LiH: Session Two - "Ancient Artifacts"

It takes several hours to load the large containers of battle droids onto the Ashen Angel. As the crew finishes their hard manual labor, an alarm begins blaring throughout the ship: Incoming ships. Four droid starfighters are streaking towards the Ashen Angel. Fri orderers everyone to their stations and Missindi jumps into the pilot's seat and detaches from the wrecked Confederate Frigate and guns the engines. Rallyn makes it to the Ship's engineering console and angles a deflector shield just as the starfighters begin peppering the Ashen Angel with laser fire. Katerr takes over Jebbo Wugz's turret duties alongside Traxim Kallos as Jebbo is still recovering from his brush with death.

Missindi weaves the Ashen angel through the debris field, using the large floating ship parts as shields and forcing the droid starfighters to move around them to get a clear shot. Katerr and Traxim Kallos blast away at the fighters, picking them off one by one while Rallyn redirects power from the engines to the weapons to give the gunners an edge over the starfighters.

The battle takes the Ashen Angel out of the debris field of the wrecked Confederate ship and close to a large asteroid, where they pick up a faint distress signal just as they destroy the last of the Droid Starfighters. The transmission is garbled and weak but strengthens as they approach the asteroid. A blue-skinned humanoid with red eyes appears in a repeating message, "This is Jedi Knight Nuru Kungurama to any Republic ships, my escape pod has crash landed on an asteroid in the Aduba System. The Republic Cruiser Remembrance has been destroyed after a battle with a Confederate frigate and I am stranded here with little food or supplies. Please render aid." Katerr recognizes the Jedi to be Chiss.

Although intrigued and slightly spooked at the reference of the Jedi, the crew deduces that this distress call is likely decades old and they will be able to find the source after they have done their job and surveyed the wreckage of the Confederate Frigate. After a few days of very successful surveying and cataloging, Fri Penuabb feels confident their work is done and the map and information they have compiled, along with the battle droids will fetch a good paycheck when they return to Ord Mantell.

With the job well done, the crew turns their sights on the Jedi's wrecked escape pod. Missindi lands the Ashen Angel on the Asteroid near the crashed pod where the distress signal is emanating from. Traxim Kallos and Katerr don enviro-suits and disembark to search the escape pod.

They find the pod to be pressurized but without oxygen. A rotted and desiccated body of the Chiss from the transmission is found on the floor of the pod near the engine compartment. On his body, they find several items, including a Jedi Holocron, a Jedi Credit attached to a necklace around his neck, as well as a comlink and hologram recording device. Katerr establishes that the cause of death for this Chiss Jedi was exposure along with complications due to losing his right hand, which she deduces was crushed.

Traxim Kallos activates a recording on the holo-recorder, which shows the Chiss Jedi relaying a report to his Jedi Master. "Master Ambase, We have reached the Abduba System and have scanned the surrounding space for the Katana Fleet for several days now with no results. We will depart from this system for Eadu after launching our probes in less than a day from now. We will resupply at Eadu and continue our search of the Outer Rim. I hope this message finds you well and that my next message will be better news of a break in our search for the lost dark force! May the Force be with you!" The message ends as the blue-skinned Jedi smiles and bows slightly before the hologram finishes.

The revelation of what this Jedi and Old Republic cruiser's mission are is lost on no one. The Katana Fleet is supposed to be a tall tale old spacers tell each other to pass time or to be the "what if" question to entertain their wildest dreams of wealth and prestige. It's supposed to be a myth, but here is hard evidence and possible clues to the actual existence of the fabled lost Katana Fleet.

They search the rest of the pod and find 14 enviro-suits, allowing the rest of the crew to also assist in searching the pod. Rallyn and Missindi are able to gather navigation and telemetry data from the escape pod's engine computer which might be useful later. After gathering everything of value, Traxim Kallos suggests demolishing the remains of the Escape pod and everyone agrees. It is done and the Ashen Angel begins the long journey home to Ord Mantell.

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GM Notes:

As a player, it's not a lot of fun spending hours making a character and having them die at a low level, especially when you're still trying to figure out your character's strengths and weaknesses. As a GM, I know that by starting my players at level 2 they have a high probability of character death since they don't have access to their main class features. Knowing this, I still started us at level 2 because I wanted to ease us into this new campaign with its new lore, abilities, and setting. With that said, Jebbo Wugz technically died while attacking the Spider Droid in the combat described in Session One post.

