Star Trek Adventures: Into the Junkiverse

[Mothra]

ST: Junkiverse, S1E4, “Toad of Honor”

Tasked by Finnegan and the Council to fulfill their promise to Elysian ally The Heart, the gang makes ready for landfall on Tartarus IV. Little is known of this world, none have returned from its surface. It is soon decided to take down a “crashabout” loaded up with The Kid’s (@tacotaskforce) starcycles and organic bladders to use as cushioning on impact. The Heart grows a smaller, one-eyed, frog body which allows the team to carry her around in an adorable bubble backpack with an Infinity Nikki bow:

Thanks to The Kid’s piloting, the crashabout avoids dendra sentry robots as they plummet through atmo and safely into a large lake. The team swims to shore, then follows the sound of music to a troupe of Seven Years War-style soldiers in a merry display with your typical Star Trek Peasant civilians.

This army contains a great variety of humanoid and non-humanoid species, including the insectoid Solanae, who welcome the group, and inform them that all who crash here soon find that electricity does not generate here, and thus, all technology is trapped at this strange era. They reveal that the troupe is here to attract the attention of a wandering dendra tripod, so that it can be felled.

As Payaya (@gary) joins the band with a flugelhorn, Bog (@daphaknee) dances with the friendly Captain Khathed, a three-segmented Pandronian who - unbeknownst to the team - once betrayed The Kid after a heist. There is a lot of friendly assplay on display, and merriment is had until The Kid catches sight, and hurls himself into combat with Khathed, much to the alarm of the party. After wrestling in the mud for a bit, a duel to the death is called to settle the matter.

As preparations are made, Tosk (@Tulpa) shrouds and successfully sneaks around Khathed’s men, wetting the gunpowder of the pistol using mouth slime. Meanwhile, Payaya senses that Khathed holds no remorse for his earlier betrayal, and the team has The Heart gestate a calcium bullet with a knockout chemical for The Kid to fire with. As the duel begins, Khathed turns and dastardly fires before the 10 paces have completed, but, the gun does not fire, and The Kid hits him with the knockout bullet. Falling into three segments, the team stashes his head for later justice.

With the troupe now under the team’s leadership, Joe (@iguferon) prepares a strategy against the tripod-like dendra walker that is their objective. The soldiers distract the walker in a broad formation, taking several losses but giving time for the canons to get into range and fire a two-balled chain that wraps around two of the legs and brings the walker to the ground. Applying a bonding cement to prevent the tripod from getting back up, the team examines the strange hybrid of robot and amoeba. Payaya has The Heart secrete a powerful hallucinogenic toad venom, rubs it on the amoeba. She senses regret from the dendra, but in a distant sense, as if it is one small part of a larger whole. She also senses that the amoeba is an mindless engineered bioweapon of some sort. The team resolves to travel back with the troupe, to an underground settlement.

Notable Details/Moments:

• Tosk shooting blood from Tosk’s eyes to cool down the canon after firing.

• The Kid’s starbikes look like this, but person-sized, with handlebars and a seat:

  

• Tartarus IV is an Earth-type planet, another example of Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planetary Development.

• Tosk inspects a leaf, and sees that it contains a very small “i”-like insignia grown into the veins.

• The dendra, when inspected, contain a very simple design, and a similar symbol found on the rings of Eos.

  

• The amoeba “half” of the tripod seems to impossibly reach through the metal of the dendra without damaging it.

• Lot of assplay in this one it seems.

[daphaknee]

the gunpowder story was so much funnier than tosks spit, which was hilarious I love tosk and tosks ready to pounce position. the preparations were involved since we cant kill people, it’s one of the main directives of the whole game. we had to come up with something that shoots out of a gun non lethally. I originally was thinking of using the organic 3d printer (no not a pussy) to print us out some webbing made sticky with pussy goo (it’s not a pussy!!!) but i started getting lost in the weeds with the actual composition of the web so someone said why not like a sleeping dart or something and bog said ‘oh of course! reverse smelling salts! better than melatonin’ so we made a reverse smelling salts bullet

I also had a big long story of how bog built the crash about and how finnegan helped but someone else said something about it looking like Paris from voyager built it, which I don’t know what that means, I haven’t understood a single reference in this game yet (I just look everything up I figured they’re references star trek fans should know). but now it has flames painted over someone else’s flames on the side that’s the description. my orignal idea was to have it basically be the shittest flexiest metal that like dents when we walked around in the crashabout and I wanted to bang it with a hammer to work and stuff and to tell people not to stand /lean in certain places cuz it would break apart. I’m very much leaning rp wise into my characters talents of jury rigging everything and thinking outside the box but I havent used these skills mechanically once, which doesn’t bother me I like rping. my joke was gonna be that we all had to stand in the direct middle in an incredibly uncomfortable tiny clump for best results. the flames are still funny i just like talking about what i didnt say/do

