The Enterprise D finds this strange object drifting in space

>>49209793
So is this /tv/ or /v/?

>>49209793
Night Terrors, only worse

>>49209793
Something something put it in storage for study, something something a redshirt is killed, something something reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, something something space the artefact and blow it up with phasers, something something captains log, stardate numbers; status quo is maintained.

>>49209793
The crew disappears suddenly with sensor logs indicating that they were ripped through reality violently. During most of the episode fragments of their panicked pleading for mercy can be heard echoing through the corridors. Single random personnel remain throughout the ship, hiding and sometimes following boarding protocols and trying to secure key systems with mixed results. Coms are mostly out but will randomly function for dramatic effect.

At the same time the main computer starts malfunctioning in ways that are hardly noticeable at first. Decks are vented seemingly at random. Replicators start producing gases that fog up quarters. Doors fail to permit the characters through. Turbolift shafts open without a lift waiting. And a feedback cascade is starting to build up in the main deflector.

It is an ancient probe built to discover life and retrieve samples automatically. The culture that built it probably perished long ago and far away. Its slipstream teleporter has been out of order for a while so it is reprogramming the ship to beam the crew to wherever it has to send them via the main deflector.

The bridge crew can discover this through a detailed computer analysis in the central isolinear node where controls still function to a degree. They can launch a shuttle and retrieve the object, tractor beams are down. They can destroy the probe but that won't return the crew who are encoded in the ship's transporter buffers only retrievable by the probe, which also puts transporters out of order (maybe the shuttle ones will work).

Not sure how to stop it. One way could be techno babble, modifying the ship's systems to deny the probe access and restore the crew by hacking the probe? Another might be diplomacy, finding a language the probe will recognize and convincing it that its mission has stopped making sense and is causing harm. Or it could finish its transmission and return control of the ship so that the remaining crew must retrieve the others.

>>49213608
blocking the marker signal could do it.

>>49213608
The probe has collected lots of other life as well. And it is failing to contain it all in the ship's inferior systems. This leads to random creatures materializing at inopportune moments in the worst possible place. Could be armed Klingon warriors, could be a Xenomorph, could be Species 8472.

>>49209793
All turns out to be Q fuckery and is later reversed with the snap of a finger

>>49209793
>"Ensign Clark to the bridge"

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Moving on
What happens when there are no demons, only communists?

>>49212857
I know I'm late, but /thread

>>49209793

As far as the lore goes, nothing happens; The original marker is not a threat unless you read a whole bunch of "WARNING" labels and suddenly decide to replicate the biochemistry the label warns you about.

>>49215132
>The original marker
op's pic has a red marker, activated.

>>49215222

My bad, it's been a while.

Well, if Starfleet is even slightly well run, we're only going to lose like twelve ships as every captain in turn pretends they're smarter than the previous one.

>>49213928
>[Painful shouting intensifies]

Well, nothing much is going to happen on a starship.

The only reason the markers were cock suckers to begin with in the Dead Space games was because they piggy backed on the whole Unitology shit wagon and people offed themselves because their faith made it seem like a good idea to do so.

The Enterprise crew, not knowing of this religion or the markers religious significance would jettison the bastard as soon as members of the crew started having mass hallucinations.

They are under no obligation to bring the marker back or protect it in any way like the Dead Space crew members were.

A better deep space artifact to find would be the flight data of the Event Horizon that would infect the ship from the inside turning the Enterprise into a hellscape from which there is no escape.

>>49216190
The thing is, unless they flat out destroy the marker it's gonna keep broadcasting it's crazy signal and reanimating dead tissue. If not the Enterprise, then some other ship zeros in on it.

>>49209793
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr0OHhA6rGs

>"Computer activate EMH program"

>"This isn't part of my program, I am a doctor not a doorstop"

>"I don't care do a dance, tell a story, just buy a us a few seconds!"

>"...according to Starfleet research, pain is a major side effect of advanced necrosis reanimation. Perhaps you would like some anesthesia"

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?

>>49216383
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OCKDEdtWys

>Trying to board a Prometheus-class must be a straight up nightmare. Full ship solid holograms. So much fun with them for the crew. Oh well, even non solid holograms, forcefields, gravity plating and transporters could probably repel boarders.

None of the hallways are at 90 degree angles any more. They twist and rotate as you walk down them. The walls bleed and gibber. You go full on Space Hulk at that point. Xenomorphs and other fun things.

>>49209793
"Take us in number 1"
"engage"

you want horror?

Reflections in the window do not look quite right, on closer examination all of the people in the reflection look as though they have started to decompose, although it might just be a trick of the light of course.

The players are doing whatever in the ship when a creature that cannot eaisly be described tears it way through someone's eyes. It proceeds to murder and mutilate all of the players. When the last players dies they wake up in their bunk having all shared the dream.

The computer occaisionally refuses to perform commands claiming that is in violation of Sub procedure 912.8 Paragraph G.

No such procedure exists.

>>49212857
This.

If it's in the Star Trek setting it isn't horror. Star Trek can't do horror. They try but it inevitably fuck up because Star Trek can't help but try and explain everything and once it's explained it stops being scary and starts being lame. Once its explained you can just technobabble your Bull Shit Science and reverse the polarity of the tachyons in the main deflector dish to invert the subspace field of the warp core.

The nearest they ever managed to get with horror was the VOY episode with the radiation zombie. But then they had to explain it and it turns out it was just a former crew member with radiation sickness fucking up his brain.

