Taking Trek to the Table

 

William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk in "The Devil in the Dark"

 

A friend and I have been on not-quite-parallel journeys of Star Trek self-education during the pandemic. They're currently watching, and lobbying me to try, Discovery (of the post-Voyager series, I've only watched Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds), while I've been dragging myself through the final season of the original series and half-heartedly encouraging them to give TOS a try too. Sure, lots of it's awful, but there are classics in there too! I offered to draw up a list of some of my favorite episodes and some of the ones most referenced in subsequent series.

Looking at all the episodes at once, two things are obvious. First, way too many involve godlike aliens contriving wacky scenarios that the crew (or certain members of the crew) have to deal with. The 90s series had the good sense to mostly confine such antics to a single character (Q), which created some opportunities for character development and for the writers to play with expectations. In TOS, it's just one thing after another, always context-free, with little variation: the most obvious proto-Q is Trelane from “The Squire of Gothos,” but we've also got Apollo, the Metrons, the Organians, the Melkots, and a half-dozen more.

The second thing that jumped out at me, though, is that there a lot of TOS episodes that can be dropped into a TTRPG (say, Stars Without Number, which I happen to be running for the above friend and others) with very little modification. The 90s series rely much more heavily on character and plot, and although those episodes offer plenty of inspiration, they tend to rely heavily on the personalities of specific characters. In fact, the overdone equivalent, on TNG and Voyager, to a godlike being's wacky TOS antics, is “a familiar character is behaving in an unfamiliar way or has been replaced by an unfamiliar character.”

There are some great character-driven episodes in TOS, too, of course, including the archetypes of those “familiar characters act weird” plots ("Mirror Mirror,” “The Enemy Within,” “The Naked Time”) and some heavily plot-driven ones that might serve as inspiration for a game session but would take some work to reverse-engineer (“The City on the Edge of Forever,” “The Enterprise Incident,” “Balance of Terror,” “Amok Time”). But there are a lot of episodes, including some of the very best, that can pretty much go straight to the table if you're playing a SF game and your players have a spaceship.

Here are seven of my favorites, with rough outlines of how I'd play them:

• “Journey to Babel”: The party is hired to transport a bunch of diplomats (or a bunch of scholars, or a bunch of whatever sort of passengers) to a summit (or a conference, a business negotiation, wherever). One of the passengers is a spy, secretly in contact with a ship that's shadowing the party's vessel. The spy's mission is to sow distrust among the passengers—carry out a murder, or least an attempt, and frame another passenger (or maybe a player character!) for it—to disrupt the summit (or conference, or whatever). Is the mystery ship going to attack as a last resort, spirit the spy away when the mission is complete, carry out some kind of false-flag operation? Lots of good possibilities.
• “The Ultimate Computer”: The party is contracted to test a computer system that'll turn their ship into an autonomous weapon (or hired to crew a different ship that's being used as a testbed for such a system—as security, evaluators, or research adjuncts). The system's designer is on hand to supervise (and complicate the situation). The fatally flawed system goes haywire, the designer has an emotional breakdown, and the crew can't communicate with other ships, which theirs starts to attack (or, if we don't want to escalate immediately to lethal danger, maybe the ship plots a collision course, or starts heading for some dangerous or off-limits area). The players have limited time to choose an approach (reason with the machine, try to disable it, make contact with somebody outside and help them disable the ship) and attempt it.
• “Space Seed”: The party finds a derelict adrift in space (or responds to a distress call). There are a bunch of people on board in suspended animation who need to be awakened, or are being awakened without the party being able to safely stop the process (or maybe they're just on board, awake already). One of them (doesn't have to be an ancient superhuman war criminal, but something along those lines certainly spices things up) makes a nonviolent (or minimally violent) but forceful play for control of the party's ship. Maybe they take the ship; maybe they end up holding just part of it. Negotiate, retake the ship by force, try to divide the loyalties of the castaways? Once the players manage to reassert control over their ship, assuming they haven't killed everybody, they need to figure out what to do with the castaways.
• “Where No Man Has Gone Before”: Yeah, this is kind of a godlike being wacky antics episode, but it has two fun twists. First, the godlike being starts as one of the crew (ideally a beloved henchman, sidekick, or other friendly NPC, in TTRPG terms) but is exposed to some MacGuffin that gives them awesome new powers. Second, the new powers keep growing. The party needs to figure out how to resolve the situation before their erstwhile companion becomes so strong that the players won't be able to challenge them. Expose one or more of themselves to the MacGuffin to get similar powers to fight back? Find some way to reverse or disable the effects? Duke it out?
• “The Trouble with Tribbles”: While the party is docked at a space station for repairs (or held in port because of a quarantine, or stuck in place for just about any other reason), a merchant sells one of them (or an NPC crewmember, if necessary) some adorable little alien pets. And they start reproducing uncontrollably. And they start eating (or damaging, or destroying) some valuable commodity or otherwise making trouble on the ship or station. And the party is held responsible! You don't even need a Klingon in disguise or poisoned grain to create drama. Most of the obvious solutions involve wanton violence to helpless, cutesy-wutesy little critters. (Whether that's actually an obstacle depends on the character of the party, I guess.)
• “The Conscience of the King”: Under some other pretext, the party comes to a planet (or station, or asteroid base or whatever) to surreptitiously surveil an actor (or some other entertainer, or a person of pretty much any description) who is suspected (by an acquaintance of the party, or perhaps by the authorities) of being a mass murderer (or other heinous criminal) long thought to have been dead but seemingly alive, at large, and in disguise. Ideally, at least one member of the crew is familiar with the guy, or you've dropped his backstory into the game at some point, but works fine cold. To complicate matters, the few surviving witnesses to the man's past crimes keep dying mysteriously; the party must figure out whether the suspect himself is the one killing them. He's actually contrite, if basically unrepentant, and harmless—it's his daughter (or biggest fan, or secret admirer, or manager) doing the killing.
• “The Devil in the Dark”: Probably my favorite TOS episode of all. The party takes a contract, or responds to a distress call, and ends up at some remote industrial (or scientific, or run-of-the-mill colonial) outpost where a mysterious “monster” is wrecking equipment and dragging people away to their deaths. The monster is actually an intelligent, but entirely non-humanoid, alien, difficult but not impossible to communicate with. If they manage to figure out what's going on without immediately resorting to violence—turns out, oops, the colonists' major economic (or research) activity involves unwittingly killing the alien's offspring—they might have to switch sides (after a fashion) and negotiate with the angry, grieving colonists on the creature's behalf.