December was for me, like many people, super-crazy. This year hasn’t been much better and as a result I missed two Tuesday updates that have been irking me. In December I had a fourth Gorn NPC to put up while last week I had a Breen NPC that didn’t go up on time. Rather than having these things hanging over my head, I’m putting them up together as a special treat that I’m going to call Thursday at Quark’s.
The Breen and the Gorn are both species that are definitively enemies of the Federation but which also have had little interaction with them. In coming up with a series of NPCs for these species, I wanted to challenge that a little bit and I came up with the idea of a quasi-sympathetic ear for both enemies. Just making a Gorn that doesn’t want to fight or a Breen that’s super-chatty doesn’t totally do it since that makes them something other.
Instead, I’ve tried to redirect those impulses to make variations on the same sort of themes we’ve seen before. Arenbet is a Gorn diplomat who believes in domination and strength. He also is against fighting for fighting’s sake and critical of the stances taken by the Gorn Hegemony recently. Zir Sedl is a Breen thot who serves as a liaison to Starfleet when a statement is required. He is as quiet and mistrustful as the next Breen but also considers the Federation to possibly be the best of the bad options that the Breen Confederacy has in terms of allies.
There are plenty of ways you can use these characters, together and separately, but here are some plot hooks to get you started.
- On a mission to meet with Thot Sedl to discuss possible cooperation, the crew witnesses the Breen’s ship explode in a fireball… then blink back to its normal appearance! Can they figure out what temporal loop the ship is caught in, how to reverse it, and who destroyed Zir Sedl’s ship in the first place?
- Several Federation colonies in the Beta Quadrant are attacked by ship’s that appear to be Gorn, but Ambassador Arenbet informs his contacts within Starfleet Command to say that it wasn’t them. Can the crew find the real culprits and avoid war?
- When the Cardassians and Breen join the Dominion, the Federation looks close to losing the war. However, Captain Vesena believes that talks can be opened using Ambassador Arenbet as a go-between. With his help, Starfleet could potentially contact Thot Sedl and Toja Pell as sympathetic counterparts that could pull their people from the Dominion’s grasp.
Click on the images below for the PDFs.
