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View Full Version : [Star Wars] One Bite at a Time!



Kiero
2008-12-19, 08:37 AM
In a similar vein to Golko Wants You Dead! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=97379)I've had another one-shot idea for a KotOR era scenario. It's going to be another semi-structured "canned" scenario with pregens for very fast pickup type play.

Inspiration came from a single source this time: the latest arc in the Knights of the Old Republic comic, Vector. Though minus all the stupidity with the evil talisman and crossover into different timelines. It takes place around the time of the Siege of Taris (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/First_Battle_of_Taris_(Mandalorian_Wars)).

So here's the outline.


Life in the lower city (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lower_City) here on Taris (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Taris)was always hard. You don't end up down here unless you've failed somehow. Refugees. Criminals. Non-humans kept down here by Taris' racist laws. Life up there, in the light, clean air, that's beyond your reach. But at least it's not the Undercity (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Undercity). Down there with the Outcasts is worse. They say there's a plague down there.

Course that was before the war (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Mandalorian_Wars)came here. Taris was on the front lines, rushed through membership of the Republic because of it's strategic location. Didn't stop them fleeing with their tail between their legs when the Mandos attacked. The Jedi pulled out. Even the Exchange, who ruled the Lower City ran. Left us all to fend for ourselves.

Not everyone surrendered and allowed themselves to be turned into Mandalorian cannon fodder. There's a Resistance (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Taris_Resistance)down here and the swoop gangs are fighting back. Neo-crusaders are all over the place. So we moved a lot of our people into the Undercity to avoid their attacks and regroup.

But that's not all. The plague is real. And it's here in the Undercity. There were always rakghouls (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Rakghoul), the Outcasts tell us, but this is different. They're normally mindless beasts, but they now act with a purpose, as though someone were directing them. Something isn't right.

So what we have is basically a survival-horror type scenario in Star Wars. Not so much a full-on "everyone dies by the end of it" but perhaps more "lots of NPCs with you kark it, plus some of you might get infected". The infection bit is important, unlike the super-rakghoul disease of the Vector storyline, there's still an incubation time of a few days before someone turns. Which means for the purposes of the game, being infected isn't the end of the world, but it does mean you won't live out the whole thing.

If you're doing a points-scoring type thing at the end of the session, you get the most points for making it to the end whole and uninfected. Less if you're alive but infected. Less still if dead, but uninfected, and least for dying infected. You could end up mercy-killed by your erstwhile companions.

What's happened? The rakghouls have a master. A Force-sensetive Outcast was infected, which caused their talents to suddenly manifest. Rather than turning into a rakghoul, their burgeoning powers allowed them to control them and resist the final stages of the disease. They're quite mad, and deeply into the dark side as a result, but they're the effective king/queen of the rakghouls. And they want revenge on all the uninfected. They've massed their army and suddenly unleash them.

Will the Mandalorians down here work together with the other hapless people down here for mutual survival? Can anyone take out the rakghoul's ruler and put an end to this menace?

As always the pregens won't be complete, they require the player to give them a name, species and gender, and explain what they're doing on Taris, and how they ended up in the lower city in the middle of all of this.

So what are the archetypes we need covered here? I think we've got a fairly broad palette we can draw on, not just Resistance types, but also Mandalorians as well. We've got class and species tensions from the off with high-born Tarisian nobles who might be in the Resistance, along with natives of the Lower City. We've got invader and resister, if there's some Mandos in the mix. We might have a Jedi who couldn't get out in time, for additional resentment.

Thoughts?

Kiero
2008-12-19, 12:04 PM
I just found the entry on the rakghoul plague (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Rakghoul_Plague), which has a note about incubation:


After contact with a rakghoul, infection with the disease was a rapid and painful experience. The victim was transformed into a rakghoul within 6 to 48 hours. Bodies would become twisted, skin pigmentation would drain and the victim would turn attain a whitened corpse-like state.

Looks like there's a potential random roll (manifests in 6D8 hours?) there for PCs who get bitten, for those who like that sort of thing. Could even run it with a timer of some description, or hour-by-hour slices of game-time to keep it moving.