The Delta Quadrant Sourcebook has a lot in it but there’s no question that the star of the book is the Borg Collective. They are probably the scariest thing that the Federation ever regularly faced and so they hold a special place in Star Trek canon. One of their scariest aspects is their assimilation and it’s not always limited to people…
This post originally appeared on my site Mephit James Blog.
The Borg sometimes capture other starships and convert them to Borg technology just like assimilated people. Most notably this happened to Voyager in “The Gift” and the Enterprise-E in the movie First Contact. There are rules in the Delta Quadrant Sourcebook to do this in your campaign and they’re very clear and easy to use. Found on page 83 of the book, they involve replacing the starship’s Systems and Departments with standardized (and strong) values, removing anything lacking Borg sensibilities like Diplomatic Suites, and changing the ship’s Traits to Borg ones. It’s easy to do but sometimes as a GM you just want things easy to go, you know?
To that end, I went through and assimilated all of the Romulan, Klingon, Cardassian, and Ferengi ships from the core Star Trek Adventures rulebook and all of the Federation NPC ships provided in the Klingon Empire Core Rulebook. This is not everything you might want to have in a Borg-centered story but one thing I learned from doing all of these is that the process really is fast and easy. These are just to get you started and provide you with an arsenal, but I did try to include some hooks for why the Borg might have an assimilated version of that ship. Let me know what you think in the comments!
This looks pretty good. You going to do any of the ships in the Alpha or Beta Quadrant books?
If there’s a lot of demand! The process is pretty easy to follow at home too.
Given how a handful of Borg built out a simple scoutship in ENT:Regeneration using assimilation of parts from various ships it came across, the process can continue to the point the original ship is barely recognizable. I sometimes wonder that if such a process continues, would you eventually get a new sphere or cube?