Edge of the Empire, baby! First time I’ve ever DMed long form. I feel like it went well!
About once a week 3-4 players, 3-4 hours. I think my players finished at like 800 earned xp.
Across the course of a little bit less than 2 years my players:
Stole a one of a kind prototype cop ship, took out an imperial spymaster, killed a dowutin in a 1 on 1 bare knuckles pit fight, rescued a satellite full of mad scientists, met their old maker, met their old master, met their mom, met the last of the evociii, became generals in the rebellion, scuba dived the high pressure atmosphere of a gas giant, became the personal chef for the queen of Naboo, cleansed a temple, took a padawan, punched SO MANY SPACE NAZIS, accidentally convinced someone to self-publish reams of fanfiction, fought a walker, beheaded an old boss, did a coup on a hutt, kidnapped a pirate queen, fought multiple giant space monsters, stole a star destroyer, joined a space hockey team, exposed a criminal plant inside the imperial government, brokered a cooperation between rival rebel groups, and finally ended it all by stealing a one of a kind prototype imperial inquisitorius ship.
I’m gonna debrief on what worked and what didn’t, but yeah, I did wanna say it. I’m pretty proud of myself, and of all my players.
So for nearly 2 years I ran an Edge of the Empire campaign with 3-4 players, mostly weekly. These last couple of months we’ve been using discord, which has gone great. I want to get down some of my thoughts about what worked and what didn’t.
This is gonna be a big wall of text and all but two bits are gonna be under the cut: system and play style.
Fantasy Flight Star Wars game system is legit my favorite system EVER. (Not to dick wave or anything, but that’s including D&Ds 2-5, Gurps, White Wolf, Blades in the Dark, Dungeon World, Deadlands, and a few miscellaneous other short form ones). The system of advantages and disadvantages, and especially triumphs and despairs rather than just straight successes and failures really opens up complex narrative opportunities and gives a chance for wild story beats that just would not have happened otherwise. The fights go fast but feel meaty and there’s a lot of room to pitch advantages to your friends so you’re not just waiting your turn. Character creation is granular enough that your choices always feel meaningful, and points can be spent anywhere, so you can really specialize and shape your character.
We played very collaboratively and it made things AMAZING. Part of this is that we were all good friends and have played together for a while now. Our taste in what kind of story we want is similar- nuggets of drama scattered throughout, but mostly cutting up. A lot of the best NPCs and story suggestions came from my players rather than from me- our season one boss villain, Imperial spymaster “Uncle” Karston Severax, a pantoran ex-special forces black operative whose current public face was a Mr. Rogers-esque children’s TV presenter, for example, was someone my players started out and all of us collective “yes and” added to around the table, and he was JUST THE BEST. These kind of exchanges also gave us moments like the time our tech tried to blackmail the head of a security corporation with the fact that he was having an affair and he’d written just LOADS of incredibly cringey fanfiction; but the roll was such that the attempt ended with him finally getting the push he needed to quit a job he hated, get out of a marriage that just wasn’t working, and follow his dream of self-publishing. He even dedicated his first book to our slicer. Because it wasn’t a DM vs Players atmosphere, because we were all on the same page, I could ask my players “hey, what do you want for your triumph?” and “all right, so who is the NPC you know?” as well as just “that’s enough to finish this guy, what does this look like?” This campaign was 1000% better for sharing that world building load, and the players were all, I think, more invested.
more below the cut.
What Worked
One of the most useful things I ever did was start giving players morality pet NPCs that were their special hench people, and I’m embarrassed that I waited so long to assign one to our droid.
The zero session was absolutely invaluable in setting the tone of the game and the relationship between characters, and I will bang this drum until I’m fucking blue in the face. Don’t meet in the first session. Sit the players down and say “how do you know each other, why do you stay together, what are some of your past adventures?” It’s just so much better.
Cameos and ties to our other games, in what we’ve been calling “The Drax Kreiger Expanded Universe” have continued to be welcome pretty much every time. People were delighted to have a moment or two to slip back into old characters.
I was able to identify what each player wanted and give them that. Brick’s player wanted quiet scenes with big character emotion, like his one on one pit fight the character didn’t want to have, or the letter from his mother telling him how proud she was of him, or the time in training where he tapped into how angry he really was and it spooked the character and everyone on the ship. Nyla’s player wanted a big epic, but also difficult space journey of good vs. evil, and so Nyla got a padawan whose parents she had possibly killed when she fought for the empire, she dug up the grave of her clone teacher’s order 66′d jedi for the crystal for her lightsaber, she got to cleanse a temple that was trapped in a fruitless struggle between light and dark, and a climactic lightsaber battle that was about possibly sacrificing herself for the good of others. TK’s player was deep into star wars trivia and space stuff, so he practically squealed when Verpine shatter weapons showed up, and he seemed to get a kick out of the Evocii, and also that time they put on wing suits and dove the atmosphere of a gas giant. It’s worth noting nobody was actually all that interested in the thing that turns my gears: complex mysteries with a lot of clues and investigation, and once I let that shit drop, things ran a lot smoother.
Some of our best stuff was non-combat challenges, like climbing the cliffs of Naboo or navigating the deep undercity of Nar Shadaa. The guys reliably failed anything social, but environmental challenges were always appreciated.
I always tried to make sure there was more than one way to do things. For any given mission, especially early on, I’d try to brainstorm at least three ways something could be accomplished.
My party split up a LOT, but we found a sort of cinematic cutting back and forth to be really useful. When there was a big crit, or a goal accomplished, or something like that, we’d jump to the other party even if the fight wasn’t over. Sometimes that was only just, like, Brick and the guys doing drunk karaoke and saying to no one in particular “MAN, I hope Nyla’s having as fun a time as we are!” but it kept everyone involved and it wasn’t just people waiting their turn for 20 minutes at a time. Also people chimed in with fun advantages and disadvantages.
I had everybody write backstories and whenever I could, I incorporated in things from what they’d written. Our second season was basically TK tracking down the guy who’d made him, a Thackwash alien with the same sort of shifting personalities he had. TK’s player hadn’t written much about the guy except that he’d been a salvage mechanic who constructed TK for protection when he got in trouble with the local mafia. Giving that guy complementary personalities for each of TK’s really helped stick the landing on that one, and the player really enjoyed having actually completed his character’s goal.
It’s worth saying, we took some time at several points during the campaign, either individually or as a group, to talk about what we liked and didn’t, what we wanted more of, where we wanted things to go, possible directions for characters, mechanical issues, how to have a better game, group dynamics, all sorts of stuff. In a way it’s like sex: people have this fucked up expectation that you’ll just be good at it without communicating, and man, fuck that. Talking to my players was ALWAYS worthwhile.
I was always adamant, because it was a thing that bugged me when I was a player, that if a character had spent the points to be good at something, they got to be good at it. That made some things difficult, but I think it was the right decision. It took me a while to tailor fights right, and honestly a lot of times, splitting up the party was the best way to balance fights, but I never said to anyone hey that thing you spent all those points on, could you please not do that?
