Welcome back to another edition of Tuesdays at Quark’s! We’re exploring time travel this month with the rest of the Continuing Mission crew, and this week I’ve got a classic time traveling villain for you: the Na’khul!
Introduced in Star Trek: Enterprise, the bat-like Na’khul may superficially resemble the Remans but they have a unique position in the series. Like the Devidians, the Na’khul are a time-traveling species who is threatening the Federation by traveling from the future, but the Na’khul are also imminently relatable and have base motivations. They are excellent villains and if you want to include them in your Enterprise-era game they are a great option. If you want them in later periods, though, you might need some planning and that’s where Ver’sal comes in.
Commander Ver’sal is pitched as one of the Na’khul officers who came back with Vosk to change the course of Earth’s history and help the Nazis win World War II. When that didn’t go well (see the ENT episodes “Storm Front, Par I” and “Storm Front, Part II” for more details), Ver’sal retreated into space with other Na’khul and found a remote system to hang out in. Freezing themselves, they woke again in the 24th century (or a bit earlier, see the plot hooks below) and are ready to try and destroy the Federation again when it’s at its most vulnerable.
As a mechanical note, Commander Ver’sal shares some qualities that make him similar to the Tal Shiar officer from the core rulebook. This is partly an effort to not reinvent the wheel but it also offers an option for making your own Na’khul NPCs if you need: reskinning Romulan NPCs with some adjusted abilities. You can even use the plasma weapon in Ver’sal’s write-up as well to better equip Na’khul NPCs. To the GMs out there, Ver’sal works best when he’s using Rally and Direct to send his underlings out so don’t think of this as a cop out. He’s a Mastermind, after all.
There are a few different directions to take this character but here are a few plot hooks to get you started.
- The Player Characters arrive at a Federation starbase to meet with representatives of the Klingon High Council. They are supposed to lay out plans for a military alliance against the Dominion, hopefully winning the Klingons to their side. It’s already a tense situation when the representatives’ shuttle is destroyed by an unknown weapon. Now the crew needs to avoid war with the Klingons and also unravel the machinations of the Na’khul who are secretly behind this assassination.
- When a Na’khul agent is caught on a security feed from Bajor, the crew is sent to work with Deep Space Nine staff to find out why they are there. The Na’khul haven’t been seen in centuries, after all, and it’s alarming to see one at what is currently the most critical site in the quadrant. Things become even stranger, though, when the crew find that the Na’khul sought the Orb of Time for reasons that are not clear but almost certainly worrying.
- In the 23rd century, Ver’sal and his crew have awoken earlier than planned in an attempt to sabotage the peace talks at Khitomer following the Praxis Incident. The Player Characters are merely bystanders when an unknown assassin shoots both the acting Klingon Chancellor and the Federation President. The peace talks dissolve into chaos as the crew uncovers the Khitomer Conspiracy themselves and the secret Na’khul plot supporting it.
Click on the image below for the PDF.
