Welcome to the first article in the Featured Foe series. We will profile established characters that have the potential to be a major opponent in your game.
Valeris is a member of the Khitomer Conspiracy in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. The conspiracy was a cabal of officers that included Starfleet, Klingon, and Romulan officers, who wished to stop the peace talks between the UFP and the Klingon Empire in 2293.
She was the first Vulcan to graduate at the top of her class at Starfleet Academy, and was mentored by Spock. She served as a helmsman aboard the Enterprise-A.
Lieutenant Valeris’s role in the conspiracy was to orchestrate Chancellor Gorkon’s murder, the framing of Kirk and McCoy, and the elimination of the actual assassins aboard the Enterprise-A. When she was ultimately captured, Spock used a mind meld to uncover the other conspirators.
In the beta canon novel Cast No Shadow, it’s revealed that her hatred of Klingons stems from being taken hostage by them when she was age 13. After she was captured, she was sentenced to imprisonment in the Jaros II penal colony. In 2300, due to a faction trying to destabilize the Khitomer Accords, as the sole surviving member of the conspiracy, she was remanded to Starfleet Intelligence in an advisory role. After she assisted the mission, she was given a new identity of T’Leris and became a civilian pilot on Sigma Draconis V.
You may choose to use the material in Cast No Shadow (which would explain how she was discharged from prison) or give her a different path forward from her movie appearance of your own design. As a Vulcan, she could easily be still active in the TNG era. She may have been recruited by Section 31, or carried on her vendetta against Klingons with a new conspiracy. She would be excellent as a hidden antagonist in a storyline that involved the sabotage of Federation and Klingon cooperation.
Featured Foe articles spotlight familiar characters not currently covered by official stats. Each article will feature a Major NPC version of the character (Core Rulebook compliant, or with fan creations here) that you can use in your game.
The problem with Cast No Shadow is we don’t need a basis for her supposed “hatred of Klingons.” In the movie her rationale for what she does is entirely logical and she believes it is right, and there is no reason to believe she is influenced by emotions such as hatred. In fact, it makes her much more interesting if she is motivated by what she believes is the logical course of action than if she is merely a bigot. Remember, she was supposed to be Saavik, which would have made her betrayal of Spock’s ideals much more interesting and dramatic.
One of the major themes of “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” is the price of bigotry, and the rationalizations that some people create to maintain that bigotry. At the end of the movie, we see that some people have left it behind (like Kirk and John Shuck’s Klingon Inquisitor character from Trek IV), and some pay the price for their prejudice (like Admiral Cartwright). Valeris maintains her bigotry regardless of revelation of the illogic behind her prejudice, and she has to pay a price for that. Which she does.