Before, I reviewed the first arc of my Star Wars: Rough Edges campaign, “Frontier Souls.” With Bamaru saved from pirates but now under the control of the Empire, the crew of the Valkyrie has been forced to find a way to live under an Imperial blockade. But their fortunes are about to change…

Episode II: Storm in a Glass

Victory! Striking from their hidden base, the REBEL ALLIANCE has successfully destroyed the DEATH STAR, the Empire’s secret weapon of terror.

Hurt but not crippled by its loss, the Empire has recognized the Rebels as a serious threat. DARTH VADER now hunts them across the stars.

Meanwhile, on Bamaru, Imperial forces are scouring the world for any sign of Rebel activity. The people are scared and angry, while the crew of the VALKYRIE is forced to lie low and wait for their chance to escape….

Synopsis

Three months pass, during which time the Valkyrie crew makes ends meet on Bamaru. Rage, Mara, and Bix all take on jobs for Zyrus, while Leyli finds work helping the local doctor, a Chiss woman named Hayara Wave. They’ve stayed vigilant for more pirate issues, but the Empire has been successful in stamping out anything that even looks like dissent. To stay out of trouble, they’ve been avoiding getting pulled into the burgeoning rebel cell put together by displaced locals.

They also think that Vamma lied about there being another crime lord interested in Bamaru—until one night, they’re approached by a figure in Mandalorian armor. He introduces himself as Jafan Bhur’i, and says his employer is interested in meeting them. However, as she isn’t currently on Bamaru, they’ll need to find a way through the Imperial blockade.

The crew is hesitant to get involved with a crime lord, but Jafan convinces them that her intentions are noble, even if her methods are not. In addition, everyone has their reasons to want to move on: Bix knows he can’t earn enough money to free his fellow droids while working as a walking wrench. Rage is getting anxious staying in one place, and he’s overdue to check in with his guild. Leyli is beginning to worry about what’s happening on Selonia now that she’s gone, and Mara has started having vivid, disturbing dreams about a future in which they don’t escape Bamaru.

They agree to meet this crime lord, and Jafan leads them to Imperial transponder codes they can use to spoof the blockade. During the mission, Bix learns Jafan is an old clone soldier. Despite bantering with each other, they manage to get along and steal what they need.

Just before they leave, they’re approached by Zyrus and his teenage assistant, Sula. They want to get off-world, too, and hope the crew will be kind enough to take them somewhere they can catch another transport. Mara agrees.

The Valkyrie crew, plus Jafan, Zyrus, and Sula, travel to the Wheel. The Valkyrie attracts the attention of an Imperial Security Bureau agent, due to its similarity to the now-infamous Millennium Falcon, but they’re ultimately cleared.

After Zyrus and Sula say their goodbyes, the crew meets Jafan’s employer, a human woman named Kandri Vondar. She tells them that Jafan was observing them during their fight with Jado Prinda months ago, and she thinks they have the skills she needs to expand her operations. Her ultimate goal, she says, is to establish and secure a Free Zone in the Outer Rim—one where people can be free of the crime syndicates and the Empire.

The crew deliberates her offer and ultimately agree, with the understanding that they can walk away if they think she’s going too far. Vondar agrees.

She gives them work, paying them fairly for each job and keeping them apprised of her progress towards her goals. She also approaches Rage for his connections to Prad Lay, believing the guild could help her accomplish her mission that much faster.

Of course, the galaxy doesn’t stand still. While doing these jobs, Leyli begins to hear rumors of an outbreak of plague on Selonia, and Mara continues to have visions, now focused on Redar Typhe and his connection to her father. When she reaches out to him on Bamaru, she discovers that he got off-world shortly after the Valkyrie made its escape.

She tracks down some of Redar’s old contacts and finds out that he may have gone to Taris, and that he might be hiding something from her about her father’s death. Likewise, Leyli learns more about the plague affecting her people and decides she needs to go to a serious research facility to get answers. With Vondar’s blessing, the group takes some time to visit the planet.