This was not what I would call a good PC death and I ultimately decided to retcon it so Jebbo would live, taking away the pleasure of my first PC death for several reasons. One, as I stated above, it's our second session and losing your character that soon sucks. Two, Jebbo's player played a super awesome Monk in our last campaign and wasn't used to being so squishy and hadn't gained enough of a feel of his new character to know how to best play him in combat. Three, at this point the rules for Bacta tranks/Medbay hadn't been released yet so there was no safety net. The combination of all this didn't make sense for a PC death this early so we retconned it. Going forward, this will not happen again.

My philosophy on killing PCs is that the number one priority for when a PC death happens is for there to be RP consequences. Whether that is roleplay of the rest of the group mourning the loss or more long term effects, something good should come out of it roleplay-wise ("good", meaning something that adds to the game). In this situation, it was too soon for this to happen for it to add to the game as a whole.

As a GM, this would have been my first actual killing of a PC, which I've been looking forward to for a while. "But you said you GMed your last campaign for almost two years, how have you not killed a PC before?" Yeah, yeah, that's a whole other story in a whole other blog I'll be working on soon. Stay tuned!

The other big thing that happened in this session is Traxim finds a Jedi Holocron. At this point, a stumbling block for this campaign being set during the Galactic Civil War, is that there are no Jedi to train the player characters who want to be Jedi, and there has to be some sort of training going on for a Jedi PC to gain power (Level up) in their force abilities. So, enter the default Jedi training MacGuffin: the Jedi Holocron. I have plans for more things to be revealed through this Holocron, but Traxim will have to be higher level for those things to happen!

Thanks for reading and May the Force be with you!

LiH: Session One - "Prospects"

The Ashen Angel returns to Ord Mantell and spends a few days resting and recuperating from their harrowing escape from Ultaar System. Though, it doesn't take long for Fri Penuabb to call them back together for their next job, a good paying salvage job for the moderately well known Vog Salvage, Inc. Records show the wreck of a Clone Wars era Confederate Battleship is located somewhere in the Aduba System and Vog Salvage wants a team to find, survey and clear the wreck of any dangers that may face the salvage team.

The crew gathers with Fri and their handler, a Besalisk fixer named Vash Tolen. He congratulates them on their good showing on Ultaar, recovering a bad situation and getting away with money in hand. "As long as you continue in this fashion, you'll make a name for yourselves as a crew who delivers and that's good for everyone!" Vash Tolen has is a typical gruff Besalisk demeanor, but comes off as an experienced spacer and smuggler. Vash buys the crew all some drinks and tells them about their next job. A few drinks later, he begins regaling the crew with stories of his past.

"Go to any bar, tavern or cantina on any planet, moon or space station and you'll find a spacer spouting any manner of tall-tale. Giant space monsters, massive alien fleets, or escaping the authorities by the skin of their teeth using nothing but their wits. These stories are always full of danger and are always quick to remind you of the perils of traversing the expansive voids of space.

Space is a mind-bogglingly large place, everyone knows that. But what people sometimes forget is it is also old, very old. More importantly, the void is full of old treasures waiting to be rediscovered. People have been traveling the stars for millennia and with that comes wrecked or scuttled ships, mineral-rich asteroids, lost cargo or ancient artifacts; they're all out there waiting to be found.

Non-spacers usually write off treasure hunting as merely a get rich which scheme or a fool's errand, but there wouldn't be so many Spacers, smugglers and prospectors in the galaxy if there wasn't something to it! At the very least you can earn a living on a ship and at the very most you may stumble across something in your travels that will change your life forever!"

The next day, the Ashen Angel is readied and departs for Aduba System. Traveling through the hyper-lanes to the Aduba system takes about four days jumps through about 30 systems. This travel is quite tiring for Missindi, Katerr and Fri as they fly and navigate, but rather boring for the rest of the crew. Once they arrive, another three days are spent surveying the Aduba System, searching for clues of the wrecked Confederate ship they are tasked with surveying and salvaging.

Remains of the Confederate frigate.
(See below for more info.)

