Lit We Hav to Go on an Adventure with Jello

One of a Kind, by Paul Danner, kicks off this issue. Danner comes out of nowhere to grab the prominent leadoff spot, a considerable distinction considering this issue has short stories by Charlene Newcomb and Patricia Jackson. It's not surprising that Danner would achieve this, however, as he's an extremely accomplished man. Not only would he go on to write several more short stories for the Journal, but he's also a lawyer with "more than 16 years’ experience counseling clients on complex business, commercial, and construction matters," a longtime assistant director and stage manager for The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, the author of an engine performance diagnostics textbook and award-winning automotive instructor, a retired naval aviator who made captain and now serves as an international business consultant, and the CEO of Alliance MMA. Yeah, there are a surprising number of Paul Danners out there.

Our first introduction to our lead character is in the full-color art piece at the head of the story. He must be at least as awesome as Han Solo and Lando Calrissian put together, at least given that he's wearing both a vest and a cape. His name is Sienn Sconn, and he is introduced sipping a "Venaarian Cringe-Ale," which isn't a good start to anything. He's a thief, on the Imperial planet Venaari (population: planet Earth, 1927). Despite being, in his own mind at least, the best thief in the sector, he's down on funds, with rent due, and so desperate he's considering stealing the swoop hanging off the ceiling of the dive bar he's in when a mysterious, alluring woman walks in. Sconn notices that something seems to be going on, she's getting signals from the bartender . . . and then a dude runs into the bar and gets shot down by the stormtroopers chasing him. And the girl and the bartender both react. The stormies lock down the bar, and the bartender then reacts rather more strongly by pulling out a grenade launcher and firing at the stormtroopers. An angry dude with a grenade launcher is always a good way to start a story. One of the stormtroopers takes out the bartender, and is about to take out the woman, whose escape the bartender is covering, when Sconn acts against his better judgment, whips out a huge collapsible stun staff, and takes down that trooper, then takes out the last one with a wrist-mounted particle beam.

Shandria, the girl, having been exhorted by the dying bartender to get something to the New Republic, Sconn heads out the back with her, dodging more stormtrooper reinforcements. Except once he gets into the alley, he accidentally locks her inside the bar while pinned down by fire from more reinforcements. So he blows the door controls and gets back inside the bar, since there's no escape the back way. Shandria knows enough to get them out through a ventilation shaft, and then Sconn takes out some Imperials and steals one of their speeders to get away.

Cut to Major Daraada, leader of the Imperials. He's upset that Shandria is the only surviving member of this nest of New Republic spies, and the least experienced one at that, with the least intelligence value. He's into interrogations. She does have a stolen data card, though, and he wants to recover that. He notices a speeder leaving, though. Foiled again!

In the speeder, Sconn and Shandria finally get to know each other. He explains that he took action because he doesn't like the Empire. In fact, as a thief, he usually targets rich Imperial sympathizers, and whenever he takes a contract to steal something for somebody, he makes sure he's okay with it first. He's one of those nice thieves. It's probably why he's broke. He declines her offer to drop him off, though. He wants to make sure this important information gets offworld to the New Republic.

Daraada, meanwhile, is in hot pursuit, and gets on the line to Governor Vaerganth to demand the planet's Star Destroyer be diverted to cover the spaceport. Vaerganth blows him off, though. It's already tied up fighting terrorists and he seems to regard Deraada and his bluster as a joke. So Daraada settles for alerting spaceport security and calling in a bounty hunter.

That's our cue for the bounty hunter to land on the roof of the speeder and fight Sconn when he comes up for a look. The bounty hunter is an enormous person named Pentix Graphyt, which sounds like the name of a pencil, and he's choking Sconn to death without a lot of difficulty. Sconn, however, manages to shoot his wrist gun thing into the cooling unit on Graphyt's rocket pack, which starts it overheating. Graphyt struggles to get it off, but can't. So Sconn grabs him as he's struggling and triggers the pack, launching him directly into the upcoming spaceport security roadblock and detonating him like a human bomb. They gun it into the spaceport, followed by Daraada. They pull up by Shandria's Y-wing (maybe, you know, a clue that she's New Republic), and do the usual routine of you can come with me, join the New Republic, we could use you, oh no not me, I'm not a joiner, I'll cover you, but they'll kill you, oh I'll be okay. All that. Shandria gives him a kiss and takes off, while he uses the speeder's gun to shoot up Daraada's speeder. You'd think Shandria could help out with that Y-wing, but nope, she hightails it out of there. Sconn makes it out via a maintenance conduit, and finds in his pocket twenty-five thousand credits from Shandria. Kind of a big payout, there. Daraada's so pissed he decides to just torture his own men for their failure.

There's a lot more context to be found in the sidebars. Venaari only became of major interest to the Imperials after Endor, and is the site of a mysterious Project Orrad, housed in an underground base. The New Republic sent agents to foment rebellion on the world, given resentment at the increased Imperial presence, and they discovered Project Orrad's existence and are looking for further information on it. That's what the datacard is all about. Sconn is twenty-three. When he was seven, his parents were killed by Imperial orbital bombardment when the Empire was putting down a rebellion on his homeworld. That's why he hates the Empire. He was taken in by his uncle, Cryle Cavv, who taught him to be an ethical master thief, one of those wonderful pulp inventions. So he only steals from crooks, Imperials, and the very wealthy, who for some reason are in the same category. Sconn still doesn't know that Cavv used to be an Alliance operative. Currently a New Republic operative is Shandria L'hnnar (Danner LOVES double letters), a twenty-four-year-old Corellian who wanted to attend the Academy until her college friend, who had joined the Alliance, convinced her the Empire was evil, and promptly got arrested and disappeared. Shandria joined the Alliance instead. Gaevril Daraada is a big old mean jerk who likes to personally administer some good old-fashioned torture, but whose career has stalled, probably because he's an incompetent loser who likes to blame his failures on others, if the story is any indication. Daraada's in charge of security for Project Orrad, and is constantly in conflict with the governor, who doesn't like Daraada and doesn't give a crap about his project. The Adventure Idea ties into this, with your group assigned to find the underground base, and discovering whatever the hell the secrets of Project Orrad actually are while avoiding Darrada.

