Star Trek: Return to the Taurus Reach: Vanguard, Books 1–3

Star Trek: Vanguard was a series of original novels (plus some novellas) from Pocket Books, released from 2005 to 2012. I read the first five novels (roughly) as they came out... but when the sixth book came out in 2011, my progress through my reading list had gotten quite bogged down, and as of 2026, I still haven't read it! I've been slowly digging my way out recently, though, and am at last ready to tackle it... only at this point the last time I read a Vanguard book was in 2010, over fifteen years ago. I am hardly ready to jump straight into book six in the tightly serialized saga.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Harbinger
by David Mack

Published: 2005
Acquired: July 2005
Previously read: September 2005
Reread: March 2026

So, before moving onto book six, I am rereading the first five Vanguard novels. The first three predate my bookblogging, so I have no written reviews for them. Thus, in this post I'm going to (briefly?) cover all three at once.

Vanguard is a sort of parallel to the original Star Trek television series. The first book starts shortly after the second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before"; I think that the final book takes place around five years later, when the five-year mission is about to come to an end. At the time the series was announced, many fans wondered if it would a "Deep Space Nine in the 23rd century": just as DS9 took place simultaneously to Next Generation and Voyager, but was set in one place, aboard a space station, Vanguard was set in one place, aboard a space station. No traveling across space, with a new planet every week; instead, every installment is set in the same region of space. Vanguard Station (a.k.a. Starbase 47) is located in the Taurus Reach, a newly opened region of space at the fringes of Federation, Klingon, and Tholian space.

The creators of the series, editor Marco Palmieri and writer David Mack, pushed back against that conception. Rereading the series, it seems to me that everyone back then was comparing it to the wrong tv show: this isn't Deep Space Nine in the 23rd century, it's Breaking Bad in the 23rd century. Well, of course no one in 2005 could have said such a thing because Breaking Bad wouldn't debut for another three years. But Vanguard seems to me to be along those lines: one of those "prestige" television shows were we watch characters (usually white men) make difficult choices, many of them morally dubious, where the stories are willing to show the seedy underbelly of the universe and its inhabitants. I suppose more chronologically appropriate would be The Sopranos (1999–2007) or The Wire (2002–08). Really, a lot of those series came along after Vanguard, so I suppose Mack and Palmieri were ahead of the curve!

That said, shows like Breaking Bad and Sopranos and Mad Men did this to explore American conceptions of masculinity—that's not what Vanguard is doing. (Though, perhaps, it would be nice if it did; there's an emphasis on sexual dynamics here, but the books are in general more interested in reproducing them than examining them. There seems to be a mandatory "man she looks good in a miniskirt!" scene once per book. Similarly, self-descriptions like "[t]he slender, leggy young woman" populate the supposedly close third-person narration of the female characters!) Instead, it's exploring the dynamics of post-9/11 security state. When have people gone too far in pursuit of their political objectives? So, perhaps, what the books really are in the end is "Battlestar Galactica in the 23rd century." 

If that was meant to be the case, though, I find the books frustrating. The narrative arc of the first three books seems to be taking Commodore Diego Reyes to a point where he feels like he's gone too far. In the first book, David Mack's Harbinger, he authorizes some heinous stuff done to Tim Pennington, a journalist seeking to uncover the truth about what Starfleet is doing in the Taurus Reach. Throughout all three of the first three books, he coordinates the Federation's ongoing colonization efforts in the Taurus Reach, knowing that this is just to provide cover for the Federation's attempts to obtain the Taurus meta-genome, which places those colonists in grave danger. At the end of book three, Mack's Reap the Whirlwind, this plotline culminates in Reyes's ex-wife and her entire planet dying, and Reyes thus permitting Pennington to publish a story that reveals what should have remained classified, resulting in Reyes's arrest. His court-martial is covered in book four, Open Secrets, so I'll cover that later, but I found this arc unsatisfying. The problem is, as I see it, is that we don't really go into Reyes's head as he makes these decisions; we don't really know how he justifies them to himself or how he ended up in this position. If this is a commentary on the post-9/11 security state, we don't get to see the logic that causes people to make these kind of decisions to begin with. In Reap the Whirlwind and Open Secrets, we're told Reyes has lived much of his life carrying secrets for Starfleet, but why does he believe this is the right thing to do? I'm not sure. Without that justification, the reversal at the end of book three falls flat.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Summon the Thunder
by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

