We dropped out of hyperspace somewhere near the edge of the outer rim. I was looking at the scanner, so I was the first to see the freighter. It was inside the Ghost Nebula, and appeared to be disabled.

The comm crackled to life. Between bursts of static, we heard “…distress … oxygen … please help…”

Our mechanic wanted to help the ship. I was convinced it was a trap. Before we could come to blows about it, the captain ordered me to run another scan, which confirmed that the ship was, indeed, venting oxygen into space.

“I’m a droid,” I reminded them, “I don’t care about oxygen the way you meat sacks do. Pull up close to the ship and I’ll go investigate.”

Cap pulled us up alongside the freighter. We attempted to raise them on the comm, but they were silent. A quick scan showed weak life signs. “If anyone is alive in there, they won’t be much longer,” the medic said. The captain decided that we’d connect our airlocks, so we could evac the survivors more quickly. I volunteered to go first into the ship. I’m big, I don’t need to breathe, and I’m built to kill, so if it was a trap, I wanted to be first in, to protect my crewmates.

The airlock attached and I cycled through. The ship was dark inside, except for flickering lights.

“IG, what do you see?” The captain asked me.

“It looks empty, at least on this deck,” I replied.

“What’s the oh-two situation?”

“Irrelevant to my existence,” I said. I sometimes make jokes. I’m not very good at it and my timing is usually bad, they tell me.

“Just check the level, Iggy,” he said. That’s not my name. My designation is IG-426. They call me Iggy. Biologicals are curious that way.

I looked at a scanner. “It’s … one hundred percent. The ship is perfectly pressurized,” I said. Before the captain could reply, a group of humanoids revealed themselves, blasters drawn.

In under a second, I scanned them all and identified their leader. In the next second, I raised my disruptor rifle. Before the third second had ticked by, I fired.

+++

Last night, I started a Star Wars RPG campaign with some friends. We are playing as a small rebel cell, five years before the events of Rogue One. My character is a reprogrammed imperial assassin droid (yes, because I think K-2SO is cool) who was given to this cell by a mysterious Rebel agent, which allowed me to drop into the campaign three sessions after it began, and fits into my real life situation of knowing one of the players very well, and being barely acquainted (until now) with the rest of the players.

I haven’t been a PC in a campaign in years, and I’ve never played a Star Wars RPG until now, and I’m already looking forward to playing next week, because it was so much fun. We’re using the Edge of the Empire and Age of Rebellion rule books. Our GM has us focused on narrative, instead of tactical minis combat, which is my favorite way to play any RPG, because it’s about the collaborative storytelling experience, rather than the boardgame experience.

It’s a really fun system, and there’s a ton of material that I’m looking forward to reading and incorporating into my character. I shouldn’t like the primary dice mechanic, because it requires proprietary dice, but it’s so well-designed, I don’t mind. Check it out:

The core mechanic of the Age of Rebellion 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 he can apply to the specific task. Negative dice represent the forces that would hinder or disrupt him, such as the inherent difficulty of the task, obstacles, additional risks, or another character’s efforts to thwart the task. If your character’s successes ( ) outnumber his failures ( ), the action succeeds. However, the situations of Age of Rebellion 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. The sheer number of possibilities provides opportunities to narrate truly memorable action sequences and scenes. Nearly anything can happen in the heat of the moment; even a single shot fired at an Imperial Star Destroyer might hit some critical component that results in its destruction. Players and GMs alike are encouraged to take these opportunities to think about how the symbols can help move the story along and add details and special effects that create action-packed sessions.

Even for someone like me, who has the legendary ability to roll dice in a statistically improbable and terrible way, the dice don’t get in the way of the fun, and instead of simply deciding if you succeed or fail, they sort of land you on a spot that’s in a spectrum between total success and rolling two 19s in a row doesn’t get you out of the acid pit for some reason not that I’m saying Chris Perkins deliberately murdered Aeofel because he is a monster.

cough

I really owe a lot to Rogue One, because it reawakened a love of Star Wars that I’d forgotten I had, after the disappointment from the prequels and the cluttered mess of the EU that never managed to land on me in a meaningful way. But after seeing Rogue One twice, The Force Awakens twice, and playing in this game last night, I have this desire to not just watch the original Star Wars films again (get the despecialized editions if you can because they are amazing), but to also dig into Rebels.

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