House of Wookiees Campaign Upgrade Part 1: Skill Challenges

Another Galaxy, Another Time..

Winston, a teenage Rodian, sat uncomfortably in the plasma-like chair. He found it difficult to focus on the holovid program. Mon Mothma’s recorded voice detailed the history of the Alliance to Restore the Republic. There were so many odd beings around him… like the gray-haired noble in the dark cloak and the red-head human girl in the flight suit. Most frightening of all was the Wookiee. Its yellow eyes threatened to start trouble. If the Wook did, Winston would not back down.

Was it Winston’s nerves, or was there a rumbling? It didn’t seem to be coming from the holodisplay… although it wasn’t out of place with the graphic war footage showing the Kwymar Suppression.

Boom! Part of the roof collapsed. Winston sank into the heart of the plasma chair and floated helplessly as though encased in carbonite. Debris rained all around him, smashing the holoprojector… and most of Winston’s orientation class. The majestic telescope plummeted past Winston and vanished down the stairwell, taking out whole flights of stairs in the process. By the time Winston, the Wook, the noble and red-head forced themselves out of the impact-safe prototype chairs, Winston realized they were the only survivors. The Sarge was bent over backwards with the telescope’s mount impaling him through the chest.

More TIE bombers streaked across the sky visible through the elongated portal. What was that at the edge of the hole? A ladder? It was propped against a support beam now at a 45 degree angle, leaning against another beam, which vanished behind a computer bank. It was risky, though entirely possible to climb to the portal then the roof.

An annoying buzz filled the stairwell shaft in the center of the room, where the telescope had fallen and vanished. Winston blinked, staring downward. His mind swam among the refracted images surrounding him. The holoprojector lens had cracked and now, he looked through distorted views of the orientation video; what was real and what was part of Alliance History 101? He looked up to find himself surrounded by three different groups. Each one was comprised of an Imperial officer pulling a baby from its mother’s arms, then throwing the youngling beneath the wheels of an oncoming tracked transport.

Three black-armored troopers rocketed from the debris swirling in the stairwell. “Freeze!” the lead jumptrooper ordered as the other two raised their blaster rifles. Blue energy bursts fired from the barrels. The Wookiee howled and charged, intent to knock one of the jumptroopers down the stairwell. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get a grip on the jetpack-mounted Emperor’s minion.

The holovideo changed to show the interior of a cantina. A group of old men were blockading the door. Grenades flew through the windows and clattered to the floor like apples falling from a tree. All was consumed in fire. Winston raised his arm as if that would prevent him from getting burned, as if he really could get burned by the holovid. Blue blaster bolts streaked past him. That could really hurt him. He raised his blaster and put a hole in a trooper’s chestplate. The trooper fell backwards, vanishing down the stairwell.

“Get over here,” the red head ordered as she began to climb the computer bank. “Time to leave this party.”

**********************************

Imagine being the player running Winston or his companions. You struggle to make it from the observatory to the portal ladder dangling high above the duracrete floor. There is as much risk of being killed in this escape attempt as there is fighting the jumptroopers. You experience gripping moments as the red head slips and barely clings to the edge of the beam. You dive, sliding on your belly, arms outreached to catch the girl before she drops. The gray-haired man, you learn, was an engineer before he joined the Rebellion. He walks around the observatory, makes a couple of quick calculations on his datapad then instructs you and your cohorts to shove a toppled caf brewer between two support beams to gain a little more stability.

When you finally get through it all, as your green hands pull you up the ladder to the “safety” of the dome’s roof, are you going to be satisfied if the GM only gives you xp for defeating the jumptroopers?

I wouldn’t. But when I wrote the first scene of the House of Wookiees campaign, which the first part of this entry describes, I did just that. Back then, Galaxy of Intrigue wasn’t available, and I hadn’t yet played Dungeons and Dragons 4e.

When Winston and his companions fought their way out of the observatory at the unveiling of House of Wookiees, there still wasn’t Galaxy of Intrigue. During the inaugural session, the PCs made a dramatic series of climb checks on their way to the portal. There were a few by the skin of their teeth moments, but there wasn’t any inspired creative skill uses that serve as the cornerstone of a well-run skill challenge. No one tried to make a Use Computer check to move an overhead catwalk against one of the beams, securing the structure and making it easier to climb. No one made a Mechanics check to reinforce the beams.

