Lit We Hav to Go on an Adventure with Jello

Is that a dance, or a dry heave set to music?

 

Another reason to be glad I never tried to read Hambly's novels.

I think burdening the survivor is supposed to be it's own moral reward or something. I can easily imagine, if Drake was Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame, one of the myriad fringe paternal/avuncular figures we've met would be telling Drake/Calvin that killing Toob builds character.

 

What if if we gave him a hair metal haircut, one of the Cat's suits and filled his YT-1300 with potted plants? That's definitely not Han.

 

Ah, so this is the WEG thread!
Anyhow, I liked the guide, but annoyingly, it lacks stats for Bor Gullet.

 

Available now, Indiana Jones and the Tomb of the Templars is the first collection of adventures and source material for West End Games' Indiana Jones line. The title adventure is a race for Templar treasure, but the book also includes Indiana Jones and the Druids' Curse and Indiana Jones and the Sword in the Stone. They're going very European medieval here. So that's your update in the world of new advertisements.

After the ad, we have Crimson Jailbreak, yet another of everyone's favorite features, the solitaire adventures. Previous solitaire adventures cycled between assuming the use of a premade character and offering one but not requiring its use. In no case, however, did the nature of the premade character particularly impact the storytelling of the solitaire adventure. Which is a bit of a disappointment when Schweighofer created a character as interesting as Lady Selnia Harbright and then didn't get anything out of it. Here, however, the entire story is informed by the fact that your premade character is . . . a protocol droid. If you don't want to use him, make up another protocol droid character. But you're going to be a protocol droid whether you like it or not. This isn't just another generic fringer/Rebel type. Peter Schweighofer, opening up your horizons whether you want them opened up or not.

U-THR is your character. His nickname is Uthre, for some reason, and not Uther. He probably does not have a droid son named R-THR. He's a 3PO model who prefers not to break the rules, which is complicated by the fact that his owner Mistress Crimson (which sounds like the working name of a dominatrix) is a smuggler. His programming prevents him from injuring others.

The story begins as Crimson and Uthre land on Byblos. Byblos, an industrial world, has a massive population, housed mostly in vast city towers, interconnected hollow-centered towers up to five thousand levels high. You stay on the ship while Crimson offloads the cargo, only for her to be arrested by stormtroopers. You start off with options to figure out what to do -- consult your own memory banks on Byblos, consult the ship's computer, or ask the docking bay technician where the troopers have taken Crimson. It all ends up feeding back into realizing they've probably taken her to the Imperial Customs office.

You find your way there, where she's being questioned. Uthre apparently knows enough to not just try to talk his problems out, so you've got to figure out a diversion to help break her out of custody. You roll to figure out if you can come up with one. A bad roll gets you reprogramming a binary load lifter to barge into the office. Which comes with its own bad rolls that foil the plan as it wanders off in the wrong direction, funneling you back toward the better plan. If you succeed at reprogramming it, though, the rescue attempt works, with the distraction allowing Crimson to grab the keys, unlock her binders, and escape. But in the process, rather than just run out, she grabs a blaster and starts shooting, leaving you in the crossfire. If you roll badly, you get shot and deactivated. If you can make it back to the ship, you find it's locked up and impounded. You can try to work the computer, either failing and ending up imprisoned, or succeeding and escaping.

The better plan, which you can get to through a good roll in coming up with your initial plan or get funneled into via bad rolls in the initial stages of the load lifter plan, is to piss off a rude Rodian you asked directions from and lure him into the office as a distraction. I'm not sure what makes this a better plan, but it takes a better roll to come up with it. If you fail your roll to insult him, your insult is so strong that the Rodian just whips out a blaster and blows you apart, which has got to be the best ending to the adventure. A good roll has you walking back to the customs office, insulting him along the way, baiting the angry Rodian into following, waving a blaster. He takes a potshot; failure to dodge results in death. Dodging results in you making it to the office, where you exclaim that there's an angry Rodian shooting out in the crowd. The stormtroopers rush out, and the escape goes off much as happens the other way, with you bumping into the last stormtrooper, Crimson freeing herself, and getting into a shootout. This time there aren't as many people shooting back, though, and since you already had to dodge shots you don't get called on to dodge the crossfire. You haul ass to the sealed blast doors, which puts you back on the same track as the other option, as far as trying to override the seal through the computer, either by overriding the controls or by removing the impounded status.

As far as solitaire adventures go, I still don't care for their inclusion but at least this feels like something different. A protocol droid protagonist makes an interesting change of pace, and Byblos is a cool setting to introduce, and could maybe give people some ideas about taking their own campaign there. Next up, we'll tackle a piece reporting on a Skywalker Ranch Star Wars summit and the exciting doings there (hint: prequels and Special Editions), as well as Smuggler's Log.

 

Byblos is a good setting. We had some interesting encounters with the subculture that lives in the access spaces between floors. Lots of opportunities there for extralegal and black market action.

 

Star Wars Summit is the unimaginatively-titled piece tackling a big Star Wars meeting at Skywalker Ranch. This is a new type of piece for the Adventure Journal, reporting on real-life events with the license. West End Games vice president Richard Hawran writes up a hype-filled piece dishing on the developments in this big two-day meeting held for all the Star Wars licensees. His writing style is actually really annoying, all fake-stream-of-consciousness fanboy hype. But the important takeaway here is that WEG's letting you know about Star Wars's big plans for the nineties. By which I mean the prequels, the special editions, and Shadows of the Empire.

Hawran buries the big news behind a bunch of gushing about how excited he was to be there: Lucas has begun writing scripts for "the next three movies." Which we know are the prequels, but Hawran actually doesn't specify here that it will be the first three episodes. Everyone's presumed to already understand that's what it means. Fandom's plugged in to that extent at least. Intriguingly, he says they'll be shot concurrently and the first one will come out in 1998 -- not, as has been rumored, 1997. Obviously none of that quite worked out. The Phantom Menace came out a year later than that, and Lucas never had the scripts for the next two movies ready, let alone have things ready to shoot them at the same time, Lord of the Rings-style. Clearly Lucas's ambitions were greater than his ability to execute. The idea of shooting them at the same time, however, suggests that at this stage (the meeting was held in late 1994), Lucas may not have been planning on the ten-year jump. Maybe he was going to have people running around, playing wildly differing ages from day to day, acting off different Anakins, but I kind of doubt it. We do get the usual note that Lucas claimed he waited so long because he was waiting for the technology to realize his vision, and Jurassic Park proved to him CGI was ready. You know, I'd really like to see a version of the prequels made by Lucas immediately after ROTJ, with technology that was plenty good enough for his purposes.

From there, Hawran moves on to talking about how there's so much stuff about to come out. The real meat of the meeting sounds like it was about the nitty-gritty marketing details of getting all the licensees to understand the big plans for a Star Wars merchandising push, to familiarize everyone with what's coming out through 1997. Books and comics, toys, a bunch of different kinds of collectibles, Shadows of the Empire (which is just mentioned offhand like everyone in early 1995 knows exactly what that is -- was the promotional push going that early, or is Hawran simply assuming intimate fan familiarity with every rumor and pre-release announcement flying around the fan community? He expands on it later, but here's it's just like, "Yeah, you know what I'm talking about"). Oh, and there's going to be a theatrical re-release with added footage. Yet again, Hawran loves to bury the lede.

