June 17, 2012

On the closing of a Star Wars campaign.

A while back, I posted about how my Star Wars Alternate Universe campaign came to a rather abrupt conclusion due largely to burn-out on d20 games amidst the players.  Which considering that for the longest time the only thing most of them played were d20 games, I guess it's to be expected, kinda like eating nothing but pizza every night for dinner.

Well, luckily that wasn't the only SW campaign I had going on.  Up until last night, I've also been a player in a friend's campaign that was set during the New Jedi Order era.  While the Vong invasion was certainly a thing, the Vong weren't the main threat in the campaign, but rather something else that was perhaps just as creepy and unnatural as RotJ Palpatine doing reading a book for a group of pre-school children.

In this campaign, I took the role of Alwyn Reezaki, a young Jedi apprentice and member of Skywalker's New Jedi Order.   I'd actually played Alwyn with the notion of it being a one-time gig back in August 2011 for the NJO Traitor's Gambit as run by Garrett of the Threat Detected podcast.  So when one of my local buddies whose gaming group I'd only recently joined mentioned he wanted to try his hand at running SWSE and was going to set his campaign during the NJO era, I was quite amused at the serendipity behind it all.

We played roughly every other week on Wednesday nights, though occasionally sessions had to be missed or rescheduled due to various real life events.  Wherever possible, the GM was courteous enough to let everyone know as soon as he could that the game was going to be postponed, so kudos for him on that.  Well, this past Wednesday the game got cancelled due to "excessive GM wife aggro," and was rescheduled for last night (Saturday).  Now going into this, I thought we had another session or two, but it turns out I was wrong.  All the stops were pulled, and what I suspect was intended to be a two-part adventure wound up being run non-stop until the wee hours of the morning.

The campaign had been building up to this point, a confrontation with the BBEG in a desperate bid to stop their deranged plan to cause further strife and mayhem in a galaxy already ravaged by a vicious war.  Just about every character had a stake in stopping the villain, a (likely demented) ex-Imperial Inquisitor from the days of Palpatine's Empire that went by the name of Lord Raith that had risen to a position of power and influence within Black Sun.

I'm not going to go into too many details, although I've posted summaries of the previous campaign sessions, all from Alwyn's POV, over at the d20 Radio Network forums in the thread "Tales of an NJO Jedi Apprentice" which also includes Alwyn's stat block from first level all the way up to 7th level.  But I'll just say that the GM did a wonderful job with handling a split-up party and running a starship combat, a running skirmish, and a duel that were occurring pretty much all at the same time.  It was hectic, it was frantic, there were character deaths, but  most importantly, it was fun.  The only thing missing was the Ewok dance party at the end :D

While the campaign was fun and ended on a high note, I am sad that to be putting Alwyn aside for the foreseeable future.  But who knows?  The GM has hinted that he might run another campaign with this same group of heroes at some point down the road.  After all, the Vong menace still exists and our characters have proven to be badass enough to be able to provide a meaningful contribution to the war effort.

Tales of a NJO apprentice thread @ D20 Radio Network forums:
http://www.d20radio.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8798

Threat Detected Blog: NJO Traitor's Gambit podcast sessions:
http://threat-detected.com/2011/08/11/gencon-special-edition1.aspx
http://threat-detected.com/2011/08/18/gencon-special-edition-part-2.aspx
http://threat-detected.com/2011/08/25/gencon-special-edition-part-3.aspx
http://threat-detected.com/2011/09/01/gencon-special-edition-part-4.aspx
http://threat-detected.com/2011/09/08/gencon-special-edition-part-5.aspx
(fair warning, first one is tough to hear as there was a very rambunctious table within spitting distance of Garrett's table)

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