might cut funding to planetborn Haradin, as this might have become politically unpopular. 

This dovetailed nicely with a prewritten mission I've long had on my list of potentials to run, "Entropy's Demise" by Anthony Jennings from the first STA mission compendium, These Are the Voyages. That's about a Federation wine colony that needs help, but what if it was a Haradin wine colony... whose requests for help from the ship-clan had gone ignored? It also has a role for the Romulans, and one of my players had requested more familiar Star Trek aliens in the campaign. (And I could see how I could build on this to have more Romulans going forward.)

So I decided to do that one, adding a B-plot. I'll go through the A-plot first here and then the B-plot. 

“Chief Engineer’s Log, Stardate 54910.9. Doctor Gurg and I are returning to the Diversitas via runabout after spending a week supervising the construction of a new hospital on Maxia Beta VIII. However, we have been asked to divert to Deep Space 10 by Lieutenant Commander Mazio Sanna of Starfleet Intelligence...”

Planning the Mission 

Morghanek's Hope (image generated by ChatGPT)

The basic premise of "Entropy's Demise" is that the player ship is sent to Morgan's Hope on Carina VII, a colony growing grapes and producing wine. The colony is beset by mysterious temporal anomalies: a kid who should be six months old looks six years, grapes are going through their entire life-cycles in days, buildings only built recently are collapsing overnight. This turns out to be due to a century-old Federation starship, the USS Hamilton, which was testing a temporal weapon using tachyons; the abandoned ship is orbiting Carina X. The three acts are 1) the players investigate the colony, 2) the players discover the Romulans are observing the colony in secret and clear out their base, and 3) the players go to the Hamilton and deactivate the weapon while competing with the Romulans who want it themselves.

My main changes were, first, making the colonists into Haradin, which mostly involved changing names.

• Morgan's Hope → Morghanek's Hope
• Syreeta Sebastian → Siretha Sebanil 
• Mackley family → Maklen family
• Wesley → Weslar
• Aurelia → Aureneh
• Efren → Efrevi
• Zane Knoll → Zanil K'nor

Se'irrah's estate (image generated by ChatGPT)

There was one existing colonist with an alien name, whose species I don't think is ever established, Se'irrah, so I kept that name as is.

The other main change I made was altering the backstory of the USS Hamilton a bit. In the mission as written, it's a Constitution-class starship testing a weapon; I made it a Crossfield-class starship testing an experimental drive system, a sister ship to the Discovery from the same program. I felt like 1) "Burnham's War" seemed like a plausible source of Starfleet desperation (this wasn't really accounted for the mission as written), and 2) a tachyon drive seemed a much more likely thing than Starfleet making a tachyon superweapon! Plus, I have a nice Eaglemoss model of the Discovery.

Thanks to this friendly redditor for making a map of the Romulan outpost I could print out. Very useful! (And, as always, I made the title more pretentious.)

Playing the Mission 

warehouse on Carina VII (image generated by ChatGPT)

These are the players I had:

• Ryan as Rukot, captain (sessions 1-3)
• Debi as T'Cant, first officer/science officer (1-3)
• Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer (1-3)
• 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 (1-2)

Kenyon and Andy were who I siphoned off into the B-plot, so more about them later. I was able to keep things to one session per act. (Technically our sessions are three hours, but we usually socialize and eat for the first thirty minutes.)

Act I: Trouble on Carina VII 

secret Romulan outpost (image generated by ChatGPT)

At the first session of the summer, I asked the players to reflect on what their characters had been up to in the months of narrative time since we had last played. Cari had the idea that Jor had become disgruntled about how poorly most of the crew had done in some recent Fitness challenges, and thus was imposing a strict workout regimen on the crew; Andy built on this by Gurg being tired of treating workout-related injuries and thus being willing to write crewmembers frivolous medical excuses for getting out of workouts. This was leading to tension between the two once-tight friends. I had the players reflect on who would adhere to Jor's regimen and who would not; Ryan and Debi said their characters would, but Claire said Mooria would only participate in "fun" workouts, while Austin said Frector (who, as a Ferengi female, just can't keep up no matter how much she wants to) would have started engaged but gotten discouraged. We began the episode with a scene of Jor confronting Mooria about participating more, which was interrupted by the distress call from Carina VII.

