Star Wars 2

So on this last session I kind of overshot the source material – that is, I think my PCs are farther along than mordicai's in Mordicai’s own campaign!
Stealing – liberally – I borrowed this technique of having the droid memory core stolen from last session turned on and watched by Chiss pirate Eris Berserk.  Seen from the perspective of Concilliator Kek’s spy/protocol droid the scene of the bad guys planning their moves & setting up plots was played out by the PCs with what may become their sub-characters?  Each PC was tasked with playing one of the baddies summoned to Imperator Pryll’s presence.  It went like this –

First, the star-wars open of the ship leaving the planet, flying up, up, up to the big-red star destroyer of the Praetorian Grand Moff.  At first it seems like you’d expect – like Vader arriving at the second death star – the floors are polished and shining & the storm-troopers rank up in parade formation.  But it’s the touches that show the age & change in the former Imperial ranks.  The high polish of the floor is broken up by elaborately etched platoon & squad insignia, the troopers aren’t in shiny white by mainly in dulled red – their armor is recolored & a lot of them have messages of resilience & worship written up and down the armor.  All of them are over-armed with vibro-knives & swords & sidearms & rifles, and here and there there are among these, the Emperor’s last devotees, a few sporting ewok scalps & even some old droid-army fingers.   They seem to be standing in parade formation, but they also don’t bow or scrape to the Black Sun Vigo Kek – rather they glare him down with withering tough-guy stares.

From there he’s led not to the command deck – but back and around – through the guts of the ship.  The Grand Moff wants him to see something.  He’s presently joined by Rao Kast, Crosh, Vice Moff Solt & Contessa Misaani.  Described by Mordicai well enough that I felt no need to embellish:

Rao Kast (Black Sun Vigo) The ancient Mandelorians & the Sith were allies, or so the story goes.  The same legends say the only way to unite the clans is under the blade of a laser sword.  Whatever the truth of the legend, Rao Kast believes it: his twin red sabers tell that story as plain as can be.  Not a Force user himself, Kast's customized black battlearmor & red blades nevertheless made him one of the galaxy's premier assassins, until his fame & notoriety grew too large & forced him into semi-retirement as a Black Sun Vigo.

Concilliator Kek (Black Sun Vigo) Ostensibly the liaison between the various business consortiums of Ord Mantell & the government-- whether the Imperial garrison or the hereditary nobility-- Concilliator Kek is in fact the de facto authority of the planet, as well as the public face & legal owner of the legitimate business interests of the Black Sun crime consortium.  The Faleen Vigo is a respirator-wearing germaphobe who delights in wearing furs & feathers, whose topknot is long enough to trail behind him.

Crosh (Arms Dealer): A warlord who controls the old Old Sienar Fleet Systems orbital shipyards around the second Moon of Ord Mantell. Mostly fallen to decay, Crosh has scavenged the facility to keep it operational, cannibalizing the failing factories to cobble together some kind of operational assembly line. They now churn out mostly traditional TIEs, sold to corporate guilds, local systems, & criminal enterprises that want to bulk order starfighters. Not the most graceful of leaders, what Crosh lacks in subtlety he makes up for in decisiveness & low-cunning.

Vice Moff Pandar Solt (Corrupt Bureaucrat): Vice Moff Solt is absolutely terrible at his job-- that's why he has it. Never good enough to be quickly promoted through the ranks, never ambitious enough to have a position worthy of being thrust from by rivals or Force-choked by Lord Vader, Solt's studious mediocrity & lack of imagination presented an opportunity for Concilliator Kek, as Solt's imperial betters abandoned the proverbial ship. He sponsored Pandar's rise to command, making sure to keep a long holotrail of incriminating evidence & blackmail material along the way, though the pompous Vice Moff is utterly a creature of the Black Sun, & doesn't require much pushing.
Solt
Contessa Wilva Misaani (Arrogent Heir): The young, spoiled heir of Ord Mantell technically owns the whole planet and its moons. But Concilliator Kek controls Wilva's funds entirely.  All of her funds are funneled through an anonymous banking clan account, to which only he has access, & Kek is not shy about making sure the Contessa knows that she is on a short leash. She may want to govern, but she has never been taught the skills needed to do so. She is a figurehead, trained to spend her allowance fashionably, & she knows it. The Contessa lives the life of an epicurean, hedonistically flirting & fencing her way petulantly across the scarred face of Ord Mantell

PCs were on hand to play everyone but Contessa Misaani  - and all of them got to witness the breaking of Savrip slaves in the guts of the ship – electro-torture & corrective surgeries – a very sever message is sent here, the bad guys respond in various ways.
Then it’s time to meet our big bad – Grand Moff Tanda Pryll stands behind the recovered throne of the Emperor – not seated on it, she stands behind.  She wears her Imperial officer uniform, all black with the little hat and everyting, the LED buttons showing her advanced rank.  Also she has a lightsaber, also she has a tribal-like necklace worn over her uniform that shows some backwater devotion to obsolete religions that she must have.  She is polished silver & matte black & addresses these, her minions with a cold, efficient menace.

