Need some advice on my SW game's plot.

[Thanas]

Okay, numbnuts. I'll make this simple and use really small words so you can understand it.

Simply repeating the plot is no justification for anything.

Also, the fact that despite repeated showings of why this is a bad idea, you have even refused to change the non-essential ubership detail really shows that you did not want to receive advice at all, but rather to just list stuff and expect us to praise it.

Your plot makes less sense than one of Karen Traviss novels. And that is quite an achievement in itself.

[Sheridan]

I think you guys are conflating Tyber Zann and Darth Oster. They're different people; this is going to be a three-way throw-down. <snip>

Crud. Sorry, I was doing that.

<snip> So I think it might be smarter to do something like what Vehrec suggests: find Zann another supership, such as a Malevolence-class type from the Clone War era. Superships in and of themselves, even ones with a devastating spinal mount weapon like Eclipse or Malevolence are not implausible. The Eclipse, specifically... kind of is. To make matters more interesting, a Clone Wars-era dreadnought will have the infrastructure for a droid-heavy crew. Which reduces the trained manpower problem Zann faces, and creates problems for boarding Jedi if the defenders are clever and play games with the atmosphere and such.

<snip>

So have Fey'lya come to his senses and remobilize the fleet, refit the ships, and so on. Fake Vader manages to steal some, and Zann has an exponentially growing number of droid warships of his own, but at least the New Republic is actually responding intelligently to a threat for once. Even so, they're still in danger of being overwhelmed, so the heroes still get to feel overwhelmed. Imagine they feel great because half a dozen rebel ISD-weight ships appear to support them... only to find their enemies throwing two dozen at them.

This is actually a really good idea. I'd expand on it by throwing the galaxy into war again, with both (all three? all four? all seventeen?; fuck it, just Balkanize the whole galaxy) sides scrambling for more ships, more territory, more manpower, etc.

<snip> Given that it [the Lusankya] will have been mothballed with a bare skeleton crew and a mere one X-Wing squadron to protect itself and the starship mothball yard it was stuck in, yes. The place was preferring security through obscurity, but that's going to fail, obviously. Lusankya's no longer a flagship of anything; Borsk mothballed it. <snip>

This actually kinda stretches my credulity. You want the ship mothballed? Sure, I can see that (if Fey'lya's opinions on the military run to this sort of thing: I've never really seen his personality that way, but I've never seen evidence to the contrary either [note: my knowledge of the EU is very limited]). However, having one freaking X-wing squadron running CSP for the place is not likely. There's gonna be at least an ISD-II commanded taskforce guarding the place, since the ships (even disabled) are going to be extremely valuable to any number of powers.

<snip> Also, if you really want, you can surely create a fictional type. Imagine Malevolence with a low-power superlaser, something in the dreadnought-killer class, instead of its superheavy ion cannon? I mean, if some random private citizen could fit a superlaser to an Imperator-II, couldn't Zann manage the same?

The idea of Zann making his own supership makes a great deal more sense than Zann managing to pirate one of the few existing ones out from under the nose of the Empire and keep it hidden for decades. <snip>

This actually ties in really well with the idea of finding an old CIS shipyard/droid manufacturing facility out in the middle of nowhere. If they can reproduce themselves (and, remember, it's primarily a social stigma against droid/AI-driven militaries in Star Wars, not a technological one), then they should have some way to alter the designs to correct for noted flaws. While this may not overlap into making new designs, it wouldn't cause my suspension of disbelief to burst a leaf spring thinking that new designs could be created either. Figure that instead of keeping the Eclipse, he instead kept a complete technical readout. Incorporating that into an already-existing design, while not being a trivial excersize, is also not completely out of hand.

<snip> I'm not sure you understood me. The point is that you can make Zann a dangerous enemy without having the PCs come face to face with him and demolish him with their Force powers. His minions are dangerous, his battledroids are dangerous (because you can reasonably make battledroids superhuman in strength and firepower), and so on.

It's the minions that are the threat, not Zann himself. If they ever even interact with Zann, it's over a commlink in another star system; he doesn't want to get near this bunch of Jedi super-commandos. <snip>

This, right here, is one of the best pieces of advice for making villains great. Think about, for example, Bond movies. Does the leader of S.P.E.C.T.E.R. have any martial arts skills or super-sniper talents? No, he's just smart enough to get the right people to work for him in convoluted plots that are difficult to unravel (well, not so difficult, but you get my point).

The K.I.S.S. principle is one of the best to apply to any game. The less crap that you have to explain in order to keep the story moving, the better. Most folks (myself included) will accept something that looks plausible on the surface, even if the logic underneath is not entirely correct--as long as we don't have to think about it. The less that you have to handwave in order to make things work, the less your players will have to work to understand things, and the better your game will be.

[Tiriol]

I don't know how well a military dismantling fits Fey'lya, actually: it was during his tenure that the New Republic military started to receive new, updated warships outside MonCal cruisers and some Rebel-based designs (new Star Defenders etc.). His major weakness was that he was unwilling to engage that force and when he did, he mostly protected the Core Worlds (and the Bothan Space) against the Yuuzhan Vong (although arguably there might be a good reason for that: if the New Republic military was in enough a bad shape, like during the Camaasi Document crisis, they couldn't afford thinning their forces too much).

[ShadowDragon8685]

How does all this exist in the shadows long enough that the powers to be....do not notice a vast military build up, an immense procurement of force users, and the theft of high end military weaponry?

Military build-up: It's easy enough to get a military build-up going if you're taking pains to hide it, whilst simultainously letting it slip that the build-up isn't meant for you: IE, if Darth Oster lets it be believed that his build-up is in plan to consolidate control of the remnant with no further aim on the N.R., then the NR will be wary, but not immediately go and pull all the old ships out of mothballs until it's too late. See, his initial problem will be that those who choose to throw in with him will have fewer ships than crew to man them; this is where the hijackings come in.

Procurement of force-users: (at least0 Thrice before the powers that be have missed this one. During the Reborn crisis, during the Disciples of Ragnos crisis, and during the Shadow Academy/Second Imperium Crisis. Frankly, the PTB are bollocks about not caring about the procurement of force users. They consistantly underestimate the Force, possibly because the Jedi have always taken care of it before it needed any serious commitment from the PTB to fix.

Theft of high-end military weaponry: They certainly won't fail to notice this, which is why it's part of the late-game. By the time this happens, Borsk will be conducting the business of government from atop his refresher to prevent his trousers from being soilt every twenty minutes. This is the point where the boy will realize he done fucked up and fucked up good.

But, as per Borsk Fey'lya's Hierarchy of Importance, covering his own ass will come first, covering the asses of his friends will come second, covering Bothan asses will come third through fifth, and only then will covering the Republic's ass come sixth.

What does Borsk Fey'lya do when it gets to this point? What all real politicians would do: deny, cover-up, and send in the spies. It goes without saying that the Bothan Spy Network and Republic Intelligence will be burning the midnight oil, the 2 AM oil, the 5 AM oil, the sunup oil, and the taking sunup speed to take care of the situation.

If you answer: Because I wrote it so. That's useless. You are set in your ways and this entire exercise is just for you to show us what you and your gaming group spanks off to. Otherwise, you either need to flesh this out over several sessions or it's just "And then Luke II became a Jedi Knight, slayed Emperor Anakin Palpatine Skywalker Solo who was possessed by Darth Omnus". Your opponents are all geared to some high end with no real hint that they are nothing more then shoehorned in there by using reputations you simply inserted.

I'm fleshing it out over quite some time, you know. I have thought about this, you know. I'm not an idiot.

For plot? You've presented : Plucky heroes, retard government, uber Sith Lord #8908797812, Crime Lord that outdoes Kuat and Sienar and the CSA combined, and last but not least....name dropping helpers. Combine with a story that is nothing short of conquering the known galaxy.

Of course they're plucky heroes. There's plucky heroes as the protagonists of everything.
Retard Government is a problem that is persistant throughout the Star Wars mythos, and why not? It's deeper than just saying "here's a bad guy, he wants to eat up everyone you know and love, go shove a lightsaber where the sun don't shine." This puts them in a conundrum; Borsk Fey'lya's actions are materially harming them and the Republic they're sworn to protect, but he is also the leader of that Republic. They can't simply remove him by force - think about the precedent that would set! They have to work around this problem, including the problem that Jedi have already been arrested at least once for vigilantism when they brought in a kidnapper/slaver that had been preying on Courscant's younglings. It gives them problems to deal with, which they cannot simply solve through lightsabering, and which will require creativity, roleplay, compromise, and the art of social activity.

As for Zann, I'll point out that it is canon (a lower canon, but still canon) that he had the potential to conquer the galaxy during the Galactic Civil War. His vessels were capable of going toe-to-toe with Alliance and Imperial forces, and were arguably superior in his vast use of special ship-killer weapons (mass drivers, axial fuckoff guns,) clever technology, and even the ability to shut down Jedi with Ysalamiri cages.

Obviously, he did not do this. But he had the potential, and now he's come back to realize that potential. Tyber Zann is not a motherfucker to be trifled with.

As for name-dropping helpers...? Wha?

Your actions would have to be multiple confrontations that will either be vast fleet battles given the armies and vehicles you are pointing out to us.

Yes, that's the idea. The players will need to bring a fleet with them when they come to take down Eclipse/Malevolance/Whatever or Lusankya. They might even decide that both vessels should be recaptured for the Republic, which would require boarding them. But first, they'd need to disable the big bad ship's combat ability with their starfighters, quite possibly by escorting in B-Wings and Y-Wing in the company of Rogue Squadron whilst the rest of the fleet fights a desperate battle against the rest of Zann's/Oster's forces. Once they've done that - scuttled her Axial Fuckoff Laser and her turbolaser batteries, they can board, then they get treated to a running fight through the ship's hull, on their side: whatever allies they managed to bring together. On the bad guy's side: a fuckton of stormtroopers/Sith Soldiers and all of the darksided bad guys the enemy can bring to bear.

Your Climax is either a final confrontation with the SUPER SUPER SUPER STAR DREADNOUGHT WANK! with an obligatory Lightsaber spank fest. Maybe the villains flee ala Cobra or die.

Yeah, and? Is there something wrong with that?

Your falling action is the galaxy either being fucking dumber then usual or make your group the galaxy's greatest since Luke.

It's not impossible for dumb politicians to run things into the ground. See also: Righttards, healthcare. And why shouldn't they be; they're the player characters, the protagonists. They have a right to be as great as they can be, and if that means outstripping Luke Skywalker in power - at least collectively - then so be it.

Your finale is...RETURN OF THE SITH or they died, what else to do on this fine Saturday evening.

And again, what's wrong with that? Sith are a classic, and none of them are more classic than Darth Vader. That alone justifies it, the fact that I have actually thought out how and why someone is going to be going about the business of impersonating him allows it to take place sensibly; it'll come as a moment of deep relief when they realize the guy they're fighting is not in fact Darth Vader... But it should be nothing short of a "holy shit!" moment when they realize he's powerful enough to give them a run for their money anyway.

Even with your telling us of building and structuring, it still sounds nothing more then a bad Del Ray novel. And you are still telling us that it's not, because you're telling us.