The search is a success after detecting a long spreading trail of debris on the outer edges of the system. Following this trail into the void of space, it isn't long until the Ashen Angel finds a large cloud of debris and wreckage that was once a Munificent-Class Star Frigate. Approaching the center of this debris field, where it is most densely populated with debris, a large, intact section of the ship is discovered to be mostly intact and pressurized. Judging that this is the best chance to find some valuable salvage of the size the Ashen Angel can retrieve, Fri Penuabb instructs Missindi to dock the ship to this space hulk and for the crew to prepare to board and explore the remains of this Frigate.

Once securely attached, Traxim Kallos and Missindi don Enviro-suits and begin attempting to breach the airlock doors and gain access to the Confederate Frigate. Missindi uses her security hacking skills to open the airlock doors, with assistance from Rallyn as the doors need to be powered by the Ashen Angel in order to be opened. While opening the doors, Missindi learns that the remains of the Confederate ship that it is still pressurized, but the air is not breathable Upon activating the doors, she also sees that this has activated several other systems that remain intact in the ship, including security systems.

Together and wearing respirators, Jebbo Wugz, Katerr and Rallyn join Traxim Kallos and Missindi as they enter the Frigate. Moving forward into a large access corridor, they find one direction ends with large unpowered blast doors and the corridor blocked by debris. Seeing no way to power these blast doors and deducing that something valuable might be on the other side, they decide to use their plasma cutters to cut through the debris in order to find a way to open the large doors.

After cutting a clearing the debris, the crew finds two doors flanking the corridor and large debris blocking it way further on. Moving to the left door, the crew hears noises coming from the other side and ready themselves for action as Missindi overrides the security and opens the door.
The room is occupied by a large offline power generator, a GNK power droid and three battle droids who immediately begin to attack. Traxim Kallos rushes in, attacking with his double-bladed vibro-sword, while Missindi sneaks into the other side and as Rallyn, Katerr and Jebbo Wugz lay down blaster fire. As the firefight ensues, a door on the far side of the room opens and a Super Battle-droid steps in, flanked by two additional battle droids. Traxim Kallos is quickly outgunned and is knocked unconscious. The rest of the crew hurriedly takes out the remaining battle-droids and Katerr heals Traxim Kallos, bringing him back to consciousness.

Moving into the next chamber, they find a large cache of Blaster Carbines and other supplies as well as a large security terminal. Rallyn and Missindi manage to gain access to it and find that they cannot open the large blast door without powering it first. They were also able to access the security feed from the room across the large corridor. It showed three battle droids in a room with large fuel tanks. The Crew moves to this fuel tank room and takes out the three battle droids there, recovering more blaster carbines and droid parts to add to their haul.

In an effort to power the large blast door, the usher the GNK power droid towards it, but it doesn't seem to do the trick. After some engineering analysis, Rallyn deduces that they will need to fuel and start the generator they found in order to power and open this door.
Preparing for whatever may be on the other side of the blast door, they power it up and Missindi overrides the security. The blast door slowly opens, revealing a cargo storage room with three large containers, several smaller supply crates, three activated Battle droids and a spider droid.

Traxim Kallos runs forward attacking the battle droids, assisted by blaster fire from the rest of the crew. They cut down the three battle droids, but the Spider Droid proves to be a tough nut to crack. Traxim Kallos is forced to hide while the rest of the crew pressed the attack. Katerr realizes that the leg armor is too strong for blasters and steadies herself and waits for the opportunity to snipe the less armored inner body of the spider droid. Ralynn uses her tech powers to cryogenically freeze a battle-droid, disabling it while keeping it whole. Jebbo Wugz flys above the Spider droid in an attempt to bypass its heavy leg armor and is viciously attacked by the Spider droid. Missindi uses her natural climbing abilities to rush in an attempt to catch Jebbo Wugz if he falls but is unable to help when Jebbo Wugz goes for the kill with his hidden blade, landing directly in the center of the spider droid.

In this position, Jebbo Wugz was incredibly vulnerable to the Spider droid's melee attacks with its powerful legs and he is beaten down by the droid. He falls down to the ground, seemingly killed instantly. Just as the Spider droid had opened its legs and made the attacks on Jebbo, Katerr is able to take the shot she had lined up and blasts the droid apart.