Star Wars is about creative problem solving. Sometimes the heroes are successful, like when Han and Luke donned stormtrooper costumes and pretended to deliver Chewie to the detention block as part of a prisoner transfer. Sometimes they fail disastrously, like in the same scene when Han failed to deceive the security officers that “Everything is fine here”).

The other day I was reading Edge of Victory: Rebirth by Greg Keyes. He tickled me with his masterful understanding of Han and Leia’s dynamics. He really thrilled me with the creative solutions he provided his characters. For instance, the Falcon was floating powerless in space, having been yanked from hyperspace by a Vong warship. As Han worked to restore power, Anakin sealed 3PO in the cabin that had access to the waste removal tube. He ordered 3PO to physically push concussion missiles out the waste chute toward the massive Vong warship. Then, Anakin remotely detonated the missiles once they reached the target. Great thinking, kid!

As in the example above, skill challenges push players to think beyond obvious solutions. Using the observatory scenario, the easy to think of skill choices would be climb and jump. A great skill challenge will cause the players to stretch their creative muscles and hone in on their characters’ unique strengths.

In the movies, when there is combat, the characters play to their strengths. They don’t all pick up a blaster and hope to shoot better than the stormtroopers. Artoo is quick to find a computer port and shut doors on the enemy or open doors so his allies can make their escape. Leia provides covering fire for Artoo or other allies using noncombative skills in a combat encounter. Lando uses Deception to catch his enemies off guard, like when he orders the Wing Guard on Cloud City to ambush the stormtrooper patrol, or when he disguises himself as a guard in Jabba’s Palace and on the skiff over the sarlacc pit. Ben Kenobi preferred to use Stealth and Use the Force skill checks to go about the Death Star unnoticed to reach the tractor beam controls.

Here’s a non-Star Wars example. While playing Living Forgotten Realms, my character, Claethia the Bard, took part in a skill challenge where the goal was to catch the plague-ridden rats the mad man had set loose. I thought about my character. Was Claethia great at shishkabobbing them on a sword or arrow? Could she cast a sleeping spell? She was a bard. Bingo! “I want to do a Pied Piper,” I told my DM. I’m certain there weren’t any clarifications in the module about how to do this. We ended up treating it as a Persuasion check with some modifiers to account for the power of the bard. There were many great moments in the combat encounters that gaming session, but what I think a lot of players still remember about the game was the Pied Piper skill challenge.

The TIE bombers blast the observatory. Jumptroopers emerge from the stairwell. There’s a chase to the portal at the top of the observatory. The rebels scurry up beams and debris, all of which could collapse any moment. The way I rewrote this encounter, it will be much more exciting than a couple of Climb checks. It will challenge Wookiees to make astounding leaps and Mechanics checks to use their wits to prevent the whole thing from crashing down. Once everyone is finally safe on the roof… they will get well-earned xp.

Dawn of Defiance Video

September 4, I begin running the Dawn of Defiance Campaign for the Buffalo Gaming Society. I am a huge fan of using video to show cutaway scenes and to establish the mood, and as a reward for success. Here is the opening video for the campaign, as created by me.

The Mandalorian Killed Katie Holmes

In the Ghostbusters: Who Ya Gonna Call D20 Modern RPG book, Michael Tresca gives his take on finding appropriate adventure hooks for Ghostbusters. Read the tabloid headlines. Each headline is a potential adventure, combining absurdity with an ounce of horror or the supernatural. The same formula can be applied if you want to do a comic relief Star Wars mini adventure to break up the tension in your campaign’s main plot.

For the Corellian Diet Breakers adventure I wrote, I saw the tabloids ragging on Tom and a sad-looking Katie. I found myself thinking “those guys can’t get a divorce; it would financially destroy both of them.” Then, my mind went down that film noir dark alley. I thought, “What if they each hired someone to kill the other, so they’d inherit millions and get really good press for being a poor little widow/widower?”