Okay then, you care to come up a plot that gives a group of Jedi characters, in the New Jedi Order era, 23 ABY, a gigantic, galaxy-spanning, seemingly-hopeless situation to deal with that does not involve the Yuuzan Vong (who will never, ever, EVER appear in my games) or yet another fucking Corellian uprising the likes of which make me wonder why they haven't just BDZ'd the damn insufferable world and had done with it.

The plot you come up with must have equal parts struggle against seemingly-hopeless odds, such as battle droids or stormtroopers in seemingly inexhaustable supply, epic, whirling space battles in their starfighters and space transport while towards the end game entire fleets clash in the background, and lightsaber duels against competant, Force-wielding, lightsaber-wielding bad guys. It must also have struggles against obstacles which may not be expediantly solved by the application of violence, such as obstructionist or difficult politicians pursuing agendas which are genuinely-held and thought out but ultimately wrong.

Show your work.

Well, they like it so far. They're learning to dislike Borsk Fey'lya with an intensity that rivals Rogue Squadron's pilots, and they're liking the recent plot with Ackbar.

OK, fun dominates. But remember, you ASKED us to help you make your plot make sense; don't be surprised and defensive if you get complaints that it doesn't make as much sense as you thought it did.

It makes plenty of sense to me. Nothing I've plotted has so far gone out of character for the actors involved. Darth Oster doesn't come out of nowhere, I know exactly who he is (the third Red Guard, the one who survives the Shadow Academy,) and his motivation is the same as the one he just attempted (re-forge the Empire by using dark Jedi) only with a lot more competance. Tyber Zann is a canon bad-guy who was left with a plot that's ready-made for this sort of thing, what with his whole carbonite-frozen Sith Army and Sliri and Nightsisters support and what-not.

And while it may be stretching things to have him retain Eclipse, it's less stretching than that "oh and by the way, he discovered some lost CIS warship that, despite being the better part of a century old, is still powerful enough that it's the most powerful ship in space today." That genuinely comes out of nowhere, whereas fudging already-existing facts to have him retaining a ship he laid his hands on and hyperspaced off with once does not. Like I said, if you're going to take the goods and vanish for a few decades, it's pretty easy to vanish no matter who's tracking you down. He might have simply stocked the ship with thousands of Ysalamiri and plenty of food dispensors to ensure that they bred strong, and that would've easily prevented Palpatine, even if he personally decided to track the ship down, from finding him through the Force. Use swarms of MSE-6 and astromech droids to prevent the Ysalamiri from destroying the ship (or more likely, to tend to their cages,) with Urai Fen (the ageless old owl) awake to oversee the whole operation while everyone is asleep.

It can even be reconciled with all the canon facts except the ending of the campaign of EaW:FoC, by simply stating that the Rebellion believed the canon ending to be true, the Empire worked to make it seem to be true, and by the time he was ressurected, the Emperor thought it to be true because they'd built him another ship with the same name and it never crossed his mind that they would have done that rather than tracked down Zann. Or hell, maybe he didn't care; as long as he had an Eclipse and the Galaxy Gun, he held the galaxy by the throat anyway.

If he's powerful enough to convincingly impersonate Darth Vader, then this objection basically vanishes. But that is damned powerful.

It is, and unashamedly so. This dude is hardcore dangerous. It's not without precedent; Desann was big enough and bad enough with the Force that he pulled the Darth Vader Take-Over of star destroyers whilst being a gigantic tyrannosaurus-thing. Oster has power armor and is actively impersonating Vader, and doing so convincingly. I want even my players to wonder if Luke might be wrong and that he might really be Vader. I want them to hear the Imperial March.

So, in other words, the reasoning that Zann canonically applied was just plain wrong? Oh...kay... I mean really, why not just use another big evil battleship? Do you have some specific motive for making it the Eclipse? Does there even NEED to be a big evil battleship, as opposed to a larger fleet of more normal ships?

Because making it any other battleship is just "Oh, and he somehow found this, too. Yes, while he was asleep." Whereas he had Eclipse under his command, he was literally standing on the bridge and ordering the ship to make the jump to light-speed. It is undisputable that Zann had his hands on the Eclipse, so I'm simply reasoning that, if he was planning to go dark for two decades, he would have known he could pull it off with the Eclipse in tow.

As for there needing to be a big evil battleship, yes, yes there does. He's a Big Bad Evil Guy, he needs a Big Bad Evil Command Ship, he needs a Cool Ship. Frankly, his personal Agressor doesn't cut it for his flagship when even the Keldabes that will be part of his regular forces are bigger and badder. It might be his away-from-home ship, but when it comes time to take Zann on in his home territory, it should be as daunting a challenge as the second Death Star run was. They might even find it above Mandalore itself; a fully-armed and operational battleship.

And no. Their cruisers won't be able to repel firepower of that magnitude. But Ackbar won't say it, he'll be too busy experiancing deja vu. Though it may not actually be a trap. That depends on whether Zann knows they're coming or not.

Anyway, Malevolence is neither big nor bad enough. His standard Agressor-class Destroyers are bigger and have twin fuckoff cannons.

OK, this is simply not true. Looking at the game, Aggressors are built to the same scale as ordinary star destroyers. Malevolence was more like the size of the Executor- or the Eclipse. In addition, the Malevolence had one hell of a "fuckoff cannon" in its own right, capable of one-shotting a Venator.

So I think you've got your sense of exactly what Zann had on hand and how it compared to the rest of the galaxy badly miscalibrated.

Well, I know that in the Vongshit stories, Luke bemoaned the fact that they'd destroyed all the Eclipse-class dreadnoughts, since one of them would have been capable of popping Vong Worldships. Anyway, Malevolance is only listed as ">5Km" long. Eclipse is 17.5, and it vastly out-masses even an Executor-class SSD. It is true that one of the estimates of Malevolance's size was 17Km; I'm certainly capable of extrapolating from the stats from Executor and Eclipse and the other CIS ships to come up with stats for a 17Km Malevolance with a fuckoff gun capable of erasing entire Star Destroyers.

But again, this begs the question of where it was; how did the Emperor fail to find it once he'd shut off the Clone Wars? If it was out there, wouldn't Palps have hung onto it? If it was gone, wouldn't he have destroyed the shipyard that built it, so nobody could build ships capable of challenging his Star Destroyers? And where and how the hell did Tyber Zann get his hands on it? Any argument against him keeping Eclipse goes just as much if he'd stolen Malevolance from Palpatine, since Palpatine wouldn't want a finished warship with a fuckoff gun capable of being a credible threat to his Eclipse in Zann's hands anymore than he'd want the Eclipse itself in his hands. If he just "found it", then I have to ask, how and why? Did he coincidentally find it floating in space where he went to go and hide? What happened to the crew; there had to be some organic in charge. What did that guy do at the end of the Clone Wars, eat his blaster? Go into piracy? Make a long-jump to another galaxy?

It's a lot of variables, a lot of questions, and all of them feel more contrived than Zann simply having retained a ship that we know he was in command of. Don't get me wrong, I think Malevolance is fucking cool. She reminds me of the ships from EVE Online, from Homeworld 2. I can very, very easily see that beast with an axial fuckoff cannon that lights up her middle and spits out between the upper and lower prongs.

I mean. Look at this beast! (Huge image warning; 56.6 beware). She's fucking beautiful. I count dozens - well over a hundred - of what look like Dual Light Turbolaser emplacements and plenty of dual heavy turbolaser turrets. Give her an axial fuckoff cannon and she'd easily commit horrible rape to any unprepared vessels or fleets that come near her. And that's visible guns on the hull; the official stats give it a much greater story (though they seem to consider a single turret to be a battery, for some reason.)

I just cannot rationalize Zann having gotten his hands on her.

I think I've adequately explained how he has Eclipse, unfinished, but in a usable if fragile state. It's really not that much of a stretch; Emperor dead, Alliance believes that the Empire has it, Empire trying to prevent anyone from knowing they don't have it while hurriedly building another... It's easy to lose track of those things, and Eclipse is both really, really fearsome, and has the benefit of having unquestionably been under Zann's control. As well, the Emperor couldn't have farscryed it if he'd filled the thing with Ysalamiri, after all.

SD, what I'm not clear on:

Are you looking for an excuse to give Zann the Eclipse, when canonically he decided to abandon the ship because of the heat it was drawing him? Or are you looking for a logical plot? Pick one and stick with it; don't just keep insisting that it "has to be this way!" when people are raising problems with the idea?

Appealing to the canonicty of an event that I've already decided I don't mind retconning isn't an argument winner any more than "but I said so!" is.

Frankly, of all the superships he could have, Eclipse is the least implausable. I've already decided he has to have a supership, that's nonoptional. Hell, if even the Hutts could have one, Zann should. Sure, there are other ways; it's not impossible Zann could have found the Malevolance. Hell, her captain might have given it to him while he was dying, seeing Tyber Zann as the best hope for a non-Republic, non-Imperial galaxy, the last, greatest Seperatist hope.

But that's still more implausable than Zann simply having decided that the level of heat that was being turned up on him was irrelevant if he was going to go dark by freezing himself and all his loyal men in carbonite, and freezing the disloyal ones in the vacuum of space. To my point of view, it's perfectly logical; he's going away to nowhere. The Emperor won't be able to track him down since he'll be dead, and the Rebels will think he let the Empire have it back. He makes a clean getaway, the heat drops off, and he's poised to return in twenty years. How does this not work logically?

Also... Zann? Ysalamiri? When and where did he get those? It's not as if everyone in the galaxy knew about them.

Tyber Zann did. He used them during the Galactic Civil War in the form of Ysalamiri Cages which he built on top of Mobile Defense Units in order to shut down the force powers of opposing Jedi so his forces could perform horrible rape upon them.

I suggest that the trick is to make options for bypassing the trap (without spending Destiny Points) available, but make them difficult and taxing. They can go through the hangar bay (which is obviously rigged to blow the atmosphere out into space), or they can crawl through the maintenance tunnels with berserk flamethrower-bots harassing them or something.

A better option than save-or-die red jam traps, and certainly I'm not opposed to using obvious bad-choice/worse-choice situations on the players, that still doesn't change the fact that it would make actually taking the guy down once you get to him pathetically easy, which feels like an anticlimax.

Given that it will have been mothballed with a bare skeleton crew and a mere one X-Wing squadron to protect itself and the starship mothball yard it was stuck in, yes. The place was preferring security through obscurity, but that's going to fail, obviously. Lusankya's no longer a flagship of anything; Borsk mothballed it.

Why would they do that?

Don't be married to your existing ideas if they don't make sense, at least not if you want them to make sense? You may have a rationale that you cooked up for how it happens because the result of it happening would be Just. So. Cool! But that doesn't make the rationale into a good reason.

Why would the New Republic cripple itself so thoroughly? Why would Fey'lya suddenly catch a case of stupidity worse than anything he'd ever had before?

Funnily enough, nobody in my game seems to have a problem with Borsk behaving this way. I've explained his reasoning to their satisfaction; I'm playing him as holding genuine Libertarian ideals. One can hold ideals and still be a corrupt motherfucker; it's no secret at all that he blatently favors himself, and then the Bothan people, but that doesn't stop him from still wanting to ease the tax and tarrif burden on the Republic's member states (and by doing so get them to look more favorably upon him) by cutting a lot of headachy old machinery out of the New Republic's military budget.

