'Nathan Burgoine's Blog

Saturday, the day I continue my project of re-watching the TOS-era episodes of Star Trek with the goal of finding ideas—scenario seeds—useful for Star Trek Adventures as put out by Modiphius. 

Today’s episode?

Shore Leave

Let’s beam down.

The teaser of this episode is one of the most amusing in Trek, in that we start with an Away Team basically reporting that they’ve found a super nice planet with no life forms beyond, y’know, plants and stuff that will make a perfect Shore Leave opportunity—also Kirk is among those who really needs some down-time, it is noted—and then ends with McCoy, who has casually mentioned it’s “like Alice in Wonderland down here” seeing the White Rabbit (a furry costume, basically) and then Alice, and then we cut to the opening credits.

Post-credits, McCoy tries to convince Kirk that he either hallucinated or there’s something wrong with his tricorder, and Kirk… *sigh*… assumes McCoy is manipulating him to get down on the planet for shore leave. That’s right, his chief medical officer says he might have to relieve himself of duty and Kirk makes it all about him, discounting his chief medical officer. Again. What are we at now, four times in fifteen episodes?

I should mention we also have Yeoman Barrows dropping by, telling Kirk he should take shore leave too, and Kirk being all, “I’m not falling apart like all those other non-Kirk type people, I’m a Captain so I’m not gonna!” and whatever. But as I mentioned in “Balance of Terror,” throughout the entire episode it’s clear the Yeoman Barrows role would have been Yeoman Rand had she not been kicked off the show, and as such I had a really hard time (a) not being reminded how shitty Grace Lee Whitney was treated, and (b) how even Rand’s replacement has to get victimized (but I’m getting ahead of myself).

There’s also a fun scene where Spock notes there’s a crew person who clearly needs time off, and walks Kirk step by step through it until Kirk is all, “Yep, force that crewman to take a break!” and Spock is all “It’s you, jackass; ha! Checkmate!” (I mean, that’s what his wry eyebrow movement translates as to me, but your lightyears may vary.)

So. It turns out, of course, that no one is losing their mind, that McCoy was correct in that something odd is going on (listen to your fucking people, Jim) and you get glimpses of this UHF-like antenna aiming itself at the crew now and then before random things they’re thinking about come to life, and this includes Sulu getting a gun, some other crew conjuring tigers and a strafing run from earth history aircraft, which kills the woman who’s been flirting with him the whole time and annoyed he’s doing work instead of relaxing. And, listen, it’s the same actress and Memory Alpha lists this as the same character, so just take a breath because it’s Martine—Martine who just lost her husband-to-be last episode.

So. Uh. Got over that, eh?

Yeoman Barrows—who McCoy flirts with a lot—conjures a Don Juan to attack her and rip her uniform (I’m not keeping count of victimized yeomen anymore, it’s too depressing), then later gets to dress up like a princess, and then a dark knight comes to take her and “kills” McCoy (don’t worry, he gets better).

When Kirk gets involved, he sees (a) a stereotype, super-cringey Irish bully named Finnegan he’d like to beat up from his academy days who comes complete with super-cringey stereotype music riffs, and (b) Ruth, a beautiful woman he apparently had a thing with who’d like to snog. He beats up the Irishman until they’re both in torn shirts and dirty and Finnegan asks him if he enjoyed finally getting to do that, and Kirk is all, “you betcha!” and starts to realize this place is trying to give them what they want. (Which, apparently, for Kirk is “beat up a bully and have sex” and for Sulu is “gun” and the other guy wanted to get shot at from a plane and Barrows was “Don Juan who won’t take no for an answer” and… Yowza. Where’s Dr. Noel when you need her? Rorschach eat your heart out.)

Ultimately, Spock beams down to deliver news on why they can’t communicate with the ship and also explain there’s major power usage and even the living creatures are synthetic and it all turns out the planet is basically a “read your mind, make it real” machine and all the dead people aren’t—they were taken away and repaired/restored/what-have-you—and McCoy comes back with a woman on each arm because it reminded him of a casino, and Barrows does a slightly huffy, “a-hem, you were flirting with me!” and they head off, Kirk decides he’s had enough up until he spots Ruth-bot and decides to stay on-site for snogging, and then eventually they all finish their Shore Leave after the planet’s concierge/controller/is-he-a-robot? says he’ll get it right this time.

We mock Spock and Vulcans (because we must mock Spock and Vulcans any chance we get for not being the same as humans) and then credits.

So, as is likely obvious, this episode is really not a favourite for me. It just sort of… rambles. Rabbit. Alice. Crewman visualizes tiger. Tiger hunts crewman. An airplane strafing run! Sulu has a gun. Black knight! Finnegan! Ruth. They run around a lot, mostly in circles, and… ultimately it’s all just a big nothing-burger where even the stakes we saw—the death of Martine and McCoy—are both ultimately reset.

That said, I do think it would have made a better role playing game scenario than it did an episode. Being a player and wandering around and bumping into all sorts of weird things and then ultimately finding the source is kind of par for the course in a lot of scenarios—though it’s not often going to be “our own thoughts are making this happen!”—but let’s dig and find some inspiration here.

First, the whole notion of crew taking shore leave is worth visiting (Starfleet is a high-stress job, after all, and time off is necessary for even the most Kirk of Kirks), and that’s a big sandbox to play in. Second, Sulu’s thing about collecting ancient weaponry made me think of exploring the crew’s various pastimes and hobbies (something the 2nd Edition of Star Trek Adventures codified into a kind of bonus Focus—bonus because it’s assumed the usefulness of things like “winemaking” or “violin” won’t come up often, but what if we crafted a scenario specifically around someone’s pastime?)

Seed One: Shore Leave

While there’s always Risa (after all, it was discovered during Archer’s time), we see the various starships declaring shore leave much like in this episode throughout and across series—and also see it going south or not being as restful as expected (looking at you, Wesley Crusher, getting the death penalty for falling on some flowers). Exploring somewhere that just happens to be nice, rather than a shore leave destination, leaves the door open for a few more twists and turns.

The One We Have Been Waiting For—The crew are offered shore leave at a planet where the people believe in hospitality, spiritual guidance of prophecy and omen, and have moved from a hostile past of warring nations to their current day of co-operation and peace, in part due to the belief that they must work together until a chosen one leader arrives, capable of some particular feat (which begins with drawing forth a crystal shard in one piece from its ancient holster in a former-palace-temple-turned-spiritual-retreat). A member of the crew being given a tour by one of the guardians of the palace ends up tripping/tumbling/otherwise stumbling when said guardian has a stumble of their own, and ends up holding said crystal in hand, which the guardian announces to all as the revelation of the one true leader of the world coming to pass. What follows is anything but restful, as (a) the crew scramble to unpack ancient prophecies for a loophole or pass that will get their crew person out of this mess, including a series of trials and qualities that unfortunately do seem rather tailored to the crew person in question. It’s a Prime Directive minefield—even if the planet is a fully present member of the galactic community, this is “interference” on internal affairs of the highest order. Also, there are factions on the planet very, very ready to have a new leader—and they all want said leader to go in different directions. Is the hard-won peace of the planet going to fall apart, or can the crew person figure out a way to extricate themselves from lore and leave the planet’s culture intact. Or, (b) in their investigation, the crew come to realize things have been every much arranged here, that the fact the crew person aligns perfectly with the prophecies in question might not be fate nor an accident, but a plan put into place, but by who? Ultimately, they’ll have to uncover the truth: the guardian who was giving the crew person the tour was actually the person who pulled the crystal free, a few days ago, but immediately put it back, feeling unworthy and terrified of what it might mean, and upon learning the crew would be arriving, managed to keep the removal (and replacement) a secret while looking for someone perfectly suited to take their place from the ship’s crew. Getting this individual to accept their fate—whether or not the crew believe in prophecy or omen—becomes the real task at hand, but all the factions and potential damage to the planet’s culture still remain.

Nothing to See Here, Just Taking a Break—For a different spin on a shore leave, you could include a layer of “showing the flag” on an independent planet where an opposed polity is getting more and more comfortable taking their shore leaves, with Starfleet assigning the player’s vessel to take some time there to remind the locals of the goodwill and positive associations of being involved with the Federation. Depending on the era, this could have Romulans, Klingons, Ferengi, Vorta, or other species “taking a break” on the planet alongside your players. Perhaps the independent hosts are vocal about expecting both sides to be civil, which (a) sets one (or both) sides to try to catch the other out breaking the rules—or outright setting them up to be caught doing so—creating a back-and-forth of what on the surface is prank-level annoyances rather than high-stakes, but in fact could have far-reaching repercussions should the planet decide the Federation isn’t capable of “playing nice” with others. Or, (b) the shore leave crew realize there’s more going on here, after a few clues lead them to believe the opposed polity isn’t taking a break, they’re aiding a seditious subculture, setting up a spy cell, or some other act intended to sway the populace to their side or weaken the Federation’s security in the area. Following the rules while attempting to stop these agents from succeeding will make for a less than restful shore leave indeed.

Seed Two: Pastimes and Hobbies

While on the surface of things, a character’s hobby or pastime is a way of adding colour and exploring their personality (who are they when they’re not at work?), there’s ample opportunity to add a tweak here or there to an adventure where the hobby has a moment in the scenario (think Dr. Crusher growing her Diomedian scarlet moss as a plot point in “Clues”), but you can also have it be far more front and centre to a scenario (such as Cadet Nyota Uhura’s musicality showing up in Strange New Worlds for “Children of the Comet” as the key to understanding an alien artefact).

The Arts of Communication—When the crew find a damaged vessel and beam over to help a reptohumanoid species, the universal translator offers up zero aid in breaking the language barrier between the two species, the device determining the hisses and vocalization of the species in question incapable of providing enough variance to actually form a language. Figuring out how to help a species that’s injured on a vessel that’s damaged without any communication methods is tough enough, but the vessel itself provides even further mysteries: there’s a similar “not complex enough” quality to the bare-bones symbology the crew can locate on the various ship readouts and systems. Ultimately, communicating with the species requires a different methodology. Perhaps, (a) the species see further into the infrared and ultraviolet end of the spectrum, and can also alter their scale colouration in those visual ranges in complex patterns—this being a key a portion of their language and thereby invisible to the crew, it takes a crew person with an interest in art to notice that they do seem to have paintings and art objects, but all they can see is… texture. No colour variance. That can be the crew’s first real clue—when they scan the painting and realize the pigments used are outside the human (and Vulcan and other player species) range of vision. Or, (b) a player with a background in dance notices details in the way the reptohumanoids move their tails, hands, or body-language, unlocking that a significant portion of the language this species uses is, in fact, something closer to a full-body-and-tail sign language alongside their vocalizations (as well as the scale colourations from before). In the end, the crew may have to figure out a way to see differently, be seen differently, and move differently to speak to the aliens.

