There is a noted lack of Earth-bound religion in Star Trek. I don’t know why.
In the years post-Dominion War, the Federation takes a beating. A lot of resources have been lost during the war, and Starfleet becomes strained trying to deal with policing a lot of systems with fewer ships. A beat-up forward recon vessel, in service for nearly a century, has been policing a couple of interesting locations in a star cluster. Old ruins from a lost civilization, a failed colony, a couple of pirate moons, a techno-utopia, a swath of contested space, some alien race under Federation protection, any idea you want, but roughly twelve interesting locations. The ship has been on assignment here in a sort of “stop-loss” situation, with the fleet pressing them into a new tour of duty above and beyond what was expected of the assignment. Some of the crew has been forced to accept a longer tour of duty than has been signed on for. It isn’t ideal, but a lot of rhetoric regarding the sacrifices everyone in the Federation is making has been thrown around so no one’s mutinous.
The player characters are the typical away team complement, which pretty much allows them to be a mix of whoever: third shift doctor, alien security chief, space marine, interpreter, second in command, whatever.
During the first session, where they stop a rogue Romulan plot to blow the fuck up out of some lawless pirate planets in Federation space, there’s a firefight and the Romulans fight to the death. Afterwards, one of the security detail is surprised by a dead Romulan while searching the body, and has his throat ripped out before the Romulan is disintegrated by another teammate. Everything is beamed back up for continued investigation.
Later that night, the security guard and one of the Romulans who died have risen in the morgue attached to the sickbay, and bitten the doctor, who has now also turned. An intruder alert goes up, but before anybody has a handle on anything, the main security team is bitten as well. After dealing with this mess, the captain responds to distress calls that grow in magnitude: This is happening across the Federation. Across the Universe. The remainder of the game is a zombie story with a Star Trek twist.
Zombie games are in some ways at their best when the Player Characters have no understanding that they’re about to enter a zombie story. Survival horror in Star Trek is a contradiction, a beautiful dichotomy: an optimistic utopia faced with a hard stop. Here, the true characteristics of Star Trek’s morality can be tested. It’s not enough to simply survive. You have to earn it.
As to the rules of the campaign: At first, zombies are limited to anyone who has been bitten, but the virus quickly adapts to infect anyone who dies, anywhere, and the bites simply become a gauranteed death sentence. To kill a zombie, you either remove the head or disintegrate them, which in turn requires expending a serious share of a phaser’s energy, reducing what used to be a limitless weapon into a more appropriate one for a zombie flick. Zombies are undetectable to mind readers and the advanced sensor equipment common to Starfleet vessels (no simply beaming them off into space). There are force fields and replicators, but zombies are patient fucks and will exploit unexpected openings.
While there are several theories across Starfleet regarding these event,: (temporal cold war shenanigans, the Q-Continuum is dead and caused the plague, some sort of subspace glitch,) the cause and cure are not within the scope of the game.
Tags: Star Trek, Star Trek: Revelation, zombies