Published: 2006
Acquired: June 2006
Previously read: May 2007
Reread: April 2026

Indeed, I would say that the main thing that stops me from getting invested in Vanguard is the characterization. I think in principle, the ideas are fine. I do very much appreciate that (as was later done on screen in Discovery) that "main cast" is not necessarily the senior staff, but the set of characters who are influencing and influenced by events. In addition to Reyes, that's: Rena Desai, the JAG officer assigned to the station; Ming Xiong, the scientific lead assigned to Project Vanguard; Jetanien, the ambassador posted on Starbase 47; T'Prynn, the Starfleet Intelligence officer posted there; Cervantes Quinn, a smuggler operating out of the base; Tim Pennington, a journalist based on Vanguard; Ganz, an Orion smuggler whose ship is docked at the station; Ezekiel Fisher, the chief medical officer; and Anna Sandjeso, a Federation attaché who is secretly a Klingon spy. (There are lots of other characters, and not all of these characters play as big of roles as others, but these are the ones we get bios for at the end of book one, so they seem to be the ones Mack and Palmieri considered the leads.)

My issues with the characters, as of book three anyway (I'll have more thoughts on this in my writeup of book five, Precipice) is twofold. The first is that Harbinger seems to be trying to set up that these are more complicated, conflict-prone characters than you might be used to from Star Trek, especially the original series era. Unfortunately, it accomplishes this somewhat ham-handedly, in that the early parts of Harbinger are mostly about character walking around thinking about how much they don't like all the people they meet: Ming doesn't like his roommate on the USS Bombay, Reyes and Jetanien spend meeting scenes grumbling about what the other characters say, and so on. It makes everyone seem passive-aggressive and unpleasant.

My other issue is that there are just too many characters. There are the eight "main" characters, that would be fine... but there are tons of other point-of-view characters sprinkled in here, too. Random crewmembers on the Bombay in Harbinger (presumably to make us sad and surprised when they die), a whole bunch of USS Endeavour crew in book two, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore's Summon the Thunder. Why do I care about, say, the Endeavour's chief medical officer? We also get the addition of the S.C.E. characters on the USS Lovell. Too many of these characters are generic Starfleet types, without any interesting hooks, the precise kind of thing it seems to me the series's main cast was designed to move away from. I would have liked to have spent more time with our supposed actual leads, instead of cutting away to all these random people all the time.

Also, maybe I wasn't reading carefully enough, but was there a discontinuity between Harbinger and Summon the Thunder when it came to the relationship between T'Prynn and Sandjeso? Near the end of Harbinger, we find out they're sleeping with each other other—the Intelligence agent and the Klingon spy—but there's no indication that T'Prynn knows Anna's true identity. Suddenly in Summon the Thunder, T'Prynn not only knows but has turned Anna into a double agent at some point in the past. Weird transition, and also weird undermining of the premise's potential drama. (Also the tone in Harbinger was very much convenient-sex-buddies, and then in the Reap the Whirlwind they're apparently actually in love?)

My original reason for doing these three in one go was that they were simply the three I hadn't reviewed before, but I actually think they work pretty well as a complete unit, a trilogy with beginning, middle, and end, as it ends with the "secrecy" arc that began Harbinger being blown wide open. Similarly, books four and five seem to work as a duology as the series shifts its focus—more on that next time.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Reap the Whirlwind
by David Mack

Published: 2007
Acquired and previously read: August 2007
Reread: April 2026

Other Thoughts:

The cover to Harbinger is solid, giving us a nice view of the setting of the series, and I appreciate the inclusion of diagrams of the station in the book. I also like the cover to Summon the Thunder well enough. But the cover to Reap the Whirlwind is excellent, a work of art. Rarely has a "ships in space" cover to a Star Trek book been so dynamic and striking; never has a D7 battlecruiser looked more formidable. Unfortunately, I felt like after this point, the series's covers became pretty generic and mediocre, almost always just a picture of Vanguard with a Constitution-class starship somewhere. (Presumably so your casual bookstore punter would go, "oh, the Enterprise!")