Basically, he wants to replace all the ships of the Rebellion and early New Republic with the New Class ships. He's doing so slowly, so as not to strain the budget, and he mothballed all the old ships instead of having them scrapped, because he felt that if nessessary, they could be brought up to active duty status.

That's what makes him dangerous; it's not that he hasn't thought this through, it's that he has. And there's enough crisis-weary senators from cash-strapped worlds out there to go with him on it if it'll mean lower taxes and tarrifs and more 'incentive' for the Republic to solve it's current and future problems through diplomacy rather than with Rogue Squadron.

Because they're an expensive boondoggle. He views everything pre-New Class as a logistical headache, sucking up excess resources in exchange for subpar performance. He is, as I said, pursuing an aggressively libertarian agenda, which involved cutting out the Mon Cal vessels, the Star Destroyers, and drastically cutting back on military expenditure in favor of reducing taxes and tarrifs to make him very, very popular, and using diplomacy instead of military might to mollify the Empire.

Is this in character for him? Is this in line with his normal policies?

It's not out of character from what's been seen of him so far. It's expounding upon what we've seen and taking some liberties with his motivations. Borsk is a corrupt, self-serving opportuist, but when the chips were down in the YV crisis he did lay down his own life to buy everyone who had a better handle on things time to get away and organize a military resistance against the Vong. He genuinely believes that he's doing right by the Republic with his actions - righter by himself, his friends, and the Bothans, but still right by the Republic. He believes that the military expenditures they have now are wasteful and excessive, maintaining old, outmoded equipment that needs too much maintenance, too many seperate supply lines, and that the ships have far too vast crew requirements, requiring far too many people to be maintained under arms and trained.

In his mind, the Republic does not need the gigantic fleets it had, when the existing New Class fleets are enough to maintain order. (He's underestimating, but he's genuine in his belief, if not his figures.) He is continuing military procurement, but only of new class starships and fighters - which is itself a mistake, since the New Class fighters are rubbish compared to the modernized X-, A- and B-Wings, but he's looking at the standardized parts supplies as being efficient.

Basically, when thinking about what he's doing with the New Republic's military, think of the vitriol with which Shep hates Robert MacNamara. Borsk is the Republic's MacNamara. He's looking at "how cheaply can we maintain order." Except he's not scrapping the old stuff, he's just putting it up on a shelf up high in case of emergency. He's not planning for someone else to come and take what was on his shelf five-fingered discount, but that's because he's not a military man, and he fired the best military man in the fleet (out of an airlock,) with the rest of the best military men resigning in protest.

He's not 100% incompetant. He's just competant enough to be more dangerous than someone who is 100% incompetant.

Again, the precedent exists: the Katana Fleet. But it's questionable whether Zann would decide to do that rather than simply abandon the ship, especially if it involves cryogenically freezing himself for decades. Remember, that's exactly what he did decide in the main timeline.

Yes, I know. However, in the main timeline, they were obviously setting themselves up for a sequal to Forces of Corruption which never happened. Since I'm usurping that for myself, I see no reason for him not to have been planning to pull off the uberheist and escape retribution by going dark for a few decades. Since he was planning that all along, it (a) dovetailed beautifully when he found the Sith Army frozen in carbonite, and (b) gave him no particular reason to divest himself of Eclipse.

The rest of the Eclipse-class is gone with the destruction of Byss, and Zann needs a big fuckoff weapon powerful enough to oneshot any capital warship that comes calling up to and including Lusankya (on a good damage roll, anyway.) Malevolance, while cool as all hell, simply lacks the size and power he needs. It's sufficient to wax a Star Destroyer or three, but it's not a serious contender in the realm of Super-Star Destroyers.

I'm not sure I agree.

Also, if you really want, you can surely create a fictional type. Imagine Malevolence with a low-power superlaser, something in the dreadnought-killer class, instead of its superheavy ion cannon? I mean, if some random private citizen could fit a superlaser to an Imperator-II, couldn't Zann manage the same?

Booster Terrik's not some random private citizen, he's the guy who combines all the slickness of Lando Calrissian with all the luck of Han Solo and all the military brilliance of Ackbar.

Anyway, I surely could come up with a custom ship class for Zann, probably drawing on his Mandalorian ship design wanking and giving it some kind of retardedly huge mass driver that ignores shields and can shoot it's projectiles through hyperspace. Basically a Galaxy Gun with a Keldabe-class battleship++ wrapped around it. I could also have him somehow come up with a gravitational-based weapon that simply pastes a ship's insides, or even some kind of super-super lightning gun.

But none of that, I think, is as cool as giving him an existing ship type. While I could give him Malevolance using the 17km figure to put it in the threatening size range, or have him steal an SSD from somewhere, we already know that he had his hands on Eclipse.

Basically, I'm employing Occam's razor here. If he already knew he was going to go dark when he got Eclipse, why would he abandon it for the Empire to reclaim when he could simply take it and run. Why go out of the way and invent a reason for him to have a different ship with his trademark axial fuckoff cannons when he could simply have retained the one he already had his hands on.

For that matter, why wouldn't he have simply dumped Eclipse into the Maw or something and said "if I can't have her, nobody will!" I know, retaliation, right, but you'd think if they were going to hunt him down like a dog, they'd have done it regardless, simply for doing what he did.

The idea of Zann making his own supership makes a great deal more sense than Zann managing to pirate one of the few existing ones out from under the nose of the Empire and keep it hidden for decades.

I do not agree. I cannot see how anyone could agree with this. How could it possibly be easier to make his own supership than keeping one he had his hands on and had the ability to jump to hyperspace in?! Keeping it hidden for decades is easy if you just picked a spot in the random middle of nowhere and didn't have any through traffic.

How does this add up to him downsizing the military, which he never did during his twenty years in political office?

How does it preclude it? I am not obliged to contact Timothy Zahn whenever I want Borsk Fey'lya to do or say something in my game any more than I am obliged to contact George Lucas when I want Luke Skywalker to do something.

Rather, I am simply obliged to play the characters as if they were sane, rational actors (unless they're not sane, rational actors,) coloured by their emotions, prejudices, prides, personal beliefs, and values. If nessessary, I can and will expound upon them; for example, Borsk Fey'lya is allergic to seafood. There, I've expounded upon him. The stories don't mention any such allergy because they don't come up, and I strongly doubt there's any references to him eating anything, but if nessessary I can and will expound upon his character; I just have to not violate it.

Now, Ackbar downsizing the fleets would be entirely out-of-character, but for Fey'lya, it's not so. He's an obstroperous diplomat with no love of the military. He doesn't have to hate it, he just has to hate expenditure and taxation; in his mind, as Cheif of State, it is his duty, Duty to the Republic, duty to the Bothan people, and duty to himself, to ease the financial burden upon everyone by drastically cutting back on unnessary and wasteful expenditure.

He can acomplish this by putting all of the old, inefficient, bodged-together classes and the old, Imperial-sized vessels (to go with an Imperial budget) on a shelf, up high, away, not draining but a pittance of money to have them guarded, in deep space where nothing breaks, while building more of the New Class vessels to flesh out the fleet.

Is this a dumb idea, yes. But in his mind, it makes sense, and in the beancounter minds of the Bothans he surrounds himself with, it makes sense. And because he would automatically assume that any military sentient who objects is biased because of obvious self-interest, the only people he's listening to are the beancounters.

I mean, I get him being corrupt, I get him fighting wars of intrigue against genuine heroes within the New Republic (like Ackbar). I get him being ambitious. That's all in character. But for him to suddenly turn into a libertarian stereotype? I mean, does libertarianism as we know it even exist in Star Wars?

Sure, I can't see why a philosphy of less governmental intervention and less taxation needs not exist. It might not exist in that word, but then, "Democracy" did. So why not "Libertarianism". Hell, he's seen firsthand that individual actors with motivation and drive can acomplish what entire governments cannot - Rogue Squadron took down Courscant, with the Rebel fleet as backup, not the other way 'round. Skywalker dueled Darth Vader and Palpatine and emerged alive. So why shouldn't the idea that there's a lot of slightly-less-skilled individual super-beings out there, just waiting to break free and become super businessbeings or super-charitybeings, just that they're chained by undue taxes and unnessary, cumbersome regulations; isn't it Borsk's duty to ease the budgetary burdens of the New Republic, his duty to 'cut the fat' and the unnessessary regulations, so that more that are like him can succeed?

Bollocks, of course, but if he believes it, that makes him more dangerous than any cynical bastard unbeliever. The fact that he's a cynical bastard believer who's more than happy to be corrupt whilst still pursuing such ideals just makes him even more dangerous.

Why not just have the military not be downsized, but have Fey'lya mismanage the war? Or crank up the power of the opposition so that even when Fey'lya makes the right tactical calls, he's still outgunned?

Well frankly, it's because it's already happened. The Republic's military has been downsized, Lusankya and many other vessels are being put in mothballs, the MC80s and MC30s are flying back to Mon Calamari to be delivered back into the hands of their true owners.

You've already got two really great villains. Why add a third, much lamer one on your PCs' own side?

Borsk Fey'lya is not lame. He adds a third dimensional villain because he's not malevolantly opposed to the players, he's just genuinely pursuing goals that are at crossed purposes to them. He's not someone they can point to and say "he's a clear-cut bad-guy, if we ever get a chance to drop a proton torpedo on him while he's taking his morning walk, we're bringing the rain." He's not a malevolant villain, he's someone they have to deal with diplomatically; they might talk him around to their way of thinking, they might talk him into stepping down. If either of those fail, they face the hard choice of trying to subvert enough of his inner council to have him ejected from office, outright staging a coup d'etat and removing him from office at the point of a lightsaber, or trying to work around him by subverting the Republic-under-Borsk into impotancy by going to the member worlds directly and asking them to throw in their forces and money with the Jedi.

None of those are easy options. None of them will be without fallout or consequences, and none of them is the clear-cut 'right' answer. None of them is clear-cut as a wrong answer, either. With Darth Oster and Tyber Zann, killing them outright in as cheap and lame a way as possible is clearly justified, since they both seem to be making a claim to the title of Dark Lord of Sith and Emperor or Overlord of the Galaxy. If they caught Oster out in the open with a starfighter, I would expect them to drop a proton torpedo on him - but with Fey'lya, it's not nearly so simple.

I'm not sure you understood me. The point is that you can make Zann a dangerous enemy without having the PCs come face to face with him and demolish him with their Force powers. His minions are dangerous, his battledroids are dangerous (because you can reasonably make battledroids superhuman in strength and firepower), and so on.

It's the minions that are the threat, not Zann himself. If they ever even interact with Zann, it's over a commlink in another star system; he doesn't want to get near this bunch of Jedi super-commandos.

Of course he doesn't want to get near them, but eventually he'll have to when they hunt him down like dogs. It's not impossible they might just vape him in space, but if they decide to get him the hard way, I'd like him not to go down like a chump? Obviously, his forces will be annoying and dangerous, but it just feels wrong if the BBEG goes down like a chump. After all, Palpatine was just a frail old man... Until he busted out a red lightsaber and personally waxed four Jedi Masters in three seconds. He probably could've done the same to Vader if it had occured to him that Vader would sacrifice his own life to kill Palpatine and save Luke, but Vader took him completely off-guard with that one.