He actually does lead off the section on the new footage (even the prequels didn't get their own header-marked section!) by emphasizing that you need to buy a copy of the original films now because after 1996, there are only going to be versions with the new footage, which, with hindsight, appears the most prescient segment here, and the most important takeaway). See, Lucas is going to add footage of things he couldn't do with technology back in the day (in hindsight, it's kind of striking how utterly irrelevant all the things he chose to add are, with the exception of the Jabba scene and changing who shoots first). The only one discussed was the Jabba scene. A scene with Jabba! In the first movie! There wasn't the technology to do a moving Jabba then, but there is now, and he's seen a snippet and it looks great! The most interesting point here is that Hawran doesn't write this as an announcement of the special editions. That is to say, he's not announcing a revision of the entire original trilogy. Everything is specifically stated as a re-release of the "original film," singular, with added footage. Nothing is said about new versions of the other movies. Apparently Lucas didn't think of redoing the sequels until later; originally it was just that non-moving dewback that was really bothering him all these years, or something.

Also lumped into the new footage section for some reason is Shadows of the Empire. It's a boo, yes. But it will be "supported by" a comic book, a WEG sourcebook and campaign setting, and a bunch of other stuff. "It's going to be hot!" It also, in one of the odder but not inaccurate summaries, is stated to be about "Palpatine, Luke, and the 'godfather' of the underworld" between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. I can't imagine people making much sense out of that summary. What's Luke doing with Palpatine?

We also get announcements on The Art of Star Wars coming to San Francisco with a bunch of props, and a 1997 exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum celebrating twenty years of Star Wars. Also in 1997: The First National Star Wars Collectors Convention, held at Disney World. Is this a thing that actually happened? I can't find any trace of it online; it may not have had that name when it happened. Are we talking about what became Star Wars Weekends?

Then he goes on for a while about the continental breakfast and how huge the Skywalker Ranch theater is. And they got to watch Wow!, a terribly-named bunch of clips from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and freaking Willow edited together as some kind of demo reel for people who buy a THX home sound system. It made him cry. Then there were people in Imperial and Vader costumes and yet more presentations. Fox had a "hilarious" bit where they shot scenes with their head of marketing dressed as Luke and spliced them into Star Wars. "What a trip!" Also between presentations they ran clips of Star Wars parodies and interviews with Star Wars nuts. Then Lucas stopped by with Threepio and Artoo! Then they went to a replica of the cantina with the actual alien costumes and a landspeeder! Then they got gift bags. "It was a most enjoyable day!" The next day was dedicated to discussion groups on working together to create "an even more consistent universe," which sounds valuable and interesting. Then they went through the archive of all the Star Wars props and everything. It's ridiculously easy to impress people when you're LFL. The curator of the archives specifically told Hawran that they had given the WEG writeups on all the cantina characters to the actors hired to play the cantina aliens the night before, so they could get in character, and repeated that the WEG material was the "bible" for everyone working on Star Wars. Impressive to hear from that high up.

So, yeah, Hawran's a bit of a goof and makes it easy and fun to rag on him, but it's a very interesting piece to read, a look behind the scenes of how the licensees were operating in the heady atmosphere of the nineties, with a lot of little hints and how things developed behind the scenes. I'm especially interested by the discussion of greater coordination.

This issue's Smuggler's Log is a bit of a grab bag. Platt was rummaging around in her computer and found a random bunch of files. Most of them were not that interesting ("a services directory for all 4,527 luxury hotels on Spira . . . 30 years ago"), but there is a misfiled bit of data on Criton's Point and two more Imperial Customs officers. It feels kind of like once Schweighofer realized he was going to have to rerun the Criton's Point piece somewhere, he decided to just stick it in Smuggler's Log along with some cut content from the second issue's Smuggler's Log and call it a day.

The Criton's Point entry completes a profile from the Pentastar Alignment article that was truncated in issue three. I won't repeat the whole thing, even though it's pretty short, except to remind you that Criton's Point is an ancient world of mysterious ruins and the fabled Library of Xer. The part left out is that the library is speculated to predate the Republic, and its texts remain untranslated. There's also a planetary sidebar that specifies that access is forbidden by the Pentastar Alignment, with only a small scientific team currently digging around the library.

In a radically different topic, Lieutenant Borvil Mish is an impressively side-whiskered fellow who's much too old to be a lieutenant. He works in Byblos Tower 214, which we've just visited. He's very energetic and makes a point of vigorously inspecting random crates. He's very sensitive about his short stature, and short jokes will get you written up for failure to cooperate with Customs. He also likes to eat. If he discovers edible cargo during his inspections, he'll insist on sampling it. He doesn't take cash . . . but he does take bribes in food. Platt's notes point out that if you get him to sample some food, he'll usually get distracted and leave the rest of your cargo alone. Even better, if it's the right time of day just offer him a meal and he probably won't get around to inspecting anything.

Lieutenant Chalden Smethwile is a haughty inspector on Kelada. He enjoys haranguing spacers on their vagrant lifestyle and often cites people for obscure violations. He's insulting, arrogant, and brandishes a crop. He also cannot be bribed. Trying will just get you arrested. The thing, Platt says, is that he's incompetent. He claims to have all the customs laws memorized, but while he might be ready with some obscure citations, he usually fails to notice violations. He's too busy chewing people out to actually do a decent job of inspections. Sometimes, in fact, he'll get so caught up lecturing people that he forgets to even visit the cargo bay. He's supposedly the scion of a noble family who wanted to make a fortune as a starfarer, but here he is, taking his frustrations out on everybody else.

A decent piece, even if it doesn't exactly hang together, with two of one thing and one of something completely different. All the entries are short, but not bad. Next, we'll have Wind Raiders of Taloraan, an article that would prove weirdly influential in some ways.

 

Wind Raiders of Taloraan is a piece that would have an unexpected shelf life. It introduces Taloraan, which Rogue Squadron would steal for use as a pseudo-Bespin setting, yet another obscure location pulled from the Adventure Journal. And the Wind Raiders themselves would be the subject of John Ostrander's digest graphic novel The Clone Wars: The Wind Raiders of Taloraan, in which Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Ahsoka team up with the locals against the Separatists.

The adventure begins with your Rebel characters stuck working in Ordnance and Supply. Captain Eedan decides you're being wasted there, though, and sends you on a mission into the field to obtain some tibanna gas. The Empire has been cornering commercial sources of tibanna, and the black market running through Cloud City has been shut down now that the Empire has occupied it. I'm not really sure it makes sense for the Rebellion to have been buying all its tibanna through Cloud City. So now that they can't get tibanna at all, the Rebellion is going prospecting for it itself, visiting likely gas giants to look for some tibanna. To make this make more sense, and since Eedan's speech refers to "us" and not the entire Rebellion, I'm going to say this is just the Rebel cell in this sector that can't get tibanna anymore, because the Rebellion being unable to get tibanna anywhere in the entire galaxy is ridiculous. Also the idea that Taloraan has to be prospected doesn't fit with its depiction as an actively mined tibanna gas source in Rogue Squadron.

You're given an incredibly old YT-700 prospecting ship called the Jackpot. You're to proceed through several locations before you hit Taloraan, all without results. Author James Cambias suggests that the GM should have something for his players on each world, but doesn't suggest anything that could happen in Lequabis, K'taktaxka, or Poviduze systems, or the Shasfath Cluster. On arriving at Taloraan, you find to your surprise that it's teeming with life. Oxygen-creating sky algae, balloon creatures eating the algae, and flying predators eating the balloons. Your ship is disabled in a lightning storm, but saved from plummeting into the core by blimps made out of sky whales, basically -- gondolas slung under floating creatures. The natives grapple the ship long enough for you to climb up your ropes before the ship plummets away. The leader of the wrapped-up natives turns out to be a human who speaks old-fashioned Basic. He's Laspevar, leader of the Denfrandi. They live in these gondolas slung from sleft-chuffni, and swing between them using grapples. Laspevar says that another ship came recently and gave them gifts, but then traveled to the Wind Raiders, who killed him and stole the ship.