I did not reread the prequel to the series, the crossover with S.C.E., a novella called Distant Early Warning (collected in Corps of Engineers: What's Past*). What is funny to me is the novella came out between books one and two, but takes place before book one... thus in book two everyone starts going on about the "Jinoteur carrier wave," a thing they for some reason never brought up in book one! 

My copies of Harbinger and Summon the Thunder are both signed by the authors; in Summon the Thunder, Kevin Dilmore wrote what is definitely my favorite thing an author has ever inscribed to me: "M-O-L-L-M-A-N-N... see I can spell it!"

Reap the Whirlwind contains a "minipedia" with entries for all the characters and places of the series thus far. I appreciate the assistance in trying to ground the reader in this sprawling saga... but unfortunately you can't use it as reference while reading the book because it contains spoilers for it! Weird call.

* This is in fact the reason I didn't reread it... I don't own it in a form where it's a complete "book" and thus I wouldn't count it as a book read on my reading list! Gotta keep those numbers up, can't waste time on reading that won't contribute.

Star Trek: Encounters with the Unknown by Jeffrey Moy, W. C. Carani, et al.

Star Trek Classics #3: Encounters with the Unknown

Collection published: 2012
Contents originally published: 2000-01
Read: April 2026

Written by Nathan Archer, Janine Ellen Young & Doselle Young, Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, Kristine Kathryn Rusch & Dean Wesley Smith

Pencils by Jeffrey Moy, David Roach, Robert Teranishi
Background Assists by Philip Moy

Inks by W. C. Carani, David Roach, Claude St. Aubin

Colors by Dan Brown (with Nick Bell)

Letters by Ryan Cline (with Jenna Garcia) & Naghmeh Zand

Like Enemy Unseen, this "Star Trek Classics" release on Hoopla from IDW takes a Wildstorm trade paperback from the 2000s and rebrands it. While Enemy Unseen collected several otherwise unrelated Next Generation stories, this one collects four Voyager stories, three double-length one-shots and one three-part miniseries. I was surprised that the obviously intentionally vague title Encounters with the Unknown is actually pretty applicable to all four stories even though it feels like it could be applied to almost any Star Trek story if you squinted hard enough!

The first story is "False Colors," whose basic premise is that Voyager encounters what seems to be a Borg ship, but turns out to be something else entirely, and then Seven, Chakotay, and Tuvok must infiltrate it in the guise of Borg drones... leading to Seven possibly starting her own little collective. Like Perchance to Dream from Enemy Unseen, it reads like it's written by someone who is new to the comics medium: lots of word balloons, few visually interesting things near the beginning, the kind of stuff that might make for a fine episode of the tv show but is dull on the comics page. When the interesting conceit of the story finally turns up—would it be ethical for Seven to establish a "collective" of her own if it helps protect Voyager? how would she feel if she did?—it's not really used in an interesting way, the characters don't seem to actually face a dilemma due to it.

I felt like the whole comic might have been constructed around the idea of the shocking cover image of Seven as a Borg—which to be fair, was similar to how several actual Voyager episodes were developed.
from Star Trek: Voyager: False Colors #1 (script by Nathan Archer, art by Jeffrey Moy & Philip Moy and W. C. Carani)

The second story in this volume is the one story I can say I've wholeheartedly enjoyed across both volumes of Star Trek Classics that I read. "Avalon Rising" is about the Doctor being sent to an alien planet to recover an artifact blocking transporters; the planet is in a medieval time period, and its knights and squires interpret the Doctor as a wizard from a distant land, a role he ends up leaning into. It's delightful stuff: visually interesting (artist David A. Roach proves every bit as adept with this Doctor as the one he normally illustrates) and the dialogue and character arc for Bob Picardo's Doctor are pitch perfect (the writing is by the unknown-to-me wife-and-husband team of Janine Ellen Young and Doselle Young). It's the kind of premise you could image them doing on screen, but they never did, reminiscent of some screen episodes (sort of a mix of "Heroes and Demons" and "Muse" and "Living Witness") without being derivative of them. Neat conceit as the Doctor retells stories of Voyager's adventures through a medieval lens, a nice heartwarming ending. Honestly, one of the best Star Trek comics I've ever read.