Let me put it this way.

Force users have an uncanny knack for achieving extremely difficult feats (like destroying the Death Star, or taking over the galaxy). That goes double for extremely powerful Force users, who do difficult feats all the time and make it look easy. Just as your PCs tend to overpower their opposition easily, NPC Force users who are active in the galaxy should be doing the same thing.

So a Dark Jedi with Vader-level powers is a great threat because he can accomplish things that would not normally be possible. Even if he can't physically blow up a planet, he can do other things that have as much impact in a galactic war as blowing up a planet would.

I am not saying that's not true, however, I am saying that the ability to destroy a planet is not insignificant. No more, no less. Less powerful and cool and useful than the Force, yes, but not insignificant.

I mean, think about what Luke accomplished when he killed the Death Star using the Force. Strategically, that was at least as important as the destruction of Alderaan, because it saved the Rebellion from immediate defeat, and because it removed (for years) the Empire's ability to destroy planets. Thus, while in a sense Vader lied (because the Sith cannot physically destroy planets), in another sense he did not (because they can do other things that are roughly as significant).

Darth Vader does not need to be able to destroy planets to be a menace. He certainly didn't in the movie; was Vader any less impressive in Episode V when he didn't have planet-destroying weapons than in Episode IV when he did?

I agree with you. I am, however, saying that the ability to destroy a planet is not insignificant. If Zann were to get Eclipse mobile, he could hold the galaxy in the grip of fear because he could glass entire planetary surfaces, no matter how strong the planetary shield. He'd be a major force to be reckoned with. That would make him not-insignificant.

But it seems like you made this up to justify using him to sabotage the NR military. Why not just strip that out of the character and make him a perfectly normal politician? It isn't even necessary for him to sabotage the military in order for Fake Vader to steal the Lusankya; the ship could simply be down for routine refitting and maintenance.

It's already happened. You might as well argue, during ESB, why not have Tarkin just blow up a moon of Alderaan to make his point instead of blowing up all of Alderaan.

You're adding plot elements that don't need to be there, and that weaken the character of the NPCs you're relying on to drive the plot.

You guys are the only ones who think so. I don't know why, I wish you'd come 'round. All of my players love my expounding on Borsk Fey'lya as a libertarian with an agenda that does not include them or a vast number of old military ships.

As I've cited previously, when he feels guilty or useless, Ackbar is given to retreating to solitude.

I was not aware of this aspect of his character, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Could you explain?

From his Wookiepedia entry. When Ackbar felt that he was responsible for destroying the Cathedral of Winds and killing hundreds of Vors, he was stricken with grief and went into self-imposed exile. He basically fucked off to the middle of the wilderness of Mon Calamari and had to be tracked down by Leia and Cilghal (one of his nieces,) to be convinced to come out of it, and even then he didn't come out easily; he only came out to help track down Terpfen, who had been brainwashed into sabotaging his shuttle. It was only when he told Terpfen that he had a great many things still to offer the republic that he realized that applied to himself as well.

So, that's the aspect of his character I'm drawing on for this. He feels like an obsolete old fish, a relic as old and unwanted as Home One itself. It's untrue, but that's how he feels, and what he needs is for young people to drag him out on adventure to realize that he and the ship both still have much to offer the galaxy.

Home One's a heavy cruiser, but she currently has a crew consisting mainly of R-series astromech droids. While they're more than competant to keep the ship in good repair and fly her about, they can't fire the turbolasers at all, and they're untrained with the ion cannons and tractor beams. The players could personally man the guns, it's true, but she's nowhere near full fighting trim. Primarily, Home One is a cool flying base for them to play around with for the time being, a mobile base with all the trimmings. If they come up with a good reason for her to be fully-crewed, I won't object, of course; I welcome such innovations.

Well, I suggest reading Eleventh Century Remnant's stuff anyway, because it's well in line with the quality of EU stuff that is itself worth reading- though I have low standards, so take that with a grain of salt.

Who/what is Eleventh Century Remnant, and where can I find that stuff?

If you want to write capital ship battles, I think that ECR's stuff becomes required reading, much as you shouldn't be allowed to write Star Wars dogfights without reading the Rogue Squadron series.

Roger-roger. Where can I find it?

Why?

I mean, you can write GREAT adventures where the PCs think they're screwed, they're outgunned, they're scrambling to save what they can and find a way to survive... and then the NPCs they'd dismissed as useless idiots have a change of heart and come storming in to back them up. Well, you can if you do it right.

Sure, that's a thought. But by the time Fey'lya would, on his own, come around to realizing he does need the Jedi, he'd be too late to send much help, since the Core Worlds would be under siege and he'd need most of his remaining military to protect it. If they convince him to come around earlier, well, that's a perfectly valid way to resolve the situation; as is staging a coup d'etat to remove him and the inner council and install the person the Senate elects, and as is going around him by going to all the worlds they can think of and recruiting a war-fleet of their own.

It's up to them how to solve it. Persuading Borsk Fey'lya to give up his current, destructive course of action, is one of them.

What I don't understand:

Why do you keep talking about the way this Will Be? It sounds as if you aren't really interested in advice...

I'm not interested in people taking the pre-sets that I've already made and saying "this is no good," I'm interested in advice of "okay, here's how to make this work better."

I'm sorry, I may not have been clear on that when I started. Taking the plot that's already in motion and telling me it's no good would be like telling Michealangelo to scrap David half-way through. Even if I thought your arguments against the plots I've set in motion were right (I don't,) to rectify the situation I'd have to tell all of my players the game is over and start from step 1 again.

The opportunity cost of revising the plot points that are so widely disliked is too high to change those things. That wasn't what I was asking for, I was asking for stuff like "okay, you've decided Borsk is a libertarian. Here, here, and here are ways you can play that up reasonably and sensibly while still putting him at cross-purposes with the players," and "okay, this guy is impersonating Darth Vader. Here, here, and here, are probable steps he could take towards becoming the Emperor of the Imperial Remnant and expanding it," and "okay, you've decided that Zann is back. Have you considered how he's going to expand his power base from frozen men? Here's what a sociopath of his stature could do in this kind of situation..."

Also, the fact that despite repeated showings of why this is a bad idea, you have even refused to change the non-essential ubership detail really shows that you did not want to receive advice at all, but rather to just list stuff and expect us to praise it.

You assume it's non-essential. I disagree. I think it's very essential.

Your plot makes less sense than one of Karen Traviss novels. And that is quite an achievement in itself.

How does it not make sense? The third Red Guard decides not to die like a chump but that he's going to make his own bid for Emperor, and Tyber Zann returns to take over the galaxy. That's perfectly sensible, inasmuch as anything in Star Wars makes sense!

Gor, you guys would have, if consulted in the 70s, advised Lucas that the bad guys don't need these ridiculous "death star" things when the resources which go into making one could have been more efficiently spent on making more Star Destroyers, wouldn't you?!

I think you guys are conflating Tyber Zann and Darth Oster. They're different people; this is going to be a three-way throw-down. <snip>

Crud. Sorry, I was doing that.

No worries.

<snip> So I think it might be smarter to do something like what Vehrec suggests: find Zann another supership, such as a Malevolence-class type from the Clone War era. Superships in and of themselves, even ones with a devastating spinal mount weapon like Eclipse or Malevolence are not implausible. The Eclipse, specifically... kind of is. To make matters more interesting, a Clone Wars-era dreadnought will have the infrastructure for a droid-heavy crew. Which reduces the trained manpower problem Zann faces, and creates problems for boarding Jedi if the defenders are clever and play games with the atmosphere and such.

<snip>

So have Fey'lya come to his senses and remobilize the fleet, refit the ships, and so on. Fake Vader manages to steal some, and Zann has an exponentially growing number of droid warships of his own, but at least the New Republic is actually responding intelligently to a threat for once. Even so, they're still in danger of being overwhelmed, so the heroes still get to feel overwhelmed. Imagine they feel great because half a dozen rebel ISD-weight ships appear to support them... only to find their enemies throwing two dozen at them.

This is actually a really good idea. I'd expand on it by throwing the galaxy into war again, with both (all three? all four? all seventeen?; fuck it, just Balkanize the whole galaxy) sides scrambling for more ships, more territory, more manpower, etc.

This is what's essentially going to happen, but I'm starting the New Republic off in a seriously tight spot. They'll have to go to the Mon Calamari, hat-in-hand, to get their warships back, and even then they're going to be stuffed; enter the players. If nessessary, they could capture Kuat and/or Fondor and seize the starships under construction above them. Though they're staunchly Imperial worlds, they're in the frigging middle of the New Republic, far away from either Tyber Zann or the rest of the Remnant. It would constitute a violation of the Gavisrom-Pellalon treaties, but by the time it gets this desperate that document will be worth the flimsiplast it's written on. They'd also need to seriously amp-up construction underway at Mon Calamari while at the same time amping up the defenses at MonCal, since they'd be in striking range of both Zann and the Empire. They'd need to source back all the sold-off surplussed starfighters, and go around to regional powers, hat-in-hand, for more help; like the Naboo, even the Hutts (who would certainly be willing to back anyone willing to kick Tyber Zann's teeth in.) They do have a bit of a leg-up in that I've wrote-in a custom race which hid in a state of paranoid military build-up for three hundred years, acting on a three-hundred year old prophecy, so they can secure a lot of military aid there. (I wrote them as an example of a custom race, basically combining a lot of the Draenei, egalistarianism, and the video game Dead Space, but the players loved them and now I have one player playing a space goat with a lightsaber.)

<snip> Given that it [the Lusankya] will have been mothballed with a bare skeleton crew and a mere one X-Wing squadron to protect itself and the starship mothball yard it was stuck in, yes. The place was preferring security through obscurity, but that's going to fail, obviously. Lusankya's no longer a flagship of anything; Borsk mothballed it. <snip>

This actually kinda stretches my credulity. You want the ship mothballed? Sure, I can see that (if Fey'lya's opinions on the military run to this sort of thing: I've never really seen his personality that way, but I've never seen evidence to the contrary either [note: my knowledge of the EU is very limited]). However, having one freaking X-wing squadron running CSP for the place is not likely. There's gonna be at least an ISD-II commanded taskforce guarding the place, since the ships (even disabled) are going to be extremely valuable to any number of powers.

I don't think an entire task force, though just one squadron is probably too little. Maybe one fully-crewed Nebula-class Star Destroyer per depot, and if you assume each depot has five or ten ships in the middle of nowhere... Well, it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for Oster to bring along three star destroyers, overpower the Nebula by leading with TIE defenders, and then quickly board and seize the mothballed vessels, especally if he brings support vessels with lots of crew ready to board the other ships which are going to exit hyperspace ten minutes after the first wave.

This actually ties in really well with the idea of finding an old CIS shipyard/droid manufacturing facility out in the middle of nowhere. If they can reproduce themselves (and, remember, it's primarily a social stigma against droid/AI-driven militaries in Star Wars, not a technological one), then they should have some way to alter the designs to correct for noted flaws. While this may not overlap into making new designs, it wouldn't cause my suspension of disbelief to burst a leaf spring thinking that new designs could be created either. Figure that instead of keeping the Eclipse, he instead kept a complete technical readout. Incorporating that into an already-existing design, while not being a trivial excersize, is also not completely out of hand.

