Guest Post: Where No Man Has Gone Before

Science Fiction & Fantasy author Chris Willrich takes over Lazy Wolves today. Chris did something I never expected. He merged one of my Thrones & Bones adventures with a fan-made Star Trek game, sending Starfleet up against the draugar. Here's his breakdown of this wild mashup.

“The Aptrgangr’s Challenge” from the Thrones & Bones setting book, using Where No Man Has Gone Before (d20 Star Trek)

“We're not ‘adventurers!’ We aren’t here to loot anything! We're scientific explorers from a post-scarcity society!”

Hi, my name’s Chris Willrich. I wrote the story “Runefall” in Tales from Stolki’s Hall. I had a great time writing something set in Norrøngard, and I’m grateful Lou Anders let me play around a bit in his world. So, speaking of playing around with Norrøngard, here’s what happened when I used it in a Star Trek game.

I have a very occasional Star Trek campaign set in the original series era using the fan-made d20 rules set Where No Man Has Gone Before by Mike Berkey. The rules can be found here. 

Where No Man Has Gone Before, since it’s ultimately derived from Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 (by way of Microlite20, see: https://donjon.bin.sh/m20/Microlite20.pdf) is fairly easy for me to use with any published adventure for games of that lineage. Since the other game I occasionally run is 5e D&D this also helps simplify things for my brain. (Where RPG systems are concerned I’m kind of like a Vancean spellcaster; I can only hold so many in my head at one time.)

I’d been wanting to run “The Aptrgangr’s Challenge” for a while. I’d meant to do it for my D&D group, but scheduling for that game has gotten difficult, and it turned out to be easier to arrange for the Star Trek game. And one of the joys of Star Trek is that you can shoehorn just about anything into it.

And so we bring you the following program in living color ...

Voyages of the U.S.S. Cousteau, episode 5, “The Aptrgangr’s Challenge”

The PCs:

Captain Dirk (Human Yellow Shirt) — Dashing captain of the Cousteau, skilled orator.

Security Chief Peters (Human Red Shirt) — Haunted veteran of gruesome missions.

Science Officer Shras (Andorian Blue Shirt) — Peace-loving scientist from a martial culture

Engineer Scott (Tellarite Red Shirt) — Sure, Tellarites can have human names, why not? Hates transporters.

Nurse T’Vol (Vulcan Blue Shirt) — Field medic, xenobiologist, and, sometimes unluckily for her, the only telepath on the ship.

Ensign Riley (Human Yellow Shirt) — Probably not the Riley from TOS, but maybe a cousin? We’ll find out eventually. Eager young officer, played on purpose like a “Lower Decks” character. 

Cadet Ming-Lau (Human Yellow Shirt) — On her cadet cruise. Daredevil shuttlecraft pilot.

A few recurring NPCs:

First Officer Temple (Neanderthal Yellow Shirt) — She’s from the Neanderthal planet. Of course there’s a Neanderthal planet!

Third Officer Stella Morrison (Human Blue Shirt) — She wears one of the alternate shirt badges they had in TOS; she specializes in finding uninhabited worlds for settlement.

Lieutenant Dodge Forrester (Human Yellow Shirt) — Seasoned shuttlecraft pilot. Plays music on flights. Loves 20th Century rock.

The campaign is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as you might have guessed. The tone is somewhere between TOS and “Lower Decks.” But it’s not outright comedy, and the focus is on exploring unknown worlds in the classic format.

The teaser:

The Cousteau (a Constitution class ship like Pike’s and Kirk’s Enterprise) encounters an uncharted Earthlike planet. This world quickly presents some anomalies. It has a large population of Earth humans — not just humanoids, not just close matches, but beings indistinguishable from the many humans on the ship!

The Cousteau also gets a communique from Starfleet that a Klingon ship was detected by long-range scanners elsewhere in the sector. This is neutral space, and the Klingons have just as much right to explore here. But the crew must stay on their toes.