Unlike any other story in the volume, this one was clearly constructed around interesting visuals suited to the comics medium.
from Star Trek: Voyager: Avalon Rising #1 (script by Janine Ellen Young & Doselle Young, art by David Roach)

Next comes "Elite Force," which I guess must be an adaptation of the videogame of the same name. Despite writing by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, stalwarts of space adventures comics in general (e.g., Legion Lost) and Star Trek comics in particular (e.g., Early Voyages), I found this hard to grab onto; the "Hazard Team" characters just don't give us enough to care about. Plus (and this isn't their fault) two stories about derelict Borg and scavengers in one volume is too many!

This guy's entire personality is "dumb jock."
from Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force #1 (script by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, art by Jeffrey Moy & W. C. Carani)

Lastly there's Planet Killer, a three-part miniseries about Voyager coming across another iteration of the same weapon as in "The Doomsday Machine" from the original series. The beginning is too slow and obvious considering the reader already knows what's up even if the characters don't; the second issue wastes half its pages on Harry Kim laboriously recapping "Doomsday Machine" for some reason; the third issue is very rushed, with a lot of stuff happening in reported speech or narration, instead of on the page. Like "False Colors," too talky for a comic, and despite some good efforts by artists Robert Teranishi (who I don't know) and Claude St. Aubin (who did strong work on DC's R.E.B.E.L.S. a few years after this), the action sequences lack the necessary intensity to make the premise work. The guest character feels like an afterthought (contrast them to Commodore Decker in the episode this story very closely mirrors).

Probably the best part of the art were all the ship-in-danger shots; very well done.
from Star Trek: Voyager: Planet Killer #3 (script by Dean Wesley Smith & Kristine Kathryn Rusch, art by Robert Teranishi & Claude St. Aubin)

So, on the whole, aside from "Avalon Rising," there's little here I'd call "classic." (Oh, also my Hoopla edition has a mistake where what's included as the first page of "False Colors" is actually the first page of "Elite Force." I think the first page of "False Colors" is missing as a result.)

Star Trek Adventures: Adapting Dayton Ward's Available Light into an Original Scenario!

Often, when I read a Star Trek novel I think to myself, "This would make a good Star Trek Adventures scenario." Novels that have made me think this include John Vornholt's The Next Generation: Masks (1989), Jeffrey Lang's Deep Space Nine: Force and Motion (2016), John Jackson Miller's Prey: Hell's Heart (2016), and especially many of the Next Generation works of Dayton Ward: Armageddon's Arrow (2015), Hearts and Minds (2017), and Available Light (2019). (It's probably not a coincidence that Dayton himself has written a lot for STA.)

That last one I thought would not just make a good STA adventure in general, but would make a good fit for my campaign. The premise of the novel is that the Enterprise finds a derelict ship in deep space. It seems abandoned, but the crew eventually discovers that it's carrying 60,000 refugees from an alien planet, they're just suspended in the ship's transporter buffer—where they can actually live until the ship arrives at its destination. Things are complicated, though, when a group of scavengers turn up.

This would work well for a couple reasons. One, I wanted to make the scavengers into Ferengi instead of an original race. One of my player characters is a Ferengi woman, and she has a brother who works as a successful businessman. If her brother was among the scavengers, it could lead to some good character conflict for her. (Additionally, one of my players requested more familiar races from the show.) Second, way back in our fourth episode, the players acquired an alien superintelligence living in their computer system, the "Engineer" named "Mercury." Unlike most of their people, Mercury wanted to explore the universe; they had briefly done so in an android body (which the players found way back in episodes 1 and 2). However, Mercury had honestly not done a lot since coming aboard, aside when the players briefly consulted them in episode 6. I had the idea that Mercury might complicate things here by uploading themself into the derelict's transporter buffer, which would then let them materialize themself as a living being.

I also did a B-plot, as I've been doing more of this season. The players have been dealing a lot with the Haradin and the ways their nativist movement is disrupting the entire Ekumene sector. I wanted them to help shape Starfleet's response to this, so my subplot for this episode was a conference on the player ship's home base of Deep Space 10, where Rukot and Mooria would be summoned to participate.

Also, at the beginning of the summer, one of my players, Cari, had been torn whether to continue playing her regular character of Jor, the Diversitas's security officer, or a new one-off character she'd played in our ninth episode, Rina K'var, the blue Orion pickpocket, who'd ended up exiled by her aunt. I suggested she could play Rina once, an idea she went for, because I had a good idea how to fit the character into the B-plot of this episode.  

