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.

The Conscience of the King (TOS Season 1, Episode 12… or 13?)

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.

He might be crap at holding onto his phaser, but hello Ron Vito as “Harrison.”

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.

Scenario Seeds

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.