Language as a Complication—In Captain’s Log or Star Trek Adventures, 20s mean complications, and “the Universal Translator can’t figure this out, Captain!” is a great way to toss an extra barrier between communicating with a new alien species at your players (or your character in CL).

Bonus: If you’re in the mood for some fan-fic, I’m going to point to something I wrote that deals with this scenario: Parturition (Alternate) was my take on the episode of that name in Star Trek: Voyager fanfic I write, and I leaned heavier on the reptohumanoids to form the basis of the episode, and communication being the key hurdle. I ended up porting those aliens—the Hisith—into one of my campaigns as part of an ongoing arc.

Have you rolled out any shore leave episodes on your players? What about pulling in their pastimes into a scenario? Let me know.

It’s Tuesday, and so I’m here to talk geeky nerdy things to do with gaming, and also outside the weather is frightful—which is to say, it’s snowed. Ottawa is like that, sometimes it snows early and just stays and I think that’s the winter we’re going to have, and as such, it put me in the mind for the upcoming holidays, and how much I like to tuck a game or two under the tree—but also in the stockings.

Which isn’t always as easy.

I should note our stockings aren’t tiny, but I don’t think they’re huge. Here are three card-based games I’ve managed to fit in them over the years that have turned out to be winners.

Timeline—One of the first games I always think of—and check to see if there are any new expansions thereof—is Timeline. One year for the holidays, I tucked Timeline Canada into the stockings of each of the couples and it turned out it had more than just the benefit of being small enough to wrap for a stocking going for it. The other thing it did well as be super-quick to explain and easy to play for anyone, even those who don’t normally play a lot of game, and we ended up playing it a couple of times on Christmas Day.

The idea behind Timeline is deceptively simple: you each get a number of cards with events on them—you might end up with The Invention of Radio, The Discovery of Antarctica, and The Birth of Cleopatra, say—and in the centre, the dealer flips up a single card. It could be anything, an invention, a discovery, an event, like: The Domestication of Bees. Your job is to put your card before or after that card to begin to create a timeline. Once you place your card (before it or after it) both are flipped, and the dates are revealed, and if you were wrong, you discard your wrong card and draw a new one to place next time it’s your turn, and if you’re right it’s added to the ongoing timeline. As the game progresses, it gets more and more difficult to drop a card between the cards already in play with the precision you need, and even if you lose, it’s always fun to learn that the thing you placed in the 1900s actually happened in the 1600s. Who knew? The first person to play all their cards wins, and that’s it. Simple, educational, but also fun.

What’s great about Timeline as well as if it’s a hit one year, you can nab the expansions thereafter. The base game has a bunch of expansions—Inventions, Events, Science & Discoveries, Music & Cinema, Canada—and you just add all the cards together (or keep them separate, it’s up to you) to add to the complexity of the game.

Sushi Go!—Another fun game that comes in a small enough tin to pop into a stocking is Sushi Go! It’s a set-building card game played over multiple rounds where you pass cards around while keeping some and the way the game plays and scores is simple, but contains just enough complexity to be interesting to those who are way, way more into considering all the options and permutations than I am.

But what’s great is, if you’re not like that, it’s still fun, because you can just try to do the best with what comes your way, the cute cards are adorable, and honestly, who doesn’t want to see how many puddings they can get before the game is over?

This one also lands as particularly kid-friendly in that regard as well: as I said, it’s still fun to play when you’re not really strategizing what’s going on with other people’s hands and the hands you’ve sent forward (some of which will eventually get back to you)—my games with younger folk have always seen them just as engaged playing “what can I do with what’s right in front of me?” Also, kid logic is fun to watch play out: “I just like nagiri!” can be a sound as sound a strategy as anything else, frankly.

Joking Hazard—Okay, so I need to caveat this one with a very, very clear caution that you should only gift this to someone with a truly bent sense of humour, but the game is basically a series of panels from a Cyanide and Happiness strip, only you’re arranging it to taste. Most of the time, the judge will lay two cards and ask you to place a third to create a strip; sometimes the draw will make it so you have to place two out of the three.

Whoever makes the judge laugh loudest wins the round. And that’s it. I cannot tell you, however, how truly inappropriate and dark some of these strips end up turning out, and watching people say, “Okay, don’t judge me,” as they place a card is the best.

(Also, you’ll judge them.)

I once took this game with me to a writer’s retreat with a bunch of romance authors, and my stomach was aching the next morning from the laughter, and I think most of the players wrote down what the game was called to get it for themselves.

There are also blank cards where Green and Blue are speaking but there’s space for you to write in whatever you’d like—I’m not sure if I got those from backing the original Kickstarter or not—but every time I play the game with a new group of people, I end up writing something someone said as one of the blank cards, and it’s a nice way to remember past games.

What are your go-to small-box, could-fit-in-a-stocking games? Hit me with your faves.

Saturday again, so we return to my project of re-watching the TOS-era episodes of Star Trek with the aim of finding scenario seeds useful for those playing Star Trek Adventures as put out by Modiphius. 

And today’s episode is a great one.

The Balance of Terror.

Lock on. And… Fire!

Okay, so this episode has so much going for it, and that’s not even including the sheer joy of revisiting it via the Strange New Worlds alternate-timeline episode where we got to see it again, but different. The teaser is adorable and cute: Jim Kirk is officiating a wedding! D’aww. He pauses to ask the Bridge if they’ve heard back from the Earth Outposts—they haven’t—and then starts his whole speech about how ship’s captains get to do this happy job of officiating weddings in front of the happy bride and groom only then it’s Red Alert and everyone runs off because Earth Outpost 4 is under attack.

Post-teaser, we’re on the Bridge, and we have a terse discussion of how the Earth Outposts in discussion were put in place after the Earth-Romulan War, the end of which was done over subspace radio (ie: they never saw a Romulan) and we meet one Lieutenant Stiles.

Let’s pause to admire Lieutenant Stiles, this week’s Trek Hunk.

Okay, Stiles. Whilst definitely of the hunk persuasion, he’s also got some Romulan baggage: namely, lots of his family lost people to the Earth-Romulan war, at varying ranks, and he knows about as much about Romulans as anyone—but Kirk notes that was their war, not his war, and hey, score one for Kirk being hesitant to fire the first shot in what could be war. Good for him.

Stiles swallows his anger (you can tell because those brown eyes do things, and his jaw also does things and look, I get he’s an asshole. But, like many, I have that self-destructive devil on my shoulder whispering ‘You could change him!’ in my ear).

Ahem. Uh. Right. Where were we? This is a super-famous episode, so you probably don’t need a massive play-by-play here, but the short(ish) version is Earth Outpost 4 is, in fact, under attack and is destroyed in front of Enterprise, who witness a ship—one decorated exactly as Stiles said it would be, by the way—decloak, fire, and then cloak again. Goodbye Outpost 4.

Enterprise gives chase, and what follows is a really great cat-and-mouse plot thereafter. Enterprise manages to damage the Romulan ship with the equivalent of depth charges being tossed at sensor ghosts, and the Romulan Commander (played to perfection by Mark Lenard) manages a UNO reverse by disguising a bomb in detritus and luring the Enterprise closer to determine if they blew up the ship or not and basically both ships are damaged, doing their best, and the border of the Neutral Zone acts as a ticking clock counting down to what would be a declaration of war.

But before all that, Uhura does her usual magic with communications and picks up a signal and it turns out to be a feed from inside the Romulan ship and they put it on screen and… Oh. Romulans look like Vulcans.

Cue Stiles being an asshole to Spock after that. (Though, in his defense, Sulu backs him up on the whole ‘We shouldn’t rule out inside/traitor help, given the Romulans took down four outposts.’)

This episode is the foundation of “Romulans are the Vulcan splinter group who are aggressive, paranoid, colonizing warmongers” and it has a moment that’s honestly fantastic from Leonard Nimoy when Stiles is all “We have to blow these damn Romulans out of the sky or they’ll think we’re easy pickings!” and Kirk is all, “I don’t want to start a war,” (again, huh, nice to see you not be Mr. Half-Cocked) and then Spock is “No, dude, he’s right—if the Romulans are the offshot of Vulcans only still emo, we need to blow them the fuck up, Jim.”

(I’m paraphrasing.)

So, both ships are damaged, the Romulan Commander doesn’t want to start a war but he’s also doing his duty, and he has an older advisor, a Centurion, who is his advisor and honestly their platonic, respectful relationship is one of the best we see in Trek, especially after the Centurion dies saving the Commander and the Commander realizes verisimilitude in that whole “garbage trap” would be greater if they put the body in there, too and you see it on his face how much this hurts him—oof—it’s almost enough to make you sympathetic to the Romulan warmongers, is what I’m saying, and that’s a freaking feat.

Long story short, Kirk wins, Spock saves Stiles’s life (and the day) when gas fills a room and nearly stops phaser control from firing (something we never see again in the series, so maybe this is the point where they realize having to relay orders to another spot to press a button to make the phasers go pew-pew-pew is a bad idea), and the Romulan Commander offers a rather moving speech about how in another time they could have been friends before blowing up his own ship.

Oh, but it turns out the groom was also in phaser control and he died. The Bride has a sad moment, says it has to be worth something, and Kirk and she share a moment of hoping that’s true. (Also, Stiles has a moment of, wow, he saved my life even though I was a dick so see? HE CAN CHANGE!)

It’s a great episode.

Unrelated to the greatness of the episode (and also definitely not great): this is the last time we see Rand. She’s not victimized (for the third time out of eight appearances) but this is her exit, and as I mentioned before, Grace Lee Whitney was treated like shit, assaulted, and it will always leave a sour taste in my mouth—especially when you can see in quite a few future episodes where she was supposed to be present and they just shoved in a random new guest yeoman. The last thing Rand gets to do on the show is say, “Starfleet says they’ll support you in whatever you do,” to Kirk.

