Author: Serf McSerfington

Pallbearers End

My 9-month Blades in the Dark campaign ended last week. It was a hell of a ride and I wanted to share it with y’all.

The Pallbearers:

Ashen Crow: Leech, devotee to a dead sun god and master of the mystical and mechanical.

Finni Gyles: Bruiser, ghost-fighter and partially ghost himself, lover of sandwiches and seeker of eternal life.

Herrik Vanir: Smooth operator and team rakehell trading in whispers and favors to further his own ends.

Veretta Jingshen: Deposed Svoklan noble turned sorceress and burgeoning playwright.

The team had spent months fighting back against enemies like the Gray Cloaks, Inspectors, Spirit Wardens and Lord Scurlock while in the background a clock counted down to the arrival of a demon they had accidentally unleashed on their second score. The demon, named Murmur, finally emerged from the sea and began a campaign of terror against the people of Doskvol, killing and abducting as it pleased. It then approached the Pallbearers (minus Ashen Crow and Herrik who were imprisoned at the time) and marked them as its agents on a mission of pure destruction: they were tasked with infiltrating the Ministry of Preservation and destroying the city’s leviathan blood stockpiles, bringing down the lightning walls and letting Murmur rule over the survivors.

Without much choice, the B-team of Pallbearers, now including Dog the Skovlander tracker and Ioane the Dagger Island archer, broke into the fortress of the Ministry of Preservation and went about their task of sneaking past the hazard-suited workers to find the leviathan blood reserves. What they discovered was that the leviathan hunters have been failing to return for months and that the reserves were depleted, a secret not even known to Murmur. Veretta convinced the Director to use the reserves to protect the fortress with its own lighting walls, a last-ditch redoubt for the team.

Meanwhile, Finni Gyles led another B-team consisting of Lily the ghostly avenger and Jolly the Iruvian sniper into Ironhook Prison to break out Ashen Crow and Herrik. In the process, Ashen Crow assembled his arcane materials and unleashed his greatest ritual: summoning a demon that embodied the power of the shattered sun and bringing light to Dunslough in the form of a blazing creature that hung in the sky. Doing this earned him the devotion of the imprisoned sorcerers, who began to follow him. The team then released all of the prisoners in Ironhook and escaped while the prisoners overcame the guards.

The two teams came together in the fortress of the Ministry of Preservation, fighting their way past demons and defenses to reunite. The core team remained behind and the others were sent to organize the defense of their home Six Towers, using the sorcerers to ignite old wards left by the Emperor in the hopes of holding off the denizens of the Deathlands. The Pallbearers then waited for Murmur to arrive, and in the final showdown they managed to kill the demon, hooking its body to an experimental generator and transferring its essence into the sun demon summoned by Ashen Crow.

As the lightning barriers fell, the team tested their preparations with some Fortune rolls. They managed to save Six Towers along with Charterhall, Brightstone, Nightmarket, Coalridge, Dunslough and the Docks. With their new miniature sun and the ancient spells of power reawoken they were able to hold back the mass of Deathlands inhabitants. The sun demon’s power is great but not infinite, and it has to rest for half of the day, and during that time the lightning barriers are reignited to protect the reduced Doskvol. And the light draws the attention of powerful horrors from across the continent as well as the eye of the Emperor, who contemplates what to do next.

We had a discussion on how each character’s epilogue would go, and this is what we came up with:

Ashen Crow became the leader of the cult devoted to the sun demon, keeping it supplied with power. His cult becomes a very powerful force in Doskvol and is contacted by the Emperor about the city’s continued status as a part of the Empire.

Finni Gyles: His hands were turned to demonflesh during the fight with Murmur, and after the battle he left the criminal life to become a leviathan hunter, captaining a small fleet of ships that work out of Doskvol while still pursuing immortality.

Herrik Vanir: Falling back on his core talents, Herrik expanded his spy networks across the new city and became an information broker playing for all sides. He is entertaining offers to work for both the Emperor and his distant homeland of Tycheros, who are very interested in this new sun.

