Ardon Nortt, SCE Team Leader

Hello, folks, and welcome to October! This month we’re going to be looking at characters inspired by the Operations Division Supplement. You may recall that I had mixed feelings about the supplement as a stand-alone product but I am very excited by the book as a part of the Star Trek Adventures collection and I’m certainly interested in the division itself. To that end, here is our first character from the gold-shouldered departments.

Ardon Nortt is a Bolian which isn’t a species I’m used to seeing in the command seat. While Nortt isn’t the captain of a starship, I see him as a role-model for command officers across the board. In fact, one of his best uses is as an example of “another way” to prompt some introspection in your players. Hard-nosed commanders might dismiss Nortt’s approach to leadership and then see his team in action and realize what he does is actually effective. On the other hand, those who feel stuck in the command role might see that they can be empathetic too and make a good team.

There are lots of directions to take this character but here are a few plot hooks to get you started.

• Called into a dangerous region of space, the player characters pick up Lt Commander Ardon Nortt and his team to help them with the distress call they picked up. En route, Nortt starts rubbing the ship’s engineering staff the wrong way when he acts overly-friendly and its up to the bridge crew to act as go-betweens.
• Nortt’s team is called in to help with a colony project on Capella IV. The project is well underway when the players’ ship is called in to mediate a dispute: apparently Nortt and his engineers were joking and enjoying themselves and offended some local customs. Now they’re in prison and the fate of these Starfleet officers lies in the PCs’ negotiating tactics.
• Starfleet organizes a training exercise for the Player Characters, an automated course on an uninhabited planet. Lt Cmdr Nortt and his team are in charge of constructing and programming the course and modifying it after each day’s performance. From the beginning the course is extremely difficult and the crew will fail spectacularly the first few times, an experience made even worse by the dinner-time jokes and good-natured ribbing by Nortt.

Click on the image below for the PDF.