Okay, when it comes down to it, this episode follows the pattern of any number of ship-or-submarine-vs-submarine plots—see: The Enemy Below, the Hunt for Red October, etc.—but there’s a reason that’s a staple. Hide-and-seek and cat-and-mouse are a solid set-up for tension in a narrative, and replicating that at a gaming table might be a challenge, but it’s doable—in Star Trek Adventures, I’d eye both the Extended Task mechanics and Creating Advantages (and then having the other side counter-creating Advantages for themselves to negate the player Advantage, and so on). So that scenario appeals right off the bat for a scenario seed.

The second seed—and this is one I’ve used in my games—is the “Romulans look like Vulcans” thing, or, rather, aliens that look like other aliens, and how you can play on that perhaps for a plot twist or two.

Seed One: Cat And Mouse

Setting up a scenario with a Cat And Mouse between the player ship and an antagonist comes down to picking an antagonist, plotting a reason why it’s not as simple as performing a sensor sweep, and then trapping both ships in reach of each other with a countdown of some kind in place. (Of note, this works just as well with opposing Away Teams from different vessels—it doesn’t have to be starship-scale.)

No Port in a Storm—Ion storms are both destructive and wreak havoc on sensors and can whip-up out of anywhere. Perhaps, (a) an enemy takes advantage of an ion storm—or the players take advantage of an ion storm if they need to escape an enemy. This can set a unique ticking-clock in the sense that you can rule any complications rolled are ion strikes (applying damage to the ship’s shields and/or causing breaches) or even an increase in the storm’s intensity (making the next strike all the more potentially damaging, or increasing the difficulty of catching glimpses of the enemy ship). There’s no going to warp in an ion storm, either, so both vessels know they’re in this until the storm breaks or one of them chooses (or has no choice but) to exit the storm (where, if you’re feeling particularly cruel, another enemy vessel might be keeping watch). During the Dominion War this could be a Federation starship taking advantage of an ion storm moving through a Dominion-held sector to get a ship close enough for recon or a strike on a Dominion facility (perhaps where they keep their Ketracel-white), in a fight against Klingons or Romulans in any era where hostilities exist between the two, the need to keep shields up in the storm would at least negate the Klingon advantage of a cloaking device—though finding them is obviously still beyond difficult. Either way, requiring Sensor Sweep Tests to locate the enemy vessel at any given time (with difficulty raised by the intensity of the ever-worsening ion storm) should push the Difficulty to the point where the crew will need to create Advantages to make the attempt possible—and targeting locks would be similarly affected… And all the while, the storm rages against the crew defenses as well. Or, (b) to add further stress, perhaps the crew pick up a distress call from a colony, arrive thinking the ion storm is the issue, only to find a hostile vessel used the storm to arrive under cover, and now they must use the same storm to not only keep the attention of the enemy vessel, but outlast it and defeat it so they can render aid to the colony.

Seed Two: Alien Misidentification

I mentioned I’ve actually used the whole aliens that look alike thing in my own game, so I’ll offer up that as an example option, with the same scenario that’s playing out in my Shackleton Expanse campaign in the form of Ero Drallen—who allows everyone to think he’s a Trill, when in actual fact he’s a Kriosian male empathic metamorph. I’ve also considered finding a way to bring in some Brekkians or Ornarans and having them misidentified as Bajoran—they’re similar in appearance enough—which would end in a shocking reveal! Sorry. I’ll see myself out.

That’s Not a Trill—When called to evacuate a planet where Starfleet was unaware there was a population, the crew meet Ero Drallen, the Trill leader of a group of miners and who’ve struck out on their own to form a small self-sufficient community. He’s handsome, a good diplomat, and strives to keep his people free and cared for above all else—and he absolutely won’t allow Starfleet to make their routine scans of his mining facility, nor will he accept them on the planet where his group has staked their claim, despite their orders (even if there’s danger, he absolutely resists moving his people). He wears gloves and a high-collared shirt most of the time, and that’s because his spots make it easy to pass for a Trill until you note they come to a point at the base of his shoulder blades rather than continuing down his sides, and his hands are rarely cold, like Trill usually are. He’s actually a Kriosian empathic metamorph—a male, which is far more common than women, but still not exactly commonplace—but thanks to members of his immediate family, he was smuggled away to live among the Iyaarans while he matured. The Iyaarans have no concept of romantic love or attraction, and so his empathic abilities never forced him to become someone’s “ideal,” and he is—to the best of his knowledge—himself as he should be. The profits he makes from his community and mining exploits fund an underground railroad he operates to get more male empathic metamorphs off Krios—which is what he’s hiding from the crew, perhaps including having a young man or two who hasn’t reached their finis’ral hiding in whatever facility the crew was sent to evacuate. Will the crew expose both his false identity and his (technically illegal) railroad that feeds these individuals through to Iyaar, or will they help him evacuate everyone and set up a new route to ensure the freedom of these young men who don’t want to be used as prizes in trade agreement deals between Kriosian aristocrats.

Player/Captain’s Log Seed

Okay, I normally don’t do this on my trek through Trek, given this is aimed at narrators, but I do have a player-specific thing I want to bring up inspired by this episode. As mentioned before, I love the Support Crew mechanic, where you can whip up a crew member for an away team or scene where your main character isn’t needed, and there’s a thing I’ve done in every game where I’ve been a player thus far.

There’s Always Been a Stiles in Starfleet—Given I’ve always tried to pick a character who allows me the flexibility of employing the Support Crew mechanic more often (I’ve played the Chief Medical Officer and the Helmsman, and both times I took the Supervisor Talent), when I create a Supporting Crew, the first opportunity I get, I create an Ensign Stiles, and make one of their Focuses “Starfleet History.” The second time I activate the character, I add the Value “There’s Always Been a Stiles in Starfleet.” Boom! A legacy character who ties into “Balance of Terror” through a family long-devoted to careers in Starfleet. Yes, I’m a nerd. But you knew that already.

Also, in Captain’s Log terms, this suits as a great Advantage or Complication opportunity. “A crew member has a family history that provides unique insight to the situation,” is great, whereas “A crew member has a family history with the situation that creates a hostile bias,” is not-so-great.

Hey all! It’s Tuesday—(or, in my case, it’s “you had a migraine last night and your vision is still blurry day” but it’s still Tuesday)—which means let’s talk nerdy gaming stuff. And this week, I want to talk about a one-shot I got to play in last week of the adorable—but also deadly—Mausritter.

I did! Okay, first off, let’s do the overview: Mausritter is like playing “The Secret of NIMH” or something like it, where you and your fellow players are wee little mice in a deadly world. You’re adorable. You’re so freaking precious (the artwork in this game is really cute, is what I’m saying) and you’re anthropomorphic but also still it’s the world (well, at least, that’s the set-up we played, to say that Mausritter has a bajillion support documents out there for different styles of play would be understating, and they’re also right this minute hosting a massive month-long celebration/game-jam on Backerkit which that link should have taken you to but instead will remind you Cloudflare is down and we really shouldn’t have allowed the internet to be balancing in the hands of a few rich people).

Sorry, where was I?

Ah! Right. Cute and deadly. Mechanics wise, making your self a mouse is as easy a few dice rolls. You roll three Attributes in order using 3d6 (dropping the lowest) for Strength, Dexterity, and Will. Yes, this means you could end up with pretty low scores—7ish being average. I had the opposite experience, though, managing to roll an 11, a 10, and a 9 for my first character, whereas my husband got a 6, a 7, and a 10. But, as it mentions elsewhere in the rulebook, if you’re rolling dice? It’s already dangerous. Clever plans are better than rolling dice.

After you roll your three attributes, you roll two more d6s, one for Hit Protection (yes, we not once remembered that’s what it was called, and always referred to them as Hit Points, but they’re not), and once for “pips” (Mausritter currency), and then you cross-reference the two rolls to get your background on a big chart with the 36 possible combinations. This will provide you with your background and two items you’ll be carrying. (Also, there’s a bit of rubber-banding/compensation here. If your highest Attribute is a 9, you get to roll a second time on the Background and pick one of the items from your second roll to add to your starting items; if your highest Attribute is a 7, you get both the items from your second roll on the Background table.)

I once again had great luck, rolling a 5 for my HP and a 5 for my pips, so I was a Grain farmer, which gave me a heavy spear and a whistle. Husband’s 3 HP and 6 pips made him a Merchant, and our third player became a Mendicant Priest (which meant he had a magic spell, but did I mention this game is deadly, because hold on to that thought).

A few more rolls for your birth sign (I was born under the Star, meaning I am Brave and/or Reckless), your coat (I was solid chocolate), and a physical detail (I rolled a prehensile tail which was flipping awesome for holding a torch while I was wielding my spear) and you’re ready to go.

Your character sheet has a grid on it, which is a 2×3 area for inventory, and a 2×2 area where the left column is your main paw above your off paw and the right side are two “body” slots. All the equipment in Mausritter is printed on sheets and cut out, creating squares or rectangles that take up one or two (or sometimes more) of these slots. If you want to wear armor and carry a shield, it will cover the bottom row: your “off paw” and your lower “body” slot. I had a large spear, so it took up my “main paw” and my “off paw.” As you pick things up, you need to have a slot for them, or you’ll be dropping stuff. It’s a great little way to simplify equipment and carrying capacity that does go into equipment wonkage, but also shields are little buttons and helmets are thimbles and at one point we picked up a “heavy club” that was a golf tee and listen, it’s so freaking cute, okay?

Once we had our characters, we got into the game, and we three mice were checking out on another mouse community that had fallen silent. They lived in a big windmill castle among a strange land of twisty paths of odd grass, round holes, and strange statues (read: They lived in a windmill on a hole in a putt-putt mini-golf course!) and we were there to make sure they were okay and restore the trade between our two people.

Fairies were swarming around their windmill, so we decided on recon, spoke to some grumpy gophers, had to broker a deal with some rats, and then things got rough when we were noticed by the fairies and they send a fey fox after us and we ended up using gopher hole bombs and our own cleverness to get the heck out of immediate danger, but ran afoul of a snake and it took one swipe at us before we could react to it and—

That one swipe was a one-hit-knockout of my husband. My brave (reckless) August (call me “Gus”) Snow managed to drag him to safety in time, and we had to spend a while holed up and recovering after we used our second gopher hole bomb on the snake (RIP Mr. Slithers, but not really because you nearly killed Mr. Figgin Whistletwitch), and long story short, we did manage to come out of our adventure both (a) alive, and (b) having restored trade with the community of mice we’d come to speak to, but also at one point our Mendicant was terrified of the giant alligator (it was plexiglass and fake, but we did have to crawl into its mouth) and he decided to use his spell to restore his mental balance and instead reduced himself to a drooling shell of his former self because magic carries a 1-in-6 chance of basically frying your little mouse brain.

