Adventure
three is _Duty or Conscience_ from the Romulan boxed set. It's a full
adventure that starts off with the characters investigating a weapons
smuggling ring. Their investigations lead them to a freighter captain
and to a planetary survey team on a border world of the Federation.
They quickly find out that these people have been transporting a
primitive village to their planet, from another planet in Romulan
space. They're doing this because the Romulans are wiping out the race
in order to make room on the planet for their own purposes.
To tie it all together I introduced the Meeps -- blue fuzzy creatures
of approximately 1m diameter with short arms and legs. They're from a
Doctor Who comic book. Anyways, the Meeps inhabit the star system
wherein Deep Space 17 is located. They are still quite primitive but
had already been contaminated when the Federation found them. Since
then they've acquired various skills, though they're still quite simple
creatures. Meeps are named due to their fondness for saying "Meep".
Similarly, the planet of _The Crusoe Effect_ is also inhabited by a
Meep variant, the Meps. Meps are a stone age tribal culture, with the
different tribes at war with each other. Meps are more warlike than
Meeps, though still quite friendly if you are not seen as a threat.
Finally, I replaced the race of _Duty or Conscience_ with the Gleeps.
Gleeps are also stone age, who inhabit a wet and marshy world. They
don't war with each other and are very friendly, which means that
they're totally getting slaughtered by the Romulan sweeper teams.
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The statue of
_Idol Threats_ is also part of the main thread. It is a six- armed
artifact, thousands and thousands of years old, which travels via
miniature wormholes. The statue appears in all three scenarios, each
time doing scans and checking up on the various Meep races. Naturally,
it doesn't know about the transplanted Gleeps, but when checking up on
the Gleep homeworld it will deal with the Romulans -- a nice deux ex
machina that follows logically from the adventure rather than appearing
out of nowhere.
The final design decision was how to split up the characters. I could
do it randomly, sort of let them choose, or assign them. And if I
assigned them I could either put them in "appropriate" adventures or
mis-match them to see how they handle different situations. In the end
I decided to make it easier on myself by assigning them to appropriate
adventures. So Venor got the weapons smuggling case, Clancy was in
charge of Deep Space 17 when the Idol appeared, and Krystal was
conducting a survey when she received the distress call from the downed
shuttle.
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