Star Trek Adventures: Launching My New Mini-Campaign—and Writing My Own Episode for the First Time!

Previously on this blog, I've chronicled my Star Trek Adventures mini-campaign from summer 2024. Scroll to the bottom of this post to see the links. As discussed there, in episode 3, my player captain gave me a gift as GM. In that episode, the characters captured a Haradin pirate ship that had attacked a Klingon convoy they'd been assigned to escort. Throughout the episode, the captain, Rucot (played by Ryan) had faced prejudice from the Klingon captain, Akul, because he's a Cardassian (on an exchange program in Starfleet, to foster peace after the Dominion War); at the end of the episode, Rucot gifted the Klingons with the ship they captured. "What about the crew?" I asked. "Oh, I hand over them, too," he said. "You know how the Klingons treat their prisoners, right?" "I'm a Cardassian—they're all guilty."

This seemed like the kind of thing that could have interesting repercussions. I began episode 4 just with a quick comment from Rucot in the captain's log that "Starfleet Command has raised questions about my handling of the Haradin prisoners," but that that was to the side because of a crisis the ship was in. Then, at the end of the episode, once everything was resolved, I passed this note to Debi, who plays the executive officer, T'Cant: "You have received new orders from Starfleet Command—you are to relieve Rucot of command and take him back to Deep Space 10 for questioning over his handling of the Haradin prisoners."

A cliffhanger ending for the mini-campaign... and hopefully to entice people back for another one in 2025! 

Most of my players were indeed available to return for 2025:

• Ryan as Rucot, captain
• Debi as T'Cant, executive officer
• Kenyon as Nevan Jones, chief engineer
• Claire as Mooria Salmang, flight controller
• Austin as Frector, chief of security
• (plus our pinch hitter) Toren as Tronnen, counselor

To get us back up to seven, I reached out to two old players from my previous campaign, Cari and Andy. In my lower decks campaign, they had played Jor Lena from security and Gurg bim Vurg from medicine, and they had reprised those roles in my Christmas one-off. They were up to do so again. Andy as Gurg could step quite naturally into the vacant chief medical officer position... but now we had two security officers!

Deep Space 10
(image from the Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide)

We discussed this at the new campaign's session zero, and what Cari and Austin ended up deciding is that Jor would come aboard as the Diversitas's new chief of security, while Frector would transfer into Starfleet Intelligence. (They had worked for SI during the Dominion War according to their backstory, so it would be natural enough.) 

Our other gap was thus science officer. Debi had struggled a bit with T'Cant in the previous season, having built her as a command character with no particular specialization... sort of okay at everything but great at nothing. I suggested that T'Cant could fulfill the position of acting science officer, and she could totally rebuild the character with that in mind, which she was into.

So all this meant I needed to open the new mini-campaign with an episode that 1) accounted for all this crew shuffling, and 2) followed up on the cliffhanger ending. Was there going to be a published mission that did this? Of course not! So, for the first time in four years of GMing STA, I was going to have to write my own episode!*

I've already shared my second attempt to do this (see "The Word for Word Is Word" at the bottom of this post), but in this case, I won't share the actual episode because it's so specific to the circumstances of my campaign and my crew it wouldn't really make sense for anyone else to use it. I ended up writing the episode's acts as I went along, so I'll write it up here session-by-session, instead of my usual "Planning the Mission"/"Playing the Mission" structure for STA posts. 

Act I: Suspicious of Where Your Loyalties Lay

"Acting Captain’s Log, Stardate 53853.4, Chief Engineer Nevan Jones reporting. Though we have been lauded for our handling of the black hole that threatened to devour the sector, there have been many changes since the Diversitas arrived at Deep Space 10 to offload the personnel we rescued from Abyss Station. Our medical officer and science officer have both been summoned to Starfleet Command to report on their unusual experiences with the advanced intelligences we found in the Dyson swarm. Commander T’Cant has been assigned to some kind of training seminar. 
     "Most significantly, Captain Rucot has been relieved of command and confined to quarters pending an official Starfleet inquiry.…"

Of my seven regulars, Debi was going to be out this week, but that was easy to work around—as the log entry above notes, I just said T'Cant was at the training to become acting science officer.

