On Monday, we started the second half of my Star Wars: Rough Edges campaign with Episode IV. In Episode V, the PCs are aware of a major threat, an individual with considerable power who seems to be seeking ancient Force-imbued ruins for an unknown purpose. They need to bring what they’ve found back to rebel command…

Episode V: The Dark Wolves

Armies and fleets clash across the galaxy. Things that have hidden in the spaces between stars sense the opportunity to pursue their sinister agendas.

GENERAL RIOSE of the Rebel Alliance has tasked the VALKYRIE with finding out the plans of the strange entity called TRINTIGNANT.

Supplied with mysterious hyperspace coordinates, the crew sets off in search of rebel operative LA’TALA. But they are not the only ones looking for Trintignant and his untold power….

Synopsis

Before this episode “properly” began, the crew decided to deal with one more issue: Ma’lona’s mother. They received word from Kasim that Bolbu had returned to Teth with Ma’vida in tow. Rendezvousing with the rebel fleet and trading the Valkyrie—now easily identifiable to Trintignant—for a generic transport, they head back to Teth.

As it turns out, whatever Bolbu’s business was off-world, it went well. He’s throwing a celebratory party at his palace Bunko Bolbu. The crew reaches out to Jool to secure an invitation, and they meet up with Kasim to help them blend in with the crowd. Mara and Nereida dress up like club girls, while Rage and Ma’lona disguise themselves as bodyguards.

Once inside, they find Ma’vida in the main chamber, seated next to Bolbu. They also find that Jafan Bhur’i, Kandri Vondar’s right hand, is making a case to Bolbu. He recognizes them and a fight breaks out, with Blood Takers storming the palace and the Hutt’s private mercenaries firing back. In the chaos, the crew corners Bolbu and successfully intimidate him into giving up Ma’vida, as well as several others. However, in the process Nereida revealed herself as a Jedi to Kasim, who believes the Imperial propaganda about Force users. He breaks off their budding relationship.

The crew transports Ma’vida to the world where her husband and son, Ma’lona’s father and brother, are staying. The family reunites, and Ma’lona is happy. However, their threat motivates Bolbu to ally with Vondar’s Blood Takers, boosting her numbers.

With that adventure out of the way, they go back to the rebel fleet and talk with Bel Riose about Trintignant. General Riose takes the threat seriously, sharing with them a top-secret Alliance Intelligence document called the Revenant Report. In it, a young rebel operative investigated a series of seemingly unrelated sightings in the Outer Rim, eventually piecing together that a malevolent, mysterious power was seeking out ancient artifacts and disappearing entire settlements. The rebel high command never quite believed it, but Riose never forgot it. The Valkyrie team’s description of Trintignant’s operation matches several key details in the report.

To get on the trail, Riose sends the team after the operative who wrote the report: La’tala, the same Twi’lek woman who previously worked with Marl Bell and was captured alongside the Valkyrie crew by the Inquisitor. She’s on a special assignment, and General Riose gives the team coordinates with strict instructions to broadcast their identity as soon as they arrive.

They do so, and are guided to a world firmly in the grip of an ice age. They’re escorted in by X-wings and welcomed to Echo Base on the planet Hoth. They get a guarded reception since they’re not on the arrival schedule, but they deliver their orders to General Rieekan and cleared. They’re put on the duty schedule, which includes patrols in the snow and clearing out wampas, until La’tala returns from her current assignment.

Once she does, they fill her in on what they’ve discovered. She’s wary of Silverbird given her connection to Trintignant, but she accepts what they’ve told her. Her suggested destination is Vixteth, one of  the planets mentioned in the report and home to an expert in the kinds of ruins Trintignant is searching for.

Before they can leave, though, they’re told that the planetary shield has been raised. Echo Base is under siege by the Empire, and the Valkyrie is needed to help evacuate the rebels.

While the ship is being prepared, the crew joins the defense. Mara and Rage fly a snowspeeder against Imperial walkers, but they’re shot down in the opening volley and need to make their way back to the hangar. Nereida, Ma’lona, and La’tala fight in the icy trenches, helping hold back the waves of snowtroopers. Nereida has an especially good showing, leaping out of the trench with her lightsaber and bringing the fight to the enemy. She embodies the iconic Jedi Knights of old to inspire the troops.

Eventually, they fall back and are forced to flee. With La’tala on board, the Valkyrie makes for Vixteth. On the journey, Mara has a dream about her mom’s life before she met her dad, as a member of the Jedi AgriCorps on a verdant world called Kom Ombo. Mara can’t explain the significance.

