And so it begins - the Star Wars campaign done the right way this time! It's more than half a year since the beginning thoughts about a Savage Star Wars campaign, and now the first session is behind. While I wanted to run the campaign more improvising way, I wanted to plan the first session so it would have a lot of different elements the campaign would consist of: Flying in dangerous circumstances, doomsday weapons, darker aspects of war, spies, politicans driving their own agendas, chases, close combat (although this part was quite minimal), dogfights. The session ended to a potential mass combat situation.
Just prior to starting the actual game, a small craft had docked Cavalier, Nebulon B Frigate commanded by Kel Dor Commander Korin Plo around which (and which's crew) the campaign wraps. The craft has some resemblance to some Sienar Fleet designs, and has a cloacking device with a few hours worth of power left. On the ship, a Rogue Squadron member Ferro Jet and a former imperial officer and currently a diplomat of the Republic Maximillian Von Totenstrauchen, joined the ship crew. Ship's commando group's 2nd in Command 'Trouble' (Twi'lek) was promoted to lead the Commando team.
NPC's introduced: First Mate Mord Farena, shortish balding man, and Communications officer Karen Miladoc.
Now to the actual beginning of the game:
Link to crawl: (Unfortunately the crawl has been removed and crawl maker moved)
The captain acted lighting fast and dodged a huge piece of a Corellian cruiser that flew towards them after entering normalspace. A lot of scrapped ship pieces, both Imperial and Republic, faded to background when everyone turned towards the planet in front of them, which was slowly being consumed by a huge whirlpool of fire. Apparently The Empire had a generator that can destroy a whole planet - according to Maximillian, this is the only generator created due to rarity of it's fuel.
Evacuation mission
The ship took part to the evacuation of the planet. There were numerous ships leaving the planet, and as apparently communications to the planet had been quickly restored after the battle, a lot of republic ships, both military and civilian, started arriving to the location, helping to evacuate the planet. Cavalier's captain decided to take part to a risky shuttle mission, where a group of citizens stranded on a city about to be engulfed by the fiery whirlpool had to be rescued. Former Rogue squadron pilot flew the freighter very skillfully away from the infernal place, taking both elderly and men to the freighter despite it making the departure much more risky.
It took a two days to fill the Nebulon B frigate with civilians, and all kinds of conflicts took place among people who had just lost their homes, and in some cases, their close ones. Once the captain decided that the ship couldn't carry more civilians and the huge amount of passengers residing along corridors started to drain ship's food supply fast, they headed towards Relesh III, a mostly uninhabited planet with friendly environment, that had been set as the target of the evacuation project.
While unloading people, the ship started hearing reports about several Republic systems being captured by Imperial forces. When unloading operation was complete, Captain Plo was ordered to return to the administrative world of the sector, Alessina; there was no point to return to Caledon, as the planet would already be completely engulfed by the fiery tempest and hopefully the evacuation would be complete. A few days later, Cavalier arrived to beautiful planet Alessia.
Alessia, Republic administrative center of the sector
The planet's cities are dark and have been built of large pillars and huge thick disks one on another, their builders were trying to preserve the planet's nature by making the cities high and compact. The cities look very dark and imposing when looked from afar though, and they can be seen from really far away.
Once landed on the planet and entered administration center's impressive hall with a glass dome, Korin saw a suspicious -looking man looking closely at the group. When he was about to point the man to the others, he accidentally slapped the man who had came to take them to Executive Senator Malach (fumble on notice). He remembered the man only when they were about to enter the Senator's office. In the office there was a board of 6 concil members, in order to confirm the correctness of the orders the captain was about to receive.
The senator was a joyless man who stubbornly drove his own agendas; he declared that 'special mission units like Cavalier' only caused trouble and instability and static defense is what Republic needs, as shown by recent imperial attacks, and therefore the unit is assigned to defend a small moderately important mining colony on the border of the sector. The mission sounded pointless, boring and somehow even wrong, and after some heated discussion between Maximillian and Malach the hearing commitee was convinced that the Cavalier must not be assigned to such guard duty - especially as Senator isn't in position to cancel orders of Republic's head of miltary, admiral Ackbar. Malach swore that Cavalier's staff will hear from him again. When the group was about to leave, the building was shaken by an explosion.
To the sky and space!
Everyone run to the lounge that was in chaos - an explosion had caused havoc and there was wounded people lying here and there. Someone run on next level's walkway shouting that datacenter has been intruded. Korin remembered the earlier man, and everyone started to look around - and saw the man juming on a speeder car outside and speeding away. While Ferro and Trouble confiscated taxi speeders, Korin and Maximillian run to the data center in order to find out what was lost; Data center workers weren't happy to see outsiders there (even if they were republic personnel of some rank) and asked them to leave. Korin pushed himself to database to find out the info they needed, and when guards arrived to the site, Korin's and Maximillian's bad explanation attempts made the situation look bad for these two...
In the meantime, Ferro and Trouble had followed the mysterious man to a building still under construction. Trouble run in not worrying about cover while Ferro scouted the building outside, and the Twi'lek was shot badly, but was also able to wound the stalker. The man run in a freighter he had waited to warm up, hit the ramp switch and started to navigate out. Trouble tried to jump on the closing ramp, but was forced to drop out before he got squished. He got a benny for that anyway.
Ferro sliced to a data interface of the unfinished building (not much security there yet) and started smiling after finding a defense turret on the roof. He got an aim on the fleeing freighter and opened fire - unfortunately the turret's targeting systems weren't calibrated at all and he wasn't able to hit - however one stray shot hit a large antenna on administration building, making it fall on the glass dome and drawing attention of the guards that were about to arrest Maximillian and Korin. After short communication Korin ordered Cavalier to intercept the freighter while the group picked up a shuttle to the orbit.
Cavalier wasn't able to intercept the freighter but had sent a group of fighters after it. The fighters couldn't catch the freighter before it flew into asteroid field, and the captain recalled the fighters - navigating in an asteroid field is not a job for extras. Except for Tie-fighter pilots, among whom a common destiny is to crash into an asteroid. Anyway, player characters jumped in fighters in order to catch the villain.
Maximillian didn't climb on a fighter and his player got an extra to control (temporarily promoted to Henchman -status). After successful navigation through an asteroid field, the fighters found the freighter, but were intercepted by a group of Tie-fighters - right at the gate of the Republic center of the sector!
Group of 7 ties went down fast, and Cavalier and more fighters closed in to intercept the fleeing freighter, but then an imperial escort carrier appeared, launching a huge swarm of ties!
End of session.
GM notes: I was very happy how the game went. This session was much more Star Wars that my earlier games have been. Nebulon B is a perfect ship for the group - it is a real warship although not very powerful compared to heavier destroyers and cruisers of the universe. It has a squadron of fighters, allowing dogfights, which I feel is very important to Star Wars. And I got to use Rory's Story cubes for the first time, as I had no idea how I could get Maximillian and Korin from the situation with guards so they could take part in the following chase. Players could have used npc's though (as Maximillian actually did) so wasn't as critical as I thought at the moment. Anyway, Rory's cubes didn't give very good results (Building, airplane and Tree I think) but helped me to find a solution to the situation anyway.