Okay, so what was I up to here?

I wanted to run “The Aptrgangr’s Challenge” basically as written, but re-skinned for Star Trek. I had a lot of options on how to bring “Vikings” in. When you look at some of the places Kirk’s crew went, it’s kind of surprising they didn’t run into Vikings. Even without the time travel episodes we’ve got a duplicate Earth, a Chicago gangster planet, a Roman planet, a Nazi planet, and a Native American planet.

It’s that last one that intrigued me the most, and which felt the most science-fiction-y. In the episode “The Paradise Syndrome” the Native American planet is explained by the existence of a lost advanced civilization — the Preservers — who transplanted various humanoid cultures to different parts of the galaxy. They also left behind enigmatic “obelisks” filled with high technology to protect the transplanted beings. Here I had a nice, tidy way to put Norrøngard into my Star Trek campaign. I could say the Norrønir’s ancestors had been Norse people transplanted by the Preservers.

This immediately made me wonder, but when exactly? The obvious answer seemed to me the vanished Norse Greenland settlements from Earth history. Their disappearance by the year 1500 is likely the result of many mundane factors, and the colonies were surely just abandoned rather than contacted by aliens! But it’s a fun conceit to use, that the Norse Greenlanders actually got taken to a distant world.

(I don’t know if the math works for these ancestors to have given rise to the population of Norrøngard by the 23rd Century. If any of the players had been worried about that I would have had them find evidence of cloning in the early days to bulk out the population.)

The choice of having the Preservers involved suggested a few more wrinkles.

First, that even though I’d put Norrøngard into my campaign, I hadn’t put the whole world of Qualth into it (though I did give the planet two moons, like Qualth.) The reason is that Qualth is a full-blown fantasy planet with a huge array of cultures, and that just didn’t fit my scheme.

What did fit, and what seemed thematically on-target, was having the Preservers also move a population of Inuit from Greenland to the same planet. I decided for simplicity of concept to put the Norse on a northern continent (matching the Norrøngard map from Thrones & Bones) and the Inuit on a southern continent, both pretty cold places surrounding the planet’s poles. The two continents would be separated by a large equatorial ocean so that travel between them was possible but not at all easy.

This suggested a further concept — the Preservers wanted to transplant both cultures and give them space to grow without coming into conflict with each other. With that in mind I decided there were two Preserver obelisks on the planet, one in the north and one in the south. I put the northern obelisk in (my version of) the town of Bense, and decided the locals venerated it and built their temple around it.

That gave us another anomaly the crew might want to check out, to get them to Bense and the scenario.

(As an aside, early on I considered a different approach, having the locals be aliens who had some Scandinavian-like cultural traits and combining this with a Universal Translator malfunction involving old Viking movies. In the end I thought that was a bit too “meta,” although it might have been funny. Maybe that basic idea can be recycled for a different adventure.)

Returning to our episode …

Science Officer Shras does some orbital recon. Something fun about this was that Shras’ player works with satellite weather images as part of his real-world job, so he ad-libbed some discussion of how you might go about judging the tech level of the local society based on overhead views, smoke plumes, etc.

The crew gets a sense that there are two civilizations here. The Northern Continent has the look of early medieval Europe and the Southern Continent more of a highly-developed subsistence culture.

Nurse T’Vol, using a life sciences bridge station, confirms that the inhabitants are Earth-descended humans. Thanks to her Vulcan mental abilities, she also has the sense that there’s a powerful psychic presence on the planet. She’s able to pinpoint the location of the presence to a particular town on the northern continent.

Meanwhile Ensign Riley, who is doing all kinds of cross-training, does a sensor scan and turns up signs of an idling warp drive and an unusual alloy in the same vicinity. The warp drive and the alloy are not in the same exact location, but are fairly close to each other.

In short, all roads lead to Bense.

Despite it being a low-tech world, Captain Dirk finds these anomalies too interesting not to investigate. Soon a fur-clad landing party (with hooded cloaks for the non-humans) zooms down aboard a shuttlecraft.

