Back to the discussion. The Wrath of Khan idea looked to be too much work considering I only had a couple of days to prepare and I had work and another adventure to prepare for too. How the hell did Eric run two campaigns without going crazy I'll probably never know. I needed something pregenerated. Looking around some more I found the old Superworld RPG and three modules, all put out by Chaosium in the mid 80's. Flip flip flip... here's an interesting adventure. It seems to take place underground, as the heroes discover an underground civilization, mutants descended from humans genetically altered by aliens which crashed thousands of years ago. Random creature encounters in the jungle, a city to explore, and ancient space ship, and a supervillain group to stop.

Sounds very interesting. But it's 30 pages! And I'd still have to adapt the super powers to GURPS. I have no idea about the Superworld statistics, or the Villains and Vigilantes statistics, but there are Champions statistics and I'm still familiar with that game system. Still, it's a bit too much to read and prepare in time for Saturday.

Meanwhile, I decide to prep the Star Trek game. I wanted a holodeck adventure that dovetailed into a real adventure, wherein the events in each part affects the other. Ok, that was going to take too long. Why did I not take a week off like I should have? I just don't have the time to put together adventures that I feel will interest players. Speaking of which, I expected six people including one possible new player, so that also affects my planning.

I decided to run just a holodeck adventure. Three to choose from: a mystery, a swashbuckling adventure, and a fantasy adventure. We've just completed a fantasy campaign so I'll save that one for later. The mystery was made for three or four people, not five or six so that was out. That left the cutlasses and pistols adventure which is made for five or six characters.

An adventure in the Spanish Main. Read read read. Make notes. I like to have all the names and the basic plot outline, as well as relevant combat stats in my notes. First, it makes me think and remember these details as I write them down but more importantly it's easier to run an adventure with notes rather than looking up details in a book. Keeps the adventure flowing if I don't have to stop to look up the target number needed to figure the treasure map or whatever. This is also a good time to write down the important clues and plot points that I have to give to the players, so I don't forget some minor thing that would have really helped them to know.

Ok, so now I have the Star Trek adventure mostly prepped. Other than the sea combat rules and a couple of speeches, everything is summarized in my notes. Back to the GURPS adventure. I'm still intrigued with the Superworld adventure, which is number two of a three adventure arc. The first adventure looked really short though, involving the theft of a nuclear reactor. But that gives me an idea.

This actually combines with an idea I had as I was falling asleep the night before. I was imagining the characters confronting a high-level agent of the opposition and what the conversation would be like. The bad guys aren't all bad, they have a goal and they want the characters to understand that there are two sides to the conflict. It was basically a "this is how we view time and why we're fighting Vacations Unlimited or whatever their name is".

So tying up the different ideas, I have the characters appear on Regula-1 just before Khan. But that's not the main plot, the main plot is that enemy agents (which I've borrowed from Superworld) are also there to accomplish something. I'm thinking they'll want the Genesis device themselves but I'm not sure. They might just want to stop the characters. Naturally, the two agents are "super-powered" to keep the Superworld flavor -- the super powers being techie devices instead of natural powers.

What are the characters supposed to do? What are the enemy agents supposed to do? How does this tie in with Khan and the Genesis project? Don't know yet, but I'll be writing it up in a little bit. Meanwhile I have a list of the Regula-1 levels, since that's about all I'll need, dispensing with the detailed deck plans. A list of Wrath of Khan characters from the novelization. And the bad guys done up in GURPS terms. Still a bunch of work to do and meanwhile I'm not getting any work done. Some days it doesn't pay to be nice...