The group travels to the Taris Prime Medical Center, where Leyli learns more about the plague on Selonia, including that it’s likely to mutate into a pandemic that could affect the entire planet. Meanwhile, Mara finds Redar living in the wilds and confronts him about her father. Redar reveals that what he had been hiding had nothing to do with her father, but rather her mother: a lightsaber she once owned.

When the group meets up with Mara and Redar, an assassin strikes, nearly killing Leyli. Bix chases down and subdues the assassin, and Redar is able to learn he was contracted by someone on Selonia, not long after she started looking into the plague. After an emergency bacta treatment, Leyli agrees that she has to return home and deal with whatever is going on.

Leaving Taris, the crew runs afoul of the ISB, which has been following them since they arrived at the Wheel. They get away, but a notice is distributed throughout Imperial space regarding their ship, now suspected of belonging to the rebels.

On Selonia, the crew is arrested by the Selonian guard and accused of kidnapping the crown princess, Vissica Cavisek. Now revealed to the group as royalty living under an assumed name, Cavisek admits she ran away willingly. She makes her case to her father, the chief consort who has taken over as acting regent during the queen’s illness—the one which Cavi believed would be fatal, yet her mother continues to hang on. Cavi reunites with her sister Retikel and takes charge of the effort to stop the plague.

During the process, Mara, Bix, and Rage investigate the attempt on Cavi’s life. They discover it was masterminded by the Longtails Movement, a revolutionary pro-male organization that seeks to end the matriarchal rule of Selonia. Rage finds a droid, R4-H1D, whose owner was killed after discovering a key piece of information—that Cavisek’s father is a member of the movement and introduced a genetically-modified virus to the queen.

Cavi confronts her father, who admits to the truth. She uses the original virus to formulate a cure for the modified one, which mutated into the plague. When she demands to know where her father got the original virus, he says only one word:

“Trintignant.”

Unfortunately, Queen Vissica the Pale, Cavi’s mother, is too weak to survive the treatment. In a private conference with her daughters, she recognizes Cavi’s right to refuse the title of crown princess and encourages her to pursue her dreams. She transfers the crown to Retikel before passing away. Retikel is then crowned as Queen Vissica the Maiden.

Taking the R4 unit with them and calling her “Hi-D,” the Valkyrie crew departs Selonia. As it’s in the same system, Mara decides to return to her grandparents’ home on Corellia to find out more about her mother. Her grandparents, who were Marl’s mother and father, tell her that her mother was a Jedi initiate who was never taken as an apprentice to a knight. Instead, she worked for the Agricultural Corps and met Mara’s father while on assignment. She died in childbirth from a rare infection, shortly before the outbreak of the Clone Wars.

When she asks if her father might have been involved in something that got him killed, her grandparents say they don’t know. They do know that he was friends with a strange woman, a female Twi’lek named La’tala, who might be able to tell her more. As she leaves, she takes her parents’ soul diamonds—their cremated ashes compressed into crystals—with her.

Mara reaches out to Redar, to find out if he knows La’tala. Not only does he know her, he’s actually en-route to meet her on Belasco, having been spurred into action after he spoke with the group. However, when the Valkyrie arrives a few days later, Redar misses the rendezvous. The crew is forced to try and find him or La’tala during a local festival.

They’re shadowed by the ISB, but before they get arrested La’tala intervenes and rescues them. She reveals that she’s part of the Rebel Alliance, that Marl Bell was a courier for the early rebel cells, taking messages and packages between them under the pretense of going to swoop races. She further reveals that Redar has been captured by the Empire after they mistook him for one of her agents. She enlists the crew’s help in breaking him out.

Mara flies the getaway speeder while La’tala, Cavi, and Rage sneak into the prison and Bix leads a band of rebels in a diversionary attack. They’re successful, managing to get back to the Valkyrie and take off, but the ISB strikes again. The Valkyrie is shot down, prevented from crashing by a tractor beam, and delivered to an Imperial Star Destroyer.

Once on board, the crew is dragged in front of a female Mirialan, who is dressed all in black and wielding a red lightsaber. She has just one question:

“Where is the Artificer?”