(Note: The actual scenario starts in Bense, in Stolki’s Hall specifically. Now, this is wise — if you want the PCs to be guaranteed to go somewhere, just start them there. However a big part of the Star Trek vibe is the approach to the planet and discussion of what to do next. That puts the players in the driver’s seat, and the sense of travel and choice is important to the feel, I think. So I stacked up anomalies in the town of Bense to make sure the PCs went there.)

Why use a shuttle? Engineer Scott hates beaming down. Clearly he knows all about evil duplicates, accidental parallel-world travel, etc. On top of all the other risks, Scott’s of the opinion that beaming just destroys a person and makes a copy, so his existential dread makes him prefer shuttles. Cadet Ming-Lau specializes in small craft so she’s all over this, and her player gleefully describes plunging into the atmosphere and flying close to the wave-tops.

(Note: Ming-Lau’s player later joked that she was very tempted to fly to the Southern Continent since I was clearly pointing all the big red arrows at the north. Narrow escape for the Gamemaster …)

They pass close to what is very obviously a Norse knarr ship, avoiding detection, and they also spot that the undersea life is a mix of Earth creatures and non-Earth creatures. One of the NPCs on the trip, Stella Morrison, is a colonization expert. She tells the group she thinks there’s too wide a dispersal of Earthly life for this planet to be a forgotten colony of Earth spacefarers. It’s more likely the humans and associated creatures were transplanted by aliens many centuries ago — there is precedent for this. Security Chief Peters has heard all the wild stories told in Starbase bars, and he knows about the Preservers.

Landing in a stretch of forest to the northeast of the town the team leaves behind one of the NPCs (Dodge Forrester, a pilot) to guard the shuttle. The others walk toward town. When they get closer they encounter barrow hills and realize that the warp drive they detected is inside one of the barrows!

(Aside: The central image I had for re-skinning the adventure was of a small starship buried inside a hill, just like a funereal Viking longship, such as the one in the original scenario.)

Meanwhile the team detects the strange alloy in a different location — inside the temple in town. The alloy matches that used by the mysterious Preservers.

The landing party decides it makes sense for the non-humans — T’Vol, Shras, and Scott — to stay outside town and check out the barrow hill under cover of night. NPC Morrison decides to stick with them. Dirk, Peters, Reilly, and Ming-Lau enter town to check out the temple. The two groups are dubbed Team Church and Team Grave-Robber.

Captain Dirk gives a speech about the importance of advancing Federation knowledge while showing respect and discretion among other cultures, especially those less technologically advanced. The stirring speech is a special power a Yellow Shirt character can have — the result is a buff to the party’s ability checks and saving throws. (Big respect to Dirk’s player for carefully balancing “acting” the part of a gung-ho captain character while thoughtfully facilitating out-of-character discussions among the real-world player group.)

Team Church experienced the sights and sounds of this alternate version of Bense. I drew on descriptions from the Thrones & Bones campaign guide and from the Yorvik Viking Centre in York, U.K.

I have to say, I stumbled a bit presenting Norrøngard as itself, rather than as movie-Viking-land. In the press of the session I kept forgetting the names of the Norrøngard gods and defaulted to Thor, Odin, etc. I also had mental vapor-lock on remembering any town names beyond Bense, or other specialized terms. But I tried hard to get the flavor right.

Now, I was hoping to get the PCs to the actual start of the written adventure — Stolki’s Hall. But players never do quite what you expect them to do …

They could see that Stolki’s Hall was the social center of town and a good place to get information. And they did consider going in. But they were very reasonably mulling over how to deal with the problem of payment. There were some options, like scanning coins and having the ship manufacture counterfeits, or singing for alms. But since a fight in Stolki’s resulted in someone being tossed out into the street, they decided to question the guy who got thrown out.