“Captain’s Personal Log, Stardate 55020.9. Consul Vrossaan has invited Mooria and me to a conference on Deep Space 10 to discuss growing Haradin tensions in the Ekumene sector. Professor Orven Jadrel’s understanding of Haradin history, trade, and the meanings of Harad will be essential. The Haradin are not simply facing piracy. They are facing a crisis of identity....”

This is who I had per session:

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

...with special guest stars: 

• Cari as Rina K'var, freelance Orion (1, 3) 
• Hayley as Charley Lee, DS10 science officer (2)

I'll write this one up act by act. I did change the episode title to "No One in Here" to fit with my usual pretensions, but maintained Dayton's original title as the title of Act I. To keep with his usual theme of using Rush song titles, I used two other track titles from the same album as "Available Light" as the titles of Acts II and III. 

Act I: Available Light

Mercury appears to Gurg
(image generated by ChatGPT)

It's been an ongoing subplot in our campaign that Gurg, the Diversitas's chief medical officer, has been trying to make contact with Mercury; it was the whole reason he snuck aboard the Diversitas and finagled an assignment there. The episode began with Mercury presenting a genetic problem to Gurg; once Gurg solved it, Mercury appeared on his screen and asked what he wanted. Gurg's big technological goal is to connect people's brains to each other for the sharing of information (a collective, he is always quick to point out, not the Collective); when Gurg told Mercury this, Mercury gave Gurg a set of nearby coordinates.

It took a bit of persuasion for Gurg to convince T'Cant, who was acting captain with Rukot away at the conference, to go there, but he eventually did. There the players discovered the derelict. The three scenes were basically 1) examining the derelict from the outside, 2) beaming over and exploring it, and 3) discovering the Ferengi were aboard. (Kenyon, who plays Nevan the chief engineer, was away for this session, so we just said they left him in command when the players beamed over.) I had to come up with a bunch of Tasks for the players, of course, but I very much benefited from being able to take a bunch of description and such right out of Dayton's novel!

Nejamri derelict
(adapted from the Available Light cover by Doug Drexler)

My players were convinced this was an Alien-esque scenario, so they proceeded very cautiously. I had a bit where I played some Ferengi laughs they heard from the other side of a door, but they were convinced it was something creepy and malevolent! I had planned on having scene 3 be about them dealing with the Ferengi, but things went slightly longer than expected, so I just ended the act with the Ferengi turning up and one of them hugging Frector and exclaiming "sister!"

In Available Light, a fight breaks out between the scavengers and the Enterprise crew, and a mysterious emitter seemingly evaporates the character of T'Ryssa Chen; if there had been a fight, I would have done something like this, but this didn't happen, so I had an emitter evaporate T'Cant seemingly at random—because Debi would be out of town next week! 

In the B-plot, my goal for this act was mostly to establish the NPCs and the parameters. There were a lot, since I wanted a bunch of different possibilities represented for the conference, but most of them were returning. These were:

• Captain Akul, Klingon (episodes 3, 5, 8)
• Professor Orven Jadrel, Haradin academic (episodes 7, 8)
• Lt. Commander Mazio Sanna, Starfleet Intelligence (episodes 5, 8, 10)
• Subcommander Taleria, Romulan (episode 10) 
• Consul Vrossaan, Federation diplomat (episodes 5, 6, 8, 10) 

conference attendees

Plus there were three new NPCs: Della Robbia Roman, the admiral running the conference, (my players were delighted by my southern accent); Commander Derzir Ban, a Trill logistics expert (I wanted a joined Trill who could be snobby about Mooria's failed Initiate status); and Ashrevi, a Return to Harad agitator protesting the conference. And also Gregin Shrek, DS10's bartender, would put in an appearance (he previously appeared in episode 5). Each NPC would have a different take on what Admiral Roman should do about the Haradin: a military solution, a diplomatic solution, an Intelligence solution, and so on.

My other goal was to get Rina K'var involved. Since being kicked out of her aunt's pirate guild, she'd been playing Orion tambourine in Gregin's bar; he asked her to sneak into the conference and get him some information. With some judicious use of Threat, I got the players to intersect, and Rina even overheard some of Taleria's subordinates plotting. The act ended with Professor Jadrel giving a keynote at the conference... and then a bomb going off, injuring Jadrel, Mooria, and Rina. (Mooria's and Rina's players would be out of town the next week, so this worked well with my preexisting idea for a bombing subplot.)

