When a professional wrestling returns from a long absence a common occurence is what is called 'ring rust', an initial period of less-than-optimal performance. Man, I had ring rust last night. Not running a game while I packed up and moved the family really took the oomph out of my GMing. Or maybe I just sucked last night. Even putting my notes through the adventure funnel didn't seem to help me as much as I had hoped. I just lacked oomph.

Either way, I wasn't very happy with the job I did. It was great getting together with the guys on a social basis, though. I hadn't seen Doug in far too long. And we all got to talk about games, what we wanted to do as this campaign develops, and movies. Doug was shocked that neither Stuart nor myself had seen Ocean's Eleven or The Italian Job. And we all expressed dismay at not getting into the 4e playtest.

Meanwhile Our Heroes navigated the treacherous skies of Vudrak's Nebula, narrowly avoiding both an old Clone Wars era minefield and a close range encounter with a Star Frigate on anti-piracy patrol. A Star Frigate is the short bus version of a Star Destroyer. At least in my head that's what it is. The party then almost fell for the Kobiyashi Maru trap despite the fact that I literally said "This is the Kobiyashi Maru, we've struck a gravitic mine." But they dawdled so long on planning a course of action that the Star Frigate responded to the distress call faster. Queue a running gun battle between the Impies and the pirate ship that sent the fake SOS. The party tailed the battle long enough to get navigation data on the minefield the pirate vessel flew through and to watch the Star Frigate hit a mine and 'sink'.

They finally made their rendezvous with the Tantive IV deep inside the nebula. My notes indicated that Captain Antilles was paranoid of any intel operations that don't go through the Bothans and also that he is generally a cranky-butt. So rather than permit Green 13 to dock, a ship's gig was sent to search the vessel first. That's how the party met Krato Vesbek, random Rebel Trooper guy. He was dressed just like the guys that got slaughtered in the hallway at the beginning of Episode IV, except he had a red shirt on.

Princess Leia also had a brief cameo, just before the klaxons went off due to three Star Destroyers incoming! The PCs and Krato hightailed it back to the gig and made it back to the Green 13 just as the shooting started. Krato opted to stay on the ship, as he would be a sitting duck trying to zoom through a warzone in a little shuttlecraft. And anyway his ride home just took off, with two of the Star Destroyers in pursuit. The last one decided to pick on the PCs. It was a short running battle with the Y-Wing getting away, but it was very tense at one as I rolled a successful ion cannon hit on the tiny craft. Only a last minute maneuver from Boyd (Doug's clone pilot) saved the ship from ion overload and subsequent capture.

Their mission completed, the good guys prepared to hyperjump to the coordinates where they could hook up with the Rebel carrier that serves as their base of operations. But I tell them that they are arbitrarily almost out of fuel and need to stop over at a filthy mining colony for more space juice, or whatever the hell makes Star Wars ship go zoom. So they are hanging out in a bar described as the Mos Eisley cantina, only with zero-g go-go dancers, when in stroll two space bear bounty hunters. Space bears look like polar bears, only they have opposable thumbs and big bug eyes. One of them has a pokédex that identifies Pat's character, Cee-Lo, as being worth 1700 Cr to the right party. So we have a big shoot out in the bar. Red-shirt Krato takes a gut full of blaster for his trouble, but barely survives thanks to Kip (Stuart's Jedi) administering a medpack. Kip uses the force to bang the two polar bear dudes into each other and then Cee-Lo hit 'em with a grenade. Boyd sets up another round. End of adventure.

Later, while we were discussing what to do next, Doug says that he really wants to wander the galaxy and get some more Han Solo action into the mix. No one objects to this idea, so I decide that the space bears were operating out of a ramshackle YT-1300 freighter with some custom modifications. The PCs jack the bear's ship and Krato flies the Green 13 back to base. Actually, I said it was a YT-1000 freighter, because I couldn't remember the exact designation for the Millenium Falcon. There's an almost assuredly non-canonical but cool-looking YT-1000 on this non-English Star Wars page. I'd totally use that vessel if the players were game.