The PCs have universal translators built into their communicators, with amazing abilities to mimic voices and project sound so as to create the illusion that a translator user is actually speaking and hearing the local language. (This isn’t canon from the original Star Trek, but this kind of technology was strongly hinted at in the Star Trek: Discovery episode “An Obol for Charon,” and I like this rationale a lot better than everyone in the galaxy speaking English.) The translator has very little trouble with a language related to known Earth tongues. Soon they’re happily talking with the ad-libbed town drunk Bjorn. Bjorn turns out to be conveniently friendly and well-informed, bypassing any need to get them into Stolki’s Hall. (Alas, we missed the food fight, but we had to get things moving.)

Bjorn gives them a quick tour. He asks if Cadet Ming-Lau, who is of Chinese descent and who strikes him as someone from far away, is an Inuit from the Southern Continent. She gives a story about having been a foundling from a shipwreck, raised in a distant town. Bjorn is simply being curious and friendly, and now the group knows for certain there’s more than one transplanted culture on the planet.

Team Church goes to the temple and encounters the Preserver obelisk inside. The gothi there is leading a discussion about what the gods and the Preservers want for the people. In particular he stresses that the gods — just like the high king of Norrøngard — do not want northern raiders attacking the Inuit in the south. At the end of the discussion worshippers are invited to touch the obelisk. A few of the crew do this too, to blend in. They ask the gothi about the Preservers and are informed that the Preservers brought the ancestors of the people — Norse and Inuit alike — from a place called Greenland on a world he calls Midgard. The Norse and Inuit had often been fighting so the Preservers placed them on different continents, to give them a chance to build and grow in peace. No one has seen a Preserver but all revere their works. The local religion seems to be a strange blend of Scandinavian mythology, Christianity, and reverence of the Preservers, all mixed together. (This deviates from Norrøngard as written but seemed to fit the background for this planet.)

At some point during the town exploration first officer Temple calls from the ship. She informs Captain Dirk that there’s a transporter inhibiter field now covering the town, centered on the barrow with the warp-capable ship inside. They can still get back via the shuttle but there’ll be no emergency beam-outs.

So, by now it seems time to start the scenario-as-written. At this point the catalyst for the original scenario, Hermund Tall Tales, bursts into the temple looking for help: “Cat—cat—cat! A monstrous cat is trying to kill me!”

(Note: I had no plan for touching the obelisk to be relevant but decided it mattered when I ran a later episode involving Preserver obelisks.)

We switch back to Team Grave-Robber.

As it’s gotten dark, Team Grave-Robber heads toward the correct barrow hill. They encounter wolves. These wolves are re-skinned from the ones in the adventure but have the same stats. While they do look generally wolf-like they are purple-furred and have black cilia extending from their heads. T’Vol comes to the conclusion that these are examples of life forms native to the planet. Team Grave-Robber decies it’s time for the phasers to come out. They aren’t eager to kill (good for them!) but aren’t sure the stun setting will be effective, and even if it does work they’d still have dangerous creatures in the vicinity who will eventually wake up. So they set a tree on fire and the creatures run off.

The team enters the “dungeon” proper. The barrow is used more or less as is, statistics- and atmosphere-wise. The rationale for the re-skinning is this:

There is, or was, a (non-canon) species elsewhere in the galaxy, which various other species came to call the Monitors. The Monitors were in the habit of sending scout ships to observe various galactic phenomena, and one of the things they were intrigued by was the activity of the Preservers. Thus, wherever there is a Preserver relic, there’s a chance a Monitor scout ship is lurking nearby.