Veretta Jingshen: A master of the arcane in her own right, Veretta gathered up the sorcerers and witches who abhorred the light of the new sun and took them to the Deathlands, where she has built her own fortress to continue her studies and write her plays far from the light over Doskvol.

Since we kinda broke the setting, we decided this was the end of the campaign for the time being. We all had a ton of fun and I look forward to running more Blades of FitD games in the future. Right now I’m really eyeing Blades Against Darkness and Copperhead County. And we might not be done with our version of Doskvol! I’ve considered writing up the changed city a hundred years in the future and picking up from there with new factions and characters, and we’ve also thought about using a different system to play around in the aftermath of this campaign. Either way it was a blast to run and Blades is my new favorite system for how easy and fast it is.

Just ended my 6 month campaign of Scum and Villainy in the Star Wars universe. It was a ton of fun and the players all got to have a moment of awesomeness when taking on their final job against the Czerka Corporation. Once the main action was over, we had a fun little series of scenes with a pair of detectives meeting with each member of the crew and engaging in some verbal sparring over their involvement with the final heist, and then each crew member got an epilogue, complete with a mid- and post-credits scenes.

I really love Blades, and Scum and Villainy especially, as I’ve always wanted a system that does what it does. Flashy heists and daring cons and planet-hopping space adventures are a lot of fun and the system does them quite well. My only criticism is that with the right combo of ability choices, a character built for combat can easily throw around 5 dice with a push/gambit, which can trivialize those sort of events for them. But this was also my first run with a Blades system, and I think I learned a lot about how to present situations that aren’t so clear-cut and on my next go-around I reckon I’ll be better at it.

There will definitely be a next time, too as I really want to run a campaign set in the base setting of S&V because its delightfully weird and cool. Right now I’m running Stars Without Number with mostly the same group, and after that I might take a break from sci-fi but there is definitely another S&V game coming in my future.

The Pallbearers: Demons, Kaiju and Flame

This is a double session report, since the score spanned two weeks of play. In this one, the crew was confronted during dinner by Setarra, a powerful sea demon with a mission: go to the docks and find a stone idol dredged up by the dredging crews. They were then to return the idol to the bay at all costs. For payment she offered some coin and an arcane workshop for their lair. After a little bit of debate, the Pallbearers decided to do as she asked.

Ashen Crow (Leech) used his previous connections with the Iruvian noble Tasha to get the crew a boat, and they used that for a stealthy infiltration of the docks from the water. When they were confronted by a dockworker, Herrik (Slide) and Finni (Cutter) teamed up to knock him unconscious, and then Herrik pulled off a Desperate/Limited roll to imitate the worker’s voice and deflect suspicion from another worker. The crew then disguised themselves as inspectors and headed out into the docks. Veretta (Whisper) had previously used Attune to determine the position of the idol, as it was basically a black hole of mystical energies, and she led them to the warehouse where it was being kept.

They were stopped by two guards, who seemed sluggish but intent on keeping them out, and after a bit of arguing they drew the attention of the dockmaster Ox Ahuja, who Finni is currently gunning to take down. After they presented some documents and a good argument Ox relented and agreed to let them inspect the idol. That was when Ashen Crow noticed a curious acrid black fluid leaking out of the warehouse. With the doors opened, Veretta and Finni stepped inside while Herrik left to procure another boat. Inside the warehouse Veretta and Finni eventually found the light switch and threw it, revealing that the idol was leaking that black goo, and suddenly one of the dockworkers grabbed Veretta, leaking the same goo from his mouth and nose. Finni clotheslined the worker, and much to his surprise he decapitated him and revealed that he was almost entirely black goo holding together a thin layer of skin and muscle.