And he rolled a 6.

Like I said, deadly. I mean, he’ll get better, but I don’t know if he’ll ever use magic again.

Mausritter is perfect as a one-shot, and I’m thinking of running a Hexcrawl as well (the rulebook contains a bare-bones but still enough set up to roll up a 5-wide Hexcrawl), where we can choose to keep the same mouse or roll up a new one as we feel like. Given the life expectancy of the mice, having another waiting to go is a smart idea anyway.

The mechanics, which I barely touched upon, almost entirely come down to rolling checks against one of your three Attributes (which is rolling a d20 and trying to get less than your Attribute, which is not generally on your side for most mice), and gameplay is definitely centred around avoiding those checks if you can possibly do so. Yes, you could risk setting off a trip, but better you use your twine and some cunning to lasso the cheese on the trap and yank it and let the trap go off with no danger to you than to risk the Dexterity check. If things turn to combat, you better hope you get a first shot in, or that enough of you survive to drag the rest to safety, because almost everything out there is tougher than you.

I mean, of course they are. You’re a mouse.

There are ways to gain advantage on rolls (roll two dice, doubling your shot at success) but you can also have disadvantage (the opposite), and again, cleverness trumps all: if you can gain advantage in a combat situation, you get to upgrade your usual damage roll to a much better dice, but I think what it really comes down to is this wonderful portion of the Rules reference page I have to show you:

That, to me, sums up the whole vibe of the game. (And look at the cute wittle mouse!)

It’s Saturday, which means another entry in my project of re-watching the TOS-era episodes of Star Trek with the goal of taking a peek for ideas—scenario seeds—useful for those playing Star Trek Adventures as put out by Modiphius. 

Previous episode scenario seeds are all on a tab under Star Trek Adventures here on the blog, so if you want to look through, that’s where they are. This week?

The Conscience of the King

Hailing frequencies open.

Trek has this thing it did for a really long time that always made me chuckle, and that was how art got sort of stuck. Shakespeare, classical music, maybe some jazz, but nothing y’know, remotely modern, and certainly nothing transgressive. While I didn’t love the “let’s go full action movie” of the Abrams Kelvin-verse reboot, I did love finally hearing the Beastie Boys being played.

All that to say, we open mid-way through a Shakespeare play on a particular actor, Anton Karidian, and then we pull back to the audience, spot Kirk sitting with someone, and that someone claiming the actor in question is actually Kodos the Executioner!

Dun-dun-dun.

Sorry, who?

We get to that after the teaser, but basically the fellow sitting with Kirk is one Dr. Thomas Leighton, one of only nine people who saw Kodos the Executioner’s face after he did a coup on Tarsus IV in 2246 and ordered the execution of half its population of 8,000 people because their food had been contaminated and there was only enough to feed half. Kirk is also one of the nine, so Leighton lied about something to drag Enterprise into orbit to see the play and Kodos, but Kirk—and I know this is going to be hard for you to believe, here, given his track record of carefully considering the opinions of those around him—doesn’t believe Leighton.

Le Gasp.

Okay, if I throw a metric tonne of benefit of the doubt at Kirk, he does start to investigate once Leighton is murdered (eek) and he also has Riley bumped down from his recent promotion to a lower position on Enterprise to keep him out of the way, because Riley is also one of the nine, and then he launches a completely solo investigation as best he can (all while, of course, using some Kirk “charm” on Anton Karidian’s daughter, Lenore), trying to figure out if Leighton was right or not.

Kirk’s investigation makes Spock notice things are wrong, Kirk wrangles it so the theatre group has to come on Enterprise and keeps wooing Lenore while trying to get readings/voice-prints/what-have-you from Karidian to prove or disprove his Kodos, someone tries to kill Riley (so much for making sure he’s out of the way) and while Riley is saved, eventually Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are all in on the theory that Kodos is wiping out the last of the people who might be capable of identifying him.

Ultimately, that turns out kinda-right, kinda-wrong. Karidian is of course Kodos (fucking listen to Spock, Jim!), but the one doing the stabity-stabity and poisoning is Lenore. In true Shakespearean fashion, we get a series of verbalized confessions: Lenore is doing it for her father; Karidian is distraught because she was the one good thing he had in his life and now she’s got blood on her hands; when Riley tries to kill Karidian, and Kirk stops him, and Karidian/Kodos admits the truth to Lenore, she admits the truth to him about murdering all the witnesses—there’s a lot of confessing, is what I’m saying. Kirk calls for security and Harrison (despite being this week’s Star Trek Hunk) just sort of lets her grab his phaser (because plot) but when she tries to kill Kirk her father jumps in the way, is killed, and then Lenore has a total breakdown (also via Shakespeare quotations).

Curtain. (Semi-literally, because this happens in a theatre on the Enterprise, actually).

Okay, three things! One: Lenore has the best (and highest?) number of costume changes ever in a Trek episode. I think every time there’s a break and we come back, she’s got a new outfit on. We love a sartorial queen, even a murderous one (especially a murderous one?).

Two: Rand has a blink-and-you’ll miss it scene here, where she shows up, throws a shady-glance at Lenore, and that’s it. Importantly, this makes it two out of seven episodes with Rand where she’s not victimized, but this is also her last filmed appearance in TOS (though the airing order means we’ll see her again). The backstory behind Rand’s exit from the show is awful (including being assaulted) and it’s painful to see this last moment from the actress once you’ve read what Grace Lee Whitney went through. I try to keep things light and fun on this project, but the behind-the-scenes realities were often garbage (especially for the women), and I’m not a fan of glossing over them.

Three: Kirk is—deep sigh—once again so bad at trusting his crew. This rewatch has been so painful on that level for me. He leaves Riley thinking he’s done something wrong, rather than telling him what’s going on (which nearly gets Riley killed, mind you; then nearly drives Riley to murder to boot); when Spock gets involved in the investigation on his own merit because Kirk is acting oddly and Spock is smart-as-hell and figures out something is amiss and concludes Karidian is, in fact, Kodos, Kirk is all “but I don’t know that for sure.” Dude. Spock might not be infallible, but come on—someone tried to kill Riley, all the other people who could ID Karidian as Kodos are dead except for you and Riley, Spock has figured out the theatre company was always there when they were killed, and Spock—y’know, logical, Science Officer Spock—is telling you this theory is definitely fitting the data. And while I know it’s all for plot, Kirk is fucking infuriating. Again.

So, right off the bat, it occurred to me that exploring an infamous political figure/nightmare of a being is both (a) a session one topic you’d want to have with your group beforehand and, (b) something that can be really galvanizing and narratively interesting to explore with your players. I’ve done this once (or, kind of twice, actually) with my almost-entirely-Trill group on the USS Curzon campaign, where they bumped into a Trill doctor, Tal Duron, famous for escaping a trial mostly unscathed (he was connected to a powerful family) when he tried to “save” a symbiont by removing it from an injured host and intended to join with it (again, to “save” it) only the data didn’t support the host being so severely injured in the accident-in-question and Duron had washed out of the Symbiote Initiate program, so it was all suspect as hell. That the symbiont and host both died was salt on the wound (and that the host was the Captain’s brother was even more salt on the wound) and when Tal Duron crossed the paths of the crew a second time, he was doing something even worse, so… the urge to ensure he finally faced justice was served in the latter case, as the data was inconclusive enough in the former.

The other seed that came to mind from the episode was art. Shakespearean (in the original Klingon or nay) plays, music, or other forms of entertainment aren’t things we get to often see in Trek, and it might be interesting to frame an episode around art—adding, of course, some sort of science fiction twist.

Seed One: Political Infamy

There’s a solid Star Trek Strange New Worlds episode where Enterprise is asked to ferry a Klingon diplomat who is considered “the Butcher of J’Gal,” responsible for a massive slaughter before defecting to the Federation, and… yeah, it’s a heavy episode—with a fantastic twist reveal, frankly—and offered some wonderful character moments that I could see players really digging their teeth into from a challenging their Values point of view (though, again, touch base and/or refer to your Session 0 guidelines).

I May Disapprove…—After a failed assassination attempt occurs on an infamous political figure in Federation territory, the player’s ship is tasked with safely carrying the person in question to their next destination, regardless of their feelings about the individual in question. Perhaps (a) this is a former Bajoran freedom-fighting terrorist (perhaps even Orta himself) who has responsible for more than a few attacks on the Cardassian occupying force with little-to-no care about collateral damage so long as Cardassians themselves were harmed, who has received a full pardon by the Bajoran Provisional Government, and is on a speaking tour to specifically argue further and harsher sanctions on the Cardassian Empire. If this occurs post-Dominion War, this is tantamount to a “let them die” speech, given the sheer destruction suffered by the Cardassian people when they finally turned on the Dominion, but the Bajoran’s point of view is adamant and unswerving: they do not deserve aid now, or ever. Or, (b) this is a defector from a current enemy of the Federation, one known to have taken part in a massive attack, raid, or otherwise destructive assault on Federation territory (perhaps a Klingon who led groups slaughtering Federation citizens on Ajilon Prime during the 2372-2373 war with the Klingons; or a Cardassian involved in the occupation of Betazed if this is set during the Dominion War era; or a Gorn involved in the attack on Cestus III during the TOS-era or so on). In this case, the assassination attempt may have come from Federation citizens, and the players might have more than a few fellow crew—or even themselves—with very reason to loathe the individual in question. Amnesty for information is a sour-tasting reality of war, especially for the self-serving, and it can put an officer’s devotion to ethics and morality to a difficult test.

Seed Two: Art

Art, entertainment, music, and games don’t get a lot of screen time in Trek—though I do love me a good “guide the disk into a funnel” brainwashing device—but a few lines here and there often make reference to it. As Tendi puts it, “Why even listen to Klingon if it isn’t punky or acidic?”