[daphaknee]

oh also the assplay joke was funny too!! the people we were dancing with were incredibly chaste except for the fancy ass dances they do, which Mothra continually referenced as ‘they’re into just a little ass play’ which made me SCREAM and related to my scream or not, Mothra doubled down on the assplay

bog also got to teach aliens the stankey leg and one stankey legged so hard his three part body came apart

[Mothra]

YES thank you, it’s crazy how much shit happens and how in the weeds we get about the strangest things, it’s very Trek to zero in on how tf this organic bullet of reverse-meth would work, or precisely how fucked up the crashabout would need to be to still be spaceworthy. A friend of mine will occasionally hit me with another tale of how terrible her trailer home was growing up, and mentioned that they had a balance beam down a hall to replace a floor that had fell through, and that’s the kind of stuff that came to mind with this old derelict space craft that had eventually decayed to the point of being unlivable.

I love the notion you could lean on a wall in the crashabout and the metal would deform.

[iguferon]

I enjoyed having to organize a proper use of the king’s artillery

[Mothra]

ST: Junkiverse, S1E5, “Stitchms”

Having felled a tripod in the previous session, the gang returns with the platoon of Neo Prussians to the underground city of Neo Leuthen, where the buglike solanae begin to take samples to a nearby era-appropriate laboratory. The society appears peaceful, with all species and sorts interacting, including such as a bugazoid child using such as a hoop and stick in merriment. Not a cell phone in sight.

Surveying the area, The Kid (@tacotaskforce) notes that there are water wheels and trains, so not all types of power are impossible here. Joe Miracle (@iguferon) chats with one of the Neo Prussian soldiers of the platoon, an andorian woman named Veera, learning she has been here, fighting against the tripods, for 400 years. They bond over mutual derision of the bidooferous pinkskins, and ponder how plausible it is to fall into doing the same basic thing without larger success for four star centuries.

After a bit of discussion, the gang samples the tripod’s rubbery ameobal portion and interacts with a bookish orion in the lab, who allots them some lab space. She provides their research up to this point, as well as some of the more alien solanae reading material. Cedric (@COINTELBRO) and Bog (@daphaknee) put their heads together to parse the documents, and find that the ameoba is a macrovirus that exists partially in subspace, allowing it to do a dimensional “reacharound” upon the dendra, weaving “under” and through it like a thread through cloth. The team devises the idea of a “subspace seam ripper” that could be used to sever the fabric of subspace.

Outside, The Kid follows his curiosity regarding a large water wheel, finding it several times too large for the small task of grinding powder it is used for. The gang follows the axle to find it goes into a wall one way and does not come out the other. Testing the brick wall, they find it can be pushed through, into a subspace realm without light or air (but full of clicking). Leveraging their success toppling the tripod, Joe negotiates with the platoon leader to borrow several era-appropriate diving suits. Bog brings the Heart with them in their helmet, while Cedric collapses themselves uncomfortably to fit into a human-sized suit.

Following the axle to a power station full of batteries, they discover the solanae - natives to subspace - are using the realm to work around the limitations of realspace, such as the power limit or the resistance of the dendra. In a bit of hail-mary negotiation, the team works with The Heart to establish trust with a solanae engineer and learn the following:

• The solanae are the ones who created the macrovirus, with the intent to defeat the dendra and escape Elysia. In fact, the solanae were at war with the iconians in the distant past, and used a similar virus to wipe out the conquering empire. Since at least one iconian (the alien in the maid outfit) is still walking around fixing problems, they clearly did not fully succeed.

• Tartarus IV is in fact, per the leaf found earlier, an Earth-type created world by a race called The Preservers. Their designs are responsible for the energy-suppression - which is meant to prevent “protected” species from destroying themselves again - and for creation of The Heart’s race, which was intended to protect these endangered species.

• Subspace seems to “end” at the edge of Elysia, preventing escape that way. It is as if subspace here is an orb with nothing beyond.

Joe and Bog are able to convince the solanae that they have run their head against the wall on defeating the dendra for too long and only made things worse. They agree to work with Zeal on a better solution.