In a previous post I was asked if my new sandbox OD&D campaign was replacing my Star Wars Saga Edition campaign. The short answer is no. Wednesday next week will be session 2 of Rebel Scum, wherein the crew of Green 13 rendezvous with the Tantive IV to deliver the crucial Death Star data. We had to put the campaign on hold as I packed up my game room for last weekend's big move to the new Rients family residence. Last month there was a two week period where I couldn't even tell you where my dice bag was. That was weird.

I'm seriously considering starting a second biweekly campaign for the all-new World of Cinder. Voting just closed and I'm sticking with the clear winner. Thanks to everyone who voted! I think by keeping the rules for Cinder light, I can keep up with running a game every week. But I'm still mulling that over.

As usual, I've also got a armful of other games I'd like to run soon. Right now the hot list consists of Forward... to Adventure!, In Harm's Way: Aces in Spades, and Aces & Eights. I'll maybe run one of those as a con game in February, but I'd really like to try Aces in Spades for at least a couple sessions before I review it. And Aces & Eights looks just too damn awesome to run merely as one-off.

Vudrak's Nebula is known throughout the sector as a deepspace rendezvous point for smugglers and other miscreants seeking to shield their activities from Imperial eyes. Some regions of the nebula are known for their static discharge and gas clouding tactical displays. Visual won't function, shields will be useless, and hyperdiving out of the cloud is impossible. Travellers through the nebula are also warned to steer clear of the turbulences around the protostars inside the denser clouds. Vudrak herself was lost on the third expedition attempting to map all the magnetic currents running through the active areas of the nebula. The coordinates to meet-up with the Tantive IV are deep inside the nebula. You'll hyperjump to the outer edge of the gas cloud then use standard stardrives to make the rest of the trip.

Having departed Neldanis IV with a KT-57 Repair Shuttle, our heroes set the hyperdrive for the Urgonia system. Effo, the party's astromech, follows the party in the Green Thirteen. Effo parks the Y-Wing on a comet in Urgonia's Oort cloud and awaits the return of our heroes. Meanwhile, Cee-Lo and Boyd change into black stormtrooper armor with markings indicating that they are members of Imperial Intelligence. Cee-Lo's a Rodian, like Greedo. So I give a flat 1 in 6 chance his helmet just won't fit. Pat makes the roll, but we agree that sometimes the helmet shifts on his antennae, giving him the appearance of a bobbleheaded stormtrooper.

Kip puts on a spooky black robe. During pre-play email discussion Doug (Boyd's player) asked me how common darkside force users would be in the campaign. I basically responded that I wanted to keep the Force a special asset only available to a few, but that they could expect a lot of dodgy Sith types working in Imperial Intelligence. That's how Doug came up with this plan. What Doug didn't know was that before we had this conversation with him I had already statted up a couple of I.I. agents who would appear in the scenario. More on that in a bit.


So the disguised PCs and their Repair Shuttle zoom into the orbital shipyards of Urgonia, which I describe as full of skytraffic like rush hour on Coruscant. Finding Repair Dreadnought Reconstructor wasn't hard, as it was one of the largest ships in dock and the flat slab of a prow littered with space-ship scale Swiss Army Knife tools is unmistakable. Our heroes must now choose between landing in the upper repair shuttle access area or the lower one. They go for the upper shuttlelocks because it is slightly closer to their target, the Main Computer.

Since the Reconstructor no longer uses KT-57 Repair Shuttles, the space devoted to their maintenance and supplies had been assigned to other functions. The upper shuttle access had been turned into a janitor's supply closet, with crates of cleaning materials just on the other side of the airlock. Had the players used the lower shuttle access area, they would have walked right into an illicit cantina run by some rogue supply officers. That would have been an interesting encounter, given that all the PCs were wearing the colors of the S.S. of Outer Space.

Just outside the broomcloset the PCs encounter three dudes in the standard red jumpsuits of Urgonia Maintenance. I wanted to give the PCs one last chance to dump their disguises for something less eye-catching. Instead, the player's use this as an opportunity to boss around people that normally wouldn't take orders from them. This will become an ongoing theme throughout the rest of the run. Some GMs might turn up their nose at the abuse of faux authority by the good guys. Me, I think scenes where you boss people around are fun when done in moderation.