Feel No Pain—While at a planet for a routine mission that allows for some shore leave time for some of the crew, the presence of a Napean (or other empathic or telepathic species) musician group on their first-ever tour away from their homeworld is a major draw to multiple musically-inclined members of the crew (perhaps including some of the players, but definitely including some of the player-favourite support or supervising crew). Music mixed with an empathic (or telepathic) awareness of the crowd creates a spectacularly moving euphoric and pleasant experience—but one with an accidental side-effect. After experiencing the performance, those who attended begin to exhibit unusual behaviour. Perhaps (a) the telepathic/empathic connection has dampened their ability to feel pain or other negative emotional states, leaving them to progress into an ever-more manic, euphoric state, which begins to reach dangerous levels only after the crew are on their way again, perhaps on a time-sensitive mission of delivery—with the crew who attended acting more and more without consideration of any consequences to their actions, actively incapable of any form of “feeling bad,” the players will have to figure out the source of the strange behaviour, counter the actions it has led the affected crew to take, and manage to complete the mission with whichever crew remain unaffected. Or, (b) the uplifting experience has a crash-effect thereafter. Affected crew suffer listlessness, struggling harder and harder to motivate themselves to do anything, and ultimately dropping into comatose states while their neurochemistry desperately tries to restore a sense of balance—one the ship’s medical crew might be able to attempt to aid, assuming they’re not among the initial group affected. The crew, inattentive and sloppy as the symptoms grow, leave the ship open to any number of failures or accidents via negligence, and a time-critical mission puts a ticking clock on finding the cause—and a solution—before it’s too late. Also, for a more chaotic option, you could mix (a) and (b) and have some species affected one way while others are affected the other.

Have you dropped a politically infamous figure into your campaigns? Have you had music—or any other art form—play a major role in any of your scenarios? Let me know.

Hey all! Tuesday, nerdery, gaming, etc.

Thanks to our gaming friends (we actually gather on Tuesdays, which is how this day got associated with games for me in the first place) over the years I’ve been introduced to the whole concept of “roll and writes”—games that come with pads where you roll communal dice, each player makes choices, and write down your choices on your own pad to various results.

It’s a little like communal Yahtzee, only usually with more complexity and theme and they’ve become a game style I’ve really started to enjoy, in part because while it’s often a competitive game—you’re trying to get the most points—you’re mostly doing your own thing.

As I’m sure you’ve realized by now, that’s my sweet-spot when it comes to competitive games. I don’t like being mean or snatching things away from other players, but a race to be the first to complete something on my own, using my own choices? That’s okay. Especially if I can’t even know what other people want.

I thought I’d talk about two of the roll and writes I’ve played and enjoyed the most thus far, and begin with Encore! (I actually played the German version, Noch Mal!) The system around this one is pretty simple (which is often the case with roll and writes, I find), leaving the complexity to be something you’re handling yourself on your own page.

With four players, you roll six dice: three of them are colours (five colours and a wild), and three of them are numbers (one through five and a wild). For the first few rounds, everyone just picks the combination (one colour plus one number) and then, starting with the middle row and spreading contiguously (not diagonally) checks off that many boxes on their individual sheet, which has a kind of Tetris like pattern of colours of blocks in groups of one to six for each colour.

What’s important is you can only place an X beside where you just placed a previous X, and you have to place your first X in either the middle row, or beside somewhere you’ve already placed an X. You can only place Xs in the colour you’ve selected, and you have to be able to place the number you selected (meaning: you can’t use a 3 if you’ve only got two blocks of that colour to X out—you need a 2; if you choose a 1, that’s fine, but you’ll be leaving 1 block behind for another future roll). This means those blocks of six will require at least two rolls to complete, no matter what.

Scoring points is ongoing. You get points for filling in entire columns (with further-from-the-centre columns worth more than the centre ones) and the first person to fill in any given column gets more points than everyone else who accomplishes it. The first two players to complete any given colour also gain points (similarly, the first player getting more than the second), and as soon as a player has finished two colours, it’s time to tally things up.

There are more rules than that (using the wild-dice is a limited thing, you only get so many, and check them off, unused wilds are worth points, there are spaces that cost points if you haven’t managed to X them out, etc…) and after the first few turns, whoever rolled the dice starts to remove their choice from the options (ie: “I’m taking Blue and 3”) which means the other players have to make do with the four combinations left on the table (two numbers, two colours).

It’s quick, it’s fairly straightforward, and the dice blunt how far skill can take you given sometimes you just roll for garbage or amazingly well and that’s amusing in different ways.

The other roll and write I’ve really come to love is Welcome To… This one has a rather unusual theme, in that you’re basically building streets in suburbia, and trying to make them welcoming. The mechanic involves drawing cards from two decks, one giving you house numbers (1 to 15)—which, on a street, must go from lowest to highest, one of the first things you’re placing—the other giving you qualities of said houses (placing a fence, giving a house a pool or a park) or the ability to fudge some of the other rules (like duplicating a number to make a 9a and a 9b, or adjusting the house number up or down for a turn), and all the while there are three goal cards up for grabs as well (patterns of fences between houses, basically: like having a group of three fenced in houses beside another group of four fenced in houses).

You have three streets you’re working with, and there are a few other options on your sheet for fudging or adjusting things when you start to end up hemmed in, and the game ends when a certain number of the goals are snapped up (first place and second place there, so two players can claim each goal but no more). That’s the only real “competitive” part in this one.

Ultimately, though, you do your best with your own streets and it’s always amusing to hear your fellow players groan or grumble as you flip exactly the wrong combination of numbers. “Another [insert number here]? COME ON!” or “Where are the damned fences?” are not uncommon utterances in my experiences. But it remains fun, and I find myself not minding losing in the slightest because you basically have to set your own goals—you can’t accomplish everything in a single game, you have to focus on what you can.

Have you played any roll and writes? Do you have a favourite? Let me know.

It’s Saturday, which means my project of re-watching the TOS-era episodes of Star Trek with the goal of finding ideas—scenario seeds—useful for those playing Star Trek Adventures as put out by Modiphius. 

Today’s episode?

The Menagerie (parts one and two)

Engage.

Okay, this is the only TOS two-parter, and it’s one of the most unique uses of a failed pilot I’ve encountered, and while I know it was basically done to both recoup some financial losses, using the original Star Trek pilot episode to make a completely different story building on the plot thereof using the characters of the successful show and treating it as a historical event?

I mean, it’s really clever. More than that, it set the stage for Discovery and Strange New Worlds to show us some of the past with this original pilot (which I really enjoyed) folded into canon after all. Also, Jeffrey Hunter walked so Anson Mount could run.

I mean, again, Trek knows how to hunk, no?

Ahem. Okay, so the set-up for this two-part episode is pretty choice: Spock basically kidnaps his badly wounded former-captain, Christopher Pike, fakes orders to get out of orbit in command of the Enterprise, and hot-wires the starship so it won’t respond to anyone but him, and Kirk (and Commodore Mendez) take a shuttle and try to give chase and eventually Spock has to pause to let them on board, at which point he maneuvers everyone into giving him a court martial.

Oh, and somehow has meticulous records in watchable detail—as though recorded for some sort of entertainment broadcast or something—of the only planet where beaming down (or even approaching) where the death penalty is still on the books.

And he won’t turn the ship around.

What we learn from watching these records (which Spock doesn’t explain, but Captain Pike beep-beeps an affirmative to the direct question “are these records accurate?”) and this is one of the few sticking points I have about this episode that—even when I re-watched it for this project—really annoyed me.

When they’re all trying to figure out what the hell is up with Spock, McCoy says something like, given Pike can only say yes or no, “they could question him for days—weeks—before they stumble on the right thing!”

So… Pike can communicate in a binary, triggering a “yes” or “no” response via his motorized chair. He has access to a literal binary mode of communication. He could yes/no Morse Code. Or, if that’s too tiring for him, someone could just, y’know, offer up letters?

Like, this is something Jean-Dominique Bauby did in 1997, using a French language frequency-ordered alphabet being spoken to him, and him blinking when the correct letter came up. I mean, okay, that’s long after the episode aired, and yes, to be remotely smart about this otherwise would have been plot-destroying, but it’s annoying as heck. These are smart people. They should be freaking capable of figuring this out.

But, again, plot. Fine.

Basically, what we learn about Pike’s command of Enterprise, and a particular mission to the Talos Star Group. If you’re here, you probably know this story: Captain Pike and the Enterprise pick up a distress signal, find a group of old men survivors (and one blond woman who was “born as they crashed”) and then—ripple effect—everyone vanishes, the Captain has been lured into an underground bunker by throbbing-headed aliens, and it turns out this is a kind of zoo where telepathic aliens create so-real-it’s-like-reliving-it-in-real-time memory/telepathic illusions in their captured aliens.

Why? Because they need breeding stock to create a working class/slave caste to rebuild/terraform the surface back to liveable (something went very wrong) and they’ve picked humans. Pike figures out hate blocks them out (at least temporarily), he and Vina (the blond woman, who it turns out is real and did, in fact, live through the crash of the old earth ship decades ago) eventually connect, and then the various shoes drop: the aliens are basically addicted to experiencing other people’s experiences and are on the decline/trapped in their own way, the crew—including a super-smart Number One and a younger (far more smiley) Spock—figure out that their weapons are working, they’re just being telepathically told they’re not (and set a laser to overload) and basically, Pike manages a jailbreak, gets out with Vina and then—at the last moment—Vina won’t go with him.

Because when she crashed, she was horribly disfigured, and while they put her back together again, they had no “instructions” and so she’s only able to feel normal in their telepathic illusions. So Pike leaves—getting a promise from the telepaths they’ll let her be happy—the planet gets cordoned off, and that’s that.

Back to Kirk and Spock and the trial, and it turns out there’s more illusions going on: the aliens are the source of the signal, and this whole shebang has been about Spock “repaying a debt” to Pike and he’s determined to deliver Pike to the planet. Oh, and also there’s no actual trial after all, it was just the telepathic aliens keeping Kirk busy, and Mendez never joined Kirk in the shuttle, so… sorry ’bout that.

They beam down Pike, and we get a shot of him walking back into the distance hand-in-hand with Vina, both of them living in a telepathic illusion where they’re hale and hearty and able-bodied and pain-free, and ultimately Starfleet is all, “Well, given Pike’s service, we’re letting this drop.”

Credits.

