What Do I Know?

Apologies up front–if you are one of the 2.7 people that regularly awaits updates on the blog, I’m a bit behind.  I’ll try to rectify that, but for now, just pretend that there is some kind of temporal anomaly that has occurred which makes my blog end up running behind yet removes all blame from me.  Thanks!

I’ve taken the reigns of the Age of Rebellion game, and with the changing of the guard, I wanted to try out an idea I had.  I wanted everyone to keep the same characters they had, if they wished to do so, but I was going to shift the focus of what the Rebel operatives were doing.

N’zoth is the planet where the Yevetha hail from.  You might remember the planet and the species from the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy from the EU . . . er . . . Legends series of books, or from them getting wiped out by the Vong later on.  Essentially, the Yevetha are enslaved by the Empire and forced to build ships for the Black Sword Command branch of the Imperial Navy at the super secret Black 15 Shipyards, and sometime after the Battle of Endor, the Yevetha threw the Empire out and took over the shipyards, and eventually they decided to take on the New Republic with their ships that they built at the shipyards that they took from the Imperials.

I felt a very compelling urge to take this storyline and inject a Rebel cell into N’zoth, with the objective of helping the Yevetha overthrow the Imperials a few years early, to see how that would change how the events of the Black Fleet Crisis would play out.  We all know the Imperials are bad guys, but what about xenophobic, brutal allies?  How to the PCs deal with allies that might kill them, and probably hold to some pretty scary traditions?

I also wanted the team to hit the ground running.  Or at least to hit space running.  Or flying really fast.  You know what I mean.  The team was already coming out of hyperspace near an asteroid field, with orders to follow a debris field to one of N’zoth’s moons to meet with a Rebel operative that would be coordinating things from the least developed of the planet’s moons.

I will freely admit that I probably made the check to fly in through the asteroid field into the debris field a little hard.  I ruled that the ship was moving pretty fast coming out of hyperspace, so the check was established by the lower of the ship’s speed and size, upgraded by the other, and complicated by three setback dice to represent the tightly packed nature of the debris field.  For those not familiar with the system, really tough check.

Currently on the team we have a Duro mechanic that is good at flying, but doesn’t want to be known as a pilot.  We also have a Corellian whose motivation is glory and whose duty is Space Superiority.  The Duro has a bit of a chip on her shoulder over Duro being reorganized under the Corellian sector.  So there is some tension there.  The Corellian didn’t ask for any help on his piloting check, and hilarity ensued.  Two Despair showed up on those dice.  The Lambda Class shuttle slammed into one asteroid, then another, and lost their shields.

Thankfully the Chiss slicer noticed the TIE-drones that were positioned in the debris field, and figured out that there was a relay station that they could jam to keep the drones from reporting their arrival in the system.  The team actually made pretty quick work of the three TIEs, and the relay station was jammed so badly that it would take days for it to notice the TIE-drones were gone.

The team found their Rebel contact, Agent Taproot, a Neti, who happens to be allergic to humans.  The Duro took this minor trait and told the Gran in the party that the Neti was reacting to spores given off by the Corellian.  This gets worse later.  Watch for it.  Agent Taproot gives the team their false identities, and the location of their cover business, and then sends them to meet a smuggler that was going to ferry them to the planet.

The smuggler turned out to be a Hapani captain, who had long flowing blond hair and an open chested shirt.  The Duro pointed out to the Gran that the pretty boy pilots were spreading because of the spores, and the Gran, confused over human reproduction, was afraid that the Corellian population was going to get out of control.  Thus the Gran decided that he may need to neuter the Corellian to keep his spore producing glands from overpopulating the region.

The team landed on N’zoth, visited their business, met with local Imperial representatives and corporate types, and bought a cheap speeder truck for transportation.  Their cover business is a processing center for sending paperwork off for all of the contractors working on N’zoth.  The Chiss slicer managed to do a week’s worth of paperwork in a few hours, but failed with a Triumph.  Thus the paperwork looks in order and nobody is going to notice that it all got filed to the wrong place for about a week.

The team also received a PROXY style droid equipped with encryption devices and long term communication gear, as well as holoprojectors that allowed it to look like anyone.  The team renamed the droid, then decided to make it look like the Corellian’s sister, scanning the Holonet for images of her.  At this point, the player of the Corellian managed to get a surprise attack from backstory he never created.  Not only did we find out he had a sister, but he had a sister that graduated with honors from the Corellian Military Academy and is working as a Merchant Fleet ship captain with honors and her own bloodstripe, and that he may have actually been trying to outdo his sister when he set out to seek glory on his own.

The group was ready to head out into the desert to look for insurgents to ally themselves with, under the cover of nightfall.  Before they left, however, the Gran decided to neuter the Corellian before any more spores could be produced by his spore producing glands.  This resulted in some dice rolling and a Despair showing up.  The Gran failed to castrate the Corellian, and a patrol of Stormtroopers heard the ruckus in the garage, and investigated.

The Stormtroopers were ready to round up everyone and start investigating what was going on, but the human medic/sniper decided to act quickly, shot the Gran with his stun rifle and knocked him out, and apologized to the Stormtroopers.  The Stormtroopers set up an appointment for aggression testing for a week from today to make sure all of the aliens were safe to be working around Imperial citizens.

The Gran was sitting at home with the droid watching him.  The rest of the team piled into the speeder truck and set out for the desert.  They failed to find the hideout from the coordinates they had, and the crew was attacked by a pack of Siringana predators.  As it was getting late in the night, we resolved this with a one roll resolution check, and the team survived the encounter with only a few bumps and bruises, despite the Siringana Alpha damaging the truck.

All in all, a pretty great opening session for the campaign relaunch.