Not bad for a debut story. Danner's probably read a bit too much hardboiled pulp and tries to give it a bit of attitude, but he's not exactly Chandler. Still, the story moves along nicely, it's free of dumb plot points, it's clear on the story it's telling, and it's generally well-written, with solid, respectable, slightly flavorful prose. I could definitely read more from Danner, and I can see why his fresh new story, a promising debut, was given pride of place. Next comes this issue's interview, with West End Games' own Bill Smith.

 

This is going to be a rare occasion where I judge something more harshly than Havac: I thought this was a bit generic, really. Venaari doesn't really pop as a setting, and the bad guy may as well have come off an assembly line for mustache-twirling Imperial sadists. Sconn wins points for being a thief with morals instead of another Han Lite, but he's still rather obviously within the bounds of that archetype. It's fast-paced and acceptable for a debut, but I'm not sure the AJ's bar for short fiction has been set low enough for "generic story competently executed" to get the lead spot.

The fact that the nature of the macguffin is left to GMs as an adventure hook is pretty cool, though.

 

I would agree, but even the best Adventure Journal short stories have had a hard time rising above generic storylines middlingly executed. Even the professional authors' stories have been just okay. The only one to really shine as more than just competent-fanfic-style has been The Final Exit. So judging by the standards so far, this is crisply written entertainment that's inspired by something other than Han Solo being pretty cool. I'll take it.

 

Sconn is less interesting than his uncle by far to me.

 

Ah, my very first SWAJ! And the only one I've ever read cover to cover, though it's been over 20 years since I did that ...

These days, it's the one I tend to pull out least often, because my early heavy use of it has rendered it more fragile than its brethren.

IIRC, there's an interview somewhere where they say that the Star Destroyer wound up being way too big for a player just starting the game, so it got moved to the back of the game and became the Arc Hammer level. Still, I wish they hadn't made something as important as nabbing the Death Star plans a quicky first-level thing. Even then, I knew it deserved grander treatment (and two decades later, we've gotten our wish in spades).

This. It's been forever since I've read One of a Kind, but that's because I've never felt enticed to reread it. And Danner will keep pulling from that mustache-twirling Imperial sadist assembly line - both Sollaine and Gaen Drommel wind up being more psychopathic caricature than realistic human. Of course, that assembly line was already pumping Imperial antagonists out long before Danner picked up his pen.

Also this. Sconn was just kind of there, while Cavv, whom we'll meet later, packs quite a bit more personality. Cavv might also be rather archetypal - he's the charming rogue who's always talking while never saying anything - but he still comes across as quite a bit more interesting.

 

Bill Smith: An Inside Look At . . . Star Wars Gaming is our interview of this issue. "Bill Smith" is by far the smallest and most obscure font of the title. Timothy Zahn he's not. Though Smith is a very important part of the West End Games team, his value isn't in name recognition -- apparently they don't expect even the RPG fans reading the magazine to be that familiar with the behind-the-scenes team putting out their sourcebooks -- but in his ability to provide that inside look.

Smith, a WEG editor, is only twenty-six at the time of writing, and was hired four years ago after applying as an avid fan of the Star Wars game. A year after being hired, he was overseeing the publication of the second edition. You can thank his friend who, when Smith was saying that his magazine-editing job was okay but he'd really love to work for WEG, whose products he was passionate about, told him to shut up and send in his damn resume then. And he got hired! How many of you would love to be just hired off the street to do important editorial and writing work on major Star Wars products at age twenty-two?

For the second edition, he says that the main goal was "to round out the game," by adding elements and making tweaks to how things work that users had requested, not "to change the game." The other major thing was to consolidate the developments that had already happened across several books into one core rulebook so that there was a single go-to resource for playing the game. He highlights the refinement to the skills system as one of the most important changes, bringing skills more into line with the situations people needed to use them in and allowing for more specialization. Also important: scale and movement rates. And adding more baseline stats. And adding a simple chapter really laying out the game's universe and how it's supposed to work. Most important, though, he says, was opening up the game. The first edition was written exclusively for people to play Rebel agents. Now you can be Rebels, or you can be New Republic -- or you can be just about any kind of fringe operator you can imagine. So all the people out there clamoring to play as Han Solo smugglers can do it now. If there's anything WEG has made clear, it's that gamers ****ing love Han Solo.

The main thing he's not happy with: vehicle rules. They were complex and difficult to come up with. Smith doesn't really like the current vehicle rules; they were just less bad than all the other ways they tried to do them.

Ilene Rosenberg finally gives the second edition a rest to ask something more general: how involved are the original creators when WEG does a sourcebook for their work, as in the case of the Thrawn Trilogy or Dark Empire? Smith answers that they try to keep the creators as involved as possible when fleshing out statistics and backgrounds for their creations. They have a great relationship with Zahn and he provided them a lot of information, and Kevin J. Anderson has expressed strong interest in WEG and in working with them. Then the inevitable, unavoidable question: how involved is Lucasfilm in all the blah blah blah? They're very involved! They're great, very helpful! There are certain things they say you can't do but they really help you out with whatever you're doing, answer a lot of questions! . . . Aaaand, yep, actually read the response now and I was totally accurate. I think we can retire this question, Ilene.

For an interview in a WEG publication, it's pretty forthright. Rosenberg asks about complaints about the different editions. Smith just says that second edition was mostly responding to consistent requests from gamers for changes, so it's been mostly well-received. Some people haven't liked different new elements, but he says to just use the old rules for any parts you don't like. Both systems have their strengths.

For upcoming products, he strongly talks up Schweighofer's work on Platt's Starport Guide. He also talks up an intriguing project: an upcoming Lando Calrissian Adventures-based sourcebook, written by Brian Thomas in the style of Lando's autobiography, and produced in consultation with L. Neil Smith. Unfortunately, this was never actually published. This is a national tragedy.

Lastly, the other inevitable question: what makes Star Wars great? And the answer is because it's imaginative and has black-and-white morality and no one makes stories like that anymore. Now let me actually read the response and check . . . yep, that's the answer. I think we can retire this one too.

