I love Star Wars and Roleplaying so when Fantasy Flight Games announced their plans to do both together in a new and improved system I was naturally excited! Alexander was the one who bought the Core Rulebook and the dice for us to play so he decided to put a campaign together for me and my son Elijah.
We decided to make characters and I chose to play a Human Smuggler with the Scoundrel (fast talker) specialization named Tekk Deevus and Elijah wanted to be the muscle so he went with a Trandoshan Hired Gun with the Marauder specialization named Krussk. With that, I’ll give you a quick overview of the game and then move into a narrative summary of our 1st campaign session.
From the Fantasy Flight website on the game:
Each Edge of the Empire campaign is loaded with potential for rich and exciting stories of heroism, betrayal, redemption, questionable morality, and mercenary greed. Edge of the Empire characters are tough, savvy, and resourceful. They’re likely to know a few tricks, and they’re probably going to have to know when to make good use of them. The core mechanic of the game is the skill check. At times, the GM will have the characters roll pools of dice to determine whether their actions succeed or fail.
Whenever you roll a skill check, you compare a pool of “positive dice” and their results against the results of a pool of “negative dice.” Positive dice help your character accomplish a task or achieve beneficial side effects. These dice may reflect his innate talents or abilities, special training, superior resources, or other advantages that you can apply to the specific task. Negative dice represent the forces that would hinder or disrupt you, such as the inherent difficulty of the task, obstacles, additional risks, or the efforts of another character to thwart the task.
If your character’s successes outnumber his failures, the action succeeds. However, the situations of Edge of the Empire are rarely simple, and the game’s custom dice do more than determine whether an action succeeds or fails. Even as the dice indicate whether an action succeeds or fails, they determine if the character gains any Advantage or suffers any Threat as the result of the attempt. With Advantage and Threat, each skill check is loaded with myriad dramatic possibilities. Your character may successfully repair the transfer circuits in his ship just in time for a dramatic jump to lightspeed only to come out of hyperspace in the middle of an asteroid field. He may take a wrong turn into a dead-end alley while trying to outrun a pair of Gamorrean mercenaries but discover that the Gamorreans are susceptible to bribes. Or he might find that he not only wins a high-stakes game of sabacc, his victory happens to impress the club owner who knows the secrets behind a large and valuable shipment of blasters. The sheer number of possibilities provide opportunities to narrate truly memorable action sequences and scenes. These layered results move the story along and inspire details and special effects that create action-packed sessions.
The narrative is the most well done part of the game and makes the experience very cinematic meaning you feel as if you are creating a movie with details that enhance and cement the experience!
Now onto the campaign. Tekk Deevus has never known where he came from and has been on his own since his 9th year. He grew up on the rough streets of Nal Hutta and learned many skills that not only kept him fed, but that provided him a better life than many of the other street kids. This skill got him noticed and he became associated with a Human named Asori Farran. Asori gave him duties that made many enemies for Tekk but always promised to protect him. One day, shortly after his 17th birthday Asori simply stopped contacting Tekk and Tekk sought out a new employer, the Kerrzek Mining Guild who loaned him 130,000 credits to purchase a run down YT-2400 Light Freighter named “The Cutter”. This was the start to his smuggling and shipping career. He ran into Krussk in a bar room brawl on Coruscant and they both worked together well so Tekk asked him to join his crew as he felt he needed some brawn. Krussk agreed and they have become a very effective team over the past few years. Tekk still has to remind him to shower regularly though and they don’t eat together as Krussk’s favorite food Gundark doesn’t smell great.
One day out of the blue, Tekk received a coded message from a contact calling himself “Shadow” asking Tekk to meet on Tatooine in Anchorhead to accept a “high risk” job. Tekk needed work but declined only to be given a code word by the mysterious contact that Asori used often! This intrigued Tekk and against his better judgement, he charted a course to Tatooine. Upon landing, he made his way to the central market and tried to find “Shadow”. As he made his way through the crowd, he noticed he was being tailed by 2 thugs and also noticed an unusual number of Stormtroopers in the crowd. As he rounded the next corner of stalls in the market, he came face to face with Asori Farann, his former boss! Immediately Asori asked Tekk why he had left and where he had hidden the merchandise from his last job. At that moment, Asori shot his own man to the right of him and called attention to the Stormtroopers by saying “rebel scum”!
After the fight and after getting away from any further attention but still perplexed by his encounter Tekk then had a run in with a Nikto named “Buckets” who made and sold disgusting soup in Anchorhead
He gave Tekk information on who had initiated the set up and hired the bandits they had fought off and also gave their ships name (Shadow’s Call) and coordinates. Now that he had this info Tekk was set on finding Asori. Before leaving Tattoine, they checked the local bounty board and decided to take a bounty for an Ugnaught named Ulek Taradhrim located on Nal Hutta in the city of Narsha Daa. The bounty was from Bortha the Magnificent, a local Hutt crime lord, and was in the amount of 5,000 credits. They also were given a shipment by a Jawa trader named Helek N’Kark destined for the Kuat Drive Yards which consisted of 5 cases of “speeder parts”. They were to deliver this to Lt. Danek, an Imperial Officer located there. Tekk thought this was a bad idea but the price was right and he had been a little bored lately!
After being set up by Asori and then almost murdered, they tracked the Shadow’s Call to orbit just outside of the planet Nal Hutta. The tracking of his ship using their transponder frequency alerted them to our intentions and Asori left his ship in orbit with a few droids and a Human who then engaged in a battle with Tekk and Krussk. They defeated them with some deft piloting by Tekk and great shooting by Krussk and boarded their ship to find the human barricaded inside the cockpit. He said he was not involved but was hired only to fly the ship and defend it from what he was told were pirates by Asori. They searched the hold finding several thousand credits along with 5 crates of medical supplies, 2 crates of military grade weapons and 1 crate of Ryll spice. They were able to salvage a few droids and reprogram them for sentinel duties. They also found the ship’s cargo manifest and decided to commandeer the shipments and deliver the goods themselves, collecting the payment in return for being double crossed.
They delivered the 5 crates of medical supplies found in the cargo hold of Asori Farann’s ship to the Justicars in Narsha Daa. They had only ordered 4 crates but Tekk was feeling generous and gave them the 5th for free and they were truly grateful. They were paid 3,000 credits and provided the leader with their transponder frequency code so that they could be contacted in the future for further deliveries.
They then decided the search for Ulek Taradhrim, an Ugnaught demolitionist wanted for murder, who was located on Nal Hutta in the city of Narsha Daa. Entered the lower levels of Narsha Daa and found a bunker where Ulek was hiding out. Ran into several well placed and precise shape charges that were remotely detonated as they were approached. Finally found Ulek and was confronted by 4 security droids that they dispatched very easily. Rather than kill Ulek, they captured him and on the way to collect the bounty struck a deal that he would pay 10,000 credits and he would become a working member of the Cutter’s crew and travel with Kruusk and Tekk to Ryloth providing them with mechanical assistance and weaponry (grenades, shape charges, etc.) and he would be paid a fee of 15% of the take on each job. Since then, he has installed a new targeting system and reprogrammed one of the security droids to perform gunnery duties on the ventral turbo laser. He has become very useful to the crew and Tekk was pleased that he thought to strike a bargain rather than turn him in. In the long run, this will pay off 10 times more than the bounty would have!
What will the crew do now? Will they go after Asori Farran to figure out why he contacted them? Will they make some of the deliveries they have commandeered? Will Krussk eat Ulek? Find out next time in the further adventures of Tekk Deevus and Krussk (& Ulek?).
The Players' Aid 