Help Rearranging the Shackleton Expanse

Star Trek Adventures
1

Hello everyone! First time posting here, but I’ve run several games of STA on and off over the years. Looking for folks’ thoughts on rearranging scenarios in the Shackleton campaign. Details below, and I’ve tried to divide them up to give some structure to all this thinking out loud.

Thank you in advance!

I’m hoping to start 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. As such, I’m brainstorming, trying to settle on a good story to kick the campaign off, and I’ve been pre-reading the Shackleton campaign.

THE TOS EPISODES (Scenarios 1 & 2)
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 introductory scenario to the game as a whole, 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.

I think I feel fine skipping these, or moving them around to elsewhere in the saga? Does anyone have experience moving these scenarios around elsewhere, or using them differently?

THE FIRST TNG EPISODE (Scenario 3)
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 (eg, attending the conference scene and seeing info about other sites in the Expanse they have encountered).

I suppose, though, the overall structure could be inverted to some degree? Like, Narendra has all this information about weird objects all over the Expanse, info gleaned without the PCs help. Then, later on, when the PCs get kicked out of the Candidate Three system and its big blue light shoots into the sky, maybe the structures on Starfleet record start emitting signals and so it’s time to take a tour of the Expanse to check on all those locations. This could be interesting, and gives a framework to the game that follows.

In y’all’s experience, does starting directly with Scenario 3 feel good? Does it feel like a good, exciting opener to a Star Trek series, and have your crews felt excited and motivated?

JUMPING WAAAAAAY AHEAD (Scenario 7)
The scenario that, for some reason, has really grabbed my attention is The Needs of the Few (Scenario 7) and I just honestly really like it as a potential first scenario.

You’ve got a once-in-a-lifetime encounter with an alien life, you introduce a major antagonistic species, the situation escalates significantly, there is a chance to take a risk on new allies, there’s cool flying bits, a cool skydiving set-piece, chances for psychic stuff, high-stakes engineering and science, and you get to watch a new sun be born. Beat for beat, I think The Needs of the Few is an amazing scenario, and it just screams “start your campaign with this” to me.

Two major things stand out to me, though, about just jumping ahead and treating this as a first scenario.

  1. Firstly, the NPC Thacinn knows he is a Tilikaal (more or less), which wouldn’t mean anything to the PCs right out of the gate, and probably defangs the early game of its major mystery. Or do you think an early Thacinn as a recurring NPC could enhance the mystery?

  2. Secondly, the presence of an Assessor during this scenario would be (in the campaign as written) the third or so time the PCs encounter an Assessor. If Scenario 7 is used as a launch point, the Assessor would come out of nowhere and probably make his teleportation rescue feel forced and maybe even disappointing. Or, do you think the Assessor’s presence would just reinforce the predatory themes of the VinShari? Could its psychic powers feel like interesting foreshadowing?

TL;DR
The short version is I am 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.

  • What are peoples’ experiences just diving directly into Scenario 3 without any other preamble?
  • How have people repurposed/rearranged/remixed Scenarios 1 and 2 if not running a TOS campaign?
  • What do people think of using Scenario 7 (“The Needs of the Few”) to kick off a campaign? Has anyone done it? What details (Thacinn, the Assessor, etc) of that scenario would you revise/explain away, and how would you do it?

Sorry for the giant wall of text as I try and talk out my ideas! I would love folks thoughts, insight, experience, opinions, and help! Thank y’all!

2

I have run this time period twice and what I have done is initially created my own opening adventures. In both cases I set up a gold rush scenario between the Federation and The Star Empire, where both sides star exploring and expanding into the Shackleton expanse so my first encounters are diplomatic missions with the Romulans effectively setting out the “rules” that both sides will abide by when encountering each other in non-aligned space. I used it as a chance to introduce them to my roster of reoccurring Romulan sub-commanders and commanders. From their a few rough encounters where both sides help each other out of sticky situations and then I start mixing in the Shackleton missions, though I skip the TOS episodes and mix in the others depending what seems to catch my player intrest the most.

1 Like