Make Judgement by Their Rules

The Plot

A starship receives a distress signal from a cold-sleep colony ship launched X years before, to an unexplored section of space. When they arrive, they discover that the entire colony ship is under the death sentence (or has already been killed) because a native killed one of the colony ship's scouts. The reason was that the scout violated . You may up the stakes by leaving the entire colony ship, still in cold sleep, in orbit, and the captain apparently committed suicide. The scenario is a mystery: why do we get punished for them killing us? Why did they kill us?

The crew of the starship is soon under the same death penalty. Evidence shows that the scout had a slight xenophobia--("Well within bounds, though--he was a scout, after all.") The aliens happen to be horned hominids, vaguely Satanic looking. Further examination shows that the scout also had a strongly religious background.

Eventually, peculiarities in the alien culture are explained when it's discovered that they are telepathic in some ways, and that is Privacy. Or maybe *Aggravated Mental Assault*. The scout didn't have the decency to keep his/her emotions under control, the alien picked them up and broadcast them back, and voila positive feedback cycle wherein the alien was tougher than the human, and won the fight.

This scenario depends upon a universe where telepathy is not impossible but is also not present among any of the players and probably not common or reliable in player space. I've never run it because I haven't had any brilliant thoughts about a society created by graminivorous telepaths.