While inspecting a civilian freighter for contraband or on an away mission surveying a planet, you come across something unusual. It is a sentient, amorphous blob of carbosilicate material that looks like a mobile pile of sludge with eyes. While not a Changeling, it can alter its shape in order to fit through small spaces, and it can eat just about anything - though the interior space it can generate to use as a 'stomach' is also used as a storage space for anything it intends to use, like weapons, and can even be used to carry a person inside, if said person needs to avoid detection. And it's also more bloodthirsty and trigger-happy than just about any other race known to exist.
Write a story detailing your encounter with this strange creature.
Your ship is in orbit of an ice world, and you've been ordered to investigate. Two crew members beam down to set up a base for surveys.
Then a trio of enemy starships drops out of warp and forces your ship out of transporter range, leaving two of your crew on the planet with night closing in.
How do they survive? How does the experience affect them? And what hazards lurk in the icy night?
Based on this DS9 episode, one of my personal favorites.
While on a routine relief mission to a new colony, your ship discovers that a supposedly uninhabited class-M planet...is inhabited. The colonists hail your ship and ask you to beam down, and reference a minor personal detail about you that nobody except maybe your bridge crew should know.
When you beam down, you find that the "colonists" are your descendants, stuck here for hundreds of years after your ship fell through a spatiotemporal anomaly and crashed. A spatiotemporal anomaly that is going to close in two days.
How do you deal with this revelation, how does your crew cope, and do you ensure the existence of your descendants, or prevent them?
(this one would be a lot of fun to creatively interpret)
One of my favorite TNG Episodes is "Cause and Effect". It's very Twilight Zone esque.
I'm sure I need not explain this is the one where The Enterprise is trapped in a time loops thanks to some collision with a ship stuck in the loop as well. I think the funnest part of that were what remained the same and the subtle differences each time they had to relive the same sequence over and over and over. I've thought about rewriting it with my crew but haven't done it yet. The daunting thing is you are obligated to write one scene several times before the clilmax. So its a long haul till the end, unlike other stories where you might be able to reduce the duration.
The new LC will be posted today. yesterday we just had to many fires to put out and I wanted to avoid a thread full of what has happened here.
This thread is supposed to be for submitting ideas, so I am going to go back and delete all posts about refreshing the page every 10 minutes or other non-LC-idea posts while I hunt for this months selection from the forum folk.
Thanks for your patience everyone, new LC is incoming! Prepare yourself!
OK so I moved 23 pages of posts to a discussion thread.
Lets keep this thread for ideas only, and discuss the ideas or write short responses in the discussion thread.
33 pages of posts is WAY TO MUCH to try and hunt down any ideas you all have submitted, so lets keep this thread for essentials only if you want your topics to have a chance to make it into the monthly challenge.
It might be the starboard latch that keeps the Captain's Gig snug against the primary hull, a tractor beam that shorts out every time the target is at 4.3 km from the ship, or a sensor pallet that just won't stop sending feedback into the primary deflector array. It could be the torpedo launcher's exhaust drives the internal temperature up 10 degrees on Deck 7, or perhaps the phaser array's coolant keeps leaking into crew quarters, ruining the carpet.
Or maybe the replicators just can't make a good pie.
Something keeps breaking down, over and over and over...
What aspect of your ship has your Chief Engineer cursing the day they put on the gold? What component does your captain not rely on because it keeps breaking down? What makes the Science Division create a backup repair tool made of tricorders, duct tape, and 30 year old Romulan Ale?
Format ideas:
--from the Captain's perspective, a log detailing what keeps going wrong, or a report to Starfleet demanding that this be looked at by the SCE.
--from the Chief Engineer's perspective, a report to the Captain filled with explanations and excuses; a general hail to other ships of the same class asking, "Is your ship doing this too?"; a personal log on how you're overseeing the repairs personally this time.
_________________________________
"Respectfully, Sir...please don't do that again."
Captain, you've certainly done some unorthodox things in your career...but what has your crew crying, "Mercy!"
Maybe you demand Evasive Maneuvers every 45 seconds, and the SIF, Inertial Dampers, and other systems are being replaced on an daily basis, as opposed the the scheduled maintenance cycle of every six months.
Perhaps you separate the saucer so much that the docking latches are worn down.
Could be you're a stickler for discipline, deportment, and decorum, and you order your crew to repaint every corridor weekly, whether it needs it or not.
So...is it a Junior Officer that comes up the chain of command to respectfully request you stop flying your personal shuttle to the redline? Does your First Officer kindly suggest you take it down a notch before your crew gets on the edge of mutiny? Or does somebody have their Admiral Aunt or Uncle call you to ESD to discuss just why is it you're mounting 8 torpedoes on a Federation cruiser with a turn rate of a sick whale.
Format ideas:
--a Junior Officer risks his or her career to confront you directly...maybe after what you did got their best friend killed.
--you overhear crewmen talking while repairing a shuttle they don't know you're inside of.
--one of your senior staff tells you there's a problem.
--An Admiral demands an explanation for something you've done.
--counterpoint - you're called on what you did, but you explain why it is you did what you did...and it becomes a new SOP when the alternatives, in simulation, have proven disastrous.
___________________________________
"Are you trying to tell me something?"
Comms from Starfleet get 'lost'.
Orders are 'misplaced', then found once you can't do anything about it.
Supplies to your ship never arrive, or are incorrect, or consist of obsolete equipment.
You get invited to meetings after the meeting occurred, or when it's in a sector that's so far away you'll never make it.
