Faren Sul, Criminal Collaborator

Welcome back to another edition of Tuesdays at Quark’s with your host, Mephit James! This month we’re covering various Bajoran NPCs and I wanted to try something a little out of character for Bajorans as we’ve seen them in the series. Faren Sul is a successful crime boss who has navigated the different forces on Bajoran for decades. Like the other characters played by Alyson Hannigan, though, she gets a lot more interesting the more you develop her in the story.

Basically, the question with Faren Sul is this: what about the Bajorans who weren’t part of the Resistance? The story of Bajor as seen in Star Trek is the same story told with a lot of occupied countries in history, where after liberation comes everyone was “secretly part of the Resistance.” It happens a lot in French media, for instance, where composers, politicians, and artists worked with the German officials during World War II but everyone likes to tell stories about how they were privately undermining German occupation. That’s all well and good but the fact is that most of the country, for pragmatic reasons, went along with their occupiers and a large fraction were actively helping them to look out for their own interests.

Faren Sul is a complication of the Bajoran story that will deepen the Cardassian-Bajoran-Federation dynamics in your campaign. She worked with the Cardassians during the Occupation and has killed and stolen to get ahead in life. On the other hand, she was a starving orphan who took her fate into her own hands. She could be an evil self-hating Bajoran but she also makes an interesting pragmatist as the Provisional Government finds its feet in the post-Occupation galaxy. People like her have a lot to offer liberated Bajor but if folks in the Provisional Government see everything in terms of black and white then she’s a traitor who should be condemned. Push everyone like that back to the Cardassians, though, and you hand them plenty of power to destroy the fledgling government on Bajor. What to do then? Well, that’s for you (and possibly your players) to decide.

There are lots of ways to use this character, but here are a few plot hooks to get you started.

• Records from the time of the Occupation show an important Bajoran artifact going missing. The Player Characters are asked to assist in tracking it down, which leads them to Faren Sul who many say probably smuggled it off-world. When the crew talks to her she has a valuable opportunity: send Starfleet into Cardassian territory and tip off her old contacts in Central Command for a big payout.
• When an incident along the Cardassian border (possibly the handiwork of Li Chami) threatens to shatter the peace in the region, the Provisional Government looks for any backchannels to come to an understanding with the Cardassian Union. Faren Sul is identified as someone who might still have contacts but when her past comes to light the politicians involved are bitterly divided. Can the Federation mediators (i.e. the crew) stave off war?
• When Gilora Darhad is captured in connection to a terrorist plot, she pleads innocence and says she’s being discriminated against for her mixed heritage. She offers up a “real traitor,” Faren Sul, who protests that the past is the past and she’s as much a patriot as the next Bajoran. Both women have histories that offer more questions than answers but what is the truth?

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