Welcome to Generating Threat, which adds new hostile NPCs and ships to the Star Trek Adventures roleplaying game, filling in some gaps until official material can be released.
This time we look at the inhuman Tholians, recently highlighted in Fred Love‘s Star Trek/ Adventures IDW Year Five Tie-In PDF. Tholians have appeared in small handful of episodes, first in the episode Tholian Web for The Original Series and In a Mirror, Darkly for the Mirror Universe arc of Star Trek Enterprise. (With an additional appearance of a Tholian vessel in an earlier episode of that series.)
Tholians are both xenophobic and territorial, and unlike most Star Trek aliens in that they’re not a carbon-based mammalian humanoid. And since they’ve been a threat to humanity since before the founding of the Federation, there’s plenty of opportunity for conflict and border skirmishes. There’s also no canon story for what they’re doing during the Dominion War. They could take advantage of the strife to expand their borders into Federation or Cardassian space. Heck, there’s plenty of room in the timeline for a small Federation-Tholian war in both the Lost Era and even the twenty years between Star Trek: Nemesis and Star Trek: Picard, assuming Tholians even have a concept of traditional warfare and aren’t just being bellicose until some goal is achieved. An advantage of the Tholians being non-humanoid is they don’t need to behave in a way we would consider rational or logical; they are truly alien beings.
Note: The tholian ships use the Weakening damage effect detailed in the Expanded Weapons article.
Ships
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NPCs
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