Your suggestions to the brass get ignored. (Or, your submission to the LC idea thread that's a legitimate idea doesn't make it to the new idea thread. )
Is somebody trying to tell you something? Is an Admiral very displeased at something you did? Or did the person who thought *they'd* be in command of your ship find themselves at HQ with a lot of time on their hands and a big grudge against you?
Format ideas:
--how have you become aware of the cold shoulder treatment?
--your staff asks why the brass is treating you as they are, and asks what's going on?
--what are you going to do to solve the problem?
You've been assigned to joint military operations with a Tamarian starship in the Psi Velorum sector, near Federation, Republic, and RSE space.
While beaming down to a planet to investigate your target--a suspected Tal Shiar internment facility--you and the Tamarian Captain are separated from the strike force, beneath massive amounts of transporter-disrupting minerals, and must escape together.
How do you escape? Is the Tamarian's story reference-based language a fun puzzle for you to keep yourself occupied with in your boredom and anxiety, or do misunderstandings cause a disaster?
While exploring the Delta Quadrant in a shuttle, near the Jenolan sphere, you and one of your crew are kidnapped by a Delta Quadrant species for use as gladiators. Sold at a slave market, bought by a fight promoter, and sent into combat against monstrous beasts, other slave gladiators, and alien criminals, you must fight to survive.
Meanwhile, the rest of your crew is searching for you with your ship. Will they find you? Can you and your crewsentient escape before it's too late?
Everyone's story starts somewhere. Whether in the slave mines of Remus, a comfortable home on a Federation core world, or the warm fires of a House mansion on Qo'noS, every story has a beginning.
Every hero's story has one moment where everything changed. That one, defining instant where his or her purpose in life changed, where he or she gained the raw, willful determination that drives him or her to this day.
What is YOUR origin story? Write a story detailing your Catptain's origins and rise to command.
While on a routine weapons test of your new targeting systems you accidentally open a temporal anomaly and the next version of your vessel (20+ years in the future) comes through, hails you requesting current star date and reason for their/your presence. Turns out that you were also triggering a subspace snare and this battle went down in history: your vessel winning or losing aided by an unknown vessel that was never seen again (until it came out of utopia plenitia 20 years later, but section 31 obscured that little tid bit) Maybe your ship gets pulled forward in time (ending up like the enterprise c)
Responding to a distress call in an unknown system, you find the ship that had sent the distress call destroyed...and a starship with a menacing paint job waiting for you. Before you can react, you are hailed by the other ship and told to surrender...
By yourself.
It looks like your mirror universe self is in the Prime universe for some reason. And they want you.
What does your dark twin want from you, how are they different from you, and how do you fix this mess?
Your ship has crash-landed on an alien planet following an accidental trip to an alternate universe. While searching for supplies to set up a camp while your engineers get to work on repairs, you come across a charming fellow in an impractically long black vampire cape, who introduces himself as Supreme System Lord Ba'al and asks if you would mind terribly helping him conquer the galaxy. He offers a large sum of the local currency, which his hulking, armored bodyguards corroborate.
What do you do? Do you keep working on repairs to return to your universe, or do you Hail Ba'al?
And now another, perhaps less humorous one:
"What do you MEAN, the replicators are broken?"
Every single food replicator on your ship is broken. Every. Single. One.
They refuse to produce normal comestibles, and instead release vile-smelling orange glop that oozes off of plates, eats through bowls, and appears to be toxic to certain species.
And you're on an extended patrol mission in the Gamma Orionis sector.
Kathryn Janeway. Celebrity. Admiral. Public hero and face of Starfleet.
And war criminal.
On a world in the Delta Quadrant, you have discovered indisputable evidence that Janeway allied with the omnicidal menace that is the Borg Collective and engaged in a preemptive strike on Undine home space with weapons of mass destruction, possibly precipitating the current Undine crisis.
What do you do? Do you deliver the information to Command in your report like a good officer, or do you go with your conscience and alert the media? How does Command react? And more importantly, how do you respond to the news that you have been taking orders from a genocidal psychopath?
Kathryn Janeway. Celebrity. Admiral. Public hero and face of Starfleet.
And war criminal.
On a world in the Delta Quadrant, you have discovered indisputable evidence that Janeway allied with the omnicidal menace that is the Borg Collective and engaged in a preemptive strike on Undine home space with weapons of mass destruction, possibly precipitating the current Undine crisis.
What do you do? Do you deliver the information to Command in your report like a good officer, or do you go with your conscience and alert the media? How does Command react? And more importantly, how do you respond to the news that you have been taking orders from a genocidal psychopath?
If I wouldn't be already in rehab, I 'd be now. Our marriage is officially over.
Kathryn Janeway. Celebrity. Admiral. Public hero and face of Starfleet.
And war criminal.
On a world in the Delta Quadrant, you have discovered indisputable evidence that Janeway allied with the omnicidal menace that is the Borg Collective and engaged in a preemptive strike on Undine home space with weapons of mass destruction, possibly precipitating the current Undine crisis.
What do you do? Do you deliver the information to Command in your report like a good officer, or do you go with your conscience and alert the media? How does Command react? And more importantly, how do you respond to the news that you have been taking orders from a genocidal psychopath?
I'm pretty sure it was made common knowledge when they got back.
Especially with a blabbermouth like The Doctor looking for his next best selling holonovel. :rolleyes:
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"
I'm pretty sure it was made common knowledge when they got back.
Especially with a blabbermouth like The Doctor looking for his next best selling holonovel. :rolleyes:
Yeah, well, see, worffan and I, among others, have this theory that the only way Janeway could've possibly avoided a general court-martial for that and the numerous other criminal acts she committed in the Delta Quadrant are because A) Starfleet JAG Corps is completely and utterly incompetent, or there was a massive cover-up to protect Starfleet Command's backsides after they spent the last three years building up Voyager's crew as heroes fighting to stay alive in hostile space without support. Nobody native to the Alpha Quadrant except for the crew were ever confirmed to know about it, so it wouldn't have been too hard to get the whole clusterfrak classified beyond belief.