With the help of The Heart’s gestation printer in the torpedo casing, the Subspace Seam Ripper is fabricated from coral, Neo Leuthen steel, a sinew ripcord and a crystalline ZPM battery. The gang follows The Heart’s nose to where the Creator’s signal originates, uses the Ripper to tear open subspace like the Subtle Knife, and emerges back into realspace. They soon find a Preserver tower - something once encountered by Kirk’s Enterprise:

Bog uses their vague recollection of first-year Starfleet Archaeology mixed with their own engineering intuition to turn off the power-limiting field, returning the use of electricity to Tartarus IV. Joe bids her andorian buddy Veera farewell, and all return to Zeal in The Kid’s kickass starbikes.

Notable Moments/Details:

• Bog popping their head outside of subspace for a hot second to open their diving suit helmet, let out The Heart, and lock it back in.

• Joe revealing in conversation that she was a circus knife-thrower who was forced by a right-wing group into an assassination attempt on the andorian empress, intentionally missing by a hair due to her throwing skills (leading to her exile). She then demonstrates this by throwing a knife at the dead dendra - a variable broad side of a barn - and the handle pings off unsuccessfully, requiring a second knife throw to prove her point.

• Bog stealing a beaker from the lab such as to sippe woter out of should they become parched during the adventure.

• The entire party spending a significant amount of time outside of the subspace hole, pondering whether or not Credric’s green phylosian ass needs to breathe in a vacuum.

• The solanae’s macrovirus seems to be designed around the DNA of a specific Iconian woman, Eris, who Bog recognized as the one being tormented by Finnegan on Eos. Her file says she’s an artisan of fine detail, and the inventor of “skeleton key”, which she once said prevented her from ever getting sick.

• Gagog’anag’s downed bug ship was found in a field of ketracel flowers, evidently where he’s been getting them. As for how he’s gotten back and forth from the surface… truly a mystery.

• The Kid successfully convinced Joe to allow them to keep Captain Kathed’s head on The Vagrant for now, and not report it to the Council.

• The team has suggested to the Neo Leuthens that they could run a train through subspace to Zeal, creating a bit of a Galaxy Train 999 situation. They loved this idea.

[daphaknee]

subspace seam ripper was all me sorry everyone im taking my credit. when mothra was describing subspace i thought he was making ajoke about describing something undescribable like i was supposed to be picturing something bog couldnt comprehend but as i said that mothra drew us a diagram and oh, no, its just subspace. sewed to reality with a interspace needle. i overthought everything again so bog saw that diagram and went ‘oh we just need a seam ripper, or an unsewing machine’

whenever i deliberately UNDERTHINK it turns out to be a good idea so im trying to put that into practice more and it keeps making bog a man of invention

bogs gonna collect stickers from tourist shops to stick on his beaker

[iguferon]

@Mothra

Joe revealing in conversation that she was a circus knife-thrower who was forced by a right-wing group into an assassination attempt on the andorian empress, intentionally missing by a hair due to her throwing skills (leading to her exile). She then demonstrates this by throwing a knife at the dead dendra - a variable broad side of a barn - and the handle pings off unsuccessfully, requiring a second knife throw to prove her point.

still kills me after all that preamble and being almost as strong as conan the barbarian that joe managed to look like a fail knife thrower the only time it’s ever mattered

[Mothra]

This session kinda brought to light a bit of a problem with this experiment I’m doing of just creating situations without known “solutions”, and seeing what the players do with it.

I did not necessarily expect you guys to be curious about the trains and water wheels, which led to finding out where the wheel’s energy goes into, which led to the subspace realm, where you made another really unexpected decision to try to just talk to them, which led to you guys finding a whole fuckload of information, which made the last third of this session a pretty big info dump. That kind of thing stops the game as I rip a fanfic off the typewriter and read it to you, which felt bad.

I sort of feel like you guys didn’t really have a lot of choices once you got into The Realm, but then again, you guys did decide to stay there and try to talk to someone, so choices were definitely made.

I’m not entirely sure the answer yet but I did feel like the adventure screeching to a halt for a while to get a crazy amount of lore wasn’t good, I’m gonna ponder how to avoid that in the future.

[daphaknee]

every time i got stuck i yelled ARGH THIS IS LIKE PLAYING MYST and i think at one point the kid just fucking kicked the wall cuz we could NOT figure out the weird wheel

it rocked

[iguferon]

i was clamoring for lore this entire time tbh are you kidding me that session was amazing

[daphaknee]

it wasnt boring at all it was just a little stressful cuz there were way less people this week and so there was more responsibility for individuals to participate. so you reading fanfic was actually like a nice break

[tacotaskforce]

@Mothra

I’m not entirely sure the answer yet but I did feel like the adventure screeching to a halt for a while to get a crazy amount of lore wasn’t good, I’m gonna ponder how to avoid that in the future.