Rosenberg never gets very deep into Smith himself or working at WEG, and the interview ends up mostly just being promo for WEG products, unfortunately. Still, there's some interesting material there. Next up, we get an article on "alternative starships," which hopefully are starships that listen to alternative music.

 

I really, really wish we had gotten that Lando Calrissian Adventures sourcebook.

 

That's too small a scope. This was, is, and ever shall be a universal tragedy.

Me too, Nom. Me too.

 

With the vignette that had Corran's POV at the Battle of Bilbringi. Oh yeah.

Or "The Jarnollen Expedition," a Pablo-penned SWAJ article that would have covered the first arc of the Goodwin/Williamson newspaper strips.

The might-have-beens when it comes to WEG just ... hurt.

 

Maybe I'm misremembering and it was Sluis Van. Either way, yeah. Dang shoes. :-(

EDIT: No, according to this, it was Bilbringi.

 

That and Pablo Hidalgo's "Era of Rebellion" sourcebook. Both of those would have been great stuff. On a somewhat related note, did Pablo ever dish on what "First Empire" was supposed to be since the time that "Lost RPG Material" page was compiled?

 

A Buyer's Guide to Alternative Starships comes to us from Stephen Luminati, who gave us an adventure last issue.

The article opens with a vignette of Threepio and Artoo knockoffs C-D20 and R2-RD bickering while being approached by someone Captain Antilles said needs a starship. Unfortunately, they're fresh out of YT-1300s, but here's a list of other starships available. The bickering is derivative but amusing, but anything that skewer's WEG's obsession with YT-1300 freighters is magical. Seriously, get over the freaking YT-1300. I had a good laugh over the implied sputtering response of the player-character stand-in to being told he can't have his own Millennium Falcon.

The CEC HT-2200 medium freighter leads off. A beefy, boxy, U-shaped crate, it came out shortly after the YT-1300 and was designed to carry bigger cargoes, with four separate bays capable of maintaining different storage conditions. It's not very fast or maneuverable, but CEC built it into a tank, with heavy-duty shields and a very tough hull and frame. It's lightly armed, though, making it less useful in combat than the YT-1300. Highly modifiable, however, it can have more and stronger weapons added, as long as you upgrade the power plant. The factory drive, in fact, is so weak that almost none of the ships have them, with a stronger dual drive essentially the standard. In short, it's more profitable on cargo runs, but less useful if you plan on getting shot at.

Our ship-seeker isn't impressed with a "guaranteed piracy target," however, and our droids move on to the Starfeld Seeker Z-10. The first ship Starfeld designed, it was intended to be a scout ship, with a focus all on engines and sensors. Its weaponry was too light for it to find success on the Rim as a scout, but it was quickly adopted by couriers as a fast, light ship. It's great for fast deliveries, and highly maneuverable, with cargo stored in detachable pods. Only one very light, forward-facing blaster makes for limited punch, however. You're not going to beat anybody in a fight; you just have to rely on being able to see them coming and outrun them. It's unshielded, too, so don't get shot. It doesn't take modifications well, as it's dependent on a central computer whose manufacturer has since folded, and it doesn't take well to non-compatible parts. It's cheap, though! There's also a little sidebar vignette here that accomplishes nothing but to show off Luminati's ability to write some atmospheric scene-setting, as a courier with a Seeker gets a contract from a crime boss she doesn't particularly like, hooking up a detachable cargo pod that's totally sealed; she doesn't need to know what's inside.

Another Starfeld model is the ZH-25 Questor. They followed up their surprise sort-of-success with the Seeker by creating a bigger, more defensible version with the same speed. It has more space and a bigger drive, though it's still slightly slower. It can go quite a while without resupply, is shielded, and is more heavily armed. It also doesn't have the modification problems of the Z-10, having moved on to a new computer supplier. The sensors, however, were cut to save costs, since this ship's use profile wouldn't really require the scout-grade sensors of the Z-10. Our ship requester is quite happy to settle on this, except wait, the one they've got has some damage.

That brings them to the last resort, the ship Captain Antilles didn't want them to assign to another hotshot pilot. The Arakyd Helix light interceptor is a highly maneuverable ship with a big, glaring sensor profile; it's not stealthy at all. It's somehow classed as a light transport but is obviously not, with a weapons loadout way beyond the regs for transport ships. It's a starfighter with cargo room. The Empire noticed this after about six months of production and forced Arakyd to shut it down, but thousands of Helixes had already shipped. Those who had them were required to register them and to modify them by removing half the weaponry and downgrading the shield generator. Most owners did not comply. The Imperials know most owners did not comply, and are therefore on the alert any time they see a Helix. False papers for Helixes are a good black-market business. There's an attached vignette, following a pirate who ambushes a pilot who was set up by a female confederate, only for his ship to turn out to be a Helix; he blows up the three pirate craft.

It's a nice piece overall. I'm in support of anything that gets people off the YT-1300, and this does a good job of introducing four different types of ships that players could use. They have pluses and minuses, and fill distinct roles that could appeal to players with different needs, and that players could see them in even if they don't buy them for their own use. I'm fond of the Questor, which is a good all-arounder model, and the Helix, which is a fun concept, a high-powered gunboat masquerading as a freighter, perfect for people with a certain sort of need but obviously not the most profitable, given its limited cargo space.

I'll also cover this issue's HoloNet Hype. The letter column begins with Sam McCord, who should clearly be the lead character in an action movie, politely pointing out the typgraphical error that cut off the end of the Criton's Point entry in issue three. Schweighofer admits to the error, which was also pointed out by other letter-writers, possibly not as polite. The whole entry will be reprinted in this issue's Smuggler's Log. Guilaume Nonain of France writes in, in charmingly barely-stilted English, about how he had been a longtime Star Wars and roleplaying fan, but avoided the Star Wars Roleplaying Game because he didn't want to play in a setting where all the big stuff had already been done, the bad guys defeated, and heroes would be limited to side jobs. His mind changed when the EU rolled out, and he realized that the galaxy was bigger than he had thought, with lots of stories to tell and lots of room for campaigns. So he's especially excited to see the Adventure Journal adding a lot of New Republic-era material, and adding short stories into the mix.