Anyway, some submissions:
"Broken Threads"
Many of us have complained in the past about Cryptic having the attention span of a goldfish and leaving plots unfinished left and right. The Fek'Ihri are implied to be the result of a foreign plot which is never fulfilled, the Gorn separatists are barely alluded to outside of doff assignments, the True Way get no conclusive resolution (yes, you captured two of their leaders, but they're a terrorist organization), and the fact that there's a continuing fragment of the Romulan Star Empire, reeling from the loss of Empress Sela, is never referred to again after "Hidden Camera".
Of course, this isn't unique to Cryptic; there are plenty of cases in the various series where a plot thread was left to dangle. Pick a plot from the series or game that was left unresolved and do something interesting with it.
"Zhian'tara"
As seen in DS9: "Facets", the Trill have a custom wherein joined Trill cause the personalities of their past hosts to emerge, in order for them to more fully understand their pasts. The Trill Symbiosis Commission reportedly goes to great lengths to ensure the ritual is performed. Write a story where a Trill member of your crew goes through the zhian'tara.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
"During one of your tours of the mysterious Delta Quadrant, you've come into contact with an almost space faring species. They are aware of the universe around them, but they lack the materials to construct vessels of their own. They are friendly, accommodating to your crew and their needs and very hospitable. When it is time for your crew and ship to go, the leaders of the people have asked you for a very strange favor. They wish for you to take a few of their people into Borg space. One of your officers tells you that the species seems to know of the Borg and, in an alarming discovery, actually worship the Collective. They deem the Cooperative as a "false path", so taking them to the Cooperative is out. They WANT to be assimilated by the Collective! You have a choice to make: Allow the species passage to Borg space and fulfill their grand desire or deny them and possibly burn one of the few friendly bridges your faction can make in the Delta Quadrant. What do you do?"
"Holodeck Havoc"
"It's a slow week for your ship. A few surveys here, an uneventful anomaly there. Your bridge crew has decided to take in a few sessions in the Holodeck. Unknown to you, your ship has slipped into a fold in space and is smack dab in the middle of an amalgamation of photonic space and real space. As such, the laws of existence and matter are now reversed. You are the hologram and the holodeck is now reality! The characters are spilling out into the ship and causing havoc! You and your crew must figure out how to get the ship out of the overlap and back into real space. But, seeing as how you're the incorporeal ones now, you must rely on the characters from the programs to help you bring the ship home."
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"
"Before your crew can enter the Delta Quadrant, your faction has insisted upon you taking a new bridge officer, designation "Intelligence". This officer's job is to gather intel on the Delta Quadrant and report to "Command". You have a suspicion that this new officer may be a spy, which is an ethical quandary of epic proportions. How do you deal with a crew member you cannot trust?"
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"
Couple random ideas - I don't think they've been done directly before.
"Between a Rock and a Hard Place"
A sentient species of cave-dwellers is currently having a problem. They live on a harsh environmental world in the Klingon-Federation frontier and are seriously agoraphobic and so never developed space flight or warp travel. Neutrino and subspace emissions indicate advanced technology, but they may not even conceptually be able to deal with 'outer space', so the Federation didn't contact them, the Klingons didn't when they were friends with the Federation and then were too busy fighting the Federation to set up an occupation force.
That said - a hefty extinction-level asteroid is headed their way and will impact in a few months, and with things calming down in the Neutral Zone, your captain on patrol picked up the upcoming problem on an astrometric survey, that the species itself is slowly becoming aware of.
Socially, they're an insular culture, and so were left out of contact for fear that it would destroy them culturally from the Federation perspective. Thanks to previous peace treaties, the Empire hasn't managed to exploit them quite the way they'd like, so they're experience with both powers is a blank slate.
What does your captain do? Try a temporary transplant? Reveal yourself as the terrifying 'Sky God' and swear their loyalty to your House in a fairly bloodless takeover? Reveal yourself as the terrifying 'Sky God' and let the rioting run its course to rebuild the culture into a more 'normative' form to induct them into the superpower of your captain's choice? Infilitrate and try to put together an interception program in a few months? Or just replicate a bag of marshmallows, let nature take its course, report on the sadly empty planet, and see if you can get ten percent on the proceeds for turning the place over to a horde of hungry Horta?
"I will wait forever"
With the Preservers still busy integrating with the Deferi, more and more are being awakened and ranging farther afield all the time as tourists and storytellers par excellence. Your captain or one of your bridge officers/crew encounters one of these travelers, and find to their surprise/amusement/disgust that the Preserver is convinced you are a reincarnation of a lost lover or family member of their own genetic history line. It may not be a major event, but certainly should be worth a round of drinks for the retelling before it's over.
"The Rise and Fall of the Delta Quadrant"
It's been noted before that each Quadrant seems to have its own governing style among the strongest players. With the Alpha Quadrant characterized by the republican Federation, the Beta by the imperial structures of the Romulan (until recently) and the Klingon Empires. The Gamma has the totalitarian theocracy of the Dominion....
and the Delta Quadrant seems defined by utter anarchy, with historically, strong governments going imperialistic and being pulled down by loose coalitions. Combined with the Quadrant's generally longer history of warp travel versus the expansion rate of the Alliance governments, and with the Borg more or less falling into this model at this point, it's starting to be noticed as a trend.