(a ChatGPT rendering of a painting from the
Command Division Supplmental Rulebook)

I began the episode with the players at Deep Space 10, meeting with Commodore August Hebert, the station's commanding officer;† they had visited the station and met him in episode 3, where I had established him as someone known to T'Cant (they had both previously served in Starfleet Intelligence), but also someone continually committing microaggressions against Rucot. In this episode, Hebert seemed eager to get Rucot—now relieved of command and confined to quarters—to an inquiry. To do that, he brought in an investigator: Lieutenant Jor Lena. I also established a set of other characters populating DS10, all potential lines of inquiry:

•  Lt. Commander Mazio Sanna, an Intelligence analyst
• Chief Susu Webb, head of communications
• Consul Vrossaan sh'Chiaqis, Federation Diplomatic Corps 
• Gregin Shrek, Yridian bartender and information trader

(Thanks much to B. C. Holmes's STA character creator, which did a lot to help me come up with these NPCs.) 

At our session zero, we'd discussed doing more character stuff, and more character conflict. So for our first scene, we had a big emphasis on that: how does Rucot think about what he did? what do the other characters think about it? what does Jor do to investigate? The players did a good job with this stuff; Cari as Jor told Rucot she'd be watching him, and even covertly bugged his communications. She also ran into Claire as Mooria in the station bar—the two being old friends from when they served together during my first STA campaign.

Meanwhile, I established that Gurg was assistant chief medical officer on DS10 but feeling unfulfilled. Processing the evacuees from Abyss Station the Diversitas had rescued in episode 4, he learned some hints about the Diversitas's encounter with the uploaded consciousnesses called the "Engineers"; Gurg has always had an interested in cyborgs, because he's obsessed with the pursuit and sharing of knowledge. Gurg talked to the evacuees, and learned enough to want to find his way on board the Diversitas. 

(image rendered by ChatGPT)

While Jor and Gurg did this, the Diversitas characters followed up their own leads. Specifically, they talked to both Mazio, the SI analyst, and Chief Webb, the comms technician; the latter gave them a hint that something suspicious was up, that originally investigators from the Starfleet JAG office had been called in, but then those orders had been cancelled and Jor Lena summoned instead. They were able to get Webb's cooperation by helping her lock down a fault she hadn't had time to handle, one that was on the outside of the station and required an EV walk, but she hadn't had time to do it. On doing this, Nevan discovered a chip had been implanted in the communications system, but it shorted out as soon as he touched it. (This is an idea I ripped off from the published STA module "A Plague of Arias," which my first campaign fizzled out in the middle of.) The chip turned out to be of SI manufacture—who had planted it?

Frector showed the chip to Mazio, who denied all knowledge of it; the two went to Shrek. Shrek handed over to Frector a letter:

During the Dominion War, the USS Diversitas participated in the Battle of Eldorado Omega. Hundreds of innocent civilian scientists died, their only crime being the location of their facility. The commander of the Dominion forces in that battle? Just one Gul Rucot. Has he ever mentioned this? 

Gregin Shrek's bar on Deep Space 10
(image rendered by Flux)

This was a reference to our Christmas flashback episode (see special #1 below), where I'd done a story about the Diversitas during the Dominion War, and in a stinger at the end, established that the commander of the Cardassian ships chasing them was Rucot. The note from Shrek was a bit misleadingly worded (Rucot commanded the ships chasing them down at the end, not the main force that tried to obliterate the station), but technically accurate. Nevan had been aboard the Diversitas at the time, and Kenyon did a good job role-playing it; Nevan was thrown by this reminder of his darkest day, and no longer was quite as full-blooded in his attempt to defend Rucot.