Having been introduced, the Wind Raiders then attack.They ride fleft-wauf, big flying carnivores, and are armed with harpoons. They may capture one or more of the party to show them how to use the ship. You fight off the raiding party -- Cambias doesn't really set a scene -- and return to the main Denfrandi tribe. They appear to be the descendants of marooned crews likewise stranded on the planet, who somehow managed to land on a sleft-chuffni or something and tame it and survive on a planet with no freaking land. Their uncontacted Stone Age culture likewise doesn't jive with having been contacted by the Separatists and Republic just a generation ago, either. This is the danger of picking settings from the Holocron, I feel -- you get told, "Oh, here's a Bespin analogue, and they've got these cultures," but there's no note saying they're not contacted until 3 ABY. It's a list of things, not a thorough description in context.

You need this captured ship to escape, unless you want to spend the rest of your life hanging underneath sky whales. But the Denfrandi want no part of attacking the Wind Raiders. You need to convince them that the Wind Raiders will never stop preying on them unless they fight back. So, yeah, convince this peaceful tribe to assault a superior force of warriors so you can abandon their planet. An old Denfrandi picks up on this and they end up insisting that you prove yourself and become a member of the tribe before they'll go to war for you. You must pass the initiation rite of catching and taming a juvenile sleft-chuff. You do that by roping and riding it. If you fall off, maybe a lurking Wind Raider will catch you, though the rest of the party will think that character is dead. Assuming anyone actually hasn't been captured by Wind Raiders at this point, you head off to attack the Wind Raiders now that you're part of the gang.

The Wind Raiders used to be just a peaceful tribe of hunters to the Denfrandi's more gathering-based society. But recently Genogri, their chief, realized they had the capacity to be warriors who could terrorize the other tribes, and they've become basically a gang of bandits. They actually live inside a giant gasbag critter called the island-beast. The ship is tied down inside their camp. No word on how the island-beast is so buoyant as to stay floating with a huge chunk of dozens of tons of metal sitting inside it. Either you can mount a direct assault on the island-beast, which is a bit foolish, or try to sneak onto it, defeating or avoiding the Wind Raider patrols, and stealing the ship. You could also try to get in and negotiate with the Wind Raiders, some of the older members being dissatisfied with Genogri, but that's a bit of a foolish risk to take. Since the island-beast is full of flammable gas, you can't shoot blasters inside it. Genogri has a captured blaster from the scout ship, but he doesn't know about flammability, so there's the danger of him taking potshots if you're caught trying to steal it.

The next paragraph says you won and are about to leave. Cambias . . . really doesn't give you a lot to work with. He's very much, "Here's a very general challenge. You overcome it." He doesn't give a lot of ideas of how you might overcome it, or throw you some details to bring the scenario to life. It's very abstracted and general. Anyway, now that you've got the ship, its sensor logs show a deposit of tibanna gas that you should be able to get at with the continued assistance of the Denfrandi. Assuming they didn't all die attacking the Wind Raiders head-on for you, you heartless bastard. Cambias then specifies that though he gave the adventure a fairly specific setting and context, it can be modified to allow you to play it at any time. You can stumble into Taloraan's atmosphere fleeing enemies, you can go prospecting as a fringer, you might chase the scout ship's distress signal. In the future, you might return to set up the mining platform, or the Empire might arm the Wind Raiders to attack the Rebel operation. In the New Republic era, maybe pirates set up an operation there. You get the picture.

It's worth talking a bit specifically about how Wind Raiders of Taloraan lines up with . . . The Wind Raiders of Taloraan. The comic is pretty specific about using the creatures and names from the adventure, replicating their look, and even name-checking the island-beast, and replicates the division between sedentary Denfrandi and predatory Wind Raiders . . . but it completely sacrifices the social dynamics. The Denfrandi here are technology-using tibanna miners, with the Wind Raiders being those who have refused to readopt technology after contact. It makes sense with the depiction of active tibanna mining in Rogue Squadron that there would have to be a technologically capable population, but it makes a hash of the adventure's depiction of uncontacted primitive tribes. If offworlders were mining while the Denfrandi lurked on the other side of the planet uncontacted, that would be one thing, but applying the Denfrandi label to the city-dwellers makes a real headache. Maybe some Denfrandi tribes lurk uncontacted? Anyway, it's kind of interesting that, with the Wind Raiders as villains here, the comic has the Wind Raiders as Republic allies, and the Denfrandi, who were in contact with the Separatists, are here Rebel allies. I'd like to make a neat observation about a source actually lining up Separatists with the Rebellion and not the Empire for once, but the truth is that the comic has the Denfrandi duped by their duplicitous leader, and both they and the Wind Raiders team up against the Separatists in the end. Still, the whole thing, including Rogue Squadron's tibanna mining operation on an unexplored planet, is a good illustration of the perils of referencing stuff based on looking up one or two facts and not maintaining the whole context.

Overall, I'm not impressed with Cambias. His adventures have shown a pattern of having some creative ideas, but never giving the GM and players enough to work with. He doesn't set up a really strong storyline or set a scene well. This feels like the bare bones of an adventure that's depending on the GM to really turn it into anything. It's really not a surprise that Schweighofer is having such a hard time filling his pages with adventures. It's hard to get good quality adventures.

Up next, now that her storyline has started moving, Charlene Newcomb steps back to give us a prequel story.

 

With last issue moving the Alex Winger plot forward, Charlene Newcomb takes a breather with Turning Point, a prequel story telling us of how Dair Haslip became a rebel, and dedicated to the principle that every single person in these stories is old friends with everyone else, and no story is allowed to take place without somebody traipsing through the mountains around the goddamn mines and running into scout troopers. It's got an interesting placement, coming two-thirds of the way into the issue, much farther back than Schweighofer is accustomed to placing Newcomb's short stories. This issue is a break from the usual in layout in general; Schweighofer's pretty good about spreading the quality material out throughout an issue, leading with feature attractions like the NewsNets and his ongoing short story series and then spacing out the highlights throughout the issue alongside the weaker stuff. This issue, Schweighofer frontloads a lot of untested and less-exciting material and buries his star attractions in the middle-back of the issue. Normally, you'd have Newcomb and Jackson hooking people up front, and the alternative starship sourcefiles sandwiched between more exciting stuff like a new author's short story throughout the issue. This time, he leads off with an unproven author's story and a bunch of dry sourcefiles, and saves all the flashy stuff for the end. Just very unusual arrangement for Schweighofer.

Being a prequel story, we get a nice little sidebar on the Garosian conflict. It doubles down on Garos's isolation -- only four days from Coruscant (implicitly nearby) but difficult to reach thanks to the Nyarikan Nebula, it's had a mostly isolated existence, trading with Sundari, an arid mining colony. Massive Sundar immigration, however, raised conflicts due to economic competition, which finally erupted into civil war when a prominent anti-Sundar businessman and twenty-four others were killed in a grain processing facility explosion. The explosion was accidental, but many Garosians believed it deliberate and the war began. It's a pretty ugly history for Newcomb's pet planet. Sundar Tionthes Turi and Garosian Assistant Minister of Defense Tork Winger were able to negotiate a truce while peace negotiations proceeded, but isolated incidents continued to take place, and some Garosians worked against peace. Winger now has the Empire's backing in enforcing a final peace. Winger was injured in the attack that killed his friend West Haslip, a businessman and peace promoter.

