It’s Saturday, so you know what that means: Trek. I’ve been re-watching the TOS-era episodes of Star Trek with the goal of mining them for ideas for use in Star Trek Adventures as put out by Modiphius.  

I’ve collated all the previous episode scenario seeds on a tab under Star Trek Adventures here on the blog, so if you want to look through the previous episodes, that’s where you can find them. Today? That brings me to an episode I remember loving as a kid.

Miri

Let’s beam down.

Okay, teaser wise this one is great as it drops an immediate “pardon?” in the form of Enterprise having found an M-class planet, they’re rattling off details about the planet, and Janice Rand notes that’s… all the same measurements of Earth. (Let’s have a moment here to note that Janice Rand has Earth’s measurements memorized, because we love a trivia queen.)

On the viewscreen, the planet rotating below them has the same continent shapes, the same everything, really, and is putting out a distress call, but they don’t see any signs of life. So, they’re going to beam down. Now, we’ll later learn there are children survivors on this empty planet, enough that there are a group of a dozen or so in this one particular city, so why the ship’s sensors couldn’t pick up lifesigns I’ll leave down to a hand-wavey technobabble “the treatment also makes it hard to detect lifesigns” or something.

Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Rand, and two security officers—Fields and Galloway—beam down. Now, okay. I’m sorry. I know I keep doing this, but let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Or, rather, the fucking shoulders in the room. Galloway. Dude. Also, the chin? The lips? I joked with my friend and fellow author Jeffrey Ricker a couple of weeks ago about TOS having hunk game but hello, Galloway. Ahem. Anyway. Moving on.

The place looks like it hasn’t been touched since Paramount filmed whatever show they filmed in the 60s and then used the same set for this planet, and the Away Team spend some time looking around (including ringing a bell on a busted tricycle) which basically summons a creepy screaming monster of a human to attack the group and have none of these people ever played a single session of any sort of TTRPG in their life? You don’t ring the bell when you’re in some abandoned nowhere. It always summons something that wants to eat you. This is gaming 101, folks.

The summoned creature doesn’t try to eat them, just beat them up and is going on about how the tricycle belongs to them, and then they die, and Bones is confused because it’s like their metabolism is set to nuclear levels and they just burned themselves out.

Okay, you’ve seen the episode most likely, and what follows is the crew realizing some things; one, the civilization vanished because they tried to create a life elongation drug/treatment, but it was delivered via a virus and that virus basically made every adult go psychotically angry while getting covered in blue sores and then dying; two, the life elongation project worked—but only in the children—once you hit puberty the fuse on that go-psychotic-and-die thing is lit, but in the meanwhile, you only age about a month per century; three, there are kids in this city who have been kids for, y’know, centuries, and they’re not socialized particularly well given they watched all the adults go mad and kill each other and now here are a group of adults in Starfleet uniforms; and, finally and most importantly: four, the Away Team (minus Spock, who isn’t fully human, only half) are infected, and starting to get really creepy blue patches on their skin.

Well, except for Fields and Galloway. One of the plot holes in this episode (one with massive shoulders) is how Fields and Galloway just… vanish. I think we’re supposed to believe they’re standing guard or something, but if so, they do a shit job of it, as the kids steal the communicators and kidnap Rand—oh, hey, five-for-five on Janice Rand being victimized—but where the hell were the two security officers when all that is happening? Galloway shows up again at the end of the episode once Bones has come up with a cure that he has to try on himself because they don’t have time to get the communicators back and run the numbers via Enterprise, but these guys are the worst security officers ever.

(But I forgive you, Galloway.)

Okay, so the Away Team also find Miri—the title of the episode is a girl’s name—and while as a kid when I watched this episode I thought the whole story was cool (ageless kids! apocalypse! disease! ticking clocks!) as an adult, Kirk’s interactions with Miri (who is approaching/reaching puberty and thus the disease has begun to show up on her, too) are fucking creepy as all hell. They could have gone with dad-like, but instead Miri has an obvious crush on Kirk, and he basically uses that to manipulate her—which works until she sees Kirk comforting Rand, at which point the plot does what it does so often in TOS: woman acts emotionally and irrationally. Miri helps the rest of the kids kidnap Rand (she gets tied to a chair) and then Kirk has to give a big ol’ speech to them about how they’re the ones who’ve gone all grown-up-like (sorry, grup-like) by kidnapping and attacking and hurting people.

The kids see reason, but McCoy has already injected himself with his best-guess of the cure, like I mentioned, and it works out fine and they’re all okay and Galloway’s shoulders return.

They beam up—leaving the kids with a medical team who I guess are just staying behind to help the kids—and Rand points out that Miri was in love with Kirk and he quips about not getting involved with older women, har-har, get it because Miri might be physically just-reaching-puberty, but she’s also centuries old and still gross, dude.

That said, the episode still holds up otherwise, and I enjoyed the re-watch, even if I had a couple of questions. But those questions make for excellent scenario seeds.

So, my first big question that’s never answered by the episode is this: why is there a completely duplicated Earth, one that’s identical in every way, just sitting elsewhere in the galaxy? I mean, they had a lot to worry about with nearly dying and all, but they barely pay lip service to this amazing coincidence in the first few minutes of the episode and listen, this feels like a big deal.