Somehow, your poor captain and his or her crew has been shanghaied into an archeological dig as a result on one of the oldest ex-capital worlds that friendlies in the Delta Quadrant have found in their histories. What's there to discover? Iconian interference? Ancient conspiracies? Or maybe the researchers just got the weight wrong when they replaced the idol, and would really like a beam-out please.
Fate - protects fools, small children, and ships named Enterprise Will Riker
Member Access Denied Armada!
My forum single-issue of rage: Make the Proton Experimental Weapon go for subsystem targetting!
What better way to break in the new guy then by scaring the pants off him? After a new bridge officer is assigned to your ship, the rest of your bridge devotes a little downtime to relate a tale of terror - the sort of thing he should expect to face on a "typical" mission.
Is the story true? Did your officers ad their own embellishments? Did they make it all up?
Could it happen again?
...Oh, baby, you know, I've really got to leave you / Oh, I can hear it callin 'me / I said don't you hear it callin' me the way it used to do?...
- Anne Bredon
What better way to break in the new guy then by scaring the pants off him? After a new bridge officer is assigned to your ship, the rest of your bridge devotes a little downtime to relate a tale of terror - the sort of thing he should expect to face on a "typical" mission.
Is the story true? Did your officers ad their own embellishments? Did they make it all up?
Could it happen again?
Azip to new exchange officer: "Three's imprinted on the crew but not on you, so don't TRIBBLE her off or she'll kill you brutally."
Daysnur to new guy: "Do not under any circumstances express Tal Shiar or Iconian sympathies around the Admiral. Just don't. No, seriously, not even as a joke. She WILL snap, and she WILL beat the living sh*t out of you, and that's if you're LUCKY."
Anyway, here's another idea.
"Berserker Button"
Everybody has one. For a certain psychopath, it's her imprints. For everyone's favorite Gorn, it's his kids. For Picard, it was the Borg. For Odo, it was people who denied others freedom of thought and religion.
What's your personal Berserker Button? This is a hate that goes beyond a pet peeve, more serious than mere annoyance yet still overwhelmingly over-the-top in your hatred of it.
Jean-Luc Picard, an experienced career officer with a first-rate crew and a ship so new she squeaked, ready and eager to take on the universe and preach the Federation's gospel. Benjamin Lafayette Sisko, a grieving widower and single father, put out to pasture in a backwater post expecting one last tour before retirement, with a fiery Bajoran redhead for an XO who took an instant dislike to him.
And then there's you. Write a story or a log entry about your captain's first day in command of their ship. Did Starfleet Command throw them in the deep end right away, or did they get a few days to get to know their crew? What did their new underlings think of them? Did it all go off without a hitch, or were there unforeseen consequences?
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Whatever your opinions on her, you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Thanks to spatiotemporal thingamabobs, you're on her ship, the Voyager, during the First Contact with the Undine species. And you have your ship on standby. And a weapon.
When Janeway casually announces that she's going to ally with the Borg to attempt to exterminate the Undine, what is your reaction? What do you do? Do you kill the insane Captain and potentially destroy the timeline as you know it? Or do you allow the psychopath to use the equivalent of bioweapons on Undine space?
Jean-Luc Picard, an experienced career officer with a first-rate crew and a ship so new she squeaked, ready and eager to take on the universe and preach the Federation's gospel. Benjamin Lafayette Sisko, a grieving widower and single father, put out to pasture in a backwater post expecting one last tour before retirement, with a fiery Bajoran redhead for an XO who took an instant dislike to him.
And then there's you. Write a story or a log entry about your captain's first day in command of their ship. Did Starfleet Command throw them in the deep end right away, or did they get a few days to get to know their crew? What did their new underlings think of them? Did it all go off without a hitch, or were there unforeseen consequences?
Three's first day: "Alright, I'm the Captain, I'm a sadistic monster but don't worry, I only let myself go occasionally. Now let's go figure out this distress call Quinn told me to investigate."
D'trel's first day: Her best friend's dead after saving her from an Elachi drone, her de facto XO is an arrogant farm boy, the man she loathes more than anything else in the universe is making a gloating speech at her, her adopted home is so much burning wreckage, and she's almost insane from hatred.
You proceed from a false assumption. You assume that everyone shares your assessment of Janeway.
In point of fact, while I believe she was in well over her head and totally unsuited to command in any capacity in which she was out of touch with Starfleet Command (given that anywhere in the usual range of her ship, Command was a phone call away), I also think that she did the best she could with what she had, and that her understanding of the Undine threat was in fact accurate.
Of course, it's totally unbelievable, but Trek in general and VOY in particular has always specialized in Planet of Hats Syndrome, and the writing in "Scorpion" was no worse than anywhere else in the series and better than some parts ("Threshold", for example).
You proceed from a false assumption. You assume that everyone shares your assessment of Janeway.
In point of fact, while I believe she was in well over her head and totally unsuited to command in any capacity in which she was out of touch with Starfleet Command (given that anywhere in the usual range of her ship, Command was a phone call away), I also think that she did the best she could with what she had, and that her understanding of the Undine threat was in fact accurate.
Of course, it's totally unbelievable, but Trek in general and VOY in particular has always specialized in Planet of Hats Syndrome, and the writing in "Scorpion" was no worse than anywhere else in the series and better than some parts ("Threshold", for example).
I happen to agree that Threshold was the rear end hole of Star Trek, but I disagree entirely on Janeway. And I think that Scorpion is everything bad about Voyager concentrated into one pile of Swiss cheese.
And some people will probably write stuff that makes Janeway out to be some sort of angel. That's fine. I'd write something that has D'trel executing her for announcing her intent to attempt genocide with bioweapons while Three says that she's fine either way (because Three's a monster).
