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Iconian War Anthology discussion thread
drogyn1701
Member Posts: 3,606 Media Corps
This thread will be the main discussion thread for our Iconian War Anthology project.
The first thing I want people to know is that everyone is welcome to join in! This is an open project, and it's very easy to be a part of it
You just say "I want in" and go start your mission.
The basic idea is this, we want to make a collection of stories about the Iconian War. These could be anything from big battles, to small operations, to attempts at diplomacy. Missions can also deal with any of the servitor races (or make up new ones!). There is a lot of room to maneuver here, and I don't intend to worry too much about oversight or interfering in anyone's story. Make the mission you want!
These missions do not have to be connected (other than the general Iconian War theme), but authors can work together on plots if they want. One thing we may do is develop a library of characters than can be re-used in missions if authors choose.
I want this to be an open project, so I'm not setting any deadlines right now. As people get missions done, we'll make a master thread in the mission forum just for that and we'll start promoting the Anthology.
Some things I want people to discuss here:
-A name. The current working title is "Tales from the Frontlines; An Iconian War Anthology" but if there are other ideas I'd like to hear them.
-Ways the series can be promoted once we get some missions done.
-Do we need a pool of mission testers that can be called upon to help an author once they get to that phase?
-Timeline. Should we limit missions to be within the scope of the war itself, or can missions be set before or after?
-A short-ish tag like [???] that can be put before mission titles to signify that they are in the series.
The first thing I want people to know is that everyone is welcome to join in! This is an open project, and it's very easy to be a part of it
You just say "I want in" and go start your mission.The basic idea is this, we want to make a collection of stories about the Iconian War. These could be anything from big battles, to small operations, to attempts at diplomacy. Missions can also deal with any of the servitor races (or make up new ones!). There is a lot of room to maneuver here, and I don't intend to worry too much about oversight or interfering in anyone's story. Make the mission you want!
These missions do not have to be connected (other than the general Iconian War theme), but authors can work together on plots if they want. One thing we may do is develop a library of characters than can be re-used in missions if authors choose.
I want this to be an open project, so I'm not setting any deadlines right now. As people get missions done, we'll make a master thread in the mission forum just for that and we'll start promoting the Anthology.
Some things I want people to discuss here:
-A name. The current working title is "Tales from the Frontlines; An Iconian War Anthology" but if there are other ideas I'd like to hear them.
-Ways the series can be promoted once we get some missions done.
-Do we need a pool of mission testers that can be called upon to help an author once they get to that phase?
-Timeline. Should we limit missions to be within the scope of the war itself, or can missions be set before or after?
-A short-ish tag like [???] that can be put before mission titles to signify that they are in the series.
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Post edited by drogyn1701 on
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Here's mine: You are sent to help set up a surveillance post, that (not coincidentally) comes under attack from the Heralds. Your ship has to retreat without you, and you have to hold out till they get back with reinforcements. I'm adapting some missions I already had outlined (I was gonna re-write the 2800), and I had the main map already built.
If I keep going, further missions along this storyline would have you helping defend refugees from the area, then attacking and boarding a Herald ship in which you find out the original reason behind attacking that outpost was to keep Starfleet from finding something (not sure what yet).
KDF: The Sands of Gornar - Ambassador S'taass contacts the player with an emergency distress beacon, informing the player of an attack by the Heralds on Gornar. You respond and eventually hold the line against them with the assistance of the Empire's allied races, setting up Catastrophe at Cait.
Fed: Catastrophe at Cait - After the attack on Gornar, the Heralds retreated over to the Federation side of the border and started picking off strategic points. You are sent initially to the Allendon System where contact with the Allendon Refueling Station, one of the key civilian refueling ports along the rim, has been lost. Soon, Cait issues a distress call as they fall under attack by Herald and Elachi forces. This is not helped by the fact the Tholians view this as a great time to land a beachhead (Tholia is only a few light years away, akin to Cardassian and Bajor). After a Melee a Trois in which you acquire a MACO squadron, you speed off to the Pleaides to track down the Elachi's base of operations. Eventually you find it and set up a subspace dampening field to prevent them from exiting subspace in the system at the cost of subspace comms.