For this session, I imposed a real-time limitation: the preliminary inquest would be at the episode's end, and thus they players had a finite amount of real time to do their investigating. The inquest was the last thirty minutes or so of the episode, as Commodore Hebert was clearly determined to railroad Rucot. There were some good speeches, particularly from Jor—and thankfully the characters cottoned onto the fact that even though this whole inquiry was about the Haradin prisoners, no one actually knew how the prisoners were being treated! So Jor demanded that she be allowed to investigate the status of the prisoners on Outpost SE-119 firsthand. The session ended with the commodore reluctantly authorizing the Diversitas to go to SE-119—which is what I hoped for.

Gurg ran into his old friend Jor on DS10, and convinced her to appoint him deputy investigator so that he could get aboard the Diversitas to investigate the rumors he'd heard. ("You make a Cardassian captain, of course he's going to commit a war crime; I don't know what you're all so upset about.")

(image rendered by ChatGPT)

Claire and Austin were going to miss the second session, so at the end, I also had Mazio from SI recruit them to run an op, one whose full nature and purpose would be revealed in the subsequent session.

Act II: We're Not Worrying about the Optics

“Acting Captain’s Log, Stardate 53854.0, Commander T’Cant reporting. My days at the training seminar proved instructive. Apparently, staffing shortages mean the Diversitas cannot be supplied with a replacement science officer at present, and so I have been cross-trained to double as science officer.
    “Upon my return to Deep Space 10, I have discovered that Commodore Hebert has authorized the Diversitas to proceed to the Klingon station SE-119 to discover the disposition of the Haradin prisoners. I have been surprised by what the crew has told me of the past day on the station. The Hebert I knew from before the war was an efficient but fair officer…”

With two players out, we were joined by Ryan and Debi's son Toren, who plays the Diversitas's Klingon counselor. 

Not only was this the first time I wrote my own episode from scratch, but I also took the approach of just writing it out one session at a time; with a prewritten one, you are of course given the whole episode at once. I did have vague idea of where I thought it should all go, of course, but this also let me be more genuinely reactive to player choices.

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

Based on how some stuff in the first session went, I had the second open with Jor and (the recently returned) T'Cant meeting with Consul Vrossaan, the Federation diplomat they hadn't ever got around to in the first session. Vrossaan was able to deliver some exposition about the Haradin: they had been disunified, but were becoming more unified again, but in a way the Federation was worried around, and the treatment of the Haradin prisoners was becoming a cause celebre even among those not affiliated with the pirates. Vrossaan didn't just want to discover the status of the prisoners, but wanted them brought back if possible. She also iterated that Jor was responsible for the actions of Captain Rucot.

We had time for some good investigation and roleplaying while the Diversitas travelled to SE-119: talking about the note from Shrek, looking into the origins of the SI chip, investigating Hebert. They discovered that Hebert had left Intelligence after the war; during the war, his entire analysis unit had been overrun by the Obsidian Order despite being well behind the lines. The going theory was that Hebert was prejudiced against the Cardassians because of what happened to him during the war.

Once they got there, they had to persuade the Klingons to let them aboard; fortunately, the station was still suffering malfunctions due to the subspace anomalies they'd struggled with back in episode three, lingering aftereffects from the black hole they'd dealt with in #4. Thus, alongside the social conflict, there'd be some Engineering and Science stuff for Nevan and T'Cant to do. Most of the players beamed over (except Rucot, of course), including Tronnen... only Tronnen had a preexisting beef with Captain Akul, commander of SE-119 from when he defeated Akul at a dance challenge back in episode three. Akul challenged Tronnen and alas, Toren rolled really badly, including getting a Complication; Tronnen had to go back to the Diversitas, and the first couple social challenges were harder because the Klingons didn't trust the Federation for bringing Tronnen over.

