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Valley of the Shadow III (ST-HNDYF3PDR)@NCC-89471
"[Rom] Valley of the Shadow III" (mission ID: ST-HNDYF3PDR, aka "Fear No Evil") is the third and final mission in the Valley of the Shadow series. The [Rom] tag in the title identifies this mission as one designed for Federation-allied Romulan Republic characters. (The Foundry only supports Federation and Klingon factional alignments, so this mission was published as a Federation mission. A Klingon Empire-allied version, titled "[Rom] VotS3: Fear No Evil", is also available.)
Synopsis[ | ]
Historical context[ | ]
The series takes place in the year 2409 during Cryptic's Romulan Republic story arc, in between the mission series Vengeance and Freedom. It is also a prequel to the Foundry mission series Ghosts of War by the same author.
Plot summary[ | ]
Part III picks up right where Part II left off, as the player's ship charges headlong into the battle above New Romulus. The Imperial fleet comes in three waves, as do reinforcements from the Romulan Republic, the Federation and the Klingon Empire - including the Republic's new flagship, the R.R.W. Lleiset, which was hastily recalled from a joint mission with Starfleet to help defend the Republic homeworld.
In the end, the Republic and its allies emerge victorious - but at a heavy price: The lead Starfleet vessel, U.S.S. Pax Federatica, is critically damaged and must be evacuated before its destruction in a warp core breach. Her captain, Serida Auslin, temporarily assumes command of the U.S.S. Lexington (whose captain and first officer were both badly injured in the battle) to help shore up New Romulus defenses while the Lleiset resumes its joint mission with Starfleet - and the player is ordered by Proconsul D'Tan to return to Nivay IV, presumed to be the Tal Shiar's first target for its newly developed orbital thalaron weapon platform.
Upon arrival in the Nivay system, the player discovers that the Tal Shiar have begun broadcasting high-energy tachyon pulses from the planet's surface, in order to expose any cloaked ships approaching the planet - to then be attacked by the Imperial blockade fleet parked in orbit. The player must be careful to stay out of weapons range of any of these ships, lest his/her ship be too close when the next pulse hits. After slipping past the blockade, the player tries to hail the Nivayan resistance but gets no response - and soon discovers that their underground tunnel network has been overrun by Imperial troops and their Hirogen and Elachi allies.
The player leads an away team into the tunnels to join the fight, helping the Nivayans clear out the invaders from the tunnels. In the process, they also discover and defeat a traitor within the resistance (albeit an unwitting one, having apparently been abducted and mentally conditioned by the Tal Shiar to secretly act against his comrades). Upon learning from the player about the Tal Shiar's thalaron weapon, General Breka records a message instructing all Nivayans in the capital city's ruins to shelter in the tunnels, in the hope that they will provide sufficient protection from thalaron radiation. He then asks the player to go topside and upload the recording to the city's public address system.
The player's team emerges into a freezing rainstorm - and a pitched battle still in progress between the Tal Shiar and rogue resistance fighters. Dodging the chaos surrounding them, the team make their way to the transmission tower, only to find a group of Hirogen hunters there, closing in on a seemingly defenseless Nivayan. Then, without warning, several more identical Nivayans appear, confusing the Hirogen. The team takes advantage of this to defeat the Hirogen, then approaches the Nivayan to find out what just happened.
The Nivayan is Larna Premesh, whom the player met in Part I - but Premesh turns out not to be who she seems. In truth she is an undercover Starfleet Intelligence operative code-named Black Snow, a Betazoid-Vulcan hybrid with exceptional psionic abilities (some of which she has just demonstrated). She says she believes the thalaron satellites are being controlled from a remote island facility on the other side of the planet, and offers to use her abilities to help the player slip into the facility undetected.
Once inside the facility (having beamed there using the Tal Shiar's own planetary transporter network), the player and Black Snow take over its command center and use it to hack the satellite control system in order to shut the weapon down, all the while having to fight off Tal Shiar security reinforcements. Unfortunately it all turns out to be for nought, as satellite control is overridden from an outside source - Colonel Hakeev's new Borg-enhanced flagship, the I.R.W. Llaihr, which has just arrived in the system.
As the Llaihr begins evacuating the last of the Tal Shiar forces from the surface, the player's ship must defend itself against the Imperial fleet still in orbit. But soon, Republic reinforcements arrive, led by the Lleiset (which has just completed its joint mission with Starfleet). They are soon followed by the U.S.S. Lexington (still under Auslin's command) and the Klingon warship I.K.S. Hor'tagh, both having come from New Romulus to bear witness to any use of the thalaron weapon - which would be all the proof either government would need to destroy the weapon by any means necessary. The player hails Hakeev aboard the Llaihr and urges him to stand down - but the defiant Tal Shiar Colonel refuses, and presses a control on his console to fire the satellites...
...which then promptly explode instead. A flabbergasted Hakeev demands answers from his underlings aboard the Llaihr, before finally, unceremoniously departing the system with tail between legs. After over sixty years of Imperial Romulan domination, Nivay IV and its people are finally free again.
The player doesn't understand why the thalaron satellites exploded either - until Black Snow admits that she may have telepathically influenced Hakeev to use the wrong controls, causing the weapon to overload and self-destruct instead of sterilizing the planet's surface. All the same, she is quick to point out that she would never have been in a position to do this if not for the player's involvement.