The Monitors are gelatinous goo creatures (modeled on the monster the green slime), self-luminous, with powerful psychic abilities. They seem amoral, lacking many of the scruples of other species, though they’re not really evil as such. The Monitor who came to this planet long ago had, for example, no regrets crashing its ship into a barrow mound and destroying the Norrøngard sailing vessel buried there, letting the starship take the sailing ship’s place. The Monitor rebuilt the mound and set up shop. It learned enough of the local history to ooze into the remains of Skathi, the warlord buried there. It amused “Skathi” to animate this dead warrior and play into local legends about draugr. It installed various technological tricks to simulate a haunted barrow mound. Sometimes it toyed with treasure hunters who entered the mound. In this way “Skathi” kept itself amused while it kept its long watch over the Preserver obelisk. As the adventure starts “Skathi” is very bored and is seeking to draw in more visitors. Thus it flows into a second host-form, a robotic cat it’s constructed for excursions, and goes off to torment a local tale-teller, so as to lure someone into the mound.

Thus the space explorers are drawn in. “Skathi” is very intrigued as it realizes the new visitors aren’t from this world.

Here’s a run-down of the re-skinned barrow mound.

Area 1. Forgotten Warrior’s Barrow. The gust of wind and eerie light are both technological tricks of “Skathi.”

Area 2. Beleaguered Frost Sprite Tunnel. The frost sprite is a psychic attack from “Skathi.”

[Team Grave-Robber defeats the psychic attack with no casualties. At this point Team Church, having been pointed this way by Hermund Tall Tales, catches up. I bypassed the earlier encounters with the NPCs Bergljot Karlsdóttir, whom I would have made a local psychic, and Nils the Nisse, whom I would have made a stranded member of Keenser’s species (Keenser is Scotty’s colleague in the alternate reality “Kelvinverse” Star Trek movies.) If I do run “The Aptrgangr’s Challenge” for my D&D group it will be fun to actually do these encounters as written.]

Area 3. Trapped Barrow Full of Rats. The “rats” are from the local ecology, and like the “wolves” earlier they are purple-furred and have sensory cilia. The dead Svartálfar Underhand agent is re-skinned into a dead Klingon explorer who arrived here days ago.

Area 4. Barricaded Barrow of the Terror-Stricken Svartálfar. The surviving Svartálfar agent Linura in the adventure is re-skinned into the surviving Klingon explorer Klinura. Captain Dirk charms Klinura into accepting an alliance, though she is suspicious. She proceeds with the Starfleet group.

Area 5. Barrow of the Disgruntled Draugr. I don’t remember exactly how I re-skinned this room. I think one of the two foes here is a dead Klingon possessed by “Skathi,” who sneaks off after the Klingon corpse is defeated, and the other is a robot simulating a “draugr.”

Area 6. Barrow of the Recently Departed. The opponent here is Etri, a human warrior mentally dominated by “Skathi.” A complication here is that starting with Area 6 the PCs enter an energy dampening field generated by “Skathi’s” ship, and their phasers won’t work. [Etri goes berserk against the PCs and they defeat him, but are unable to save his life.]

Area 7. Barrow of the Buried Longship. In my re-skin this is the barrow of “Skathi’s” starship, which I represented on the battlemap with a frying pan.

The PCs enter facing the “saucer section” of the frying pan. The frying pan’s handle, its single “warp nacelle,” points toward the stairs leading further down. By this point in the adventure the PCs are being mocked by “Skathi,” who is going all horror-villain with his dialogue. It especially taunts T’Vol, since she is telepathic too, and Peters, whom it can sense has experienced lots of terror in his security career. When it calls the team “adventurers,” Engineer Scott fires back that they are “scientific explorers.”

“Skathi” is enjoying its games with the PCs, but the PCs are focused on how to turn off the dampening field. They figure “Skathi” is going to kill them all otherwise. It probably wouldn’t but they don’t know that.

They seek to get inside the ship. The ship is protected by a more powerful robot “draugr” (Hargil the Bloodless in the original adventure) with swords that can launch like missiles from its arms and be drawn back to the main body. It leans out a porthole and attacks from above. (Our younger kid had gotten a gift of a miniature figure with magnetic swords, which I asked to borrow for this. I draped the mini over the edge of the frying pan.)

(A robot, honest!)