Next up, we have Stand and Deliver!, a piece on pirates.

 

Ah yes, WEG's obsession with YT-1300s...to the point where ships that looked only vaguely like YT-1300s had to be YT-1300s.

 

This is the article that sold me this issue, back when I didn't buy AJs that didn't apply to my game, and largely because I, too, was sick of YT-1300 abuse. The core rulebook only had three usable stock space transports (the Guardian light cruiser had a high crew count and was unavailable for civilian/Rebel purchase), so every player had either a YT-1300, a Ghtroc 720, or a Lone Scout-A. Other supplements from this time frame had a similar dearth of usable stock transports. Even Galaxy Guide 6: Tramp Freighters, which you would assume would have a good supply of stock tramp freighters, instead has a number of already-modified ships owned by NPCs, so if you wanted to use the ship modification rules found in that book, you'd find yourself modifying ... a YT-1300, a Ghtroc 720, or a Lone Scout-A. So when I found this this Journal, even though it only had four ships in it, it was still worth the cover price of the whole issue just to expand my stock ship selection.

 

IIRC...one of the old supplements had a Mon Cal Jump Freighter that had the same shape as a YT-1300. You would think back in the day that they would have been a litte more inventive. How difficult would it have been to have a staff artist come up with a dozen or so designs.

 

To be fair, it was a roleplaying game and thus entirely customizable to the GM's needs. There was really nothing stopping gamemasters from taking those YT-1300 or Ghtroc stats and repurposing them for their own game as a Lantillian BL4 Short Hauler or something like that, making up their own exterior design as desired. They didn't call it "reskinning" back then but that's always been a tool in the GM's toolbox.

 

After a significant delay, we return with Stand and Deliver!, by John J. Richardson III. As a piece on pirates, it differs from the great article on privateers, which heavily covered pirates as well, in that it focuses on one pirate gang, that of Drek Drednar, setting them up as possible antagonists.

It opens with a vignette as a freighter captain, Drev Jalok, and his Sullustan copilot, Sullub Soonin, are pulled from hyperspace by an asteroid. Pirates await them, with a Corellian corvette, two Headhunters, two Zebras, and two Y-wings. It is, of course, Drednar who captures them..

Drednar's crew is a violent lot, and they've spent years attacking anything that comes their way, civilian, criminal, Imperial, and Rebel alike. Their usual technique is to use Sable III, the corvette, to tow an asteroid into a hyperlane, where it pulls out whatever comes along (sometimes they make their own mass shadows by dumping a huge cargo of water into space, though I have a hard time seeing how that would be enough mass). If it's good prey, they pounce on it. If it's a big warship, they recover the fighters and bounce. "Stand and deliver" is Drednar's signature hail; if the ship doesn't surrender, they'll disable it with ion cannon fire and fighter attacks on the engines and weapons. They board, armed with stun and smoke grenades, before Drednar makes his big entrance. Drednar talks up his ruthlessness, but he actually has little interest in killing anybody. He just knows that threatening to space people out the airlock means he'll get cooperation and won't actually have to space anybody. This is much the same technique actual pirates used (Blackbeard didn't kill anyone until he was fighting for his life in his final battle). He takes the cargo and valuables, kidnaps anyone he can get a good ransom out of, and leaves. Recently, Drednar has become more aggressive, taking advantage of the Imperial preoccupation with the escalating Galactic Civil War.

Richardson lets us know the value of running into some pirates: it can be a change of pace between bigger adventures, it can be a result of a failed astrogation roll, it can be a way to take away some gear if players have accumulated too much money and equipment, it can get fringers in trouble with the people whose cargo they just lost, it could strand the players in deep space and force them to limp to a nearby world which may be the source of an adventure.

The encounter will involve the party's ship being pulled from hyperspace by the asteroid, which they must then avoid. They could surrender, try to flee, or fight, though there's a high difficulty associated with fleeing, and obviously no party is going to decide to surrender. If the ship is captured, they get boarded. Both damage and level of opposition throughout the encounter should be guided by party strength and the needs of the adventure; that's why Richardson offers a range of fighters available to the pirates (ten Headhunters, five Zebras, three Y-wings, and one X-wing) rather than locking in a set force. If the crew are captured, Drednar boards and will probably talk with them, taking their cargo and leaving them stranded. Drednar loves his piratical image, so he may be willing to challenge a character to a duel over a share of the cargo. He likes to duel to first blood, so characters may be able to wiggle out of some consequences that way.

The next section is on Drednar's crew. He's got a crew of two hundred, with a network of information brokers and spies who tip him off to promising targets and plenty of contacts with black market fences. Drednar himself was originally a young man seeking excitement when he shipped out on a merchant trader's crew. It turned out life aboard ship was dull. He was about ready to jump ship when they were attacked by pirates, who stole the ship's cargo. He defected to the pirates, joining the crew of Captain Karn Granzor. He learned the ways of piracy, and became enamored of the romance of the piratical life. He didn't like Granzor's dull style, however, nor the significant share of plunder he kept for himself, so Drednar organized a mutiny and jumped ship with many followers among the crew, stealing the Sable III and setting himself up as a pirate captain. He then tracked down Granzor, defeating him in a battle that scuttled Granzor's ship but allowed Drednar to seize his treasure. Currently, he's a large, handsome man with long hair, an eyepatch, and a piratical costume, who carries a blaster and cutlass. He's basically determined to pretend to be a character out of an old pirate movie.

Chillo Sanpona is a Rodian who enjoys violence and money, which makes him an enthusiastic pirate. He stole from Granzor, but Drednar persuaded Granzor to maroon him rather than execute him. Drednar, still planning his mutiny, had some friends pick Sanpona up. He ended up smuggling Sanpona back aboard Granzor's ship, where he led the effort among Drednar's allies remaining aboard to sabotage the ship during the last battle, and is supposedly the one who personally killed Granzor. He's now Drednar's first mate, though Drednar often has to restrain him from unnecessary violence. I guess he's not very Chillo, after all.