The players surprised me by contacting Matriarch M'Syrolath of Clan Marvek while en route to Carina VII and informing her about what was going on, but this worked well, because it let me foreground the  ship-clan's abandonment of the colony. The players were very cautious on arriving at the planet, sending a probe at first rather than getting close. This meant they detected interference, so they used their ship's "Modular Laboratories" Talent to set up a sort of isolation laboratory that would screen out any environmental influences. Instead of beaming down to talk to the governor, they talked to her over comms; instead of going to the Maklen family home to see their prematurely aged child, they beamed the Maklens up into the modular laboratory!

I did eventually get them to understand they needed to go to the planet, so while T'Cant studied Efrevi Maklen and Rukot tried to isolate the interference, Jor took Mooris and Frector to the surface. This part of the mission as written turned out to be kind of redundant and repetitive. Your players talk to some characters and find out something weird is going on, repeat again and again. They don't get much new information out of each iteration of this, and I don't know that the colony needs all these NPCs who ultimately don't contribute much. I ended up skipping through some stuff in the interests of time and tedium. The characters don't get to do much detective work; basically, they scan a bunch of stuff, then someone shows up and says it's Romulans and it is Romulans. If I were to run it again, I think I'd add more clues throughout and let them piece together the Romulan observers themselves.

There was a bit of shenigans because investigating the planet is mostly Tasks in Medicine, Science, and Engineering... but T'Cant was on the ship, and Gurg and Nevan were somewhere else entirely! The remaining characters were not exactly well-suited to this. 

Act II: The Outpost 

USS Hamilton near Carina X
(image found on Facebook; I think it's from Star Trek Online?)

We had some fun roleplay stuff on the way to the Romulan outpost: I suggested to Cari that Jor might carry out an impromptu fitness challenge as they made their way down the path. This ended up being an Opposed Task: could Frector and Mooria match Jor's roll? Austin was like, "Well, there goes my Determination for the session already": he felt Frector's Value of "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better" would cause her to do this to try to keep up. Claire also spent Mooria's Determination. Mooria did keep up, but even with Determination, Frector failed the roll! But I rewarded Austin with another point of Determination for this in-character decision.

The mission as written shows, in my opinion, some signs of being ineffectively edited down from a longer version. Act I ends with a note saying the players can't find the outpost, but Act II begins with the players just going into it! But I easily fleshed this out by giving them some Tasks to find their way in. Similarly, the mission as written just begins a scene with, "If the Player Characters interrogate D’Tok, they learn that he and his team of scientists recently arrived at the Romulan Outpost after the discovery of the tachyon emissions," without explaining who D'Tok is or where the players might find him! Everything in the base was pretty straightforward, however. There's a Difficulty 2 Task to disarm a bomb the Romulans plant; I dumped some Threat to make it D5, but T'Cant succeeded anyway. Frector and Jor got the jump on the Romulans setting the bomb and knocked them out before they could even react.

I think that in the mission as written, the interference is supposed to come from the tachyons, but Ryan wanted Rukot to study it; I hadn't planned on this, but I decided the Advantage from Modular Laboratories could let him do this, and so let him isolate the interference as something generated by the Romulan outpost to make them harder to discover.

Act III: The Lost Starship 

Subcommander Taleria and her soldiers aboard the Hamilton
(art from These Are the Voyages mission compendium)

The mission as written suggests the players will research the USS Hamilton once they find it's the source of the tachyons... mine did not! However, once they got to it, they wanted to use its command codes (like with the Reliant in Star Trek II) to run it remotely; I had them find the ship was classified once they attempted to do this, and they acquired the Hamilton's logs. The mission as written has no explanation for how Starfleet could have final logs from the Hamilton. If Starfleet knew it was in the Carina system, why did they never recover it? I established that the logs were jettisoned in a recorder buoy Starfleet recovered a century after they were recorded, and the logs only indicated the Hamilton was lost in "an unknown solar system in the uncharted Ekumene sector," so Starfleet didn't know where to look for the ship. (Maybe the mission as written is thinking the crew evacuated, then the ship vanished to the Carina system? I don't know.)

My players dithered a bit in approaching the Hamilton (they had a long debate about sending a message to the Romulans), so they didn't have a ton of time in the final session, so I made things a bit simpler on the fly. Still, they did good. They convinced the Romulan subcommander, Taleria, to work with them, nicely setting her up for a return appearance. The final fight is supposed to be on the Hamilton's bridge, trying to knock out all the Romulans before their commander can download the plans for the tachyon device. Austin had the idea that instead of shooting the Romulans, they should just shoot the console they were using. The Romulans missed on their opening turn (I should have spent more Threat!), and then Frector and Jor each hit the console (I made it D1 instead of the usual D2 for a phaser shot, since it seems to me shooting a console can't be that hard), blowing it up and knocking out the Romulans. In the whole episode, the players only shot two Romulans and never were successfully hit by one!