Missindi picks up Jebbo Wugz's limp body and yells for help, angry that Jebbo had been so careless. Traxim Kallos, Katerr and Fri Penuabb administer aid to Jebbo, although it seems useless. Fri attempts to apply a medpac, while Katerr pulls a large syringe from her pouch, injecting an unidentified substance into Jebbo Wugz's chest cavity and Traxim Kallos lays his hands on Jebbo's body while projecting some sort of light energy onto him. Miraculously, Jebbo comes back to life, having somehow cheated certain and seemingly unavoidable death.

Breathing a sigh of relief that they had narrowly avoided disaster once again, the crew takes a look at the prizes they nearly died for. They find three intact squads of 12 deactivated battle droids, weapons for each and a large supply of droid parts. Satisfied with their haul, they begin loading it onto the Ashen Angel while Jebbo Wugz recovers in his quarters.

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GM Notes:

I threw together the opening crawl above using the Star Text app on my phone and Windows Movie Maker. It didn't turn out exactly how I wanted, but it really got the hype wheels turning ahead of session 1!

Starting out a campaign with a small dungeon crawl seemed like a good idea in order to get everyone involved comfortable with the mechanics of the game as well as their character's abilities. Since the overall theme of the campaign is treasure hunting, picking over the wreck of a Clone Wars era battleship seemed like a fun idea!

The dungeon tiles and other parts pictured above were all found on Thingiverse and printed on my Prusa i3 MK3 and my Tech2C Hypercube printers.

3d Models pictured above:

• Modular space scenery for wargames by niphilim
• Star Wars Legion Terrain - Power Generators by sablebadger
• Star Wars Legion Terrain - Lothal Merchant Crates (Rebels) by Bountyhunterxx5
• Deagostini Millenium Falcon parts by 300zxcolin
• Shipwreck terrain Remix by Wurrkop
• Starship wreck by Terrain4Print
• Star Wars Legion Terrain - Fuel and Chemical Tanks by sablebadger May
• Rogue One containers by DreiDBV
• 40mm Scifi Terminal Objective by mr_mich

Thanks for reading and May the Force be with you!

LiH: Session Zero - "The Shootout"

The Ashen Angel (not painted yet!), a stock YT-2000 owned by Fri Penuabb.
(Read below for more information.)

It's been a year since Fri Penuabb brought the crew of the Ashen Angel together and began running cargo as Penuabb's Payloads. The crew has bonded and works well together, but it's been a tough year financially. Small contracts, small paying jobs, and simple bad luck have left the coffers somewhat empty. Although making ends meet has been a headache, Fri has kept her signature positive attitude and made sure that the crew has been paid their agreed upon wage.

Things seemed to have turned a corner last week when an old friend of Fri's contacted her about a high paying job transporting and delivering small arms to some settlers on the Mid Rim world of Ultaar. Some new settlers to this world have run into some trouble with a local crime organization and need the guns to defend themselves as soon as possible. The original ship who had been tasked with this contract was caught in an inspection by the Imperial Navy and detained. This quick, in and out, delivery of blasters, power cells and supplies would be just the payday Penuabb's Payloads and the crew needed to get back on track financially and upon completion, promised bigger and better-paying contracts in the future.

The Ashen Angel acquired the cargo and traveled to Ultaar without incident. Making contact with the settlers was quick and Missindi easily guided the ship down towards a clearing outside of a small rough and tumble settlement. The ship landed and the crew begins unloading the cargo outside of the ship as they wait for their contact to arrive. Only, when the contact did arrive, they weren't the settlers in need of defense and supplies as they had advertised.

A tense negotiation between the crew and these heavily armed "Settlers" broke down in just a few moments as the leader of the group explained in clear terms that they had no intention of letting the crew of the Ashen Angel leave when they could "easily have the guns, the money, and a new ship." At this statement, there was a short moment of tense silence before Fri replied, "Over my dead body", as she drew her blaster and gunned down the first of these thugs.