While you've got a point, I should point out that Tyber Zann's ownership of battle droid technology is primarily because he has the plans to fabricate an automated Destroyer 2.0 plant, not because he's found an old Confederacy shipyard. I mean, it's possible he could do so, but it would have had to have been very secret for Palpatine not to know about it... It's also not impossible he could have kept a read-out of Eclipse and could incorporate and fashion it's superlaser if he found a shipyard capable of producing Malevolance-class Star Dreadnoughts...

Actually, that would be like him - he's very fond of dual axial weapons. Use the super-ion-cannon to bring down a ship's or planet's shields and then follow up with a blast from the Eclipse-class superlaser.

It wouldn't be impossible, especially if he set up the auto-factory before going into deep-sleep. But that still begs the question of how he found the auto-factory and all. Plus, being in deep sleep at a location where there's something of interest is a bigger risk than buggering off to the middle of nowhere... Still, that's not a bad idea. I just don't like it that much because I like having a picture to show my players. With Oster, it's easy; just use a picture of Vader, and there's pictures of Tyber Zann. They've all seen SSDs, and even with Eclipse or Malevolance, I could link them to the wookiepedia entry..... But it's not a bad idea at that.

<snip> I'm not sure you understood me. The point is that you can make Zann a dangerous enemy without having the PCs come face to face with him and demolish him with their Force powers. His minions are dangerous, his battledroids are dangerous (because you can reasonably make battledroids superhuman in strength and firepower), and so on.

It's the minions that are the threat, not Zann himself. If they ever even interact with Zann, it's over a commlink in another star system; he doesn't want to get near this bunch of Jedi super-commandos. <snip>

This, right here, is one of the best pieces of advice for making villains great. Think about, for example, Bond movies. Does the leader of S.P.E.C.T.E.R. have any martial arts skills or super-sniper talents? No, he's just smart enough to get the right people to work for him in convoluted plots that are difficult to unravel (well, not so difficult, but you get my point).

No, and it does, I admit, make for a cool Bond movie when Bond just corners him and the bad guy launches into some speech and Bond just shoots him.

Not for a good RPG, though. In a game, you want the big bad to stand up and let you beat the holy fuckwads out of him. Even at the end, with his armies materially beaten and his cause hopeless, it doesn't feel right if he doesn't say "Fuck this and fuck you, if I go down, I'm taking you with me," pull out a lightsaber, and go totally crazy-shit on your ass.

Think about RotS, which was more climactic; the battle with Palpatine, or when Obi-Wan just pulled a blaster to him and gunned Grevious down. Grevious went down like a chump, like sword guy from Indiana Jones, which made him a bad final battle. Phantom Menace had the fight with Maul, AotC had the brawl with Dooku, RotS had the fight with Palpatine (several of them.) ANH had the starfighter battle with the Death Star, ESB had the battle with Vader, and RotJ had the fight with Vader/Palps and the Death Star run at the same time.

It's not very epic if you beat down the bad guy's lieutenants, corner him, and he dies like a punk. Just like SLJ didn't want Mace Windu to die like a punk, it's unsatisfying for the players if the bad guy they fight so hard just to get to simply dies like a punk.

The K.I.S.S. principle is one of the best to apply to any game. The less crap that you have to explain in order to keep the story moving, the better. Most folks (myself included) will accept something that looks plausible on the surface, even if the logic underneath is not entirely correct--as long as we don't have to think about it. The less that you have to handwave in order to make things work, the less your players will have to work to understand things, and the better your game will be.

I agree, but KISS has to be balanced by the Rule of Cool. If it won't be cool to go through it, there was no point in having it.

I don't know how well a military dismantling fits Fey'lya, actually: it was during his tenure that the New Republic military started to receive new, updated warships outside MonCal cruisers and some Rebel-based designs (new Star Defenders etc.). His major weakness was that he was unwilling to engage that force and when he did, he mostly protected the Core Worlds (and the Bothan Space) against the Yuuzhan Vong (although arguably there might be a good reason for that: if the New Republic military was in enough a bad shape, like during the Camaasi Document crisis, they couldn't afford thinning their forces too much).

As of right now, there's no apparent military threat to the New Republic. Everything seems to be safe; in Borsk's mind, this seems to be precisely the time to shed old deadweight and build newer, updated, more efficient warships. That's exactly what he's planning; he hasn't halted military procurement at all, he's simply cut out the old and, in his mind, money-sinkish Mon Cal designs and the Imperial designs to focus on entirely Republican designs like the New Class stuff.

[Darth Yan]

Yeah, and? Is there something wrong with that?

Only that it's been done to death.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Yeah, and? Is there something wrong with that?

Only that it's been done to death.

You know how a cliche gets to be a cliche because it's popular for some reason?

Since my players haven't had a climactic battle between bad guys and themselves, a brawl to end all brawls, it certainly is not 'done to death' to them.

[Srelex]

Reading that...Tyber Zann taking over the galaxy? He's a crime lord, not a galactic dictator. He won't have the cash or the resources of the Empire or the New Republic, for the simple reason that to initiate a buildup to launch such an assault, you need the infrastructure and the manufacturing base. Black Sun, probably more powerful than the Consortium at its highest, got its ass handed to it by the Empire. Crime organizations are simply not meant for galactic takeovers, regardless of how easily you can snatch all the planets as the Consortium in FOC's galactic conquest mode.

[Ghost Rider]

Yeah, and? Is there something wrong with that?

Only that it's been done to death.

You know how a cliche gets to be a cliche because it's popular for some reason?

Okay, this is too good, because no one is this fucking stupid. But I digress, he has shown us this level of stupidity before.

From Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry: cli·ché
Variant(s): also cli·che \klē-ˈshā, ˈklē-ˌ, kli-ˈ\
Function: noun
Etymology: French, literally, printer's stereotype, from past participle of clicher to stereotype, of imitative origin
Date: 1892
1 : a trite phrase or expression; also : the idea expressed by it
2 : a hackneyed theme, characterization, or situation
3 : something (as a menu item) that has become overly familiar or commonplace

Think about how you are using that to justify this plot and story. As I said, it's a mish mash of what has happened before and it wasn't better then either.

[Vehrec]

Eleventh Century Remnant, author of such works asHull 721 and Pt 2 of the same as well as the dubiously canonical but incredibly fun Squelch of Empires, is one of our own. Our best and brightest, he has totally overturned how many on this forum view the Imperial fleet, Capital Ship combat in the Star Wars universe, and the Rebellion period in general. His stories center around a single ship, HIMS Black Prince, the 721st ISD constructed, and one of only three of her class with a unsupported Star Cruiser kill. In pretty much exactly the circumstances you describe for the theft of the Lusankya, the rebels tried to board and steal a Sith War era cruiser, and had just barely got underway when Black Prince began to hound them, launch counter-boarders and generally make a nuisance of itself. They overloaded a shield panel, got a team onboard the cruiser and gave their lives to blow out a critical subsystem that crippled the ship in ways the untrained skeleton crew couldn't deal with, and then turned it into vapor. That was perhaps the single best day they ever had.

His fic includes such subjects as cross-sector battles involving everything from fighters to Mandators, multiple concurrent actions, using engineering tools as combat weapons, stealth and detection in hyperspace, fighter tactics and the rationale for the TIE series, Dark and Light Force Philosophy, and crew management tips. Also, a stormtrooper group that combined jedi-hunting and darkside adept recruiting-they were mostly clones who had deviated from template in some attitude related way, and their equipment had followed suit. Prismatic colored armor materials, melee weapons made from Phrick, much more suitable than fiddly Cortosiss weave stuff, customized blasters, flamethrowers, and so on.

[Simon_Jester]

Eleventh Century Remnant, author of such works asHull 721 and Pt 2 of the same as well as the dubiously canonical but incredibly fun Squelch of Empires, is one of our own. Our best and brightest, he has totally overturned how many on this forum view the Imperial fleet, Capital Ship combat in the Star Wars universe, and the Rebellion period in general. His stories center around a single ship, HIMS Black Prince, the 721st ISD constructed, and one of only three of her class with a unsupported Star Cruiser kill. In pretty much exactly the circumstances you describe for the theft of the Lusankya, the rebels tried to board and steal a Sith War era cruiser, and had just barely got underway when Black Prince began to hound them, launch counter-boarders and generally make a nuisance of itself. They overloaded a shield panel, got a team onboard the cruiser and gave their lives to blow out a critical subsystem that crippled the ship in ways the untrained skeleton crew couldn't deal with, and then turned it into vapor. That was perhaps the single best day they ever had.

Unfortunately, I have to add... this all happened in the backstory. Which sucks, because I would very much love to read ECR's description of that battle.

Military build-up: It's easy enough to get a military build-up going if you're taking pains to hide it, whilst simultainously letting it slip that the build-up isn't meant for you:

OK, but what happened to the New Republic's intelligence agency? Airen Cracken and his guys? In real life, I may not stop you from making a military buildup because you've fooled me into thinking it's aimed at someone else. But I won't just completely ignore you and behave as if your buildup does not exist; I'll be keeping an eye on roughly how much firepower you have, and making sure that I've got defenses that satisfy me that I can handle you.

I may underestimate how effective you can be (as the US did at Pearl Harbor against Japan), but I won't completely ignore you. In a galaxy where surprise attacks can take hours to set up because of hyperdrive, this becomes even more important: I will not have time to mobilize mothballed ships to meet a surprise attack.

Theft of high-end military weaponry: They certainly won't fail to notice this, which is why it's part of the late-game. By the time this happens, Borsk will be conducting the business of government from atop his refresher to prevent his trousers from being soilt every twenty minutes. This is the point where the boy will realize he done fucked up and fucked up good.

But why does it need to be done this way at all? You never got around to answering that question.

But, as per Borsk Fey'lya's Hierarchy of Importance, covering his own ass will come first, covering the asses of his friends will come second, covering Bothan asses will come third through fifth, and only then will covering the Republic's ass come sixth.

But he can't cover Bothan ass if the Republic gets conquered. That's one of the reasons this is a hole in your plot: Fey'lya is deliberately shooting himself in the foot here, and ignoring even the barest minimum of military precautions. Is he cheap? Maybe. Is he that cheap?

I mean, why doesn't he stand down Lusankya in orbit over Coruscant, some place with orbital fortifications already in place? Why doesn't he give it a skeleton crew of astromechs (like you say Home One has) so that the ship will stay mobile and combat-ready?

What does Borsk Fey'lya do when it gets to this point? What all real politicians would do: deny, cover-up, and send in the spies. It goes without saying that the Bothan Spy Network and Republic Intelligence will be burning the midnight oil, the 2 AM oil, the 5 AM oil, the sunup oil, and the taking sunup speed to take care of the situation.

But spies who are worth a damn would already be there...
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I'm fleshing it out over quite some time, you know. I have thought about this, you know. I'm not an idiot.

Nononono. "I have prepared this idea for a long time" is not a counterargument to "There is a problem with this idea." I mean, it's OK to change your mind about things like this; it's not stupid or evil or anything. If you're already committed because of stuff you've told your players, then I guess you're committed, but you shouldn't just repeat "This is How It Will Be" endlessly in that case.

