Modiphius Entertainment released Mission Briefs for the Star Trek Adventures RPG. These are a series of ten to twelve expertly-tailored adventure outlines. Even better, they give these packets away for free. Seriously, they’re giving whole seasons of adventures for a campaign away for free!
I was extremely excited when they released Michael Desmuke’s Lower Decks collection of Mission Briefs. I’d previously tried pitching ideas for Star Trek modules to Modiphius, but I have a sense I was adding comedic elements to my plots… and the man in charge of the line, Jim Johnson, reminds us that humor is subjective.
However, Michael wrote ten snappy comedic episodes, which fit my style of running. I’ve run a monthly Star Trek Adventures game for almost seven years now, and I like to balance the serious galaxy-changing plotlines with lighthearted stories. I think the writers of the series do the same.
Michael created an adventure where… from an alternate universe… tribbles are beamed onto the ship. These aren’t just any tribbles. They have been assimilated by the Borg. When my players realized what they were up against, they immediately panicked. This was the worst thing they could even imagine encountering.
It wasn’t funny to them. It was terrifying.
Flash back… for the B plot of the adventure, Michael added a delegate from a planet where there was a problem with infertility, now solved of this serious issue, leading a seminar on the crew’s ship on their developments in this scientific field.
I imagined the people on this planet all now had large families. The delegate would certainly be traveling with her children. Before the accident happened where the Triborgs were summoned, the delegate and her family were escorted to her suite.
The Science Officer, Leodi Mac, was so scared of the Triborg invasion he declared he was going to create a force field around all Triborgs multiplying in the Jeffreys tubes. I casually declared I was spending two Threat.
Threat in Star Trek Adventures is what the GM uses to add monsters to an encounter, to create a dangerous situation or something that the players need to solve. Secretly, I was using Threat to have one of the delegate’s children go play in the Jeffreys tubes.
The player of Leodi Mac said this was fine and declared he was disintegrating everything caught in the force field in the Jeffreys tubes. He rolled really well.
The next scene, the diplomat rushed onto the Bridge, worried her child was missing.
They made some rolls to check the scanners and the computer, and they found out what happened. The diplomat accused the Science Officer of killing her child and demanded he stand trial on her home world. The Captain said it was her ship, and everyone on it acted as a result of her commands, so she stepped in to accept responsibility. She would stand trial.
They were able to bring back the disintegrated child.
What I thought would be a one-shot adventure blossomed into a multi-part series. If these were episodes of a television show, there would be two or three episodes ending with “to be continued.”
I needed to figure out how to run a legal procedural using Star Trek Adventures. I needed to come up with a B plot for the rest of the crew to be occupied with while the Captain (and any characters who volunteered to step up as legal counsel… there were none) engaged with the legal procedure A plot.
Then, with a fresh cup of coffee in my hand the day after the session, I thought of a song Heather Dale recorded on her Fairy Tale album. My mind was off to the races with the next leg of my crew’s adventures. We’ll discuss that next week.
To be continued…
