Last Sunday we continued our adventures in the Star Wars universe using Scum and Villainy!
The crew worked on their various projects and missions. The Speaker discovered who owns the deed to their fallen family company and is working on a plan to reclaim it, while the Scoundrel cracked into a treasure trove of data from her former employer Czerka and found that the entire upper management has been replaced by something ominously named OVERLORD. The Mechanic worked on modifying the ship and the Muscle began the process of clearing their mind for training to use the Force. The Stitch discovered the truth about the half-clone children: they would not live past the age of 40. With this in mind, he informed their leader and offered his help, and the half-clones accepted. His research into how to fix them has begun in earnest.
They then received a distress call from Resistance pilot Rana Byard, who they had met in one of their first missions. She was being hunted by the First Order after blowing up a significant portion of their grounded Star Destroyer and offered the crew payment in exchange for being rescued and returned to the Resistance. The Scoundrel, a friend and confidante of Rana, agreed without hesitation and the rest of the crew decided to help out. They jumped to Abin-Sau, the ocean planet and made for the Reef, the traveling city built atop a wandering mega-whale.
Unfortunately their Engagement Roll was a bust, and so the situation was rough. The players left their ship at a distance and approached with the help of a mon calamari contact aboard his skiff. A storm blanketed the Reef and TIE fighters were screaming by overhead while First Order troops tore the city apart in search of Rana. The Mechanic Attuned to the Force and found her location, which was besieged by a platoon of stormtroopers.
Charging right in, each member of the Crew started ticking the “Rescue Rana” clock. The Mechanic took control of a giant crane in hopes of destroying the enemy tank, while the Muscle climbed a nearby building to rain fire on the stormtroopers. The Speaker hobbled her way through the firefight into the bar where Rana was hiding and took command of the thugs inside. The Scoundrel joined her, using custom rocket-boots to kick a lot of ass. The Mechanic was forced to crawl out along the crane and cut the connection to the supermagnet manually, getting shot up in the process while the Muscle was sighted by a passing TIE fighter and managed to blow it up with a grenade launcher before pulling out their sniper rifle and attacking the platoon below. The Stitch pulled a fancy maneuver and blocked off the reinforcements before recalling his college years on the rugby team and bumrushing through the firefight to draw their attention. The Mechanic killed the tank, and the Speaker and Scoundrel rescued Rana.
As they tried to leave, a local sullustan gang boss Dua Ath threatened to rat them out. So the Speaker put a round between his eyes and intimidated the other gang members into shutting up.
We had to end the session there, but next week the crew of the Invincible 2 are going to see if they can escape the planet and get their passenger where she needs to go!
Really like how exciting and chaotic this all sounds ^_^
It sounds like you started the session with Downtime and ended after the completion of the job. Do you always do that?
Scott Wheelock Pretty much always, yeah. I find that’s the best flow you can have. We start with the relaxed scenes of downtime playing out and then get into the score where the action rises and things get exciting, and end as the action winds down. It’s my preferred way to run things now.
Brock McCord I have a lot of players, but everyone got a time to shine, which I love. Swinging the spotlight around liberally makes things chaotic, and I try to emulate the feeling of an action movie scene.
These are always fun to read.
You know most people are surprised when I tell them that my core media influences for SaV were Outlaw Star and Cowboy Bebop mixed with Dune (because it’s the same setting Throne of the Void will be in).
So it’s fun to see how people fit other flavors of space opera into things.
Stras Acimovic That’s a little funny– everyone in my group went, “Oh, it’s Star Wars” as soon as they started reading the materials, and our game has basically become known as “copyright non-infringing Star Wars” >_>
(I think I’m the only one in the group who’s seen Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star, and I totally see that in it too, for what it’s worth <_ <)
Serf McSerfington I totally got the feel of a good action movie scene from reading that! I’ve had sessions where we’ve struggled to find a really exciting pace or raise the stakes to really fun levels, but this sounds like a real blast.
For what it’s worth Brock your group is by far not the only one. The thing about making genre fiction (particularly one with a lot of pastiche elements) is that people project whatever example of that genre they’re most familiar with onto it. The problem comes when they get angry that it’s not a perfect analogue (“But in STAR WARS Jedi are like THIS!” … “Yes, but this isn’t star wars.”—I have this discussion a lot) in which case I have to smile and give a few suggestions on how to hack it for what they need.
