USS Crowfield

An idea occurred to me the other day. I can’t even say it was a new idea. It was the marriage of several old ideas:

• In my second post about Crowfield I talked about the challenges involved in “a campaign … about exploration into unknown lands.”
• About 5 months ago I posted an idea about a campaign where “…the player characters will have no technology. No stone tools.”
• Almost 2 years ago I talked about how a D&D world’s alignment might might have originated with members of the Federation and Klingon empire visiting a fantasy world.
• Just a couple of months ago I said “I think it would be great to set a campaign [with] … A group of star travelers arriving at a strange new world, with no way to leave and nothing but what they brought with them trying to establish a new home.”

Putting it Together

Here’s my idea. The player characters were crew members aboard the U.S.S. Crowfield, a (Star Trek) Federation vessel. The Crowfield is a Columbus class¹ that has been refitted as a hospital ship. It was launched maybe 10 years before Captain Kirk’s Enterprise.

A Backstory to Address Issues

Back in my second Crowfield post, I spoke about my concerns for a background. Let's look at those concerns and how they work here.

If the lands are unknown, how did the characters happen to be there?

The Crowfield was on its way back to Deep Space Station K-7 to resupply after treating an outbreak of Tellarite blood plague on Mashime IV. A random sensor malfunction lead the ship off course and they stumbled upon an uncharted planet. Star Trek is full of unchartered planets.

Taking advantage of the opportunity for an impromptu exploration mission, the Captain led an away party to the surface while the chief engineer recalibrated the navigational sensors. While on the surface, the away team encountered issues with their technology. Everything from tricorders to communicators began to fail. Fortunately, Star Fleet has protocols for such things, and the away team was beamed up after they failed to report in.

The team was safely aboard for a few hours when shipboard systems began failing throughout the vessel. The engineering team was convinced that the failures were related to whatever caused the original sensor malfunction on the journey from Mashime IV.

They were wrong. Not only were they wrong, but they spent too much time chasing a red herring. By the time they learned the truth, it was too late.

The truth was that this uncharted planet was home to a tiny microbe. By some happenstance of destiny this otherwise harmless microbe found highly refined carbon nanofilaments to be particularly tasty. It would devour them and reproduce, creating more of the microbe. Unfortunately for the crew of the USS Crowfield, Federation fabricators and synthesizers used highly refined carbon nanofilaments in everything that they produced. Even more unfortunate, fabricators and synthesizers were used to make all the components of the ship and all the equipment therein.

The Crowfield was being eaten from within. Critical systems were failing. There was no calling for help; coms was down. Even the shuttlecraft were infected. Having no other choice, the captain called for the crew to abandon ship. 

Regular escape pods were useless, so the crew had to rely on survival cocoons. Each person was secured in their own little rescue bubble and ejected into space. Fortunately the cocoons were built to survive atmospheric re-entry, and the crew of 400 was scattered across the planet's surface like seeds. 

Once I get the characters into the strange land, what do I do about replacement characters? Especially if I want to run the campaign as an open table, I need a way to explain why all these people are here but they don't know where they are.

This is easy! The party just finds an "unopened" cocoon with a fresh character inside!

How can players have a meaningful backstory if everything and everyone they knew are unreachable?

This remains a challenge. Of course people can have relationships (good or bad) with other crew members who may or may not be "out there" waiting to show up.

What stops the players from walking into the first village they find and asking the locals for a map?

Technology! In this scenario I turn the clock way back for the planet. Instead of being a medieval fantasy I would place this in a stone age world. No metal, no writing, no maps. The natives are just transitioning from hunter-gathers to domesticating animals and planting crops.

Plus there's the Prime Directive. If the players follow it, they'll have to avoid almost all contact with the natives. Of course, the players might argue that without their technology there's little chance that they can corrupt the native societies. Following that line of thought they would be free to interact. Even in that case, the players don't have any Universal Translators, so speaking will be difficult.

That's It

That's the idea. I spoke about it to some guys at work. Sam said it was an awesome idea. Dustin said that he'll be angry if I let the players "invent" electricity.

What about you? What do you think? Does it sound like a fun setting for a game?

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1. My original thought was a Next Generation era Nebula-class ship. I changed it because I don’t want Andorians and Vulcans running around my fantasy world. Human-only crews were common in Kirk’s time.↩