Which would ultimately lead to the extinction of the Federation and most likely the rest of the Alpha Quadrant when the Undine in 2409 start trouble over here because of the Iconians. Because Voyager never studied 8472, so we would have no defence from them. So congratulations, you not only wiped out the Borg, but the entire Federation, Klingon and Romulan Empire as well.
Frankly, I'm getting weary of all this constant Janeway bashing.
*******************************************
A Romulan Strike Team, Missing Farmers and an ancient base on a Klingon Border world. But what connects them? Find out in my First Foundary mission: 'The Jeroan Farmer Escapade'
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Which would ultimately lead to the extinction of the Federation and most likely the rest of the Alpha Quadrant when the Undine in 2409 start trouble over here because of the Iconians. Because Voyager never studied 8472, so we would have no defence from them. So congratulations, you not only wiped out the Borg, but the entire Federation, Klingon and Romulan Empire as well.
Frankly, I'm getting weary of all this constant Janeway bashing.
Or alternatively the Undine are contacted by your Captain, who says "Thanks for helping us with the Borg! Hey, there's these guys called the Iconians who think they're tough, too. I heard them say that they were the strongest being in the universe and they were going to attack you guys for laughs. This is their homeworld, these are the Iconian-made Dyson Spheres we know of. We can give you anti-Iconian weapons and transwarp drive that should work with your bioships. Interested?"
And everyone lives happily ever after, maybe including some "negotiation" where your 25th-century ship of badass nukes and Undine bioship or two to prove your might.
After being severely wounded on an away mission you will never be the same, you lost use of your right arm, a deep gash in your forehead stares at you in the mirror everyday. You are grateful to be alive, through the nightmares and horrors of your memories you contemplate "is it all worth it?" Sometime afterword on a First Contact mission you encounter a race with remarkable healing abilities which could heal your wounds fully. However you thinking back you weigh the pros and cons of asking for help, Do the scars define you or are you above them? Does this solve your trauma or only mask it?
Quote-moved to the proper thread.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"
Comments
While inspecting a civilian freighter for contraband or on an away mission surveying a planet, you come across something unusual. It is a sentient, amorphous blob of carbosilicate material that looks like a mobile pile of sludge with eyes. While not a Changeling, it can alter its shape in order to fit through small spaces, and it can eat just about anything - though the interior space it can generate to use as a 'stomach' is also used as a storage space for anything it intends to use, like weapons, and can even be used to carry a person inside, if said person needs to avoid detection. And it's also more bloodthirsty and trigger-happy than just about any other race known to exist.
Write a story detailing your encounter with this strange creature.
Your ship is in orbit of an ice world, and you've been ordered to investigate. Two crew members beam down to set up a base for surveys.
Then a trio of enemy starships drops out of warp and forces your ship out of transporter range, leaving two of your crew on the planet with night closing in.
How do they survive? How does the experience affect them? And what hazards lurk in the icy night?
Based on this DS9 episode, one of my personal favorites.
While on a routine relief mission to a new colony, your ship discovers that a supposedly uninhabited class-M planet...is inhabited. The colonists hail your ship and ask you to beam down, and reference a minor personal detail about you that nobody except maybe your bridge crew should know.
When you beam down, you find that the "colonists" are your descendants, stuck here for hundreds of years after your ship fell through a spatiotemporal anomaly and crashed. A spatiotemporal anomaly that is going to close in two days.
How do you deal with this revelation, how does your crew cope, and do you ensure the existence of your descendants, or prevent them?
(this one would be a lot of fun to creatively interpret)
I'm sure I need not explain this is the one where The Enterprise is trapped in a time loops thanks to some collision with a ship stuck in the loop as well. I think the funnest part of that were what remained the same and the subtle differences each time they had to relive the same sequence over and over and over. I've thought about rewriting it with my crew but haven't done it yet. The daunting thing is you are obligated to write one scene several times before the clilmax. So its a long haul till the end, unlike other stories where you might be able to reduce the duration.
The new LC will be posted today. yesterday we just had to many fires to put out and I wanted to avoid a thread full of what has happened here.
This thread is supposed to be for submitting ideas, so I am going to go back and delete all posts about refreshing the page every 10 minutes or other non-LC-idea posts while I hunt for this months selection from the forum folk.
Thanks for your patience everyone, new LC is incoming! Prepare yourself!
~CaptainSmirk
OK so I moved 23 pages of posts to a discussion thread.
Lets keep this thread for ideas only, and discuss the ideas or write short responses in the discussion thread.
33 pages of posts is WAY TO MUCH to try and hunt down any ideas you all have submitted, so lets keep this thread for essentials only if you want your topics to have a chance to make it into the monthly challenge.
Thanks everyone, and enjoy the new topic!
~CaptainSmirk
It might be the starboard latch that keeps the Captain's Gig snug against the primary hull, a tractor beam that shorts out every time the target is at 4.3 km from the ship, or a sensor pallet that just won't stop sending feedback into the primary deflector array. It could be the torpedo launcher's exhaust drives the internal temperature up 10 degrees on Deck 7, or perhaps the phaser array's coolant keeps leaking into crew quarters, ruining the carpet.
Or maybe the replicators just can't make a good pie.
Something keeps breaking down, over and over and over...
What aspect of your ship has your Chief Engineer cursing the day they put on the gold? What component does your captain not rely on because it keeps breaking down? What makes the Science Division create a backup repair tool made of tricorders, duct tape, and 30 year old Romulan Ale?