Let's talk for a moment about this huge ship the PCs are infilitrating. The Reconstructor, like the Death Star, is based on plans drawn up by winged aliens. So lots of gangways traversing large horizontal shafts. Not all of these gangways have safety rails. The aliens who designed the deckplans have a thing for Y-shaped intersections, making many of the decks confusing to people accustomed to floorplans laid out on a square grid. Here's my map of how all the encounter areas fit together.One of the PC's hacked a general purpose computer terminal to get good directions to the Main Computer, so we ended up using only a small fraction of the overall map. They started in area 3, the Repair Shuttle Access/Janitorial Supplies, and took the turboshaft nearby down to area 7, the Main Reactor. Here they encountered the First Officer overseeing the reactor maintenance schedule. The Internet kinda failed me at this point, because I really wanted to hold up a picture of Leslie Bevis as Commanderette Zircon in SpaceBalls. But Google image search found no pictures of her from that cinematic masterpiece. Fortunately 2 of the three players knew who I was talking about. The First Officer acted as if she totally expected three I.I. personnel to barge into the main reactor, "Can I help you, sir?" she says to Kip. Stuart was pretty fast on his feet here, as he immediately responds with a snappish "See that my ship is fueled immediately." So the Commanderette gets on her comlink and orders the Imperial Intelligence shuttle to be refueled. While she's talking into the mic the PCs get the heck out of the Main Reactor before they are asked any questions that can't answer.

From the Main Reactor is a short walk through a series of confusing Y-intersections to get to the Main Computer. A pair of stormtroopers are posted as guards here, as the Death Star plans are considered a very valuable commodity. Incidentally, that's why I.I. is on the ship, to audit the security procedures surrounding the Main Computer. Unbeknownst to the PCs, these stormtroopers have been recently briefed by Vaj Kerlac, badass I.I. agent, to the effect that even the Emperor himself must show his ID to get into the Main Computer room. But again Stuart came through in a pinch, as he immediately went for the Jedi Mind Trick. "Your First Officer has seen our passes." For the lack of hesitation and the invocation of the First Officer (who much of the crew fear) I awarded a +2 on the roll, which allowed Kip to easily trounce the Will Defense of these two armored goons. They get inside.

Here's a paraphrase of what I say next to the PCs:

"Cut to another part of the ship. Commanderette Zircon walks up to a dark hooded figure flanked by a pair of black-armoured stormtroopers. 'Your ship is fueled, as requested, sir.'"

The tension in the room became palpable as the players immediately grasped that the Jig Was Up.

Back to the computer room. A couple of ship's flunkies are doing some maintenance on the computer. One is on his back working in a small access panel, like a mechanic under a car. The other is up on a catwalk about 20 feet above the level the PCs entered on. There's a door up there that doesn't provide a means of escape, but the PCs don't know that. After milling about trying to figure out a clever way to steal the data while the NPCs continue to work, they just decide to get rid of the poor schmucks. They knock out the guy on his back by beating him with a rifle butt. The other guy makes his way for the upper door, with the idea being that he might be able to lock himself in and call his CO for help. But a couple of stun blasts put him down.

The two stormtroopers at the door bust in at this point. And again Stuart fakes them out, ordering them to 'dispose of this trash', i.e. the unconscious maintenance guys. The stormtroopers make sure the maintenance guys are dead and stuff them in a nearby trash chute. Meanwhile, Cee-Lo tries to hack into the main computer to steal the Death Star data. That doesn't go so well, so they eventually pull the main computer Data Core and get ready to leave. The big doors slide open and facing them are a dude in a dark cloak and two blackclad stormtroopers. And it's on like Diddy Kong.

This far from the session I can't give you a play-by-play of the action. The PCs and the black stormtroopers exchange a lot of blaster fire in and near the computer room. The white stormtroopers that were guarding the door have a lot of trouble figuring out who is on their side and they are eventually tricked into chasing one of the Imperial Intelligence troopers down the hall in a running gun battle. Vaj Kerlac, the guy in the cloak, takes a bad blaster hit early in the fight, so he hides behind a corner at one point, applying a bacta patch to his zorch wound and yelling into his comlink for someone named 'Ozzie' to get down to him.