Behind the Screen

At the start of this episode, I posed a question to the group: how did they want this campaign to play out? They had two choices:

• Leave Bamaru behind and get out into the wider galaxy, or
• Stay and get involved in the fight against the Empire.

By this point, Age of Rebellion—the Rebels vs. Empire counterpart to the fringe-focused Edge of the Empire—had been out for a while. I’d wanted to get the PCs involved in the rebellion from the early planning stages of the game, but I also wanted them to have the opportunity to decide.

And they chose to leave.

They had good reason to do so, and I was happy to plan the campaign accordingly. By this point, I’d worked out more detailed backgrounds for each character, and the players were invested. Since it meant we were sticking with Edge of the Empire for the time being, I kept the criminal element active in the form of Kandri Vondar, who I wanted to present as a reasonable person driven to do unreasonable things.

Making Jafan Bhur’i a clone trooper who became a Mandalorian after the war was a little gift to myself. I was a fan of the Republic Commando books by Karen Traviss. It also made things tense between Jafan and Bix.

Bix’s background also made it possible for Mara to receive her mother’s lightsaber from someone who had no idea what it really was or how to use it. Olivia and Priscila played out the scene in which Bix teaches Mara what the weapon means, and I agreed that he would have enough knowledge to start training her in how to use it. After all, commando droids were designed to kill Jedi—it stands to reason they’d have a good amount of information handy.

You can also see how the PCs’ Obligations began to affect the story. I would make the Obligation roll at the end of every session, so I had some idea of whose story to emphasize the next time. It was bouncing back and forth between Mara and Leyli/Cavisek for a good chunk of time, until they both had events that helped reduce their Obligations: finding her mother’s lightsaber for Mara, and returning home to deal with the plague for Cavi.

And by the time we got to Selonia, I had an idea how the game was going to end. I’ll discuss it more when it becomes relevant, but dropping Trintignant’s name in this episode is the first bit of foreshadowing of what’s to come.

During this campaign, the Force and Destiny beta came out, which opened a few doors for the story to explore. Priscila had been deliberately vague on where she thought Mara’s Force sensitivity came from, only that it had come from someone in her family. Because she’d left it up to me, I think she imagined it would come from her father.

So, just to make things a little more interesting, I decided her rarely-commented-on mother had been, in fact, a Jedi. More than that, she was a failed Jedi, having never found a master and was instead relegated to the AgriCorps. I made the decision early that she had built her lightsaber as part of training, but she’d never used it for anything, explaining why it was a completely basic lightsaber when Mara found it.

It also helped because AgriCorps Jedi weren’t as strictly monitored as the Jedi Knights were, meaning it was more likely that she could get away with being pregnant. In fact, I figure it was probably encouraged, since a Force sensitive person was more likely to give birth to a Force sensitive infant who could then be taken in by the Jedi Order. (It comes up later that Marl kept Mara hidden during the Clone Wars, not wanting her to be taken.) I wasn’t a fan of the “died in childbirth” part of the story, but it had already been established in the game and, at the time, I couldn’t think of a good way to have Mara’s mother be in the picture. I can now, of course, but it’s too late.

This episode took twelve sessions. About the ending: I’d wanted to have the group be captured in order to meet a member of the Inquisitorius, but they slipped every net I threw their way. I hadn’t hit the point where I’d force the issue, though. When the Valkyrie was shot down, however, they refused to get into an escape pod. They decided they’d rather link arms and face the end, Toy Story 3-style, than risk getting hunted down and captured by the Empire.

Of course, that would have been a terrible ending. Bold, but terrible. So I told them there was one more chance: I asked them each to flip a Destiny Point, then had the pilot of the ISB ship make an Impossible Piloting (Space) check to try and grab them. It worked, and they were spirited away.

As for the Inquisitor herself and the Artificer, that was a twist I’d been planning for a while, ever since Mara became Force sensitive. Someone close to the Valkyrie crew is secretly a Jedi Master in hiding, one who has long been sought by the Inquisitorius. Their true identity isn’t known, just the nom-du-guerre they had during the Clone Wars: the Artificer.

As you might imagine, Episode III: “Balance of Enmity” picks up almost right away. I’ll go over that next.

May the Force be with you.