Haradin prisoners on Outpost SE-119
(image rendered by ChatGPT)

But they did good at the Engineering Tasks, repairing the station, and thus gaining access to the prisoners in exchange. This is when a late Austin made it, and I established that Frector had actually been covertly inserted among the Haradin prisoners as part of a fact-finding mission:

• Frector has been surgically altered to resemble a Haradin and covertly beamed aboard Outpost SE-119 during a prisoner transfer. (Mooria did some amazing flying in a stealth shuttle!)
• Starfleet Intelligence wants her to figure out what she can about the Haradin:
• What is the “collapse” of Harad?
• Who “invaded” Harad?
• What even is “Harad” or how can it mean “universe”?

We didn't have a lot of time at this point, so some stuff I thought I might do with Frector insinuating herself into the Haradin, we didn't do. Instead, Austin had Frector contribute from their angle, helping warm up the "other" Haradin to Starfleet.

Esha Vortan, a friendly Haradin pirate
(image rendered by ChatGPT)

The Haradin were a low-key presence in our first campaign; episode one took place on one of their colonies, and the players battled some Haradin pirates in episode three. In that episode, they began to learn there was something weird about the Haradin, in that the Haradin insist that Harad was invaded—but also act baffled when Starfleet asks them where Harad is or who invaded it ("how can you not know?"). Thankfully, this concept seems to be engaging them, and here they asked some questions... but didn't get too far, except to learn that 1) the Haradin were surprisingly resistant to intimidation by the Klingons, and 2) they kept talking about their leader, General Zotabia. The Klingons were frustrated, but it turned out the worst that had happened to the Haradin was a little malnutrition and a few zaps with painsticks.

My players being prone to far-out plans, they decided to offer for T'Cant to mind-meld with a Haradin prisoner, and even managed to persuade one to do it. The mind-meld succeeded... but also failed as T'Cant was zapped, and the players discovered they have chips in their brains! But more on that next time.

Captain Beshlor, Haradin pirate
(image by ChatGPT)

At the end, the players had to go to Captain Akul to ask for the prisoners... but he only wanted to speak to Rucot. An idea I had been pushing across both episodes from a variety of perspective was if Rucot was genuinely remorseful about what he'd done, or just sorry he was in trouble. But if he was sorry he was in trouble, did that make sense? A Cardassian, after all, would know all who were accused by the state were guilty! To persuade Akul, Ryan played on his ego and his desire for honorable battle—but Akul wanted to know if Rucot was honorable. When Rucot argued regulations were the reason he needed to get the prisoners back, Akul sneered and said a man of honor acted out of principles: what were Rucot's? This forced Ryan to articulate—yes he did believe people had the right to a fair trial. Aha! A D5 Task, and Akul was willing to hand over the prisoners.

Act III: A Holiday for Secret Cops

“Acting Captain’s Log, Stardate 53855.5, Commander T’Cant reporting. The Diversitas is returning to Deep Space 10, the Haradin prisoners now in our custody. Our report to DS10 has received a formal acknowledgement, but that is it. Hopefully we are able to make some progress with our understanding of the Haradin…”

Going into the third session, I was worried. Was it too obvious that Hebert was a bad 'un? On the drive there, I contemplated making the villain either Mazio or Webb, either of whom I thought could plausibly be it. But I worried that I'd set things up a certain way, and fifteen minutes ahead of time was not the time to make the change!

We did some more Haradin stuff on the way back to DS10; the players learned some hints about the devices in their heads and about how the Haradin perceive outsiders. The meat of the episode, though, was the very long second scene—when the players arrived at DS10, Mazio arrested Rucot on suspicion of being an Obsidian Order agent!

(screencap from TNG: "Birthright, Part I," 
courtesy Memory Alpha)

His evidence? After the Diversitas left, Chief Webb went out to see the tampered panel for herself... and found that the SI chip had been replaced by one of Obsidian Order manufacture... complete with Rucot's DNA! Mazio, who'd I'd established as talented but also eager for promotion, had seized on this as his big break. He'd also been pretty complimentary to Frector, but now he was a bit condescending about how she'd missed that her CO was an Obsidian Order agent!

