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Director's Commentary
Episode II: A New Beginning
ACT I, Scene iii
Hello, and welcome to the Director's Commentary track for Act I, scene iii: "Traveling through
hyperspace ain't like dusting crops."
My name is Ryan Decker and I am the GM for this arc of the
NorthCo Gamers'
Star Wars campaign. In today's commentary track I'll be discussing Niven's Star, that wacky
star system that the party crash landed on this session--and how it wasn't supposed to happen!
The opening/introduction scrolltext for this episode was as follows. Luckily, it left a lot
of room open for interpretation:
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"Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops" Things are looking up for our intrepid heroes. Although the party has escaped the minions of Ploovo Two-For-One with their lives, they did so only by playing various enemies against one another and earning a few potential enemies themselves in the process. Having made contact with the Rebel Agent known as TARGETER, our party has managed to discover the location of their missing ship. Shipping out with the Duros captain of a Ghtrok 720, the party is on their way to rendezvous with TARGETER and attempt to recover their ship. After The Battle of Ord Mantell, the evil Captain Lemsh Tyderra had claimed the Excessive Debt as his personal spacecraft and is overseeing her repairs at the Imperial Sluis-Van shipyards. It will be very difficult for the party to get their ship out of such a heavily guarded facility. Luckily, our heroes have the Rebel Alliance on their side! Together they begin the race to Sluis-Van, but not before something unexpected alters their plans...
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This episode title is based on a line from A New Hope, and is meant to strongly hint about how the
party managed to smack straight into the leading edge of the plants at Niven's Star. The Force works
in mysterious ways... Well, maybe not so mysteriously. You see, this session wasn't going to happen that
night of gaming. I'd sort of had the idea in my head, but was planning on having the party
fly straight on to Sullust to rendezvous with Targeter and do the Sluis-Van ship breakout.
There was going to be a pirate raid or something to shake them up en route, but nothing big.
However, the guy who played Kir couldn't make it that day, but the gal who played
Zeryn could.
Since it's no good breaking out the ship when the guy who owns it can't be there to
join in on the fun, I decided to throw in Niven's Star a lot earlier than planned and use
it as a way to introduce Zeryn.
As the name implies, I got the idea for the Niven's Star's unique makeup from the
front and back covers of the novel Integral Trees
by Larry Niven. I say covers, because I've never actually read the book! I was looking at
it the night before the game at Barnes and thought the idea sounded cool: a breathable
atmosphere around a neutron star where everyone lived in zero-G. Very cool stuff to be
used in Star Wars. Someday... However, with the character swap happening I decided to go for it.
Yup, that's right. I pretty much made up the entire scenario as I went. The space
kudzu, the floating islands, the atmospheric layers, the woven huts, the fractal orchard, the mynock flyers,
the crashed Imp ship, the Imp ship design, the Jedi ship, their Arecibo-like dish to call for help... everything.
The only things I had from Niven's book were the crashed human colonists, their
cool spears (as seen on the cover), and the very important idea of the zero-g atmosphere thing.
I mixed that with the Dyson's Sphere
concept, something that has always fascinated me, and Niven's Star was born.
Lucky for me, the players really got into it. It was such a strange world it was really
fun for all of us to explore it together. They'd ask what they saw, I'd think about how what I
wanted to show them would be affected by the weird environment, and away we all went happy
as a Squib in a Jawa junkyard. the party would toss in lines like "Are there monkeys in the trees?"
and I'd think, "Why not?". It was one of those nights when the players and the GM were really jiving.
It also helped that Cindy (Zeryn) was a major Farscape fan like myself.
It was her first night playing Star Wars, but I was able to toss in a number of Farscape references
for the Commando team that she was able to jump into the session very quickly. This has since
lead to all Imp Commando teams dressing like Peacekeeper Commandos, something
that neither group would really disagree to I don't think. As a trivia point, for you 'Scaper fans out there,
listen to when John Chriton is impersonating a Peacekeeper--the accent he's using isn't
Sebacian, it's Imperial. I guess what with all the Star Wars references he makes in the
series that it isn't all that surprising really. Even worse, the character of Zeryn Soe is based on a
mix of Aeryn Sun from Farscape and Zoe from Firefly. Overall, it was one of those cross-references
galore nights.
Once the world and the situation was established this session, it was an easy job to set the stage for
the infiltration of the Dagyar-1 next time we played. It would
also give me time to get some NPCs ready for the ship, first among them Bebo.
I already knew at this point what was going to happen to Yanna, and wanted to have a backup engineer in
place before she got taken away. Note that at this point, Bebo was still just an NPC. All sorts
of nasty things could happen on the Imperial ship, getting caught least amongst them. Mainly
I needed to keep the Yanna/DarkSide tension high, so that seemed the perfect place to do it.
Much to the chagrin of the party no doubt.
This has been the Director's Commentaries for Act I, Scene iii
 Back to Scene iii without the commentary
On to Scene iv 
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