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
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| 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.
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| 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!
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| a necromancer tower in sickbay (image rendered by ChatGPT) |
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
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| 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.
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| Consul Vrossaan (image rendered by ChatGPT) |
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.
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| the Diversitas's lounge ready for a reception (image rendered by ChatGPT) |
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!
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| a dragon attacks the Diversitas (image rendered by ChatGPT) |
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.
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| an orc in Engineering (image rendered by ChatGPT, based a couple reference images I provided) |
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.)
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| Wadi game box (image rendered by ChatGPT*) |
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!
Star Trek: Ekumene:- "Patagon in Parallax"
- "A Terrible Autonomy"
- "Stinks of Slumber and Disaster"
- "Angels in Your Angles"
- "A Thousand Miles from Day or Night"
- "When I Get through This Part…"
- "Only Trying to Do Right in This Wicked World"
* 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.
This summer, when I was running my Star Trek Adventures campaign, I was also watching season two of Strange New Worlds. (Me to my wife: "'I fly the ship' is clearly Ortegas's Value.") When I got to the episode "Under the Cloak of War," I went, "I want to do that!" Specifically, "Under the Cloak of War" is a flashback about what a couple characters did during the Federation-Klingon War before the series started; it has a much different tone to the rest of SNW.