Seely is a Twi'lek dancing-girl slave who escaped and drifted around the galaxy, where she ran into Drednar and was engrossed by his buccaneering aura. She stowed aboard his ship, and when she was found, Drednar let her join the crew. She's seductive, persuasive, and dangerous, preferring to avoid fighting but with the ear of Drednar, with whom she's in love.

Tron Nixx is the pirates' navigator. He's a human from Corlass, a planet with a long history of piracy. He joined up with the pirates after a career as a navigator, putting to use his tremendous natural gift for finding a path. His navigational ability is a sign of his latent Force-sensitivity, though not even he is aware of it. Nixx also instinctively uses the Force when placing asteroids in hyperlanes, significantly increasing their chance of pulling out prey.

Also among the crew is Virtrol Devin, their security expert, who often leads boarding parties due to his ability to slice airlock hatches.

The Sable III, Drednar's ship, started its life as Anto's Star before it was stolen by his allies and modified as a pirate ship. It defeated Sable II, Granzor's ship, and some of the equipment from Sable II was salvaged and added to it. It's not as powerful as a gunship, which Granzor's ship was, but it can carry more cargo and is more versatile. It's been modified to boast a stronger hull and shields, and the front turbolasers were replaced with ion cannon and tractor beam mounts. It also has a docking bay that can hold six fighters. It usually carries five, with one spare space, and is accompanied by the hyperspace-capable fighters that don't need to dock. The others are left back at base to guard it. The ship is painted with the blazing claw pirate symbol, so it can't exactly blend in.

The pirates are based on Taraloon, an uncharted world hidden inside the Quintar Nebula, discovered by Nixx when they were fleeing an Imperial Star Destroyer. They landed in the planet's network of caves and canyons, where its subterranean ecosystem flourishes beneath the barren plateaus of the surface. Nixx found a safe route in and out, and they promptly set up a secret base, naming the planet after a Corlassi word that means buried treasure. The only wildlife of note are the Gornalaks, large predatory lizards the pirates have driven away from their base but which might bother players who are sneaking around outside it. Sanpona's also fond of hunting them to work out his aggression. The base is hidden from sensors by the nebula and the minerals around the cave it's set up in, and while the pirates have sensors of their own set up they're not reliable for the same reason. They have no defenses aside from the fighter patrols. There's a nice map of the rather extensive compound they have set up inside the extremely roomy cave network. They can build their own quarters if they want to move out of the barracks, and they even have a rec center. It's a pretty nice setup.

That's it for the article. Richardson does a very nice job of establishing a lot of interesting pieces to work with and creating a gang that could make for some compelling encounters. They're colorful and boast a lot of resources for players to go up against. I also like all the detail on their base, in case players try to hunt them down or get captured and taken back and have to escape. Richardson also has a talent for names. It's not always easy to come up with sci-fi names but Richardson's tend have a good ring to them. It's a very good piece. I'd be interested to see more from Richardson, though he only has one more article. Unfortunately, he doesn't appear to have found success in the film industry, which he's interested in according to his bio capsule in the issue. IMDB only shows him with four assistant editor credits (two of which are nineties indies, one of which is a 2001 NBC fifty-years-of-late-night special, and one of which is Whore 2. Stick around for our next installment, when we learn about Smugglers of the Outer Rim!

 

This intensely Fringe-focused issue follows up our piece on pirates with one on smugglers. Smugglers of the Outer Rim is by Doug Shuler, a WEG artist with a lot of Adventure Journal work who here both writes and illustrates this set of character profiles. It's nice to see an artist getting to branch out.

The article, set shortly post-Return of the Jedi, introduces some smuggler personalities thriving in the neglect and chaos of the Outer Rim. Our first smuggler is the unfortunately named Jin-Jin. Jin-Jin is a blocky, rugged, lightly bearded, impressively mulleted guy who would look pretty tough except for the fact that his name is Jin-Jin, which precludes him from ever being taken seriously. He was originally a TIE pilot whose career trajectory looked dim due to poor discipline and some bad luck on missions. So he decided to get out of the flying-target business by stealing a TIE Advanced and cashing in on the black market. The problem is he was caught before he even got to the fighter and had to shoot it out and escape on an impounded freighter. It turned out to be a piece of junk with a malfunctioning hyperdrive that injured him and got him lost on the jump out, so he's spent his whole smuggling career since doing small jobs to make the money to make his freighter slightly less of a piece of crap so he can do better jobs. His ship, Beggar's Solace, is okay now, but he's still pursued by bounty hunters. He actually is a pretty good pilot and maintains an optimistic attitude, and will take almost any job that has him pissing off the Empire, though he tries to avoid getting involved with criminal organizations, especially in their feuds. But he's famous in smuggler circles not for his talent, but for his consistently terrible luck. "On one occasion, he was hired to rescue a princess from Imperial captivity and later discovered that the princess was being held in her own palace. Breaking in to rescue her, he stumbled into the family's grand hall and was spotted by more than 700 of her closest relatives. Wanting to leave no witnesses to her escape, he kidnapped the entire royal family. During another incident in which he was to sneak into an Imperial garrison and plant a number of electronic bugs, he somehow managed to accidentally create a power feedback in the energy core, causing the entire base to detonate in a fiery explosion. A third occasion found Jin-Jin winning almost half a million credits in the Arenas of Mepha'as Prime, which he quickly invested in real estate. Unfortunately, the land he purchased was on the beautiful world of Alderaan a week before the Death Star arrived." This sounds like exactly the kind of guy who would have a mullet.


The diagram of Jin-Jin's Starlight-class freighter, a minor design from this obscure article that would, somehow, not only appear as one of the ships in WEG's Stock Ships sourcebook, but also, twenty years later, in Fantasy Flight's Fly Casual supplement, complete with illustration.

