Hours before the start of my Saturday night Star Trek Adventures game, I was dreading signing into Discord and Roll20. This week, I was going to attempt something I had never done as a player before. This week, I was going to be antagonizing the team from within.
It was time for the Evil version of my character, Captain Riale Chai.
When approached by my game master with the idea of a classic Star Trek transporter accident that divides my character into 'good' and 'evil', I jumped at the chance to play this up. Then promptly forgot about the short story I had planned to write to tie some motivations and prejudices into her background. Luckily the GM prompted me again to think about what might push Captain Chai into a more paranoid state of mind.
Eventually I settled on attempting to portray an idea that I had heard actors discuss from time to time in their roles as villains. The idea that the villain believes they are in the right to an unquestioning degree. Interpreting that for my character, when Evil Chai took effect I tried to do away with the idea of taking everyone's advice into consideration. The captain stopped asking for her crews' opinion, she started issuing more direct orders, and she didn't hold herself back from following her instincts even when they no longer seemed to have a logical basis.
It was a lot of fun.
The first victim of my character’s transformation was a civilian Vulcan scientist, who received a snarky critique of his transporter management. Although the person most surprised by this small conversation was probably myself. Neither the GM or a fellow player in the scene reacted to Captain Chai’s tiny tantrum as anything out of the ordinary. For me however, it was something of a surreal experience, as I tend to withhold my complaints to people who I consider family or close friends. Letting out a negative comment, and an entirely fictional one at that, was crossing a taboo. Soon afterwards, Captain Chai was injecting comments that pushed the boundaries of what was considered acceptable.
But it was also a challenge. Behind the actions of the character, I had several moments of wondering if I had gone too far, or not gone far enough to hint without ever explicitly saying that something was up. For the majority of the night, Captain Chai did not overtly come into conflict with the other player's characters. During one interrogation of an NPC (non player character) the Captain made threats to harm the non-aggressive woman; this was my least favorite moment of the game. Looking back, I wish I had thought of a different way to handle the threat. More subtlety, or a better phrasing of the threat would have been more in character.
With her crew, the Captain pushed and encouraged them to be suspicious of the starbase they were on, and the nonplayer characters as well. Eventually though, the Klingon exchange officer, our ship's CMO, called her out on her behavior. Captain Chai ordered the Klingon back to the ship, and then issued an order to confine her to quarters as well.
Still, that wasn't quite enough. The game continued on, until the First Officer questioned the Captain's methods of controlling the investigation on this suspicious starbase. We ended with the Captain stunning her XO with a phaser blast to the back.
The secret was out.
Next session I get to use the Threat pool, a resource normally used by the GM and his antagonists, and I get to pull out all the stops. Which is important, because I only have one tenuous ally, the civilian Holo-deck specialist who is unpredictable at best. The rest of the group is going to be out to get me, and, with my rolling lately, the reign of Evil Captain Chai may be short lived!
