Section 31 adventure

Hello,

I am starting an STA group, and I am having them be on a section 31 ship. I have some storylines, but I was wondering what peoples thoughts are, if you were to run a Section 31 game, what would you put your players through? Looking for more story ideas.

I always envisioned Section 31 as being much smaller and much more behind-the-scenes and manipulative than a lot of people seem to. I don’t picture them as having ships or installations - it’s a loose, one-on-one or at most small cells conspiracy that utilizes existing resources and takes advantage of situations to get what they want.

If they wanted to blow up a secret Romulan weapons lab in the Neutral Zone, for example, they wouldn’t order a ship of their own in. They’d have an operative research which starship captain has an especially low opinion of the Romulans, and make a subtle alteration to his ship’s patrol route that would take it close to the Romulan lab, and have another operative leak intel to a known Tal Shiar agent that would set the lab on high alert so that the starship would notice it when it got close, and then hopefully the Romulan-hating captain would just do their dirty work for them, never knowing he’d been manipulated to do it.

That said, if the players are all S31, on a S31 ship, and you wanted to put as positive a spin as you can on things, you could have them do the kind of things that Navy submarines did during the cold war.

There were all kinds of secret missions in Soviet territorial waters - tapping undersea cables, inserting small special ops teams onto soviet territory (or picking them up), collecting close-up intel on new soviet ship and submarines, testing Soviet communications by letting themselves be briefly detected to see the capabilities of enemy radar and sonar, etc.

All of those things translate pretty easily to Trek.

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Theres a classic episode with the Roms, that was originally thought of as a submarine warfare theme.

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going back to my first thought about how I see S31 operating, I wrote a story on fanfiction.net years ago about a heroic S31 operative - feel free to steal anything from it if it looks useful to you:

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/758621/1/Star-Trek-Shadow-Wars

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I would look to have my players setting things up to cause problems for the Federations enemies (and some Federation factions as well) in a manner that the Federation cannot claim to do.

So breaking into minor starbase to set up false documentation that implicates someone as being a Federation (or other enemy) asset and allow the enemies internal security to get rid of them.

For more dubious routes you could have them move against a Federation diplomat who is advocating a peaceful negotiation with an enemy that would give up a Federation advantage in return for peace.
Or have them make an attempt to recover the files behind the Pegasus so as to provide an advantage against the Romulans.

Essentially I view Section 31 as a the ‘End justify the Means’ type of organisation. They are willing to betray the ideals of the Federation in order to protect it.
How your group would handle that in the ST universe depends on how morally ambiguous they want to be.

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This thread has been redacted…:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Oh no, we’ve said too much.

You could always adapt FASA’s old Triangle Campaign, which along with atrocious artwork, provided a multi-session adventure, and an excellent setting for espionage operations.

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