Our next rogue is Bora Boru. It's fairly early going but I'm willing to say Shuler has a problem with names. Bora Boru is a Bosph from Bosph. His past is mysterious, as his homeworld was catastrophically bombarded by the Empire years ago for reasons that are themselves mysterious, with speculation that it was because the Rebellion was starting up there, that it was retribution against the Bosph royal family, or that it was a response to the Bosph's philosophical and religious nature, part of a religious crackdown. Bora Boru is disappointed that he was not able to die with his people, but his hatred of the Empire manifests not as a desire for revenge, but a total disregard for the Empire. He lives his life as if it does not exist at all, this refusal to acknowledge its existence being the greatest insult to the Bosphs. Instead, he smuggles and he develops his limited Force talents, which are related to his former position as a Bosph elite. He is a Farseer, which allows him access to all Bosph philosophical teachings and grants him the right to a glyph. In Bosph society, there are no personal possessions, all things being owned in common. The exception is for elite officials, who have the right to mark anything they want with their glyph, taking it for themselves as their personal property. This system is known as "exactly how communism works in practice." One of the problems is that Bora Boru, at least, doesn't quite get that this doesn't really apply with anyone else, as he acquired his ship, Batman Forever Bosphon Forever, by sticking his glyph on someone else's ship and then killing the guy when he did not let this strange alien take his things. He's made the ship a shrine to Bosph, though he's so reclusive that almost nobody is allowed aboard. The Bosphs venerate the stars and travel, and tattoo records and maps of their travels on themselves. This means Bora Boru is a walking star chart, including valuable unmapped systems, and his astrogational expertise is key to his success. He is old, much older than his species average, and he enjoys playing the Bosphon Geddy, which I can only assume must be a Rush reference. He is slow and cautious, highly analytical, but he can also sometimes intuit a feeling about events through the Force, meaning he may often turn down a seemingly great deal or take on a long shot with total confidence that he's doing the right thing. He knows absolutely nothing about the Jedi. Despite his refusal to acknowledge the Empire, he will sometimes help those who fight it.

Josephine and Jericho are sisters, daughters of Lord James Ortell Donovan (apparently this marks the exact point at which Shuler realized he wasn't getting very far trying to make Star Wars names and just gave up), the representative to the Senate from Mindabaal, a "politically influential planet." Jericho, the older sister, was a born rebel who quickly proved too much to handle and was sent to boarding school. She kept getting kicked out until she ended up at the last resort for the worst of the worst, Mindabaal Royal Academy. There she finally fit in, because everyone was a rebel, and they weren't just goofing off -- they were committing major felonies. They weren't fighting in the hallways -- they were smuggling weapons. She finally stopped fighting the system visibly and started visibly complying while engaging in serious crime under the surface. Shortly after graduation, everybody realized that maybe she hadn't really reformed when she and several classmates stole a yacht her father was going to give to an Imperial ambassador and went pirate with it. Just maybe. Josephine, the younger sister, was a good girl, and each sister hated the other. Josephine did everything her father wanted. She excelled in the Mindabaal Diplomatic Corps and mastered such aristocratic pursuits as riding, hunting, dancing, and language. She served as a peace negotiator and Imperial liaison for her homeworld, and was being groomed to succeed her father in the Senate. She was, in short, Jello's dream girl. During peace negotiations that would have Mindabaal finally join the Empire (the "peace" suggests that it was not just an unincorporated Outer Rim world, but had at some point been actively in conflict with the Empire, though having a representative in the Senate suggests a peaceful relationship . . . perhaps a long-lasting Separatist holdout transitioning from an armistice to membership?), however, that pirates attacked the family corvette. Lord Donovan escaped, but Josephine was captured . . . by her own sister. Eventually, however, as Josephine was held by a prisoner, both sisters realized that they had the same basic goal of their homeworld's good, one seeking it through peace and position within the Empire, one seeking it by resisting Imperial oppression. When Josephine was finally allowed to call her father, however, the message couldn't go through due to a state of emergency. They rushed to the system, only to find Mindabaal had been BDZed. Now they're united by a desire to fight the Empire and determine if there's any chance their father is still alive. That doesn't mean that they're not constantly arguing about how to do it, however -- the quick, shady way, or the diplomatic way. This often turns into a competition, especially when they're both trying to use their looks to persuade a man. Though they don't really get along, they make a good team, with Jericho flying and Josephine navigating their pirate yacht. Which is usually named Jericho's Pride and sometimes named Josephine's Honor. Because everything is a competition.

The last persona is SCr-114. As the name suggests, this is a droid. He goes by the nickname Skar. He was a cleaning droid aboard a starliner until an uncharted meteor shower struck the ship. I guess the meteors somehow snuck up on it. The passengers and crew evacuated the doomed ship, but the droids were left aboard as it crashed into the mudhole world Edonaaris. Those droids that survived mostly puttered about the ship until they ran out of power, unable to make it anywhere else through the mud. Skar survived, but with his inhibitors damaged. His ethical subroutines were gone, with only survival driving his decisionmaking. When a salvage team finally arrived at the wreck, he set traps throughout the wreckage, killing the scavengers so he could take their ship and escape with a crew of droids he reprogrammed to, like himself, lack inhibitors. He is now a bounty hunter aboard his ship, Efficient, and often lures in his prey by having the droid-crewed ship pose as a powerless derelict. He's quite willing to exploit his status as a droid for his own benefit, using it to blend in and make use of expectations. He hates organics, but prefers to kill legally as a bounty hunter rather than go on a rampage that would see him hunted down. He frequently modifies himself using the facilities aboard his ship to incorporate new or different equipment and weapons as suits him.

I like this piece a lot even if only half or fewer of the characters are, properly understood, smugglers. All four are interesting characters, distinctive types who feel creative even if they're not that unusual. It helps that Shuler has a very good sense of how they can be used and fit into players' games, something that you don't always see with writers who get caught up creating an adversary or setting but forget to imbue it with something distinctive to offer to players' and GM's games. He's got sections for each character saying that hey, Jin-Jin is a good contact based on his long career as a smuggler, he can impart valuable information, but he's also going to get the characters involved in something going wrong around him. His unique flavor is the way he'll bring his loser luck down on players. Bora Boru's cryptic, Force-imbued nature makes him a good way to give characters obscure hints and a sense of the mystic, or pass on a strange artifact. He's strange and unpredictable and can warn them of danger, or take them into danger while assuring them that they're on the right track and he knows everything will turn out successfully. The sisters bring the sibling rivalry dynamic, and can possibly fight over a man in the party before abruptly picking a different one to fight over. And Skar makes a great antagonist, a bounty hunter who can be on their trail and whom they'd never suspect when they encounter him. There are a lot of fun dynamics in play here.