Seeing this, Ashen Crow ran for the crane device, which was holding the idol aloft. Using it, he raised the idol into the air, out of the warehouse as all hell broke loose and half the dockworkers dissolved into goo that began to attack the other half and the crew. Ashen Crow fended one off with a fire oil grenade. Herrik attempted to enlist the help of a sailor on one of the ships, but botched, revealing that the sailor was a goo monster that attacked him after dissolving its skin, and Herrik’s resistance roll put him over the edge. Ge fled the scene by throwing himself over the side of the boat.

At that moment, Veretta jammed some of her arcane miscellany into the goo and attempted to Attune and take control over it. The players suggested a Devil’s Bargain: her attempt would wake up something else in the process. I loved it and the roll was pretty good, causing all the goo to take weird geometric shapes and freeze up, but at the same time there was this immense sucking sound as the water level dropped momentarily and out of the bay rose a baby leviathan, called from its slumber by Veretta’s telepathic force.

Seeing that the situation was rapidly deteriorating, Ashen Crow overloaded the crane and used it to launch the idol into the bay, aiming for the leviathan, scoring a direct hit on the beast that also shattered the idol, revealing that it wasn’t a statue, but a shell encasing some sort of demon that proceeded to fall into the inky black water. Veretta used her control over the goo to force it to roll into the water as well, and Ashen Crow started tossing grenades, setting the docks on fire as he, Veretta and Finni jumped into a waiting electroplasmic carriage. In predictably action-movie fashion they escaped the inferno and the raging leviathan with a stylish jump through the dock gates and fled back to their hideout in Six Towers.

Herrik returned home a few hours later, stinking and filthy with a new Cold trauma, and the crew was rewarded by Setarra with the agreed-upon coin and room for working with rituals and arcane inventions. She left with the promise of more work later down the road. The leviathan was eventually brought down by a docked leviathan hunter, but not before causing great damage to the docks and Whitecrown, and now the corpse is being drained of blood, causing the water levels to drop in the city’s canals as the massive underground space it occupied is filled in by water. The Ministry of Preservation is moving dirt and stones from older sections of the city to dump into the evacuated cavity, and a cult that worshiped the slumbering monster is out looking for the people responsible for waking it up.

Meanwhile the Pallbearers have decided they want to push the Gray Cloaks out of Six Towers and have enlisted the help of the Iruvian Consulate to do so. Next session they’re going to make a daring raid on some Gray Cloak turf and attempt to take it from them.

Star Wars Scum and Villainy: the Invincibles!

We got off to a hell of a start from the end of last session with the Stitch scaling an extended crane to patch up the severely wounded Mechanic and the Muscle getting ambushed by a team of stormtroopers on his rooftop perch. However, the Muscle is one paranoid droid, and his Ready For Anything ability meant that the booby trap of detonators he left at the door went off without a hitch, sending him careening off the side of the building, but he stuck the landing. The Stitch managed to get the Mechanic back on his feet with the Patch ability and the crew reassembled to get the hell out of there.

At this point the Pilot made his grand appearance by divebombing a TIE formation and taking out several of them before he made a hot landing and the crew scrambled aboard, but not before a lone stormtrooper was able to chuck a detonator aboard. The Mechanic, all hopped up on drugs, kicked it away, but it still went off, damaging their cargo bay door and wedging it open. The crew piled into the ship and blasted off. The Scoundrel took the controls while the Pilot handled the turret, the Speaker started pretending to be a Czerka team and the Stitch and Muscle dragged the Mechanic and their Resistance contact to the medbay for treatment. The Speaker set the team up with her bluff and the Scoundrel/Pilot made a group Helm roll. By blasting away at the pursuing TIEs and flying into the face of the hurricane they were able to ditch their pursuit, but not before they found themselves locked onto by a waiting frigate starside.

Unable to engage the cloaking device while being locked, the crew hatched a desperate plan: the Scoundrel and Muscle would launch in one of the escape pods and sneak onto the frigate while the Speaker and Pilot did their best to distract them with fake Czerka codes and bluffing. The infiltration team managed to get aboard while the Speaker used the last of her stress on pushing herself for a bluff to buy them some time. At that point she succumbed to her wounds and took another trauma. Aboard the frigate, the Scoundrel made for the computer core, hoping to steal valuable data for interested parties, while the Muscle went for the engine room, drawing the attention of a curious droid that he was unable to bluff. As it went looking for its manager, he scrambled to get the job done. The Scoundrel was able to get what she wanted, but had to kill several guards, setting off an alarm.