To Kast – “Why haven’t you found Eris Berserk?”
To Kek – “What are you doing about the Droid Uprisings?”
To Crosh – “Why haven’t you produced the elite TIEs for my Elite Troops?”
To Pandar Solt – “Where.  Is.  My.  Money?”
To Contessa Misaani – “Why haven’t you dismissed the rebel presence?”
Kek
We break down the roles & what they do – each of these cronies/rivals.  Rao Kast is pure arrogant bravado.  He virtually threatens her to a duel before swaggering away.  “I’ll capture this Eris Berserk.  You need to be more patient.  Things don’t happen just because you think they should have.  You have to ask.  Then they happen.”  Pryll doesn’t like this, but isn’t sure, in her heart, that she could take him in a duel.  For what’s to come she’ll need both hands.  Kek is eyes & ears, confused, but capable – the uprsings are being dealt with – we’ve developed more advanced restraining bolts & are  making progress in jamming the carrier signals that the uprising has been using to transmit their trickery.  (this brings a chuckle, because his own personal droid, the one allowing the PCs to see all this, is a traitor and a high ranking part of the uprising – so Fun!).  Solt is funny – he’s been around & knows all there is to know about Pryll – but hides it.  He’s flattering & erudite & never, ever says no to her nor ever asks her a question.  As for the money – he’s leveraged her confederate space-bux to operate the local casinos & is cleaning that money so that it can be used to pay Crosh – the margins are razor thin – but he thinks he can manipulate the books a little more in her favor.  While in fact-  he’s been padding his nest aggressively & getting it over on her Hard.
Crosh
Crosh & Misaani.  Crosh – played by a PC came on all wrong with Pryll.  Excuses, a lot of rhetorical questions, a lot of “I can’t.”  None of her reasons impressed Pryll & none of her questions failed to anger her.  In a sidebar – observed by the spy-droid with lip-reading subtitles & behavioral analyses – Kast & Pryll take their leave – where the droid reports the presence of ‘a biological response’.  Pryll puts a hit on Crosh – for failing & being a fool.  Kast asks for help & he’s given the 5 members of Task-Group 66.  These guys are like the red storm troopers from before  but they have capes.  And a few of them have padawan braids to go with their ewok scalps.  They depart in time to miss the Contessa’s shaming.
Misaani, played by me, is petulant & fails utterly to be conniving.  The rebels are here because of everyone else – Solt is letting them into the casinos, Kek hasn’t’ taken care of the droids, and there aren’t star-fighters enough and after all – if you’re so tough  why don’t you get them?  This is my planet, who are you to boss me!?  Well.  Pryll don’t like that.  She uses the force – not to choke the Contessa, but to bow her.  The Contessa is forced to her knees and drug to the throne – which she is made to kiss the foot of.  “All planets are his.  All of them.  Remember.”
(I ended up breaking out the bads in a kind of corporate structure.  Crosh is Operations – Solt is Finance – Kek is Production – Misaani is marketing/ambassador)   With Rao Kast as the hired assassin somehow on the payroll.

So that was the bad guys intro & exposition.  I was pleased & helped by this.  It took a second for everyone to switch back to their actual characters – and at the table we have the returning cast Onee the cyborg repairman, M7 the protocol droid full of secret knives, PX-8 the imperial battle-droid bruiser, Billy Arr the nautilan tough-guy charmer & Inzno the rhodian creeper.  They’re with Eris Berserk who goes berserk – trying to understand why the Grand Moff is looking for her but not offering any details about why – beyond her being a pirate queen in the complex-shifting asteroid field that comprises the Hero’s Moon.  She’s not particularly interested in the PCs – now that they’ve completed their mission for her – more or less & is worried, now, about the heat they’re likely to attract given their shenanigans last session.  So she tasks them with a mission to the Junk Moon – to deliver this robo-brain the Uprising – of which most of the team has some amount of Obligation.

Getting in & out of the Junk Moon is hard – (a couple of the dudes I play with are straight up rocket scientists working at NASA so I try and throw smarty-stuff at them about this here & there).  The junk moon has a debris field halo twice as big as itself surrounding it – it’s hard to come & go from – but there are scavengers & people living in the debris field that can effect a journey to the surface.