She also takes the opportunity to ask La’tala about her father. The Twi’lek confirms that she worked with Marl, and that after his death she looked into the possibility that it was foul play. But everything she found suggested it was what it appeared to be: an accident.

Their arrival on Vixteth is met with suspicion. The planet’s dictator has placed the blame for his son’s kidnapping on the Academy of Royal Science, of which La’tala’s contact, Sava Garrix, is a member. He’s been placed under house arrest. While La’tala takes Mara and Ma’lona to sneak into the house, she tells Rage and Nereida to make contact with a Fulcrum agent and pick up a datacard with updated Alliance fleet positions.

La’tala, Mara, and Ma’lona are successful, getting into the house to speak with the excitable Sava Garrix. He’s overjoyed to hear that his suspicions regarding the ruins are correct and fills them in: the ruins belonged to an ancient civilization called the Lifewalkers, which archaeologists believe were the Kwa species. Their crystalline technology was highly advanced, but they were wiped out fifty thousand years ago virtually overnight.

Garrix wants to help, but he needs to escape. Mara promises to get him off-planet, and they proceed to sneak him out of his house.

Meanwhile, Rage and Nereida make contact with the surly Fulcrum agent, who tells them the Alliance is in full retreat to the Outer Rim. On their way back, they encounter two local security guards roughing up a young girl who’s screaming at them about her missing father. Nereida notices the girl unconsciously move a pipe into her hand without touching it. She and Rage intercede, disabling the guard and asking the girl to come with them. The girl is Lorelei Chaval, and she’s looking for her father who went missing weeks ago.

When both groups reunite on the ship, Lorelei explains that her father witnessed a kidnapping. He told her about sleek black droids that could turn invisible, and how they took the dictator’s son. The Valkyrie team recognizes Trintignant’s servitors and begin to investigate. Eventually they locate one of his facilities on Vixteth and sneak in, discovering that Trintignant is building ancillaries with holographic disguise emitters to infiltrate governments.

Lorelei’s father is one of the ancillaries.

They destroy the facility, with Lorelei herself firing the shot that kills her father. Mara helps her process her grief over losing him. Afterwards, Nereida offers to take Lorelei with her and train her in the ways of the Jedi. Lorelei accepts.

That night, Mara dreams of her mother again. She sees Ayna discovering a Lifewalker ruin under a farmer’s field on Kom Ombo and finding the still-working crystals within. Mara wakes up and changes course, bringing the Valkyrie to Kom Ombo. They search the planet until they find the right field and follow her mother’s footsteps to find the ruin.

The crystals are barely functioning, but the construct within them speaks through El’orica’s holocron and Mara’s soul crystal lightsaber, taking Ayna’s form. It tells them a brief history of the Kwa, how they developed interplanetary teleportation technology called the Infinity Gates, and how those gates were corrupted and used as weapons by their enemies, the Rakatans. It’s this weapon that Trintignant is seeking, as the construct has watched through the lingering network as he scoured their ruins.

However, only one control node, called Final Provenance, still exists that can activate the weapon. Its location is hidden from the construct here, but it can be found elsewhere.

The construct tells them that the true power of the Kwa crystals was the ability to transmit information instantly across the galaxy. To keep up with the influx of data, they constructed a number of Data Vaults throughout the Outer Rim. Only two remain, and one has just recently gone silent. If the group can find the last one, they’ll be able to find the location of Final Provenance and stop Trintignant from using the gates’ power.

It uses the last of its own power to provide them a star chart, albeit one that’s fifty thousand years out of date. Then it goes dark.

The Valkyrie makes contact with General Riose, who confirms that the recently silenced Data Vault was on Ord Gimmel, which Trintignant just attacked. He used a massive dreadnought to tear the royal palace out of the ground in order to retrieve it. The crew reasons that Trintignant must also be looking for Final Provenance. Riose tells them to return to Mon Cala so they can plan their next move.

They present their findings to the Alliance High Command, but the rebel leadership still doesn’t believe the threat of Trintignant—or at least, that the threat is greater than that of the Empire. While La’tala and Sava Garrix try to update the star chart, and General Riose works out what to do next, the crew of the Valkyrie is summoned to Zyrus’s shop by his assistant, Sula.

On their arrival, they’re directed into the dark, empty vehicle bay. The door closes behind them, and a loud voice booms out: “Mara Bell and Nereida Harik. Step forward.”

A green lightsaber ignites in the middle of the room, illuminating the features of Zyrus Bahr. He wears a hooded brown robe. He adds, “And kneel.”