Back on the Invincible 2, a shuttle from the frigate docked with them for a search. After dismissing multiple harebrained schemes, the crew decided to just let them aboard, hiding their Resistance contact in a smuggling compartment. During the search, an interrogation droid attempted to arrest the Mechanic, who was forced to perform a “combat disassembly” on it. Meanwhile, the Stitch was busy trying to revive the Speaker in the cockpit right next to the Pilot, who was explaining himself to a squad of stormtroopers. The sergeant recognized his name and brought up his sister, the Pilot’s longstanding enemy because of her fervent belief in the First Order. So the Pilot pulled the oldest trick in the book (“hey, what’s that over there??”) and shot the sergeant, setting off a gunfight in the cockpit, damaging the ship’s fake transponder. The Stitch lunged at the nearest stormtrooper, jabbing him in the neck with a syringe of knockout drugs and using him as a human shield in the tense standoff.

The infiltration team reconvened on the frigate after the Muscle finished rigging the engine to blow with a detonator. They stole the captain’s sleek racing ship and blasted off just as the frigate exploded. Shooting back to the Invincible 2, they slid into the open cargo bay and prepared to breach. Unbeknownst to them, the Mechanic was using the last of his drug-fueled strength to rig the ship’s doors, and with the press of a button the interior doors all emergency sealed and the interior cargo bay door shot open. The result was that one stormtrooper got spaced, and the other two that happened to be standing in the cockpit entrance brandishing blasters at the Pilot and Stitch… got mulched.

As two more frigates jumped into the system but were beyond visual range, the crew engaged the cloaking device and jumped to hyperspace, following the coordinates given to them by their Resistance passenger. They arrived at the Big Belt, a vast and dense asteroid field, and inside they found a Mon Calamari battleship, home base of the Resistance in the Corporate Sector. With big promises of payment, they made their approach.

And that’s it! Next week we’ll get into payment and downtime and all that. This was one of our most fun sessions yet, with every member of the crew getting the spotlight multiple times and each person playing a part in their own crazy plans. I can’t wait to run it again for them soon!

The Pallbearers had themselves a hell of a session last night.

Having found out about an accountant named Shanti Shukla in need of help, the team sought her out at the Crawford and Sons firm. There, Herrik (Slide) created a distraction for the Skov barbarian-turned-secretary Tatiana, allowing Ashen Crow (Leech) and Veretta (Whisper) to slip inside. There they found Shanti and her assistant Wyman being watched studiously by a strapping thug that Ashen Crow dispatched with clever application of glue to the face. Shanti explained that she had invested the Bowmore’s money into some cargo that was currently being held by the Hive as leverage in some other scheme. She then asked the Pallbearers to get it back for her and they agreed.

A little scouting led them to an infiltration plan, coming in from an old disused tunnel from below. In our Duskwall the city has been so heavily built up that under the streets are more old streets, converted into sewers. There are many levels below the current Duskwall and all sorts of weird things can be found down there. They aced the Engagement roll and found that the only thing standing between them and their breaching point was a weak ghost that Veretta managed to bottle. With that, Ashen Crow set the detonation charges and Herrik performed a flashback to him spreading rumors that enemies of the Lampblacks would be assembling in the warehouse above. So at the moment Ashen Crow hit the switch the Lampblacks burst in and started fighting with the Hive thugs. With the floor blown open, Veretta created a fog to cover their entrance as Finni (Cutter) led them into the fray. With most of the two gangs distracted fighting, Herrik led a group action to Survey the area, and since two members of the group weren’t skilled in Survey, one of them opted to take a Devil’s Bargain. Finni discovered the cargo they’d come to recover, and at the same time the Pallbearers found that they had drawn the attention of a titanic ghost, so old and twisted that it had taken on the shape of a worm with a human face and wriggling arms and legs.