Your Climax is either a final confrontation with the SUPER SUPER SUPER STAR DREADNOUGHT WANK! with an obligatory Lightsaber spank fest. Maybe the villains flee ala Cobra or die.

Yeah, and? Is there something wrong with that?

Well, it's stereotyped. If that bothers you, then this plot should bother you.

If not... well, it's not like it's an unsuccessful formula; if it can sell novels it can probably sell an RPG campaign to undemanding players.

The plot you come up with must have equal parts struggle against seemingly-hopeless odds, such as battle droids or stormtroopers in seemingly inexhaustable supply, epic, whirling space battles in their starfighters and space transport while towards the end game entire fleets clash in the background, and lightsaber duels against competant, Force-wielding, lightsaber-wielding bad guys. It must also have struggles against obstacles which may not be expediantly solved by the application of violence, such as obstructionist or difficult politicians pursuing agendas which are genuinely-held and thought out but ultimately wrong.

Show your work.

Well, what bothers me isn't the basic plot outline. It's the fact that you seem so inflexible. I can't remember hearing you agree to make even ONE change, agree with even ONE suggestion anyone here has made, despite the hours they've put in reading your posts and commenting on them. That's kind of unreasonable.

It makes plenty of sense to me.

OK. But if that was enough reason to ignore advice, why did you even bother to ask for advice in the first place? I mean, is this like one of Galactic Juggernaut's threads where you just throw some random stuff at a wall and expect everyone to go "Wow, how awesome!", or did you have something a bit more involved in mind.

And while it may be stretching things to have him retain Eclipse, it's less stretching than that "oh and by the way, he discovered some lost CIS warship that, despite being the better part of a century old, is still powerful enough that it's the most powerful ship in space today."

People have been reactivating old Clone War droid foundries for a very, very, long time in Star Wars. It's traditional. The Separatists had quite a bit of industrial capability that never got tracked down and destroyed; that much is canon. That people can use that capability to make ships that can compete in the modern galactic naval environment isn't really all that surprising. I mean, the Geonosians drew up the plans for the Death Star. The Death Star would certainly be a valid naval weapon in 20 ABY, if anyone could build one.

Star Wars is an environment where technological change goes very slowly, at least when we're talking about big stuff like weapon firepower. A 40 year old ship can still be an effective ship.

Because making it any other battleship is just "Oh, and he somehow found this, too. Yes, while he was asleep."

But that begs the question: why was he asleep? I mean, wouldn't it be hard to conquer the galaxy after spending twenty years out of touch with everyone, even given plenty of weapons? Zann depends on Boskone-style corruption to support his war effort; what happens to his criminal networks and intelligence sources if he goes out of the picture for twenty years?

And yes, I know you can say: "Well, he's rebuilding all that stuff!" But if he hadn't gone underground he wouldn't have to rebuild it, it would still be there. And so he'd have a lot more agents in galactic affairs (which makes it more reasonable for Our Heroes to come across evidence of his plots).

But again, this begs the question of where it (the Malevolence-class ship) was; how did the Emperor fail to find it once he'd shut off the Clone Wars? If it was out there, wouldn't Palps have hung onto it? If it was gone, wouldn't he have destroyed the shipyard that built it, so nobody could build ships capable of challenging his Star Destroyers?

That's the tricky bit. Again, the CIS had a lot of manufacturing capability that wasn't found until much later. The "reactivated Clone Wars droid factory" is a fairly common plot in recent Star Wars material. Moreover, because their manufacturing is so heavily automated, they can use their facilities to build new facilities.

This would give Zann a steady supply of troops and weapons: some time shortly after ditching Eclipse, he found a major Clone Wars-era droid foundry and shipyard facility on the Outer Rim, some place where Palpatine had never found it (again, this wouldn't be the first such facility). He went there, took the place over, and started building up a military-industrial complex in the shadows. Now he's ready to take on the galaxy, with a steady stream of reinforcements at his back. And he can build his own superdreadnoughts, given time, rather than having to steal them.

Zann was bad enough when he didn't have a large fraction of the galaxy's total heavy industry backing him. How menacing would he be now? This way, he has an advantage in total forces over his enemies, rather than just being stuck with whatever ships he had twenty years ago and not being able to replace them.
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But that's still more implausable than Zann simply having decided that the level of heat that was being turned up on him was irrelevant if he was going to go dark by freezing himself and all his loyal men in carbonite, and freezing the disloyal ones in the vacuum of space. To my point of view, it's perfectly logical; he's going away to nowhere. The Emperor won't be able to track him down since he'll be dead, and the Rebels will think he let the Empire have it back. He makes a clean getaway, the heat drops off, and he's poised to return in twenty years. How does this not work logically?

Is it typical for Zann to abandon everything he's built that way? Remember what I said above about how this will cost him control over his criminal networks.

Also... Zann? Ysalamiri? When and where did he get those? It's not as if everyone in the galaxy knew about them.

Tyber Zann did. He used them during the Galactic Civil War in the form of Ysalamiri Cages which he built on top of Mobile Defense Units in order to shut down the force powers of opposing Jedi so his forces could perform horrible rape upon them.

Ah. I see.

A better option than save-or-die red jam traps, and certainly I'm not opposed to using obvious bad-choice/worse-choice situations on the players, that still doesn't change the fact that it would make actually taking the guy down once you get to him pathetically easy, which feels like an anticlimax.

If that would be a problem for your characters, then fine, don't do it that way.

Funnily enough, nobody in my game seems to have a problem with Borsk behaving this way.

Well I still say it's a plot hole. I mean, it's all very well to play to your audience, but I like to think there's a certain amount of craftsmanship involved in coming up with a good plot where you can have competent people on the good side and they're still losing.

Basically, when thinking about what he's doing with the New Republic's military, think of the vitriol with which Shep hates Robert MacNamara. Borsk is the Republic's MacNamara. He's looking at "how cheaply can we maintain order." Except he's not scrapping the old stuff, he's just putting it up on a shelf up high in case of emergency. He's not planning for someone else to come and take what was on his shelf five-fingered discount, but that's because he's not a military man, and he fired the best military man in the fleet (out of an airlock,) with the rest of the best military men resigning in protest.

Ah... it would be practically impossible for Fey'lya to remain in control of the New Republic if he'd openly murdered a military leader. Or was that a metaphor? Sorry. Never mind.

Anyway, the question then is: didn't someone hang around to advise him? Something like "At least put a decent security cordon around the mothballed shipyards?" Even to Fey'lya that's liable to seem like a good idea; it's not as if he's normally in the practice of encouraging thieves.

And you can still have Fake Vader boarding a ship that's guarded by meaningful security forces (which makes him more credible as opposition), or that has a scuttling charge to keep it from being captured (which Fake Vader disables by neck-crushing the guy with the clearance to set it off). This does not make your plot worse; it makes it better, because it makes your "Vader" more credible. The real Vader could deal with much more serious opposition than one lousy X-Wing squadron.

Booster Terrik's not some random private citizen, he's the guy who combines all the slickness of Lando Calrissian with all the luck of Han Solo and all the military brilliance of Ackbar.

Meh. OK, granted, but still. Tyber Zann's no pushover either. If Terrik can find a superlaser to refit a relatively normal capital ship, Zann can do it for a supercapital.

Basically, I'm employing Occam's razor here. If he already knew he was going to go dark when he got Eclipse, why would he abandon it for the Empire to reclaim when he could simply take it and run.

If that's what he was planning, fine. Is there evidence that that is what, or should be what, he was planning?

How does it preclude it? I am not obliged to contact Timothy Zahn whenever I want Borsk Fey'lya to do or say something in my game any more than I am obliged to contact George Lucas when I want Luke Skywalker to do something.

Rather, I am simply obliged to play the characters as if they were sane, rational actors (unless they're not sane, rational actors,) coloured by their emotions, prejudices, prides, personal beliefs, and values... I just have to not violate it.

Note: "Expand" != "expound."

Anyway. I think it makes more sense to stay visibly faithful to the character's behavior, where there is precedent. Fey'lya spent much of the time between Endor and the Vong in power in the Republic. Did he ever gut the New Republic's military so thoroughly as you're having him doing, purely to make it marginally more convenient for your powerful supervillains to walk over his forces, so that they won't have to stretch their muscles to do it?

Well frankly, it's because it's already happened. The Republic's military has been downsized, Lusankya and many other vessels are being put in mothballs, the MC80s and MC30s are flying back to Mon Calamari to be delivered back into the hands of their true owners.

OK, OK, if you're committed, you're committed, and I wish you'd said so earlier. Still kind of a plot hole, but there's only so much to be done about that.

But I think you should at least put some decent guard forces around the targets Fake Vader will be hitting, if only to make him look dangerous. Any fool can yoink a battleship that's unguarded. It takes a galactic-level badass to crunch through an entire task force in the process.

Of course he doesn't want to get near them, but eventually he'll have to when they hunt him down like dogs. It's not impossible they might just vape him in space, but if they decide to get him the hard way, I'd like him not to go down like a chump? Obviously, his forces will be annoying and dangerous, but it just feels wrong if the BBEG goes down like a chump.

To some players in RPGs that would be fine; to others it would not. It's more realistic to have fragile evil overlords whose main security is their minions, and some people like that. But other people like the classic adventure story; being a fan of Galactic Patrol (which is in some ways the prototypical science fiction adventure story, complete with a form of "levelling up," I can't say.

After all, Palpatine was just a frail old man... Until he busted out a red lightsaber and personally waxed four Jedi Masters in three seconds.

Well... as portrayed, Palpatine was just a frail old man till he started crapping lightning from his fingertips and torturing Luke. But yeah, I take your meaning.

I am not saying that's not true, however, I am saying that the ability to destroy a planet is not insignificant. No more, no less. Less powerful and cool and useful than the Force, yes, but not insignificant.

OK, but the point was something a little different. Vader's boasting aside, the fact that Vader (or Luke, or Fake Vader, or Palpatine) was strong in the Force made them a huge threat by itself even independent of whether they had a supership capable of wrecking continents in one shot.

You can exploit that. Darth Oster (did I get that right?) can be using the Force to guide him to targets ("I have foreseen it") and striking at just the right targets with his fleet of destroyers (which are capable of glassing planets; it just takes a little longer). Meanwhile, Zann is taking the brute force approach: mass industrial production of heavily armed ships.

It's already happened. You might as well argue, during ESB, why not have Tarkin just blow up a moon of Alderaan to make his point instead of blowing up all of Alderaan.

Umm... you could have told us that earlier...?

You guys are the only ones who think so. I don't know why, I wish you'd come 'round. All of my players love my expounding on Borsk Fey'lya as a libertarian with an agenda that does not include them or a vast number of old military ships.

I can think of some good reasons for us to have a problem with your plot that your players do not.

I'm not interested in people taking the pre-sets that I've already made and saying "this is no good," I'm interested in advice of "okay, here's how to make this work better."

Part of the problem is that you never made it clear which bits are pre-set and which aren't. So people will criticize the old stuff as much as the new.

