I’ve been reviewing the Star Wars campaign I finished, and last time we discussed the second  arc, titled “Storm in a Glass.” The PCs started working for the crime lord Kandri Vondar, who seems to have noble motives. However, while on a personal mission, the crew of the Valkyrie was captured by a fearsome Inquisitor…

Episode III: Balance of Enmity

The Galactic Empire is preparing for war. Its fleets are arming themselves and training for a vicious fight against the entrenched Rebel Alliance.

Meanwhile, the crew of the VALKYRIE is in danger. They are the captives of a mysterious Inquisitor, who seeks a fugitive Jedi known only as THE ARTIFICER.

After two weeks in Imperial custody, all hope seems lost. However, one of the crew’s allies has set a desperate plan of rescue in motion. Success means the Valkyrie will fly again, but failure means certain doom….

Synopsis

For the last two weeks, the crew of the Valkyrie—along with La’tala and Redar—has been imprisoned aboard an Imperial Star Destroyer. While being tortured, the Inquisitor has been interrogating them about the whereabouts of a Jedi Master known only as “the Artificer.” She claims to know they’ve crossed his path, yet they get the impression she’s unaware of his true identity.

Then, while Cavisek is being interrogated again, the Inquisitor receives an unexpected visitor. A man in black armor, mechanical breath whirring, demands to know why the Inquisitor is wasting her time on the PCs. She insists they know something about the Artificer, but the man—whom she refers to as “Lord Vader”—tells her it’s a fairy tale. He orders her to put Mara Bell on a transport to Coruscant, kill the rest, and get back to her assignment to track down someone named “Skywalker.”

Meanwhile, Bix and Hi-D have been placed in a tech lab and fitted with restraining bolts while their memory banks are trawled for information. While the process is underway and the technicians have gone for the night, a Klatooinian and a Trandoshan enter the room, carrying an unconscious stormtrooper. They remove the restraining bolt from Bix, pass him the trooper’s E-11, and tell him that his friends are in the detention area. Then they slip out.

In the detention area, Mara dreams. She sees a figure in a brown robe sitting on a mossy log in front of a waterfall. When she approaches, stormtroopers move to surround them. The figure leaps up, blue lightsaber in hand, and steps between Mara and the troopers. Then she’s awakened by the sound of a commotion. Two stormtroopers have entered the detention area, and they’re confronted by the lieutenant in charge who wasn’t expecting them. They all go for weapons, but a blaster shot rings out from the doorway and drops the lieutenant.

Kandri Vondar steps into the room, and the stormtroopers take off their helmets. One is Jafan Bhur’i, and the other is a young woman. They free the crew of the Valkyrie and are about to get moving when a squad of authentic stormtroopers arrive to investigate the shots. Before combat begins, Bix appears and mows down the Imperials, clearing the way out. Bhur’i and the young woman help Redar Typhe and La’tala walk, as they’re the most heavily injured.

Vondar tells them the plan: while they get to the hangar where her ship is, the rest of her crew is sabotaging the tractor beams. Unfortunately, halfway there they get an alert on comms: a woman with green skin and a red laser sword attacked Vondar’s crew. While they succeeded in disabling the main tractor beam generator, the backup is still operational. Vondar wants to redirect and take down the backup, too, but Mara is confident she can fly out of there and avoid the tractor beam. She convinces Vondar to have everybody converge on the hangar.

Once they arrive, they discover Vondar’s ship, the Heliodragon, is parked right next to the Valkyrie, which is clamped to the deck. Mara wants to take her own ship, despite it being known to the Empire and probably outfitted with a tracking device. She and the rest of the crew get to work freeing it while Vondar’s people (plus Bix) hold off the arriving stormtroopers.

Just before the clamps are released, the Inquisitor shows up, wearing Mara’s lightsaber on her belt. Before anyone can react, Vondar draws a blue lightsaber from her jacket and steps between the Inquisitor and the group, saying she’ll hold her off while everyone gets to safety. As they begin to duel, Mara rushes forward, sliding past Vondar and using the Force to pull her own lightsaber off the Inquisitor’s belt. They successfully fight the Inquisitor to a standstill and then escape, with Mara avoiding the repaired tractor beam.

