Insert another apology for this being over a 5-minute read again!
Welcome to the game notes for our Star Trek campaign. The aim is to provide a diary of the experience from a player’s perspective. The notes will follow a similar structure each time discussing the session itself as well as thoughts on the next sessions and things the players discussed post-session.
The Setup
This is a Star Trek campaign that ‘sort of’ takes place in the Kelvin timeline immediately after Star Trek Beyond. Temporally it IS the Kelvin timeline I only say ‘sort of’ as I’m pretty sure it’s sort of an amalgamation in everyone’s heads between Strange New Worlds, Discovery season two and the Kelvin films.
Basically the modern interpretation of The Original Series era.
In the parlance of today, it is a private game and is homebrew, so basically just a regular old role-playing experience. It’s played online via Roll20.
We’re using Fate Accelerated rather than Star Trek Adventures to run the game. Why is that? It’s simply because Fate Accelerated has a much lower ‘effort cost’ in terms of setting up and running it online. I think most players like Star Trek Adventures, including myself, but I tend to agree Fate Accelerated makes life easier on the GM without much being lost.
The sections
The pre-game
I was looking forward to this one, primarily because I was given some level of advanced warning. I didn’t know exactly how it was going to be structured but I did know the purpose would be to address some character issues and plot lines before the finale and it would feature a flashback to the events on the Dauntless as there was a brief discussion about that basic truths of that (the idea being McCallister obeyed an order and is haunted by more people being saved if she’d disobeyed it and she’s acted on that twice now).
This made the whole thing enticing as I knew enough to be excited about it while not knowing anything in terms of how it might go down.
Key points
This one involved scenes developing across a number of distinct moments in time: –
- MacAllister’s time as the XO of the USS Dauntless
- The immediate aftermath of the return from Klingon space
- A simple mission to rescue a Betazed ship
- A briefing from Starfleet High Command and Starfleet Intelligence
- And it ended with a dramatic exit…
Addressing it chronologically seems to be the best thing to do for clarity.
Loss of the Dauntless (One Year Ago)
- The USS Dauntless are called into the Phyrexian Nebula to rescue Betazed Science Ship Calliope
- The Caliope has been torn to shreds by something or someone and needs repair
- Miraculously, the engines can be brought back online.
- Suddenly there is an attack! Dauntless is battered!
- Capt. Alessandro gives McCallister orders to take Calliope home
- The crew of the Dauntless are beamed onto the Calliope
- He holds off the attacker and the Dauntless is destroyed
- One of the survivors is Ambassador Deela Rwa
- After the Calliope leaves, the attacker is shown as the Dominion
Character Moments at Yorktown (After return from Klingon space)
- Ensign Matrix is given a medal of honour for his bravery in ramming the Dominion Array
- Laker meets with Admiral Huskins and is questioned about McAllister’s mental profile.
- Matrix unveils more of his tragic backstory through Laker and Th’Shra. Lyle, his partner, was suffering from carbonium poisoning and took his own life.
- McAllister meets with her mother onboard the ship and talks about her feelings about Starfleet. Her mother, essentially, tells her that she needs to tough it out.
Rescued Betazed Ship (Two days before launch)
- USS Guardian sent to look at an emergency signal
- Discovery of the critically injured body of Ambassador Deela Rwa
- The analysis shows that she has been held in stasis for at least two years.
The Mission Brief (Launch Day)
- Admiral Huskins and Agent Irene Aponi brief the senior bridge crew
- Th’Shra revealed as a Starfleet Intelligence agent
- His actions have been caused by the secrecy of the wormhole project
- This was scuppered by Kligon’s engagement with the Domion
- The Guardian has been armed with Carbonium bombs. It will travel through a newly developed wormhole generator, find a core of the Dominion network and attack it with the bombs.
- Laker objects and demands that the crew should not be forced into committing what could be genocide.
The Launch
- Laker pleads with MacAllister that there is another way to do this.
- MacAllister disagrees and orders the launch
Now in the Cut Scene
- Ambassador Deela Rwa appears on a vidcast and outs the Federation and their genocide mission. She implores the Betazeds and the Vulcans to withdraw from the Federation.
To be continued…
The session
It was a great session. Yeah, it takes a lot of mental agility which is a lot more difficult to do online but it was worth it. I love experimenting with the default mechanisms of play so I was all for it. I even enjoyed the mental agility and attention that was required to keep all the moments in time in check.
