We had the first play session of Lightspeed d6, my Star Wars hack of two hacks of WEG d6 & SWN. I am really kicking myself because I had used a Star Wars crawl generator to come up with a pretty sweet little intro for the players so they understood:
- They were in a canyon-city of the rust planet, Khoraj
- They had been gathered together in a cantina called the Frisky Jawa
- They were there for a job given by the Toydarian smuggling boss, "Uncle" Pen Posla
But I improv'd the writing of the crawl moments before we started and then promptly lost what I wrote because I hadn't saved it. Oh well -- you will just have to trust me when I say that it was cool and totally landed.
Definitely recommend using the crawl generator for this kind of shit, and I would even consider using it for your plain jane OSR games. Why? I'll tell you why -- it's a nice visual way of delivering three sentences of background info to players who generally can't be bothered to read anything you would give them normally and if you absolutely must deliver an info dump, there is no better way.
Our cast of (PC) characters are as follows:
- Cheekie, the Rodian Smuggler
- Waz Rulgink, the Sullustan Pilot
- Tong, the Kaminoan Combat Medic/Black Market Organ Harvester
- Jubjub, the Ewok Spy
- Allent Var, the Zabrak/Human Thug
- J4-K3 (Jake), the Astromech Scoundrel
The game starts with the PCs gathered around the back table of a seedy cantina, where the friendly but dishonest smuggling boss, "Uncle" Posla holds court. He told the group they were gathered there for a pretty simple job -- take a flatbed speeder to an abandoned factory, meet the contact who had been paid in advance, pick up some unserialized droid parts that had fallen off the assembly line, and deliver them to a waiting smuggling ship at Teb's Pick-a-Part scrapyard. 500 credits awaited each of them once they returned.
(As an aside -- I wanted to sort of callback to Watto from the Prequels without making yet another pile of antisemitic tropes, so I did my best to imitate a New Jersey mafia sounding guy instead. It got some laughs so I'd call it a success.)
The group accepts the job and loads up into the speeder, flying along the canyon city on the way to their destination. They followed the directions on their datapad to find a rusted landing platform jutting out into the canyon, attached to a neglected-looking building hewn into the canyon wall. They landed and hopped out to take stock of the scene in front of them: huge double doors at the end of the landing platform leading into the building with a cargo crane protruding from the side of the building. The doors were ajar about 10 feet, and as the group approached quietly, they heard voices from inside.
The PCs stack up on either side of the opening in the cargo doors, SWAT team style. Tong’s player asked if there were cargo sleds or boxes they could stack to use as cover – lo and behold, there were some pretty rusty repulsor sleds nearby that they could get working with a Vehicles skill check. The group decided that the element of surprise would serve them better so abandoned the grav sled mobile cover plan.
J4 volunteered that as an astromech, he had a little radar dish scanner thing (I vaguely remember R2-D2 having this, so I said yeah sure whatever) and wanted to scan the building to see what they were potentially up against. Succeeding on a Search roll, J4 detected 4 lifeform signatures inside the building. Tong then stealthily craned his long Kaminoan neck into the door opening to take a peek and managed to avoid being seen by the four Rodian gang members (and obvious spice addicts) huddled around a trashcan fire. Cheekie’s player asked if there were second story windows where they could get a vantage point – lo and behold, there were! But they connected to some very rusty, rickety gantries above the main factory floor.
It was at this point that the group decided that Waz, being the weakest, most vulnerable (coincidentally also unarmed) member of the group, should be the one to parlay. He stepped into the building to speak to the gaunt, withdrawing Rodian gang leader, Oonda.
Oonda claimed the group was supposed to be meeting with Uncle Posla directly, and that he was to be paid upon pickup. Waz told him, “Oh yeah, the payment is in the speeder, you can come grab it.” Oonda was nobody’s fool – he sent one of his lackeys with Waz instead.
So Waz promptly turned on his heels and started walking straight for the speeder. As the gang member passed the threshold of the cargo doors, Allent Var drew his ancestral vibrosword and in one clean stroke, decapitated the poor bastard. Violence ensued.
Jubjub took a shot at one of the gangers, hit him, but resulted in some nasty burns to his yellow gang leathers – no damage. The same Rodian turned around and charged Jubjub with a knife but missed his lunge. J4-K3 drew his blaster and blasted Oonda right between the eyes, killing him instantly. Tong ran up and drew down on the one remaining ganger by the trash fire, who promptly surrendered. Allent tackled the knife-wielding gang member and wrestled him to the floor. With the cargo secured, the dead and captured looted, the interrogation could begin.
It didn’t take much convincing to wring out of the surviving two gang members that the “unlabeled droid parts” were in part a cover for an even more valuable cargo: half a ton of piebald spice bricks, hidden in one of the six cargo containers. The shipment “came from somebody big” but the details were above the gangers’ pay grade. The PCs decided to tie them up with some chain they found and left.
As the group started their flight to Teb’s Pick-a-Part, they had a long discussion about their end goals here: do they deliver the merch as directed, or try to rip off Uncle Posla and keep the spice? They ultimately chose to continue the mission and then extort more money out of Posla because of the added danger.
The discussion and scenic flight were rudely interrupted by the appearance of two Imperial Remnant scout troopers on speeder bikes who pulled the speeder over. I then got to RP a Star Wars traffic stop that Cheekie navigated well, successfully winning an opposed Deceive v. Search check to convince them to search only two containers (which didn’t have any spice).