We open with West's son Dair Haslip brooding in the moonlight over the fact that he's going to leave for Raithal Academy, but his friend Jos Mayda won't be able to go with him the way they'd always planned, because his father Desto (previously seen as a resistance leader) has been accused of treason and gone into hiding as a member of the anti-Imperial underground. He's approached by Assistant Minister of Commerce Magir Paca (also a known future rebel) in a scene that serves mainly to establish that Paca exists, literally everyone knows everyone, and allow them to converse about all the stuff I just mentioned. There are rumors that Tork is about to be installed as the first Imperial governor of the planet as the Empire takes a more active hand on the world and perhaps enforces a peace. It has recently bought up the mines, sold by Dair's grandmother Keriin. So Dair was the heir to the frigging mines. Always with the frigging mines. Anyway, Senior Lieutenant Brandei (still with the Judicator, jeez) has arrived and asked Tork and Sali Winger to meet him, so the Wingers take the Haslips with because they were going to hang out that night.

They go to the med center, where Brandei gives Tork and Sali a little girl. Yes, it's that weird. Apparently he's really good friends with the Wingers and knows they want a kid, so when they dug a Rebel kid out of the rubble after a raid, he was like, "Oh, I know somebody to give this kid to!" Dair and the ladies go in to see the injured girl, who hasn't spoken yet. With her is Lieutenant Chanceller, the officer who saved the kid and now won't leave her, who mentions that, to his disgust, she was injured not in a Rebel attack, but an Imperial raid searching for Rebels, who weren't actually there even though the Empire ended up leveling half the city. Idealistic Dair is shocked, shocked, that the Empire could have caused civilian casualties in the course of an attack, much less actually done a bad thing.

Then we get Dair and Jos walking in the mountains near the mines, which are the Empire's now, and are patrolled by the omnipresent scout troopers. They know this is a bad idea but are doing it anyway, because they are dumb and because this is a Charlene Newcomb story and it needs desperately to have mine-related mountain scout trooper action. They're just hanging out, watching the scout troopers go around, maybe searching for that Lieutenant Chanceller who deserted (obviously our friend Chance from prior stories), crying over being abandoned by daddy Desto, when some troopers come up on them. So, like idiots, which they definitely are, they run. Dair hides, but reemerges when shots are fired, and finds the troopers standing over Jos, who, like an idiot, attacks them when they try to arrest him. He gets shot while fleeing, so Dair grabs a rifle and shoots the two troopers. Dair is sad, and disillusioned with the Empire now, but honestly it's all his moron friend's fault.

He talks with his grandmother, the mining tycoon who sold her mines because she thought the Empire really wasn't going to give her a choice, and who doesn't like the Empire because she suspects it was somehow behind her son's death despite the fact that there is absolutely no motivation given for the Empire to want him dead, and actual motivation exists for the Sundar radicals who are credited with the act. In their conversation, Dair admits what happened, and granny finally lets him in on the fact that she doesn't like the Empire. She was going to let him join it, because he's got to make his own decisions, but she doesn't like it. It's not the force for good he thinks it is. In fact, she's one of the underground, the anti-Imperial resistance. She takes him to a meeting. Desto Mayda is there. So, shockingly, is Magir Paca. So's ex-radical Sundar leader Camron Gelorik, convinced by Paca's outreach efforts that the Empire is the true enemy. They accept him among their ranks, but insist that he still go to Raithal. They want him to join the Empire, to work from inside to work minor acts of sabotage, and to request a transfer back to Garos after a few years and be their man. Dair agrees to this rather hare-brained scheme.


Future couple. This is not how relationship backstory should work.

Some months later, it's finally time for Dair to leave. Tork has been made governor, and the Empire has forced a peace, killing radicals on both sides, though Tork stood as a voice of moderation on the Empire's policy and Dair still admires "Uncle Tork." They talk, and then Dair says goodbye to their little girl Alexandra, whom he's been playing card games with. He laughs and jokes with her, as you do with little girls, and says she may be all grown up next time he sees her. None of this is a good backstory for people with sexual tension in the current timeline.

There are some Adventure Ideas but they're standard "the underground wants you to do an underground thing" and frankly not worth your time. As for the story, it's nice to have some backstory filled in. It's a neat use of the short story format to be able to jump back and do that. But as far as tales of disillusionment go, it's pretty trite. I've had it up to here with people fighting the Empire because they're totally for it right up until somebody they know gets killed by it and then they suddenly realize it's evil. And this is an even more clumsily executed play on that theme than usual, given there's no great insidious evil revealed, just . . . civilian casualties in war and a stupid guy trespassing and getting himself killed through his own aggressive idiocy. It's not exactly genocide or slavery or something getting revealed here. All the civil war backstory and political conflict is interesting, but it's in the background, and there's absolutely nothing interesting about Dair's trite, undermotivated flip from starry-eyed idealist to anti-Imperial so motivated he's willing to commit to a massively hazardous long-term undercover career on little more than a whim and a hope of a transfer to this planet, of all the galaxy's millions, someday. Oh well. I'm still looking forward to getting back to the main story.

Following this are our inaugural Journal Classifeds.

THE DARK​

NEXUS BBS​

Over 50 megs of Star Wars​

files (918) 254-8069​

Tulsa, Oklahoma​

​

Wow, fifty megs! Let me dial in right now!​

​

THE EMPIRE
WANTS YOU!
We are a fan club for those
interested in the Empire of
the Star Wars saga. For more
information, send a SASE
to:
The Galactic Empire, 8306
Wilshire Blvd., Suite 7007,
Beverly Hills, CA 90211.

Jello, is that you? The best part is that you get to address your self-addressed stamped envelope to "The Galactic Empire." Jello, if only you'd known the Galactic Empire could be found right there on Wilshire all along.

And finally, we have a Fragments from the Mind's Eye before our next article, on Zirtran's Anchor. This Pablo Hidalgo cartoon is labeled "When AT-AT pilots get bored . . ." and depicts an AT-AT squishing probe droids with its feet. I guess it's supposed to be funny.

 

Maybe it would be less awkward if Alex asked Dair if he was an angel.

​

​

On a 14.4 modem like you'd probably have at the time this came out, your phone would be tied up for nearly eight hours getting it all, assuming you kept optimum bandwidth the whole time.​

​

One more reason Jello is kicking himself for not getting the Adventure Journals sooner. ;-)

This one was definitely one of young Pabawan's less successful Fragments.

 

Platt's Starport Guide to . . . Zirtran's Anchor is another new-content preview feature. Like last issue's Creatures Preview, this previews the kind of material you'll see in an upcoming sourcebook, but does so with unique material rather than reprinting an entry. It also showcases the Adventure Journal's typographically obnoxious love of pointless ellipses trailing off from prefixes to titles. It's a preview of Platt's Starport Guide, a sourcebook written by Schweighofer in Platt's voice. This article, however, is written by the inescapable Anthony Russo.