TRIBBLE Hydra! Hail Janeway!
I've been mulling over an Iconian storyline for some time. It involves goings on inside the Solonae Dyson Sphere - an area I feel had great potential, but then got left in the dust (along with the Voth storyline) in the mad rush to get to the OTHER Dyson sphere - which ended up just being a door to the Delta Quadrant sector space area - lol.
Unfortunately, the assets I need, like the sphere ground battlezone map, sphere interior maps, Solonae NPCs, etc. are unavailable.
arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1203368/pve-content-a-list-of-gamewide-polishing-pass-suggestions
As for missions... I'm thinking M'Tara or another Iconian might develop a personal grudge against the PC.
Speaking of the Iconians... devs... pretty please can we have our own Iconian overlord? We'll give her, her own plot etc :P (P.S. Yellow Iconian
Ive been thinking about trying a trek spin on this little gem of a mission for awhile now. The anthology sounds like the perfect place for it.
PS- in case anyone asks, no that's not me flying in the video. I'm much better of course.:P
Question, is there a plan for players to be able to find all the missions outside of the game, like some kind of mission catalog to view? Or will they need to search the tag in game to find them?
Beyond just forum posts, we can obviously utilize Starbase UGC as a clearing house for information.
Any time a new mission is added, we'll promote it and the anthology as a whole on Twitter, Reddit, on podcasts here on the forums, and anywhere else we can think of. Would love to maybe get some help from PWE. I don't think we need the missions spotlighted (I'd rather have them available in the top 3 system), but maybe a guest blog?
The broad strokes: You, the player, get a report from ESD that a Devidian appeared out of nowhere and attacked Temporal Agent Philip Crey. Crey is killed in the attack - or rather, he was, in another timeline, but before dying he managed to get a warning to himself a few hours earlier via his Tesseract communicator, so "this" time he and ESD security were ready and easily defeated the Devidian.
Since you've dealt with various Devidian threats in the past, Crey decides to involve you in Starfleet's response, so he calls you to ESD for a confab. He believes the Devidians have somehow been drawn into the Iconian war (this is also being hinted at in the Delta Recruit dialogue I'm adding to the GoW missions). Since the Devidians are experienced time-travelers, Crey suspects they've been manipulated, via their need for neurochemical energy, into doing the Iconians' temporal dirty work for them, either as willing servitors or unwilling catspaws.
As you approach ESD, a Herald fleet suddenly appears and wipes out all the ships parked nearby. It then begins bathing ESD in triolic radiation, at which point large numbers of Devidians suddenly de-phase aboard the station and start attacking. At this point it becomes basically "Ghosts of War, Part V" Redux, i.e. another huge battle against Devidians, only on the new ESD instead of the old. The twist is that [SPOILERS]this all turns out to be a diversion allowing the Heralds to steal top-secret information relating to something called "Operation Cherry Bomb", which I may or may not revisit in a subsequent mission. (If someone else wants to do an "Operation Cherry Bomb" mission instead, be my guest.)[/SPOILERS]
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
I've already had one idea for a mission, though it would be more of a standalone "Episode" than part of an arc.
[Fed] Sol Survivor
The player returns to Earth Space-dock for a routine briefing, but beams down to a vastly different Earth Spacedock. Turns out, there was a quantum singularity passing through the Sol system, which beamed them five years into a very, very bleak future, where the Heralds destroyed Earth. ESD is now the last remnant of the Federation, hiding among the rubble.
The player is faced with a choice - stay, and help these refugees survive, or risk all that remains of the Federation to return to the point in time they came from, and prevent the Herald attack from ever happening.
Could [ICO] also work for a tag?
There's also something I'd like to ask about. Could it please be permitted for some missions to take place earlier, during the storyline leading up to the Iconian war, as well? Some of the storylines I'm working on involve events leading up to new things in the war, such as the introduction of new servitor races or incidents the Iconians had involvement in. If not, would it work to have a "related tag" for pre-war missions?