Flash-forwarding three months, the player attends festivities to celebrate the foundation of a second settlement on New Romulus. Several characters from the series are in attendance, and the player has the opportunity to chat with them, get to know them a little better, and discuss how much the cosmopolitical landscape has changed in the three months since Nivay IV's liberation. (By this time the Romulan Star Empire has been eviscerated, with Hakeev dead and Empress Sela vanished with the Iconians for parts unknown.) Finally the player walks into a speech by D'Tan, who calls out the player and his/her crew as heroes to the Republic, without whom none of their rapid progress since the Virinat incident would have been possible.
Outline[ | ]
Mission text[ | ]
Objectives[ | ]
- The Battle of Mol'Rihan
- Valley of the Shadow III
- Defeat first wave of invasion fleet
- Defeat second wave
- Concurrent objectives:
- Defeat third wave
- Mopping up
- Blockade Runner
- Approach Nivay IV
- Tunnel Vision
- Defeat Elachi raiders
- Talk to Major Herev
- Concurrent objectives:
- Defeat Elachi at corner
- Defeat Elachi in corridor
- Defeat first Hirogen patrol
- Defeat second Hirogen patrol
- Defeat third Hirogen patrol
- Reach the mess hall
- Confront Major Troth
- Defeat Troth's reinforcements
- Defeat Remans outside infirmary
- Defeat Elachi outside command center
- Secure the command center
- Talk to General Breka
- The Rain and the Snow
- Go to transmission tower
- Defeat Hirogen hunters
- Concurrent objectives:
- Talk to Larna Premesh
- Upload Breka's recording
- Go to transporter station
- Dancing on the Devil's Doorstep
- Scan doorway near transporter pad
- Survey central hub
- Examine console banks in central hub
- Explore the facility
- Talk to Black Snow
- Power down shields and satellites
- Crunch Time
- Defeat advance squadrons
- Charge the Imperial fleet
- Defeat main Imperial fleet
- Hail I.R.W. Llaihr
- Scan Nivay IV orbit
- Llaihr departs
- A Growing Legacy
- Three months later...
Walkthrough
- There is no walkthrough for this mission, yet. You can help STOWiki by writing it here.
Gallery[ | ]
Notes[ | ]
- Just as Captains Auslin and Cha'vaQ are NPC versions of two of the author's in-game characters, their respective ships are predecessors to those presently commanded by each character in-game. (Here, the U.S.S. Pax Federatica is a Sovereign-class assault cruiser which is destroyed to make way for the current Odyssey tactical cruiser ship of the line. The Odyssey Pax appears in Federation missions "Ghosts of War, Part V" and "Trouble In Paradise", both by the same author. Meanwhile, the Vor'cha-class I.K.S. Hor'tagh seen in this mission is eventually replaced by a KDF Tactical Command Battlecruiser, which also appears in "Trouble In Paradise".)
- In previous versions of this mission, Commander Tiaru Jarok was put in command of a different ship, under the premise that the R.R.W. Lleiset hadn't been commissioned yet. This premise changed when Cryptic revamped the Federation's Romulan story arc (whose original version approximately coincided with the events of this mission series). At one point during the revamped mission "Taris", Jarok and the Lleiset are recalled to New Romulus to attend to an unspecified urgent matter; this became the inspiration to make Part III not only concurrent, but explicitly linked with the events of "Taris" - the urgent matter turns out to be the attempted invasion of New Romulus seen here. Once the invasion is repelled, the Lleiset rejoins "Taris" in time for that mission's wrap-up, then heads for Nivay IV to join the final battle there.
- Part III reuses several maps built for Parts I and II, including the Nivayan underground tunnel map. In Part I, the player starts at one end of that map and works his/her way toward the other end; here in Part III, the player goes in the opposite direction (and unlike Part I, is forced to fight virtually every step of the way through).
- The Black Snow character featured during the second half of this mission first appeared in "Ghosts of War, Part II". She was not originally planned to appear in this mission, but once the decision was made to introduce her via the Larna Premesh character, Premesh's appearance was designed (and in Part I, retroactively altered) to be, in essence, a Nivayan version of Black Snow.
- The Jadarak (pronounced JADD-ah-rack) facility was built upon the Hobus stock map, using its spire as the facility's central antenna and its forcefield "ceiling" to let natural light in. Only belatedly did the author realize the Hobus map has built-in low gravity, hence the attempt to explain it away by chalking it up to gravitic weapons in storage.
- The I.R.W. Llaihr is the prototype of a Borg-enhanced Tal Shiar vessel featured in-game. It was chosen as Hakeev's ship for this mission to replace the I.R.W. Khnial, another Borg-enhanced Tal Shiar ship used by Hakeev until it was destroyed during the Romulan Republic storyline.
- The mission's final scene is purely optional for the player. It is, in essence, a "post-credits" scene with nothing but optional dialogue and interactions for the player to speak with various characters from throughout the series as desired.
- The series title, and all three mission alternate titles, reference the 23rd Psalm of the King James Bible: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." This is referenced in-story by D'Tan during his post-credits speech, when he recalls how Ambassador Spock encouraged him to study human as well as Vulcan culture; according to Spock, humans and Romulans had more in common than most members of either species would care to admit. D'Tan goes so far as to add that the quotation might even make a suitable motto for a young Republic that has already been through that valley.