You don’t need jumpgates, just clocks for hyperspace jump, you have to change the Way like THIS.
There’s some very core conceits of Star Wars that don’t fit well here. The Way is not denied to any. All the playbooks start with it as an ability. You’re not magically born with more of it. You don’t have to join mystic orders to be trained. It has no morality (no light or dark side). Mystics aren’t respected powerhouses that determine the fate of the galaxy. There is no destiny that’s set in stone. Not all ships are small battlecruisers with weapons and shields coming out of every end.
If you look at the way Pirates, Daoist Magic and such work in Outlaw Star you can see the shape fits with a little less fiddling (again, many differences exist because I only used things as inspiration rather than trying to emulate exact details).
So I’m always curious what groups that successfully use this to play their particular flavor of genre most closely do (and in particular why it works for them when it doesn’t for others).
Stras Acimovic I’m so lucky to have a very easygoing group who are willing to entertain my loose interpretation of Star Wars lore. I was reading some notes George Lucas made when Star Wars was still in development, and he maintained that the Force was something anyone could use, and that people used it in small ways all the time. His thought was that the Jedi were mutants who had an innate ability to shape the Force, but that anyone could learn with enough training. So for my game, I invented the Heterodoxy, a faction that has thrived in the Corporate Sector and has sects that train people in how to use the Force. We also have the Clankers, who are battle droids who escaped deactivation at the end of the Clone Wars, and have taught themselves to use the Force too. Our Muscle is a droid, and he has decided that his next pursuit will be to get trained, which is a combination of long-term project and training actions.
My players have really embraced this view of the lore, and they’re getting used to making Attune rolls even with 0 dots and pushing themselves to represent the Force helping them out in small ways.
Brock McCord One thing I’ve learned while running Blades is that it takes a while to pick it up and really grasp how it works (though it is super easy to get into). But the biggest thing is that PCs have Stress, and Resistance rolls, so if I want higher stakes, I just throw the worst thing I can think of at them. That gets them engaged and makes them start taking bigger risks, use stress and just overall makes things more interesting.
Like in the session I posted about, when the Muscle made a Scramble roll to get up to a vantage point and rolled a 5, I figured the worst thing that could happen would be getting sighted by a TIE fighter, since for a group of ragtag scoundrels air support is tough to contend with. And when he decided to use his grenade launcher against it, I thought that was amazing, and we set him at Desperate/Standard. He pushed himself and managed to roll a 6, which led to a great moment where this droid somehow manages to shoot down a fighter jet with a grenade and we loved it. When the Mechanic failed to drop the supermagnet on the tank, obviously the worst thing would be to have them scurry out over a huge firefight to cut the connection manually. In the end he wound up taking level 3 harm and he’s sitting at 8 stress, but he killed that tank and is in an interesting place for our next session.
You don’t have to be cruel or mean, but just really hit them hard with consequences and complications and you’ll be amazed at what they do to get out of it and overcome.
Serf McSerfington That’s good advice, I’ll remember that ^^
Stras Acimovic That’s interesting– like you say, the setting isn’t actually specifically all that much like Star Wars, but it’s the biggest touchstone we all have, so it’s how we immediately interpreted it anyway. Luckily, none of us are so attached to the idea that we’ve cared at all when the details don’t line up ^-^
And for that matter, we haven’t gone to any great lengths to try to reintroduce any major Star Wars elements. We’ve mostly taken what lore there is in the S&V book and added our own ideas to it, so it really is just that “Star Wars” is almost shorthand for “sci fi” for us.
If anything, it’s all the more specifically not Star Wars, because I’ve personally been taking world building opportunities to make our universe a sort of head canon take on Star Wars that changes things I’ve had gripes with over the years (the main one being “what if there were many Mystic/Jedi orders and you didn’t have to join The Good Guys or The Bad Guys to be one?”) XD
Rad ^_^ That kind of personalization is kind of what I was hoping to hear. SaV is very much written to be “make it your own”.
Serf McSerfington Re: downtime first: I was also thinking about changing the order of things, ’cause it makes more sense to me.
I did Downtime at the end after our first game so we could have a taste of everything involved in the game, but I think I’ll alter the order starting with the first ‘real’ job. I think we all found that the Entanglement was anti-climactic; I didn’t want to make it too much, so it was just a little speed-bump without too many teeth. I also like the idea of getting the job during Downtime, then being able to better use the Acquire Assets activity.