My players were excellent about encouraging each other to have serious dramatic moments. TK was completely ready to die in a fight, and when he lost a significant chunk of his programming, the way he chose to play it was really heartbreaking. Everyone came inside and had tea with Brick’s mom. No one stepped on anyone else’s fun when it was time to be serious, and everybody was great about cheering each other on, whether they were being funny or being dead serious.
I FUCKING FINISHED A CAMPAIGN. IT HAD AN END. So much stuff petered out over the years, I was adamant I wasn’t going to do that.
What Didn’t Work
Boy, my players had pretty much all the trouble trying to remember to use “they/them” pronouns for NPCs with neutral or alien genders.
No one is interested in falling damage. Sigh.
I did not keep good track of money or ship fuel or anything. The campaign didn’t end up relying on it too heavily (I was honestly expecting a much more Cowboy Bebop setup than where we drifted), but that was an area I kind of fell down.
We never really got obligation working correctly and in the end we just ended up abandoning it. We kept doing the force morality because the lone force player was very into it and it was a huge part of that character’s journey, but for the rest having people show up to collect on obligation was sometimes not possible in the story- or if it was possible it was pretty cumbersome. Campaign did obligation by arc, and I think that’s a pretty useful way to do it- roll at the end of the arc for what’s coming next.
Early on, I made way too many assumptions about what was an adventure hook for my players and what was an annoyance. Honestly, bits of this lasted pretty late. At one point I gave my players a spy for the larger rebellion they could totally talk to- he was even working with their resident bothan spy- but they looked at the senatorial assassination he was doing and literally said at the table “I think it’s best if we just walk away from all this.” And so they did. Which was frustrating, but, you know, it is what it is. They also never much cared about the hutt gang war.
I let a lot of things drop that I would have liked to bring back before the end, but in all honesty, I think we were all running a bit out of steam. I would have liked to put in Brick’s old mentor, or follow up with the imperial governor that was a falleen in a human skin suit, or see more of the bounty hunter’s guild, or have a nice end thing with our bothan spy, or any of that. But I do think it was time to end it. And we followed the threads people liked.
I had way too many NPCS.
What sort of worked
I had like 200 npcs and they were not all bangers. In particular, I let the party design their own ship, which I wish had played a bigger role (though it did really set the tone), and I let them design 2 npc crew who would fill in any party roles they didn’t want to play and guard the ship so they could go on adventures without worrying about it. The devaronian scoundrel was with the party to the end though I never really got him to be more than a joke, but the bothan spy kind of fell off, and while she made some appearances, she didn’t really have as big an impact as I would have hoped. She kind of got replaced by Nyla’s padawan, a hench mon calamari called Nezrene, who was a better fit with the party. But, you know, players will do what they like.
Factions. In the first bit of the campaign, my factions were a fucking life saver, because I could design scenarios with a sort of “what is each faction doing/ which faction hurts from this, which benefits?” By the second season we’d kind of abandoned them to go to the core, and by the third my group was solidly rebel, so the hutts and bounty hunters fell a lot by the wayside. I still think having a couple of broad poles of power, and having the players know them and their leaders, is a good call. But they do seem to kind of organically pare down on their own, and it’s easy to get caught up too much in them. Useful sorta?
There was definitely a point where my players just were not challenged by conventional challenges. We ended up doing most of the later fights that involved a lot of minions in montage. I’d have them roll their fight skills unopposed, just to see if they got any interesting advantage/triumph set ups. I still had boss fights that were mostly challenging, but there just was no point in throwing storm troopers or low level gangsters at them. Not when they have soak 8 and autofire, and that one talent that lets you kill every minion in a combat. Designings fight got a bit tricky, and in those big high level combats, despairs and triumphs come up a lot more and really sway the fight, which I like, but also it’s very hard to plan for.
Mass combat was tricky. I did a lot of it toward the end because my players were generals in a rebellion. I always had them do the rolls and some of the narration, but that wasn’t always enough to make them feel like things weren’t very arbitrary.
I personally love the rule that if you roll a despair shooting into an engaged combat you shoot your friend. Nyla, who got shot twice this way, does not.
We started the game with a tech character who dropped out. Toward the end, we picked up another tech character whose player couldn’t do their regular stuff because of covid lock down. Neither of these characters could fight at all, and both were very differently oriented than the rest of the party, and that was tricky to manage. Additionally, the dude coming in at the end had like a year and a half of in jokes he did not get and there were 200 goddamn npcs. I tried to give him the lowdown on what he might have heard about the party, but it was a combination of too much information and not that much player interest. He did get to break a star destroyer though, and I think he liked that.
I offered players XP to write backstory stuff, and later goodbye notes others could find if they kicked it. Not all of them did. In the end it made a negligible difference, and I still think offering the bounties on this is basically a good idea.
What I would do different next time.
Three ring binder that opens and closes so I could move fucking NPC stats around. I filled two goddamn school notebooks with notes for this campaign and there were so many goddamn times I was like “I KNOW I wrote this down, but where?!”
Players felt a bit aimless when they didn’t have a specific villain. I’d planted a few in, but they took finding, or they were too easy to avoid. Next time I would have a few more people who were actively on my player’s tails.
I would keep better campaign notes and/or ask one of the players to do so. I used to do recaps for the games when I played Rek. There’s stuff I KNOW I’ve forgotten, and more I’ll forget as time goes on, which is a shame. It’s a weird, ephemeral medium, but possibly I’m just spoiled by living in an age of easy reproduction and enormous storage where data is concerned.
Better book keeping in general, really.
When I did a mystery short, I wrote up a list of all the clues people could find but not where specifically they were, so that I could just jam them anywhere they seemed like they’d make sense whenever a roll called for a player to find something. I think I’d try to do that with player’s personal stories so they could be woven in a little better. I did a lot of flying by the seat of my pants.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with how it went, and I’m ready to get back to playing for a bit. I loved DMing, and I more or less DMed the game I would have liked to play, but man, doing this all the time, or being the only person who does it? After a while, that’d be a lot, and I’m looking forward to the break.
Buckle up, it’s Edge of the Empire tabletop Roleplaying time.
Yeah, I know I don’t post here much. I’m still doing the devaron’s angels thing, which is scratching a lot of my online itches, and I’ve got a part time job and full time parenting.
I’d really planned on doing regular updates of what happened each session. Aaaaand that didn’t happen. Which is a shame, I’d love to be able to have those summaries to look back on. But here’s the short version:
The gang, who are a crew of space chancers and criminals rolling around in a stolen police ship, were doing odd jobs together for a while, including some for the empire. Their contact, a Pantoran spymaster whose cover was as a children’s entertainer, congratulated them on their most recent heist job (where the campaign started in medias res), and gave them a new job: deliver a mysterious sealed orb to the leader of the peskiest rebel cell in the general area, led by a Rodian pirate by the name of Cheng Maxeda. They said maybe, took the orb, and then checked around and picked up a delivery job for their local Hutts going the same direction for some extra cash.
They were brought in because the Hutt shipments had been interfered with by somebody. Their Hutts weren’t sure who, but were damn sure they were going to pay. The gang defeated a whole crazy mess of people who were being lead and bolstered by a falleen who had been surgically altered to boost their pheromone output. Then they picked up the package and made the poor decision of looking inside. It was the carbonite frozen but still living body of the cop who’d previously owned their ship that they were now knowingly handing over, because they couldn’t bring themselves to cross the Hutts.