The two ships rendezvous in deep space. While Vondar’s crew sweeps the Valkyrie for bugs, Vondar catches them up on what they missed and admits to being a former Jedi Master. She survived Order 66 by being too far away to receive the transmission, and Bhur’i, who had been her second-in-command, underwent surgery to remove his control chip. She decided not to say anything to the group before, but after seeing them in action—especially Mara—she says she wants to make them more vital parts of her organization. Vondar also offers to help train Mara in the ways of the Force, saying, “I can’t make you a Jedi—there’s no percentage in that for anyone—but I can teach you how to make a difference using the Force.” Mara accepts.

To start with, she’s sending the group to Nar Shaddaa. One of her allies, a Shell Hutt named Nullada, wants a team to compete in the Granee Noopa, the “Grand Banquet.” It’s a competitive event, where the sponsor of the winning team wins great prestige and the team itself gets wealthy. Vondar needs the wealth, and Nullada wants the prestige, so it falls to the Valkyrie crew to carry the day. They win—though in the process, Mara realizes she still has a lot to learn about using a lightsaber—and though the winnings go to Vondar, they receive an ardos disk as a prize. It’s a powerful diplomatic tool, essentially granting them free, unmolested passage through Hutt space.

Mara has another dream. She’s wandering through the woods at night, unable to find her way. She feels someone calling out to her but can’t figure out where they are. But she manages to follow the call and find her way to a campfire, where a figure in a brown robe stands over it. They ignite a green lightsaber and tip it towards her.

While on Nar Shaddaa, Rage decides to make contact with his slicing guild, Prad Lay. He discovers they’ve been put in a bad spot: they were working a job on Formos, breaking into a lab to steal corporate secrets, but security was suddenly alerted. Only one operative got out alive. Then, without warning, the guild’s sponsor Tronox cut all ties. When digging into why, they discovered that the lab on Formos was a front for the Black Sun, a powerful galactic syndicate, and they’ve put a termination order out on Prad Lay.

The guild’s leader and Rage’s mother figure, Kyla Vene, believes the guild was set up by the mysterious elite slicer named Silverbird. However, Rage and Silverbird have crossed electronic paths before, and Rage doesn’t think Silverbird would go to such lengths. He convinces the Valkyrie crew to help him investigate, and they go to Formos.

After breaking into the same lab, they find out that one of the two Prad Lay members thought dead is actually still alive. They escape with her. She’s able to give them enough details for them to realize it was actually Tronox who set them up, and that Silverbird was trying to warn Prad Lay when things went bad. However, when they arrive back on Nar Shaddaa, they find out Kyla Vene is disbanding the guild. They can’t hope to hold things together with the Black Sun breathing down their necks.

Before Kyla leaves, though, she has a score to settle. She’s tracked Silverbird to a location on the planet, and she intends to make him pay. She ignores the crew’s claims that Tronox was responsible, and she asks Rage to go with her. Rage refuses, and Kyla storms off, never to be seen again.

Vondar assigns them to rescue a former Imperial Senator from captivity, and they discover they’re not the only ones trying to get to him. They evacuate him to Dornea. While waiting to hear from Vondar, Bix learns about a recent spate of droid attacks. The hostile droids match the description of his old comrades from his time with Wylo the Hutt, and he decides to investigate.

The crew catches the droids in the act. When Bix tries to talk to them, they give him the cold shoulder. One secretly agrees to meet with him, and discloses that the group has been chasing someone called Venom, a Gank bounty hunter who is trying to blackmail Wylo using stolen data. The other droids are upset with Bix because they think he abandoned them; Wylo claimed Bix bought only his own freedom and said nothing about trying to earn enough to free everyone else.

Bix realizes Wylo will never let him actually buy his friends’ freedom, and he hatches a new plan to take what Venom has and use it himself. The Valkyrie crew manages to track Venom back to his hideout and stun him. Taking the data, Bix contacts Wylo and successfully blackmails the Hutt—though not before receiving veiled threats of revenge. To keep the Valkyrie safe and also help his old comrades make their way in the galaxy, Bix decides to leave the crew.

