You may be playing through the Star Trek Adventures Living Campaign by Modiphius. I’m running my players through Season One of 2371, and I tried an idea: what if we put a few of their Supporting Characters through their own Side Trek adventure in the 2371 era, using some of the existing modules? No Main Characters, just a few stranded Lower Decks characters?
Spoilers abound below, so stop reading if you’re not a GM!
My campaign is set in 2371. I adapted two adventures, one from 2269 and the other from 2371, to create the Side Trek. They are “We Come Forth to Contemplate the Stars” and “Tug of War”. They work in any time period as a connected pair, and you’ll need to tweak a few things, as follows.
To start the Side Trek, start the scenario in “We Come Forth to Contemplate the Stars”, setting the scene of an exploration. However, tell your players to pick or create Supporting Characters to staff the away team for the Lower Decks Side Trek; no Main Characters. Established Supporting Characters will have an easier time. Tell them that no Crew Support points will be available, and that they may be stuck with these characters for a while.
The adventure proceeds as planned, but as soon as they have been chased down the tunnel and be caught in the blue light, switch perspective back to the ship. The crew aboard the ship sense the planet about to explode, and have very little time to pull away or suffer catastrophic damage from the planetary destruction. The away team is presumed dead…but then switch back to the away team’s perspective as they are transported away. The adventure progresses the same, until the end of mission. Instead of returning to the planet of origin, they must now figure out how to access another gateway on a different planet.
You can then insert another adventure at this point, for a cliffhanger, or simply continue with the second mission. You can reward the Supporting Characters by allowing them an extra activation of an unactivated Talent, Value, or Attribute increase.
Once they travel to the new planet, they arrive on one of the planets for “Tug of War”. Instead of having a starship from which to investigate the pair of planets, they must reconstruct the mystery from the ground, using their ingenuity to survive. You can expand upon the adventure with hostile underwater creatures (see this article for some krakenesque creature stats). I placed the gateway underwater, to make it even more difficult to try and re-activate the gateway. Some challenges include trying to get a derelict boat to work, all the while being attacked by the kraken creatures. They may be forced to jury-rig an S.O.S. subspace signal, trying to attract a passing starship.
It could be any ship that makes sense to your campaign region. If you have a campaign villain, the starship that responds could belong to that villain! The rescue could become a hostage situation. The players should be on edge at this point – when the rescuing starship becomes endangered. This could lead to cooperation, and eventually an escape attempt. In our playthrough, it was a Romulan D’deridex they encountered before. They negotiated a truce, allowing them to leave in a shuttle if they were able to save the starship.
The adventure ends when the characters are rescued by an ally.