If you wanted horror you would have to go and make it inexplicable. But then it might not be considered propper Star Trek, but it might be very good.

>>49220004

Well I mean the Borg were fairly horrific...till Voyager fucked it all up.

>>49220004
>If you wanted horror you would have to go and make it inexplicable.

No you don't.
You just need to invoke fear.
Fear of the unknown is not the only fear, or even the strongest fear.

>>49220004
What if they stumble upon a Space Hulk?

There is some technobabble to pull out, but once they get to warp fuckery? That is basically Space magic.

If anything it would interesting.

>>49220159
I wouldn't say they were that horrific.

Scary for sure but not true horror because everybody knew what they were after and they were predictable In their behaviour.

You couldn't stop them anymore than you could stop a tsunami and standing in front of one would have about the same effect but they were big, unsubtle and could be spotted a long way off so you could always find a nice hill to stand on. Or deep space to hide in as the case may be.

But yes. Voyager turned them from an unstoppable force of nature into extensions of the Queen's toddler tier tantrum.

>>49220172
At least for a game context you are definitely mistaken. Anything the players can measure becomes a challenge, not tension.

And in general: the part that's scary is always loss of control. No matter which fear you dissect, that's at its heart.

So to construct fear in fiction, first establish something as reliable, then undermine it. In Star Trek that can mean the computer, the ship, or the crew, sometimes reality itself.

Anyone remember a thread we had a few years ago when someone wanted us to make the Starfleet ship with the worst possible serial number and potential to be unlucky?

First post in thread was

>136164

>In Russia even numbers are unlucky.

>In Japan and Korea 4 and 9 are unlucky as 4 sounds like 'death' and 9 sounds like 'suffering'.

>In most European countries except Italy 13 is unlucky.

>6 and 4 are even numbers and putting the 3 of 13 next to the first 6 gives you 9 by association. Also 616 is number of The Beast.

>Additionally, 164 in Mandarin is a homophone for "one road to death"

The game was also to be set just post-Dominion war. As such the ship was the Frankensteined together corpses of other Starfleet ships due to the Federations desperation and crippling ship shortage at the time.

Could be a good start for a game. Also keep throwing in other weird numbers.

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>>49220314
Forgot pic.

>>49209793

By Star Trek logic? They beam it aboard, decontaminate it, and put it in a level 5 containment field. No exposure to black goo, no necromorphs.

However, the signal basically hits the jackpot. something like 70+% of the crew of the Enterprise has the skills necessary for their brain to handle the marker signal, so a pretty low number of them would start to go crazy. The rest start building markers and shit. This becomes fucking trivial with replicator tech, by the way. If the crew isn't stopped, there could be hundreds of new markers in a matter of days.

Then it turns into a Data episode, as he would be unaffected by the psychic signal. Data makes his way down through the failing ship tot he storage area and destroys the marker dual wielding phasers set to max. Finding that removing the source of the signal hasn't stopped the insanity, Data goes to medbay and works with Beverly and any other sickbay staff lucid enough to contribute to concoct a biogen gas that non-lethally attacks a specific portion of the brain, specifically that related to memory.

Flooding the ship with the gas, the crew passes out and waked up only to realize that they have no memory of the past few days, the signal removed from their minds. The crew still has to undergo more thorough quarantine and memetic sterilization procedures to make sure that no one person still has enough of the signal buried int heir mind to cause a resurgence, but the matter is basically treated as solved with only a couple of deaths and some self maiming that can be fixed up by a skilled federation doctor.

>>49220695
Data's best ally in such a situation would probably be Barclay.

A combination of his brain being an unhospitable ball of self-loathing, fear of everything and treating everything like an engineering problems would probably not be conductive to the Signal taking root.

That and having your brain over ridden is a train he has ridden before and wouldn't be ridden by it again.

>>49220695
Now do the Flood from Halo.

With and without a Gravemimd

>>49220760

Without a Gravemind? The Flood are basically at the mercy of Federation transporter tech. While the initial outbreak will be devastating to anyone int he same room as it, even a basic lockdown of the area will buy enough time for them to be systematically beamed into space and vaporized. Federation tech is good at vaporizing things, so a biological contaminant like the flood can be fairly easily purged in a fight. Flood combat forms are still deadly if they get close to you, but handheld phasers turn beating them into a point and click adventure because they don't have any fancy shielding or science armor.

With a Gravemind? The flood can infect and subvert computer systems as well as flesh. This makes them 3000% more dangerous to the federation, because it turns their own science against them. In that case, there is a very limited window where the Federation has the chance to purge the Flood at its point of initial outbreak before it has a chance to spread. They have lots of ways to do this, the Federation can shit out planet burning superweapons with hilarious ease. But if they fail to contain that initial outbreak, when the Flood infestation is at its weakest? The federation likely goes the way of the Forerunners, except the federation would never build something like the Halo rings to purge the entire galaxy of life.

>>49220004
>If you wanted horror you would have to go and make it inexplicable.

That's wrong. Alien is classic horror movie, and nothing was inexplicable. In fact, that can make great horror, where you know exactly what's happening, but are still incapable of stopping it.

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>>49223516
>Alien
>nothing was inexplicable
Maybe Xenomorphs have become an established trope from Starcraft to 40k. But Alien is the film that established them.

The whole process of egg > face hugger > chest burster > drone was entirely original. The insect appearance maybe reminded a little of Starship Troopers, but only insofar that it was alien yet somehow familiar.

You really ought to think before you type.