Personally, I very much wanted the ‘episode before the finale’ sort of experience where issues are resolved and plot lines ended, or framed for season two, before the characters head off for the budget-busting finale. This is a structure most TV shows use and I’m a big fan of it as these episodes can often be stronger than the actual finale.
There was a lot of GM directorial control to the point of it being heavy-handed with little rolling of the dice. I’m happy to accept this for the benefits it brings. I’d not want every session of play to have that heavy a set structure and GM scene framing but the reason it existed in this session made perfect sense and really worked.
You make choices for a specific outcome and this was easily worth it.
We even had our moment when a scene was inserted at the ‘wrong time’ which caused some jarring last-minute moments before the command was given to enter the wormhole – but it wouldn’t have been the bold session it was without the odd mistake and incongruity! This was so jarring that the director’s cut of the episode moved it to a post-credit scene.
The post-game
Okay, this may go long there as a lot of interesting things to discuss. You know it’s going to go long when you start to introduce the subtitles!
TV structures and tropes are cool
This type of session is something that’s not overly new to the gaming group I and @vodkashok used to belong to. We’ve experimented with numerous narrative structures and tropes and we’d even joke about sweeps weak episodes. Remember those? Yeah, terrestrial broadcast TV has some advantages.
I mean, since we’ve established McAlister was on a Faces of the Federation ‘promotional documentary’ there is still space for the reality TV and talking heads narrative structure to appear. We’ll come back to that a few sections down.
Those damnable ‘facts’
These episodes are complex never mind introducing online play and an erratic schedule. The mental juggling can result in facts that break established facts: –
- McAlister served on the Dauntless for all of her career (Roll20 bio) yet it was established she hadn’t been on the Dauntless long
- Her mentor was Cpt Phillipa Jennings (Roll20 bio and log entries) no idea who this Capt. Alessandro insert is!
- She had a significant conversation on Khitomer with Deela Rwa, psychic and verbal, yet didn’t remember her being on the Calliope (I suspect this scene was forgotten)
- Apparently, whoever the hell this Capt. Alessandro is he did a heroic Kirk’s father moment right out of 2009 saving everyone so I’m not even sure why it’s been a troubling aspect for season one
While purely meant in jest these are mentioned to demonstrate how such icongruities aren’t the end of the world, albeit I have seen it almost end campaigns in other groups. You can ride these things out, talk about them, see new opportunities, etc.
While (1) and (2) are a bit weird since they’ve been stated or eluded to in-play via captain’s logs they just become established facts as I’m probably the only one who remembers the logs anyway! The fact they seemed an overly personal and selfish embellishment was why I backed off them a bit. Hell, maybe it means McAllister was on another ship for most of her career and left it for the Dauntless to be its XO meaning Phillipa Jennings could still be alive (assuming we keep her at all). See, everything has an interesting outcome.
We can put (3) down to the confusion of events, it’s a bit of a stretch but it’s not like TV shows haven’t played with memory in this fashion before. Well, it’s probably a very big stretch considering it’d be all over logs and the like, but what the hell, we’ll figure a way to ride it out.
I think we’ll discuss (4). See how that’s done? Just talk about it, as that sequence of events turns an NPC into the hero for which there is no real traumatic event, as everyone survived, to really justify it being her trouble aspect all season!
Stars and Wishes
At the end of each session, we can list stars (things to keep doing) and wishes (things we want to see).
Did we officially do this? I don’t think we did, but we did say how we liked the session. Since we didn’t I’m going to be selfish and put some in retrospectively.
I think the finale should be more than just a straight-up ‘bomb drop’. It’s Star Trek, so the morals of the mission need to be explored. We know literally nothing about why The Dominion have their whole approach to genetic harvesting so figuring that out would be cool. It plays into numerous character arcs. The Doctor doesn’t want it to happen on moral grounds? Matrix’s partner’s death has connections with the experiments that lead to the bombs so does he want that legacy to be more death? McCallister sees The Dominion as an existential threat that can’t be negotiated with but does this need challenging?
The Faces of the Federation. The episode where everyone reflects after the events of the finale is a great moment for the Faces of the Federation promotional effort to catch back up with those whose careers and lives they are following. I mean, these momentous events are going to need each character to have their version of the ‘Picard goes home’ episode after Best of Both Worlds, right? Assuming we get home and we even have a season two!
There is also something I’d do in relation to the flashback but I’m not going to say it here and I’ll maybe see if it happens – but this may fall into another thing I’d do which doesn’t mean it needs to.
Plans for the next session
There aren’t really any plans for the next session in my head beyond what I’ve proactively inserted as Stars and Wishes. It’s the series finale though so bring it on!