Ran another oneshot from J.C. Connors' excellent 1shotadventures.com : the Star Trek adventure Who Tracks the Steps of Glory. If you might want to play that adventure you should probably stop reading after this paragraph to avoid spoilers. The PCs were four senior officers of the crew of the Miranda-class cruiser USS Renown, investigating a space anomoly near the Romulan Neutral Zone. We used GURPS 4E and GURPS Prime Directive for the rules, Foundry with Nose and Nick's Unofficial GURPS System for the virtual tabletop and maps and dice, Jitsi for video and voice, and GCS for character sheets that were imported into Foundry.
Player Characters:
Captain Andrew Seong (Kalzazz), Captain of the USS Renown
Commander Kirshex (djt), Edosian First Officer and Science Officer
Dr. Michael Westinghouse (Demented Avenger), Chief Medical Officer
Lt. Bexley Gracen (Kocrachon), Acting Chief Engineer
Significant NPCs:
Lt. Ethreti Zhress, Andorian Head of Security
Admiral (Retired) Carl Gonzalez, Passenger
Sub-commander S'anra, Romulan commander of secret base
Centurion Tr'mas, Romulan second in command of secret base
Commander Vharien, Romulan commander of hidden comet fleet
The adventure started with Captain Andrew Seong reading a Captain's Log handout that summarized the recent situation, which was a great touch that I highly recommend for any Star Trek RPG. The Renown had discovered a rare boson micro-nebula just on the Federation side of the Neutral Zone, and was going closer to investigate. Safely scanning from outside the nebula revealed a small dormant spaceship inside the nebula, so the crew reconfigured their shields and dared to get closer. The Renown took some damage, but the crew managed to map the nebula and recover a derelict Tholian ship that had been lost in the nebula almost a century before, with its pilot unfortunately dead.
While investigating the nebula, the Renown received an unencrypted distress signal, indicating that a secret Romulan base inside the Neutral Zone was in distress, with a complete life support failure. After a quick discussion the captain decided to crank the Renown up to Warp 8, risking more damage, to get to the Romulan base and render assistance as quickly as possible.
As they neared the base, sensors revealed that the Romulan base had a landing pad and a building at ground level and probably more underneath, though they failed to scan well enough to tell. (Electronics Operation (Sensors) was definitely the most used skill in this adventure.) They tried hailing the Romulans, but got no response. So they beamed down most of the senior bridge crew, leaving Kirshex behind to command the ship.
The building contained a turbolift, and the turbolift contained four hostile Romulans, who opened disruptor fire on the PCs. The captain attempted diplomacy, which failed, and then a phasers vs. disruptors battle ensued, with Doctor Westinghouse taking cover and preparing to help anyone injured. Fortunately for the PCs, they were better at shooting and dodging than the Romulans. Fortunately for the Romulans, the Federation phasers were set to stun. After all four Romulans were stunned they were tied up and then transported to the Renown's brig.
The PCs entered the turbolift and went down to the lower level, where they saw more Romulans, these ones not hostile. They eventually met the Romulan leader, who said that the base's life support system was destroyed, the environment suits were running out of air, and they could really use rescue. The captain ordered the remaining 30-some Romulans to be beamed up and kept in Transporter Bay 2. The PCs stayed behind to investigate the base for a while, and found radioactive europium isotopes in the life support system and a phased-magnesium actuator trap in one room. Much evidence of sabotage. Eventually they headed back up to the ship.
And not a moment too soon, as sensors indicated that the base was about to explode. Kirshex ordered shields rear full and to fly away from the base as quickly as possible in the ship's damaged condition. The explosion caused a bit more damage, but nothing fatal.
At that point, the PCs had about 30 untrusted Romulan guests on board their somewhat damaged starship. They wanted to find a nice neutral world to drop the Romulans on, while getting out of the Neutral Zone as quickly as possible. At that point they detected an encrypted transmission: some Romulan ships were coming to investigate the distress signal.
S'anra, the Romulan leader, asked to have dinner with the senior officers. While they were trying to figure out each other's motives, the captain got an alert that the second-in-command, Tr'mas, who the captain had agreed to move from the transporter bay to a passenger cabin, had apparently stabbed a Federation security officer and escaped. Dr. Westinghouse ran to sickbay and successfully performed life-saving surgery, while Lt. Zhress led a team of redshirts to find and stun Tr'mas. When he awoke, Tr'mas said that he had been attacked by a rabidly anti-Romulan crewman and had merely defended himself, but nobody believed him. He was thrown into the brig near the other four aggressive Romulans.
Realizing that their damaged ship probably could not outrun or outfight the approaching Romulans, the PCs decided to parley. They would put S'anra on the communicator to explain that the Renown and rescued the Romulans from their base, and then they would transfer all the Romulans, including the ones in the brig, to the Romulan ships. This offer was good enough for the Romulan Commander Vharien. Dr. Westinghouse knocked out Tr'mas and the other four aggressive Romulan prisoners, and then all the Romulans were put in a shuttlecraft, with one redshirt pilot. The shuttlecraft was let through the Renown's shields before the approaching Romulan Stargliders were in weapon range, and then the Renown put its shields back up. The Romulan leader was true to his word: he beamed all the Romulans off the shuttlecraft, leaving the shuttle and its pilot unharmed, and then the Romulans departed back to their side of the Neutral Zone. The Renown was able to limp home without a final battle.
Overall, it was a successful mission. The Renown explored the nebula, recovered an old Thorian ship, rescued a few dozen Romulans from whatever happened to their base, and managed to hand them back to their side without a climactic space battle.
What Went Well:
The GM and players had fun. The PCs were interesting. It was a good adventure. Most nerds like Star Trek. Foundry mostly worked. Jitsi mostly worked. We had two GURPS veterans and two GURPS newcomers, but "pick the skill you want to try and click on it in Foundry to roll against it" is pretty easy so we avoided rules problems. Even with a few minutes lost to technical issues, we finished in about three hours, half an hour less than our time limit.
What Didn't Go Well:
We lost a few minutes to audio problems as one player couldn't hear the others in Jitsi. (The fix was to switch browsers to Chrome.) The GM had the idea of having a few standby PCs so that anyone not involved in the current scene could run a redshirt instead, which was a good idea in theory, but in practice swapping tokens around is a bit of a pain, and shared ownership of a token leads to token vision issues and general confusion. I wanted to use this one-shot as a test drive of some high-tech GURPS rules and Foundry before I start a GURPS Traveller campaign, but we ran it very rules-light and the players managed to avoid the final starship battle with diplomacy, so it wasn't much of a test.
What's Next:
I'm going to boldly continue prepping the March Harrier Traveller campaign that I've been thinking about for a year and actually start running it sometime soonish. One-shots are fun, but I think a longer campaign is even better.
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