Now the players needed to investigate exactly how all this had happened, because Mazio certainly wasn't doing his due diligence. Frector went to confront Mazio, Nevan and Frector hit up Webb again and got some details, Jor talked to Commodore Hebert and got sneered at a bit (basically Hebert assumed she would do anything to get Rucot because she's a Bajoran), Jor and Frector teamed up to talk to Shrek in the station bar, Nevan and T'Cant scanned the station. Nevan and T'Cant found there was a Cardassian masking themselves on the station, while Frector and Jor learned it was a Cardassian who had given Shrek that damning note.

Jor and Frector managed to find an EV suit that had been hidden away... and within it, a mix of DNA traces: Cardassian and human, all muddled up. Specifically, Hebert's. Could the Obsidian Order have replaced him during the war?

(That some other Cardassians would have it out for Rucot was an idea I'd had from the beginning of thinking about this episode; the backstory Ryan wrote for Rucot indicated that he's the face of a movement of younger Cardassian devoted to peace. It seemed interesting to me to have this be an extra complicating factor in everything that was going on, but it took me a long time to hit on the idea of making Hebert an agent of the Obsidian Order, pulling everything together.)

Gurg whipped up a hypospray that would force a Cardassian in disguise to revert. They decided that for maximum drama, they should do this at the hearing... then saner heads prevailed, and they were like, "No, we should call Starfleet." But obviously maximum drama was desired! So I spent 2 Threat to establish that sudden, inexplicable ion storms made contacting Starfleet impossible.‡ Jor went back to Hebert and claimed she had damning evidence against Rucot; he scheduled the hearing for right away.

hearing room on Deep Space 10
(image rendered by Flux)

At the hearing, Hebert asked Jor for her evidence, and she began talking about the suit. A miscommunication between the players caused Cari to misjudge the plan; others had expected her to just hypo the commodore. He knew where this was going, so I spent 2 Threat to have him activate a preset program, beaming out.

This began what I had planned as the climax of the episode:

They will need to chase Hebert down: This is a Magnitude 6 Extended Task, with a base Difficulty of 6, Work Track 35. Each player can contribute only once (and can assist once), based on what they would do to hunt him down. 

They did some good plotting and planning, using their Talents and previously established Advantages, and Determination and such. T'Cant begin by using her Determination and her Focus in Computers to analyze the program, narrowing down Hebert's destination to the launch bay. With one breakthrough, it was now Difficulty 5. Then Frector spent her Determination to initiate station lockdown; she has the value "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better," which worked nicely to show off to Mazio, who she'd out-thought; Austin also used one of Frector's Talents (Intelligence Agent) to decrease the Difficulty to 4.

Next, Nevan used a scan to pinpoint exactly where in the launch bay Hebert was, arguing an Advantage they'd set up earlier to scan for Cardassians would make this easier; I agreed. Nevan also has a Talent that gives him extra Work on Engineering Extended Tasks, so he rolled 11! Now it was Difficulty 3; Mooria used her Small Craft Focus to force open the shuttle that Hebert was in. Her success filled the Work track, so she scored two Breakthroughs. So now it was all down to Jor Lena to take down Hebert with a Fitness + Security Task.

Hebert unmasked!
(image rendered by ChatGPT...
which struggled with Cardassians)

I like Extended Tasks a lot, to me they're the signature mechanic of STA (and losing the Challenge dice from them is why I refuse to switch over to 2E) but one thing I do struggle with is that they get easier as they go, which can make succeeding on them kind of an anticlimax. But one thing that occurred to me when planning this one is that I could spend Threat to make a Complication and increase the Difficulty. I had seven Threat left, so I spent six to increase the Difficulty by three... back up to a D4 Task! A suitably difficult climax, but of course Jor succeeded. I was really happy with how this Extended Task played out, and I think the players enjoyed the intensity. They had a little wiggle room... but not a lot!

