It’s Tuesday again and I’m back with my series of traitorous garbage characters discussion. When I first thought of this as a topic it occurred to me that I have two stories—and maybe a bonus semi-third—from a TTRPG point of view about weaving traitorous characters—this time an NPC—into campaigns as the narrator, and that it could be fun to talk about them. 

This time, I’m heading back to Star Trek Adventures, which mostly plays as an episodic game—which can make weaving in a traitor a bit harder. You generally only get one shot with most characters, but it’s the most I’m talking about today because of a pre-printed adventure and the kismet of the characters in one of my ongoing campaigns. 

Let’s talk Tal Duron.

Trill Seeking

In one of my gaming groups for Star Trek Adventures, I’ve got an (almost) entirely Trill-based crew. This happened at random (I’ve told this tale before) as a result of me asking if I knew anyone who’d like to try Star Trek Adventures online, and getting eleven people who said yes, half of which wanted to play Trill characters. I leaned into it, and the USS Curzon was launched: the first majority Trill-crewed Starfleet ship. This allowed the ship to have some cool qualities (traits, in Star Trek Adventures terms) like “Trill-crewed,” and “Grand Experiment” (this latter being a more political than technological or scientific, but adding some pressure for Curzon to always be a PR success for the Trill Ministry back home, who pushed for this ship to happen even though Trill isn’t yet a Federation Member).

I tend to use pre-published adventures about half the time (and I’ve talked before about how awesome pre-published adventures are), and one of the joys of having the two groups is deciding which adventure works best for which group. When I was looking at the three-part adventure included in the Starter Campaign, which (spoiler territory) deals with the parasite aliens from the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I’d pretty much decided this was going to be handed to the Trill group. We never saw any Trill interact with these parasites, but it would have to make for a solid narrative for a species that embodies symbiosis to face off against a species that embodies parasitism and enslavement, no?

Then, while reading the adventure synopsis, I found him. Tal Duron.

Building a Villain The starter campaign, “A Star Beyond the Stars.“

Again, spoiler-territory, but Tal Duron is a Trill NPC who shows up mid-way through the three-episode trilogy in the starter campaign as working with the alien parasites, and his motivation is basically: he wants to be joined, but didn’t make the criteria cut-offs for the Trill Symbiosis Commission, and this—he feels—is his chance. He’s doing horrible things, genetic augmentation, messing with genomes, trying to make things more of a “partnership” for the parasitic aliens, but to be clear? This is for him. He’s not trying to make anything better so much as trying to touch immortality the way he could have done had he been joined with a symbiont. He’s horrible. And there’s a chance the players can turn him around, sure, but he’s already cut a swath through flesh and blood.

Now, in the campaign as written, he’s that. That’s his whole role. Whether or not the players turn him to their side, whether or not he ends up helping them or not, they can get past the problems and head to the main climax of the campaign. But given he was a Trill doing this horrible thing, I decided I wanted him to be way, way more important. But how do you do that when he pops up mid-adventure?

Easy. You seed him backwards into the campaign. Have him show up ahead of time, have the players briefly meet him or interact with him. Make him a known quantity before this major moment. I popped him into an earlier episode… just as a “oh, and there’s the somewhat infamous Tal Duron moment…”

And it almost went completely off the rails, of course.

Ah, Players. Is There Nothing They Won’t Notice?

Here was my simple, “what could go wrong?” plan: In an episode before the players would go through the starter campaign boxed trilogy, they were attending a medical conference. The plot of that episode was centred around harm and the fallout of not dealing well with ones own loss and grief—one of the players learning they could have been a Guardian, that they’ve got some latent telepathic ability—but in the worst way possible: accidentally telepathically connecting with a surviving Miradorn twin who’d lost their sibling and starting this sort of cascade “flashback of trauma moments” telepathic outbreak during the conference.