Format ideas:
--from the Captain's perspective, a log detailing what keeps going wrong, or a report to Starfleet demanding that this be looked at by the SCE.
--from the Chief Engineer's perspective, a report to the Captain filled with explanations and excuses; a general hail to other ships of the same class asking, "Is your ship doing this too?"; a personal log on how you're overseeing the repairs personally this time.
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"Respectfully, Sir...please don't do that again."
Captain, you've certainly done some unorthodox things in your career...but what has your crew crying, "Mercy!"
Maybe you demand Evasive Maneuvers every 45 seconds, and the SIF, Inertial Dampers, and other systems are being replaced on an daily basis, as opposed the the scheduled maintenance cycle of every six months.
Perhaps you separate the saucer so much that the docking latches are worn down.
Could be you're a stickler for discipline, deportment, and decorum, and you order your crew to repaint every corridor weekly, whether it needs it or not.
So...is it a Junior Officer that comes up the chain of command to respectfully request you stop flying your personal shuttle to the redline? Does your First Officer kindly suggest you take it down a notch before your crew gets on the edge of mutiny? Or does somebody have their Admiral Aunt or Uncle call you to ESD to discuss just why is it you're mounting 8 torpedoes on a Federation cruiser with a turn rate of a sick whale.
Format ideas:
--a Junior Officer risks his or her career to confront you directly...maybe after what you did got their best friend killed.
--you overhear crewmen talking while repairing a shuttle they don't know you're inside of.
--one of your senior staff tells you there's a problem.
--An Admiral demands an explanation for something you've done.
--counterpoint - you're called on what you did, but you explain why it is you did what you did...and it becomes a new SOP when the alternatives, in simulation, have proven disastrous.
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"Are you trying to tell me something?"
Comms from Starfleet get 'lost'.
Orders are 'misplaced', then found once you can't do anything about it.
Supplies to your ship never arrive, or are incorrect, or consist of obsolete equipment.
You get invited to meetings after the meeting occurred, or when it's in a sector that's so far away you'll never make it.
Your suggestions to the brass get ignored. (Or, your submission to the LC idea thread that's a legitimate idea doesn't make it to the new idea thread.
Is somebody trying to tell you something? Is an Admiral very displeased at something you did? Or did the person who thought *they'd* be in command of your ship find themselves at HQ with a lot of time on their hands and a big grudge against you?
Format ideas:
--how have you become aware of the cold shoulder treatment?
--your staff asks why the brass is treating you as they are, and asks what's going on?
--what are you going to do to solve the problem?
You've been assigned to joint military operations with a Tamarian starship in the Psi Velorum sector, near Federation, Republic, and RSE space.
While beaming down to a planet to investigate your target--a suspected Tal Shiar internment facility--you and the Tamarian Captain are separated from the strike force, beneath massive amounts of transporter-disrupting minerals, and must escape together.
How do you escape? Is the Tamarian's story reference-based language a fun puzzle for you to keep yourself occupied with in your boredom and anxiety, or do misunderstandings cause a disaster?
While exploring the Delta Quadrant in a shuttle, near the Jenolan sphere, you and one of your crew are kidnapped by a Delta Quadrant species for use as gladiators. Sold at a slave market, bought by a fight promoter, and sent into combat against monstrous beasts, other slave gladiators, and alien criminals, you must fight to survive.
Meanwhile, the rest of your crew is searching for you with your ship. Will they find you? Can you and your crewsentient escape before it's too late?
Everyone's story starts somewhere. Whether in the slave mines of Remus, a comfortable home on a Federation core world, or the warm fires of a House mansion on Qo'noS, every story has a beginning.
Every hero's story has one moment where everything changed. That one, defining instant where his or her purpose in life changed, where he or she gained the raw, willful determination that drives him or her to this day.
What is YOUR origin story? Write a story detailing your Catptain's origins and rise to command.
(reverse of yesterdays enterprise)
While on a routine weapons test of your new targeting systems you accidentally open a temporal anomaly and the next version of your vessel (20+ years in the future) comes through, hails you requesting current star date and reason for their/your presence. Turns out that you were also triggering a subspace snare and this battle went down in history: your vessel winning or losing aided by an unknown vessel that was never seen again (until it came out of utopia plenitia 20 years later, but section 31 obscured that little tid bit) Maybe your ship gets pulled forward in time (ending up like the enterprise c)
Responding to a distress call in an unknown system, you find the ship that had sent the distress call destroyed...and a starship with a menacing paint job waiting for you. Before you can react, you are hailed by the other ship and told to surrender...
By yourself.
It looks like your mirror universe self is in the Prime universe for some reason. And they want you.
What does your dark twin want from you, how are they different from you, and how do you fix this mess?
"Hail Ba'al!"
Your ship has crash-landed on an alien planet following an accidental trip to an alternate universe. While searching for supplies to set up a camp while your engineers get to work on repairs, you come across a charming fellow in an impractically long black vampire cape, who introduces himself as Supreme System Lord Ba'al and asks if you would mind terribly helping him conquer the galaxy. He offers a large sum of the local currency, which his hulking, armored bodyguards corroborate.
What do you do? Do you keep working on repairs to return to your universe, or do you Hail Ba'al?
And now another, perhaps less humorous one:
"What do you MEAN, the replicators are broken?"
Every single food replicator on your ship is broken. Every. Single. One.
They refuse to produce normal comestibles, and instead release vile-smelling orange glop that oozes off of plates, eats through bowls, and appears to be toxic to certain species.
And you're on an extended patrol mission in the Gamma Orionis sector.
How does your crew deal with THIS catastrophe?
Kathryn Janeway. Celebrity. Admiral. Public hero and face of Starfleet.