Next up, Patricia Jackson returns to Drake Paulsen.

 

I really like Skar. His backstory seems to be somewhat similar to 4-LOM's: Both droids started out as service units on passenger liners and went on to become independent bounty hunters. Still, he's distinctive enough to be his own character.

 

Yeah, 4-LOM's arc was more about trying to discover his personhood, whereas Skar's is about a droid released from his programming becoming casually murderous.

 

With A Bitter Winter, Patricia A. Jackson returns to Drake Paulsen after stepping away from her smuggler protagonist for The Final Exit, a seemingly one-off tale of a different smuggler encountering the Dark Jedi Adalric Brandl. Jackson won't return to Drake again until one more story in Adventure Journal 12.

We open on Tatooine, two years after our last Drake Paulsen story, which set an independent Drake out on his own after his father's death. Now seventeen, he's an up-and-coming freighter captain, working with his Wookiee partner Nikaede. Unusually, despite growing up a smuggler, Drake has avoided getting too deeply involved in the criminal underworld, and has made a name for himself working legitimate jobs as well as smuggling. Drake is waiting on Tatooine because he received through the grapevine a message stating that a friend of his father's was in trouble and he should be at these exact coordinates at this exact time. As specific as the instructions are, you'd think it could have specified what was going on. This grapevine also seems like a wildly inefficient way to get a time-sensitive message out, considering Drake arrives just in the nick of time.


Pictured: Incorrect Tatooine Drake distress message.

So he's standing there by the ship in the middle of the desert waiting when a storm blows in and up pop two Tusken Raiders who have him surrounded and . . . it turns out they're the people he's meeting, in disguise. It would have been nice to announce that before they ran the risk of getting shot. It's Tait Ransom, from last story, who got the message to him, and Toob, from the first story, who needs to be rescued. Toob, who left at the beginning of the story with the implication he was dying, is now finally dying for real. Whatever he's got, he's slowly declined to the point where Jabba was going to have him left in the desert rather than die inside his palace. Ransom managed to get Drake out there so he could take Toob away. Toob appears weak and out of it, and Drake stows him in a cabin and waits out the sandstorm.

Drake wakes up surprised to find Toob appearing hale and hearty. There's a weird, jumpy, dream-logic sort of tendency in Jackson's transitions, one that's not intentional and weakens her writing, but I don't think it's helped at all by her tendency to open scenes with Drake waking up disoriented. Toob, who is apparently Toob Ancher, Karl's brother, despite the first story never having hinted at this, tells Drake to head to Redcap, where he has a big spice shipment lined up. He also passes Drake a gift -- his father's old military ID tags. Drake is shocked to see that his father was a colonel in the Black Bha'lir, whatever that was, and he could outfly a TIE drunk. Toob's profile says he and Karl were part of the Corellian militia that the Empire cracked down on, but I'm not sure if that's the same thing. The timeline doesn't seem to match up. But apparently Toob and Karl went into smuggling only after the Empire broke up the militia, at which point they spent "decades" hellraising with all kinds of major criminal schemes. There's a lot to unpack here. What Corellian militia? Is this a Clone Wars thing? Corellian Separatists creating a volunteer militia? Or is "decades" really accurate and it was actually the Old Republic cracking down on some kind of Corellian militia movement? I feel like this is something Abel should have addressed somewhere. Anyway, Toob was too reckless and broke up with Karl, going off to do his own thing, but remaining one of Kaine's key mentors, blah blah blah. Toob passes out at the end of the scene; he's not as healthy as he briefly seemed.

We cut to Drake riding a mountain-goat-horse thing up a canyon on Recap, reflecting back on a spill he took earlier; this is part of the jumpy dream logic thing I was talking about. The previous scene ended with Toob waking up and promising to tell Drake about his father's history; we never see that. Most civilization, such as there is on a planet with a population smaller than Naperville, Illinois, is in the mountains, since the surface is all mud flats. He heads to the home of Fahs, a retired Issori smuggler who represents the billionth old father figure in Drake's life. Yes, Issori. This story originates a species that would end up most broadly known as that of Khe-Jeen Slee, the extra with the weird reproductive methods in Isard's Revenge. Fahs's story is actually a rather sad one: scion of a family of diplomats and officials, he left that life behind to pursue adventure among the stars, only to wind up toiling as a miner in brutal conditions across the galaxy. Toob saw him win a gunfight with his sonar-like senses and took him on as his first mate, where he served for over a decade before deciding to try his hand at mining again on Redcap. When the mines ran out, he was stuck on the planet, dreaming of being a smuggler again but without the means to do so and not really being willing to get back into that life.

Fahs explains Toob's condition (nothing can explain that stupid name): he's got an illness known as bitter winter. Or in Old Corellian, brekken vinthern, demonstrating Jackson's talent for making up a language by just making words slightly different. It appears to result from radiation exposure, and makes the sufferer delusional and aggressive. Sometimes weak, sometimes deceptively hearty, but increasingly losing his grip on reality, confusing present and past and sometimes getting violently confused. There is nothing that can be done for him, says Fahs, except to make sure that, when it finally comes to it, make sure it's Drake killing him and not a stranger. Because apparently that's meaningful? And if that's your theory, why not just kill him now, instead of letting him wander around and get violent and delusional with people? Or at least, you know, restrain him? Instead of just being like, "Hey, let's let the violent sick guy wander around semi-delusionally until finally his violent delusions catch up with him and you're forced to gun him down before someone else does or he kills you." Fahs also introduces Drake to Lieutenant Noble Calder, an Imperial pilot for the local ship, this barely-populated, worthless mudball somehow rating a Star Galleon and two Assault Gunboats. Despite being an Imperial, Calder is a good sort, a live-and-let-live young man who seems happy to be buddies with smugglers. That's the nice way of describing what could also be called disloyalty, corruption, and incompetence.

