“I can’t follow the Admiral’s orders. They are illegal. Besides… she’s having an affair with an Orion. It’s a security risk,” the Science Officer defied the Captain.
“Do not display that material in my conference room,” Captain Binat demanded. She tapped her com badge. “Security, escort my officers to their quarters to be detained for two hours.”
“Who am I having my security team detain?” Lt Sovalik asked.
“You… and your fellow officers,” Captain Binat responded.
The doors slid open, and a security detail arrived to take the Bridge crew into custody.
Alone in the conference room, Captain Binat requested a meeting with the Admiral…
So, I ran my Star Trek Adventures group through the module “Lurkers” by my favorite line writer Christopher L. Bennett. If you don’t want to know about the details of this adventure, please stop reading. I’ll have another article for you next week.
The adventure was released in conjunction with the Lower Decks Campaign Guide and was meant to serve as an adventure for a Lower Decks campaign. It assumes the players are all playing junior officers, and the senior officers are NPCs. The module has the Bridge officers make decisions that railroads the second and third act of the adventure.
My campaign, going on about six years, features an established Bridge crew, and I did not want to take agency away from them. So, I instead ran the adventure as a sandbox, taking what I needed, and the information of how NPCs respond, in order to fit with the decisions my crew made.
Basically, technical mishaps cause a communications relay to transmit for twelve years unencrypted captain logs and Starfleet data to the nearby planet of Shawain 2. They picked up on the signals, translated them and mass marketed the information from the stars.
The culture adapted to the lessons from the Federation: virtually eliminating poverty and nearly ending war. Religions were founded around the Prophets and Kahless. The hub of receiving this signal is at a place called the Great Computer, which coincidentally has a convention center next to it. When the PCs arrive, a Star Trek convention is in full swing.
When the PCs beam down, disguised enough to blend in with the Shawain 2 natives, they are recognized from the broadcasts and forced to retreat to their ship. Junior officers and crew members who have only recently begun serving as officers are sent to infiltrate the convention.
In the module, the Bridge crew order the crew to find a way to get past the convention to the Great Computer and sabotage it, ending the cultural contamination. They’re ordered to team up with a group called the Primers, who believe the best way for the people of Shawain 2 to follow the Prime Directive is to ignore everything they’ve learned from the stars and develop a culture on their own.
My group did not go that way. They got orders from the Admiral to remove the contamination, but the crew realized the only way to remove the contamination was to “go all Star Wars and build a Death Star.”
In my latest session, things boiled over with the Captain ordering the crew to take steps to remove the contamination, while the crew thought this in itself was a violation of the Prime Directive and refused to follow the Admiral’s orders, wanting to hear from the Admiral’s superiors.
Then, the Science Officer player sent me a note asking to search for blackmail material on the Admiral. I’d already planned for a future adventure to have the Admiral compromised by an Orion lover, so I decided to reward the player with this information… if a Difficulty 5 roll could be made.
The Captain stated they had no business digging into the personal business of the Admiral and ordered security to take her Bridge crew to be confined to quarters while she contacted the Admiral.
I thought there was lots of great roleplaying going on in the hour-long debate on how to handle the situation. What I didn’t detect was the debate was the entire crew versus my wife, playing the Captain.
She did not appreciate being in that situation. I should have ordered everyone out of character and reviewed how everyone was feeling about how things were progressing.
Several players said they greatly enjoyed this kind of roleplaying. My wife said it had gone on too long, and the crew wasn’t letting her get a word in. These are things I should have addressed.
When the Captain went to talk to the Admiral, I muted the microphone so the crew couldn’t hear the discussion. The Captain confronted the Admiral about the allegations of the affair, which the Admiral denied. Then, the Captain pled the crew’s case that the planet was not able to be cleansed of Federation interference, accidental or on purpose.
The Admiral agreed to send an observation team to Shawain 2 to watch the development of the culture, especially watching them after the signal from the communications signal had been jammed. The planet would become a protectorate of the Federation.
The Captain relayed this information, and the crew calmed down. This was a satisfactory decision.
One of the players said this would make an amazing episode, with a split scene of the Captain talking to the Admiral on one side and the crew plotting a mutiny on the other.
I wish it hadn’t gotten that far. During my off-microphone discussion with my wife, she asked what my plan was to bring this chaos from the edge. I confessed I didn’t have a plan. Perhaps the crew should be arrested and the campaign brought to a close.
My wife said we’d just gotten several good new players, and that wouldn’t be right to them.
In the end, we brought everyone from the brink. The Captain awarded the crew with twenty four hours of relaxation time and created a new cocktail to be distributed to the crew.
