The Horde Invasion

This week's adventure went fairly well, considering halfway through it I was wondering how to get it back on track.

When we last left our team of Jedi, they had heard news that the Republic Taskforce had been defeated by the Horde at Li Yong. They left with the Medical Frigate to perform search and rescue for any survivors. Dag used his freighter to pick up survivors and crashed pilots on the mountainous planet below, gathering them together in one staging area/triage.

Once the main work was over, they pick up their sensors register a crashed Horde fighter on the mountainside, so they go in to investigate, hoping to find some clues or techno-goodies. They land their freighter, the Corellian Queen, on a glacial morraine about a half-mile downhill from the crash-site. Dag (the freighter captain), Zsa-Zsa (the Gun-gan Jedi Mystic), and Alex (the human Jedi) climb the mountainside and crested a ridge, finding the crashed fighter wedged tail-up in a low crevasse like a crashed kite, and the mountainside continued up the other side. The fighter's cargo bay had ruptured and furs, skins, tents, and supplies lay scattered about. As they begin to go down towards the fighter, they take fire from the other side of the crevasse. They duck from cover and Dag returns fire. Alex's cover wasn't good enough and takes a Mortal Wound to his head. Zsa-Zsa pulls him to safety and tends to him as Dag and the attacker exchange blaster fire.

Alex is near death, and calls upon the power of the Force to heal him back to Wounded (Reduce Injury). Zsa-Zsa returns him to consciousness and reduces his pain. Dag provided cover fire while Zsa-Zsa took Alex back over the ridge to safety.

The Barbarian takes a chance and runs down towards his fighter but Dag scores a hit on him. It barely slows the Barbarian down and he gets to cover behind his fighter. Dag descends and rounds the upturned fighter only to get clocked. Dag falls to the ground. The Barbarian straddles Dag and begins to strangle him with his powered gauntlet. Dag passes out.

Ahrahm, the Elomani Jedi waiting on the ship,was alerted to the danger by seeing blaster fire above the ridge, arrives at the scene several minutes later (passing Alex and Zsa Zsa on the way up). He cuts through the fighter's wing with his lightsaber and finds Dag tied to the fighter, his shirt pulled open and a strange glyph cut into his chest. The Barbarian, suprised by Ahrahm's attack. He shot at Ahram, who used the Force to hurl rocks at him, finally incapacitating the Barbarian. As a final note of disgust, and as a sign of Ahrahm's inner battle with his emotions vs. his control as a Jedi, Ahrahm kicked the unconscious Barbarian hard, gaining a Dark Side Point. Later, Ahrahm revived the Barbarian and probed his memory for the past 24 hours, learning of the Horde tactics and mentality.

The team unpacked their new engineering droid, Zero-One, a new Binary model engineering droid with two independent bodies but one shared brain, and ordered it to disassemble the crashed fighter's engines for tranport in their freighter. Zsa-Zsa returns to the crash site, only to see Dag and Ahrahm returning to the ship. Creeped out by the bound Barbarian, she soon flees back to the ship behind them. The Barbarian wakes later and flees the scene.

While at the ship, they receive new orders from the Jedi council to rendesvous with the Republic Fleet gathering at Chador, 10 days away. They leave after loading the disassembled engines.

On the way there, they stop at Bakki Station, a deep space way-station at a Hyperspace lane crossing. Most ships travelling from the Outer Rim to the Mid Rim stop here, as Tattooine hasn't been settled yet in my campaign. The station is swamped with refugees fleeing the Horde invasion. Service is slow, and they are told to expect a 15-hour wait before their ship is readied for the rest of the jouney.

While gathering money to pay for the services, Dag notices one of the Dactaris is fake. It was won by Quarllen, his gambling Chadri-Fan co-pilot at Bakki Station on their way out. He examines it to discover that it contains a datachip. He gives the Datachip to One who plugs the data into a computer readout. In it are bank access codes, all the codes neccesary to gain access to the entire vault. The bank is right here on Bakki Station! Dag considers the possibilities, but the Jedi chide him.

Not long after the discovery, there is a call for Quarllen, a well-dressed Twi-Lek, saying she represents Captain Belial, is looking for him. The team lie and tell her he stayed with the Republic Task Force at Li Yong. She acquiesces and breaks contact. Soon after there is a knock at their airlock. A safety inspector and maintenance crew has arrived, 10 hours ahead of schedule. They hide Quarllen in the smuggling compartment then let them in, and the inspectors begin to search the entire ship, even rummaging through computer files. At one point, one of the technicians sees Ahrahm palm the Datachip from One. The jig up, Dag confronts the Inspector. With help from some Jedi Mind Tricks, and some humiliating treatment by Dag, the maintenance crew quickly reveal themselves to be agents of Captain Belial, the local crime-lord, who's looking for the Datachip. Unbeknownst to them, the Safety Inspector activated a small distress signal in his pocket.

Responding to the distress signal, there is another knock at the door. It is the well-dressed Twi-Lek woman with a datapad. She hands it to Alex. It is a message from Captain Belial, who invites them to dinner at the Null-Gee Bar in the commercial dome to discuss purchasing the datachip and releasing his agents. The team agrees.

They go to the bar and meet Captain Belial, the midget captain, his lumbering War Droid Castrati, and his entourage, including a young man of slight build and some thugs. They haggle with Captain Belial and sell the datachip and the technicians back to him in exchange for 2500 dactaris and priority maintenance on their ship so they can leave. He agrees (he got off easy, I was prepared to offer the players up to 10,000, but they caved early, HAH!). During negotians, Alex is suprised to discover that the young man does not register as a life-form. No thoughts, no life, nothing! Belial informs Dag that if he read the chip, the chip would tell him, and he'd kill him. Dag gulped. The young man retrieves the the datachip from Zsa-Zsa across the bar. The young man plugged the chip into the reader, noticing it had been read. He erases the evidence, and gives it to Belial, happy that it had not been read.