Before the crew can get moving on Vondar’s next assignment, they receive a transmission from La’tala. She’s heard about an impending Imperial trial of Dr. Esmal Kekero, Cavisek’s former mentor, on Zeltros. The group flies there only to discover it was a trap set by the Inquisitor, who wants to recapture them and use their suffering to draw the Artificer out of hiding. She senses he’s close.

Just as the fight begins, a starship swoops low overhead and a mysterious female Devaronian leaps out, wielding a white lightsaber. She helps the group fight off the Inquisitor, then tells them, “The Artificer wants to see you.”

She leads them back to the ship, which has now landed, and they find a familiar face: Zyrus Bahr, the Quarren mechanic they helped escape from Bamaru.

Zyrus apologizes that they’ve been led into danger because of him, saying that he’s hidden his identity for two decades now. When he was a Jedi Master during the Clone Wars, he earned the nom-du-guerre “the Artificer” for his work developing technology for the Jedi and the clones. He was in the Jedi temple on Coruscant when it was attacked, and he tried to erase all Jedi identities from the records before it fell. Unfortunately, he failed, and his was the only identity that got erased.

He also introduces Nereida Harik, the woman who helped them fight the Inquisitor, as the former apprentice of his old friend, Master Dujah Balek. She sought Zyrus out after Master Balek was killed by the same Inquisitor who’s been chasing them, in order to complete her training and become a Jedi Knight. He makes the same offer to Mara. She’s interested, but she says they still have an obligation to Vondar. Zyrus tells them to visit him on Mon Cala when they’re ready.

Returning to Vondar with Nereida in tow, the Jedi-turned-crime-lord tells the crew her master plan. The senator they rescued had intelligence about an upcoming Imperial war games exercise, one during which three Star Destroyers will have only skeleton crews and be out of contact with the rest of the fleet. Her aim is to steal those Star Destroyers and use them to start her plan of forming a Free Zone in the Outer Rim.

To do that, though, they’ll need more ships. As it happens, she’s recently become aware of the Veiled Sorority, an organization at the same scale as hers but with many more vessels at their disposal. Since they attacked one of her crews recently, she considers them fair game for reprisal… including, in this case, eliminating their leader and taking over their syndicate. She needs the Valkyrie to take the lead and start hunting down the so-called “Pirate Queen.”

However, as the crew begins their search on Saleucami, they encounter an unexpected response: fear. At Vondar’s name, many of their contacts and leads become nervous and afraid of the “Blood Takers,” apparently the nickname for Vondar’s organization in the underworld. They eventually track the Pirate Queen to Blackwind Crater and encounter security in the form of an old clone squad-turned-mercenaries. One of them, upon seeing Nereida’s lit lightsaber, starts having seizures.

After a quick ceasefire negotiation, the crew brings the clones back to their ship. The clones tell Cavisek that the seizures are probably related to the control chip in the clone’s brain. She performs an emergency surgery, successfully removing the now-degraded chip and stopping the seizures. Grateful, the healthy clones agree to help get the crew into the hidden facility in the crater.

Once inside, the crew fights its way to the control center and find the Pirate Queen. They disarm her, but the encounter pushes Nereida into darkness, and she uses the Force to dominate the queen’s mind. They discover this person is only a decoy, and that because they work for Vondar, she expects them to kill her outright.

Horrified by her own actions and Vondar’s reputation, Nereida refuses to keep working for her. The rest of the crew reluctantly agrees, and they leave the crater with the clones in tow. Cavisek admits that she’s become uncomfortable with all the violence the crew has been asked to perform, and she doesn’t see that changing anytime soon. She decides to leave the crew, and the clones escort her safely back home.

The remaining crew of the Valkyrie contacts Vondar and quits. She’s furious and calls them ungrateful, swearing retribution before terminating the call.

While the crew spends the night on the ship in port, a Corellian knocks on the hull of the Valkyrie. He introduces himself as Commander Wedge Antilles with the Rebel Alliance. He says the rebels have been keeping tabs on the group ever since they started waving lightsabers around, and he’s heard they just lost their job. He says the rebellion is willing to hire them on one condition: they finish Vondar’s heist, but deliver the Star Destroyers to the Alliance instead.

