Space Bastards #1 - Tooth & Mail Episode One: Space Bastards (January 13, 2021)
writer(s): Eric Peterson and Joe Aubrey | artist [penciller & inker]: Darick Robertson | colorist: Diego Rodriguez | letters: Simon Bowland | designer: Jerry Frissen | editor: Rob Levin | publishing company: Humanoids
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.
___
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.
they look like the year 2007 exploded into a person. i love them
that’s EXCELLENT because essentially the whole aesthetic of the Space Bastards concept is essentially the opposite of like those super gritty movies that take place in a comic cinematic universe and even if the characters THEMSELVES are brightly colored they’re generally not allowed to wear bright colors? so basically everyone in space wears bright colors. Howvever, there’s like sets of rules
on Azuen’s specific planet, most people wear monochromatics. Since Azuen is a prince, he wears Canary yellow (which. i love canary yellow but. your whole life?)
Anyway after he runs out on not only his wedding but the whole prince deal, he finds out that not all planets have set monochromatic color schemes and he is UTTERLY livin it up
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.
