Last Friday, we finished part 6 of the Dawn of Defiance campaign, The Core of Corruption. This installment gave us quite a number of troubles, mainly relating to its structure which assumed that we’d be more active in our investigation than we were happy in being. Honestly, most of us would be happy to have a big sign saying "Go This Way" at the beginning of the adventure, rather than the free-form investigation we ended up in… which mostly was frustrating as our plans kept getting foiled by one imperial faction after another. Urgh.
There was one glorious moment in the final session, when Martin – all credit to him – let me get away with some outrageous bluffing and retroactive maneuvers. Well, perhaps not that outrageous. Martin had assumed that we’d fight our way through all the final sessions, but my character, Miles, had other ideas (and a +19 Persuasion/Deception check). So, we impersonated engineers transporting oxyacetylene gear into a construction site. Except, I hadn’t worked out the OA gear in advance. It’s something I was doing on the fly. Martin let me get away with it, so our transport did have the gear in it despite us not specifying before we left.
Honestly, it’s something I’m much happier with in a RPG: narrative flow of the game, with things being there because they feel right rather than having to painstakingly plan it all in advance. Yes, Miles is a master spy, so he’d have seen the gear and planned his cover around it. With Martin enabling it, it made the first part of the session really amusing. And then a stray blaster bolt ignited the gear once we actually got into a fight (actually, I don’t think there was anything stray about it!) and the explosion took out a few imperials as well as severely hurting Miles, so the balance of the universe was retained.
That style of game is one I got very fond of when playing the Amber Diceless RPG back in the day; it’s nice to see it here as well.
After that first couple of encounters, we got into the final encounters, which included a Jedi (Sith?) and his apprentices. Urgh. I used up a couple of Destiny Points just surviving that combat. It’s not fun going into a Star Wars combat at half health at any time, and when you only have 60 HP to begin with? (Meanwhile, Greg’s force-using meleeist is up around 100 HP). We survived and it was a fun fight, although the relative power of the PCs vs NPCs seems all over the place.
So we survived and escaped and we finally know what the Sarlaac Project is about. Well, we almost all survived: Miles’ butler, Alfred, died in the final combat. Poor guy. I’ll have to hire a new one next week… combat trained, of course! 