Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic RPG

Recap the Seventh

6 September 2010

Recap of the previous adventure.

Fall of the Towers

Shagarr shared with his group his secret origins. As a youth, he had been trained by the governor Vilne Keepsala in an obscure Force tradition kept secret from the Jedi Council. It was from this master that he learned how to manipulate the Force, and through judicious use that he was able to make a small name for himself as a crack pilot and smuggler. His master had been killed by a Sith, and Shagarr vowed never to use his abilities overtly, for fear of being next. A vow he had kept well, until the Jedi hired him.

He was in the middle of explaining the care he had taken to disguise his double-bladed lightsaber when Chuurga sent a message from the Oota Goota: "I've got company!"

The company turned out not to be the pleasant sort. The Sith had smashed their way through the docking bay doors and were attempting to crack open the Corellian vessel like a party favor. Chuurga dropped into the bottom gunnery turret and blasted the Sith who had taken to the hull with a lightsaber, and proceeded to blast away at just about everything that moved. The Sith forces had barely started unpacking their heavy artillery before Shagarr, Breaker, Alora, and Kistra arrived to provide backup. After that, the rout of the Sith was a foregone conclusion.

Breaker took the opportunity to duck into his quarters to equip his spare jetpack, once again becoming flight-capable. Kistra picked up the heavy blaster cannon the Sith had left behind and offered it to Breaker, who temporarily put aside his lighter, more accurate weapons.

Once everyone had re-equipped, Chuurga allowed that it might be best if he accompanied the rest on their exploration of the satellite. Shagarr set the ship's auto-defenses, secure that if anyone approached, he would be notified.

And so they made their way to the second tower. The main floor was comprised of an overly large lift and some stairs. A trip up the lift landed the group in a large storage room, with huge crates looming over them. The party, ever curious, started opening the crates, and were horrified and disgusted by the contents - dead Gamorreans. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Tens of thousands. In another crate - vials and vials of Gamorrean blood, all labeled and categorized in Mandalorian.

They continued to open crates. It appeared the Sith considered Gamorreans like any other piece of stowage, for there were droid parts, computer spikes, and, hey, is that a giant robot?

The giant robot activated his heavy blaster cannon on one arm, and his auto-fire blaster rifle on the other to attack the party. His shield was so powerful that it deflected all but the most powerful attacks, and even melee weapons were barely making a mark. Eventually, Shagarr climbed up to the top of the crates, leaped onto its back, and stabbed the droid in its miniature reactor with his lightsaber. The resulting explosion destroyed the droid and knocked everyone away. But they survived.

Breaker found some assorted vibroblades and other weapons, and loaded them on the lift. The party descended to the main floor, dropped the crate of blood vials off the Z-platform to fall into a star, and then went one level lower.

This level was a laboratory. A woman, striking in her Mandalorian armour, stood admist the beakers and test tubes. She was flanked by Sith guards - who were promptly struck down by Breaker and Shagarr.

But the woman the party spared, at least for the moment. They peppered her with questions about the dead Gamorreans, and she was easy with the answers. Remember the original mission given out by the Jedi Council about the slavers taking Gamorreans? And how none of them were appearing on the front lines of the Mandalorian Wars? This is where they were all going. There were experiments that needed to be run determining how the weapon worked, and in what capacity. Test runs indicated it could take out the population of whole planets, but was it scaleable? Could it snuff the life out of only a thousand at once? Perhaps only one? Imagine the power of taking out a single person from an undisclosed location, anywhere in the galaxy. And it seemed to work. Say one thing about science, say that the results must be repeatable ...

That was about as far as she got before Shagarr beheaded her with his lightsaber.

She had called reinforcements, but the party swept most of those off the Z-platform before they could corner anyone into the lift. Then they made their way to the third tower, where the Master was said to reside.

The top of the third tower was a dark place, tapping into alien technology. The Master was at one end of the room, suspended in some kind of energy field, aware but not aware, power flowing in and out of him. His apprentice, a woman safely tucked away behind a force field, mocked the heroes and evaded their questions about the functions of the tower and its relation to the superweapon. They were in the presence of the weapon; they were inside it; it was before them and around them. The Master was the weapon itself, and it was the station.

With these last words, Breaker became impatient. While the rest of his companions wanted to go to battle the Master, Breaker was adamantly voicing his opinion that they should blast the reactor core. Eventually, he dropped the blaster cannon, took all the available detonite and primers and headed there himself.

Meanwhile, battle was joined in the third tower. The Sith apprentice stepped out from behind her force field to do battle. Heavy artillery droids stepped out to join her. The Master shot lightning from his fingertips to wound and torture his enemies.

Breaker wired the whole reactor room to blow, then raced back to the tower. His plan was simple: get everyone on the lift, rocket down to the main level, escort to the ship, blow the reactor, get out. However, the lift responded poorly to his attempt to force it down, killing his plan in its infancy. But the Jedi and Shagarr pushed one of the droids off a deep pit, destroyed another, cast down the apprentice, and soon after killed the Master.

But the apprentice's words were not all just simple nonsense. She had said that the Master was both of the tower, and of the weapon. Destroying him caused the weapon to lose its primary focus. The dark Force energy that permeated the tower also began to wreak havoc upon the structure. Chuurga found the manual override for the lift, and everyone piled aboard. Dodging falling beams and minor explosions, the party made it to the Oota Goota, and flew away.

As they flew out of the rapidly-crumbling dock, they were fired upon by two Sith battlecruisers. Weaving between the cannon fire, Shagarr plotted a hyperspace trajectory that exactly mirrored the path taken to get to this system. In a few moments, all that was left of the superweapon and the Corellian ship was a memory.

The End of This Adventure!