So in the module, when the PCs visit a crime lord’s nightclub and are waiting to see the gangster, two of the PCs get dragged away respectively by my version of Katie (named Kat Hadz)  and a henchman for the adventure’s Tom (called Chaz Barris). Both halves of the couple offer, “Kill my spouse in the next 15 minutes and I’ll activate this credit chip I’m giving you. Escape through a window in the backstage props room. There will be a speeder waiting.”

In playtesting, the mechanic-soldier turned down Kat’s offer, and the Mandalorian happily slipped Kat the poisoned cig.

The Tom-Katie encounter had nothing to do with the adventure’s main plot, but it allowed for character development, fleshed out the environment as far as celebrities and scandals are concerned and reinforced campaign themes about the elusiveness of good and bad, right and wrong – traditional film noir material. Plus, the players felt like they were not only interacting with Star Wars characters but roleplaying a bizarre situation with a flimsily transparent Tom and Katie.

Check out the latest antics of Jen Aniston, Lindsay Lohan and Nostradamus’s reinterpreted predictions. These people and issues are significant enough in our cultural consciousness to repeatedly appear on the front page of profitable publications. They must resonate with us for some reason. When you discover what their appeal is, you can transfer it into your game, where it will be equally fascinating or at least, good for a little vacation from high level intrigue.

Alternative Universe Experiments

Remember high school science class? Do you remember those lab experiments where you lost half a grade letter if you didn’t start your report with the words, “The purpose of this experiment is to determine…?” You blocked that nightmare out of your head? Sorry to dredge it up. Let’s use the old science class lab form to help create your next long form adventure or campaign. With the scientific method and the manner of thinking it dictates, you will create the crux of your campaign.

The key to the scientific method is to alter a single variable and compare the altered scenario against a control group, where everything is kept status quo. In game terms, the control group is the Star Wars movies and widely accepted canon (the Clone Wars tv show, various games, comics and books). What you’re going to do with your Star Wars experiment is alter one variable in the canon and determine how it affects everything else.

The purpose of this experiment is to determine what would happen if Force sensitive beings banded together as part of a traveling Galactic circus. This brainstorm was inspired by the last season of Heroes, where superpower endowed individuals hid in plain sight as carnies.

The first thing to consider is how this what-if scenario would affect the Galaxy or how the Galactic situation of each era would affect our what-if. For the Old Republic, the circus could be a hunting ground, where Jedi and Sith try to abduct or recruit new members from the pool of powerful Force users. Imagine contortionist Jedi or lightsaber swallowing Sith! Some circus people turn Sith, others Jedi, They would eventually square off against one another, as brother fought brother during the American Civil War. I would have the final showdown back at the circus.

For the Rise of the Empire era, Jedi could try to take the performers’ children to the Temple for training. The Jedi sent to gather the kids vanish. The PCs are sent to track down the missing and find out what happened. Are the Jedi still alive? Were they captured? Did they run away with the circus?

The Dark Times and Rebellion Eras present an interesting scenario for heroes helping hide Force sensitives, using the idea of the underground railroad. Maybe the heroes must help convince the performers to abandon their circus home, because Inquisitors are on the way. Some of the Force sensitives refuse to give up their community. The performers agree that if one stays, they all stay. The Force sensitives and PCs must confront the Inquisitors and troopers at the circus.

In the New Jedi Order era, Luke sends heroes to try and recruit Force sensitives to join the Jedi Academy. However, Vong operatives have infiltrated the circus, posing as freaks. As the circus moves from system to system, the Vong operatives scout the Galaxy to aid the upcoming invasion. While visiting the circus and doing the recruitment drive, the PCs stumble on the Vong’s true motives.

With the help of your players, you can determine the story’s angle. Perhaps your players want to be the  Inquisitors hunting down Force sensitives. Perhaps they want to be the undercover Vong operatives who have to neutralize those darn Jedi who learned too much for their own good. Maybe the players want to be the circus performers protecting their families from the Sith and Jedi trying to snatch the children and break up the families.

Next, it’s time to brainstorm set pieces. When George Lucas plans his movies, he uses this concept: design a series of locales with an idea of really cool things that happen there. Then, design the story to integrate these cool locations. One day, George might have been eating at Arby’s when he thought how cool it would be to have a fight on flat-bed like vehicles hovering above a pit where a hungry monster reaches out, pulling victims into its gullet. He may have been mowing the lawn when he thought how neat it would be to see a high speed chase through the airspeeder lanes above Coruscant, with characters leaping from vehicle to vehicle.

