What Do I Know?

We meet Team Besh on Eriadu, the Coruscant of the Outer Rim, bastion of Imperial loyalty, and former home of Grand Moff Tarkin.  Our team this time around consists of the following characters:

Doctor Smith–He tries not to be violently insulting to non-humans, and to not fall into the patterns of his previous, pro-Imperial past, especially after Alderaan.  Tries.  And he’s being blackmailed.

T3-R9–Another returning character from a previous campaign, this one being my Star Wars Saga game set in the Old Republic. Yes.  T3 is about 4000 years old, and his memory core has taken a beating.  T3 owes his continued freedom to Honest Cid, so he may have to do some work on the side.

Tiberius–A man on a trek through the stars, who also likes to negotiate.  Tiberius is a ladies man, and a talker, and is driven to explore new worlds and new civilizations while turning a profit.

Krill Anshar–A slicer that accidentally found himself working for smugglers.  He’s compelled to see if he can break into computers and to test security systems, but nobody wants to accidentally enter a life a crime, do they?

Dia Karn–Dia is a Twi’lek who was a former slave, who can’t stand slavery.  She good at quietly killing people, and has some credentials as a scholar, and owes a favor to some shadowy folk that set her free.

Gar Britt–A gambler and a fast talker, what most people don’t know is that Gar is Force sensitive, and it runs in his family.  He also tends to dislike slavery and oppression, and is driven to oppose it, even if he does so subtly and with style.

Highlights of the evening?

• A cruel guard menaces Dia, Smith encourages it to try and escape, while Gar defends her, and the whole mess is interrupted by a mysterious cyborg that bails them out of jail.
• T3 is being used as a table in the corner, and is accidentally activated and claimed by the cyborg.
• The group is scrutinized on the tram on the way to the cyborg’s ship by an imperial officer and a compliment of Stormtroopers, but they have a lot of Cool between them and manage to not set off any warning bells.  Or at least not too many.

• The cyborg turns out to be an insurance adjuster that accidentally got military grade cybernetics after an accident, and is really a very simple man doing a side job for Cid.
• Dia carves the word “scum” into Doctor Smith’s arm with a vibroknife on low power while he’s sleeping because of his offensive comments while the group was in jail.
• The team is intimidated by TK-655 when arriving on Polis Massa, and Doctor Smith says something offensive about Dia again.  Once out of sight of the Stormtrooper, Tiberius stuns Smith again, but this time, Smith just runs into the next room.
• Cid gives the team their own YT-1300, which Tiberius calls the Free Enterprise, and Cid lets T3 know that he is “emancipated,” and will do what he can to keep the droid free of ownership, for a few extra favors here and there.
• The team is sent to Malastare to pick up some parts from a failing custom speeder part business which is being absorbed by a Hutt front company.  The parts being sold are “off the books” of the company’s assets.

• Gar has a contact on Malastare, but ultimately, instead of contacting anyone, the group just finds the warehouse that the parts are likely housed in, due to Krill and T3’s slicing, and the group rents hovertrucks to clean out the warehouse.
• Tiberius and Dia pick up some items for resale in the Outer Rim, outside of the normal job parameters.
• There is a riot a few blocks down from the warehouse.  While this is good cover, Doctor Smith can’t help but want to actually see if he could do some good, as part of his effort to turn over a new leaf.  He runs down to the riot and barely manages to escape injury while the rest of the team works on cleaning out the warehouse.
• Doctor Smith barely makes it back to the Free Enterprise before the team leaves, and Dia and Tiberius convince the local authorities that Smith is actually a mental patient without medical credentials, and that they will “take him back home.”  The authorities give them a straight jacket to help.

• On the way off Malastare, patrol craft are diverted due to some incident with fighters and a bulk freighter, and a Kom’rk class fighter-transport hails the Free Enterprise, asking them to land on a nearby moon so that he can take possession of their goods.  
• The pirate is infamous in the Mid Rim as potentially, but not definitely, being a Mandalorian and using their equipment.
• T3 primes the engines to run, and starts putting the ship into evasive maneuvers, while Krill plots a hyperspace course back to Polis Massa, and finally Gar manages to talk about a supposed connection between the group and the Hutts that gives the pirate pause long enough for the hyperdrive to be engaged and the group to escape.

As a side point, the first encounter was designed when I thought have the party was going to be non-human, and eventually most of the characters ended up being human, except for Dia and T3.  I should have changed the encounter, or realized on the fly how it changed the tone of the first encounter, but I didn’t pick up on this soon enough, and the opening scene turned into a guard terrorizing and marginalizing the Twi’lek scholar, and it really wasn’t suppose to single her out that way.

I’ve apologized to the Twi’lek’s player, and I’m going to keep an eye out for unintentional changes in scene focus like that in the future.  Sometimes you really do need to sit back and visualize the scene in your head before you dive into it.

Side Note:  In general, I follow an abbreviated version of the process in Never Unprepared, one step of which is just reviewing how encounters will potentially play out after you write them.  I did that, but only from a purely mechanical standpoint  (i.e. will the players likely get violent, will they attempt to break out, will they quietly fade away or argue back).  While much of that is decision making and roleplaying based, I really didn’t envision the whole encounter, the tone and tenor of it, and I should have.