Eventually, Kip pulls out his lightsabre, which is Vaj's cue to go after him. Vaj hates Jedi. He pulls out a wicked crackling electrolash. It's like a flexible yellow lightsabre that has reach and a stun setting. You'll find it on page 32 of Star Wars: Complete Guide to Stuff Jeff Totally Made Up, the latest hardbound not available anywhere. Anyway, Vaj was whipping this thing around like crazy but not scoring any hits, right up until the point where Boyd shot him in the back of the head with a blaster and totally explodified his skull.

Boyd retrieved Kerlac's comlink and tried to talk down whoever this 'Ozzie' fellow was, but all he got back was a bunch of Wookie howling. It turns out that Vaj Kerlac is based upon answering the ages-old question "What if Thundarr the Barbarian worked for Darth Vader?" Ozzie (short for 'Ozzitowa') is Vaj's Ookla the Mok. And Ozzie knows that his good buddy Vaj is in trouble.

Look back up at my map for a second. There are 20 numbered locations, so I can roll a d20 to randomly place NPCs. Not all NPCs in the scenario were so randomly placed. Zircon started in Engineering section. The Captain (who was a total tool) could only be encountered in areas 1 or 2. Ozzie was one of those d20 roll guys. The PCs are in area 8 and want to get back to their ship near area 3, but the shortest route there currently is host to a running gun battle between some very confused stormtroopers. So they take the alternate route, which leads them directly into the path of the angry wookie. I totally did not fudge that one bit. Had the die roll gone differently or had the party taken a different route, the pissed-off furball could have been totally avoided.

So our final fight of the night is a shoot-out in a Y-shaped intersection with the 3 PCs taking on a rampaging wookie armed with a one-handed Light Bowcaster (totally made up as well) and a Sikurdian Battle-Axe (first seen in the original Marvel Star Wars comic, issue 7). The wookie charges the PCs, firing his bowcaster as he closes the gap with them. They pepper poor Ozzie with blasters until the dude's fur catches on fire. He manages to get a few nearly-fatal axe swings in before falling over dead.

At this point we're a few minutes past 10pm, which is when I like to stop my sessions. But we're all having a good time so we take a few more minutes to wrap things up. Boyd starts the Main Reactor on a build-up to meltdown. Klaxons are blaring and red lights flashing throughout the ship. The party ends up in the main shuttle bay, where they see a Lambda class Imperial Shuttle customized with gattling lasers and a red racing stripe. They correctly guess that this vessel belonged to the dude with the lightning whip and totally jack it for themselves, blasting out of the shuttle bay just in time for the whole effin' ship to explode. A couple of escape pods jettison just before the blast, one of which holds Commanderette Zircon. No doubt several people made it out of the ship via the main airlock docked to the shipyard, but being right next to an exploding starship rather than in it has got to be almost as deadly.

The party meets up with Effo and the two vessels zoom into hyperspace to rendezvous with the Tantive IV. End of session.

Tonight is the first run of my new Star Wars campaign. We're using the Saga edition rules, but I hope to run it with a lighter touch than my recent D&D outings. We took 'getting the rules right' very seriously, but for this campaign the emphasis will be on getting Star Warsy action first, correct rules interpretation third. (What's second? I dunno, but I want to leave room for something else to be second.) I think my Prussian pal Settembrini would call this method "roll & shout".

We'll be starting the campaign in media res, which is Latin for "Look out! TIE Fighters are zapping your ship!"

The dark brown represents the single landmass on the planet, surrounded by a polluted ocean. The only non-polluted water on the planet is trapped in the polar caps. A few thousand years ago Neldanis IV was an ordinary filthy middle-tech industrial world, but nearly everybody abandoned the place once hyperspace travel made emigration cheap and easy. The Techno Union eventually took over stewardship of this poisoned sphere, turning the whole world into a hi-tech dumping ground. Visitors to Neldanis IV are urged to use breather masks, like the ones used inside the cave/asteroid worm in Empire.