Moral issues aside, it was an easy job, they got well paid, the team failed a bunch of social roles and divulged more information than they should have to the Hutt point man, and Brick, the party’s wall of meat, got signed up for a pit fight. He won his round, but imperial troops broke up the match before he could win completely. TK cornered but lost a rebel bomber, and Eshi got contacted by a rebel who recognized him from a bit of backstory. Nyla chased down one of the other gladiators, an old clone with a sword who’d entered the fight because the prize included a bacta dunk and he had a friend who was hurt and dying after being caught by the Hutts trying to bust up a slaving operation. And that’s when the bomb went off, destroying some major imperial instillation bits and projecting a 40 foot holo-image of Cheng the punk rock rodian pirate queen striding across the smoking crater proclaiming she had come to liberate the outer rim. The party was presented with three job options: 1) after Brick’s pit win, the Hutts were down some muscle for a convoy and ready to pay reliable thugs 2) the rebels were looking for a study ship to bust up the hub of a spy satellite network 3) the clone and his weequay buddy (Edge and Horm) still wanted to stop the slave convoy (which was, as the party figured out, job 1). They opted for job 2, leaving town amidst a firefight with the imperials, and brought along Edge and Horm, providing Nyla with a sword fighting trainer who’d studied under a jedi, without being a jedi himself.
The guys busted up the satellite base by hijacking a shipment truck coming in (I’d provided them information for a couple of routes, including asteroid hopping amidst giant vacuum-proof winged frog monster creatures, and they figured this best matched their skillset). Inside they found tech that looked a whole lot like our droid character TK, a completely brainwashed cyborg engineer, and the control rods that were their target. TK, who is a droid with multiple program personalities, suddenly and without warning displayed a program personality they had never seen before and destroyed the computer mainframe, remembering nothing afterward. The cyborg also had hardware a good deal like Nyla’s, and contained a message begging for help from someone held against their will and being moved between facilities. They blew up the station, retrieved valuable tech, and flew off, triumphant, to get their payment from the rebels.
The rebels welcomed the gang, who got to know the faction a little bit better. TK nearly started a gunfight, Nyla got a haircut, and Brick and Eshi developed mouse droid beer pong in order to provide historically unique droid bits to an eccentric collector for the last bit Eshi needed to build his machine from the prototype he’d stolen from the corporate sector in his backstory, which runs on two kyber crystals and provides a similar benefit to the force power “foresee”. He used this to figure out the sphere they were carrying contained an intensely virulent ship killer plague that would likely kill them as well, and they resolved to throw that in the sun. The gang foiled an assassination attempt on Cheng and got a new assignment: break her old pirate buddy out of maximum security prison (again, they were presented with several possible assignments, some of which tied in to other plots.) Nyla and Cheng also worked out mutually that they were both force sensitive.
The prison break went off well. It was a sort of siberian gulag set up on an ice planet, plus some eight foot carnivorous burrowing worms- yeah, those walls are pretty short, prisoners, but where are you gonna run? The gang picked up some extra supplies by agreeing to break out a Hutt operative while they were there anyway. After some exciting sky battles, Nyla and Eshi turns the ship’s forward shields into a battering ram. They made short work of the guards inside, but discovered that there was an unexpected other party there- a wookie bounty hunter who was looking into the disappearance of the guy they handed over to the hutts. That guy was a tough fight even for the team’s big heavies, and they set a load of prisoners free to help them- taking the risk that the maximum security violent shipjackers would not decide to jack their ship to escape. Luckily between the two heavies and the giant devaronian pirate they just released, they were able to intimidate them into just accepting a ride off planet. Nyla, meanwhile, fought the wookie’s cat beast in an enclosed tunnel and nearly died, but won a pretty hard solo battle, enabling her to pick up the Hutt contact and a delirious nautolan who she had a force feeling about. Eshi forgot he was a reptile and went out in the ice with no coat, then defeated his own personal corpsec bounty hunter’s attempts to come at him with robots. With great success, they headed back to rebel space, got paid, and received a message that their former imperial employer was officially fucking pissed at them. Also, the nautolan was force sensitive and having visions of the inquisitor who tried to murder Nyla.
Faced with mounting tension and the inability to continue lying to each other, the team pretty much spilled all their secrets to each other in the absolute most fun room mate meeting I have ever witnessed. Nyla is a force sensitive ex-imperial pilot ace, TK has an extra personality, Eshi has an I-assassinated-a-king level bounty and a machine that tells the future, Thirteen (the bothan spy) knew all this and told no one, Brick likes light beer, etc. They decided they really need to murder the children’s TV spy master as their next move. Their bothan spy provided them with a dossier on him and his six lieutenants. Nyla and Thirteen went to go meet the spymaster and try to throw him off, and had to fight the stealth assassin lieutenant, which they survived. Eshi hacked the slicer lieutenant and stole her state of the art surveillance droids. Brick checked up on the Hutt-embedded spy and learned she was a pretty awful person. He also ended up scheduling a rematch with the douwutin he beat in the pit fight, who the Hutts later dropped a word in that they wouldn’t mind if he just happened to kill in that fight. The group’s one cop friend, a red-string and corkboard conspiracy melitto, got attacked by assassins, because the spies and the governor were working against each other. Nyla and TK accidentally killed the master of disguise spy lieutenant without realizing who he was. They turned the surveillance droids on the Hutts and found out the Hutt-embedded spy was working against the spymaster as well.
The spymaster was scheduled to attend the Chancellor’s day gala on Naboo, which is fancy far outside of anything the party is probably capable of pulling off, but I wanted to give them the opportunity to try. One of the spy lieutenants there, a slimy alderaanean lesser noble, has found a packet of forbidden information that had been stolen and hidden there, and the spymaster is going in person for the hand-off. Rebuffing an offer from the planetary governor, the group made a very temporary alliance with the Hutt spy to kidnap the noble spy and use him to force a meeting with the spymaster on their terms. And that’s where we are now.
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All in all, I’m really pleased with how this is going. I’m having a lot of fun and my players are absolutely great. I’d... assumed that would take less time to type up, and it’s leaving out a whole lot of stuff. I started this in October, so that’s about seven months worth of weekly sessions. That it breaks pretty easily into arcs, I feel, speaks pretty well for what I’d intended of it. I have SO MANY FUCKING named NPCs. It’s over 50 at last count. Factions are helping a lot. Each faction has a main plot that’s going to move along no matter what the PCs do, hitting beats whenever I need something interesting for the background.
I’d like to keep making some posts here about what I’ve learned, what’s worked and what hasn’t, and about each player and their character. I personally think it’s interesting, and it helps me collect my thoughts. But for now I think I’m going to bed.
I’m a firm believer in Zero Sessions, where you get the group together, talk about what the campaign is going to be, and figure out world building and back story. In this campaign in particular, I wanted my characters to create as much of the setting as possible, so a zero session was really necessary. It went super well! Details below.