Damn, it makes a good duet. It’s telling that the weaker parts are the Kirk-era bits—the original pilot was so damned smart, and one of the reasons I was so in love with Strange New Worlds in season one was how we finally got Number One back—I cannot tell you how much I adore her—and while Pike comes off a bit… wound tight, there’s some great romance of competence.

What I can say for the Kirk-era bits (other than that blip with “we can’t talk to him because he can only say yes or no”) is how wonderfully Leonard Nimoy plays a Spock willing to do anything—break the rules, endanger his very life and even the career of Captain Kirk—for his former captain. Loyalty, I’m sure he’d say, is only logical.

For a two-part episode, you’d think I’d have a bunch of references I could draw upon to come up with ideas for tabletop Star Trek Adventures games and you’d be… wrong, actually? Part of that is I kept sliding into the narrative and enjoying the flashback parts, and part of it was there’s not a lot more going on. It’s almost a bottle episode in the Kirk era. The entire episode is framed around the (excellent) flashback to the original pilot, and the rest—once Spock hijacks Enterprise—is basically a courtroom scene.

So, I sat with it a while, and what I eventually came up with was the powerful motivation Spock is showing, or, put another way: Why would a valued officer steal a starship? Another seed that I did find from a throwaway line was the Talosians referring to “thought records.” Telepathic memories they could relive, which they’d stored and used in their addicted/lost/endlessly self-indulgent way—but didn’t know how to maintain their machinery, which meant they’d eventually break—and it occurred to me since we know about Katric Arks and the like, other telepathic species could have done something similar.

Seed One: Hijacked

Taking the player’s ship away from their control isn’t something you should be doing on a regular basis, nor should it be easy, so it might take some groundwork to really make this plausible. “The Menagerie” had Spock hijacking Enterprise, requiring some major computer finesse and the aid of powerful telepathic aliens, and the extra weight of the moment is absolutely due to it being Spock breaking the rules to hijack the ship, so picking (a) a character the crew would never consider capable of this, and then (b) coming up with a path for said character to accomplish the feat as well as a motive. It’s a lot.

This Isn’t Supposed To Happen—One way a starship could easily be hijacked is simply by much better technology. Like, say, technology from the future. In this scenario, the player’s ship is diverted from its course and aimed elsewhere, at high warp, and the ship’s computer refuses to respond to anyone other than a trusted member of the crew (ideally, choose a Support or Supervisor Crew the players have worked with multiple times). This crew member won’t explain beyond asking them to trust they’d never do this without a good reason, and the crew’s attempts at regaining control of the ship should fail until the ship arrives at the site and sensors reveal a growing temporal anomaly. At that point, the crew-member in question comes clean: they’re from about three days in the future, their counterpart is unconscious in their quarters, and this future version is the only survivor after the destruction of the ship when it attempted to stop the same anomaly from destroying an inhabited planet three days from now. None of this was supposed to happen, according to the temporal agent who managed to send the crewperson back with the hijacking device to try and stop this from happening, and the agent was clear there was someone on board working against the crew. Of note, the temporal agent barely managed to pass the equipment and the barest extra information to the crewperson before themselves vanished in a temporal wake, which means in some way, this adjustment to the timeline, the destruction of the player’s ship, would have disastrous effects on the future of the temporal agency itself. Who are the enemies who created this anomaly? Why are they targeting the player’s ship at this particular time? Who—or what—is so important to the future aboard their vessel? Time will tell—assuming they can avert the temporal event without blowing themselves up this time.

Seed Two: Telepathic Records

The memories of others, left in accessible records is a staple of sci-fi, and there are great examples of this sort of thing in Trek, too (one of my favourites being the Troi-re-experiences-a-murderer’s-state-of-mind-through-her-own-lenses we get in TNG’s “Eye of the Beholder”). This is a great thing for narrators to shine a light on the telepathic characters in the group, allowing them to sense whatever is happening to others (or themselves) as the core driving force toward a solution. If you’ve got willing players, you could also put them in the role of the telepathically influenced, perhaps by passing them ever-clearer notes as more “memories” become clear.

Reliquary—The crew are performing an archeological mission on a newly discovered site where a member of the Away Team locates a series of stored objects that have clearly been placed on shelves in reverential positions. They’re not marked in any way, and appear to just be simple cylinders of solid, rather unremarkable rock, and the Away Team member in question had to catch one when it fell off the shelf when he accidentally released the panel hiding it. Unknowingly, that physical contact has activated the purpose of the cylinder and transferred telepathic memories to the crew person, who, over time (a) begins to have intuition-like understanding of the site around him as a historical archive of some of the more important elders of a species that knew they were doomed but didn’t have the technology to stop the planetary destruction. The crew member begins acting less and less like themself and more-and-more like some sort of guardian or curator for the site—cumulating in being unwilling to beam back to the ship and claiming they belong here, and seemingly telepathically controlling the entire facility to defend itself, raise shields, and otherwise keep the entire Away Team here—and eventually attempting to get others to hold cylinders of their own to “restore the Reliquary” and to “begin our society anew.” Or, (b) the intuitions lead the crew person down a different path, one of warning the crew that the devastation that visited this planet is cyclical, a parasitic-like, incorporeal telepathic being that absorbs neurological energy before going dormant in a hibernation cycle, then waking to split and seek new sources of feed to repeat its cycle, and while the elders knew they were doomed and didn’t have the technology to stop the destruction, they could do this much to warn future species of the danger—one due to wake up in a feeding cycle any day now from within the planet’s core.

Have your players ever lost control of the ship? Have you had telepathic influence strike the crew? Let me know.

Hey all! It’s Tuesday, which means let’s talk nerdish games, but also my head has decided to drop a multiple-day headache on me, so this will be quick. Recently, we had our weekly gaming night friends over and none of us were up to Earthborn Rangers (which I should really give a third, ‘Now we get it, what do we think?’ post) so we pulled out our smallest boxes of basic games, and one of those games was Arboretum.

The core concept of Arboretum is pretty simple—deceptively so. You’ve got a deck you’re all drawing from, you have seven cards in your hands, and the cards are made up of 1 through 8 of various tree types: dogwood, oak, cherry blossom, etc. Depending on the number of players, you create the draw deck from up to ten tree types (each with those 1 through 8 cards) and deal out a hand to each player, and then each player takes turns doing three things.

First you draw two cards, in any combination from the top of the draw pile (which are face down) or the top of any player’s discard pile (which will be face up). You can look at your drawn card before deciding what to do next if that’s your first draw.

Second, you play a card to your Arboretum. This is placing a card in front of you, which has to be adjacent, vertically or horizontally, to a previous card you played (once you’ve played your first card, obviously). This is where the numbers and tree types come in: during scoring, you’ll eventually be drawing “paths” from lowest to highest through your Arboretum starting at the lowest number of a particular species of tree to the highest number you’ve got of that species of tree, which means you’re trying to create paths in (somewhat) numerical order, though those paths can twist and turn horizontally and vertically. What I’m saying is, if you place a 1 and then a 2 beside the 1, it might very well be the next best play for you is to play another 2 above the 1, so that you’ve got two 2 cards of different species to “begin” a path with. Making your Arboretum, card-by-card—especially if you end up with species or numbers that aren’t of immediate use to you—can get difficult as you try to think ahead, create contingencies and so forth.

Third, you must discard a card. This is where some of the “this is more complex and competitive than I thought it would be” comes into play. If you’re more competitive than I am, you don’t want to drop cards that would fit perfectly into someone else’s Arboretum structure (it’s worth noting I don’t think I’ve ever won a game of Arboretum, and I think it comes down to this: I’m always trying to make the best I can with my own cards, and not paying enough attention to what other people are doing, and the rest of the people I play with tend to be far more clever at strategically denying cards).

Oh, and you also need cards in your hand that match the same species as any tree type you’ve put into your Arboretum that you want to score.

Yeah, the last bit is the real frustration of Arboretum (or, I suppose, the fun of it, if you really like strategic games where you’ve got a shot at ruining other people’s plans). So, by the time the game ends (when there are no more cards to draw from the draw deck), you’ll have a whole bunch of trees in front of you that make a bunch of paths from low numbers to high numbers, and it’s time to score.

But only one person gets to score each species of tree.

Who gets to score? Whoever has the highest sum of that species of tree still in their hand. There’s one last quirky bit to this as well: if you have the 8 of a species in your hand, and someone else has the 1 of a species in their hand? The 8 is considered a 0. So hanging onto the 8 point card to score your path of that species isn’t necessarily the best option, especially if you can’t see the 1 in play at any point in the game—if you don’t have it, you didn’t see it played or discarded, then someone else does, and your 8 is now worth 0 if it’s in your hand.

Only the person who has the highest sum of a species in their hand gets to score that species. They count the lowest number tree to the highest number tree of that species in their Arboretum along a path, and get points (1 per tree in the path, +1 additional point per tree if the path if it’s at least four trees long and the path is entirely made up of the same species, +1 if it begins with a one, and +1 if it ends with an 8). I should note it’s totally possible to have the highest number of a species in your hand and not be able to score a path, either—the last game I played that happened to me: other players kept multiple trees of paths I was the only one working on, and though I had the 1 and the 8 both out in play and the 7 in my hand? Someone else had the 6 and the 2, so… Bzzt. They scored nothing for that species, but they stopped me from scoring.

There is also a “tie” or “null” scenario where if no one has the highest number of a species in their hand, everyone gets to score it, but I’ve yet to see that happen in a game.

Yeah, that’s fair. I think ultimately I really enjoy the fun of trying to build my Arboretum paths, but I don’t at all enjoy the “but also try to screw other people other while you’re doing it” and unfortunately, that’s how the game is played effectively, so I’m kind of losing out of the gate every time. I think there’s a vibe mismatch here, too: like when I think of strolling through an Arboretum (something I do with Max on the regular), I think relaxing, pleasant, and peaceful—there’s too much “how do I stop you from winning?” vs “how do I build a pleasant path?” in this game for that.

Also, now that we’ve got enough games on the score pad to note recurring patterns, one thing is really, really clear: if a player can build up that path of single-species-tree and score it (for double points), they’re going to win unless you find a way to screw them over by getting those trees into your hand to deny them the scoring, but functionally that’s pretty luck based.

Oh! And if you have the opportunity to get the deluxe super-fancy version of the game, we suggest you… don’t. They chose to print holographic cards, and the shiny, reflective surfaces make playing the game difficult because it’s hard to read the cards on the table if you’ve got a light, y’know, above the table.