While all this was happening—the A Plot, as it were—I had Tal Duron be present at the conference, had another NPC character on board the ship (one the players don’t particularly like), get into a fistfight with Tal Duron on sight. Like, Dr. Mahar, the older, frustrating, fussy Symbiosis Commission expert on board the Curzon, just haul off and slugged Tal Duron. In keeping with the theme of trauma, the crew learned that Tal Duron had been put on trial (and importantly, found not guilty) when the ship he’d been on with a Joined Trill friend was badly damaged, the Joined Trill injured, but Duron deciding to operate to “save” the symbiont without the right equipment or for-sure knowing that the host was dying. The prosecution presented that Tal Duron was basically doing a “I want to be Joined, so I’ll “save” this symbiont,” whereas the defence presented it as him truly trying to do the right thing. The host and symbiont died. The trial happened. Duron was basically shunned out of society despite the not-guilty verdict because his family were important and influential and among Trill the general consensus was he got away with it because of who he was, not his actual intent being pure.

Oh, and that joined Trill who died? The Captain’s brother.

So, what was intended to happen was for this to play out in the background. The players would learn a bit about the Captain’s past (specifically, her brother), Tal Duron would get his first glimpse as “Okay, we don’t like him, but he’s not doing anything illegal or wrong, so… that’s the end of that.” And onward we’d go, right? After all, there’s a telepathic outbreak happening where people are falling into telepathic replays of traumatic events, and we need to focus on that, obviously.

Right?

Wrong.

Alternative Access Protocols

The Chief Engineer and the Ship’s Counsellor both immediately picked up on Tal Duron being bad news, and they 100% didn’t trust him to breathe at this conference without ill intent. They hacked his security. They listened in (both with tech and telepathy).

Ultimately, I ran with this—I wasn’t going to give them anything illegal they could action (and I kept reminding them of the illegality of some of their—ahem—alternative access protocols they were using to gain information about him through the hotel computers and the like. All the while, the other A-plot was unfolding, and Tal Duron was even suspected of being involved. He was a trained doctor and a geneticist. Maybe it was his fault? He’s an asshole. Surely he’s involved?

Then the crew overheard him getting the “job offer” that would place him where he needed to be in the upcoming episode, and they seriously considered figuring out a way to ground him, arrest him, you name it—and I had to lean pretty heavily on “Under what charge?” while they got annoyed that this obviously bad person was agreeing to “freedoms” he’d have with the Cardassian Empire for his research (I swapped out Cardassia for the Romulans in my version of the campaign, I should note) but they had nothing to work with. “I don’t like him being hired by Cardassians because he’s a bad man” doesn’t exactly hold up as a legal charge.

Ultimately, this side-track worked out for the best. The players loathed Tal Duron before he’d even done anything to them. But I definitely learned my lesson about dangling any potential less-than-great character in front of them at any time: less is more.

You Again! (And Again, Kind Of)!

Eventually, the players did face off against Tal Duron in the campaign, more-or-less as written in the three-part adventure. The Ship’s Counsellor got to deliver quite the therapeutic “You’re Lying To Everyone, Especially Yourself” talk with him where Duron basically had a breakdown. This was after the Science Officer had his “Everyone Deserves a Second Chance!” Value challenged by Duron existing and decided sometimes that second chance is to be slugged in the face with prejudice (his Value is now “Everyone Deserves the Chance to Show You Who They Are,” I believe).

Duron was brought up on charges for what he did, Trill justice tossed him in jail, and while it wasn’t entirely satisfying given the death and destruction in his wake—and how almost everything ended up classified—he definitely went down as one of the most memorable villains in the campaign thus far.

(Then, for funsies, I brought him back again—kind of—when the group went into the Mirror Universe, and it was great. They didn’t trust him to do anything. He was a pilot, not a scientist or doctor, and it didn’t matter. Ultimately, they also learned he was a murderer there, too, and Mirror Duron tried to betray them, and it was honestly really fun to play out the moment. They were all more-or-less, ‘And there it is!’ about the whole thing, and had prepped for it.)

And there. Tal Duron is done.

Well… he’s in jail. So surely he’s finished appearing in the campaign, right?

Right?

Right?

Anyway, tell me about your favourite villains from your campaigns—either as a player or a narrator—and if you, like me, ever flubbed up and accidentally shifted your B-plot a major slice of the A-plot time because you gave the players too much shiny in the B-plot.