My plan going in had been this, and we mostly stuck to this outline:
1. Everybody introduce their characters and find any obvious ways they fit together.
2. Build their space ship. I wanted to evoke the original trilogy, firefly, cowboy bebop, etc, and one of the ways I wanted to do that was to give the crew a completely unique ship, and get them invested by letting them design it.
3. Build their NPCs. In addition to the four player characters, I had two NPC crew slated aboard the ship, with the understanding that the players would design them completely. My thought process was, again, to get the players invested, and also to make sure they felt free to play whatever they wanted, knowing that these NPCs could pick up slack for any jobs they didn’t want to do (eg, if nobody wanted to play a pilot or a medic, they’d still have one on crew). Then we’d decide who the NPCs liked better and liked less. Because I enjoy that sort of thing.
4. Come up with a backstory of how they all knew each other and why they were a secure, cohesive team. Come up with some of their past adventures. I generally like this style of play better, because you never have to fudge the whole “I met you in a bar, but sure, let’s go kill dragons together” thing. This is where zero sessions really shine. Why do you trust this person to watch your back? Characters always come away more interesting for the collective back and forth.
5. Ask them what adventure they’d like to start in medias res for the first session.
Guys, my players are SO AWESOME.
Here are the characters they’ve given me:
“Brick”
A Nikto combat specialist and lifelong pirate. Real name Ayad. Brick is an affable, guileless mountain of person-hurting muscle. He used to run with the Ohnaka pirate crew, but set out on his own with a couple of others, because Brick doesn’t always have the sense to recognize when something isn’t a good plan. He’s been the sole survivor of a couple of gangs, used and discarded by a few others, but he seems to be on a streak of luck with the crew of the Black Star.
Eshi
Eshi is a teenage Sluissi genius slicer and mechanic. A street orphan, young Eshi was recruited by a Fagan-esque criminal he only knew as “the Madame,” who recognized and cultivated his talents. When he attempted to steal a piece of technology on his own, he returned to find his gang murdered. Alone and afraid, he hopped the first ship out he could, which happened to be the one stolen by the rest of the crew.
Nyla Vesk
Originally a swoop bike champion from the poor areas of Taris, Nyla was headhunted by the imperial pilot program for her preternatural reflexes. She was a rising star in the imperial academy, a champion fencer, and an up and comer in the empire, with a special mentor. Until someone figured out exactly why her reflexes were so preternatural- almost as if she was getting glimpses of the future. There was a “training accident,” and Nyla was presumed dead- and nearly there in truth. These days she has several jacks in her head and one in her leg, and a right arm that is completely cybernetic and clearly made for some species besides human. She’s learning to fight and pilot with her left. All the crew knows is that she’s a defector.
TK-13
Assembled from Clone Wars scrap parts by an alien species with compartmentalized personalities, TK switches between programs for a medical droid, a bodyguard droid, an enforcer droid, and a criminal. TK’s programmer was not very good at his job, and TK is not in control of the switches, nor do they always produce the desired program for the situation. The programs have wildly different personalities and directives, and don’t always share information.
Anyway.
With the ship and characters nailed down, I talked to them a bit about what I’d planned out for the world, and they talked a bit about what they’ve been doing since they met.
In addition to a ship, I’d planned to start the gang out with a safe base of operations and information about the leaders of four important NPC factions. Frankly, as a player, I hate it when there’s world information I feel like my character ought to know, but I, as a player, am not allowed to until it comes out in game. On the flip side, I respect that nobody wants to read an encyclopedia in order to play. I’m LOVING the ease of DMing with a faction system. It simplifies everything. As I’ve put adventures together, I can start from a place of “what is this faction trying to accomplish, and against what other faction” and that focuses the narrative choices I make. It’s constrained in a way that means things are always connected and moving forward, rather than going off sideways.
Anyway, here are my four factions and faction leaders.
The Empire: Lawful Political
Faction Leader: Audren Tauros
Audren Tauros is the imperial politico in charge of this sector of space, and headquartered on the grain producing planet Trayez 4, which also has a troop garrison to streamline supply. He is, by all indications, not a zealot, appearing to minimally enforce imperial law in a way that is leaving a thriving black market. There are tariffs and bribes, and crackdowns, sure, but they’re notably lighter, and Tauros quietly hires out jobs he doesn’t want to show up in his official reports. He also, unusually for an imperial, has a personal physician who is an alien. An Arcona specifically.
The gang’s home base is also on this planet. (Trayez 4 is basically a straight shot out from Naboo, on the inner half of the outer rim)
The Maxaeda Rebel Fleet: Chaotic Political
Faction Leader: Cheng Maxaeda
Cheng Maxaeda is a flashy Rodian pirate operating near the outer rim end of the Corellian Run. Of late, she’s apparently developed politics, though from the targets she’s hitting- mostly luxury yachts of imperial officers, fat payroll transports, and weapons caches- it’s very hard to tell if she’s a believer who is resorting to piracy, or a pirate who’s lying about believing. Or something in between.
Local Hutt Cartel: Chaotic Apolitical
Faction Leader: Uddin the Hutt
Uddin is an up and coming Hutt who’s been given permission to start his own branch operation in the local sector. He’s not the only criminal gang going, but he is by far the most powerful. He’s also exceptionally vicious and unforgiving, even for a hutt. His organization has a very high turn over, but it pays very well.
Quemada Ru is the sector representative for the Bounty Hunters guild. She’s built up an organization under her that’s basically run like a police union; in fact, they’re called the 919 and they’ve negotiated enforcement contracts as well as personal bounties. They’re organized, efficient, and mutually supporting. There are, of course, some freelancers running around not participating, but for the most part, the 919 works well for most of the bounty hunters working around Trayez 4. It works out particularly well for Ru as she is dug in, powerful, popular, and difficult for the Empire to oust. She’s an ardent believer that no one is above the law, and will take down even important Imperials when she can get enough evidence on them.
Of course, by this point the gang had a stolen police ship, so Quemada is very much not their friend.
Then I asked them to build up a bit of their backstory. What jobs had they done before? What adventures had they had. As I’ve said, I don’t generally care for the opening of a campaign where characters are just meeting, so I like giving the crew a chance to talk a bit about their history, clarify what sort of group they are, develop relationships, and most importantly, talk about why they trust each other and want to stay together as a group.
Here are some of the things they gave me.
Old Harry, who own’s Hob’s Garage space port, and who is literally just Satan, has changed their ship transponder codes and made all their fake IDs, because they’re taking care of his nephew, Beelz (we just... started joking hard about the space Satans of Planet Devaron and man we leaned into it. Old Harry has lots of names. Makes deals. Has a smart goatee and an expensive suit. I’m loving every ridiculous minute of it). He’s already covered for them and hid them from the Empire at great personal risk and for little reward. He just smiles and says don’t worry. Some day I’ll call in a favor.
The gang mostly runs muscle, smuggling, and theft jobs. Thirteen rarely participates directly, but oddly, everywhere they go, even when she wasn’t consulted, she seems to have a job ready and lined up. Nobody knows how she’s doing it.
