Winning your Bottle

 

We were a captain short for our Trek last Saturday as it seems that Phage vaccinations have been issued across the entire quadrant and as per orders she was confined to quarters for the episode. We are a short game already that occasionally requires us to play two characters which always makes me feel like I am managing rather than playing although the Trek is designed to have supporting characters which offers a somewhat forgiving experience. My main issue in such situations is plot block where we exhaust possibilities but are not seeing the solution to a situation or a way forward - with enough players or specifically brains on a problem someone tends to come up with either a fix or work around but with just two players there was a concern that we would get exhausted in a situation with limited options.

However the session went quickly (pros to GM Jon of course) and as the system is designed with episodic narratives in mind we decided to have a flashback bottle episode with the doctor and myself embarking from space dock at Earth on a transport before our commissioning on the Lyonesse.  I say transport but it was more like a flying bucket of bolts sprinkled over a warp core - it seems that Starfleet internal mail is pretty much identical to the staff transfer process.

Nevertheless we won our mini adventure and saved the passengers from opportunistic pirates posing as passengers and exposed the compromised crew who were conspiring with them - it was the cook of course, I suspect mainly because the cheaper Starfleet ships don't have butlers. There was also a Kzinti being transferred in cryo by an undercover Vulcan but thankfully we talked the GM out of time to release it which did help expedite matters. Flashback episodes can be a fun break from a main plot but there is no reason actually why a GM couldn't drop clues and back fill important events into such sessions but it would have to be crafted carefully as certain events and outcomes are already committed in the timeline. Ultimately I wonder if its possible to run an adventure entirely backwards from the conclusion to the outset.