I feel like this is kind of built into how each session starts with the group getting a quest, and so far each session ending with a major step being taken on that quest. We’re kind of locked into a pacing where around 140 minutes into the session we’ve got to get a door open with the keys we’ve found so far. There are other ways to pace a game, but this isn’t a wrong way to pace one.

One of the reasons talking to characters has worked out for us so far is that very few characters have attempted to actually harm the group, and no one has attempted to lie or deceive the group. This also may be something that is appropriate for the Star Trek setting.

[Father.Torque]

@Mothra

just creating situations without known “solutions”, and seeing what the players do with it.

The only real way to run any ttrpg imo, in general

[Tulpa]

@Mothra

the adventure screeching to a halt for a while to get a crazy amount of lore wasn’t good

I missed this session but in my experience, when I gm a trad game I find that I am often the only one worried that I am dispensing too much lore. The bozos can correct me if I’m remembering wrong but pretty much every time I cut myself off to say that I’m infodumping, someone would tell me that no, they want to hear more.

You also gotta remember that most of the star trek adventures we’ve had so far have revolved around solving some kind of mystery, finding out the details of these mysteries is half the fun

[Mothra]

ST: Junkiverse, S1E6, “The World Within, The World Without”

With passage now open between Tartarus IV and Zeal, the Council hosts The Icarus Conference to pool together knowledge on the nature of Elysia.

Tuff Tony’s Tuffer (@tacotaskforce) works the kitchen to provide for the flood of Tartarians, Prussians, and pirates. Cedric (@COINTELBRO) and Tosk (@Tulpa) strike up a conversation with their solanae acquaintance from Tartarus, Sarr, who inquires if Zeal has a means to “read” the memories within a preserved brain that has been kept in subspace storage. Tosk uses Tosk’s winnings from The Official Star Trek: The Next Generation Slot Machine Experience…

…to barter the bartender for a “Carbaligic Deconverger”, which Tosk and Cedric wisely reverse the polarity on to produce a Carbaligic Converger. With some help from the bookish lab receptionist/biologist Cersei, they HDMI the brain into the Domjot Table’s display screen and - with further help from an eager breen nanoengineer named Ferin - view the memories within.

In the distant past (“roughly 200,000 years ago”), Elysia did not have dendra or the macrovirus. A subspace solanae craft approached a crystalline wall and pierced the barrier by overlaying matter from subspace with realspace. The resulting explosion cracked this wall open, bringing in the macrovirus and the dendra from Outside, overwhelming the craft. Cersei noted that the dendra soon changed to fight back the macrovirus and form a perimeter around the breach. She noted the directive gleaned from dead dendra was changed from “fight infection” to “protect the body”, which evidently included Elysians.

Tosk attempted to listen in on nearby romulans, but fell from the ceiling onto the table. After a gentle chiding from Councilman Xerius, he and Likah agreed to exchange information: there is a craft - presumably the same solanae wall-breaker escape craft from the memory - adrift in a maelstorm of subspace eddies. Perhaps remnants of the ancient Iconian gate network that began the Iconian/Solanae conflict.

Presenting their findings to all Elysians, a plan takes shape: Drawing inspiration from the Earth sport Curling (a massive hit among all present, particularly the andorians), an incursion team (YOU ) will fire a shield generator onto the derelict, engaging a bubble shield, then deploy tetryon scrubbers ahead of a shielded craft to collide with the derelict and, through transfer of kinetic force, propel it out of the subspace maelstrom. It’s just crazy enough to work.

Notable Moments/Details:

• Tosk instantly turning invisible when asked by the Council who would be going on such a harrowing and risky mission.

• Cedric putting a click track onto the brain-reader, so as to encase the mind in the utter dark of subspace, but with the acoustic clicking they find so comforting. This sets the mind at ease, allowing it to be read.

• The incursion team will consist of Sarr (who has knowledge about subspace), Likah (who has knowledge of this craft), and Ferin, who awkwardly invited herself, offering up some unique information unknown to any, such as the exact amount of time on the sentence, and the amount of time Elysia has existed.

• Tosk discreetly asked Finnegan to come up with a solution should all go awry. The Irish Pipehitter seemed to interpret this as meaning, “how can the ship be retrieved even if we all die.”

• According to Cersei, dendra are interested in observing and recording suffering to pay down the sentence, but do not inflict it. They seem to be here to contain Elysians and observe them.