And war criminal.
On a world in the Delta Quadrant, you have discovered indisputable evidence that Janeway allied with the omnicidal menace that is the Borg Collective and engaged in a preemptive strike on Undine home space with weapons of mass destruction, possibly precipitating the current Undine crisis.
What do you do? Do you deliver the information to Command in your report like a good officer, or do you go with your conscience and alert the media? How does Command react? And more importantly, how do you respond to the news that you have been taking orders from a genocidal psychopath?
If I wouldn't be already in rehab, I 'd be now. Our marriage is officially over.
I'm pretty sure it was made common knowledge when they got back.
Especially with a blabbermouth like The Doctor looking for his next best selling holonovel. :rolleyes:
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
Yeah, well, see, worffan and I, among others, have this theory that the only way Janeway could've possibly avoided a general court-martial for that and the numerous other criminal acts she committed in the Delta Quadrant are because A) Starfleet JAG Corps is completely and utterly incompetent, or
Anyway, some submissions:
Many of us have complained in the past about Cryptic having the attention span of a goldfish and leaving plots unfinished left and right. The Fek'Ihri are implied to be the result of a foreign plot which is never fulfilled, the Gorn separatists are barely alluded to outside of doff assignments, the True Way get no conclusive resolution (yes, you captured two of their leaders, but they're a terrorist organization), and the fact that there's a continuing fragment of the Romulan Star Empire, reeling from the loss of Empress Sela, is never referred to again after "Hidden Camera".
Of course, this isn't unique to Cryptic; there are plenty of cases in the various series where a plot thread was left to dangle. Pick a plot from the series or game that was left unresolved and do something interesting with it.
As seen in DS9: "Facets", the Trill have a custom wherein joined Trill cause the personalities of their past hosts to emerge, in order for them to more fully understand their pasts. The Trill Symbiosis Commission reportedly goes to great lengths to ensure the ritual is performed. Write a story where a Trill member of your crew goes through the zhian'tara.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
"Cult"
"During one of your tours of the mysterious Delta Quadrant, you've come into contact with an almost space faring species. They are aware of the universe around them, but they lack the materials to construct vessels of their own. They are friendly, accommodating to your crew and their needs and very hospitable. When it is time for your crew and ship to go, the leaders of the people have asked you for a very strange favor. They wish for you to take a few of their people into Borg space. One of your officers tells you that the species seems to know of the Borg and, in an alarming discovery, actually worship the Collective. They deem the Cooperative as a "false path", so taking them to the Cooperative is out. They WANT to be assimilated by the Collective! You have a choice to make: Allow the species passage to Borg space and fulfill their grand desire or deny them and possibly burn one of the few friendly bridges your faction can make in the Delta Quadrant. What do you do?"
"Holodeck Havoc"
"It's a slow week for your ship. A few surveys here, an uneventful anomaly there. Your bridge crew has decided to take in a few sessions in the Holodeck. Unknown to you, your ship has slipped into a fold in space and is smack dab in the middle of an amalgamation of photonic space and real space. As such, the laws of existence and matter are now reversed. You are the hologram and the holodeck is now reality! The characters are spilling out into the ship and causing havoc! You and your crew must figure out how to get the ship out of the overlap and back into real space. But, seeing as how you're the incorporeal ones now, you must rely on the characters from the programs to help you bring the ship home."
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
"Before your crew can enter the Delta Quadrant, your faction has insisted upon you taking a new bridge officer, designation "Intelligence". This officer's job is to gather intel on the Delta Quadrant and report to "Command". You have a suspicion that this new officer may be a spy, which is an ethical quandary of epic proportions. How do you deal with a crew member you cannot trust?"
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP
"Between a Rock and a Hard Place"
A sentient species of cave-dwellers is currently having a problem. They live on a harsh environmental world in the Klingon-Federation frontier and are seriously agoraphobic and so never developed space flight or warp travel. Neutrino and subspace emissions indicate advanced technology, but they may not even conceptually be able to deal with 'outer space', so the Federation didn't contact them, the Klingons didn't when they were friends with the Federation and then were too busy fighting the Federation to set up an occupation force.
That said - a hefty extinction-level asteroid is headed their way and will impact in a few months, and with things calming down in the Neutral Zone, your captain on patrol picked up the upcoming problem on an astrometric survey, that the species itself is slowly becoming aware of.
Socially, they're an insular culture, and so were left out of contact for fear that it would destroy them culturally from the Federation perspective. Thanks to previous peace treaties, the Empire hasn't managed to exploit them quite the way they'd like, so they're experience with both powers is a blank slate.
What does your captain do? Try a temporary transplant? Reveal yourself as the terrifying 'Sky God' and swear their loyalty to your House in a fairly bloodless takeover? Reveal yourself as the terrifying 'Sky God' and let the rioting run its course to rebuild the culture into a more 'normative' form to induct them into the superpower of your captain's choice? Infilitrate and try to put together an interception program in a few months? Or just replicate a bag of marshmallows, let nature take its course, report on the sadly empty planet, and see if you can get ten percent on the proceeds for turning the place over to a horde of hungry Horta?
"I will wait forever"
With the Preservers still busy integrating with the Deferi, more and more are being awakened and ranging farther afield all the time as tourists and storytellers par excellence. Your captain or one of your bridge officers/crew encounters one of these travelers, and find to their surprise/amusement/disgust that the Preserver is convinced you are a reincarnation of a lost lover or family member of their own genetic history line. It may not be a major event, but certainly should be worth a round of drinks for the retelling before it's over.