Nyla hasn’t been honest with the team about her past, or her force sensitivity, but she has used a flash of foreseen future to save Eshi’s life, warning him to stay away from a cable car on a planet they were visiting that later crashed and killed everyone inside it. Nyla’s also taken one of the ship’s prison cells as her sleeping quarters, but... it’s still just a prison cell. She’s thrown a tarp over the bars for some privacy, and whenever she’s in the ship, she takes her arm off. Eshi sleeps in the engine room where it’s warm.
At one point the team took a Seven Samurai style protection job, fighting off a load of raiders who were threatening a farming village. It was glorious carnage. At one point, Brick disabled a young trandoshan and tossed her unconscious body and a blaster to Eshi. “You’re how old again, kid?” he said. “It’s time you grew up.” Not in a mean way, this is Brick. But he was 12 when he first killed somebody, and he figured Eshi was way overdue. And Eshi... couldn’t. She reminded him of a childhood friend. He let her run off, certain this decision would never come back to haunt him (it will, obviously).
Beelz knows Cheng Maxaeda’s people, and Uddin’s. He get the gang most of their more run of the mill underworld jobs. Thirteen, on the other hand, has gotten them some jobs with the Empire (after explaining the factions, I asked them who they’d like to have done jobs for, and they decided of the factions as explained, Tauros made the most sense, as he seemed the most laid back and forgiving). Specifically, she came to them saying she had an offer: a mercy mission medical run from the Empire. There was an outbreak in Tauros’s territory, and the supplies needed to treat it were restricted and labelled military use only. This was a time sensitive problem that was very bad for business, so some supplies “fell off a truck” and some unaffiliated party needed to get them where they were going. In exchange, all the warrants for the ship went away, and as far as the players know, it’s in the clear. Also, Thirteen assassinated someone while they were there. It’s unclear if this was part of the deal or something she did on her own time. (I want to pause to remind y’all my players are supplying all of this).
Obviously, they’ve never met Tauros, and officially he knows nothing about them. Their contact is a Pantoran children’s show host named “Uncle” Karston Severax, who devotes his time to teaching children reading, xenobiology, and patriotic zeal. He dresses like Mr. Rogers and always has lovely cakes. Thirteen watches the show pretty often, and the crew suspects it’s an easy way to disseminate coded information to sleeper agents. Brick also watches the show, because the puppets have names that are jokes in Nikto.
And finally I asked them what they’re doing right now, planning for the first episode to start in medias res. This one is another imperial job. The gang are stealing fighter blue prints from a corporate sector contractor who is trying to do aggressive negotiations with the Empire, and the Empire has decided that it’s not going to be toyed with. So that was where we started the first session. On a corpsec space station with the questions “who is your hostage and what is on fire?”
continued from https://rekkingcrew.tumblr.com/post/179064273187/rek-dms-space-bastards-episode-zero-pt-1
Let’s talk about the ship!
I always figured the custom ship was going to be a big focal point for the group and a big part of the initial buy in. It’s home. It’s home base. Both the players and the characters have made modifications to make it their own.
My plan had been to ask the group what insane star wars alien species their ship was designed for, and what modifications they had all made to be able to use it. I was thinking something like an aquatic species where the inside required joisting to hold it’s shape absent the presence of liquid, or it had belonged to something that was naturally much smaller or much larger than a human.
Instead, the players gave me something magical.
TK’s player said his idea for how he came to join the crew was that he had been in a crate in an evidence locker.
Or maybe an evidence ship.
“Oh my god,” said another player. “We’re driving around in a stolen cop car.”
And so they are.
And I’m not kidding, that’s the thing that set the tone for everything that came after and clicked everything into place. The Black Star is who the group is.
What the players came up with was that they and their NPCs had been disparate petty criminals who had, individually and with other groups, been part of a fifteen gang pile up when a wealthy criminal individual died and everyone tried to be the first to loot his space station, and had ended up in a guns pointed every direction space Mexican standoff (minus TK, who was in the evidence locker, and Eshi, who had already hopped aboard from one stow away situation to another), before they made the collective decision to work together to escape the collapsing station rather than fight. The main architect of this truce was an older twi’lek called Ort Fine, who was wounded during the escape. The group grabbed the last available ship, a slow but heavily gunned and armored police vehicle that was a brand new prototype model, and jetted off together into space. They peeled off the police logo and painted a black star over it. It’s not even a particularly good cover job. Ort was initially the primary force in getting them all to stay together and work as a crew, speaking to each of them about their strengths and convincing them to work a job together he arranged. He died on the job, but the crew stayed together, and out of respect Ort is still listed as the captain on all the manifests.
Mechanically, I’d told the players to pick one of the freighters or transports from the books. They would be allowed to up two stats or put in upgrades, and then I would require them to drop one stat. There would also be whatever narrative consequences I thought fit their choice of ship- in this case, they look like a cop ship, plus in stealing their ship, they’ve made personal enemies of the police forces. The ship also has a lot of internal locks and seals that have been slightly on the fritz since they stole it. I’ve also told them I’m keeping track of fuel and they’re going to have to keep refilling if they want to make long jumps. They have six units in the tank. A small hyperspace jump uses one, a medium two, a long three. The players picked an ILH-KK Citadel Class light freighter, which is a perfect police or pirate ship. They improved the handling and added smuggling compartments as their upgrades. For their disadvantage, rather than dropping a stat, they suggested the following: this ship is exclusively sold for police and military use and parts are proprietary and restricted. All mechanics checks have at least two disadvantage dice unless correct parts are obtained first. Some repairs will not be possible at all without them.
The players seemed to really enjoy making the ship. Most of them also do Warhammer, and one of them found a ship design from there they shared with everyone. “Yes! That’s perfect!”
The NPCs
I’d told the gang they got two NPCs to help cover any gaps in competencies. They were also meant to get the players invested in the world right away. Since TK was capable of covering multiple roles, they had a little freedom.
The first thing they wanted was a criminal face man. I’d been talking to Nyla’s player about some of the things I’d been kicking around about Devaronian gender politics, and so that was the species suggestion from that player. We went for some obvious Satan jokes, and everyone in the group took a turn giving the character one trait. Which is how we got:
Beelz Feck: devaronian con artist and walking catastrophe.
Beelz is a compulsive gambler and up to his eyeballs in debt. He’s also alienated a lot of people in his past and has more bounties on him than the rest of the crew combined, largely because when things get dangerous, Beelz has a bad habit of cashing out. Even so, more than anyone else on the crew, Beelz has a very good ear for what’s going on, and while he always comes back to the ship poorer than when he left it, he also comes back with loads of useful information about rumors, gang wars, and possible leads for the PCs to follow. Beelz’s uncle (who variously goes by “Old Harry”, “Old Scratch”, and “Old Nick”) runs an off-the-grid ship hangar and trading port, and out of gratitude for looking after his sister’s kid, he’s sheltered the crew even when it was a big personal risk for him (that NPC was always planned but not populated, and the group decided it made sense to tie him to Beelz). We also worked out that he is terrified of Brick, but Brick, being Brick, has never actually noticed, and just thinks Beelz is being accommodating. They’re room mates now.