"Entropy's Demise" is fine on the whole, but it feels like more of a D&D adventure than an STA one: go to a village, then go through two "dungeons" essentially. There's no Star Trek–style moral dilemmas or allegories, nor does most of the stuff in Act I really matter to Act III. But it worked nicely for my purposes: I ended with a hook into the ongoing Haradin plot, and Subcommander Taleria will come back in our very next episode! 

The B-Plot 

Esha Vortan (image generated by ChatGPT)

With the B-plot, I wanted to pick up on our Christmas episode. In several episodes, the players have bumped into a Haradin character named Esha Vortan. Esha was one of the Haradin pirates they captured and handed over to the Klingons in episode #3 (though he wasn't seen in that one, this was established later). He first appeared in episode #5, where they got the Haradin prisoners back from the Klingons; he was keen and young, and offered to mind-meld with T'Cant to try to help the crew to understand the Haradin. (T'Cant couldn't mind-meld with him because of his implant, but he didn't know this.) Esha let Gurg study his implant. When they Haradin pirates were released (mentioned in episode #7), he returned in episode #8, now part of General Zotabia's paramilitary forces trying to prevent "election interference." He was nice and genuinely thought the Diveristas crew would be impressed by this. He then popped up in episode #9, now a pirate again, and was part of the pirates the crew helped capture.

So what would happen to this guy? I wanted to explore some ideas of how someone becomes radicalized—and how they might be deradicalized. I also wanted, like I said, some potential character conflict, and to use our recurring setting of Deep Space 10 with its NPCs a bit. Nevan and Gurg seemed like an interesting pairing for such a subplot. Gurg likes to debate; Nevan likes to solve puzzles. But Gurg likes sharing information, while Starfleet Intelligence hoards it, which seemed to have good potential for conflict. Plus, Nevan's romantic interest, Chief Susu Webb, is stationed on DS10! 

(image generated by ChatGPT)

I had Nevan and Gurg diverted to DS10 after a mission and summoned to the office of Lieutenant Commander Mazio Sanna, the director of Starfleet Intelligence operations in the Ekumene sector. (He appeared in episodes #5 and 8 before, and as Frector's boss, has been mentioned in several others.) Mazio told them that SI was really happy with how Frector had acquired the coordinates to Zotabia's pirate base in episode #9, but they also wanted a PR coup: firm proof that General Zotabia had returned to piracy. However, none of the pirates were willing to name Zotabia... could Nevan and Gurg get Esha to spill the beans via Esha's bond with the Diversitas crew?

Nevan and Gurg secured a temporary release from the DS10 security stockade for Esha by talking to Captain Morox, DS10's JAG officer, and were able to talk to him in the station bar. They found out that Esha had initially received comfort from the Haradin transmitter network when Zotabia had reactivated it, but since he'd been locked up on DS10, it had gone dead. Esha had assumed Starfleet was blocking it, but they were able to prove to him that wasn't the case—having failed Zotabia's movement, the pirates had been abandoned by it. They were thus able to persuade Esha to give the testimony required.

But this was the twist: when they went back to Mazio, he told them this probably wasn't good enough to secure Esha's release. Anyone could say Zotabia was in charge of the pirates. Wouldn't it be better to release Esha, let him go back to Zotabia's base, and get a recording of him? Nevan and Gurg were pretty dubious that Esha would even survive this!

Consul Vrossaan
(image generated by ChatGPT,
based on a cosplay photo)

I think this played out nicely. Neither Gurg nor Nevan are characters built for social conflict, so they had to stretch themselves to work their way through this tangled web of mayhem and intrigue. Eventually, Nevan was able to get Consul Vrossaan, the Diplomatic Corps's envoy on DS10, to back him up and negotiate diplomatic immunity for Esha in exchange for Esha entrapping Zotabia on a comm channel, a deception Nevan had to help facilitate, thus turning a diplomatic problem into a technical one. And Nevan and Gurg were able to give Esha the sense of purpose he had lost: SI gave him an impounded pirate vessel so Esha could start a new life as an independent space merchant. Plus we got some incremental advance on the Nevan/Susu romance!

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"
9. "Legend Grew about Their Daring" 
10. "On the Edge of Nobody's Empire"
11. "Nobody Here" 

Specials:

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