Faced with this, the team shifted priorities. Finni used his Ghost Fighter ability to wreathe himself in electroplasmic energy and engaged the worm. Veretta used her lightning hook to Set Up his attack and Herrik Assisted by punching at the worm with his spiritbane charm. Finni punched the worm right in the face, and wound up with his arm devoured up to the shoulder by the immense spirit. Ashen Crow decided that the situation was spiraling out of control and expended his fire oil to set the old cargo in the warehouse ablaze, causing all sorts of weird and arcane materials to start cooking off all around them. With the fire blazing and the worm distracted, Ashen Crow and Herrik then grabbed the large cargo crate and ran for the tunnel, escaping from the fight. Finni, meanwhile, attempted to stab the worm, but wound up getting bitten by it. We decided that the ghost did no physical damage to him, but managed to rip off the arm of his spirit form, leaving him with a useless right arm. Veretta unspooled her lightning hook and lashed at the ghost worm but succeeded only in making it thrash around, shattering the floor and sending her, the ghost and Finni down into chest-deep poisonous old water and a nest of vicious biting bugs. Finni earned himself a trauma and Veretta pushed herself to create a wild storm that helped her and Finni escape, also earning a trauma in the same moment.

Ashen Crow and Herrik dropped off the cargo with Shanti and reassembled with the group back at their mansion hideout. The team is bruised, battered and bloody but they got the desired leverage over Shanti, helped out the Bowmores and also made an enemy of the Hive. That earned them 6 rep and a new crew special ability, and they chose Forged in The Fire. Herrik and Finni also picked up Not to Be Trifled With, which is very exciting.

Overall this was a really fun session to run and I can’t wait to see what the Pallbearers get up to next!

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!

Pallbearers Session 2

The crew was down their Whisper, so they chose to focus on more mundane pursuits this time around. Ashen Crow (Leech) sought out an old war buddy and they spent a few days upgrading the potency of his alchemical formulas and started probing the underground for a good way to siphon off electricity for their base. Finni (Cutter) started his infiltration of the dockside fighting pits by battling in the arena and started working on finding out more about the spirit bottle from last session by agreeing to help his body-hopping ghost friend snatch a new body. Herrik (Slide) started building a spy network in Coalridge and scouted out locations for a body dumping operation in Six Towers, gaining a warning from the Gray Cloaks in the process.

After that, the team decided that their most pressing issue was their lack of funding, and to rectify that they went looking for an accountant to manage their coin. Herrik got them into the swanky Centuralia Club in Brightstone, posing as a Tycherosi merchant with Ashen Crow as his astrologer and Finni as his bodyguard. They talked with an Iruvian merchant princess who directed them towards the Bowmore clan as having issues with their current accountant and then took Ashen Crow aside for a reading. In the private room Crow put on a bit of a show and then hypnotized her before attuning to the ghost field and drawing the attention of a weakened ghost, which he managed to shake off and his performance earned her trust as a contact. Herrik and Finni dealt with a nosy Skovlander bodyguard before seeking out Rufus Bowmore, who was boasting about his talent as a duelist before challenging Finni to a duel.

Ashen Crow distracted the guards with a flashback to a radio device that he planted earlier to cause a fire while Finni fought Rufus, who was doing copious amounts of Duskwall-coke. In the duel, Finni broke Rufus’ nose, and they were all shocked to learn that the noble scion loved it and brought them into his confidence, asking them to seek out the accountant to help her get the Bowmores’ lost money back. Next week they’ll be doing just that, but of course it won’t be easy.

I’m enjoying Blades so much that in addition to my Scum and Villainy game I’ve also started up a game of Blades in the Dark!

My players decided to pick the Bravos as their crew and came up with some characters:

Ashen Crow (Leech), the Tycherosi war veteran and field medic.