The players couldn’t think of any role they desperately needed after that, so they went for something fun: an assassin. They decided the character should definitely be female, because it was a bit of a sausage fest otherwise. They also decided she was a Bothan. We followed the same format: one trait from each player, then a free brainstorming session. This gave us:
“Thirteen”
None of the crew know what Thirteen’s real name or actual story are. Every now and again she claims she needs to visit her husband, but each time it’s a different man. They have never seen her without knives or a holdout blaster. Sometimes she’ll just disappear for days. Sometimes, even when they think a mission was their idea, she’ll coincidentally have someone she needs to kill at just that place. Thirteen mostly stays out of the rest of the crew’s business, and she keeps them well out of hers. She’s icy, aloof, and professional. Only the killbot personality in TK has ever gotten a laugh out of her. After Ort died, she took over the captain’s quarters and changed the locks, and no one has been able to get in since. Twice since she’s been with the crew, small groups of well trained killers have tried to hit the ship, which hasn’t made the rest of the crew happy, but Thirteen has not explained anything. She appears to know and will occasionally allude to other character’s secrets, but she hasn’t betrayed any confidences and does not appear likely to. Thirteen is exceptionally capable, and when it suits her, she brings in hard to find jobs that make problems like the APB on their ship just... disappear. She seems content with her situation for now, and as far as anyone can tell, she mostly likes the crew, especially Eshi.
I also gave each NPC four starting opinions, one for each character: very positive, positive, neutral, and negative. I let the players pick who got which and what that meant. I like players having asymmetric access to resources, and I like interesting social dynamics.
Beelz considers Nyla his good luck charm and goes out of his way to do nice little things for her. He’s also predisposed to think of her as competent and in charge because he grew up in a matriarchy and doesn’t examine his own thought process much. For all that Brick terrifies him, he’s a really comprehensible sort, and a useful guy to have at your back. TK is a droid, and kind of a weird one, but meh, what can you do? He doesn’t like having Eshi on the ship, though. He’s just a kid, and that feels irresponsible even for Beelz.
Eshi is Thirteen’s favorite. He’s a smart kid with so much potential. Of all of them, he’s going to be the most useful. She’s amused by TK, especially his violent program. Her relationship to Nyla is cool and professional, and that feels comfortable for both of them. Nyla is more crisp and military around her. But they don’t know each other well personally, and neither seems inclined to. And Brick? What about him? He doesn’t even merit contempt, really. He’s a dime a dozen. We could replace him with any one of a thousand thugs off the street and who could even tell the difference?
More later. Jesus this is long, but I did want to talk about the process, because I think it all went very well.
Not a full session, really, more of a prelude. It’s been one of those weeks. But the character stuff is pretty fun.
Drax is at a party with a pirate gang he knows and sometimes works with. They ran into each other on one of Drax’s more recent jobs- since the events of the last arc, Drax has been avoiding Nar Shaddaa by taking very workman contracts outside of Hutt space- and everybody had a friendly exchange of banter while they shot at mutual enemies. Drax got about 75% of what he wanted out of the exchange, and so did the pirate leader, and because he’s a friend, he’s invited to the after party. (Also established that the gang met Patience (Drax’s recent ex-wife) and while they all hated her, about half of them, the leader included, thought she was super fun at a party (also that the leader and Patience always parted with a big grin and a jaunty “next time, I’m going to kill you!”))
Mostly Drax spends his party time drinking alone in a booth and looking at the bounty feeds, though he does have a 20 minute conversation with a member of the gang who did some very brave mechanical alterations to a live grenade on the last mission (whatever number of fingers this guy started his life with (not ten), he has two less now).
Rek (around 14 or 15 at this point in the timeline) is also at the party, though he was notably absent from the mission. The pirate leader is giving him claps on the back and has bought him a drink, but Drax is able to observe that Rek is looking for approbation even more than usual from the adults in his gang, and until he gets it he seems a bit nervous.
A hilariously botched stealth vs. vigilance roll means that Rek’s attempt to skirt the side tables to sneak up on Drax results in a lekku getting caught and Rek, who is a tiny bit drunk, falling over backwards. Drax notices two things as a result of this roll. One: on the TV there’s a report about a Hutt who’s just been violently taken down in some sort of internal Hutt police action; the victorious party’s ghouls are basically standing on the TV holding bazookas labelled “crime cannon” and saying “damn shame when ‘accidents’ like this happen.” Two: Rek took a bit longer to get up than he should have and he got up weird. He’s favoring one side and seems like he was recently hurt. Drax- who canonically has the uncanny talent to pick the exact right drink for anyone- orders Rek what is essentially a chocolate milkshake with gin in it. (We recall the very first time Drax met an even younger Rek and made the mistake of saying “whatever you want, kid, my treat,” at a cheap burger joint. The camera begins on Drax making a face of mixed horror and disbelief and pans over to where a child Rek sits, surrounded by the detritus of empty cartons, baskets, and wrappers, and drinking a soda cup full of free condiments as he continues to eat.)
Rek gets up, saunters over, and does a manly lean onto Rek’s table. His voice hasn’t quite finished dropping yet, and he’s trying to pitch it down, without complete success. He’s wearing clothes that look too big for him- hand me downs from other gang members, including a decent, if worn, flak jacket- but he’s managing to pull off a thuggish look with it. Drax reaches over and flips the safety on Rek’s gun back on. He asks his teenage miscreant buddy how it’s been going and Rek assures him that it’s been good. Nothing bad. Then he inhales 75% of an alcohol milkshake without breathing to avoid following up on a really unconvincing “nothing bad.” When asked what he’s getting kudos from the boss for, Rek replies “keeping quiet, mostly.” Drax is a professional bounty hunter, and has been talking to members of the gang- he knows they stole a load of drugs recently and have been moving it around in smallish shipments. He’s able to intuit Rek’s been working as a mule and assumes he was caught and gave nothing away.
Rek says he heard Drax and Patience got divorced, and he’s glad because, man, she was evil. Drax rubs his face and says yeah, you were right. It was ugly. She cleaned me out. But she’s gone now. Rek’s face lights up. She’s not dead, Drax corrects. Rek’s face falls again. He thinks about it, gives the kind of sage nod only a teenage boy who thinks he knows everything can, and goes “Bitches be crazy, man.”
“I know we’re divorced, but you don’t talk about my wife like that,” Drax replies.
Rek nods, and, after a pause, says with the air of someone who means a lot more, “I’m glad you’re back.”
Rek asks Drax, as a man of the world, for advice on talking to, you know, a girl. Drax says just tell her you like her, worst she can say is no. Rek opines that No would be a huge fucking deal. Drax says, listen. Don’t peacock. Be yourself. You’re a good kid.
At this point he gets a ping on his datapad. In the last fifteen minutes, there’s been a flood of bounties, all related to the recently dead hutt. One in particular is flagged as very close to Drax’s location- no more than a 20 minute hyperspace jump: a twi’lek by the name of Suvi’ovask. Drax turns the bounty around to Rek and asks if he knows this guy.