Another problem is that you've made so much of your plot pre-set that you don't seem to be willing to change any of it. Which makes it pointless for anyone else to talk to you. I mean, when it comes to making up random individual actions, you'll do fairly well on your own. It's quite obvious what both new warlords need to do:

Secure not only ships, but the industrial base to support them. Fake Vader needs this because he has nothing; Zann needs this (in your plotline) because he has nothing but the ships and troops he started with twenty years ago. Ideally, either of them would like something like the Star Forge from the KotOR era; since that got blown up, the next best thing would be to go looking around the Corporate Sector for backers with lots of industry but relatively little political power (since they were on the losing side of the Clone Wars).

Play off existing factions against each other. Undermine the Republic's defenses using their own agents (maybe Dark Side agents of Fake Vader, or spies hired by Zann, are acting in secret on Coruscant to encourage Fey'lya to act foolishly, creating a Wormtongue/Theoden dynamic). Find forces outside the current galactic order (the Chiss? I don't know...) and either ally with them or use them as threats to manipulate their main enemies into giving them more time to build up.

Identify and neutralize anyone who is aware of their activities before they're ready to move openly. This is where the PCs come in, obviously...
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This is what's essentially going to happen, but I'm starting the New Republic off in a seriously tight spot. They'll have to go to the Mon Calamari, hat-in-hand, to get their warships back, and even then they're going to be stuffed; enter the players. If nessessary, they could capture Kuat and/or Fondor and seize the starships under construction above them. Though they're staunchly Imperial worlds, they're in the frigging middle of the New Republic, far away from either Tyber Zann or the rest of the Remnant. It would constitute a violation of the Gavisrom-Pellalon treaties, but by the time it gets this desperate that document will be worth the flimsiplast it's written on.

Huh. Or they could try to form an alliance of convenience with the Imperial Remnant against Zann. I mean, Vader had a mixed reputation in the old Empire. People like Pellaeon did not like him and wouldn't want to be conquered by him. Especially not if he's back and wants to find someone to blame for all the crap that happened since Endor.

Sort of a logical predecessor to either the alliance they formed against the Vong, or against the rising threat they faced in the Legacy era from the New Sith Empire or whatever they called themselves (I know nothing about the Legacy era, really).

While you've got a point, I should point out that Tyber Zann's ownership of battle droid technology is primarily because he has the plans to fabricate an automated Destroyer 2.0 plant, not because he's found an old Confederacy shipyard. I mean, it's possible he could do so, but it would have had to have been very secret for Palpatine not to know about it... It's also not impossible he could have kept a read-out of Eclipse and could incorporate and fashion it's superlaser if he found a shipyard capable of producing Malevolance-class Star Dreadnoughts...

Actually, that would be like him - he's very fond of dual axial weapons. Use the super-ion-cannon to bring down a ship's or planet's shields and then follow up with a blast from the Eclipse-class superlaser.

See, that works! It doesn't ignore the canon problem with the Eclipse, and it allows you to explain where Zann's been all this time... he's been building up the assets to make another bid for galactic conquest, including a duplicate Eclipse... or Eclipses.

Think about RotS, which was more climactic; the battle with Palpatine, or when Obi-Wan just pulled a blaster to him and gunned Grevious down. Grevious went down like a chump, like sword guy from Indiana Jones, which made him a bad final battle.

What? Obi-Wan almost died going up against Grievous, mano a manos. The blaster was just the climactic resolution of a long fight scene...

[Ritterin Sophia]

And while it may be stretching things to have him retain Eclipse, it's less stretching than that "oh and by the way, he discovered some lost CIS warship that, despite being the better part of a century old, is still powerful enough that it's the most powerful ship in space today."

People have been reactivating old Clone War droid foundries for a very, very, long time in Star Wars. It's traditional. The Separatists had quite a bit of industrial capability that never got tracked down and destroyed; that much is canon. That people can use that capability to make ships that can compete in the modern galactic naval environment isn't really all that surprising. I mean, the Geonosians drew up the plans for the Death Star. The Death Star would certainly be a valid naval weapon in 20 ABY, if anyone could build one.

I don't get this, there's a fucking thread on page one where I showed that the Republic has a class of Cruiser they successfully kept in service for THREE MILLENNIUM but a century old CIS factory is unbelievable.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Reading that...Tyber Zann taking over the galaxy? He's a crime lord, not a galactic dictator. He won't have the cash or the resources of the Empire or the New Republic, for the simple reason that to initiate a buildup to launch such an assault, you need the infrastructure and the manufacturing base. Black Sun, probably more powerful than the Consortium at its highest, got its ass handed to it by the Empire. Crime organizations are simply not meant for galactic takeovers, regardless of how easily you can snatch all the planets as the Consortium in FOC's galactic conquest mode.

And why not? At the height of it's power, the Zann Consortium could easily have fucking conquered the Galaxy. Zann decided that with all the headache of the civil war, though, it wasn't the ripe time. He's certainly capable of picking off Rim worlds with financial and industrial might - like Mandalore for it's shipyards and MandalMotors, and Hutt space for their money.

Eleventh Century Remnant, author of such works asHull 721 and Pt 2 of the same as well as the dubiously canonical but incredibly fun Squelch of Empires, is one of our own. Our best and brightest, he has totally overturned how many on this forum view the Imperial fleet, Capital Ship combat in the Star Wars universe, and the Rebellion period in general. His stories center around a single ship, HIMS Black Prince, the 721st ISD constructed, and one of only three of her class with a unsupported Star Cruiser kill. In pretty much exactly the circumstances you describe for the theft of the Lusankya, the rebels tried to board and steal a Sith War era cruiser, and had just barely got underway when Black Prince began to hound them, launch counter-boarders and generally make a nuisance of itself. They overloaded a shield panel, got a team onboard the cruiser and gave their lives to blow out a critical subsystem that crippled the ship in ways the untrained skeleton crew couldn't deal with, and then turned it into vapor. That was perhaps the single best day they ever had.

His fic includes such subjects as cross-sector battles involving everything from fighters to Mandators, multiple concurrent actions, using engineering tools as combat weapons, stealth and detection in hyperspace, fighter tactics and the rationale for the TIE series, Dark and Light Force Philosophy, and crew management tips. Also, a stormtrooper group that combined jedi-hunting and darkside adept recruiting-they were mostly clones who had deviated from template in some attitude related way, and their equipment had followed suit. Prismatic colored armor materials, melee weapons made from Phrick, much more suitable than fiddly Cortosiss weave stuff, customized blasters, flamethrowers, and so on.

Sounds like a lot of ImpWank. Well-written or not, I think I'll skip it for the same reason I only watched RotS once.

Military build-up: It's easy enough to get a military build-up going if you're taking pains to hide it, whilst simultainously letting it slip that the build-up isn't meant for you:

OK, but what happened to the New Republic's intelligence agency? Airen Cracken and his guys? In real life, I may not stop you from making a military buildup because you've fooled me into thinking it's aimed at someone else. But I won't just completely ignore you and behave as if your buildup does not exist; I'll be keeping an eye on roughly how much firepower you have, and making sure that I've got defenses that satisfy me that I can handle you.

Cracken's an old man by now, and while it's true he's not past it, nor are his people, he's not a Jedi, and he doesn't have Jedi working for him. All that Cracken will be able to figure out is that certain factions of the Remnant are backing someone new, someone who never shows his face, someone so secret that the remnant factions playing with him is only using custom-made comm droids to communicate with him, and they're melting each droid into slag after one use. They'll notice that Star Destroyers and whole garrisons seem to be going missing.

Then there will be a Purge. His agents will all be hunted down like dogs, tracked down seemingly by clairvoyance, despite all their efforts and best techniques... Because his men will be being tracked down by clairvoyance. It's not something they can guard against, when every single stormtrooper on a block can be perfectly convinced they're a loyal son of the Empire to the point that every one of them would have trusted the 'civilian' agent to have his back in a firefight... And then be ordered to turn around and summarily gun him down. No arrest, no trial, just burn him down where he stands, and anybody who witnessed it.

It's the Empire. They can do that. I mean, obviously, there will be a reckoning - one agent on one world whose locals like him so much they defy the order, and one of them even gets the guy a message to skip town. He gets a message back to Cracken that his cover's blown somehow, and he's sending a hypertransmission when his flat's door gets kicked in. Obviously the camera won't see who did it, but they'll be treated to a picture of the guy being levitated by the throat before the transmission cuts.

And the reason, of course, that the New Republic doesn't take this as an imminant threat against them is that it's a general purge of spies; Cracken's agents are so good that they've been reporting on their Imperial counterparts and other, seemingly random people from the other factions (such as Zann's men, or the Hutt's boys, or the few agents the Black Sun still has,) getting ousted and shot long before their time is come. So while this will be deeply disturbing, it won't be evidence of an imminant attack on the New Republic so much as someone getting a bug in his ass to purge the spies. Obviously, it'll be worth warily watching the borders, but it's not like Borsk shut down border patrols. He's stupider than he thinks he is, but he's not as stupid as he looks at times.

I may underestimate how effective you can be (as the US did at Pearl Harbor against Japan), but I won't completely ignore you. In a galaxy where surprise attacks can take hours to set up because of hyperdrive, this becomes even more important: I will not have time to mobilize mothballed ships to meet a surprise attack.

No, but he's expecting the Imperial Starfleet of old when he thinks about the Remnant. IE, the Empire that would watch battle lines, would want to conquer system-by-system instead of launching raids. To his mind, he has the important bases covered - all of the industrial worlds are well defended by the New Republic Navy except Mon Calamari, who have a higher concentration of capital ships around their shipyards than anybody else thanks to having repossessed all the MC80s and MC30s, and he's got all the core worlds defended.

He's thinking he will have time to mobilize the mothballed fleet. He's not a military man, he's still stuck on him being the Rebellion (and trying to transition to a wholely new entity,) and the Empire being the Empire. It's not crossing his mind that the Empire is perfectly capable of using the Rebellion's tactics against him.

Theft of high-end military weaponry: They certainly won't fail to notice this, which is why it's part of the late-game. By the time this happens, Borsk will be conducting the business of government from atop his refresher to prevent his trousers from being soilt every twenty minutes. This is the point where the boy will realize he done fucked up and fucked up good.

But why does it need to be done this way at all? You never got around to answering that question.

Because he's a fuck-up. Everything Borsk has ever done has been well-thought out, logically-reasoned out, and made enough sense to get backing for it from other, saner people, yet it cannot go right. The sixteen members of the Black Sun he unleashed, for example. The Yuuzan Vong war's bungling, though that Never Happened. >_<

Borsk Fey'lya is a fuck-up. He's smart enough to be dangerous, he's logical enough and good enough of a politician to convince people who have a twinge of doubt to go with him, and charismatic enough to get them to listen to him over people who know what the hell they're doing. He's the 20th level Bard who convinces the King to listen to him in matters of war over the 20th level Fighter with 20 years' experiance in war-campaigning, or over the 20th level Wizard in matters of magic. He's the dangerous sod who has the gift of blarney to convince people he's right, and he's smart enough to not be immediately found out as wrong, which sets him up for a colossal disaster later on.

He'd be a great diplomat were he humble enough to follow someone else's directions, but he's too ambitious and he had to be a politician out for himself. He's good enough to get elected, smart enough that he thinks he knows what he's doing when he really doesn't, and arrogant enough to surround himself with yes-men whose skillset is largely identical to his own (except inferior.)