They made it to Teb’s, helped load the merch onto a waiting freighter hidden behind mountains of scrap, and got to talking with the eponymous Gran owner of the scrapyard. Teb’s yard had three ships present in semi-hidden docking clearings: a Kazellis freighter used by the smugglers, a Lantillian Short Hauler (essentially a small yacht/pleasure craft) impounded from it’s rich owner, and the Bad Bantha, a Barloz-class freighter that had seen better days. Teb was a salesman through and through, and convinced the PCs to buy it as a “mechanic’s special.”
Waz absolutely killed the Vehicles skill check to examine the ship – I just gave the PCs the full list of all the parts they needed and what they’d cost to fully restore it. They returned to Posla and Allent, relying on his connection to Posla as a street kid, successfully convinced him through RP to give them each a 250cr bonus on account of the cargo and the danger. They then returned to Teb and it was Waz and Cheekie this time who led the negotiations for the purchase of the Bad Bantha – knocking the price down from 5,000cr to 3,700cr with the necessary landing gear actuators.
We ended there – each character coming out of the session with 4 XP, a handful of leftover credits, and a somewhat working freighter to serve as a home base, restoration project, and asset to use as collateral for all sorts of trouble.
So, there we go – a successful introductory session, albeit a littl erailroady. Here is the sum total of what I prepared:
Overview: PCs begin on Khoraj, hired by Boss Posla to pick up some merchandise from a factory to be donated to the pro-Republic cause and deliver it to a scrapyard where a freighter is waiting to take the goods off-world. However, the job is more complicated than they are led to believe – the Oonda Clique, the group at the drop, demand extra payment, and Imperial Remnant stormtroopers have an ambush set up leading to the scrapyard.
At the scrapyard, the PCs meet Teb Lia, Gran scrap dealer. Among the heaps of rusty junk are hidden three ships:
- Rylothi Sunrise – Kazellis freighter, which the merch is to be loaded on; has a 5-man crew
- Sightseeker – Lantillian Short Hauler, currently impounded (owned by vengeful snob)
- Bad Bantha – Barloz medium freighter, sold cheap as “mechanic’s special” for 5,000cr bc is missing several parts necessary to restore full functionality
Authority: Pen Posla, Toydarian union boss
Place: CA Blaster Assembly Complex #7 (factory floor); Teb’s Pick-a-Part (scrapyard)
Thing: 6 tons of un-serialized droid parts
Hostiles: Oonda Clique, Rodian-led gang (scruffy, cut-rate thieves & spice heads)
Antagonist: Imperial Remnants, Oonda Clique
Reward: 500cr each
Oonda (Oonda Clique Leader)
Skinny Rodian, spice addict
DEX: 3D KNO: 3D MEC: 2D
PER: 3D STR: 2D TEC: 3D
Dodge: 10 Parry: 10 Block: 10 Soak: 2
Skills: Bargain +1, Intimidate +1
Gear: Oonda Clique gang colors, holdout blaster (2D S), piebald spice, 2d6x50cr
Drona Banorr (Scout Trooper Sgt.)
Paranoid human woman; no helmet
DEX: 4D KNO: 1D MEC: 2D
PER: 3D STR: 3D TEC: 2D
Dodge: 10 Parry: 10 Block: 10 Soak: 5
Skills: Command +1, Survival +1, Blasters +1
Gear: Light Armor (+2), Blaster (3D M), 1d6x50cr
So as you can see, the hidden spice under the droid parts wasn’t part of my initial plan. I had thought of that originally, decided against it, and then called an audible and worked it in when one of the players wondered out loud if the cargo was actually drugs. Yay for improv.
Another takeaway – this was all done over voice/video chat in Discord with 0 maps, drawings, or handouts. The platonic ideal. I hate prepping that shit because I find that my prep time balloons to an unmanageable level, and if you’re playing online and provide a map for one thing, it can create an expectation (in my own mind or from the players) that there will be maps or handouts for everything.
I wasn’t sure what to do about the Imperials – I figured the PCs may shoot their way out of picking up the cargo and thought it would be lame/potentially TPK if I had them ambushed immediately after by a platoon of stormtroopers. So I played it by ear, and decided on the spot that rather than a roadblock or whatever, I would put my criminal defense attorney experience to use and run it as a stormtrooper traffic stop. That was the right decision, because the players immediately recognized that reaching for their blasters could quickly spiral out of control and it ended up becoming a very tense, RP-focused scene. Awesome!
If the PCs fought and didn’t kill the scout trooper sergeant or Oonda, I now had a potential reoccurring character to bring back and harass them with. However, they fuckin domed Oonda (which was actually pretty cool) and didn’t even have the opportunity to learn the name of the scout trooper woman. Whether she comes back, or the two remaining Rodian gang members (who I am now deciding are brothers) seek vengeance, remains to be seen.
I’d count this first session as a success. I really tried to put into practice the whole “yes, and” model of play and boy, did it work well. As an aside, I explained to the players right before they entered the factory doors that I wasn’t going to make maps for this game and while I would obviously be describing the scene, it wouldn’t be the entire scene – so just because I didn’t mention Willis ducts like in Die Hard doesn’t mean they aren’t there. That’s how there ended up being a cargo crane, repulsor sleds for mobile cover, and rusty gantries accessed by 2nd story windows – these were all things that were asked about by the players. Instead of saying no because I hadn’t thought of that and the implications, I simply said Yes, and they look old/unsteady etc.” Which is a small change to make as a GM but helped keep them engaged with thinking about the environment and helped keep the game fresh for me as a GM. Remember, you as a GM are a player too, which I find is easy to forget sometimes.
At the end of the day, my brother in law, who was one of the players, texted me after to say thanks and that he really had a lot of fun. Nothing makes me feel more confident than hearing something like that.
No comments:
Post a Comment