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Episode LXIX |
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These are dark times. After dissolving the Senate and the destruction of their dreaded Death Star, the Galactic Empire has tightened its grip on the galaxy in the name of security. Hoping to distance themselves from civil war, the fringers and scoundrels of the Outer Rim territories still conduct their business outside of the Empire's influence. The CANTINA TURNER carries one such crew to a routine job on the remote swamp planet Pantano. But the Galactic Empire's influence is not easily escaped. Surprising the planet's inhabitants, an Imperial naval squadron has entered Pantano's orbit and begins a blockade, preventing all ships from entering or leaving the system… |
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Prologue: First Steps Into a Larger World
A bounty hunter contact reaches out to the crew of the Cantina Turner, asking them to travel to the planet Pantano to help him with a job. That job soon goes sideways with the sudden arrival of the Galactic Empire, who blockade the system and establish a surface garrison. While the PCs battle Rodian hired guns, the Imperials capture the crew's quarry, a Nautolan gunslinger, so they formulate a plan to sabotage Delta Base and infiltrate disguised as plumbers. They escape with their bounty in a stolen airspeeder, killing several Stormtroopers and flooding the base with eels. The gunslinger explains that his bounty is a cover for a Hutt false flag meant to kill the PCs' bounty hunter contact, and he can provide evidence of this. They find this evidence inside his ship, but only after shooting their way through several Imperial Stormtroopers to get there. They choose not to turn in their contact to the Hutts, sending him into hiding, and free the gunslinger as well.
The Rodian clan who provided the Nautolan gunslinger the hired guns the PCs killed reaches out, inviting the crew of the Cantina Turner to a funeral, a common practice for warriors around these parts. They accept the offer and soon learn the real reason for their invite: their clan's bitter rival is planning an attack on their clanhold now that so many have died or been too injured to fight. The PCs offer their assistance, and though the battle is difficult, the rival clan's siege is broken and is unlikely to ever recover, forever altering the balance of power.
Act I: Scum and Villainy
The PCs meet a Kif Momo, a Neimoidian trade unionist who introduces them to his Hutt contact. "The Klatooinian" arranges an impromptu hunting trip with an Imperial arms smuggler as a cover for an intimidation job. Every crew stakes a wager on who can bring down the most big game, and the trade union's battle droids and Empire's Stormtroopers are no match for the player characters' firepower. After bringing down a stalking acklay, the Klatooinian delivers the Imperial his message from the Hutts—with his fists (and the butt of the captain's rifle). Afterward the PCs visit the Pantano Casino for a night of revelry, but several Imperial officers are there decompressing as well. The night is pretty uneventful, all things considered, and the PCs meet Leftenant Scripes, the commander of Delta Base, and Cyril Clover, a junior officer who becomes their main Imperial contact.
Shiri Bondara asks the PCs to kidnap the nobleman who sold her family into slavery. Tracking him to a docking bay, they start a fight between his bodyguards and the Empire, though the PCs are the ones who finish it. Capturing the slaver, they loot his ship but discover a cargo hold full of people. The PCs free everyone in the Rodian clanhold and autopilot the slaver's ship over Delta Base where it's shot down, raining eels on an unsuspecting Empire.
When Tuuba the Hutt arrives on Pantano, his majordomo RE-G4T0 sends the PCs to the Tanaka-Magnolia plantation to "look for the missing slaves", which soon becomes code for "pin this on someone else". They're greeted with southern hospitality, but the sudden arrival of an AT-AT crashes the party and the PCs download the contents of the owner's mainframe and make a quick exit with his (crushed, paper-thin) corpse.
Shiri's cousin Firith was on the plantation when it was attacked, so the PCs go looking for him in the plantation's ruins, where an Imperial cleanup crew is cataloguing all the valuables. They find Firith in a nearby swamp and the two groups agree to ambush the Imperial caravans and loot what was looted from the plantation (notably: its shield generators and quad laser cannons).
Since Tuuba's slave deal went sour, Kif joins the PCs in recovering a Clone Wars-era droid factory. They cut their way through the door (and some Imperials) with a mining laser and find the bunker offline. Working to restore power, it seems the overseer AI AdiOS has gone rogue, creating mechanical abominations out of scrap parts and corpse pieces. Fighting their way to central core, the PCs defeat AdiOS in battle and reimage its mainframe, bringing the factory back online.