"The Rise and Fall of the Delta Quadrant"
It's been noted before that each Quadrant seems to have its own governing style among the strongest players. With the Alpha Quadrant characterized by the republican Federation, the Beta by the imperial structures of the Romulan (until recently) and the Klingon Empires. The Gamma has the totalitarian theocracy of the Dominion....
and the Delta Quadrant seems defined by utter anarchy, with historically, strong governments going imperialistic and being pulled down by loose coalitions. Combined with the Quadrant's generally longer history of warp travel versus the expansion rate of the Alliance governments, and with the Borg more or less falling into this model at this point, it's starting to be noticed as a trend.
Somehow, your poor captain and his or her crew has been shanghaied into an archeological dig as a result on one of the oldest ex-capital worlds that friendlies in the Delta Quadrant have found in their histories. What's there to discover? Iconian interference? Ancient conspiracies? Or maybe the researchers just got the weight wrong when they replaced the idol, and would really like a beam-out please.
Member Access Denied Armada!
My forum single-issue of rage: Make the Proton Experimental Weapon go for subsystem targetting!
"Ghost Stories"
What better way to break in the new guy then by scaring the pants off him? After a new bridge officer is assigned to your ship, the rest of your bridge devotes a little downtime to relate a tale of terror - the sort of thing he should expect to face on a "typical" mission.
Is the story true? Did your officers ad their own embellishments? Did they make it all up?
Could it happen again?
...Oh, baby, you know, I've really got to leave you / Oh, I can hear it callin 'me / I said don't you hear it callin' me the way it used to do?...
- Anne Bredon
Azip to new exchange officer: "Three's imprinted on the crew but not on you, so don't TRIBBLE her off or she'll kill you brutally."
Daysnur to new guy: "Do not under any circumstances express Tal Shiar or Iconian sympathies around the Admiral. Just don't. No, seriously, not even as a joke. She WILL snap, and she WILL beat the living sh*t out of you, and that's if you're LUCKY."
Anyway, here's another idea.
"Berserker Button"
Everybody has one. For a certain psychopath, it's her imprints. For everyone's favorite Gorn, it's his kids. For Picard, it was the Borg. For Odo, it was people who denied others freedom of thought and religion.
What's your personal Berserker Button? This is a hate that goes beyond a pet peeve, more serious than mere annoyance yet still overwhelmingly over-the-top in your hatred of it.
Jean-Luc Picard, an experienced career officer with a first-rate crew and a ship so new she squeaked, ready and eager to take on the universe and preach the Federation's gospel. Benjamin Lafayette Sisko, a grieving widower and single father, put out to pasture in a backwater post expecting one last tour before retirement, with a fiery Bajoran redhead for an XO who took an instant dislike to him.
And then there's you. Write a story or a log entry about your captain's first day in command of their ship. Did Starfleet Command throw them in the deep end right away, or did they get a few days to get to know their crew? What did their new underlings think of them? Did it all go off without a hitch, or were there unforeseen consequences?
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Kathryn Janeway. Starfleet Admiral. Sadistic psychopath. Genocidal murderer.
Also a massive propaganda queen.
Whatever your opinions on her, you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Thanks to spatiotemporal thingamabobs, you're on her ship, the Voyager, during the First Contact with the Undine species. And you have your ship on standby. And a weapon.
When Janeway casually announces that she's going to ally with the Borg to attempt to exterminate the Undine, what is your reaction? What do you do? Do you kill the insane Captain and potentially destroy the timeline as you know it? Or do you allow the psychopath to use the equivalent of bioweapons on Undine space?
Three's first day: "Alright, I'm the Captain, I'm a sadistic monster but don't worry, I only let myself go occasionally. Now let's go figure out this distress call Quinn told me to investigate."
D'trel's first day: Her best friend's dead after saving her from an Elachi drone, her de facto XO is an arrogant farm boy, the man she loathes more than anything else in the universe is making a gloating speech at her, her adopted home is so much burning wreckage, and she's almost insane from hatred.
In point of fact, while I believe she was in well over her head and totally unsuited to command in any capacity in which she was out of touch with Starfleet Command (given that anywhere in the usual range of her ship, Command was a phone call away), I also think that she did the best she could with what she had, and that her understanding of the Undine threat was in fact accurate.
Of course, it's totally unbelievable, but Trek in general and VOY in particular has always specialized in Planet of Hats Syndrome, and the writing in "Scorpion" was no worse than anywhere else in the series and better than some parts ("Threshold", for example).
I happen to agree that Threshold was the rear end hole of Star Trek, but I disagree entirely on Janeway. And I think that Scorpion is everything bad about Voyager concentrated into one pile of Swiss cheese.
And some people will probably write stuff that makes Janeway out to be some sort of angel. That's fine. I'd write something that has D'trel executing her for announcing her intent to attempt genocide with bioweapons while Three says that she's fine either way (because Three's a monster).
Frankly, I'm getting weary of all this constant Janeway bashing.
A Romulan Strike Team, Missing Farmers and an ancient base on a Klingon Border world. But what connects them? Find out in my First Foundary mission: 'The Jeroan Farmer Escapade'
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Or alternatively the Undine are contacted by your Captain, who says "Thanks for helping us with the Borg! Hey, there's these guys called the Iconians who think they're tough, too. I heard them say that they were the strongest being in the universe and they were going to attack you guys for laughs. This is their homeworld, these are the Iconian-made Dyson Spheres we know of. We can give you anti-Iconian weapons and transwarp drive that should work with your bioships. Interested?"
And everyone lives happily ever after, maybe including some "negotiation" where your 25th-century ship of badass nukes and Undine bioship or two to prove your might.
Quote-moved to the proper thread.
-Leonard Nimoy, RIP