Nereida is quick to agree, as she considers overthrowing the Empire to be a worthwhile cause. Mara thinks back to her father’s last request, that she use her skills to make a difference in the galaxy, and she says yes. Rage decides he’s followed Mara this far and doesn’t want to change that pattern anytime soon.

Wedge puts them on the trail of a sharpshooting bounty hunter who can help them, currently on assignment on the Wild Space planet Keruta. They arrive to find her, a Twi’lek named Ma’lona, involved in trying to take down an Imperial overseer at a mine being worked by Kerutan slaves. They also discover she’s Force sensitive, though Ma’lona herself only had an inkling that she was different.

But while they work on capturing the overseer, they receive a mysterious warning that Rage realizes is from Silverbird: “GET OUT HE IS COMING.” Then all planetary communications are shut down, and sleek black droids begin flying down and stunning people—Kerutan slaves and Imperials alike.

The crew, now counting Ma’lona, gathers as many Kerutans onto the Valkyrie as they can and escape the planet. They’re pursued by sleek craft, one of which manages to drop a probe droid onto their hull, and they see a massive dreadnought hovering above the planet. The crew jumps away and disables the probe; Rage examines it and discovers it uses technology that’s unknown to him.

With Ma’lona on the Valkyrie, the Alliance is ready to carry out its plan. A cruiser, two frigates, and a squadron of starfighters engage the three Star Destroyers on war games exercises to cover the landing ships—of which the Valkyrie is one. While Rage leads an engineering team to work on getting the Destroyer ready to move, the rest of the crew is tasked with taking control of the bridge.

When they arrive, though, they discover the Inquisitor and a phalanx of stormtroopers waiting for them. She had a vision in the Force that they would be here. Before everyone can square up, Ma’lona decides to even the odds and shoots out the transparisteel windows on the bridge. This blows all the stormtroopers out into space, though the Inquisitor manages to hang on.

Meanwhile, Vondar’s forces arrive and split the rebels’ attention. She deploys her own landing teams, and Rage is forced to help the engineers repel the Blood Takers.

On the bridge, Mara, Nereida, and Ma’lona narrowly gain the upper hand, managing to knock the Inquisitor out and seize control of the bridge. After Rage drives the Blood Takers back, Mara jumps the Star Destroyer into hyperspace. She receives a brief message from Vondar herself: “You’ve made a powerful enemy today.”

The crew of the Valkyrie delivers the Star Destroyer to the rebellion, the only successful team after the Empire kept control of one and the Alliance deliberately scuttled the second rather than let it fall into Vondar’s hands. Mon Mothma personally congratulates them and offers them a place in the rebellion.

Behind the Screen

This arc of the campaign felt the longest, but it’s actually only two sessions longer than Episode II, at fourteen sessions total. We also had a couple of players swap out their characters: Olivia replaced Bix with Nereida, and Karin replaced Cavisek with Ma’lona. Olivia felt like Bix didn’t have any utility beyond combat and was feeling constrained, and Karin was having trouble reconciling Cavisek’s peaceful nature and focus on medicine with the group’s tendency towards violence. They both chose Force sensitive concepts independently, a decision that would later shape the end of the campaign.

With Olivia, I worked with her to come up with a story where Bix dealt with his Obligation to Wylo the Hutt and gave him an out: if things worked out well, he could ride off into the sunset with his new “family” of droids. If things went wrong, he could die in a rampage of revenge against Wylo, possibly even killing him in the process. She was okay with either option, but I’m glad the peaceful choice prevailed.

When it came to Karin wanting to switch characters, she had resolved the bulk of Cavisek’s Obligation in the previous arc, so it was easier to have her decide to leave. Given the way she saved the clone trooper, it made sense that they would agree to go with her after the group decided to abandon Vondar.

And speaking of Vondar, this episode of the campaign was designed in reverse of the previous episode. Whereas Episode II placed a decision in front of the PCs at the beginning and forced them to deal with the consequences moving forward (whether they wanted to leave Bamaru or stay), Episode III was all about setting up the PCs to make a decision at the end: did they want to be criminals or rebels?