Herrik Vanir (Slide), also a Tycherosi with a taste for the finer things in life.

Veretta (Whisper), a deposed Skovlander noble trying to leverage her untamed magical power into a better position in life.

Finni Gyles (Cutter), an Akorosian hooligan who has learned the sweet science of punching ghosts.

They based themselves out of a crumbling and abandoned mansion in Six Towers and chose Coalridge as their hunting grounds. Their first mission was a request from the Lost to break up a burgeoning band of Svovlander refugees who have just pulled off a big score of their own. The crew was contacted by the Lost because of reports that a goat-headed and crow-feathered demon was stalking the skovs.

So the crew did a little recon, with Veretta probing the ghost field and finding herself watched and Herrik surveying the situation. Ashen Crow sabotaged the generator, killing the lights and giving the crew +1d to their engagement roll. They still managed to roll a 3, which always leads to fun times. They tried a pincer maneuver, with two coming in from the back door and two coming in from the second floor of this common house.Their plan was to capture the skovs between them, beat them up for their loot and send a message to other prospective gangs.

With that 3 on the engagement roll, as soon as they burst inside the demon appeared, silhouetted by the light from the streetlamps outside. Finni pounced on the skov leader, sending the box with their mysterious loot tumbling through a window into the alley while Veretta unleashed her power at the demon, hitting it with lightning and making it flinch. Herrik tossed a demonbane charm at it, and they quickly realized the demon wasn’t actually a demon. Ashen Crow stepped in then, hitting the creature with a glue grenade and sticking it to the floor while Herrik jumped off the stairs and went for the alleyway to grab the loot. Finni watched the creature pull one leg from its boot and realized that it was actually human… probably. Veretta menaced it with her lightning hook and tried to intimidate it, which caused it to disappear again. Ashen Crow took care of the skovs who hadn’t fled, hitting them with skullfire toxin and causing them to run off into the night.

Outside Herrik found the enemy standing over the box of loot and realized that it was a woman wearing a goat-skull mask and a raven-feathered coat. With some sweet talking and a lot of luck Herrik convinced them to let the crew have the loot on the grounds that it would be amusing to see what happens to them. She then revealed that she was a Dimmer Sister before vanishing. With their mission technically complete and the loot in hand, the crew gets paid by the Lost and went home. There was a lot of debate about who should open the box and finally Finni’s obsession with the weird got the best of him and he did it. Inside was a glass spirit bottle encased in a fine silver shell and stamped with the symbol of Lord Scurlock.

Can’t wait to see where they go from here! I have lots of ideas for things that could happen, and I’m just itching to see what they want to do.

Also, the name of their crew? The Pallbearers.

I’m continuing to run Scum and Villainy in the Star Wars universe for my group, and this time around I’ll be summing up two sessions in one post. The first session was pretty much half downtime, and then half free play where the players returned a wayward battle droid to their friends on a concealed, half-finished ringworld at the edge of the Corporate Sector. Along the way they discovered that this group of surviving battle droids, calling themselves the Clankers, had escaped from decommissioning with the help of a platoon of rogue clone troopers, and now live in peace aboard the unfinished ringworld with some of the clones’ children. They also had discovered secrets of the Force and learned to manipulate it. They asked the crew to help them with disposing of a Czerka scouting vessel that was closing in on the station, and in return they offered safe harbor and a cargo hold full of rare animals they crew could trade for cash.

Accepting, the crew overtook a small scouting ship and brought it back to the main Czerka vessel. They managed to capture it with few problems, since most of the personnel involved were scientists. Now with their ship, they hauled it back to the Clankers and gave it to them as a gift, while keeping the scientists for themselves with a plan to sell them to Incom-FreiTek, Czerka’s biggest rival.

