Quick Inspiration

I came up with an entire Star Trek rpg adventure in about 45 minutes this week, and, to be honest, I’m feeling kinda proud of myself.

Here’s what happened:  I put some serious prep time into an episode that had been developing in the back of my mind since the first session of my current campaign. It’s got exploration of wondrous locales, a neat villain and what I hope will be a satisfying sci-fi twist in the final act.

But then two of the five members of my gaming group suddenly had scheduling conflicts pop up the day we were supposed to play. So I had two choices.  I could go ahead with the episode I’d originally planned, albeit with two fewer PCs than usual. Or I could quickly design a totally new adventure tailored for the three PCs who would still be present, thus allowing me to save the original adventure for when the crew is at full strength.

With about 45 minutes to spare during my lunch break, I decided to try to come up with something totally new. But I didn’t have any idea on how to proceed. Then I remembered how Matt Click, who runs the excellent YouTube channel A Fistful of Dice, drew inspiration from random Magic:  The Gathering cards.  I decided to do something similar but with Memory Alpha, perhaps the single most useful Star Trek resource on the web.

I started with the concept of the plant-based sentient beings that inhabit Arteline IV, as detailed in LUG’s ‘A Fragile Peace’ campaign supplement. The idea of intelligent plants has tickled my fancy for some time, but I hadn’t had a chance to work them into my campaign yet, so I decided that this new episode would involve them somehow. But that was all I had. The rest of the episode was a completely blank slate.

So, to fill in some of the blanks, I started clicking the ‘random page’ button on Memory Alpha until something caught my eye. I landed on the entry titled “Unnamed Ennis,” a background character from the DS9 episode ‘Battle Lines’ who was condemned to fight for eternity on a penal moon. It occurred to me that a penal facility where the inmates serve unending sentences would present an interesting sci-fi concept that could also double as a chance for some social commentary on the prison-industrial complex in the United States. 

I kept clicking on the random page button some more and found an entry on orbital gliders, and suddenly I had my idea for an action-packed climax. The PCs would get stranded in a strange prison and the only means of escape would require them to fly to safety on primitive gliders.  After that, it was just a matter of filling in the details.

I decided that Arteline society prohibited capital punishment. Instead, the Artelines utilize deep-space prison barges that resemble enormous greenhouses built and maintained by a private company that contracts with the planetary government. Corrections officers would inject condemned prisoners with an enzyme that basically robs them of their sentience and reverts them into what we Earthlings consider normal plants. The inmates, essentially, become permanent elements of the greenhouse ecosystem, never to return to Arteline society.

The crew will visit one of the prisons when a radical anti-corporate activist shows up and frees the prisoners, who have been reduced to mindless swamp-thing atrocities due to the correctional enzyme. The only means of getting back to the prison’s control room is by flying a set of gliders through the massive, domed structure. But doing so will make them easy targets for the newly freed convicts.

That’s just a bare outline. I’ve fleshed it out with a couple in-depth encounters and decision points that will hopefully force the PCs to think about the ethical ramifications of their role in the story. Still, not bad considering the story came out of nowhere with little time to prepare.

But, as a sad post-script to my story, a third member of my gaming group canceled because of a snowstorm, just as I was putting the finishing touches on the episode. That meant we wouldn’t have a quorum for the session, so the whole thing got scrapped.

For a moment, I was frustrated because my GM heroics were all for naught. But I quickly shrugged it off. Now, I have a complete episode in the can and waiting for me whenever I need it.

Thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear your methods for preparing a game session on short notice. Please feel free to leave a comment below!