On the way back to the ship, they are escorted by the young of slight build and a thug. After the exchange, the young man introduces himself as Neo and asks Dag if he can join his crew. He was only passing through when he was stranded on Bakki Station. He only worked for Captain Belial as a droid technician and Data Slicer because it was the only work he could get, and he can't leave the station because all the ship's are full with refugees. Dag's was the only ship with room. Neo told Dag about the chip erasure and Dag agreed to let the kid stay.

Dag then went and worked a deal with Furlough Kuat, a fat grease-stained woman in cover-alls who operated the little known Kuat Shipyards on Bakki Station, to sell her the Horde engines in exchange for 4% of all profits. Furlough agreed and took them off his hands. He had the papers drawn up all legal and everything. Furlough also told Dag to be careful because Belial's men in the Dockworker's Guild were intentionally slowing down ship maintenance, but she didn't know why. For whatever reason, Belial was keeping all these ships delayed here as long as possible on purpose. Dag was in a good mood when he returned to his ship. Neo had inspected the maintenance crew's work and was satisfied with the results. It was late and everyone was in bed, except Neo, who was up talking to Zero-One.

Dag was standing under the skylight in his ship, looking up, when he saw the asteroid appear, followed by thousands of fighters! He shouted and ran to the cockpit, breaking moorings. Bakki Station was actually ordering all docked ships to remain docked and wasn't supplying clearance for departure. Neo recognized the controller as one of Belial's men.

Dag put the ship into evasive maneuvers as three Horde fighters swooped down on him. Neo tried to work the shields (with 1D, HAH!) and Alex took a gun turret. They took the freighter through the densly packed traffic of the Bakki Station docking tower, weaving between much larger bulk freighters and passenger liners. They managed to lose one of the fighters, but the other two were still on them. Alex shot one for superficial damage, but they were taking a beating, losing their lateral thrusters. Just as one Horde fighter got a final lock-on, and they were dead meat, Dag made the jump Hyperspace, hoping that by sheer luck they wouldn't be lost forever in the void. By some miracle, they were on course (Dag spent a Force Point, otherwise their ship would have lost all power from the next shot) and going to Chador!

They arrived at the Republic Fleet Base at Chador, the Star Wars equivalent to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. There were hundreds of huge ships, battleships, dreadnoughts, carriers, destroyers, and cruisers, all massing for defense against the Horde. Dag cursed the fact that he's very likely lost his business venture. They were ordered by the comm officer on the Republic Flagship, "Triumphant", to report to the Jedi Council gathered in the War Room for debriefing.

The game ended with the image of the hundreds of gigantic ships orbiting high above the warm ocean-planet Chador.

As always, I threw in a "Next week, on The Horde Invasion..", next week, the team will be sent to Nal Hutta to obtain the aid of the Hutts in fighting the Horde. They will be able to promise them the small unsettled planet Tattooine, in the path of the Horde, in exchange for its defense. I will also introduce Natar, the Hutt Jedi*, and they will learn many secrets of the Horde.

The game went very well. The whole fighter scene was supposed to be resolved quickly, but my boy rolled really well and kicked some arse. It took longer than I thought and I was worried I wouldn't get to my planned Bakki Station scenes, but it got there. Also, Quarllen's player was absent, which boded poorly for much of my plans revovled around Quarllen and his money. Luckily, I was able to pull it off. I was especially proud of the Safety Inspection-as-search-team idea. That was very impromptu.

The addition of the new player, Kevin, who played Neo, went very well too. His addition was fluid and had rationale, as opposed to just showing up! He also helped to further the plot along as well! His character is very interesting, and has a bizzare secret that the other Players are beginning to guess. Once again, I can't wait until next week.

* Hutt Jedi. It is my opinion that Hutts are not biologically immune to Force use. It is my opinion, based on when Ben said "The Force has a strong influence on the weak minded" that Jabba was just a very powerful mind. I felt that giving all Hutts force invulnerability was basing the entire species on a statistical sampling of one representative. For the same reasons, just because the only two Hutts we've ever seen in a movie, Jabba and his companion in TPM, were bloated and corpulent, doesn't mean that every member of his species is bloated and corpulent. If you were to see two humans in your life, and both those humans weighted 350 lbs, would you then conclude that ALL Humans were bloated and corpulent? The Hutts in all the comics and books are all fat and slimy. I feel that is an unfair and hasty assumption. At no point in Return of the Jedi does it say that all Hutts are fat and slimy, nor are they ALL resistant to the Force.

In response, I created Natar, the Hutt Jedi. He is somewhat lean, mean, Force-using fighting machine. He actually has a neck, is very muscular, and moved around like a Naga from AD&D. He's not lithe by any means, but he's a far cry from Jabba and his decadence.

In the coming games, they will hopefully discover the secret to stop the Horde: defeat Kron, the link that holds all the barbarian tribes together. However, once they do that, they will still face the awesome power of Kron's ally, Paegana the Sith Witch. To defeat her, they must enlist the aid of the only being with the knowledge of how she was defeated a thousand years ago, the deatlhess wizard, Kascheij Bessmertni! A thousand years ago, Paegana was defeated, but the details of her defeat were supressed because it involved using the Dark Side to fight the Dark Side. Kasheij Bessmertni's aid brought about her downfall, and in return, he too was banished to a remote world where he could not die. There, they must pass three tests to gain his aid, but Kascheij is untrustworthy, so they must be careful once they have his aid. Only then will they be able to defeat Paegana's evil!