This became a personal choice for Mara, in the form of two potential mentors: Kandri Vondar, who was a closer personality match but had extreme goals, or Zyrus Bahr, who lived up to the ideals of the Jedi but was a much different person than Mara. I spoke with Priscila, Mara’s player, extensively about what the decision would mean for her. Specifically, I said Mara would have to choose, and going through one door meant the other door would be closed to her.

The group as a whole was made party to that discussion, during which time I tried to get a feel for whether they wanted to remain outlaws or join the Alliance. I always planned for there to be a choice in the Star Destroyer heist. Wedge Antilles was always going to appear and present a counter-offer. However, the question was how extreme Vondar would become in pursuit.

Ultimately, based on my players’ desires, I pushed Vondar to a greater extreme. It worked perfectly: they realized her moral compass had a much different north than theirs, and they made the choice to break with her as a spontaneous character moment, rather than through a lengthy debate between players.

And Priscila, in the moment, reasoned that Mara would rather follow her father’s advice and her mother’s path and learn to change, rather than go for the more thrilling and more morally dubious way forward that would be easier. It also worked as a challenge for Priscila herself, to avoid making contrarian, hot-headed decisions just to spite authority figures, which is her default mode of play.

I considered ending the campaign at this point, given that it seemed like a natural place to stop. However, I had already foreshadowed the ultimate villain of the story twice—with the virus on Selonia in Episode II and the attack on Keruta in Episode III—and wanted to resolve that thread. Besides, their various choices up to this point represented a huge chance to complicate their efforts as members of the Rebel Alliance.

But I think I missed a huge opportunity. When they agreed to join the rebels at the very end, I should have declared that we were switching the core game from Edge of the Empire to Age of Rebellion. They could respec their characters (basically, rebuild them from the ground up using the same XP totals but with access to both Age of Rebellion and the then-newly-released Force and Destiny to pick new careers and specializations) and we could switch from Edge of the Empire‘s Obligation system to Age of Rebellion‘s Duty system. The characters would feel fresh and maybe give the players a chance to come at their character concepts from a different direction.

Overall, despite a strong beginning and ending, I feel like Episode III was… well, not great. Running it at times felt bloated and directionless, and there were a few sessions glossed over in the synopsis in which I felt like the PCs had too little to do or too much. When they had too little, it was hard to keep the players engaged; when they had too much, they struggled with choosing a direction.

At least some of that is a player problem arising from an inability to make strong character decisions, but as the GM I feel responsible that the stakes weren’t always clear enough to help guide their thinking.

However, Episode III also had some great character moments. Mara pulling her lightsaber off the Inquisitor’s belt and fighting shoulder-to-shoulder besides Vondar was badass, and had the mechanical effect of attuning the saber’s crystal to her. Cavisek and the clones turned out to be surprisingly heartwarming in the moment, and ended up as a great sendoff for the character. Rage’s whole storyline with Prad Lay was fun to play, especially since it represented a significant emotional payoff for Cody.

And Bix had several great moments. From being responsible for wiping out every enemy minion during the rescue of the senator (thanks to a vicious Signature Ability that Olivia picked up) to one-shotting Venom at the end of a long and dynamic chase sequence, to his ultimate decision to leave the Valkyrie in order to teach his fellow droids what his crew taught him: what it means to be a family.

It’s also important to note that this episode, more than the two before it, really brought to the forefront the theme of this campaign being “family.” Not the family you’re born to, but the one you choose for yourself. Every character had their moment to reckon with it, and then the group as a whole chose to leave one problematic family (Vondar and the Blood Takers) and find one that suited them better (the Rebel Alliance).

So I guess it wasn’t all bad.

We took a short break between episodes to try an RPG some of us kickstarted, but after a few sessions we felt the pull to return to Star Wars. I put a sizable twenty-seven month timeskip between episodes, and gave each PC an extra 100 XP to represent what they accomplished during that time.

Next week, we’ll pick back up with Episode IV: “Rebellion and Empire.”

May the Force be with you.