Session 2 saw them heading to Old Hydia, a broken-down and overpopulated city-moon full of crime and squalor, to do downtime and figure out their next steps. The Stitch sold the product of their long-term project to their cousin for credits, and acquired a medical droid for the ship. The Mechanic finished up their design for a set of rocket boots and a jetpack and gave them to the Scoundrel, who was responsible for hacking into Incom’s system and finding their Chief Headhunter and making contact. The Speaker met with a nephew of hers and got him out of jail while the Muscle downloaded old battle droid routines to get better at fighting.

Armed with the Scoundrel’s intel on their prospective Incom contact, the crew left for Bathas, the arctic, barren planet where the Corporate Sector Authority makes their home. Heading far into the northern hemisphere away from the relatively warm equator, they arrived at the Northern Exposure Lodge, a fancy club/theater for mid-level corporate execs. They rolled a 6 on their engagement roll, and when the Scoundrel went in to make contact, things started off smoothly. With some lucky rolls and good use of a banked Acquire Asset from the Speaker (a horde of holonet bots that boosted up the Scoundrel’s online profile to make her look legit), things went pretty well. The rest of the party had to deal with a team from Kuat Drive Yards, a faction they are at -2 with right now, which included the Muscle rolling a 1 on a Desperate Sway roll and needed to be rescued by the Speaker. Their cover story is that the Muscle was mind-wiped a few weeks ago, and the KDY team bought it long enough to get off the crew’s backs so they could make the deal.

For the Czerka scientists they’re not getting credits, but instead are getting an upgrade to their engines and a proprietary cloaking device with a deal from Incom: after each job in which they use their cloak, they cans sell the data to Incom for 1 cred.

The crew then spent the rest of the night celebrating, and we’re in a good position to see where they want to go next week!

Corporate Sector adventures continue in my game of Star Wars Scum & Villainy!

The players took the initiative, with the team Scoundrel hitting up her weird contact Nuban for a job. Nuban is a collector and seller of Force-related artifacts, and she had something for the team to do: hit a traveling museum display and steal her a working holocron! The team hit the streets, with one group slicing into the museum’s files and nabbing the manifest, security team info and the route, the other team consorting with the team Speaker’s cousin for possible escape routes. After some gather info rolls they were all set with their plan: hit the artifacts en route to the museum, steal the holocron but also attempt to jack the rest of the display in the process!

It was a pretty daring plan and they got a 6 on their engagement roll. The Muscle had gotten a job with the security team and hijacked the rear truck with the help of the Stitch, while the Scoundrel and Mechanic snuck into the middle truck and took out the guards. The Scoundrel used her newly-acquired veteran advance Unstoppable to take out four armed guards at once while the rodian Mechanic napped the holocron. The Mechanic also happens to be Force-sensitive and this resulted in them being contacted by a spooky voice from within the holocron offering them great power! The front truck was taken with a clever trick from the Speaker and some quick intimidation work from the Pilot, but in the process they ran over a security guard and the Speaker wound up shooting another in the head when he tried to make a move on her.

They then had a chase through the streets of this space station with a security droid of similar make to their Muscle in hot pursuit, as well as a team of unknown pursuers. They dipped into the garbage maintenance tunnels and the Pilot lead a group Helm action to escape, and with their Commander ability they got a crit and left their pursuers in the dust!

Meanwhile, the Mechanic had slipped into the sewers and decided to just take the holocron right to the client. All the while it continued to whisper, promising to teach him the secrets of the Force if he kept it. He presented it to Nuban, who proceeded to commune with it in front of him. The player really struggled with their temptation to steal the holocron, but decided that the payday was too much to pass up. But they have decided that they are going to shift their Vice over to an Obsession with the holocron and learning more about the Force.

The main team escaped scott-free and loaded up the cargo into the ship. When the Mechanic rejoined them they took off, slipping out just before the lockdown went into effect. Among the stuff they found was a B1 battle droid who is apparently able to use the Force and lives in a secret space station, so the next mission is to take them home. The crew has already expressed an interest in future jobs to sell their spoils or use them for long-term projects/crafting.

Still loving the system and I look forward to running it every week! We’re having a blast!