Welcome back to another edition of Tuesdays at Quark’s, wrapping up our month of NPCs for the Continuing Mission Living Campaign. We’re ending this run with an NPC from an original CM mission, the Pranir. These sublight wanderers make excellent traders, but you know what goes well with trade? Spying.
The Pranir are a very interesting species because they don’t fit into a neat box. They are technically prewarp but they are certainly not primitive technologically. Starfleet is open to making First Contact with them (and you might have already done so in your campaign or choose to make it a recent event) but their unique situation makes the future uncertain. There are apparently no warp capable species in the region beyond the Cordon Nebulae, at least as far as Starfleet has encountered, so spacefaring species like the Pranir might be the most advanced residents besides the K’si “gods” talked about on some worlds.
There is interstellar trade thanks to the Pranir and Seeks-New-Places is a merchant-spy who gathers information for the Family he serves, Qenar. He can talk business with the best trader, and is technically a trader himself, but most of the time he’s looking for information. Does that mean he talks his way onto a ship and then hacks the computers? Does he openly and willingly offer to trade information for information? Does he plant bugs in his trade goods to collect data and recordings for later analysis? This is all left a little up in the air so you can customize him as you see fit. He could be a villain or an ally, and it certainly helps that his species is somewhat outside the whole K’si-worship thing.
There are lots of ways to take this character but here are a few plot hooks to get you started.
- Following the events of Latinum Ocean, Seeks-New-Places connects with the Ferengi traders to forge a new trade relationship. The greedy Ferengi, though, decide that they’d rather have a captive to leverage more favorable terms with Qenar Family. They are caught unawares, however, when their captive turns out to have specialized skills and manages to get a distress call out to the crew’s ship.
- The crew is beginning to piece together the nature of the K’si, the semi-mythical beings that are worshiped across the region beyond the Cordon Nebulae (as seen in Planet of the Ebon Pearl and Prayers of Suppression). They encounter Seeks-New-Places who freely admits his intelligence-gathering assignment. He proposes a trade, one-to-one details about the K’si for details about the Federation. Can he be trusted?
- Through his intelligence-gathering, Seeks-New-Places has come across a very useful bit of information. Scientists on one of the worlds at the edge of the Sargon Region have discovered a way of cancelling the effects of the Cordon Nebulae on deep-space sensor arrays. This would allow far-reaching scans to be conducted and greatly help the exploration effort. But will Seeks-New-Places offer this information to Starfleet or the K’si? And will Qenar Family support his decision.
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