It so happens that one of these – Murg Litso (played by a SW version of Radical Edward from Cowboy Bebop) operates a converted rebel-personnel carrier as her personal junk-barge & she happens to have been the person who put M7 back into operation.  We likened this to the discovery of the Iron Giant – a seemingly nice droid but secretly FULL of KNIVES (as he is, in fact, full of knives).  Murg contacts M7 through a back-channel, a trouble-alert built into him that lets him know that she’s wondering about him.  So the team makes for the fringes of the Junk Moon.
The debris field of the moon is a like an ecosystem for droids.  Old vulture units fly about – buzz droids hop from wreck to wreck – there are battleships from the Revan era slowly decaying in orbit & falling steadily to the surface – it’s a big junkyard with a lot of feral space-droids running around in it.  In this milieu Murg Litso is something like a Disney-princess.  On her barge droid combat trainers light to her fingers & shy Astromechs furtively wheel up to her.  She fixes & feeds them, cares for them and generally is a droid-fan.  She’s a Gank – like Onee, very, very cybernetic.  Sing-song patter & inexplicable moods are her ways.  She explains that access to the surface is troubled these days because of the Jerky-Jerk Nybb Jinko – who’s commandeered the old space elevator.
M7

She pantomimes & describes the Space Elevator’s functioning  - It’s a great big huge space-station and on the surface of the planet & mirror/laser array creates a hot plasma that incinerates the air which causes pressure that raises the space-station in a molten column of fiery-plasma death – but also a column free of debris.  The molten matter cools in space and adheres to the station, heavying it up again and allowing it to descend.  It rises and falls like a tide and Murg has its rises and falls calculated out 5 monitors deep.  “No, No, No flying to it – angry droids make the landing pads sad.  So sad, too bad, must not go – but Murg has a secret!  A big secret that’s little and that can get you in, secret tunnels!”

Murg shows them her barge’s torpedo tubes & is explaining to the team how the torpedo can get to the space elevator – she’s working on persuading Onee & PX-8 while Billee Arr is not hesitating, he’s sitting in the torpedo, strapping on his helmet.  His enthusiasm is persuasive to the rest of them (the player who plays him saying his famous motto:  I don’t play D&D to bunt).  The torpedo is driven forward by Gaussian effect so that it quickly breaks the sound barrier & then shoots instantly into hyperspace.  It reforms in the material world almost instantly thereafter inside the space-station – a molten hole behind them seals up as the self-healing principles that run the facility heal the several bulkheads they’ve breached.

They find themselves in a closed down old mall that is functioning as a marketplace for Jawas & ugnauts & Toydarians & every other little star wars species.  They are bartering over droid parts & droids.  PX-8 is clever & notices that some of the Jawas aren’t Jawas at all!  He pulls back one’s hood surreptitiously revealing that it is an autonomous droid – an imposter!  This creates a furor in the fire-lit marketplace so that the party is forced to shift away – it seems even in the droid graveyard the Droid Uprising is seen as a serious danger.  Among the market stalls Billy Arr & Onee manage to make a new ‘friend’.  A local guide & another Gank.  Rulm Nunto is all about his Max Reebo bootlegs & his spice habit.  It turns out that Nybb Jinko has found an old droid-army shipping container & he’s powered up the droids inside & made himself an army!  They’ve been running around the station, controlling the landing pads & beating people up to steal their stuff – for example Rulm’s most prized bootleg Max Reebo recording – the one from Jabba the Hutt’s pentultimate show-  where you can hear the Rancor in the background eating guys!  Very rare, very hard to find.  So he wants it back & is happy to guide the players through the derelict space-mall, through to the interior space-housing-project with its narrow corridors, heavy graffiti, and doorways with straight up space-monster people just hanging out, watching the scum go by.
Onee
All of this is a multi-layer shell around the heart of the station – a series of gantries & catwalks built into a huge cubic void within the station – at the top of the pyramidal organization of the catwalks is the ‘penthouse’ which Nybb Jinko has taken over for himself.  Like a jerk.  Droids in groups of 4 patrol the catwalks and the party sets about fighting them.
There’s some tricky fight-stuff.  Catwalks are burned out underneath the droids’ feet – other mechano-droids scuttle up and down the supporting columns and still more droids shoot up the party members – a few of whom make crazy – heroic leaps – up & forward.  Nybb Jinko shows up on the scene – a droid shaman – he wears the face of a giant protocol droid and hops about shooting off his stun-pistols & incanting in the binary language of power converters.  The wireless network in the place is strong enough to allow him to backdoor poor M7 – who is hacked & forced to shoot at his friends.  The ensuing fight is…  Look I’m still not great at running this game but I think I did o.k. with this fight – the first one I’ve really run correctly or competently.  The droids go down fast & hard while Nybb Jinko is formidable with his hacking- right up until he’s brought down.  Meantime Onee is gifted at droid repair & manages to quarantine the Trojans affecting M7.  There are some collapses & dangers that result in poor Billee Arr being glued to a collapsing catwalk – and PX-8 keeps sliding down, down the pole to the bottom of the station – never quite getting the hang of climbing up.

But they win & they claim the droid-mask from the bothan slicer Nybb Jinko – and then they commandeer his penthouse – a circular room with sweet views of the melting & freezing sky – which is the control room & flight tower for the landing pad array just above.  They turn off his angry droids & bring the space-elevator back into its preferred anarchic state.  And that was the end of the session.