The grey areas on the map are the individual scrapyards, with the densest grey blob in the center of the map the region the PCs can expect to find the scrapped KT-57 Repair Shuttles. The smaller island is a military proving grounds, where new weapons systems are sometimes live-tested. The squarish grey area is overflow storage for Honest Sclorbax's Used Speeders. Nearly every civilized world has at least one Honest Sclorbax's and they take a lot of trade-ins.

If you were to ask whiny teenage Luke Skywalker, he would tell you that Tantooine was the most boring place in the galaxy. This is a planet where you keep a blaster rifle in your speeder because homicidal bantha-riders might try to brain you with a pointy metal stick, where mysterious midgets steal droids and drive around in megatanks, where giant slugs are galactic crimelords, where weirdo space wizards live just down the road, where a dude at a bar can be shot in the fucking face but everyone just turns back to their drink.

For my new campaign, I want Luke to be right.

Here are my PCs for the upcoming Star Wars campaign, assuming I understand what they're telling me.

Cargo Cult Jedi - Went to an underground school established by ordinary folks with some training manuals and holovids and no real working knowledge of the Force. He's one of the few people for whom the training took. Then the stormtroopers busted up the whole thing.

Rebel Fett - A clone with a conscience. When Order 66 came through his psychoconditioning failed. In his mind all those other clones are commie mutant traitors. Having the face of the enemy has got to lead to some awkward situations.

BFG Rodian - On the run from bounty hunters from his homeworld and no fan of the Man, the Alliance seemed like the only place to turn. You can count on him to shoot first every damn time.

Here's a little graphic I whipped up for the Star Wars campaign. Click to see it at full size.

The basic idea here is that during a ship-to-ship encounter I want to be able to tell at a glance where each PC is at on the ship.

R5-F0 ("Efzero" to his friends) is the astromech droid assigned to Green Thirteen. It lacks the flying capabilities of R2-D2 and its motivator has been known to blow out once in a while. But unlike the standard R2 statblock in the book, Efzero comes with that little lightsabre launcher tube already installed.

PC briefing

"During the Clone Wars the Forge-class TechnoDreadnoughts provided shipyard-level repair and maintenance to Republic capital ships in the field. Most Imperial Records show that the last of the Forges were taken out of service several years ago, either scrapped due to wear and tear or sold off to commercial ventures. But Rebel intelligence has recently discovered that the Reconstructor was taken off the books and secretly put to work on the Empire's new super weapon.

Back in the day each Forge-class carried fourteen KT-57 Repair Shuttle in addition to its usual array of ship's craft, but the KT-57's had a much shorter service life and were never replaced. Most of them were sold off but a few were junked on Neldanis IV. Rather than docking in the shuttle bay, each KT-57 fitted into a custom docking socket, basically an exterior airlock with clamps to hold the shuttle to the hull of the vessel. Using a KT-57 should allow you to enter the Reconstructor and bypass ship's security. The Reconstructor is currently undergoing maintenance in orbit over Urgonia, one of the busiest commercial and military shipyards in the galaxy.

We're issuing you uniforms appropriate to Imperial maintenance personnel, so you can move through the ship relatively safely. Once inside the Reconstructor, you need locate the central computer on level D-14 and copy all the technical data on the 'Death Star'. You must deliver that data to the diplomatic vessel Tantive IV, which will be waiting for you at the following coordinates inside Vuldrak's Nebula. We've arranged a rather large distraction for the Imperial Navy during this operation, so even if the situation inside the Reconstructor gets messy pursuit should be minimal. Any questions?"

Last night was the last session Beyond Vinland, Season One. Too bad it ended with a Total Party Kill. The party waltzed into the lair of a couple of Yuan Ti abominations and ended up getting sliced, diced, mutilated, and poisoned. While it was kind of a buzzkill, everybody is still pretty enthused about the upcoming Star Wars game.

Also, they did finally catch up with and killerfy that duergar chieftain that had given them so much trouble. In my mind the PCs and the chieftain are all in Valhalla, drinking mead together and having a good laugh over this whole mess.

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Not only am I late hopping on the meme bandwagon, but I'm referencing an obscure old SNL sketch.