Zirtran's Anchor is a unique starport. It's kind of a space station, a floating dock, except there's no space station. It's just a collection of ships docked to each other through a complex network of pressure tubes and docking tunnels. When ships become too decrepit to continue using, they're sealed off and abandoned, but never removed from the growing structure. It has a mysterious history. It was originally a prototype space barge owned by the Zirtran brothers. During its first lightspeed jump, its hyperdrive and its backups failed, stranding it in the middle of nowhere. The manufacturer happened to go out of business at the same time, leaving the big, expensive ship stranded and useless. That's when some nests of Geelan, bartering tribal aliens, showed up and bought it off them, transforming it into a drifting trading station. It became popular, and over time accumulated the labyrinth of ships permanently attached to it. It was a hive of activity, popular throughout the underworld, until the Empire occupied it. An indignant Geelan elder told the Empire that if it did not leave, tragedy would befall the station. A few days later it disappeared from its location in the Besberra system. People showed up and it wasn't there anymore. It was later found in the Phosphura Belt Nebula, empty but for droids whose memories only ran until the station's disappearance. Theories about as to what happened -- Imperial weapons tests, the old barge's faulty hyperdrive finally kicking back in, mysterious objects stolen from a powerful entity from beyond Wild Space. The Geelan repopulated it, and it's slowly returning to business. The Imperial presence has been reduced to a token one, and everyone remains wary of what happened, worried that it could reoccur.

Platt claims it's popular with free traders thanks to its limited Imperial presence, but the statistics given don't seem very limited for a small station -- customs personnel, a commander, a couple Imperial Army platoons, some stormtrooper squads, four customs cutters, and a TIE squadron. The Geelan have their own security forces, paying private security firm Defensus Solar Security on the base and manning their own Golan station next to it. They keep things orderly on the Anchor, but the sort of regulations that trouble traders are nonexistent aside from Imperial customs. The Geelan remind me a bit of Squibs, short, furry, snouted, pointy-eared bartering tribal aliens. Their remote home star is slowly dying, building a cultural drive to accumulate wealth now. They literally hoard shiny treasure, with many nests storing treasure in the abandoned sections of Zirtran's Anchor. They associate in nests, in which each member has a defined role. Their overall leader is the Master Geel, who controls all deals affecting the species overall. He sometimes visits the Anchor. The Geelan are mostly hands-off in the day-to-day running of the station, leaving management in the hands of the Chief of Affairs and Defensus.

The station consists of four main zones. Sector Alpha is the docking location for the public, but there are independent zones among some of the station's ships that are privately controlled, and some of them allow private docking. Sector Alpha is also home to the Hub, the original barge, now the main center of trading activity. Just about anything can be bought or sold here, and it's packed with shops, offices, and stands. The most popular entertainment establishment is Chabak's, a bar and gambling den. Chabak disappeared in the vanishing, and his place is now run by his cousins Padda and Quink. Quink is an experienced operator forced to look out for Padda, who's a young, heedless braggart covering for his own inexperience. There's an open challenge for a week of drinks on the house if anybody can stump the bartender droid with a drink request, but nobody yet has. The droid was originally a medical droid that was assistant to the Emperor's personal physician before it fell into Chabak's hands and its pharmacy programming was modified to mix drinks. Despite having had his memory wiped, the droid has recently started spouting gibberish about unnerving medical sights, like endless rows of medical tanks. Platt doesn't know if this is a reference to his time with the Emperor or to the events of the vanishing, but obviously it's a suitably creepy reference to the Emperor's clones. There's also an outpost of Pandor's Hydrospanner in Sector Alpha. Pandor's is a galaxywide chain of repair and supply shops found in many starports. As a chain, they only deal in the strictly legal, but they do supplies and repairs, rent space for you to do repairs, and buy and sell ships from a small stock. So this is obviously something that has significance to players outside the Anchor as well, a location that can be dropped in anywhere to provide ready, but frustratingly limited resources.

Sector Beta is the home of Defensus Solar's headquarters on the station. There's also a backup control center aboard the Golan. They're a capable, tough, well-equipped police force that acts quickly to shut down disorder, but refuses to get involved in mediating disputes. They confiscate all heavy weapons from those entering the station; personal blasters are allowed. Their controls can be evaded, however, by entering from one of the independent ships. The Imperial garrison is co-located with the Imperial Customs station, but leaves policing up to Defensus. They're only interested in customs violations and serious Imperial crimes, like forged documents or Imperial warrants. Because it's a dead-end duty station, the junior personnel are overzealous, eager to make a name for themselves and get transferred away, while the senior personnel don't care, knowing this is the end of their careers. Platt is convinced, though, that there's at least one ISB agent planted among them, spying on the station.

Sector Delta is home to the Death Mark, a frigate run by Vygar, a retired Imperial bounty hunter. Vygar's made his docked ship into a hub for bounty hunters, mercenaries, pilots for hire, and other freelance contractor types. There they can relax, refit, get contracts, and buy support services and goods. One office aboard the Death Mark belongs to Reenogga Personal Services, Cubed. Reenogga triples Kara, Vella, and Adri are former Bounty Hunters Guild members who have set up their own agency offering protective services. They'll bodyguard anyone who's subject to a threat, except they won't interfere with the collection of legitimate bounties. The sisters look alike, but each specializes in a different form of combat, allowing them to throw off opponents. Vella manages the business side, Adri oversees maintenance, and Kara likes to go out drinking and kick ass. The Rusted Cutlass II is another ship that serves as a base of operations. In this case, it's home to a pirate ring. The Phosphura Belt Pirates are an unusually numerous gang who operate by a system of honor that has them watching each other's backs surprisingly well for pirates. They maintain a strict hierarchy, led by the Pirate King or Queen, assisted by loyal retainers dubbed Buccaneers. They still follow the rules laid down by the first Pirate King, Arvo Norstrag. They maintain that pirates keep their promises, protect each other, and settle disputes through honor duels of various types, from simple duels without energy weapons held until unconsciousness, up to formalized duels in a ring of fire held between the champions of factions that are so hostile they would otherwise erupt in civil war. Their fleet and supplies are hidden throughout the nebula, while Leo Bellsfar, the current Pirate King, keeps his headquarters at Zirtran's Anchor. He likes to keep a low profile, and is rumored to be negotiating a treaty with the Rebel Alliance to supply them with ships in exchange for immunity should they win the war (making him an unusually farsighted fellow). Defensus Solar has no authority on this private ship, and the Imperials leave the formidable pirates alone, though that would change if they could prove a connection with the Rebels. Platt notes that their ship is named after the original Rusted Cutlass, which belonged to the legendary Dread Pirate Mendel Cutter, who retired to Zirtran's Anchor and attached his ship before the vanishing. After the station was found, however, his ship was missing. It's rumored that he somehow escaped the disaster -- if he didn't cause it. Our last outfit is the Bartog Syndicate. They're the Anchor's main criminal gang, operating out of the former headquarters of gangster Quentin Bartog, who disappeared during the vanishing. These lowlifes are the scourge of Defensus, and are led by a joker known as the Ace of Staves, a jocular young fixer known for the ability of his outfit to turn out forged documents and computer viruses, as well as for practical jokes and anarchist disruption. As crimelords go, he's a very cyberpunk figure.

