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Director's Commentary
Episode II: A New Beginning
ACT I, Scene i
Hello, and welcome to the Director's Commentary track for this game writeup. My name
is J. Ryan Decker and I am the GM for this arc of the
NorthCo Gamers'
Star Wars campaign. I took over this party from the previous GM, Jon Schow,
who is now playing the part of the Jedi Padawan Lim Res. Since I was
doing a major deviation from his campaign arc, it was only appropriate to designate mine as a new
"movie" in traditional Lucas fashion. i.e. Episode II was born.
Despite the wealth of new material detailing the years after the death of the Emperor, I wanted
to run a more traditional Star Wars game. I had been a player for years, mostly doing smuggling runs
to the Corporate Sector, but this was my first crack as a Star Wars GM. I wanted to keep things where
I understood them for awhile until I got my feet--with a backup plan in case I needed a liferaft to
move the campaign towards if I needed it. And so, I set the campaign just before the Rebels
establish their base on Hoth,
to give me a fun place to lead to party to at a later date. Besides, the thought
of sticking a party of misfits and smugglers smack down in the middle of the Hoth evacuation seemed
like too much fun to pass up. Chances are we'll get to Hoth in Act II or III.
Based on a single line by Han Solo from Empire, I placed the Rebels (and the party) at the trading
world of Ord Mantell.
The opening/introduction scrolltext for this episode was as follows:
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"The bounty hunter we ran into on Ord Mantell" It is a dark time for the Rebellion. Although the Death Star has been destroyed, Imperial troops have driven the Rebel forces from their hidden base on Yavin IV and pursued them across the galaxy. Evading the dreaded Imperial Starfleet, a group of freedom fighters led by Luke Skywalker has established a new secret base on the remote trading world of Ord Mantell. The evil lord Darth Vader, obsessed with finding young Skywalker, had devised a plan to trap the young Jedi by capturing his friends at the Graveyard of Alderaan. Luckily, a small band of smugglers and outlaws managed to discover his plans and warned Princess Leia in time to save her. Together, they have now fled back to the relative safety of the Rebel Base...
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Being the first ep, I was able to borrow liberally from the opening to Empire,
just making a few changes at the bottom to indicate that the Rebel Alliance was not yet
located at the planet Hoth. In case you haven't noticed, the titles for all the
episodes/scenes are taken from lines in the movies. I just thought that was cool. Anyways...
I wanted a few things to happen this session: 1) Get the party all in one place, 2) Introduce the recurring
bad guy for this campaign Captain Lemsh Tyderra, 3) Show the scene where Han
gets attacked by the bounty hunter, 4) Make sure to point out that Princess Leia stills owed the party a
favor from last campaign (scenario "Graveyard of Aldreaan"), 5) Show that lightsabres don't reflect slugthrowers
back at their target (as a warning to Lim for later), 6) Show Yanna to be very
very useful so that they will miss her if something were to ever happen to her, 7) Point out that
Lim's snubfighter has the exact same silhouette as an Imperial Star Destroyer,
and 8) Get their ship captured by Imperials. That's a lot for one game session,
but after years of GMing Cyberpunk I was pretty sure I could pull it off. From there the party would all wake up on
an Imperial prisoner transport that was mistakenly being raided by pirates/smugglers friendly to the Allliance
(who could whisk them to safety). Admittedly, this is a little bit of a deus ex machina, but it fit within
that general Star Wars feel so I let it slide. From there the campaign would then nicely drift into a hunt to
get the party's ship back before the loan collectors for Ploovo Two-For-One
caught up with them.
Overall it went very well, although I really had to chase the Excessive Debt down with a lot
of firepower to overcome her. They were captured and woke up on the Imperial prisoner transport as planned.
Originally, I was going to start the campaign there (right when the party woke up), but I later decided
that a transition between the two campaigns was needed. Using the transport still let me collect the errant
pilots and have the party meet Dran Megrev as planned though. The whole
reason for that was to let the Smuggler players see how a successful operation was run so that they could
borrow ideas from it if they wanted to. Amusingly, Kir whipped out at datapad
and did exactly that.
At this point the remaining scenes of Act I looked like this:
Scene i: The bounty hunter we ran into on Ord Mantell
Scene ii: Oh, yeah? Watch this!
Scene iii: You lost her to me, fair and square.
Scene iv: Would it help if I got out and pushed?
Scene v: Quicker, easier, more seductive.
Scene ii was to involve Dran's ship, the Remembrance. She was going to
be sabotaged by one of the Rebel pilots on board (who was an Imperial spy), so that when she tried to jump
to lightspeed to escape an Imperial picket ship she'd instead be boarded. The blame was initially going to fall on
the innocent Haselvlat, who had been crawling around that area earlier.
I was even hoping to have Lim and Kit Reed rush into the smoke-filled engineering
area and go at it in a confused force-pike fight, as each character had taken specializations in it and both
would of thought that the other one had done the sabotage. The ship would have been boarded and the crew-party-pilots would of tried to
fight them off. This would have been a losing action, and they would of only been saved by an Imperial Commando
being transported on board the picket ship who decided to switch sides. As it turned out, Cindy couldn't make
that game session, so I had to put off Zeryn Soe's introduction a few scenes.
From there, scene iii would of been the party bumming around Ghambeezi Station hunting for clues to
where their ship went. Scene iv was going to be the raid on Sluis-Van to recapture the Excessive Debt, as well as
Yanna's capture by the Empire. Lastly, scene v was going to be the party's reaction to Yanna's capture--specifically
Lim's. These things may still happen, but the party ended up going off on a slightly different direction with the
events at Niven's Star (as detailed in the new scene iii). Time will tell!
This has been the Director's Commentaries for Act I, Scene i
 Back to Scene i without the commentary
On to Scene ii 
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