They do so. Zyrus steps forward, extolling the virtues and accomplishments of both women. He lowers his blade over Mara’s shoulders. “By the right of the Council.” He turns and repeats the gesture to Nereida. “By the will of the Force.”

He steps back, raising the saber. “You knelt as Padawans, but now I bid thee rise as Jedi—Knights of the Order.”

The two Jedi Knights rise. Mara sees her mother smiling at her, tears in her eyes. Nereida sees Master Balek nod his approval. The visions fade, and the celebration begins. Zyrus hosts a dinner for the crew and their friends, even inviting General Riose. Lorelei accidentally outs Zyrus’s assistant Sula as being Force sensitive, but Sula swiftly denies training to be a Jedi. “I would cut my own head off with one of those laser swords,” she says. She really does want to be just a mechanic.

After dinner, Riose reveals that he never thought High Command would believe the Valkyrie team, so he’s made arrangements. An old deep space reconnaissance frigate called Caelestris is supposed to be dismantled in orbit soon, but Riose had his people quietly refit the vessel for one more mission. In addition, he’s invited several of the crew’s allies to join them as they search for Final Provenance.

Technically, they’ll be committing mutiny by going against orders. Naturally, the crew of the Valkyrie is eager to volunteer. They carry out a plan to steal the Caelestris and rendezvous with friendly elements further out-system, on their way to the coordinates that Sava Garrix decoded. Vissica Cavisek returns to act as the mission’s Chief Medical Officer, and Redar Typhe volunteers as the ship’s head of security. It turns out he’s been working for the Alliance since Vondar rescued them from the Star Destroyer, going with La’tala to the rebellion and taking a job as the marshal of a rebel safe world.

As it turns out, Sava Garrix still doesn’t have a precise location, but he’s narrowed it down to a couple of worlds in a particular Wild Space sector. The first is Korvistrom, a world dotted with Kwa ruins but which turns out to have very little useful information. However, they work out that all Kwa ruins resonate with the same frequency as the crystals, which Rage uses to build a more advanced sensor that can help find additional ruins.

The second world, Barhoum, is a metropolitan world. The crew finds a Force sensitive guide who claims she can help them find the Data Vault they seek, but they’re ambushed by Vondar’s minions. After a pitched battle, they emerge victorious and discover an unconscious Jafan Bhur’i among the attackers. Taking him into custody, they convince him to abandon Vondar’s cause—he claims she’s become unhinged since Mara’s “betrayal” and has thrown in with Trintignant and “some creepy group of mystics” to get revenge. The crew strips him of his armor and weapons and leaves him on Barhoum.

Following their guide’s directions, they come to a small moon where they’re ambushed. Three Catakorizo assassins, including the guide, attack the crew on the ground while Vondar’s ships strike the Caelestris in orbit. The crew defeats the Catakorizo and receives visions from the ruins that point them towards a particular nebula, the Phoenix’s Nest.

In orbit, the crew receives help from an unexpected source: a beat-up Delta-7 Jedi starfighter with a masked temple guard on board. His name is Bastion, and he lives on a small moon nearby. He sensed the presence of other Jedi and came to investigate, only to find a pitched space battle.

They drive off Vondar’s forces, but discover too late that her goal had been to steal the information the group had already collected, rather than destroy the Caelestris. However, they hadn’t logged their latest finding, so Riose agrees to use the heavily damaged Caelestris as a decoy while the Valkyrie forges ahead alone. Bastion joins them, interested in what’s going on but mostly intrigued by these “new” Jedi Knights.

Inside the Phoenix’s Nest, the Valkyrie has to navigate a host of hazards but eventually finds its way to a dying planet about to be consumed by an exploding star. This is Xantor, the lost homeworld of the Lifewalker civilization. The crew heads to the surface, following the Force to discover the lost Data Vault.

Within, the construct tells them that the Infinity Gates were turned into weapons by the Kwa themselves, in a misguided attempt to stop the Rakatans from overrunning their civilization. However, one Kwa named Walking-Life-Through-Eternal-Sunrise rejected that idea and insisted that there was another way. She cut herself off from the Kwa, but her sanctum—Final Provenance—still has the ability to activate the network of Infinity Gates. The Data Vault then provides the coordinates, and the group races to get free of the planet before it’s consumed by the star.

Back aboard the Valkyrie, Rage compares the coordinates to the star chart correction that Sava Garrix developed. They recognize the location of Final Provenance immediately:

Bamaru.

Behind the Screen

There are so many times I’ve wished this campaign was a TV show, so I could go back and relive certain moments. In this arc, the knighting ceremony of Mara and Nereida stands out the most. It was a profound moment, to the point where I spent more time writing and rewriting that scene than I did planning for any single encounter in this entire campaign. I practiced the speech over and over. It was glorious.