An eruption of blaster fire sent the crew and the thugs diving for cover as Fri yelled for everyone to get back to the ship. Traxim Kallos takes down a thug with his vibro-blades while Rallyn sends a few blaster shots towards the thugs as she runs up the ships boarding ramp while yelling, "Stop shooting my ship!" Jebbo Wugz cuts down another with his shotgun as he flies back towards the ship, while Katerr picks another off with her blaster. "Let's get out of here!" Missindi yells over the ship's intercom as she fires up the engines.

In mere moments, everyone is onboard and the Ashen Angel is rising from the ground while being peppered by small arms fire. Missindi spins the ship around and thrusts into the atmosphere using the force of engines blowback to send the remaining thugs on the ground flying.

Just before the crew takes a collective sigh of relief, Fri gasps as she reads the console from the co-pilots seat and yells into the intercom, "Jebbo Wugz, Traxim Kallos, get to the turrets, they sent fighters! Katerr, start calculating the jump to hyperspace! Rallyn! Get the Deflector Sheilds up!" finally, she turns to Missindi and puts a hand on her shoulder, "Get us out of here!"

Two fighters scream through the atmosphere in pursuit of the Ashen Angel. Both are "Uglies", ships cobbled together from whatever parts of wrecked ships that can be salvaged. The first looked like it had the ball cockpit of an Imperial Tie Fighter, but instead of the classic Tie Fighter wings, it had two long Y-Wing engines attached to it. The other seems like a mess of X-wing and Tie Fighter parts. Although they didn't look like much, they immediately began impacting the shields of the Ashen Angel with their laser cannons, making the entire ship shake. “Ey yi yi yi!  What wazzat?!  They gonna be hearing from my insurance adjusters!” yells Jebbo as he swings his turret around and takes aim.

As the broke free of the atmosphere of Ultaar, they found that there was an additional ship moving to cut them off. A large C-Roc Gozanti Class Cruiser was dead ahead, moving to cut them off of their route to the hyperspace lane. Immediately, green turbo-laser fire arced from the cruiser towards the Ashen Angel. Missindi jerked the ship away and began speeding the ship away from the Cruiser and yelled, "Rallyn, I need more power to the engines!"

This move put more distance between the Ashen Angel and the large Cruiser, but it closed the gap between them and the two fighters. Traxim Kallos and Jebbo Wugz returned fire from their laser cannon turrets but found the two fighters to be difficult to hit as they were surprisingly fast.

Katerr's fingers raced across the Navi-computer's console as she programmed the hyperspace jump coordinates. "Two minutes to complete our jump calculations!" Rallyn runs from her console in the engine bay across to a blown circuit breaker and resets it, sending sparks flying as she reroutes power from the shields and blasters to the engines, immediately feeling the ship thrust forward.

"Our shields are at fifty percent!" exclaims Fri Penuabb. Missindi spins the Ashen Angel to avoid the laser fire from the two fighters and the now out of range cruiser just as Traxim Kallos and Jebbo Wugz are able to line up their cannon fire up with the Y-Tie and blast it out of existence.

"Get us to the jump point, the calculations are almost complete!" yells Katerr. An alarm sounds from the cockpit and sensor displays throughout the ship. The Ashen Angel's sensors detect a target lock, just as the remaining fighter fires a concussion missile towards it. "Almost there!"

A notification pops up on the Navi-Computer in front of Katerr. "We're ready to jump!" As the missile is just about to reach them, Missindi reaches out and pulls the lever to engage the hyperdrive. The stars ahead of them stretch into the familiar lines of hyperspace, and they jump to safety.

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Notes from the GM:

This is a roleplay post I wrote up as both a teaser for the campaign between session zero and session one to hype up my players and to give them a taste of their NPC captain, Fri Penuabb. So this "encounter" wasn't played out by the players. You might also notice the formatting is a little weird for these session recaps and that's because I am copying and pasting from Slack.

Because we meet in shorter 3-4 hour sessions, we had two session zeros. Both sessions were talking about what kind of campaign it was going to be, general discussion of rules for the new players, as well as character discussion, character building, and rolling for stats. By the end of the second session zero, we all had almost complete character sheets and even roleplayed our characters just a little. I also had them fill out a Questionaire form through google docs, asking a bunch of background questions about their characters which I'll share in another post.

The picture above is a YT-2000 model I 3D Printed on my Prusa i3 MK3.
Here is the model by andku85 I used: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1166152

Thanks for reading and May the Force be with you!