USS Carter Epsiode 13: Who knows what evil lurks? GM notes

[subplotkudzu]

The much anticipated musical episode. 

USS Carter Ep 13 - Who knows what evil lurks?

Starring

Asha: Captain Demy Sakhet, captain of the USS Carter; Dr. Elissa Mark, chief medical officer.

Stephen: Cmdr J. Roger Funk, first officer and in charge of the tactical station; Lt. T'Prin, Vulcan engineer.

Kristen: Suyira Knox, PhD, Federation anthropologist; Lt. Cmdr Matthias Pelski, science officer.

Jason: Ambassador Darius Rossad, Betazed envoy to the Federation; Ensign Bernie Liefson, astrogator.

Karen: Chief Petty officer Xian Coy Mahn, security chief; Lt. Fujita Daiki, sensor engineer & starship designer

GM Notes: The highly anticipated Musical Episode, this is another one that will require a certain degree of player buy-in; it's designed to be a player-driven mystery (tracking down the people messing with the culture) alongside a pre-set framing device (the PCs cover as nightclub entertainers). Much as I like the idea, I'm now finding it hard to work it through.

Synopsis: The Carter visits a pre-warp, 1920's tech world that Klingons & their Orion agent are disrupting, arming gangs with advanced tech while pushing towards space exploration. The Carter must end this disruption without revealing their presence or violating the prime directive. 

Hook: I think my problem is that I still don't have a clear hook for this: do I have them find what's happening after they beam down? If I don't give them a reason to look into things I don't know that the Carter crew would beam down - the planet is pre-warp, so why make contact at all?

So they have to know before they beam down. Does it come from finding a blasted survey shuttle, where they could look at someone else's research on the problem? Or do I start the game with them in orbit and hand them the completed analysis of the planets radio transmissions indicating the presence of a problem (criminal gangs with high tech gear)? Or do I start with them just hitting orbit and let them puzzle it out on their own? If I do that, we might never get to the plot in our limited game window. Finally, I might settle on an aggressive Captain's Log that details everything they know, everything they suspect and open with the glow of transporters on the planet. Of course, without a solid hook the rest of the session is really had to plot….

Here's what I have in mind: the Carter, discovering that someone is tampering with the planet's natural development, beams an away team down to the planet. What their sensors detect as an empty warehouse in the a city that is at the forefront of the problems actually turns out to be an empty nightclub, where the away team is stumbled upon by the owner and his muscle boys before they can really get their bearings. Fortunately, they are able to convince the owner that they're his new entertainment - Darius will have picked up the need for an act telepathically, and he and Dr. Mark will be able to make a convincing display. This has all been worked out in advance with Jason & Asha as a way to highlight their PCs musical backgrounds. That nightclub will become the away team’s base of operations as they start trying to locate the source of the meddling.

That meddling is coming from their old Orion adversary, Bardek, whom the PCs will first hear about as "the Green Man", a shadowy super-criminal responsible for the power of the local gang lords. These gangsters, outfitted with advanced weaponry, are taking over cities & major businesses, and they threaten to turn the planet into a technologically backed kleptocracy - subverting the government through fear and intimidation and making the jump from the 1920's to the worst aspects of a Cyberpunk setting in a single generation.

In the nature of things, the nightclub where they just got jobs is frequented by some of the gang leaders, who act very much like 20's gangsters, but with none of the Damon Runyon class - the predominant attitude in the country is fear, that the police and the government lack the means to deal with the issue. The players have the means to deal with the issue, but they can't reveal their presence without breaking the prime directive. I'm hoping they realize this calls for a little vigilante action on their part; this is one of the games where I'll be revealing the title to the players in advance to spur their imagination on the right track. They have the power to read minds, to appear & disappear like smoke, stun their opposition, recover from fatal wounds - they are the mysterious pulp heroes this world needs!

I see a couple of courses. They can work their way up the supply chain of to locate Bardek and take out the weapons at their source. Bardek has been keeping the gangsters under this thumb with limited use power cells, so cutting off him would eliminate the supply, letting the situation ground to a halt. They could arrange a big meeting of all the gang heads and take them all out at once, handing them over to the local authorities (similar to Kirk's solution in Piece of the Action, and as genre appropriate they would be able to get the bosses together). They could swipe Bardek's a cache of weapons or create their own for the government and restore the balance of power (the decision Kirk made in A Private Little War). Or some other solution.

I expect any solution to take a little while in game time, so I might do a montage sequence of Funk, Coy Mahn and others doing the sneaking and fighting at several locations over the sound of Dr. Mark's dulcet tones. (Asha settled on Julie London as the voice for Dr. Mark, and one of her songs, No Moon At All, is disturbingly effective for a world with little to see in the night sky except the moon, the rest clouded by the nebula.) The question is where the midpoint break would be in the game session, and how long to spend on each aspect. I have over a week, but I'm still mulling.

I keep vacillating on whether to include the warp-drive plot. I think I'll just leave it hanging - give the PCs instances in the past where this has happened, or let an NPC posit that it would be a logical next step for maximal disruption. But if I include it, that's just one more thing in what already feels convoluted - they have to find a way to remove or discredit warp drive plans, etc. That feels more inherently unfair than stopping the flow of weapons. Better, I think, to have a coda with an NPC youngster on the planet staring up to the stars, having gotten the idea that there might be life outside of their small, nebula clouded system.