It’s Saturday, which means: Star Trek. Or, more specifically, my project of re-watching the TOS-era episodes of Star Trek with the goal of taking a peek for ideas—scenario seeds—useful for those playing Star Trek Adventures as put out by Modiphius. 

Previous episode scenario seeds on a tab under Star Trek Adventures here on the blog, so if you want to look through, that’s where they are. Today’s episode?

The Corbomite Maneuver

Engage.

Teaser-wise this one starts with Enterprise mapping a new area of space and taking pictures and a Lieutenant Bailey being kind of bored, and then a cube appears (not a Borg cube, this one is more colourful and prefers to spin and move with one point facing down, so totally different) and Bailey has a little freak out when they can’t avoid it and Sulu calls for a Red Alert and the Captain.

After the break we see Doctor McCoy delighting in making Captain Kirk do some sort of kicky-pushy exercise in Sickbay for his physical, ignoring the red alert light and waiting until he’s done before Kirk notices the light and is annoyed, and McCoy snaps off one of his best lines with—hee—”What am I, a doctor or a moon shuttle operator?”

Once Kirk gets cleaned up and arrives on the Bridge, Enterprise tries to escape the cube thing, it keeps bobbing and weaving with them, won’t leave them alone or let them go, and Bailey has some more freak-out and hesitation moments, as well as jumping the gun a few times, and the idea here is Bailey is just not working out particularly well in his role. In fact, once Enterprise decides to destroy the cube (because it’s putting out a crap-tonne of radiation and is going to kill people), Bailey hesitates in ordering the phaser to fire because he’s scared (or something like that?), and there’s also a scene where Sulu reaches over and does his job for him, and basically Bailey’s character is in over his head.

Now, there’s one major facet of this that struck me as really important. After Kirk tells Bailey to run drills until he can get a 100% efficiency rating, Bones takes Kirk aside and basically says, “You promoted him too fast, you need to ease off, and just because he reminded you of you, it doesn’t mean he’s ready for this role.” That’s your chief medical officer noting the mental condition of one of your crew, Captain. What are you going to do?

Well, you’re Captain Jerk, so you’re going to dismiss the opinion, and double-down on “he’ll toughen up” because otherwise you’d be wrong, and Captain Jerk doesn’t do wrong. This is now the third time McCoy has put forth a medical opinion to Kirk in only ten episodes and Kirk has just decided to ignore it and the third time we’ll see that McCoy is—in fact—correct. Kirk is really not good at judging the mental state of others, and really bad at listening to the experts on his ship who are there to offer him opinions. I think in the time and place he was written, we’re supposed to get the idea that Jim Kirk is a maverick who is slow-to-trust and demands excellence of his people without any softness (and is used to getting it) hitting his first real “nope, that’s not going to work” but honestly, through today’s lens he comes off like any number of bad bosses we’ve all had who don’t listen.

Now, Bones and Kirk continue this conversation in Kirk’s quarters where Kirk learns he’s been given a salad diet for a while because of his latest physical results when Rand drops it off. This is doubly important because RAND IS IN THIS EPISODE AND AT NO POINT IS SHE VICTIMIZED. That’s one out of six! Hooray! (In fact, later she shows up with coffee and McCoy is all, “I thought we had no power?” and Rand shrugs and says, “I used a phaser,” and I wish we got more using-a-phaser Rand rather than victim-Rand, but life is full of unfulfilled wishes.)

After salad and ignoring his chief medical officer, Kirk heads forward through the space where the cube was, because Enterprise is an explorer, and that’s what you do—you don’t turn back when a cube tries to kill you. I guess that’s fair.

Alas. A massive ship arrives (this one is a sphere made up of domes and tubes and it looks awesome in the remaster), grabs Enterprise, announces itself as the Fesarius of the First Federation under the control of Commander Balok and basically says since Enterprise blew up the warning buoy and disregarded the warning buoy they’ve signed their own death warrant for tresspassing. Balok gives them ten minutes. Kirk tries to talk Balok down, they refuse. Spock gets a glimpse of the alien (a wobbly view of a scary looking big-brained alien). The countdown ticks on and Sulu seems to enjoy letting people know how much time is left.

Bailey. Loses. His. Shit.

And, I mean, fair? But Kirk relieves him of duty, has McCoy take him to his quarters, Spock notes that in chess sometimes you just lose, and afterwards McCoy comes back and delivers a not-so-subtle “What part of ‘You need to let up on him’ was unclear, Captain Jerk?” and he and Kirk had an argument where McCoy notes he’s going to weaponize his medical log to make Captain Kirk respond (again, I might add), and Kirk snaps about McCoy trying to bluff him and then—

Oh! Lightbulb moment.

Okay, the transition here is clever and I like the writing. Basically, Kirk thinks of what Spock says—in chess, when you’re going to lose, that’s it—and decides to swap games to poker, because in poker you can have a shit hand and still win. He bluffs. He has Uhura hail, pretends there’s a “corbomite device” on the ship that explodes in an equal reaction way to any attacker—and that they don’t keep a record of it in their ship tapes (which Balok has read by now, by the way)—as a last-ditch “if you harm us, we’re taking you down with us” sort of deal.

The timer runs down. No boom. Bailey comes back and is all, “Can I please have my station back?” and Kirk lets him—it’s an interesting choice: a shot at redemption? Recognition he asked too much of him? Just wanting to let him die at his post? It’s not clear.

Balok, having fallen for the bluff—at least a little—has a smaller ship pop out of the sphere and starts dragging Enterprise to a planet where it intends to maroon everyone and then destroy the ship (given that way it won’t blow up Fesarius, just a little ship, I guess?) and Enterprise does some techobabble to overwhelm the energy output of the little ship, which loses power, Enterprise breaks free and they’ve done it!

Only then the little ship is putting out a faint distress signal saying its lost life support and Uhura points out that little signal would never reach the big ship and then Kirk notes it’s time to send over a landing party to help out the alien.

McCoy points out this dude tried to kill them, but Kirk says this is an opportunity to live up to their ideals—yes, yes it is—and so he, McCoy, and Bailey beam over and it turns out Balok is a puppet—he admits it’s because the real him isn’t scary—and the real Balok is… a little kid. I mean, not actually, of course: just an alien that looks like a little kid, but is a grown member of his species. (Said little kid, by the way, is Clint Howard, who will grow up to star in multiple future iterations of Star Trek. Seriously! He’s in The Original Series, Deep Space Nine, Enterprise, Discovery and Strange New Worlds.) They chat, and it turns out this is the first of many a powerful alien actually testing humans to see if they’re worthy. Balok’s ship is fine, it’s all a bluff (which makes two!) and he read the Enterprise tapes but wanted to make sure they were as good as they said they were, they passed the tests. Oh, also he’s lonely because that massive ship is only crewed by him, and how about handing over someone to talk to for a cultural exchange?

So Kirk asks Bailey if he can think of anyone who’d like to stay with Balok and Bailey is all “pick me, I’m a garbage lieutenant who makes lots of mistakes!” and Kirk is all, “he super is, please let me have a better officer!” and Balok laughs and says he and Kirk are so alike and offers them all a tour of his little ship.

Credits. (McCoy was right.)

Oh! Also, a fun fact about this episode is it’s the episode where Sulu looks back at the Captain with a “what you make of this?” reaction at one point and it’s re-used in episode after episode whenever they need to show some thing on screen. They just change the thing on the screen. Even when I was younger, I noticed how Sulu did this a lot.

This is the first and last time we see or hear anything about the First Federation, which feels like fertile ground to play with. On maps, you sometimes get a glimpse of the First Federation marked with a ring of those warning buoys, and another time with an actual star system marked Fesarius. And that’s… about it. Now, I like the idea of these wee little alien folk who are like, “Okay, we look like helpless children to most alien species, so let’s put a border of explosive cubes around our space and also make scary puppets,” but beyond that it’s a completely blank slate to work with. Their technology is also pretty solid—they’re able to take over Enterprise in this episode. These aren’t lightweights (well, they’re tiny kid-sized aliens, but you get what I mean).

Given we never see the First Federation ever again, one is left with the impression that Bailey and Balok may have become friends, but Starfleet—or the Federation—and the First Federation didn’t really ever get anywhere, diplomatically. Was that a failure? Was it just the culture of the First Federation? Perhaps they simply don’t trust the larger species—or somewhere in the lost era between TOS and TNG, something went wrong between the two? Also, on the map, just a sector or so from where they’re located are the Ferengi.

I mean, that’d convince more than one alien to put up a fence real quick, no?

Seed One: The First Federation

A ring of buoys have been the First Federation’s message to outsiders—including the Federation—since the first contact of Enterprise in 2266, and that message has been consistent since: Keep Out. What happened, exactly?

Fences Make Good Neighbours—I imagine the First Federation had a brief flirtation with opening their borders after meeting Enterprise in 2266, offering the United Federation of Planets open lines of communication and officially declaring Bailey as part of a diplomatic officer exchange. More, the Federation was still rebuilding from the Klingon Wars of the late 2250s, and the technological advancements of the First Federation would have made for a particularly promising hope for reconstruction and defence capabilities. If the First Federation were to join the United Federation of Planets, the benefits could not be understated. The First Federation, however, shifted away from any overtures of that nature, and worse, their activity outside the protection of their buoys led to multiple altercations with other species: the Ferengi, the Nausicaans, the Tzenkethi, and the Patriarchy—and ultimately, a decision was made: they returned to their space and closed their borders. The United Federation of Planets (and Starfleet) would of course respect their wishes and attempt to keep diplomatic channels at least possible. So when the First Federation reaches out with a request for Starfleet to send a single ship past their normally inviolate borders, Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets is eager for the mission to end positively. So why are they calling? Perhaps (a) one of those antagonists earlier—Ferengi, Nausicaans, Tzenkethi or the Patriarchy—have launched some sort of attack, or worse have found a way to wrest the remote control of the buoys and are weaponizing them against the First Federation itself. The crew will have to not only avoid and handle the First Federation’s defensive and offensive technology in the hands of villains, but they’ll have to figure out a way to return control to the First Federation before it’s too late. Or, maybe (b) this is a shift in the First Federation’s openness, one that hasn’t happened in nearly a century, and one perhaps born of the struggles of the Cardassian and Dominion Wars—which very well may have touched the First Federation as well. If the Founders or the Jem’Hadar (or the Breen, perhaps) broke through the First Federation’s perimeters during the Dominion War, whatever the damage done before the end of the war may have been enough to create at least some voices to opening their borders to those who might offer mutual defence, but it’ll be up to the players to show the First Federation how much aid the ship can provide in the face of the post-war destruction. This could make for a mission of mercy crossed with politics and various First Federation factions: some thinking the UFP is the way forward, others thinking it would only invite more enemies into their territory and risk further death and destruction.