Those two examples are set pieces. We haven’t yet figured out how they fit the story. We only have a sense of location and some neat special effects. Get the idea?

But how do you come up with set pieces? Think about the elements of your story. Then think what cool stuff could happen. The circus setting includes the chance to battle some cool beasts. Between the cages, big top and transports there are plenty of interesting locations for eye-poppingly groovy fights. Plus, the circus travels the Galaxy, so the campaign can include multiple unique star systems. There’s also the possibility of space combat as the circus leaves or arrives at a system.

With the Force sensitive circus example, let’s brainstorm various set pieces. Make them as varied as possible. Don’t come up with all cool lightsaber fights or giant monster battles. Keep in mind, this is Star Wars, and that means space battles. Come up with at least one starfighter/vehicle battle/chase. Don’t whine. It’s part of what makes Star Wars Star Wars.

Let’s do some brainstorming.

I’m thinking of old time circus trains, like the one from the start of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. How about a chase on top of a circus transport convoy as the circus vehicles move through a planet’s atmosphere? Various beasts reach through the bars (the hull slides away so the crowds can get a peak at the beasts and consequentially want to attend the show) to snag the characters running on the roof.

I’m thinking of a clown car, a tiny automobile which impossibly spews out a hundred clowns. We could play on that concept by having the PCs think they’re about to fight a single small circus starship… but a hundred tiny ships impossibly pop out of the circus vehicle. Oops.

Can these set pieces be used in any era? Yes. Do I have any idea how these encounters fit the story? I don’t even know what story I’m telling yet!

By taking canon and altering a single element and creating a what-if hypothetical situation, you can analyze the effect of the variable on the era. Then, take this unique idea to your friends and run it by them. From their reaction, develop the angle you’re going to take. Finally, create a multitude of set pieces that can be used to craft the adventure.

Some people love the concept of an Alternate Universe, especially GM Chris from the Order 66 Podcast at d20radio.com. He wondered what would happen if Anakin Skywalker let Mace Windu slay Palpatine in the middle of Episode 3. According to Chris’s logic, the war quickly ends. Anakin grows resentful of the Jedi, especially Mace’s decision to exact justice without an arrest. Anakin resigns from the Jedi Order and raises Luke and Leia with Padme on Naboo. He becomes increasingly bitter, bad-mouths the Jedi and insists he train the children himself. Padme secretly takes the kids to the Jedi Temple, where they are accepted. Anakin blows a gasket and leaves Padme. He dies as a lonely bitter moisture farmer on Tattooine. Padme passes away soon after. Having lost his parents, Master Luke Skywalker seems to have slain a Jedi librarian, stolen a Sith holocron and vanished. When he shows up in the Outer Rim on a random security recording ten years later, the PCs are called in by Jedi Master Leia Skywalker to find her brother. Because there is a chance Luke has gone Sith, everything needs to be kept hush-hush, so the Senate doesn’t flip its lid.

Wow. What a cool story, and it all unravels from altering the single variable of Anakin allowing Mace to execute Palpatine.

Like many folks, I wish the prequels had been better. My ultimate prequel dream without altering too much of the story would involve Padme turning out to be Darth Sidious’s Sith Master. Palpatine and Padme both manipulate Anakin (what better position to be in to manipulate someone than to marry him), but Palpatine ultimately sets up Anakin to slay Padme.

Other GMs cling to canon and refuse to put the heroes in a situation where they could alter the course of accepted events. These GMs usually refuse to allow the heroes to rub elbows with legendary characters. Heaven forbid they somehow manage to kill Boba Fett. Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi wouldn’t be able to happen as written without the Fett!

I believe that by deciding to enter the Star Wars universe with your own stories and your friends’ unique characters, you have already made the decision to create a ripple in the water. You are contributing to the officially recognized, fan-made expanded universe. This is nothing to fear. This is what we always wanted… to be a part of the Star Wars universe. Why would we want to play a Star Wars rpg if we couldn’t make a difference in the fate of the Galaxy? Dream big. Don’t be afraid to mess with canon. Some of the most exciting ideas come from poking at a variable and studying the ripple effect.

