Back to StarWars-ish!

We have now started - played our second session Saturday - on our third season of StarWars-ish. For the last two years, the party has been fighting the Mandelorians, who took advantage of the Empire's preoccupation with the rebellion to attempt to enlarge again. Now, though, the rebellion is gearing up for the Battle of Endor.

The party have come to Coruscant, when the Emperor and Darth Vader have departed, to try and cause holy hell in the capital. They first went to the ruins of Jedi Temple and Academy, all overgrown with 80 years - we are working with a timeline derived from information let fall in A New Hope - of neglect. They met up with Force Ghosts of Jedi children, ultimately freeing three of them from their compulsion to stay on the grounds, and finding a few buried artifacts - a gold bladed lightsaber wrapped in a white silky robe and bound with a gold bracelet, three holocrons, one being the record of Ashoka Tano's trial, and something else which i can't remember at the moment.

As they departed, they met up with a single person who turned out to be a hidden Jedi who had lost her master to the Inquisitors, but successfully stayed hidden by acting as a doctor. I mean she *was* a doctor, but hid her force use in surgery, healing, and the like. This was a new player, and after a lot of initial skepticism, took her with them on a raid, where she could 'prove herself'.

The raid was on a giant communications tower. For a kilometer around, the Empire had destroyed all the habitable layers of buildings, creating a flat plain. The party found disused paths under this destruction, and finally found a way up into the tower. They went in stealthily, protected by Jedi Mind Tricks into appearing to be nothing unusual. They even rode a few stories with three stormtroopers in a lift. They came to a control room protected by five stormtroopers. Daykon stunned two of them immediately, Nebula, the new Jedi, took out another with Force Lightning - in our continuity, the Force's Dark and Light sides are not directly tied to Good and Evil - and Torota threw her lightsaber, curving it with the Force, to take out two more. Josea herded the techies away from the comm equipment, and the Jedis shredded it with their lightsabers.

Learning that there was a single emergency comm link station above them which would have triggered when the main stations were destroyed, the Jedi sent the techs away, and rode up the lift. Assuming there would be an ambush laid for them, they exited the lift through the top. When it came to a stop and opened its doors, a fusilade of blaster fire exploded beneath their feet. Then after a short silence, one stormtrooper stuck their head in. This was their signal.

Josea, Daykon, and Nebula force jumped out, each taking down a storm trooper - Nebula taking out the curious one, Daykon taking the one to the right of the door, and Josea stabbing one right through the side of the lift to the right of the door. Again Torota waited until the last and dropped down normally into the floor of the lift, sending her lightsaber out to take down the last two in one loop of the room. (In this case, the first three used an attack by force-jumping, while Torota did not.)

They forced the lone techie out of the Comm station, gave the rest of the tower crew 9 minutes to clear the tower, set off a delayed destruct surge of the tower's power source, and force-jumped off the tower with the techie as it exploded behind them.

All in all, some fun sessions! Nebula's player will be irregular at best, but she lives in Coruscant, and that makes sense.

Slave Mentality

In my Sunday IRC StarCluster game - which has been going on since 2003 - the party have mis-jumped from the Cluster they knew (The one from StarCluster 1E & 2E) into a new, unknown set of stars called Jeshen Space. In this place, all humans are descended from one of two slowboats, and have been given worlds by the Jeshen, humanoid aliens who rule this area.

These humans have enslaved their uplifts and bioroids, making them playthings of the rich, and this the party cannot abide. They are attempting to overthrow this society with some muzzy plans. Concurrently, there is a serious threat from the Etvar, another alien people who control the space around Jeshen Space - which has only two really difficult jump routes in and out - and hate humans. The Etvar have begun a long term effort of splitting humans and Jeshen, who are closely allied, by using their music. Fairly simultaneously across Jeshen Space, the companies that control music distribution on the various human worlds began promoting types of music designed to make humans see themselves as disadvantaged next to Jeshen, proud, individualistically heroic, disrespectful of authority, and separatist. If the Etvar can split the Jeshen-Human alliance, they could just walk in and take over.

So the party split, a third of it trying to deal with the music threat, and two thirds combating the slavery issue. The two thirds were split between a couple going in to contact the underworld, and another group - a human with her two Jeshen wives and 'pet' uplifted dog - would be rich tourists, working in contact with the upper class. They took a Sphinx Lines ship there, and first class on the Sphynx Lines has dedicated cabin hosts and hostesses who are sphynx bioroids, created to order. They fell in love with their Sphynx, and bought her contract from Sphynx lines for an exorbitant amount of money.

Thing is, the Sphynx still thinks of them as her Mistresses, for whom she provides necessary and loving services, deriving - as designed - great pleasure from pleasing them; while they have been thinking of her as an independent, free person. They just broke the poor thing. She is deep in a slave - trained, expert, valued, even beloved slave, but slave nonetheless - mindset, and they have to understand it and deal with it before they can free the other slaves. This is not a case of the slaves being downtrodden and cruelly wasted. By all appearances, these slaves are treasured and pampered. The fact that they are still slaves is arousing cognitive dissonance in both the party and the Sphynx.

This is just the way we roll in this game - this is typical stuff. Oh! And the Sphynx is being played by a player as a secondary character, not by me.

Self-Made Ghosts

My Wednesday Night IRC game totally rocked. The PCs scared each other to the insanity point. The light wind, moonlight, thick fog, a tunnel, and a black basalt statue became a deadly ghost in their minds. The next day, they finally saw the statue in the light of day and realized they had let their imaginations get the better of them, but it was just wonderful fun! They came this close to hoisting their mounts up a fifty foot wall in order to travel on an ancient ruined road across the badlands rather than take the tunnel built at immense cost for the sole purpose of avoiding the badlands!

I did almost nothing to trick them. This was all their own doing. The sound of the wind across the other end of the tunnel was a low varying moan. That was the only thing I did. The rest was the player characters' doing. They interpreted everything I told them through a supernatural rather than a natural filter.

Merchanters and Stationers

Now that The Necklace is out to beta testers, I have started a small project, an alternate setting generator thing for StarCluster 3 which will give results something like Cherryh's Alliance/Union universe rather than something like the old StarCluster 2 universe.

The Necklace out for Beta Testing Today

I've just sent the first few copies of The Necklace out for Beta Test today. :D

Golfinho

Here is my latest illo for The Necklace, Golfinho - pencil, gray tones, outline, and flood fill.

Rasi SWAT Police - from The Necklace RPG

For The Necklace RPG - Rasi SWAT police don't walk, they swagger. Pencil, brushed gray tones, and black outline.