Episode V clocked in at eleven sessions. It began a little strangely, with the interlude about Ma’lona’s mother. It wasn’t originally part of my plan (which you can tell by reading the title crawl) but the group saw it as unfinished business and didn’t want to proceed until they’d had the chance to wrap it up. So I gave it to them.

The funny thing about the Hoth sessions was that, just a few days prior, Priscila had complained to me about dealing with canon characters and events. She wanted the PCs to have their own adventures in the wider galaxy… and then they ended up right in the middle of one of the most famous Star Wars events. Screw you, Pris!

In all seriousness, I’d planned on the PCs being part of the Battle of Hoth since they decided to be rebels. It’s a big enough conflict, between what we see on screen and what we’ve seen in ancillary material like the video games, that I figured it would be safe. That said, I definitely didn’t plan for Mara and Rage to get shot down right out of the gate. But it led to a fun inside joke. We now watch that first snowspeeder going down in The Empire Strikes Back, and we all say hello and goodbye to Mara.

And to get back to Priscila’s complaint, this episode still ended up being when the PCs really do become the heroes of galactic importance. Up until the end of Episode IV, they’d dealt with high stakes, but it was always the sort of trouble they could leave behind by flying to a different sector. With Trintignant’s introduction, they’re suddenly the only people (besides a few key NPCs) who recognize the scope of the threat, and so they have to do something about it.

Episode V is when the characters finally stepped out of the shadow of canon events, and it really helped make the story better. The players became much more invested. It’s something I’ve since vowed to do more often in campaigns like this.

We also added a player during this arc: Thom, who plays Bastion. He liked the idea of a character who’s been carrying a torch this whole time, thinking he was the only one, until suddenly realizing that the galaxy has continued to turn without him. Before he appeared to help the Valkyrie, Bastion had been hiding on the Outer Rim, searching for Force users and shepherding them away from the Empire.

The fact that Mara’s mother, Ayna, was tied to the Lifewalkers was planned. At first I intended for it to be a coincidence, or just a hint from the Force that Ayna’s bloodline would have something to do with the events to come. But when I had the thought that the crystals would want to communicate through a familiar face—and that it would mean more to the players—I seized on the idea that Ayna had direct contact with the crystals. She just didn’t understand the significance in her own lifetime.

As a note about the Lifewalkers, the Kwa actually exist in the Star Wars Legends stories. It’s where I mined the idea of the Infinity Gates (which, yes, are basically just stargates) and crystal-based technology. I blended them with the Forerunners from Halo, both in their aesthetics and their names.

Bringing back a previous PC as an NPC is a decision that I spent a lot of time mulling over. There’s often a lot that can go wrong, from misrepresenting the character’s mannerisms to relying on them too much as a crutch. With Cavisek especially I worried the group would rely on her medical and scientific expertise too much. However, the players understood that her role was secondary to theirs, and then Thom introduced Bastion with some pretty robust healing abilities.

In the end, Cavisek’s return went over well enough that I decided another reunion was warranted. That’ll come up in the next arc.

The whole second part of this arc, with the team searching for the Data Vault and the Kwa’s homeworld, was my attempt to increase the number of regular NPCs the group had around them. Most of the recurring NPCs up to this point were either villains or infrequent allies, and I wanted to get better about putting a stable of supporting NPCs at the group’s disposal. I was partially successful, but at this point the pace of the campaign was picking up speed. The players weren’t very interested in slowing down to get to know the crew of the Caelestris, and I don’t blame them.

Vondar’s return as an antagonist and her partnership with the Catakorizo were both planned. After the group successfully absconded with Silverbird, Trintignant hired both Vondar and the Catakorizo to retrieve her from the Valkyrie team. When he realized the PCs were also after the Infinity Gates, his own objective changed: find out what they already know, and then win the race to reach Final Provenance.

Most of that information had to be conveyed through little details and conversations with NPCs. While it was effective enough, I’ve toyed with the idea of including “villain cutscenes” to games like this. After all, Star Wars is rife with cut-away shots to the villains scheming. My first choice to represent this sort of thing is through email, writing little vignettes to catch up the players. Another option would be to read them out during game—though that means being able to plan for them better, rather than write them with the hindsight of finishing the session.

Finally, the idea that the campaign should end where it began is one I’ve had since the very beginning. I’ll write more about that next time.

The final arc of this campaign, Episode VI: “Gates of Infinity,” brings the tale of Trintignant and the Lifewalkers to a close. We’ll talk about that on Friday.

May the Force be with you.