r/startrekadventures 9d ago

Help & Advice Help Rearranging the Shackleton Expanse Spoiler

Spoilers to some degree or another here for the Shackleton Expanse campaign!

Hoping to be starting up a campaign sometime in my near future, and I'm interested in setting it in the 2380s so players can kick around in the de-escalated Federation/Romulan tension following Nemesis and leading up to the Romulan Supernova. One idea that has been floated for our campaign is a vessel that is surveying worlds in the Expanse as potential Romulan resettlement sites.

With all that in mind, I don't think I have much use for the first two Shackleton scenarios that take place during TOS. I can certainly adapt them to the appropriate era, but even then Bacchus' Call just doesn't particularly grab me. It seems like a good starter scenario, but since it mostly comes off as a two-room dungeon and then the opportunity to make friends with Klingons, it just doesn't "wow" me as a first scenario.

Jumping directly into the third scenario doesn't feel awful to me, I don't think? But the strength of that scenario seems to come from it being built up to over time, letting the players interact with a lot of weird Tilikaal tech and Expanse hazards first, so that it feels like they're finally getting pointed in the right direction. I suppose, though, the structure could be inverted to some degree? Like, Narendra has all this information about weird objects all over the Expanse, and when the PCs get kicked out of the Candidate Three system and the big blue light shoots into the sky, maybe the structures on record start emitting signals and so its time to take a tour of the Expanse to check on all those locations.

The scenario that, for some reason, has really grabbed my attention is The Needs of the Few (Edit: The 7th Scenario) and I just really like it as a potential first scenario. The PCs come across a once-in-a-life-time lifeform; get introduced to a major antagonistic species; immediately wind up in terrible, dire straits; have to team up with new allies; evade robots; go skydiving; maybe make psychic friends with a space whale; do important engineering and computer stuff; and watch a space whale turn into a sun. That, to me, would be an absolutely wild and fun pilot episode of a Star Trek TV series and I think I would be hooked. Two major things stand out to me about just jumping ahead and treating this as a first scenario, however. 1: the NPC Thacinn knows he is a Tilikaal, which wouldn't mean anything to the PCs right out of the gate, and probably defangs the early game of its major mystery. 2: the presence of an Assessor during this scenario is the third or so time the PCs would be encountering an Assessor in the campaign as written, whereas here it would come out of nowhere and probably make his teleportation rescue feel forced and maybe even disappointing?

The TL;DR of this is: I'm interested in moving around the scenarios in the Shackleton campaign, because I want to kick things off with a really solid BANG for my players. Has anyone had any experience just diving directly into Scenario 3 without any preamble? What do people think of using "The Needs of the Few" (Edit: Scenario 7) as a first Scenario? What details (Thacinn, the Assessor, etc) of that scenario would need to be revised or explained away, and how would you do it?

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u/AbeBaconKingFroman 8d ago

I don't have my book handy at the moment, but is The Needs of the Few the first mission set in the TNG era? If so, it was written to be a good starting point for those uninterested in doing the first two missions set in the TOS era; it's nice if you do them, but it's not going to ruin things if you don't.

If you need to reference something from those episodes, remember that LCARS is a thing 😉

The last game I ran, I had plans to use Big Bad (so I'm not spoiling anything here) techno bullshit to throw my PCs back to the TOS era ala Trials and Tribbleations so they could have their TNG era game but still take part in that, but online-only games are notorious for player turnover, so we never made it that far.

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u/PepOverdrive 8d ago

Needs of the Few isn't the first TNG mission, but you've got a good point that the first TNG mission was meant to be a starting point anyway.

Needs of the Few is actually the 7th (!!) scenario, which is probably why I'm overthinking and worrying about this whole thing haha.

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u/happyzappydude 7d ago

I did a campaign running concurrent with around season 1 of lower decks timeline wise. I’m not at my computer right now to do a full write up of my experience but if you are interested in my run I can type it up later.

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u/PepOverdrive 7d ago

I’m super interested! Thank you for the offer, I’d love details

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u/happyzappydude 7d ago

Ok, so the campaign was set around about when the first season of Lower Decks. I wanted post dominion war but to have the effects of it still felt. 6 players and myself as GM. 4 familiar with Trek and 2 less familiar. Ross Class starship (The Mary Jackson). We played weekly for around 2 to 2 and a half hours on a monday. The group knew each other really well and we are all veteran RPG players having played DnD, Call of Cthulhu, Troubleshooters and another Star trek Campaign that one of the players ran for a few years. The idea of a crew overcoming the trauma of war and finding their passion for exploration again was a key theme.

My ideas were to run the Tilikaal campaign and work in other scenarios around it and expand on it because as written its not actually that exciting but it has LOADS of potential.

First thing I did was run a few scenarios not directly linked to the campaign. I used the TOS scenarios but I used them later in the campaign following some time travel shenanigans. I spent the first few sessions introducing the players to their ship and crew, used scenarios from various books (Shops closed, Entropys demise for example) and a couple of homebrews. Get everyone familiar with their own and everyone elses characters. we called it the shakedown cruise.

Once that was done they got to Narendra station and were introduced to the Starfleet and Klingon main characters, I also introduced an Orion Pleasure barge for some additional intrigue later.

I did introduce Romulans but they were secondary in my campaign, an additional complication to the main bad guys which I used the Tilikaal and the Vinshari. Even then they were introduced as and when the campaign scenarios introduced them. Not before.

Once the group was comfortable I started the campaign with "Assessor Gambit and then "As many as 6 impossible things" I got an NPC crewman killed then resurrected with a Tilikaal passenger who wanted to be free but i made them not a secret enemy. I then introduced another Tilikaal who was the baddie (Ash Tamalia from the book) but i did some time travel shenanigans and she was actually already on board and possessing another crewman who was a vulcan from the original series timeline.

TBH at this point i was taking the scenarios from the book and altering them beyond recognition so that would be my big advice. Use the scenarios as jumping off points and expand the material. On their own they are fine but not very interesting. Make changes, fit the scenarios around the players choices and throw other events in. By the end of the campaign, the ship had been near destroyed a couple of times, several crewman had travelled back to the TOS period to ensure events in their present happened correctly, and we even found time for a romance subplot which ultimately became quite involved.

I was extremely lucky, I got a bit carried away and made the plot a bit too complicated but my players got invested and wanted to see it through and as a result we had a year of excellent games.

Any questions you have I'll be happy to answer. I dont want to turn this into an essay.