• The team has theorized that maybe Elysia as a realm is surrounded by a living nebula, or similar megaorganism, and the dendra are its immune system.

• Breen without helmets in this setting are wolf-like since that’s how I imagined them as a teen, because:

  “When the Breen helmets were being designed for “Indiscretion”, it was decided that they would give viewers the suggestion of a snout, like that of an Arctic Wolf. (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, p. 277) Terry J. Erdmann recalled about the Breen, “They were never supposed to be important at all, so when the wardrobe department first made Breen costumes, they were kind of simple; they just made a mask and put them on some guys who were going to stand in the background.” (Star Trek: The Magazine Volume 1, Issue 17, p. 93)”

  I have no idea how they would’ve presented a talking wolf-like creature with DS9-era effects, but rest easy, it probably didn’t look great.

[Mothra]

Mmm, think I’m going to pause the game for the time being, since attendance is waning a bit. We can always re-start when things stabilize and a better time becomes available later.

I think I might do a writeup of what this “episode” might have looked like, since I think it’d be a pretty good season finale-type thing where it’s left on a cliffhanger, possibly for a show that didn’t get picked up for season 2 by the hit streaming service Paramount+.

[Mothra]

ST: Junkiverse, S1E7, “Snowglobe”

In the season 1 finale, the Vagrant makes a daring approach on the ancient craft trapped within a subspace maelstrom. Following Tosk’s Curling-based stratagem, the subspace thread-ripper technology is adapted into tetryon scrubbers, which are deployed to smooth out the subspace eddies, allowing The Kid to pilot a shield-drone (using the in-console joystick) onto the marble hull of the craft. Once bubbled, the shielded wreck of a Malon freighter is remotely collided with the bubble at speed, propelling the ancient craft into safer waters.

However, an energy-based entity leaps from the craft, through the freighter, along the scrubbers, and through the hull of the Vagrant. To The Kid’s horror, this is none other than Mor-Tax, the space god from which he and Captain Kathed once stole an unopened treasure chest.

As he begins draining the ship of energy, the breen ally Ferin struggles with him, becoming wounded, but delaying him long enough for Joe and Bog to “sour the milk” of the Vagrant’s warp core. Enraged, he retreats to the derelict, and the Vagrant follows in pursuit. With some photonic scaffolding from Conan’s holographic projectors and the healing properties of the first “4D drug” created by Cedric, Ferin is healed. Grateful, she reveals - to everyone’s shock - that she is no breen, but in fact, the same iconian from Eos!

Put at ease by Bog, Ferin explains to the gang that Elysia is, in fact, a prison for the Iconian Empire’s defeated enemies. At the conclusion of the distant conflict between the Iconians and the Solanae, Ferin was able to argue for the survival of their defeated foes, imprisoning their home system within a snowglobe that rests on the primarch’s desk. She crafted as idyllic a world as possible, with a finite sentence, reasoning it was better than obliteration.

However, when the sentence was rendered by the Iconian leadership, it counted every death of the Iconian Empire as a count of the sentence - which numbered several billion after the lengthy biological warfare of the Solanae - resulting in the remaining 29,820,439 consecutive sentences of 40 years each. Believing this was unendurable, the Solanae within the snowglobe constructed The Pox, a ship to break the glass of the globe and release an engineered macrovirus to finish off their foes. This worked, the Iconian Empire fell at last.

Ferin, who was holding the globe at the time and pleading with the primach, had her hand injured by the sudden break, her blood seeping inside the crack in the globe. As the Solanae’s virus took hold of the Iconian Council and the homeworld, she realized her Skeleton Key nanites (the suffering-relieving “dendra”) would consider Elysians an infection to be fought, and hastily directed them to protect the Elysians like they would her body. The only survivor of the virus, Ferin’s body went into stasis as Skeleton Key fought it over the course of thousands of years, until her recent reawakening.

Wisely, Ferin managed to get Conan to agree to the terms that he couldn’t get mad at her no matter what (see S1E2), so the crew begrudgingly agreed to focus on the task at hand. Using the now-functional transporter system, the Vagrant crew teleports onto the Pox, finding themselves in a gladiator arena battle by the lording primarch Mor-Tax, who seeks their physical bodies as a replacement for his own skeletal, desiccated matter.

The episode ends on an ominous To Be Continued… as the gang take up various gladiator weapons, nets, polearms, and garter-belts for the clash against a being of near pure energy.

[iguferon]

God we definitely need to get back to this game when people are less busy. The transporters finally working after an entire season is SO fucking funny considering how much time Joe spent flipping out about them

[Tulpa]

we surf dracula’d those transporters