The other scenario seed—and this is just me interpolating, here—is that there must be other kids on other continents if this one town in parallel sixties America managed to gather a dozen or so survivors. We saw how fast the disease hit adults—there absolutely wasn’t time to gather all the surviving children on one continent, not with parallel 1960s technology, and so if there are a dozen survivors in this one city in duplicate America, one has to assume there were very many more elsewhere all over the duplicate globe.

Seed One: Parallel Earths

We Gather The Ashes of Broken Earths—When the player’s vessel encounters a planet that’s a duplicate of Earth emitting an old-style distress call, but apparently devoid of life, they head over to investigate. What they find is a version of Earth that appears to have been emptied during the Augment crisis or World War III—and upon investigation they learn that this planet attempted a biological solution to the rise of the fascist Augument dictators: a virus meant to attack their augmented DNA, and it backfired, mutating to affect all humans, and wiping out the world before they could come up with a cure. The automated distress call was the last-ditch effort of an Augment leader attempting to reach the SS Botany Bay or any other sleeper ship of Augments that might come, remain in orbit, and discover a cure. Historians might note this is the second “identical to Earth only something wiped humanity out” planet, but with the advance of technology comes new information: a quantum resonance scan of this Earth—and in fact, every other planet in this entire solar system, as well as the star itself—is off compared to the rest of the galaxy. This solar system is from another parallel universe. When another planetary system is picked up on sensors matching this one, the ship investigates again and finds yet another Earth—this one where humanity apparently fell victim to a massive asteroidal impact one nation engineered to strike another, with only tiny encampments of human life still present. And then another Earth is located. And another. The position of these Earths denotes a Fibonnaci spiral through space, and—indeed—a distant point aligns with the world where Miri was found. At the centre of the spiral the crew locate a vast station that (a) is abandoned, much like the various Earths, but seems to still be creating a massive quantum effect thanks to an incredible internal power source—holding these various doomed Earths in this galaxy, rather than their original realities. It appears to have once been some sort of research station of an alien group attempting to understand what causes an entire species to self-destruct, but there’s only limited time to understand their motives, as the station’s power source is destabilizing, and there’s no telling what might happen to it—or the various parallel Earths—when that happens. Or, (b) is crewed by a small group of people who register as human but have a variety of quantum resonances, and call themselves “The Memory.” The station allows them to exist outside of time, never aging, where they can ensure these words are never truly forgotten. Their power source is destabilizing, and they fear their work—remembering and maintaining the dead worlds from parallel universes much like their own where they ended up being among the few survivors—might be coming to an end. Is the solution to help them restore their power source, or would it be best if all these worlds return to the parallel timelines where they originated? And either way, what becomes of these humans existing outside of time—especially if one (or more) of them are duplicates of people the crew know of (or perhaps include a duplicate of one of the players themselves, from a parallel Earth lost to a more recent catastrophe such as the Borg)?

Seed Two: The Kids Are All Right

There’s something that’s never made clear in the original episode, and that’s whether or not the cure to the disease will have any effect on the life elongation treatment already affecting the kiddos left behind on the planet. By which I mean, all those children left on the planet (which, again, I believe there had to be way more than we saw in the episode) will, by the 2370s, a century later, be physically… about a month older. I mean, they’ve been helped by Starfleet specialists, but I imagine they’re probably bored of, y’know, being kids. And they’ve had a lot of time to study.

Actually, That’s Doctor Skotty—The onlies were given aid, socialization, and schooling, and over the last century, they’ve grown—only not so much physically. Among them, a boy who was among the first group located on the planet by Kirk’s Away Team, made his way through Federation schooling, and then, despite being a child of about about nine or ten physically, went on to do a degree in history, and archeology, and anthropology and has, over the last century, has become one of the Daystrom Institute’s foremost experts in long-lived species like the Lanthanites and El Aurians. When the crew are called to explore what might be ancient Lanthanite ruins previously unknown to historians, the Federation assigns Skotty as the specialist to come with them. Upon arrival, (a) Skotty notes the Lanthanite ruins are full of warnings, and then drops unconscious—and it appears the site is set up to make telepathic contact with Lanthanites to pass on the warning—but Skotty isn’t Lanthanite. Telepathic crew will have to enter the centuries-old boy’s mind to see what warning is being given—and to hopefully wake him back up again. Or, (b) Skotty believes the site could potentially be the lost home of the Lanthanite people, one they accidentally ruined in their ancient history, but might now be able to reclaim given enough time has passed for the planet to recover from the ecological ruin. Only it soon appears it wasn’t a disaster caused by the Lanthanite people, but someone who attempted to destroy them—and forced them to flee and hide among other humanoids—and the crew accidentally trigger a beacon those enemies left behind. Now the crew need to figure out a way to stop an enemy ancient beings weren’t able to withstand centuries ago—and their expert capable of interpreting all the data is a technically a ten year old boy.

Do any of your games include ancient species (natural or otherwise)? I’ve mentioned before how among my two groups, we’ve got three joined Trill, and how much fun I’ve had using that to drop in bits of history from centuries ago. Or have your games visited any parallel worlds? (I’ve sent one of my groups to the Mirror Universe once.)