The purpose of this experiment is to create a gripping take on the Star Wars stories and to give your friends’ PCs the chance to do great deeds and make a difference in the fate of the Galaxy…

Call it what you want. It sounds like an alternate universe to me.

Vic Mignogna : Vader Did You Know?

Episode 1: Observations from a 2 Year Old Gamer

In 1978 I took my first step into a much larger world: Star Wars gaming. There were no WOTC or West End Games products. The only dice I owned were for Yahtzee and Mousetrap. I had action figures. I had my imagination, and equally important, I had imaginative friends with action figures. Sesame Street building blocks formed the catwalks and walls of the Death Star. The couch formed the Death Star trench. Ross, Terry and I got together with our boxes of heroes and spaceships to form the coolest, largest Star Wars armies in St. John, Indiana.
My mother came up with the ingenious idea of using finger nail polish on the undersides of the figures’ feet to identify my toys as mine. In our neighborhood sandboxes and backyards, we were roleplaying before we were even in kindergarten.
I have run Star Wars D6, RCR and SAGA over the past 12 years with varying degrees of success, from my current special SAGA event at the Buffalo Gamers Society to a dreadful failed campaign where the player characters turned on one another so badly they trussed up one of their own, then engaged in a swoop race to get the one shuttle that would take them off the forest world and leave the rest behind to kill each other. Hopefully none of you will fail as badly as I did with that campaign. Star Wars Saga aficionado and master GM Donovan Morningfire wrote, “I think there's a written obligation in the Great GM Codex that cites every GM must have at least five such [boneheaded] moments in their GMing career.”
I’ve used what I gained from that failure ever since.
In this blog, I wish to explore the creative process of conceiving, designing, writing and executing longer-form adventures and campaigns, drawing from my work on the Corellian Diet Breakers and House of Wookies campaign.
At the risk of sounding like the guy behind you in the supermarket checkout line who wants to show you 30 minutes of cellphone video of his kid, who bears a remarkable resemblance to the Tazmanian Devil, let me tell what happened this morning. My wife’s great-niece, Abby, was over for her weekly visit. She is almost three and has a wonderful vivacious tomboy personality. I got her hooked on Star Wars through the “Christmas Tauntauns” video on youtube and Atomfilms.com. Now, she loves my beanie baby Jawa and adores wearing my stormtrooper mask. She regularly says, “Han Solo is a cutie.”
Today, Abby was playing with a stormtrooper action figure, not the Hasbro plastic one (for you protective parents ready to point out toy safety), the Just Toys rubber figure. She noted the appearance of the stormtrooper’s codpiece and declared, “The stormtrooper is wearing a diaper.” That made a lot of sense to me, given how prone they are to surprise and getting blasted to death. How practical of the Empire to make stormtroopers wear diapers, so when they expire and relieve themselves at the moment of death, there is minimal mess. The armor can be hosed off and passed on to the next trooper.
She repeatedly made the stormtrooper fall off my desk and hit the ground with a splat sound. At three, she had discovered the joy of railing kills. Most of you know the railing kill from low budget action films where bad guys are blown away on staircases or rooftops. They fall off the stairs or roof usually over a conveniently placed railing.
The stormtrooper must have fallen to his death 50 times. I opened my rpgdeck freeware and played sound effects of dying troopers, eventually finding a prolonged “Yowwwl!” Abby howled with delight, like Salacious Crumb dismembering a protocol droid. “I love when stormtrooper falls,” she told me.
I was reminded of the bottomless pits all over Star Wars Land. The place was designed for stormtroopers to fall screaming, so Abby and the rest of us kids could howl with delight. It is cool.
Which reminds me of the last game I ran. It was Part 1 of a three-part original adventure called Corellian Diet Breakers, run for the Buffalo Gamers Society. I had 7 players, more than I’d anticipated. Three of them played Jedi. The first encounter was a starship battle. The PCs had a single Surronian Conqueror-Class Assault Shuttle, which I’d already tweaked by giving it a blaster turret, so more players could be involved in combat. Besides two people shooting, one flying, one co-piloting, one working mechanics and another handling shields, there was still a lone Jedi, untrained in computers or mechanics using the Force to twiddle other people’s fingers. He spent a couple of combat rounds studying his character sheet, struggling to find something to do. Finally, he chimed in with, “Can I use Move Object to knock a starfighter into an adjacent ship?”
Several players were well-versed in the rules. They knew about ranges and modifiers, what the powers could and could not do. I knew his first level character would not be able to pull this off. But… I saw the excitement in the player’s eyes. I envisioned a vulture droid suddenly moving horizontally into the path of another. I could see the cool explosions. I felt the same excitement as the Jedi. Players immediately lobbied on why I shouldn’t allow this. I shook my head at them and said, “It’s cool and amuses me so much, he’s got to have a shot at it.”
I made up the DC number. The player beat it. The targeted ship took more damage than its remaining hit points. Kaboom! The ship it crashed into limped out of the collision and was quickly blasted to scrap. The next day on the Buffalo Gamer’s Society message board, the Jedi player wrote that his favorite part of the game was “being the most useful Jedi on the ship by Force pushing one of the enemy ships into another one. It was more than any other Jedi did on the ship.”
It felt like I’d made the right call, but it wasn’t until a couple nights later when I found a reply to my thread on the WOTC forums about running games with large groups I knew I’d made the right call. GweK advised me, “Make sure every player gets to do at least one cool thing per session.”
As GMs, I think that is the key to running a successful Star Wars game. If that means, saying, “Fudge it” to the rules, so be it. If it makes us as rabid with excitement as a two year-old watching a railing kill, then it’s the right thing to do.
Darth Draukaunus of the d20 Radio forums had a similar issue when a Jedi PC leapt up an AT-ST, cut through the entry hatch and took out the driver. I sympathized, because in the first SAGA game I ever ran, my Wookiee and Rodian PCs accomplished similar moves, climbing the legs then blasting the trapped pilot. Draukaunus worried if this was going to happen again if he placed an AT-ST in front of the PCs. This really interested me, because I solved the unbalanced aspect of my PCs marching into Imperial-held territory blasting away with the AT-ST by having an AT-AT show up and put the AT-ST-driving PC in his place. Many posters responded to the thread by saying, “Rule of Cool is very important.”
My wife played the Rodian marching the AT-ST back to its owners, blowing up speeders left and right before being penned in a courtyard with an AT-AT. She still talks about it. It is her defining SAGA moment. She would not be this into the game. It would not be near as epic to her if I had placed realistic DC numbers in front of her and her Wookiee counterpart, denying her the chance to conquer the walker.
In conclusion, when we’re GMing SAGA, and we’re faced with a situation where a player wants to attempt something so crazy it just might work, think about how cool it would be to see it happen. Does the thought make you and your players screech like a two year-old watching stormtroopers fall in slo-mo, or like me with a pile of action figures with nail polish on their feet? Assign a DC, and prepare for something epic to transpire.

