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!