Submitted by Brent Knorr
I created this adventure for a few reasons. One of my players really wanted an adventure that involved the Borg, I had purchased the Borg miniature set, and I wanted to come up with an explanation for how Natalie ends up commanding a Romulan Warbird in the final adventure in the Living Campaign, “The Displaced”.
As I mentioned in the Facebook group, at the end of “Doomed to Repeat the Past” when she shows up at the end, they get a visual-only showing a view from her ship that shows a Romulan Warbird adrift but still powered. One of my Players did a deeper study of a recording of the communication and spotted a Borg Cube in the background as well. For various reasons, they kept that information to themselves.
In the “Convoy SE-119” adventure, I added a little sidebar where one of the ships in the convoy gets authorization to leave the Convoy for a day and then return. Details on that are in the following background notes for the Borg adventure. There was also a short bit I put in at the end where they detect a Borg Sphere in a nearby system as they are returning to Narendra Station. https://www.ob1knorrb.com/sta-mission-report-06-convoy-se-119/
Here are the notes for the Borg Adventure. These were made for me and not for publishing so they are rather rough and often in point form. You can also refer to my blog entries for how it played out.
Here are my notes for the Borg Adventure, grammar and spelling errors included 🙂
Background
Borg Cube pursues Romulan Warbird through system.
Warbird sends out a distress call.
Natalie receives a copy of the distress call from a device on Warbird which had been planted on a previous mission. This is the subspace communication she receives in the “Doomed to Repeat the Past” adventure.
A beam from one of the moons orbiting the planet hits the Warbird, destroying all life on board.
Warbird drops out of warp and begins to drift
Borg Cube pauses pursuit of Romulan to do initial scan of planet and moon which beam originated from. Starts to send a signal to remote Scout Sphere to cease current mission and to come investigate this system. However, beam from three of the four moons hits the Borg Cube destroying all the Borg on board, so the sphere only receives the first half of the message telling them to cease the current mission. Sphere goes dormant but the communication link is still active, which will eventually give the PCs a means of finding the system the Borg Cube is in.
Natalie arrives at the system to find the dead Borg Cube and the drifting Romulan ship. She opens communications to the PCs (end of “Doomed to Repeat the Past”, but the heavy interference in the area cuts it off.
The Warbird has drifted to the edge of the system by this point and Natalie manages to beam on board, then dock her ship and move the Warbird several systems away then get the cloaking device working. This system is near the route that convoy SE-119 will be following
She gets in contact with Section 31 and arranges to have a salvage crew rendezvous with her. They will be in a shielded cargo pod with one of the tugs in the convoy. The Captain/Strategic Operations Officer on the Kimura will receive a message from Starfleet Intelligence partway through the trip ordering them to allow the Tug to break away from the convoy and rejoin it on the return trip.
Adventure
The PCs arrive in the system with the Borg sphere.
The sphere is in orbit around an unpopulated Class M planet in the system, which the Borg have investigated but found to not be of interest.
PC’s must beam aboard the Borg Sphere and make their way to a communications station. Then they must break into the computer system to retrieve the message. They can also try and figure out the coordinates that the message came from. There is a chance that can figure out how to fake a recall message to have the Sphere return to the Cube, which may come in handy later.
They may also be able to pull out a recording of the Borg Cubes pursuit of the Romulan Warbird and get some clues as to what happened.
The Borg are mostly in sleep mode or just performing regular maintenance activities. Any complications rolled, or hostile activities will cause them to attack.
Once they figure out the coordinates, or at least the general direction of the communication, they could cross-reference this with the path of the communication they received from Natalie earlier and triangulate the two to get the location of the system the Cube is in.
If they approach the system carefully, and make a successful sensors roll, they can pick up the Romulan Warbirds and the Cube without being detected. The Cube is orbiting a Class M planet. There are four identical moons also orbiting the planet. The Cube is inside the orbit of the moons. It will take a difficulty 5 sensor roll to determine that there are no Borg lifesigns on the cube.
The planet itself does show signs of life, including some intelligent life, but no evidence of advanced technology can be detected. An extremely good sensor roll, or a later sensor roll if they are closer, near the moon, could reveal signs of older technology, indicating that the beings living here may have further advanced in the past than they are now.
The Romulan Warbirds are staying outside of the moon’s orbit. The Romulans seem to be evacuating one of the Warbirds, and doing work on it. They are rigging it to be able to be operated remotely so it can safely approach the Cube and try and use a tractor beam to pull the Cube out of the range of the beams from the moons.
The Players could possibly get to the moon that is furthest away from the Cube and the Romulans to investigate the facility that is on the surface. It is very old technology, similar to ancient machinery that they found on Orgun III (Decision Point). The facility is heavily shielded, but careful monitoring can detect occasional fluctuations that would allow the Players to enter the facility. The beam weapon draws power from deep within the moon, and the moon itself seems to have been constructed around the machinery.
The Players should not try and make any changes to the machinery, but can do some investigation to determine some details on what the beam does. It is part of a defensive network that was set up to protect the inhabitants of the planet in the past. At some point the programing malfunctioned somewhat, effectively trapping the inhabitants on the planet in addition to protecting them from hostile visitors. It would be extremely difficult to repair this, and at this point it would not serve any purpose as the planets inhabitants no longer have space flight capability.
However, they may discover that there is a more destructive setting for the beams that may be capable of destroying the Borg Cube if it can be determined to still be a threat. This could possibly happen if the Sphere was to return and engage in combat with the Romulans.
The players may be able to send a recall message to the Sphere. Another thing they might be able to attempt is to override the remote control of the Warbird and have it fire upon the Cube, or perhaps ram it. This would be almost impossible to do without being detected though. —
Brent Knorr