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Just a couple more days left to get the snazzy print edition of my Encounter Critical module, Asteroid 1618. Click on over to the Cumberland Games & Diversions Lulu.com storefront and slide down to the bottom of the page to order your copy. While you're there do yourself a favor and order one of S. John Ross's great works. Again, no one but Lulu is making any money off of the print version of my book. S. John and I want the price as low as possible. Of course the free PDF version is even cheaper (still available at WoAdWriMo central and the EC yahoo group), but that version doesn't come with staples!

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Here's a first look at the PC's starship in the new campaign:Green Thirteen (the Space Winnebago below the Y-Wing) is an old prototype of a Y-Wing variant that never made it into production. Based upon the slightly more successful 5-person courier variant of the Y-Wing, the BTL-D2 Y-Wing was an attempt to turn a non-frontline modification of the Y-Wing back into a fighting vessel. It didn't quite work out. But beggars can't be choosers, and the Alliance needs every ship it can muster.

In the comments to yesterday's post reader jinnetics requested that I share these charts with the group.

ARMOR
1-2 None
3-4 Blast Helmet & Vest
5-6 Padded Flight Suit

MELEE WEAPON
1 None
2 Vibrodagger
3 Vibroblade
4 Cesta
5 Light Sabre
6 Knife
7 Stun Baton
8 Combat Gloves

RANGED WEAPON
1 Hold-Out Blaster
2 Blaster Pistol
3 Sporting Blaster Pistol
4 Slugthrower Pistol
5 Heavy Blaster Pistol
6 Blaster Carbine

Understand that I'm not married to these charts. If Doug absolutely needs a dayglo orange jumpsuit for his pilot, I'm not going to make him roll. Similary, Pat has talked about making some sort of heavy weapons dude. He can have a bigger gun than a Blaster Carbine, if he wants. Anyone rolling a light sabre will be urged to come up with some sort of cool explanation for why they've got it. The default assumption will be that one of their parents was a jedi knight who fought in the Clone Wars.

Also, I recommend reading Settembrini's last comment on yesterday's blog entry.

• For the last several weeks I've been saying to myself "Luke was first level in the original movie" as a sort of mantra. No PC kills kobolds in sewers for copper pieces in Star Wars, no matter what their level. But here's my new twist: Han, Chewie, Leia, and even Obi-Wan were all first level, too. Maybe the Saga Edition doesn't map out the character's abilities that way, but it 'A New Hope' was that party's first adventure in Lucas's campaign. Our new campaign should strive for that same level of excitement, despite the low levels of the newbie PCs.
• Recommended reading: Jonathan Tweet's article There Is No Try. Tweet's main point is that a blown skill roll does not always have to be an indicator of utter, dismal failure. Sometimes a PCs can blow a roll and the GM can offer a less than perfect, but not totally suck alternative. "You failed the climb roll? Then you make it partway up the mountain. Interestingly enough, there's a cave near the point where the cliff becomes too steep to climb further. What do you do now?" "No good on the knowledge check? Okay, you don't know the location of the Jing-Soon Temple, but you do know the guy who does. He lives on Coruscant, in the underlevels below the UltraMegaMallPlex." (I should mention that Tweet, S. John Ross, and Ron Edwards all seem to have independantly discovered this idea. Any one of them can have a bad idea. Any two of them, maybe. But all three? I doubt it.)
• PCs in my campaign get two stat options. They can roll 4d6, drop one. Or they can choose the Awesome Array: 17, 16, 14, 13, 10, 10. If someone rolls a better set of numbers than that, that set immediately becomes the new Awesome Array. We like high stats. It allows us all to more easily pretend that we're cooler than other people.
• Dear Wizards: Money, WTF? The players are really supposed to roll to see if their starting characters can afford to buy blasters? Doug's pilot doesn't get to start with a stupid orange jumpsuit because it costs too much? Forget that crap. Pat and I banged out some random initial weapons and armors tables. Past that whether a PC can afford something or not will be a simple function of asking how hard it would be for Han Solo to buy it.
• I'm thinking that every PC should have a short list of People They Care About. Some of these people will die, to make the Empire look evil. Others will mysteriously disappear and return as masked cyborg sith types. Etc.
• Pat made this, and it is awesome:

When making D&D villains I often start the process by thinking something like "well, I want this dude to be a Half-Dragon Githyanki Beguiler 12". The game mechanics drive the process. While working on my new Star Wars campaign my thoughts have been more along the lines of "I need a bitter jedi that survived the Purge but blamed both the Sith and the antiquated jedi order. In anger he has turned to the Dark Side but is in no way an ally of the Empire or the Sith." Character and setting drive the process instead of mechanics. I'm totally digging that.