Sector Epsilon is the newest segment of the Anchor. Those who want to join their ships to the Anchor permanently pay a connection fee and quarterly payments for maintenance, security, communications, and life support and power if needed. One of the newest ships is the Destiny, inhabited by shy, mysterious aliens called the Kalai. They don't leave their ship to mingle; the only ones actually seen in public are the lethagoes, half-breed hybrids of Kalai and humans who are strikingly tall, thin, and pale, with sharp, protruding noses and chins and keen eyes. This sharp facial appearance has led to speculation that the Kalai are beaked avians, but everything in that description makes me totally mentally retcon the Kalai as Nagai. They're some kind of escaped Nagai community. The lethagoes don't discuss the Kalai, their lives, where they're from, or anything else about their origins. They just conduct their business, which mostly consists of buying supplies for the Destiny, and hiring mercenaries and scouts for missions outside Imperial-held space. They keep small, "hawk-shaped" fighters aboard their ship, which seem to be even more nimble than TIEs. They resist dealing with the Geelan and ignore the Empire. There's tremendous suspicion of these mysterious aliens, despite the fact that searches of those they hire turn up nothing unusual and they seem to be secretive but harmless. Various people claim to have seen a Kalai, each description being different -- they're balls of light, they're telepathic shadows, they're just humans. Platt got one lethagoe to state that they are there merely to observe. They watch the Galactic Civil War without interfering, and never choose sides. But what if they did? Well, we know what happened, because they're totally scouts for the Nagai refugees fleeing the Tofs, right, guys? I mean, come on. The retcon is begging to be made. I mean, it's contradicted by the sidebar vignette in which a reporter goes away from an interview with an informant convinced he's finally gotten the truth about Zirtran's Anchor, its disappearance and the Kalai, only for the man he talked with to be revealed as a lethagoe who has a conversation with a telepathic ball of light he addresses as "father," revealing that the lethagoe was himself telepathically gathering information about the Empire, and implies some sort of secret plot. But since this is just a vignette in a Platt Okeefe report, and the idea of people having sex with telepathic balls of light and producing children makes no sense, we can either dismiss it as fiction Platt's spinning, or else just retcon the ball of light as a Nagai communication device, not an actual being. Because frankly making them Nagai is way more interesting than making them some random nonsense that was left hanging and never mentioned in any other source again. Yeah, I'm kinda excited about that.

Anyway, there are some Adventure Ideas scattered throughout. One is to escort a historian to interview the Geelan about the vanishing, only to stumble into an arms deal between some Geelan and an Imperial governor, in which Rebel agents are trying to interfere. Another is for the characters to make a deal at Pandor's Hydrospanner, selling their ship and buying a sexy, experimental sloop new on their lot and going for cheap. They'll need to buy some weapons for the unarmed ship, but things get even more complicated when it turns out that the ship was a plant, with a cache of spice hidden in the hull, and now they've got the Empire after them, as well as the smuggler who was supposed to buy the ship to begin with. Another is that one character has a friend or relative among the pirates, who appeals for help when he's called out in the duel to the death by pirate Starfall Flanders. This contact stole a lot of money from Flanders, but was going to use it to make some money and then pay it back with interest. If you can get your hands on the shipment of rare crystals he invested in, you can make Flanders whole and avoid the duel . . . except that Customs has confiscated the crystals. The last is that while you're at Zirtran's Anchor, people seem to be disappearing, raising fears that there's going to be another vanishing. It turns out that it's a predatory creature that's broken out of a docked ship. It also turns out that you end up locked in one of the abandoned ships with it. Enjoy your remake of Alien.

A pretty great article. It definitely does its job of selling Platt's Starport Guide -- as packed with information and ideas as this is, can you imagine seven pieces like it? It's a creative place, it gives you a lot of story hooks without dictating how they have to be used, and it has atmosphere and elements to work with galore. Russo did a great job of establishing what gamers need to work with. Next up, this issue's NewsNets!

 

I'm inclined to cut them some slack on that cuz that's how the movie opening crawls tail off...

 

I just checked out Platt's myself, and it's being very helpful for planting some ideas and settings for my FFG game. So cool to see that there!

 

I absolutely love the idea behind Zirtran's Anchor because it's a unique setting and yet one that fits so perfectly into a space setting. It just makes sense to me that you'd get "budget space stations" consisting of a bunch of ships connected to one another by docking tubes, even on a more temporary basis than the Anchor. For example, I imagine some of the busier Core Worlds would get a bunch of merchant vessels linking up to start trading early while they wait for permission to land, customs clearance, etc. Maybe a bunch of derelict ships with functioning weapons but no weapons or hyperdrives could be linked to form a defence platform. I really wish this idea got picked up and expanded on more elsewhere. Plus the Anchor itself is a pretty fun and versatile setting which could fit into any of your usual stories about smugglers, pirates, or Rebels, but the circumstances behind its disappearance and reappearance also make it possible to play it in a mystery or space horror setting as well.

As for your theory on the Kalai, I really like it. When I first read Zirtran's Anchor, I looked them up on the Wook only to find this was their sole appearance and they never got picked up again. That always struck me as really weird given that WEG is so well-known the for intersectionality between its material. Almost every species they invented ended up getting an entry in one of their multiple sourcebooks on aliens, but for some reason they set up this huge mystery around the Kalai only to never touch them again. Kalai = Nagai? Headcanon accepted!

 

I own that supplement.

It actually was the first Indiana Jones supplement which captured the theme of the movies and made you able to be Indiana Jones' equal. While you had one cruddy adventure about stealing a Templar's Box (with a demon inside) and a lengthy cavern trek, the other two were:

1. A cell of Nazi aligned Druids are going to destroy London with the skull of a dead Formori god. You need to team up with the sexy good Druidess and her brother (who is doomed to die) to stop them.

2. Keeping the Nazis from getting their hands on Excalibur so they can crown their own King of England, which would not work were not for the fact it's actually involving a certain real life sympathizer who thinks having Excalibur would go a long way to making them accept him as well as his American wife.

I ran both adventures and my biggest issue was the Druid girl love interest is one of Indiana's ex-girlfriends so there's an awkward conversation there.

One thing I actually always liked about Garos IV and the unique thing it brought to Star Wars (well, mostly unique) was the fact it really is a place where you could do some morally ambiguous Star Wars tales without overselling it. It's not what Ms. Tyers intended but it's a good example of a place where the Empire would have to be opposed on ideological grounds. The Imperial Governor is a nice guy, basically a man who would do well under Pellaeon or Rae Sloane, and the Empire isn't particularly interested in brutalizing the place. It's mining the hell out of the planet but that's the places industry.

Are the Rebels really doing anything productive there? I'm reminded of my Fragments of the RIm thread where Corwin Shelvay basically says, "No, actually anything you do here won't in any way impede the Empire but might get the locals kiled so you need to move on."

 

The main thing seems to be to keep the Empire from getting the ore and building cloaking devices. Which is valuable, but it doesn't really give the resistance a basis right off the bat. It's still dependent on an ideological resistance to Big Empire out there doing bad things elsewhere.

 

Zirtran's Anchor is similar to Spider in the Cathcart system from Star Citizen.

 

West End Games had a weird kind of obsession with making Firefly before Firefly existed.

There's a lot of focus on small time, non-huge adventures as well as smuggling with a Big Bad Alliance out there but not TOO out there.

 

It's time for greatness: our third Galaxywide NewsNets brings us near the end of this issue.

TriNebulon News brings us word that the members of the disbanded Dentaalian House have met and passed a resolution refusing to recognize the Imperial governor. The "rogue Dentaal Independence Party" local chapters have endorsed this resolution, and the government employees' union has decided to strike. The governor is ordering everyone to report to work, and arresting Independence Party leaders, but his Imperial government has been massively unpopular since taking over local control in the wake of the Senate's dissolution. Many industries have been nationalized, infrastructure spending has plummet, and the economy has tanked, intriguingly frank reporting from a major outlet.