Act II: The Dark Path
Sgt. Clover comes to the PCs for help after Danny Dowager overdosed on eel bile. They find the officer spouting nonsense, so Krasius gives the drug a try, experiencing vivid hallucinations of Sith Lords and eel gods. Following the supply chain from the opium den to the ramen stall to the fishing hole, the PCs discover some eels have been corrupted by a foreign biology and quickly work to synthesize an antivenom to manage the more crippling side effects.
Twi'lek cousins Shiri and Firith reveal themselves to be Rebel operatives and invite the PCs to join them in their plan to fly a ship through a Star Destroyer. The PCs, for their part, infiltrate Delta Base as scientists looking for physicist Henri LaPlante, who had recently gone missing. The PCs uncover LaPlante and several other missing persons have formed a Dark Side-inspired eel cult under Danny Dowager. In exchange for Henri LaPlante's help with the kamikaze plan, the PCs offer to fly the cultists to the South Pole to look for their eel god.
The Cantina Turner and the cultists known as "The Called" evade Imperial patrols and reach the South Pole, uncovering a forgotten city beneath a canopy of fossilized trees. After completing a series of trials modeled after the Jedi and inspired by Indiana Jones, the PCs uncover the hidden entrance to the Temple of Darkness. Within the temple, the PCs and a portion of the cultists survive a series of trials meant to test any would-be Sith. They uncover the final resting place of Darth Lundgren and recover his Sith Holocron. Agents of the Empire led by Inquisitor Sutherland storm the temple, but the PCs and a handful of others elude the ground forces and shoot down a TIE Interceptor wing to escape with the red pyramid.
Act III: Our Blockade is Perfectly Legal
As work completes on the Taunagi, a probe droid ambushes the PCs. Their underworld contact the Klatooinian explains an Imperial assassin is targeting them and suggests they set a trap. They choose Pon Shal's downed freighter they'd previously saved from demolition, and instead lure the remaining probes there and detonate it all. When they're pinned down by the assassin, the PCs shoot back for a time, until his head is brazenly lopped off by Krasius.
The Rebels need power cells to complete the Taunagi and the only place to get them is aboard the Star Destroyer Centurion. Meeting with Tuuba the Hutt for access to his Imperial contact Gavin Goorman, the PCs learn Goorman has locked himself away and refuses to meet, so Tuuba offers them the codes they need in exchange for bringing the quartermaster back to Pantano's surface. The PCs board the Centurion and make contact with Goorman in the ship's medical bay, where he and Dr. Avery watch as cybernetic limbs are attached to the mutated torso of Dr. Klaus Weiner. The PCs abscond with Goorman (and Avery), sabotage the ship's escape pods, and steal a rack of power cells.
The PCs and their rebel commando allies steal a troop transport and assault Delta Base from within. After sneaking into the science lab and activating the sabotaged eel repeller ("eel attractor"), the PCs face off with Leftenant Scripes and his elite rocket troopers atop and around the ion cannon. After Scripes's defeat, they target the Star Destroyer Centurion with the remaining charge in the disabled ion cannon and then escape.
The Taunagi accelerates to light speed, destroying the Centurion, as Rebel warships arrive to break the blockade. Finally blasting off from Pantano's surface, the Cantina Turner is ambushed in orbit by the Black Prince. The PCs lead the Imperial cruiser through the middle of the Battle of Pantano, managing to hold their own against the larger ship by staying close and out of range of all but their point defense guns. The Cantina Turner escapes into the debris field of the Centurion, forcing Inquisitor Sutherland is to follow in his TIE Advanced x1 superiority starfighter. The Inquisitor and the PCs end up in a dogfight, a duel for the fates of the Jedi and Sith holocrons, and the Inquisitor's ship is shot down.
The PCs regroup in the Rebel flagship, where an epilogue shares the fate of most of the NPCs in the Episode (save those intentionally withheld), and the PCs finally receive their 50,000 space bucks. Roll credits.