“He’s the galaxy’s biggest fucking asshole,” says Rek, who rolled very well. He’s a slave hunter for the Hutts with such a brutal reputation that people kill themselves when they hear he’s on their trail. He always brings people in alive, but, you know, alive’s a pretty broad category. Rek is very much of the opinion that being both a twi’lek and a slave hunter is the worst selling out you could possibly do.
Well, says Drax, I don’t speak Ryl or the, you know, tail thing. You wanna come with me on this one? Rek’s eyes light up. Meet me at the ship in an hour, says Drax.
During the interval he looks up his quarry. They bounty makes a specific note that any technology found on the mark is considered part of the bounty, and it says it in such a way that it implies that’s worth a lot. He’s known to be dispatched on a moon called Unlau, orbiting a gas giant. A good roll means Drax has been there before, though not professionally. He and his first wife visited. The moon is far from the local star, but near both a nebula and an arm of the spiral galaxy in such a way that it exists in a kind of perpetual twilight full of brilliant stars, and it’s famous for geysers, waterfalls, and cave filled cliffs. It’s on the edge of Hutt space- one of the last stops before you go in, which means it’s a trading post, a favorite spot for smugglers, and a place a lot of runaway slaves wash up. It’s also about 75% twi’lek by population.
Drax puts a bunch of snacks where Rek will know to look for them. Rek gets there early, seemingly packing nothing but his blaster, though he is wearing a large jacket. Drax reminds him they might be gone for a while and Rek seems perplexed as to why he’s bringing it up. The ship is more spartan than Rek might remember. Rek asks what happened to the paneling that was in here. Drax responds by yelling “Divorce!” down the corridor.
(A pause as we imagine Patience in jodhpurs on a manicured green lawn, in front of a young holding a tray full of drinks and wearing shorts that look both tiny and uncomfortable. She yells “PULL” and raises a laser canon.)
Drax calls Rek up to the cockpit when he’s ready to leave. Rek has found the snacks, grabbed all of them, and secreted them away various places on his person. Drax shakes his head and reaches over to switch the safety back on on Rek’s gun. He asks Rek if he’s sure he can handle himself, because this guy is going to be dangerous. Rek is a teenager raised by pirates. He’s sure he can handle himself no matter what the situation is.
And then Drax punches the ship to lightspeed and the stars become bright blue lines, and our boys are off on an adventure.
(Also gave my player a bit of out of character meta on what to expect: which is to say his quarry will be trying to evade him. He can spend as much or as little time investigating as he likes, and he’ll be rewarded for doing so with information, BUT his quarry will be spending that time gathering assets that will be used against him (unless he can use information he’s found to deny those assets to his quarry). Then it’ll be a question of defeating the challenges posed by those assets and catching the quarry before he can jump planet. His opponent will also be using the gadgeteer bounty hunter talent tree, same as him).
Drax is in his shitty office in Nar Shaddaa, where he’s been sleeping for the last week and hasn’t even begun to unpack, deleting pictures of his recently ex-wife. His secretary bot is in hibernation mode because the office’s power is patchy right now. There’s a chime at the door, and Drax opens it to reveal an astronomically high-end female-coded protocol droid in a silk robe worth more than most people’s lives. Her face and head configuration are something like a multi-species noh mask, curved to suggest features without committing to them and painted in such a way that one instinctively reads the shape of her eyes as broadly like their own species configuration. She says she’s here on behalf of NuTech corporate sector interests to hire Drax to investigate a murder.
(Below the cut because this is loooooong, but if you want to try and solve the mystery, I welcome guesses!)
The droid introduces herself as Nu734047, though she concedes to accept Nu for short. An acquisitions executive representing her company was murdered a few hours ago along with two other parties. The executive’s name was Weel Bol’lan. Pressed for the other two parties she gives them as Commander Pristan Vadst of the former Republic military, currently leader of the Violet Sun mercenary company, and, after a pause, Kadjah Desjilic (as in Jabba “the Hutt” Desjilic). Nu emphasizes that her company wants a thorough investigation of the events of the evening to determine the profitability of continued business ventures.
Drax’s rolls and quick research allow him to know the following going in: NuTech is a company with varied investments in everything from starships to investments, pharmaceuticals to droid production. There was some scandal back in the Republic years wherein they were fined for knowingly making medications more addictive than necessary, but that was years ago and their profits have been up. Weel Bol’lan was a nemoidian and a frequent face in business journals, usually posed somewhere opulent, talking about exciting new technology investments and selling infrastructure upgrades- sometimes before all the details had been worked out. He seemed generally well thought of in his community and had acquired numerous patents for his company.
Pristan Vadst was a rising star near the end of the Clone Wars, but a very divisive officer; people either loved him or hated him. His numbers of troops lost were quite high, but his numbers of battles lost were very, very low. When the Republic became the Empire, more of his superiors hated him than loved him, so he resigned his commission and went freelance in the outer rim. The Violet Sun mercenary company is notable particularly for a large minority of its soldiers being clones that followed Vadst out of the Empire.
Kadjah Desjilic was a dangerously ambitious Hutt walking a tightrope between being necessary competent operator and clearly wanting Jabba’s job. They were recently very severely and publicly punished for an infraction involving hiding information from their superiors. The infraction itself was small, but the punishment was meant to send a message: know your place and stay there. Like NuTech, Kadjah was involved in diverse ventures including drugs, mercenary work, space freight, protection rackets, gambling, and so on.
The drive to the crime scene is brief. Nu attempts to pour Drax’s drinks and he grabs her arm to stop her. He tells her he knows she’s buttering him up, and he wants nothing to do with servile programming or forced compliments. He wants them to interact as equals. Nu tells him that’s very commendable. He glares.
The site of the murder is a multistory edifice called the Fortress, which has built its entire reputation on being a safe, neutral meeting ground for different factions in Nar Shaddaa’s vicious criminal underworld. The upper portion of the Fortress is composed of three concentric rings of luxury and security. The outer ring welcomes any number of employees of the factions and puts them up in style while talks happen; security in this ring includes manual pat downs and guards to keep the peace. The second ring is open to no more than five pre-determined body guards per faction, and always an equal number to the other factions’; security for this ring includes weight sensitive plates to thwart stealth devices, facial recognition software, and a blood DNA scanner- failing any of these measures triggers a stun shock and an alarm in all parts of the Fortress. Inside the second ring, two guards watch the door to the innermost ring at all times, always from separate factions. The second ring includes a comfortable lounge for guards not on active duty. The doors are staggered in such a way that someone going from the outer rim to the inner must pass by this lounge. The inner ring is a luxury meeting room designed to accommodate many species. Refreshments are provided in a quantity that clients may pass undisturbed hours in discussion. This room is soundproofed. Each faction is encouraged to send a representative ahead of time to personally check the security before the meeting.
There were three different hour long two person guard shifts last night. At the end of the third, bodyguards began to worry and opened up the room to find three cold corpses.
(the events in these next paragraphs are slightly out of order, but it makes for easier thematic grouping).