Imperial HoloVision announces an upcoming tour by the Imperial Symphony Orchestra, which is one of the most Jello-bait sentences ever. It will be touring the Mid Rim, the first time in fifteen years the ISO has left the Core. For the past five years it's been specifically engaged in promoting "Imperial High Culture" throughout the Core -- music as propaganda -- but non-Core worlds also just haven't been interested in spending the money to book the ISO. Now, with direct Imperial control, more remote worlds are shelling out to bring "recent Neoclassical compositions favored by the Emperor" to the Rim.

Another note lets us know that the Empire will not be conducting public executions during Fete Week on Imperial Center for the first time in eleven years. Generic "security concerns" mean they'll be conducted privately. I understand making the Empire villainous, but public executions as part of a festival? Really? It's a bit too medieval. Public executions, sure. But as, like, "Here's your holiday celebrations! Celebratory executions for everyone!"? Like, at the end of the Macy's parade, they bring out the firing squad? It doesn't really land. It's over the top.

A report on the Independent Traders' Infonet states that Fondor has been closed to civilian traffic, with the Imperial military securing the system to protect a massive construction project. Nice newspaper strip reference, as we're obviously talking about Executor's construction. Only two companies have been allowed to ship in supplies for the workers using permits. Of course, if somebody could smuggle in some consumer goods for the workers stuck in a locked-down system, they'd have a receptive market.

Another report, this from Imperial HoloVision, further develops the situation on Dentaal: the Dentaal Independency Party, "with full public support," has overthrown the Imperial government with the support of the Dentaalian military. They've kicked the governor offworld and declared Denaal independent of the Empire, but also claim they want to maintain diplomatic relations. They clearly don't understand who they're dealing with.

Fete Week is kicking off with a parade featuring bands and floats (that probably literally float), plus three hundred TIEs doing a flyover and dropping fireworks and smoke. The parade included walkers and a ton of Imperial military forces, but also colorful floats representing the variety of cultures represented within the Empire. God, I'd love to have art of this. The Tion Hegemony's entry included three restored war droids from Xim's vaults, their first public reveal since Han Solo and the Lost Legacy, a great little reference. The parade passed the Palatial Balcony, where Palpatine, Vader, Grand Admiral Takel, and other privy councilors could be seen occasionally coming out for public consumption. I love the idea of Darth Vader having to spend some of his time coming out to do the royal family balcony wave thing. Corellia and Corulag are hosting the Imperial Fair in the Pliada di am Imperium.

Colonial News Nets brings us news that the Empire has conquered Bakura. Two Star Destroyers deployed forces that easily overwhelmed Bakura's limited defenses with relatively little loss of life. Resistance stopped once the Bakuran Senate was secured and the senators placed under house arrest. The Bakuran government, in the Empire's line, is dismissed as chaotic, inefficient, and unable to effectively govern, being torn by power struggles. It's also cleverly dismissed by the Empire as the mere "outgrowth" of the mining company that settled the planet, implicitly less legitimate than Imperial rule. The conquering Captain Brellar's speech is also heavy on references to the Imperial belief in order and balance, slyly appealing to Bakuran religious beliefs. It's well-crafted writing to include touches like that. Imperial Governor Wilek Nereus is soon to arrive, but has been delayed by Grand Moff Tanniel calling him away to consult on a project. With Tanniel being in charge of the Storm Commandos, and the whole Dentaal situation being ongoing, and Nereus having his interest in parasitology, I'm guessing he's supposed to be consulting on the Storm Commandos' bioweapons deployment against Dentaa.

Human Events Network reports the return of Neile Janna, famous for her role as a pirate queen in a long-running holo series but retired for twenty years, has returned to Adarlon to make a comeback in holos, playing legendary explorer Freia Kallea. Kallea's Hope will be the first attempt in a hundred years to adapt the famous Kallea Cycle to holos. There's some skepticism of her comeback role, though, as she's not really known as a serious actress. I'm not sure if this entry is going somewhere, but it's always great to get this kind of cultural and artistic flavor for the galaxy.

Cynabar gives us yet more old-school seventies/eighties references with a recounting of Han Solo's run-in with Skorr, though I'm not sure that dating agrees with where the canon is at anymore. You know what I mean. The canon that's worth giving a **** about. This appears to be the first Cynabar's noticed of Han running with Princess Leia and some blond kid he was spotted with on Tatooine. The mystery to the fringe of just what the hell Han Solo is up to deepens. There's also a report on Bettle and Jaxa, whose efforts on Ralltiir didn't pan out but who are now selling slugthrowers to warring primitives beyond the Corporate Sector. Doc, meanwhile, has packed up shop and is on the move. Platt wants somebody to drop a notice to the Chyakk clan of Wookiees on Lan Barell (not, she notes, "the Bentora Space people," a nice acknowledgement that in a massive galaxy, there have to be a lot of unrelated things by the same name) that she'll drop off their parts in a few months. Nada Synnt has had ups and downs in business, but is moving in on Jabba's territory, while Lando won the rights to taxi service on Ord Wylan, a rich license, and then immediately lost them "in an idle bet on the brand of a liquor his party was consuming." Though Lando gambles more than he smuggles these days, he still does smuggle, and he's headed out to Taanab for some wheeling and dealing.

Imperial Defense Daily has the news on the end of field trials for the TIE/x2 prototype. Though it performed well in the hands of field units, it's not going to be a production unit; its advances will be integrated into the TIE/x3, a further prototype. This TIE will resemble traditional TIE/lns, unlike the prior two prototype models, though with bent wings, and won't have the hyperdrive the x2 and x1 did. Basically, the implication seems to be the Sienar built some prototype superfighters to test new technology, and now is integrating what worked into a cheaper fighter to test it before starting mass production. It's a nice reflection of an actual development cycle, with multiple iterations and expensive proof-of-concept prototypes not just automatically going into production.

Tanda Marelle of Galactic Resorts reports on the Spira Regatta, which you may remember from one of the Adventure Journal's best adventures in the first issue. WEG is great about referencing itself. The article basically just sells how great the resort planet is, and all the exciting things going on during the Regatta, including plays and concerts.

Back on Bakura, an update lets us know that Governer Nereus's arrival has been marred by protests and rioting as Captain Alecs Brellar, the Navy officer who conquered the planet and remained as acting governor, turned over the office to him. The Imperials are confident the riots were orchestrated, as they targeted key infrastructure rather than visible Imperial targets; they suggest elements of the Bakuran government may have been involved. As readers, it's hard to tell if that's true, or if the Empire is manufacturing excuses to seize tighter control.

Hundreds of thousands died in massive groundquakes on Kamori, which did great damage to three major cities and further damage through tidal waves. Chamber President (a welcome title variation) Thane Dregond has declared a disaster, and is seeking Imperial disaster relief funds (the Empire isn't entirely bad). Dana Dregond (no relation, in a wonderful bit of that WEG verisimilitude), a master in the Glanthe school of painting and designated one of Kamori's "living treasures" as a recognition of her status as one of the planet's greatest artists, was among the dead.

On Esseles, the popular President Ralle, of the Forad Party, is well-respected for leading Esseles through the Clone Wars, but he's quite old now and, Darpa SectorNet informs us, Jamson Freller, head of the Esselian New Order Party, is calling for him to resign before the end of his term due to poor health. The ENO is gaining support, with Forad and the Cardean Party's position in Parliament slipping. The Ralle administration says he has no intention of stepping down, and his party wants to block the rise of the New Order, but privately, sources say they're worried that if his health does worsen, they won't be able to stop ENO, and need a transition plan, because without Ralle's presence, Forad isn't popular enough to retain its coalition.

