Author: Serf McSerfington

My Scum and Villainy Star Wars game is still going quite well! This time the crew of the Invincible 2 started off with a busted hyperdrive and a rescued detective in need of delivery back to her beat. They sought out the Mechanic’s junkyard owner friend, an ewok named Lub with a modified cargo ship full of junk from an old battle between the First Order and the Corporate Sector Authority. There, the immediately ran into representatives of the Czerka Corporation and Kuat Drive Yards, two factions they had pissed off during ship creation. Add in some pirates attempting to shake down Lub for protection money and you get a firefight!

The Muscle tried to save the Mechanic and ended up taking their first trauma and the Mechanic took a level 3 harm while the party Scoundrel took down the pirates with an assist from the Pilot on the ship’s main gun. After fixing up the damage they did to the station and dealing with Lub for the replacement parts, they jumped to the Kandala Nexus, a sprawling mess of a station built from a thousand different cultures that all have an interest in the nearby trade route intersection.

Once there the Scoundrel slipped off with the Muscle to hit up a contact when the party found that the detective that hired them was nowhere to be found. Back at the ship, an off-duty cop showed up looking for the crew’s passenger, and the crew got suspicious. The Scoundrel discovered that the detective who hired them was apparently arrested for murdering his partner, who was safe and alive back on their ship, and the crew found themselves in the midst of a dirty cop conspiracy. The Scoundrel and Muscle found the arrested detective being worked over in the back of a cop bar while the Mechanic and Stitch snuck their passenger off the ship in an old stormtrooper suit and the Speaker and Pilot deceived the cops who came to search the ship.

After the detective was rescued and the passenger and her escort got attacked by a plainclothes cop the crew is now on the run from crooked cops and an all-seeing surveillance system as they have to find a way to get to the Commissioner and hope they’re not in on the conspiracy.

Other highlights included:

-the Stitch trying to perform last rites for a dead ex-stormtrooper from last session and being told by the ex-Imperial Pilot that they don’t have those and that they were just gonna loot the body and space him.

-the Speaker attempting to contact an old pirate buddy to smooth things over during the firefight on Lub’s and making a new enemy.

-the Pilot blowing a hole in Lub’s ship and then getting confronted by a big gammorean with a rocket launcher

-the Mechanic using their pet porg to poop in some pirate eyes and then to bite that plainclothes cop that got the drop on them

-the Muscle taking the Soft trauma and refusing to stand up for themselves against anti-droid cops

-the Speaker politely lying through her teeth to the cops while they tore through the ship looking for their passenger

-rolling a random name for the dirty cop searching the ship and coming up with Zizzy Noscondra

Star Wars Scum and Villainy continues apace with the PCs making friends and meeting people across the Corporate Sector!

This time around they attempted to repair their reputation on the Reef, the floating city built on the back of a mega-whale after getting into a shootout at the docks last session. The Stitch did most of the heavy lifting, spending their downtime actions setting up a free clinic and tending to the wounds of lowlifes and pirates alike. His companions busied themselves healing wounds taken in the last session and indulging in their vices.

Their favored contact, and corrupt cop named Craig, called them with a job offer. Another cop, a detective with the Authority, asked them for help with finding his partner, a hot-shot junior detective who had gone looking for a band of criminals and gotten in over her head. As payment he offered a fake transponder module from impounding. The crew accepted and hit the streets of the Reef to dig up information on the missing detective. After a few missteps, they got on the trail of the Eels, a local outfit who has been seen tussling with the detective in a back alley. The Mechanic rolled a critical on their Skulk roll and got all the information they wanted on the Eels hideout. Built off to the side, it was a round building with access straight to the water. The Pilot had spent their downtime action rounding up some fellow Imperial deserters for a mission, and the plan was simple: the Muscle, Mechanic, Stitch and Speaker would breach the front door while the Scoundrel slipped in the back window and the Pilot brought their ship in from above to drop in their ex-stormtroopers as backup.

Engagement roll: 3

So we took our five minute break and I thought about how to represent a Desperate starting position. My decision was that the ground team would breach right into an outgoing search party led by a Force user, and the Pilot would be flying in to support them against a loaded blaster cannon. From there, things got even more interesting. The enemy Force user attempted to send the team flying, but the Mechanic revealed their latent Force sensitivity and struck back, sending the enemy Force user flying into the water and earning a concussion for themselves in the process. The Pilot rolled very badly on their strafing run and wound up taking a blaster bolt in the engines, but managed to bring the Invincible 2 down on the enemy base, crashing in through the glass ceiling and sending the support beams caving in. Which just so happened to help the Scoundrel, who was in a blaster fight with a tough gammorean jailer defending the kidnapped detective. The Scoundrel was sealed in the room as the team outside had to contend with a hail of blaster fire, which the Muscle droid dealt with via judicious application of a flamethrower.