Drake wakes up in the middle of the night and runs outside only to see a Rodian drunk-driving a landspeeder, continuing Jackson's trend of having Drake wake up to things that make little narrative sense. In the back are Toob and Saylor Marjan, the old underworld contact Toob said was working the spice deal, and who Fahs just said in the last scene hasn't spoken with Toob for twenty years and the whole spice thing was just a delusion of the disease. Yet here Sailor Margarine is, riding around with Toob and talking about a deal. The Final Exit was the best-written short story in the whole Adventure Journal so far, but I have to say Jackson is reverting back to form here -- good ideas and bizarrely choppy and unclear execution. Drake gets his critter, the olai, and heads off to see if he can take a shorter route across the canyon and cut off the speeder before they get to the bar and retrieve Toob.

Drake does not cut them off. In fact, he comes up on the bar to find a blaster fight in progress, with Toob and Marjan shooting at stormtroopers. There is no indication how this fight started or what stormtroopers are doing on this nowhere world, and there never will be. Drake rescues Toob by riding his olai into the middle of the firefight, snatching Toob, and riding off, leaving the stormtroopers stuck in the mud behind him. And also apparently leaving Marjan to die, because screw him, he doesn't know that guy. He just knows the guy who's already dying anyway. He gets just far enough away before the olai bucks and falls, breaking its legs. Toob tells Drake to put the olai out of her misery in a scene with obvious symbolic import. Showing little apparent concern for the Imperials catching up to them, they walk off toward Drake's ship. They get there, and Toob immediately gears up, raring to go back out and finish the fight with those stormtroopers, but also demonstrates plenty of confusion about the past, who's still alive and dead, what the fight was about, and finally what he's even going to do. He then gets confused about who Drake is, and gets aggressive, pulling a blaster as he cycles through various ideas about who Drake is and what's happening. He shoots, and Drake dodges around and wrestles a bit before Toob calms down and recognizes him. In a running theme, Drake feels a bit confused and childish around this paternal figure from his childhood, and doesn't assert himself, just letting Toob go to bed rather than taking control of the situation.

Drake wakes up, like at the beginning of almost every scene, to a comm call from Fahs, who urgently demands that Drake do something about the fact that Toob has once more wandered off in the night and taken a Headhunter. Drake fires up the ship and scans for him, finding him attacking the Star Galleon. Drake decides to fly up and try to rescue a delusional guy in a fighter from a capital ship and an Assault Gunboat escort, and gets there remarkably quickly. He slips in behind the Headhunter to cover him from the Assault Gunboats and sends an open broadcast telling Toob to knock it off. He doesn't, and Calder, flying one of the Gunboats, tells Drake to knock it off and get out of there. There's nothing he can do for Toob except get himself killed too. Sick or not, the Empire's not going to let him attack its ships, kill its men, and then go, "Oh, you were delusional, okay, just go home." Drake finally shoots to disable Toob's engines, stopping him from wreaking any more havoc. But that still can't save his life. Calder gives Drake a choice: either Drake can kill Toob, or Calder can. It's the only latitude Calder can give. Toob, totally out of it, starts trying to open his fighter's canopy, despite the fact that he's not in a spacesuit. Drake takes the guns, and, as Toob hallucinates back to the death of the crippled olai, puts him out of his misery. I guess it's supposed to be better if it's someone he knows pulling the trigger.

Back on Redcap, a sad Drake and Fahs stand at the Glory, Toob's old ship that he retired on Redcap when he began his decline. Fahs talks about how Toob ran a 20.5-parsec Kessel Run in her, back when that was considered fast. Fahs would like to see her taken back to Karl as a memento of his brother, but Drake isn't willing to visit home yet. Instead, Fahs decides to leave his sad retirement behind and visit Socorro for the first time, taking off in the old ship as Drake departs in his ship of the future . . . and decides to make the Kessel Run himself, just to see what he's got.

There's also an Adventure Idea in which a crime boss hires you to retrieve a debtor for him. The debtor is hiding out on Redcap, where the Imperials are chasing him for stealing a shipment of spice. You've got to rescue the guy from the Imperials, retrieve the shipment, and help the guy deliver it so he can get the money to pay off the crime boss.

Jackson has some interesting ideas, taking Drake through this sort of melancholy odyssey with Space Alzheimer's. There are some really powerful ideas behind that, in Drake's feelings of childish helplessness before an old authority figure, in his struggle to come to terms with the fact that the old man is dying, and he really isn't all there anymore. The problem is that Jackson struggles to put a coherent story in service to those ideas, and it also largely thematically rehashes the last story's ground of Drake maturing and coming of age through loss. I'm also a little sick of the approximately forty-five thousand substitute paternal/avuncular figures Drake has in his life every story. Jackson has some clear fixations with this character. Seriously I count six actual figures in the same dad/dad's avuncular old friend role across three stories. Jackson has a lot of potential, and I really like the idea of Drake Paulsen, with this sort of young smuggler's coming-of-age story arc, but she's struggling to unlock it with this character. I'm not totally surprised that she sort of drifted away from the character. Up next, we have yet another solitaire adventure.

 

Bless you, Hav. Bless you.

I think you've finally captured in words one of the main reasons I've never really taken to Jackson's stories, despite her having some rather good ideas.

I don't get this idea either, but I've certainly heard it a lot. It's the Old Yeller principle, the idea that putting down your own rabid dog instead of letting someone else do it is somehow both a sign of one's love, and of one's own burgeoning maturity. That certainly fits with the theme of the story.

And I think this touches on the other main reason I haven't taken to her stories: her stories often drift into some very downbeat, melancholy territory in a way that doesn't appeal to me.

 

There's a certain sense that she seems to share with Barbara Hambly, of having intriguing ideas and themes that get bogged down in prose that, for some hard-to-define reason, has a certain dreamlike, disconnected, hard-to-follow quality.

I get the idea that, if you have to spend your last moments with someone else putting you out of your misery, better a friend than a stranger, and I get the idea of taking responsibility for your own problem (rather than hoping the Empire will kill him for you), but the idea that if you're going to get gunned down amidst a crazed violence spree, better it's someone you know being forced to pull the trigger on you while you're too out of it to even know what's happening, versus someone else doing the exact same thing . . . the logic breaks down. You're burdening the survivor without the gesture having any actual meaning to the dead person.