At the scene, Drax is not the only investigator on the case. The Hutts have sent their own people in, lead by a weequay ex-pitfighting champion turned bounty hunter turned Hutt contractor by the name of Quayun, though most people just call her Queen. She cultivates a “barbarian” persona, including a necklace of sentient finger bones, but it’s mostly a useful ruse, and she’s a canny, sophisticated operator. Drax likes her. She does not like Nu. They talk briefly and while she’s not in the mood for any nonsense, she agrees to let Drax investigate so long as he shows her crew proper respect and shares all his findings with her. Her crew is mostly tearing apart the outer rim, disassembling droids and scanners, and holding the owners teen son hostage to ensure full cooperation. Drax talks to Toh, who was the Hutt head guard and one of the two people on third shift. He concedes that perhaps they were a bit relaxed, but the Fortress is always considered to be an easy gig where nothing goes wrong. He explains that all of the CorpSec body guards were whisked away in a black car as soon as word got back to their bosses and that they looked “fuckin’ terrified”. He says Kadjah had met with NuTech before. He also demonstrates the soundproofing on the inner room by firing his gun wildly inside the crime scene, to the chagrin of all the Violet Sun people inside. He speculates that within the next 24 hours he’s going to either end up promoted or fed to some kind of monster, so he may as well have a little fun, right?
The head of the Violet Sun investigators is a clone called Tripwire. Even though the war ended recently, he’s already going gray, and he has an intricate circuit board cut into the back of his close-cropped hair. Drax knows Tripwire personally as well, though he has not seen him in years (this was not something I planned, but you have to give a good roll to the player). Tripwire does not like Drax. All the clones have an espirit de corps, but Tripwire particularly was a clones-first person, and the fact that his specialty in mechanics and demolitions overlapped so much with Drax’s meant he often saw Drax as a rival. He greets Drax coldly but cordially and gives him a Kansas-level flat look when asked if his mercenary company for hire, which does indiscriminate violence for money, might have any enemies. He expresses disdain for the Hutt crew and complains that they’re surely destroying clues, but he also clearly doesn’t want a bloodbath over it. All his men, clone and otherwise, seem to respect him. The Violet Sun is doing a precision sweep of the second ring and the inner room with cameras and instruments. Tripwire says he doesn’t know what the meeting was about, which is what everyone at the scene says, but the difference here is that Tripwire is lying and Drax catches it. Drax also notices his armor, which is superficially identical to the rest of his men’s, but with subtle mods Drax would absolutely recognize if he saw them again. Tripwire was the guard on the first shift, with one of the CorpSec guards. Drax also meets and speaks to a clone named Patch, who was on the third guard shift with Toh. Patch is an earnest young clone with a visible skin graft, finished just as the war was wrapping, and the transition out of the army was hard for him. He respected Vadst, and opines that even though he’s not crazy about the work and clients, the mercenary company “you know... feels like home.” He mentions this is not the first time Vadst had met with Kadjah. When Drax is done investigating Vadst, he covers the body with a sheet and gives a salute.
In the innermost chamber, the body of Kadjah has been removed, as their people considered it disrespectful to leave it there. Bol’lan and Vadst are there however, and they have clearly been hit with a gun of immense caliber. Half of Bol’lan’s head is missing. Vadst’s chest is in ruins. Drax is able to determine that the single shot that killed Vadst was fired from near the door and that Vadst never rose from sitting. Bol’lan tried to rise, and the shot that killed him was fired from slightly further into the room. Exit spray indicates three shots were fired into Kadjah, from closer in than Bol’lan’s. All signs indicate quick, precise, deliberate shots fired from waist to chest level if the attacker was human sized, and Drax concludes the attacker took out the most dangerous target first, then Bol’lan who was never likely to be trouble, then the hutt last, as it was likely to be the slowest to respond and would take the most time. The wounds are extensive enough that Drax isn’t able to tell much about the gun except that it was big, but while investigating Bol’lan he finds a vial of some unknown substance that the Violet Sun had missed (this roll was a failure with five advantages). He manages to pocked it without being observed, including by Nu, who has been watching him carefully this whole time and recording everything around her.
He tries to talk to the Fortress’s owner, a duros who is clearly near his breaking point, watching his whole life torn apart by Hutt thugs who are holding his kid hostage. He explains some of the intricacies of the security system. When Drax asks if there’s anything else, he looks nervously to his Hutt guards and to his kid and says “no.” Drax convinces Queen to let him talk to the owner alone and he immediately blurts “I will give you 100,000 credits to get my son out of Hutt space. There’s an account, he knows the password. Please. I know it’s too late for me, but please get him out.” It’s apparent to Drax he doesn’t know any more than he’s already said, and he’s turned over the blood samples for the door and all the data to the Hutt crew. Drax promises to do what he can about the kid and (destiny point), but he will not take any money for it. The owner, confused, offers him more money, which Drax again declines. Drax is able to find a trivial bounty on the kid he can put a claim on, which elicits some loud swearing from Queen. It doesn’t stop her killing the kid if she really wants to, but she’s still a licensed bounty hunter and there are guild rules about interfering with a bounty someone else has claimed. She glares at Drax when he comes out of the office. She’s not going to kill the kid now, but she’s not letting him go either. She gives Drax a copy of the security data, but keeps the physical blood for herself, possibly to give to some sort of giant horrible space bloodhounds.
Drax asks Nu if he can interview the CorpSec security. After a moment she tells him his request is granted. He tells her he needs to stop at a pharmacy and pick up his prescription on the way, which elicits another very long pause before she agrees. Drax does indeed pick up said prescription, but he also passes the vial off for analysis to a medical contact he has (destiny point), an ithorian biochemist who worked in the Republic Army MedCorps, with a specialty in researching and countering biological weapons developed by Separatists forces. This person is deeply regretful about what they see as their role in the rise of the Empire and is currently doing mercy clinic work as penance. (Drax’s player supplied the details and could not have picked a better person to hand this to.) In the car, he applies his prescription to prove he got it. Nu mentions her company makes a superior version of the same formula.
Inside the NuTech building holding cells, Drax talks to the leader of the Corpsec security forces, a nemoidian named Eyel who was on the second shift with one of the Hutt guards. He seems confused and terrified. He gives similar answers to Toh and Tripwire, and mentions that maybe they were a little lax, but this was meant to be an easy assignment. He does note that during the third shift, Tripwire got a call from someone in his organization and had to step outside for a couple of minutes to meet with them, which is technically against the rules, but isn’t really unusual, and he was back quickly. Eyel maintains he has absolutely no knowledge of the meeting, but he’s absolutely sure it was nothing illegal, as his company doesn’t do that sort of thing. As Drax is preparing to leave, an alarm goes off and security rushes to one of the other cells. The human inside, who was on first shift guard with Tripwire, is dead (dark side DM destiny point). Drax is whisked away, but not before he’s able to get a look at what killed him- a targeted implanted explosive device in the back of the head. He recognizes the injection site for it as coming from what’s called a leechgun, because of its anesthetic tip. Victims don’t tend to realize the implant is there. He’s able to determine the implantation definitely happened before they got to the fortress, possibly as much as a day ago. Leechguns are rare but if you’re going to find them anywhere, it’s Nar Shaddaa.
And that’s where we stopped for the night.
The next two clues- the security records and the analysis on the vial- will be big ones, but if you want to take a crack at solving it, please do :D