Act II: Hand over Fist

Assistant DaiMon Tozal
(Tog from TNG: "Ménage à Troi")

In the A-plot, I had three basic scenes planned out. The first was the negotiating between the Starfleet crew and the Ferengi; Frector excels at this kind of thing, of course... but I put the whole Federation crew at a Disadvantage in Social Conflict with Ferengi because they were hanging out with a female. So it was difficulty 6... but she still did negotiate to allow continued access to the derelict. Her brother was Assistant DaiMon Tozal, working for DaiMon Plen of the FCA marauder Trickledown Economics.

In the second scene, the players investigated the derelict with some technical Tasks, alternating with social Tasks to deal with the Ferengi—they got up to shenanigans that the crew would have to deal with to proceed. The players were able to pretty quickly put together the clues to figure out that the Nejamri was carrying 60,000 people in transporter buffers, but they were suitably impressed at the concept.

In the third scene, I had an Extended Task planned. I didn't know exactly what it would be, just that it would be Magnitude 5, Work 30, Resistance 1, Intervals 12. I was going to play it by ear based on what was happening: they wanted to open up a communication channel to T'Cant, so I had this cause the derelict computer to recognize she didn't belong and attempt to purge her. Nevan and Gurg took care of this, while I occasionally spent Threat to have the Ferengi do stuff Frector would have to deal with.

At the end of the act, Mercury used their connection to upload themself into the derelict computer, which also shut off the power. Commercial break! 

Lt. Commander Charley Lee
(image by ChatGPT)

Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Admiral Roman tasked Captain Rukot with investigating the bombing. I had known we'd be down to just four players this week, and suggested to my wife that she could play: she was in my old campaign, but now cares for the kids while I play usually. This would mean bringing the kids and them having a late night, but we thought we could make it work... beside, Kid One was interested in playing! I suggested to my wife she make up a character who could be stationed on Deep Space 10 and help Rukot investigate.

She decided to build a science officer with a Focus in chemistry, a human with a cybernetic hand that gave them an enhanced sense of touch. Kid One designed the visual appearance using an online Star Trek token generator, and Kid Two came up with the name: Charley Lee. A family undertaking!

When it came time to plan the mystery, I thought the only two real possible culprits were either the Romulans or the Haradin agitators. But how to make this not obvious... yet not so complicated the players would struggle to solve it? The idea I came up with was that Ashrevi had planted the bomb, but she had been given it by Romulans posing as Haradin. So the players would find some clues incriminating the Haradin, and some incriminating the Romulans, and some absolving each group: footage of Ashrevi carrying in a package she didn't carry out... but strong evidence she couldn't have brought an explosive on the station. They did a good job making their way through the clues and figuring it out.

I made the third scene an Extended Task as well, a chase where Ashrevi ran away and they had to catch her. Something interesting I did was to play both scenes at the same time, going back and forth. As Kenyon pointed out, this mean the players had to be thoughtful about using Momentum, because they needed to save some for the other group! 

Act III: Presto

DaiMon Plen
(Lurin from TNG: "Rascals")

Debi was back, so we began our third session by showing what T'Cant was up to in the Nejamri "Heaven" (it's called "Haven" in the novel, but c'mon, let's go big). This let her get some key exposition. 

Scene two then set the stage for the finale: The DaiMon of the Ferengi ship ordered Frector's brother to disconnect the Starfleet connection to the computer core of the derelict, so Frector had to stand up for herself. Austin killed it, rolling something like 11 successes, some of which he spent to establish an Advantage countering the Disadvantage I'd set up. They also made contact with Mercury and communicated with T'Cant inside the derelict computer.

I wanted the final scene to be all about transferring power to the Nejamri derelict, but I didn't want to do yet another Extended Task. So I adapted the Extended Task mechanic:

• Every round, the players could attempt a Daring + Engineering Task to transfer power to the derelict.
• On a success, they could roll Challenge Dice like an Extended Task, and the power flow would increase by that amount, on a scale of 0 to 20.
• The difficulty would start at 5, but every time they succeeded it would go down by one.
• But also every round, I would roll Challenge Dice, and the power flow would go down this amount, representing the Ferengi doing things to interfere. 
• I could spend Threat to do things like increase the difficulty of the main Task or add to my Challenge Dice rolls. 
• But the players could also undertake Tasks to either create Resistance on my rolls or stop me from rolling altogether.