We were running out of time, so I did some quick exposition. Hebert had actually only been replaced a couple weeks prior, right after Rucot had done the thing with the prisoners. The Obsidian Order had seen the opportunity to use this to discredit the peace movement on Cardassia of which Rucot is a principal member. I think the players breathed a sigh of relief when Hebert actually did turn out to be a Cardassian.

Then a real JAG officer showed up for a legitimate inquiry. Rucot and Jor both gave speeches, and the JAG officer (Captain Morox) was suitably impressed... but... "What remains incontrovertible is, that despite however else everything turned out, Captain Rucot did violate Starfleet guidelines regarding the ethical treatment of prisoners when he transferred the alleged pirates to the Klingons."

General Zotabia
(image rendered by ChatGPT)

After that a few things happened, all obviously to set up future developments:

• Consul Vrossaan asked if she could introduce a new witness, who'd just arrived at the station under a flag of diplomatic immunity.
• This turned out to be the leader of the Haradin pirates, the villain of episodes one and three, GENERAL ZOTABIA! 
• “My dear Captain Rucot—I thank you so much for your assistance in liberating these prisoners. The Haradin people are eternally grateful to you. I trust that—in the interests of peace—the Federation will not be pursuing disciplinary action against you. We Haradin would hate to see the man who brought back our lost men and women put on trial.” 
• The players were suspicious: what did he really want?
• But Vrossaan talked to Morox, and he cancelled the inquiry.

In one last scene, Morox indicated the JAG office would be carefully watching Rucot from now on, and Mazio asked if Frector could transfer to Starfleet Intelligence and continue to investigate the Haradin; Frector agreed, on the basis that she could stay on the Diversitas. Morox then asked if Rucot had any ideas for a replacement security chief and medical officer... but of course he did.

(Austin had pitched to me a great idea for a scene, where Frector challenges Jor to darts to convince her to come aboard the Diveristas, but he demurred. It was after 10pm and he was jet-lagged!) 

Overall Thoughts

conference room on Deep Space 10
(image rendered by Flux)

So that was it! I very much enjoyed it, and making it up on the fly was a bit more nerve-wracking but also satisfying and responsive. Players seemed to enjoy this one a lot, particularly the twists about the letter and the Obsidian Order being behind it all. (I had seeded some clues about the latter, but the players missed them all!) I was a bit worried about all the NPCs, but it seemed to go okay. As you can see in this post, I try to provide a visual of each one to anchor them in the players' minds.

My players particularly loved that in every scene with Shrek, I was unable to maintain the accent I'd established, and so had a completely new one. (Irish, Indian, and Italian all appeared. I had originally been aiming for cockney! I do a lot of accents when reading aloud to my kids, but I have discovered it is hard to stabilize an accent and improvise dialogue!)

Still, though... no game of darts! Jor will never get to use her Focus. 

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…"

Specials:

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

* While technically I wrote this episode myself, I'm deeply indebted to the work of Christopher L. Bennett (whose module "Hard Rock Catastrophe" gave me General Zotabia and his nationalist movement) and Jim Johnson (whose module "Convoy SE-119" gave me Captain Akul and the pirates). This is a pretty close sequel to both stories, albeit through the filter of me replacing the original modules' Saurians and Orions (respectively) with the Haradin.

† Commodore August Hebert is my take on Admiral April Hebert, the commander of Narenda Station from STA's Living Campaign. I made the character the CO of a starbase the players would visit when I intended to run "A Plague of Arias" and "Convoy SE-119" in my first STA campaign, but didn't actually finish the first or do the second when the campaign fizzled out. I don't remember why I changed her gender anymore, but I kept the changes when I finally ran "Convoy SE-119" in my 2024 campaign.

‡ Later, I revealed this was really just jamming from an Obsidian Order relay satellite.