Designing An Actor - Act 1

So with the basic premise of the story complete, I'd like to set up some actors that the user will interact with in Act 1. There will not be a great amount of people in this act, but this will be an important set up for the rest of the episode. So let's lay out our actors real quick, and then I'll go into each one with descriptions as I design them.

Vice Admiral Bryer - This is the man with the plan, he is the one who starts you out on this crazy race! He'll be your POC for giving you the mission.

Ensign Reyes - This is the girl who ultimately drives the first act. She is the one who finds the odd sensor reading and brings it to your attention. She'll likely have much to do with the rest of the episode.


Designing Bryer -
no ideas now, will fill in later.


Designing Rachael Reyes -
Initial Ideas - At first I wanted to give the user an npc they could relate to, get attached to. Someone from the underbelly of the ship that they haven't seen before to really connect to. I'm really drawn to give these npcs life much like the show episode "Lower Decks" did for several ensigns. These characters were not really fleshed out before, but they received a large amount of love in this episode, and made us grow close to them.

I decided to choose a female for this role mainly because I wanted to portray innocence and a bit of being naive, and I think I could convey that better in a female form. I also decided to make our Ensign here of Spanish descent because I always found characters in Star Trek with diverse backgrounds to be a nice touch. No everyone has to be white!

Background -
Rachael grew up off Earth on Starbase 105 where her father work as a civilian engineer for the station. Her mother worked at a small restaurant on the station. Rachael's early life was very unfantastic, the biggest thing in her life was being accepted to Starfleet Academy when she was 19 on her second try. She majored in Astrophysics and this is her first assignment out of the Academy, only being on your ship 2 months.

Creating a memorable episode

So I sat down and told myself..."I'm going to create a mission in STO using the foundry", and quickly scratched my head and said "But what would be good?". I didn't want to throw a loosely jointed mission together and then throw in a few mob groups and call it good, I wanted something to set up and FEEL like a star trek episode. I want the user to finish and have the same feeling of a star trek episode, not the feeling of "That was some text and mobs...meh".

So I need a place to start. I need to KNOW what realy made a star trek episode. I want to know the formula they used. So I hit up youtube and typed in "star trek" and jumped to a random page and looked for the first episode. What I came across was a Deep Space 9 episode "Soldiers of the Empire" so I sat back and watched it, doing my best to dissect how this episode 'ticked'.

The episode starts off, in summary, with General Martok received orders from Klingon Command to find a missing cruiser on the Cardassian border. He confides in Worf that he is slightly...hesitant to this, as it's been some time since he's been in battle, but has a great urge to get back into it. He then asks something of Worf that catches him off guard, to join him in battle. This comes off as probably a great honor, but probably something a bit alarming to leave his post on deep space nine.

Regardless of the actual reasoning why, or the actual story line, this is a very common way to start a star trek episode. Start the episode light, but something unexpected or alarming happens, drawing in the watcher. So what my foundry mission needs...is a great teaser into the episode.

So to start my episode, we'll need something light, not related to the actual story line. We'll do this by having the Captain receive a message from Starfleet Command looking to update their information of several sectors of space near the edge of Federation space. It has been a long time since those sectors were scanned, and the mission is of up most importance. Upon reaching the specified sectors, the ship's Astrometrics lab picks up a very odd signal from one of the systems. The scans indicate that the inhabitants of the sector have achieved warp technology, and possible first contact is necessary. Astrometrics call the captain down and present the data, but astrometrics also presents the knowledge that previous scans of the inhabitants indicate they were only just starting in a industrial age 40 years ago. Something is very wrong and the captain should investigate. Upon further scanning, the captain reveals that the inhabitants possess technology that rivals starfleet, and oddly enough, the technology closely resembles borg...

So in summary the rough outline for the teaser for the episode will be this:
- Ordered to scan systems by starfleet
- Astrometrics calls captain down, something is wrong
- Astrometrics brief captain about an odd signal
- Revealed to the captain that a race seems to have accelerated their technological development
- Captain scans again, finding that the technology the inhabitants have is comparable to that of Starfleet, but some technology is very primitive.
- Computer picks up something about the technology, that it's readings read very close to borg technology.

With the teaser written, I'll begin to lay down actors, environment and scripts for the teaser.