Seed Two: Alien Tests

This episode has something we see over and over in Trek, and that’s a “superior” alien in some way testing the Federation’s best and brightest to see how they react to… something. Mortality, war, violence, you name it, there’s an alien race out there apparently ready to see how Starfleet will react, and then judge all of the Federation’s species accordingly. It’s a staple of Trek and it’s a great way to shine a light on a particular facet of psychology or philosophy or sociology.

The Space Trolly Problem—An outbreak of a virus thought long-dormant at a Federation Colony has the players’ ship warping in with hope of finding a solution. The virus was thought to be eradicated by a previous and systemic vaccination effort. When the ship arrives, the medical team finds not only an ongoing outbreak, but that all previous treatments seem to be completely ineffective. Contract tracing the initial outbreak leads back to an individual who isn’t infected, but rather a carrier of this new iteration of the virus. Isolating this not-quite-Patient-Zero will at least stop things from getting immeasurably worse, but those infected with the new virus are still going to die within days. As the situation worsens the various attempts of the medical division continue to fail, until they attempt to focus on the unique immunity the isolated individual has—but all their avenues attempting to recreate the immunity continue to fail but one: testing shows bone marrow transplant seems to be potentially effective, but the moment cells are cultured outside of the individual, the immunity fails. A single humanoid only has so much bone marrow to transplant, but it soon becomes clear that’s the only solution on hand—trade one life for perhaps as many as the entirety of the colonists—in fact, the smallest viable sample works out to be exactly the amount needed to save everyone else—which is beyond statistically unlikely. Of course, the reality is everything that’s happening is a test to see how the crew and colonists react to an age-old moral question: is one life worth ten? A hundred? An entire colony? Whatever the crew decide, the arrival of non-corporeal beings to witness their decision—and take responsibility for setting it all up in the first place—should allow for the crew to enter into a heartfelt dialog about morality indeed, especially if the aliens don’t quite grasp the full impact of what they’ve been doing. What’s “exploring the concepts of morality and mortality” to them, is deadly real to the colonists and crew.

Hello! It’s Tuesday, which means it’s time to get a bit nerdy (I mean, it’s also this blog, so it’s always time to be nerdy, but this is nerdy in a particularly gaming way). I have been having a wonderful run of good luck lately (he says, knocking on wood) at being invited to play awesome games as a player—this is rare for me, I’m usually the narrator/GM—and as such I’m going to plan a few posts about some game systems in future posts on that front, but today I wanted to chat about a system I bumped into thanks to Green Ronin (a favourite here, as I’m sure you’ve noticed).

SAGE. Which is AGE, with an S.

I feel like I need to preface here I’ve yet to be lucky enough to play in an AGE-engine game. AGE—which stands for the Adventure Game Engine system—is a system that lends itself two quick set-up and play (and has various supporting lines, like Modern, and Fantasy, as well adjusted versions for IP settings—Fifth Season or The Expanse anyone?—and also a robust online community with sourcebooks aplenty).

AGE functions on a 3d6 + Attribute modifier (and potentially a Focus) against a Target Number rolling system (straightforward, no massive pool of dice, and the distribution is well known—these are all clever choices) but also has two cool quirky side-effects.

One is a different coloured d6 (which has different names in various lines, but let’s stick with calling it the Stunt die because that’s also an S). When I first read about the Stunt die, I had a bit of a flinch, because I’m playing in a Star Wars game, and the way the Force Die works in that game can sometimes frustrate me (I’ll get into that when we talk Star Wars some day), but it’s handled differently in AGE. It does two things:

One: if you succeed, it’s a measure of how well you succeed, from a drama/narrative point of view. So, if I needed a 10 (not particularly difficult), and I roll a 1, a 3, and a 6, I’ve succeeded—that’s done—but if the 1 was on the Stunt die, maybe it’s not the most spectacular version of success, whereas if the Stunt die was showing the 6? Oh, I aced it.

Two: if you roll any doubles in those three dice, you gain Stunt points equal to whatever is on the Stunt die, which you can use to do extra things from a Stunt menu related to whatever it was you were doing. So, say I rolled a 3, a 3, and a 4 in the above example, and my Stunt die was the 4? I’ve succeeded, and I’ve got four Stunt points to play with. For an example of what you can do with Stunt points, when you’re attacking, you might maneuver some, re-load your weapon, or just settle for more damage. It adds to the dramatic options—and the built-in points also help limit analysis paralysis, though I’d imagine most players find a “groove” for the kinds of things they prefer using their Stunt points for.

There’s more to AGE than that, of course, but it’s the part that leads into what I said I was going to talk about: SAGE, not AGE, so…

Whereas AGE generally comes with a set-up of what the Abilities are; Classes, Backgrounds, Heritages, or What-have-you to give you Focuses and the like; SAGE appears designed in a more narrative sense in that right out of the gate was a discussion of how you can choose as a group what to use for your SAGE game, and while that might be overwhelming for people used to structure, my first thought was how much I loved the long-gone Everway system of assigning things to the four classical elements, and how I could toss in Spirit alongside Air, Earth, Fire, and Water and would this work for telling a Triad TTRPG session, given how mentally I themed everything that way when I was writing/creating the world?

And the answer to “Could I do this?” was pretty quickly—and clearly—sure.

Once you’ve picked your Attributes (and, to be clear, you can totally go with the tried and true, you don’t have to reinvent any wheels), then you assign ratings: one is a 4 (very good), two get a 2 (good), one gets a -2 (this is your weaker area), and the rest are 0. (So, if I stick with my Triad thoughts here, I’d give Curtis, my wizard character from the books, a 4 in Air (his specialty), a 2 in Water and Spirit (he’s not bad at those), a -2 in Earth (he mentions that’s his opposed element a few times) and a 0 in Fire (which suits a particular line of dialog or two and a few plot points from multiple occasions).

Next you create Bonds—these are statements of belief, eccentricity, relationships, etc., that fit into the game world, and you also assign a rank to them between 1 (it’s a minor thing) to 5 (this is character defining), though at the start you choose to have either two Rank 3 Bonds, three Rank 2 Bonds, or a Rank 1, Rank 2, and a Rank 3 Bond.

Again, since I was practicing with Curtis, I went with: Self-Taught Orphan (Rank 1; Eccentricity); I Refuse to Join the Families (Rank 2; Belief); More than a Coven with Luc and Anders (Rank 3; Organization). Bonds basically offer you extra Stunt points or Fortune points (Fortune is a pool you can use to affect dice rolls and the like) and I’m getting a bit into the weeds here, but the short version is that by the time I was done reading through the character generation notes for SAGE, I was nodding along and thinking this feels super flexible.

Then I got to the example worlds and learned just how flexible.

Okay, the four settings included in the third issue of Engine: The AGE Roleplaying Game Magazine made the purchase worthwhile all on their own, even ignoring all the SAGE crunch (but, y’know, don’t ignore the SAGE crunch). Honestly, I felt like I was taking a master class in game setting design, and had that wonderfully familiar itch of “I want to play this… Oh, and this… Ooh! And that!” that everyone who is an adult who can’t possibly play all the games they want to play will find familiar, but there was an added little voice this time on my shoulder noting: And it’d be great for a one-shot to try it out! Because AGE—and, even more so, SAGE—doesn’t ask you for massive crunch-learning to get up and running.

But let’s talk about the four settings.

Guardians of the Key (by Monte Lin): This is a space-setting, Earth is owned (and occupied) by the 1%, the rest of us humans are scattered among the solar system in various habitats, but oh, hey, you just found an alien relics, teleported to an alien world, found out there’s a whole council of Milky Way alien folk and those relics you just found? They’re called keys, and they were long gone but their return marks you as a protector/warrior for keeping the peace—which, their return also suggests is now under threat. Welcome to the galaxy, go fight to stop it from being destroyed!

The Half Moon Department (by Katherine Schuttler): There are humans, there are spirits and living things other-than-human, and there are the dead who aren’t, y’know, good at remaining dead. Everyone is supposed to deal with their own problems, but since when has humanity (or other-than-humanity) ever been good at following rules or fitting into categories? Sometimes, you need someone who can deal with the things that fall outside the rules—and jurisdictions—of the clear-cut, defined, roles. Welcome to the Half Moon Department. Contemporary urban fantasy/horror, you play an agent who doesn’t fit the three neat boxes who is out there to deal with situations that also don’t fit in those neat three boxes. Also, those things are going to get messy.

Zarat Adventures (by Colm Lundberg): This one is desert fantasy, all sand and heat and flame and cleverly designed to be either (a) its own setting, with more than enough culture, clash, and factions to keep a game running among the three sketched out locations of main note, or (b) to be a starting point of a larger world or folded into one you’ve already got planned as a desert biome, complete with all of the above to make it feel like a living, breathing setting already existing before your heroes got there. It’s also magical—free sorcerers—as well as a powerful individual who seems to have settled the volcanic eruptions (but has, in fact, delayed them and made them build to something apocalyptic—which the heroes should probably do something about before it’s too late). The whole setting feels cinematic.

Transmigration (by Sian Ingham): Okay, I need to just say it outright: this setting fucking rocks. Think apocalypse (biological, a spore) only all the people who got shoved aside? Us queerfolk, the neurodivergent, people who just never quite fit in? The biological apocalypse is fine with us. It’ll change us, but y’know, that’s cool. There’s a breakdown of the breakdown: the stages of the fall of civilization that felt chillingly on the nose and then there’s the game-play of being, well, a being that’s now also spore. So, while the vast chunk of humanity affected by the spore basically devolve into mindless awful, some don’t, and you play as these transmigrated folk and look, the subtext here is text and I am here for it.

Have you played with the AGE system (any AGE system game)? I’d love to hear about your experiences, and if you do pick up this issue of the magazine and are considering running any of these games remotely, ohmigosh please let me know.