Klinura charges and tries to ascend the ship to reach the porthole. Alas she is wounded and falls while the main party swings around the curve of the ship, seeking a better access point. Nurse T’Vol risks enemy attacks to heal the Klingon. Revived, Klinura declares, “You have saved me! We are now BATTLE SISTERS! You will be the first Vulcan in Stovokor!"

“That’s, er, very kind I’m sure,” T’Vol answers.

“What’s Stovokor?” someone asks (I think Riley.)

“Klingon Valhalla,” Scott answers.

“That tracks,” says Peters.

Captain Dirk gets the ship’s main access opened — and “Skathi” in its green slime form oozes forth. In its natural, fully combined state, it fills much of the ship. Engineer Scott gets inside to try and get control of the ship, Ensign Riley assisting. Cadet Ming-Lau tries to assist Dirk (I think, it’s been a while.)

Security Chief Peters and Science Officer Shras proceed down the stairs (Area 8. Descending Staircase, which I meant to have the same mechanical obstacles as the original, though in the heat of the battle I think I forgot about that.) They encounter Area 9, The Aptrgangr’s Arena, and behold the marvel of the life-sized Thrones & Bones board, complete with humanoid robots for pieces. There is also a large device near the game board that Shras determines is the energy dampener. “Skathi” informs them of its cosmic boredom and its desire to play interesting games with other intelligent beings.

Peters and Shras disable the energy dampener and flee the robots. Phasers work again!

But direct phaser blasts prove of limited use against the slime-form of “Skathi.” Perhaps old-fashioned fire would work? Captain Dirk (I am not making this up) tears off his shirt, throws it onto “Skathi,” and sets it alight with his phaser. “Skathi’s” substance burns, and it psychically screams into the PCs’ minds!

Meanwhile Ming-Lau has rushed into the ship to protect Scott and Riley from the draugr robot inside. Amusing moment:

MING-LAU: I’m so dead. This thing’s got swords and I’ve got nothing.

SOMEONE (I forget who): Phasers work again!

MING-LAU: Oh! [Zap! Thud.]

Thus defended, Scott and Riley figure out how to operate the ship, sort of.

Scott and Riley activate the ship’s impulse engines to send a gout of energy down the stairs; this delays the threat of the robots and melts the energy dampener and damages “Skathi” some more.

“Skathi” is losing ground here, and proves open to negotiation.

Ming-Lau has the idea of offering “Skathi” access to all the games of in the Cousteau’s computer database. What’s more, there will be volunteers, starting with her, to play against “Skathi,” as long as no one gets hurt. “If you want games — we’ve got games! Have you heard of chess, go, checkers, backgammon, Settlers of Catan?”

“What? What are these games you speak of?”

“Our culture has thousands of games! Yours for the taking, if we can resolve all this!”

More PCs shout names of games — Poker! Parcheesi! Connect Four!

“Skathi” says, “I … I would welcome this new respite from boredom. Very well, travelers, if you can teach me new games, I accept.”

And so a deal is struck.

This bypassed the climax of the original adventure, so I didn’t get to do the big Thrones & Bones game. But it was such a Star Trek ending it seemed like the right way to finish.

In a surprise epilogue, Captain Dirk offers not only to eventually get the Klingon Klinura back home, but to make her a temporary observer/officer aboard the Cousteau, as a friendly gesture between the Federation and the Empire. Klinura agrees. (This was an unexpected idea from Dirk’s player, and I thought it was great.)

The players were intrigued by this planet, so they explored the Southern Continent in the next adventure. (I adapted the starting adventure from the RPG Angakkuit, from Abstract Nova, inspired by Inuit stories.) They then took leave of this system, but I think they will return to visit this version of Norrøngard again.

I had a great time running “The Aptrganger’s Challenge,” though I hope I do get to eventually run it more the way it was intended.

Thanks for tuning in!

Disclaimer: Thrones & Bones belongs to Lou Anders and Star Trek belongs to Paramount Pictures.