Scum & Villainy: Life Day or Yippee Ki Yay, Millenium Falcon

Scum & Villainy: Life Day or Yippee Ki Yay, Millenium Falcon

inspired by Shane Black

We’re three sessions into a short Scum & Villainy campaign set in plain old Star Wars, because on a long enough timeline everything gets used to run Star Wars. Akkol Cha the Rodian Mystic, Kass Nanto the Chiss Muscle, and Tokeyo Dorifto the Sullustan Pilot are the crew of the Porg Chop Express, a Stardancer-class freighter.

In our first session, the Porg Chop crew were ambushed during a routine cargo pickup on Kessel. Their Black Sun contact, Huntsacker, was killed and they escaped under heavy fire. Once safely in hyperspace, Akkol and Kass were surprised to find that their cargo wasn’t just the sacred Wookiee wroshyr tree bound for an enclave of emancipated Wookiees on an Ithorian worldship under the care of Akkol’s mentor, the Twi’lek Horux. There was also a significant amount of illicit orga root drugs packaged with it. Kass immediately got high and tried to strangle Tokeyo while she was hallucinating.

The hard choice: make an easy run to drop off the wroshyr tree in time for Life Day, but let the orga root sit in their hold, drawing undue attention? Or try to offload the root as fast as possible and then race against time to deliver a Life Day miracle to those Wookiee orphans? Option B, please! The Porg Chop Express set course for the planet Nakatomi and Tokeyo’s swoop-racing pal Choss.

The meet went poorly. They shot their way out of a standoff with a Devaronian Black Sun assassin as well as troopers. Choss kept his end of the deal and took the orga root off their hands, but the ordeal damaged Tokeyo’s friendship with his gambling buddy. Luckily the Devaronian had codes for a small stash of spice at the docks, which they grabbed on their way back to the Express for the long trip to the Ithorian worldship.

This was all fine. Shootouts and brief chases and tense scenes arguing about whether one’s contact is an Imperial informant. I hit a snag when it came time to race the tree back to the Wookiees, though. Basically I just didn’t have enough for everyone to do. Tokeyo was fine – as the Pilot, he was making Helm checks and managing resources to fill a progress clock before I filled my “It’s Life Day and you’re late!” clock. Kass definitely wanted to play up her addiction, and unfortunately I gave it short shrift here. Partially out of real life time crunch, partially out of drawing a blank when it came to making it interesting aboard ship when the only issue is “go fast”. I came up with all sorts of things after the session, of course, but that’s hindsight for you.

Things picked up once Tokeyo slid the Porg Chop Express into the worldship’s docking bay with minutes to spare. They all did some setup + group actions to mollify the enraged dockworkers, then delivered the wroshyr tree to a happy Horux and his band of Wookiees. I think I recovered from my earlier failure with Kass here, as Akkol and Horux worked together to help Kass realize her inner strength. This was a group Attune that we ruled would let Kass take downtime actions to reduce her addiction clock down if she wanted.

We did Tokeyo’s downtime after that, since he won’t be able to join us next time. He managed to overindulge and get the crew in debt to Mospeda, a vaccsuited Rodian modeled after the Russians from Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye run. Seriously, bro.

Next time we’ll add Dr. Cyclos, an Abyssian Stitch to the crew, and handle downtime aboard the Ithorian worldship. Akkol Cha should get some mad background XP, since it’s his childhood home.