1) You can get a lotof mileage out of only taking the first movie as established fact and using the rest of the films as inspiration. Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader are not necessarily one and the same. Luke, Leia, and Darth may not be related. Darth Vader's dark master is not necessarily the Emperor. Jabba could be merely a local thug or an intergalactic criminal mastermind able to threaten the Empire.

2) Should some characters receive Get Out Of Death Free cards? I'm kinda thinking major villains only work when they are recurring villains. No GM-created villain should get more than a single 1-Up. But I'm willing to cut Darth Vader or Boba Fett a bit moe slack than that. PCs should also get at least one Miraculous Escape if the bad guys get such consideration.

So last night was supposed to be a session of Beyond Vinland, wherein Our Heroes trap the duergar chieftain inside a barrow mound inhabited by the Union of the Snake, a yuan-ti death cult from the 80's. But the adventure never quite started. I accidentally sent the group off on a 3 hour tangent by attempting to handle some campaign business before we rolled initiative against the first band of snakemen.

As longtime Gameblog readers will recall, the Gestalt PCs in my last Greyhawkesque outing reached 23rd level or so. That got really boggy mechanics-wise towards the end of the campaign. Part of the problem was the sheer awesomosity of Gestalt characters, but the other part of the equation is that D&D at its highest levels bends the system in ways that I just don't plain dig. Prepping games for high level 3.5 seemed less like fun and more like doing homework. And the combats felt like we were swing swords in a sea of molasses.

So I asked the table what an appropriate cut off level for this campaign would be, a place on the advancement chart where we would stop and go play something else. 3.x D&D's structure heavily favors longterm advancement planning, so I thought the players would want to know in advance that their PCs would never advance beyond level X. I felt a group consultation was in order, in case some player was just dying to get a special ability only available at a certain level.

In my mind's eye we would all agree to end the campaign when the PCs reached some level in the low to mid teens. Instead, Doug said "If you're talking about switching to Star Wars Saga, I say we stop the campaign at level six." The PCs are 6th level right now.

Doug went on to explain that the present campaign was a good time, but that he was eager to play the shiny new Star Wars game. And we had kinda lost campaign momentum with the Sunken Ziggurat module, which I still think is awesome but just doesn't fit my high octane/low attention span style. And losing Jason as a player also took some wind out of the sails of the campaign. Meanwhile, I am also very keen to try out the new Star Wars game. It looks pretty damn sweet.

So we spent the rest of the night talking out the dimensions of a new Star Wars campaign as Stuart and Pat flipped through my copy of the rules. We played my copy of season one of the Clone Wars cartoon, as Stuart hadn't seen it yet and a Clone Wars era game was one of the possibilities we discussed. Although Doug made some very good arguments for a Clone Wars game, we eventually settled on a Rebellion era campaign.

As I see it, a Rebel campaign provides at least three big advantages to a Star Wars GM. First, kicking off adventures is a piece o' cake. Mon Mothma/Princess Leia/General Dodonna/your mom gives the PCs a mission and they fly off to adventure. Or the Empire shows up to wreck everyone's shit. Second, the Rebels are the underdogs, not backed up the resources of the Republic. And third, I get to play Darth Vader once in a while. On the players end, they get to stick it to the Man and any Jedi in play is one of a mysterious handful in the campaign, not part of a stodgy order with 10,000 members and a bunch of stupid rules.

Beyond Vinland is not going away immediately or altogether. In two weeks we'll fight some serpent people as planned. But that session is going to be the end of Season One, so to speak. The plan is to come back to that campaign later, perhaps after retooling it a bit and recruiting a fourth player. But in August we'll be starting Rebel Scum, which will begin just a bit before Episode IV and play out adventures running parallel to and weaving in and out of the Original Trilogy.

The first mission for the PCs: steal some boring technical data to this new space station thingy the Empire is building.