One of my missions was originally intended to just be a time travel mission, but has since turned into a story where someone caused damage to the timeline in the past to "save the present pain" at the hands of the Iconians. However, it takes place before the outbreak of the Iconian war itself, hinting at events to come similar to other official stories in STO.
And a request to allow missions from before the time frame of the war itself, but definitely involving the Iconians/servitor races.
I want this to be an open project with community decisions, so I'm putting these out to everyone, what do you guys think?
As for stories set before/during/after... sure, why not?
P.S A additional question for you guys...
Do you think we should create our own Iconian overlord? (Aka we have M'Tara and T'ket) Should we for example... ask for an Iconian... call her..."T'ren'dy" and boom! We have our own "demon of air and darkness" to use as and when it's required.
Update: communicated with Trendy via twitter, she said last she had heard, iconian npcs were being witheld while Cryptic ramps up their own storylines. Understandable, since we don't yet know what those storylines are. I've seen speculation that the reason we've only seen one or two actual Iconians is that there only are one or two left. That's just speculation though. I communicated with her about what we're planning, but In the meantime, we'll have to make do with servitor races.
Then.. bow before the Harbinger of T'ren'dy & Elachi minions.
That actually opens up the potential for some interesting stories, since I imagine an Iconian can have more than one Harbinger, explaining how she could have Harbingers in more than one place at a time, and also, killing one of them isn't going to do more than hamper her plans and tee her off...
Didn't the dev blogs say the Iconians numbered in the hundreds these days?
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
Hundreds? Interesting. I wonder who the rest of them are, and if ALL of them are this bad. (Alignment-wise.)
The "Harbinger of T'rena" needs a giant space hammer. It's super attack can be... 30 minute account ban. :P
You're in luck, the Foundry editor is back on.
Also going to be getting information for various NPCs people can use in their Iconian War Anthology missions. Although I may need to discuss how to use and portray them and stuff with people.
EDIT: Oh. One more thing. Does anyone else have some characters/NPCs of theirs that I could get permission to use in some of my missions for this anthology?
Nobody has to use these characters, but they are there as a resource and a fun way to link the missions. Authors can put up more than one as well.
We'll need a screenshot of the character sliders and a short background.
I'll let you guys know once I start having stuff to submit.
The episode now has a title: "[Ico] Ghost's Gambit". Also, the "Operation Cherry Bomb" reference has been renamed to "the Amargosa Project" instead. I won't spoil what I have in mind for the Amargosa Project, other than to say that I would need a sphere map in order to do it justice. But again, if someone else wants to do an Amargosa Project follow-up mission instead (with their own idea of what it is), be my guest.
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
Actually I'm thinking of using Liojor, but when I added her to DA, it was as a costume file.
In case peeps wanted a bit more data, Luth is a member of an unnamed race, she reproduces by "infecting" others with her DNA. Kinda like that thing in Warlord with Kes, but each time you end up with another of her. Also, she works for Klingon intelligence. it's not clear if this is typical for her race or something unique to her. Or maybe she's a sentient bioweapon and not actually a member of any race? Hadn't thought that far.
Enliss is a Borg Vorta who is part of a Dominion force charged with containing a mysterious race known as the Rek'arthar. She's from an alternate universe and rather mean, unlike most Vorta. She's stronger than most Jem'Hadar due to her cybernetics and not afraid to use physical violence.
Liojor is a Boslic scientist who works for the Tholians. The mission I included her in had her as the lead scientist of a space station whose purpose was to stop a Terran Empire invasion.
My character Tsin'xing
Maybe a little something for this thread?
That would be great. Give it a try and post it here
I'm making a costume for Fed Temporal Agent Philip Crey (not just for "Ghost's Gambit" but also for the Delta Recruit objectives I'm adding to Ghosts of War). He definitely won't be getting killed off - not permanently anyway.
Admiral Youngs and/or Sanchez from my Ghosts of War series might also get cameos in "Ghost's Gambit".
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
Is it decided now that the tag is definitely [Ico] ?