Prologue

George Lucas’s epic novel Star Wars begins with the words “Another Galaxy, Another time.”

A variation on those words, “A long time ago in a Galaxy far, far away” propels us into the movie that has shaped three generations.

As Gamemasters and authors of long form Star Wars Saga modules and campaigns, we have the opportunity to craft memorable gaming sessions that embody the Star Wars spirit. Through applying the ancient storytelling techniques chronicled by Joseph Campbell in Hero With a Thousand Faces and by creating breathtaking, action-packed encounters, we will deserve to preface our work the way the authors of the best Star Wars books and movies do. I find it daunting to write those words, because by doing so I am making a promise to my readers and players that what follows will live up to the Star Wars name.

Together we can learn to make campaigns that accomplish just that. The purpose of this blog is to explore the process of creating memorable long form Star Wars adventures. Throughout the upcoming entries, I will reference my progress through the House of Wookiees campaign, Corellian Diet Breakers, and other original pieces as they progress from flicker of an idea to final draft.

Let’s write those words magical together. Create a new Word document. Bust open a new notebook if you prefer (as I do) the pen and paper route. Take a deep breath. As you reach for the keyboard or put ink to paper, you can hear the lightsabers ignite. You can hear the blasters fire and starships soar overhead.

A long time ago in a Galaxy far, far away.

Now we’ve done it. I guess we’ll just have to tell one whopper of a tale set in our favorite Galaxy.

May the Force be with us.

Garrett Crowe