Imperial Defense Daily is back to let us know that Colonel Crix Madine, leader of the newly revealed Storm Commandos, has disappeared. He's reported to have gone missing on a wilderness training exercise, having gone into a cave network and never been seen again. He's been succeeded by Colonel Jenn Smeel. The tone of the piece is sort of baffled -- they can't confirm he's dead, though they think he probably is, probably fell into a chasm, but it just seems odd that a decorated officer would be lost so casually, so pointlessly. Of course, we know he defected.

Remember when we learned Lando was going to Tanaab? From Pandath, Taanab, we learn that "a young merchant captain" by the name of Lando Calrissian has foiled the latest predations of the Norulac pirates on sleepy Taanab. As the pirates made their latest raid, Lando, watching from a bar, told onlookers he could stop them. Gathal Danager bet him the deed to a brewery that he couldn't, so Lando took him up on it. He took off, hid in the ice ring around the moon, and then as the pirates came up on the space docks, he launched his cargo of hundred of Conner nets, disabling the ships, and then tractored ice chunks into them. He then led the orbital defense force in finishing them off, singlehandedly destroying nineteen pirate fighters and disabling two corvettes by destroying the coolant pipes on their engine pods and Connor netting the escape pods, allowing all pirates to be captured. Daniil Captane, Taanab portmaster, is quoted praising Lando's ingenious maneuvers and flair for command shown when he rallied the small defense fleet. "When asked what he planned to do with his new brewery, Calrissian laughed. 'I guess I'd better go see what kind of tinpot factory Danager has foisted off on me. But it can wait a few weeks,' he added. 'I still have business here that demands my attention .' It was unclear whether Calrissian was referring to his business interests or the lovely young lady at his side." This is, to my knowledge, the first explanation of what exactly Lando did at the Battle of Taanab. While most articles focus on smaller-picture things, we're seeing a rare ability from these NewsNets to establish major aspects of the lore, from the galaxy's response to the loss of the Death Star to the announcement of the Senate's dissolution, to this kind of major backstory for Lando and Madine.

In news that has nothing to do with Dentaal's revolt against Imperial rule, there's been an outbreak of Candorian plague on Dentaal, leading the Empire to blockade the system. As a medical quarantine. The disease is incredibly contagious, incredibly deadly to humans, and incurable, but had been thought to have died out forty-six years ago when the Bandorian colonies were completely wiped out, leaving the disease unable to propagate. No mention is made in this Imperial HoloVision release of Dentaal's rebellious state.

A Galaxy News Service report from two days later states that ten billion have died in the two days of the outbreak, and the entire population will be dead in two weeks if the plague continues spreading at its current rate. Medical professionals from Coruscant, Rhinnal, and Raithal have been allowed to observe the plague from a hospital frigate at the edge of the system in order to determine if anything can be done to save the rest of the population (which is, finally, appropriately colossal). That ends things on a bit of a cliffhanger note, leaving it to later NewsNets to reveal that the Storm Commandos were behind the release of the plague, which obviously survived in some Imperial bioweapons warehouse, and this fueled Madine's defection.

Certainly up to the standards I expect from NewsNets. This issue was dominated by the Dentaal story, set up by last issue's introduction of the Storm Commandos and to be resolved in future issues. We also got the story of Lando's little maneuver at the Battle of Taanab and the history of Bakura's conquest. There were also some political news that may pay off later, and a running theme of a lot of references to classic Daley and Goodwin/Williamson material. This also introduced some new NewsNet sources that weren't mentioned in the original article. Interestingly, the feature seems to be focusing in on its ability to provide intriguing backstory and big-picture setting details, and worrying a little less about setting up hooks for players to run with. It's tremendous fun, such immersive world-building. This issue concludes next time, as Dirk Harkness and friends finally stop reciting backstory and start kicking Imperial ass!

 

Trinebulon News' "hat" in WEG (which I can discuss if I ever get around to it in Fragments from the RIm--my wife broke her leg and I have two new books coming out so review has been kind of stalled) is it's kind of a "they don't publish anti-Imperial stories but are as honest as possible under a fascist totalitarian regime." I always liked that they toed the line just as much as was necessary to carry on with business even if I always think they suffered for that in both ratings as well as possibly the occasional reporter murdered.

I also disagree with public executions not being something you could get people to watch today. People youtubed beheadings when they were victims by the millions and you're telling me people wouldn't do the same for executing criminals?

Then again, I think it's a mistake to think of the GFFA as "our" reality plus spaceships and wizards. Star Wars is kind of a Fantasy Universe in Space with different values. Slavery, Kings, Queens, trial by combat, and so on are all things which are still practiced. It's not a modern 21st century society but a world with many many values both good and bad.

Weirdly, I was always uncomfortable with Dentaal's destruction much like Caamasai. It undermines Alderaan if the Empire is destroying planets left and right.

 

In my headcanon, the public executions for Fete Week article was a plant, a clumsy effort at anti-Imp propaganda, probably created by online adolescent hackers thinking they'll be the next incarnation of the Anonymous group.

 

I saw it was very much in the vein of HBO's Rome and the triumph given to Caesar. They broke out the old Gaul King they had imprisoned and executed him at the end of the parade. Crowds cheered.

And why wouldn't they?

 

The unwashed masses would, sure, but I suspect the cultural/intellectual/philosophical elite are a significant presence on Coruscant, and they'd be horrified. "If that's the kind of thing the Emperor stands for, it's time to stand behind someone else!"

 

Public executions fit the fantasy hodgepodge of the setting in that it would be totally unsurprising for the characters to land on some world where the native species holds festival public executions. I'd expect the Barabels to hold public executions. It would be solid worldbuilding if, say, the Bothans had public executions. I'd buy it if one of the components of Agamar's supposed backwardness is the local population going to see a hangin'. I'd accept it if the Empire executed Rebels in the town square on planets it was pacifying, as an object lesson. That would make perfect sense. I'd even expect the Empire, if it had ever captured Mon Mothma or Leia, would have taken her back to Coruscant for a nice big show trial and public execution.

But it's the specific element of festival executions on the capital that I can't get behind. For executions to be their own event is one thing; for them to be celebratory entertainment events, part of seasonal festivities, is extremely archaic. Which is not always bad as inspiration for the Star Wars universe, but the idea that it's a mainstream sensibility, that the center of galactic culture, of Leia and Han and Luke's culture, enjoys execution as festive spectacle doesn't really jive with the feel of the universe that we get from everything else. Yeah, bloodsport is common in the galaxy, but we always see it, see gladiator games and public executions, off on the edge of galactic society. On remote Rim worlds, on primitive worlds, behind closed doors as a hidden vice of the galaxy's rich and degenerate, on "anything goes" vice worlds where the depraved elite and the criminal class can satisfy lusts not accommodated in polite society. We don't see it as a centerpiece of polite society. Luke, Leia, Bail Organa -- they don't come from a society where part of the big public holiday celebrations is killing people. You can model worlds on Imperial Rome, you can pull inspiration for the Republic and Empire from elements of Roman antiquity, but you can't really have mainstream galactic society being one of bloodsport and cheering death voyeurism without culturally unmooring our heroes. Just like you can pull from history and have political representatives beating each other with canes on the debate floor of Rodia, but you can't really have Leia doing it in the Senate as part of mainstream society. Some things fit and some don't.