From there the team and their stormtrooper backup fought their way to the ship so that the rattled Mechanic could get the engines working again. The Scoundrel found herself cornered in the jail as armed droids began to crawl in through the window, and she was only saved by the Muscle using Unstoppable to pull the beam out of the way and open the door. The Speaker was a little too intent on studying the droids and wound up taking a nasty cut from the enemy Force user, who had pulled himself out of the water. However, he caught a blast in the back from the Pilot manning the ship’s blaster cannon and got erased. The Stitch attempted to help a pair of wounded stormtroopers, and was confronted by an opportunistic looter in the process. This problem was again solved by ship-mounted blaster cannon and the Stitch escaped. With their crew loaded up and the detective safe, the ship managed to lift off and limp away from the Eels base, having effectively destroyed the whole gang.

Now they need to fix their hyperdrive and get the detective back to home safely, something that won’t happen easily with a shiny new Wanted level in the system and the First Order breathing down their necks.

One interesting thing about this game is that the players are fast on their way to earning a positive reputation with the Authority, who are essentially the Bluecoats of this setting. Since the cops are owned by corrupt corporations it doesn’t bother me as a story element, but it will be interesting if they can call in favors to keep the legit authorities off their backs while they deal with other criminal elements.

Star Wars Scum and Villainy Session 2 report: It all went sideways

In our latest session, the players did their downtime actions, mostly recovering from the last mission and training. We actually didn’t know how to handle healing for a droid character, so I ruled that the Mechanic could use Rig, but the Stitch’s Physicker special ability would still apply. After that, they took a job from their contact with a bunch of anarchist criminals called the Laserbrains: simple delivery job of booze and drugs to a pirate outpost on an ocean planet controlled by the First Order. The Speaker also managed to acquire a small side job delivering a package to an unknown contact on the same planet.

They rolled a 6 on the Engagement roll and so their first obstacle was getting stopped by a First Order patrol and boarded for inspection. These FO guys are pretty sloppy and disheveled since they haven’t had a proper resupply or rotation in over a year, and the characters manage to slip the cargo past them no sweat. Afterwards, the characters met up with their unknown contact, who turns out to be a Resistance pilot and their cargo for her was a lot of explosives. The party Stitch gave her a check-up, but managed to roll low enough that she was offended and they parted on bad terms.

It turned out that the pirate base (the Reef) was mobile, built on the back of a mega-whale skimming the surface of this ocean planet. Once there, their ship got boarded by some dockworkers for inspection, and they tried to skim some of the booze and drugs off the top of the shipment. The Speaker was having none of it and immediately shot the lead pirate in the head, sparking a huge firefight and getting the first Trauma of the game. The Scoundrel held off the pirates and killed most of the boarding party. As more pirates rushed in, the crew’s droid Muscle ran in with their flamethrower and used Command to scare them off. Afterwards the party hit the engines and blasted their way out.

They considered giving up on the mission, but the Speaker hit up a contact back at the Reef who managed to negotiate a deal to still sell off the cargo. So they returned, this time watched much more closely, and sold the shipment to the intended client: a sullustan named Dua Ath. When they told him about the skimming, he figured out that the dockmaster was stealing from him and had his battle droid shoot the dockmaster. In the end, the players got paid less than agreed upon and hurt their reputation with the Laserbrains. And they started a clock with a starship manufacturing company, Kuat Drive Yards, from whom they stole their ship parts during ship creation. If it hits 4 ticks, KDY is gonna find them. The Speaker took Vicious for their Trauma, and the crew forged a new reputation on top of Daring: now they are known to have a Short Fuse.

Still loving the game so far! I do have one question, though. During the game, the Speaker used Acquire Asset and rolled well enough to get a standard item, but we didn’t decide on what it was. They later used it as part of a flashback to decide that it was false crates that they could hide their real crates inside of. Is this a proper use of Acquire Asset? From my reading, we need to decide on the item ahead of time, but the player made a good argument for combining it with a flashback later on in the game. It felt sorta like a Hannibal-esque “plan comes together” moment and it was cool. I just want to check and see if it is something allowed within the rules.

So last night I ran Scum and Villainy for the first time, using Star Wars as the setting. The players were

Human Scoundrel who was a former Czerka troubleshooter

Rodian Mechanic with a grudge against Czerka for killing his parents

Human Pilot, former Imperial flyboy gone freelance

Droid Muscle who bought their freedom and is extremely dangerous

Human Speaker hailing from a fallen corporate family turned pirates

Their starting situation was that they were going to stick up a high-stakes sabaac game happening in the back room of a pleasure barge heading into Canto Bight. They chose to pose as employees and passengers on the barge, with the Scoundrel using their False Papers to get into the game. Using a flashback, they Skulked their trick holocards into the game and cheated, while also framing the Czerka exec across the table for cheating. In the middle of the job another bunch of criminals started their own robbery and the crew managed to fight them off, rob the game, and then shot their way out to an excursion pod and escaped.

I really like this system and I can’t wait to run it again next week. The crew has some good relationships with some interesting Factions, and I’m looking forward to how it develops from here. The system itself runs like a dream and I went into it with basically no prep but it worked out really well.