If the power flow went back down to 0, the materialization process would begin without enough power to sustain it. If it went up beyond 20, then there would be enough power to sustain the process.

the Trickledown Economics
(image from Star Trek Online)

This I think was pretty fun! There was some grumbling about the fact that since it wasn't an Extended Task, Nevan couldn't use his relevant talent, but I pointed out that if I let him use it, I would have just designed the whole thing to be harder to compensate. There was a nice tug-of-war, but they won in the end. Frector broadcast to the Trickledown crew, pointing out the downsides of their undetaking, causing a work slowdown; T'Cant bent the power transfer beam so the Ferengi couldn't block it. There was one very exciting round where between them all, the players rolled five 20s, giving me 10 Threat!

In the end, the players saved the Nejamri, had some exciting showdowns, and convinced the Ferengi to lay low. My adaptation got looser as it went, but I think overall it worked well.

I'd like to make the A-plot a publicly available mission, but my notes are mostly written for my own benefit and have a lot of stuff specific to my players and campaign, so I would need to do a lot of cleanup first. Maybe someday!

The first scene of the B-plot was mostly to wrap up dangling thread from the investigation: the players got to question Ashrevi, and hear Taleria's side of the story. (The latter told them she'd already sent her subordinates home to Romulus... on a shuttle she feared wouldn't make it!) Then in the second scene, I had them hear each NPC's take and then come up with their own plan. They very much wanted to amplify Professor Jadrel's anti-nativist message... but how?

This was sort of the crux of the episode for me. I could think of a lot of ways to do this, but didn't want Starfleet to just tell them—hence the conference idea. They came up with the plan of hacking into the Haradin transmitter network, and transmitting Jadrel's message through that.

Scene three, then, was convincing other people to go along with the plan. If they could convince four of the six NPCs, they then could convince the Admiral. They worked their way from easiest sell to hardest, making good use of Talents and information to lay out their argument... and then they convinced the admiral. So now I know what to base the season finale around! 

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. "No One in Here" 
12. "Your Enemies at Your Side" 

Specials:

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

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. "No One in Here" 

Specials:

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

Star Trek Playlist: The Enterprise

I like to build little playlists of soundtrack music for myself to listen to as I work. A lot of these are pretty obvious: I have a Star Wars one with all the opening and closing tracks from each film, plus significant character themes.

One of my favorite ones draws from the Star Trek movies, which is based around tracks from each film that focus on the Enterprise. Here's the complete set:

1. Jerry Goldsmith, "The Enterprise" (from Star: The Motion Picture: Limited Edition)
2. James Horner, "Enterprise Clears Moorings" (from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: Newly Expanded Edition)
3. James Horner, "Stealing the Enterprise" (from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: Newly Expanded Edition)
4. Jerry Goldsmith, "A Tall Ship" (from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: The Complete Score)
5. Cliff Eidelman, "Clear All Moorings" (from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: The Complete Score)
6. Dennis McCarthy, "The Enterprise B" (from Star Trek Generations: Expanded Collector's Edition)
7. Jerry Goldsmith, "How Many Ships" (from Star Trek: First Contact: Limited Edition)
8. Jerry Goldsmith, "Star Field / Positronic" (from Star Trek Nemesis: The Deluxe Edition)
9. Michael Giacchino, "Enterprising Young Men" (from Star Trek)
10. Michael Giacchino, "Undersea Enterprises, Inc." (from Star Trek Into Darkness: The Deluxe Edition)
11. Michael Giacchino, "Yorktown Theme" (from Star Trek Beyond: The Deluxe Edition)

The Enterprise theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture of course needs no introduction or justification. Say what you like about the six-minute flyby of the ship, but the Enterprise has never looked better on screen, nor has it ever been treated better by a filmmaker. Part of that is, of course, Jerry Goldsmith's beautiful score for the sequence, which captures the majesty and the beauty of the starship in a way no one else ever has, before or since. My iTunes tells me it's not my most-played track on the list, but that's only because I originally had the non-limited edition of the TMP soundtrack; if you added my plays of the same track from that version, it would take the top spot.

Goldsmith reprises the Enterprise theme in the other tracks from him I have on the list: "A Tall Ship" from ST V, "How Many Ships" from First Contact, and "Star Field" from Nemesis. "A Tall Ship" is good stuff; I think on the whole, the ST V soundtrack finds interesting things to do with Goldsmith's original themes from TMP in new ways, and this track is no exception. Unfortunately, the directors of the TNG films never gave the Enterprise-E the kind of extended beauty shots the directors of the original films did, so the tracks from FC and Nemesis just feature brief restatements of the Enterprise theme from TMP over short establishing shots. (I'm sure there's a reprise of the Enterprise theme somewhere in Insurrection, but I don't have it on my list.)

For both ST II and VI, my list uses the track in the movie where the Enterprise is launched from spacedock. Arguably, neither James Horner nor Cliff Eidelman composed an "Enterprise theme" the way that Goldsmith did (or Giacchino later would), but both of these are great bits of music that turn something procedural into something majestic. Horner's piece is exciting and thrilling, while Eidelman's is almost mournful—the last time we would see the "original" Enterprise on the big screen. (Yes, I know the Enterprise-A is not really the original Enterprise, but it looks like her and it has the original cast on board.) I use the version just called "Clear All Moorings" from the original ST VI album, not the one that adds the "Spacedock" theme from the complete score.

Other than Goldsmith's original theme, my favorite Enterprise-focused piece of music is certainly "Stealing the Enterprise" from ST III. This is the thrilling piece that plays during what is the very best sequence from the entire film, when the Enterprise crew steal the Enterprise in order to travel to the Genesis planet. I could watch that sequence a million times and never be bored. "And... now, Mr. Scott." "Sir?" "The doors, Mr. Scott." "Aye sir, I'm working on it." The surprised relief on the faces of William Shatner and James Doohan as the doors finally open is utterly convincing. Oh, and then "GOOD MORNING CAPTAIN." Listening to the music never fails to bring me back to this.

There are actually two versions of this track on the ST III expanded soundtrack; I have the one closer to the music used in the finished film on my Enterprise playlist, but there's also one with some nice Prokofiev-esque flourishes as well.

Dennis McCarthy's soundtrack to Generations is by far the weakest ever composed for a Star Trek film, but there is a very quick restatement of Goldsmith's Enteprise theme combined with McCarthy's own Generations theme when we first see the Enterprise-B.

Lastly, there are the three tracks composed by Michael Giacchino. Though his style of scoring isn't totally to my taste, one can't deny that his score was the first to treat the Enterprise with the reverence she deserved since the original films—though this is because J. J. Abrams gave him the space to do it. The scene where Kirk first sees the Enterprise in space has this amazing theme under it. (I prefer the 2:40 version from the original soundtrack to the longer version from the deluxe edition, since what's added onto the longer version is not Enterprise-focused.) The scene from Into Darkness that most prominently reprises this is the reveal that the Enterprise is hidden underwater on the planet Nibiru. Can you hide a starship underwater? Who cares, so long as it looks and sounds this cool.

The track I selected from Beyond isn't Enterprise-focused per se, but it's in the spirit of the tracks I selected from ST II, III, and VI, except in reverse: instead of the Enterprise launching from spacedock, it's from a scene where the Enterprise returns to spacedock, a beautiful scene of the stasrship making its way into and through the amazing Starbase Yorktown. Yorktown is the focus here, not the Enterprise, but still it's a worthy track anyway. As one of the commenters on the YouTube video I've linked says, "Yorktown is the Federation itself represented in one city.  We the audience, and the characters on the Enterprise, get to see this beautiful 'snow globe' filled with people from all walks of life and all races living and working together harmoniously.  All the while they're surrounded and supported by technological marvels so advanced that they're damned close to magic.... This sequence tells the audience, and Kirk's crew, 'This is worth fighting for.'"

Put all this together, and you have a beautiful 34-minute journey through some of the best film music ever composed. Will the playlist ever get any longer? The prospects on this front seem pretty dim at the moment (it has been ten years, the longest of any such gaps), but I live in hope.