But, as per Borsk Fey'lya's Hierarchy of Importance, covering his own ass will come first, covering the asses of his friends will come second, covering Bothan asses will come third through fifth, and only then will covering the Republic's ass come sixth.

But he can't cover Bothan ass if the Republic gets conquered. That's one of the reasons this is a hole in your plot: Fey'lya is deliberately shooting himself in the foot here, and ignoring even the barest minimum of military precautions. Is he cheap? Maybe. Is he that cheap?

The thing is, to his way of thinking, he's covered his asses well enough. Bothan space is protected. All the major industrial assets (Sullust, MonCal) are protected, all of the Core is protected. The border is patroled. He's pared down to what he believes is the barest minimum of military precaution. No more, no less.

And he's right. Even Darth Oster won't just sail into Courscant and start attacking it, even once he has Lusankya. It's simply too heavily defended. The problem is that Borsk hasn't left himself enough reserve ships to go and deal with trouble elsewhere. This puts him in a tight spot; if say, Tyber Zann decides to throw a blocade on Naboo and shake it down for protection monies, he can't deal with it without leaving Courscant or somewhere important like it undefended.

I mean, why doesn't he stand down Lusankya in orbit over Coruscant, some place with orbital fortifications already in place? Why doesn't he give it a skeleton crew of astromechs (like you say Home One has) so that the ship will stay mobile and combat-ready?

Security through Obscurity is kind of hard when you're orbiting the capital. It would be like hiding a military secret the size of an aircraft carrier moored at New York City. He's reckoning that it would take less resources to guard a mothballed fleet somewhere obscure - like say, the edge of the Courscant system, on the verge of interstellar space, far beyond the range of sensors - with one ship and starfighters, than to moor it up at Courscant itself, where it would be relatively easy to 'infiltrate' a strike team. As for a skeleton crew of astromechs, even skeleton-crewing Lusankya would take a ghastly number of astromechs. There's probably a skeleton-skeleton crew, enough to performance maintenance and keep the lights on, but not enough to fly her.

What does Borsk Fey'lya do when it gets to this point? What all real politicians would do: deny, cover-up, and send in the spies. It goes without saying that the Bothan Spy Network and Republic Intelligence will be burning the midnight oil, the 2 AM oil, the 5 AM oil, the sunup oil, and the taking sunup speed to take care of the situation.

But spies who are worth a damn would already be there...

Except purged. Which is why they'll be trying to tap everyone else's intel streams to learn from everyone else's painful mistakes and piece together exactly what went wrong. It won't take them long to figure out that their ships got stolen by the same guys who have been running a purge of the spies. By then it'll be a moot point though, as some plucky character aboard Lusankya will have gotten off in an A-Wing, downloaded the ship's security images of Darth 'Vader' choking a bitch, and hyperspaced away.

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I'm fleshing it out over quite some time, you know. I have thought about this, you know. I'm not an idiot.

Nononono. "I have prepared this idea for a long time" is not a counterargument to "There is a problem with this idea." I mean, it's OK to change your mind about things like this; it's not stupid or evil or anything. If you're already committed because of stuff you've told your players, then I guess you're committed, but you shouldn't just repeat "This is How It Will Be" endlessly in that case.

Sure it is, if the argument in question is "you seem not to have thought this through," which is the vibe I get.

Your Climax is either a final confrontation with the SUPER SUPER SUPER STAR DREADNOUGHT WANK! with an obligatory Lightsaber spank fest. Maybe the villains flee ala Cobra or die.

Yeah, and? Is there something wrong with that?

Well, it's stereotyped. If that bothers you, then this plot should bother you.

If not... well, it's not like it's an unsuccessful formula; if it can sell novels it can probably sell an RPG campaign to undemanding players.

The hero beating the bad guy in a climactic lightsaber battle while starfighters shriek overhead and bombs hit the ship they're dueling upon... If that's a stereotype, it's because it's classic and awesome. So, no. No, it does not bother me.

Well, what bothers me isn't the basic plot outline. It's the fact that you seem so inflexible. I can't remember hearing you agree to make even ONE change, agree with even ONE suggestion anyone here has made, despite the hours they've put in reading your posts and commenting on them. That's kind of unreasonable.

Um... I agreed that one starfighter squadron was too light a defense for a mothballed fleet, even in Borsk Fey'lya's eyes, and upgraded it to a full, modern ship of the line with full starfight compliment? I'm not unreasonable, but a lot of your proposed "suggestions" would involve outright retconning things on my players, or changes that I'm just having a hell of a time reconciling and rationalizing, like changing the ship that Zann is using as a base.....

Although the more I think about it, the more him running his own Death Star II project with a slightly-less-ambitious full-sized Eclipse-class Super-Star Destroyer is growing on me.

OK. But if that was enough reason to ignore advice, why did you even bother to ask for advice in the first place? I mean, is this like one of Galactic Juggernaut's threads where you just throw some random stuff at a wall and expect everyone to go "Wow, how awesome!", or did you have something a bit more involved in mind.

As I said before, I was hoping for less "this is wrong, that's wrong, this is horrible," ala Gordon Ramsey and Simon Cowel (wankers both,) but more "okay, if you're going to do this, then this would make more sense," - like what with increasing the guard on the mothballed ships, or "this would be pretty cool," like suggestions about how I can subtly nudge my players towards ways of subtly nudging Ackbar back into a positive frame of mind.

And while it may be stretching things to have him retain Eclipse, it's less stretching than that "oh and by the way, he discovered some lost CIS warship that, despite being the better part of a century old, is still powerful enough that it's the most powerful ship in space today."

People have been reactivating old Clone War droid foundries for a very, very, long time in Star Wars. It's traditional. The Separatists had quite a bit of industrial capability that never got tracked down and destroyed; that much is canon. That people can use that capability to make ships that can compete in the modern galactic naval environment isn't really all that surprising. I mean, the Geonosians drew up the plans for the Death Star. The Death Star would certainly be a valid naval weapon in 20 ABY, if anyone could build one.

Star Wars is an environment where technological change goes very slowly, at least when we're talking about big stuff like weapon firepower. A 40 year old ship can still be an effective ship.

Just so long as they'd installed a grille over that damn thermal exhaust port, right?

All right, though. You've got a good point. But I think it's a lot different from finding a battle droid factory to finding a lost shipyards. Now, granted, it's not impossible, but it would be hard, especially if Zann has been in deep freeze. Him being in deep freeze is very important, because if not he'd be a fucking ancient creaker by now... Although it's not impossible Urai Fen could have stayed awake to keep the candle burning.

Because making it any other battleship is just "Oh, and he somehow found this, too. Yes, while he was asleep."

But that begs the question: why was he asleep? I mean, wouldn't it be hard to conquer the galaxy after spending twenty years out of touch with everyone, even given plenty of weapons? Zann depends on Boskone-style corruption to support his war effort; what happens to his criminal networks and intelligence sources if he goes out of the picture for twenty years?

And yes, I know you can say: "Well, he's rebuilding all that stuff!" But if he hadn't gone underground he wouldn't have to rebuild it, it would still be there. And so he'd have a lot more agents in galactic affairs (which makes it more reasonable for Our Heroes to come across evidence of his plots).

The problem is, if he was awake, he'd be old as Cracken. A wheezing geezer, no longer fit to think about conquering the galaxy. Plus, if he didn't vanish completely, there was still the whole problem of both the Empire and the Rebellion being more than willing to track him down and gut him like a dog. The idea was to vanish and get completely off the radar. It's not like he hasn't rebuilt the Consortium from almost nothing before, after all. He'd have more to start with this time than he did when he busted out of Kessel.

It's not impossible that Urai Fen could have stayed awake to keep the Consortium's candle burning, especially if he didn't do anything drastic but rather simply let it expand carefully and low-key, but in ways from which it's operations could amp-up. It's also possible that Fen could have started the secret shipyard up.....

That still seems a hell of a lot harder to explain to my players than "Zann just didn't abandon the ship he already had," though. Seems to be violating KISS.

But again, this begs the question of where it (the Malevolence-class ship) was; how did the Emperor fail to find it once he'd shut off the Clone Wars? If it was out there, wouldn't Palps have hung onto it? If it was gone, wouldn't he have destroyed the shipyard that built it, so nobody could build ships capable of challenging his Star Destroyers?

That's the tricky bit. Again, the CIS had a lot of manufacturing capability that wasn't found until much later. The "reactivated Clone Wars droid factory" is a fairly common plot in recent Star Wars material. Moreover, because their manufacturing is so heavily automated, they can use their facilities to build new facilities.

This would give Zann a steady supply of troops and weapons: some time shortly after ditching Eclipse, he found a major Clone Wars-era droid foundry and shipyard facility on the Outer Rim, some place where Palpatine had never found it (again, this wouldn't be the first such facility). He went there, took the place over, and started building up a military-industrial complex in the shadows. Now he's ready to take on the galaxy, with a steady stream of reinforcements at his back. And he can build his own superdreadnoughts, given time, rather than having to steal them.

Zann was bad enough when he didn't have a large fraction of the galaxy's total heavy industry backing him. How menacing would he be now? This way, he has an advantage in total forces over his enemies, rather than just being stuck with whatever ships he had twenty years ago and not being able to replace them.

This... Certainly is not implausable. Certainly it's plausable that he could have retooled a CIS shipyard - or had a CIS shipyard produce a new shipyard - that could produce his Fandalorian ships like the Keldabe and Agressor and those damn dirty cloaking shieldless mass-driver super-armored frigates he's so bloody fond of... (Yes, I hated those fucking things in FoC, can't you tell?)

But this would make him the preeminant power in the galaxy - not a contender, the front-runner. Nobody else is building Supers. Nobody since Isard's been that wealthy and powerful. The closest anybody would come would be the Planet-Crackers the totally new race I wrote in are building, but they're only Super-sized, they're not warships in any sense of the word and would fold up against even a cruiser.

I suppose it's not impossible if it's a long and slow project that Urai Fen was running while Zann was under carbonite. Especially if the effort to do so is proportionately herculean to the construction of the second Death Star...

_______________

But that's still more implausable than Zann simply having decided that the level of heat that was being turned up on him was irrelevant if he was going to go dark by freezing himself and all his loyal men in carbonite, and freezing the disloyal ones in the vacuum of space. To my point of view, it's perfectly logical; he's going away to nowhere. The Emperor won't be able to track him down since he'll be dead, and the Rebels will think he let the Empire have it back. He makes a clean getaway, the heat drops off, and he's poised to return in twenty years. How does this not work logically?

Is it typical for Zann to abandon everything he's built that way? Remember what I said above about how this will cost him control over his criminal networks.

He's not the kind of guy who balks for a second at cutting his ties, taking the goods, and running. If the heat's high (and after the Eclipse and Emperor's store-room jobs, it is,) and future prospects are shaky, it's exactly the kind of thing that he'd pull. It would cost him control, but he's rebuilt from very little in the past; and rebuilding is a lot easier if you're not dead.

Funnily enough, nobody in my game seems to have a problem with Borsk behaving this way.

Well I still say it's a plot hole. I mean, it's all very well to play to your audience, but I like to think there's a certain amount of craftsmanship involved in coming up with a good plot where you can have competent people on the good side and they're still losing.

They do have competant people on their side. In addition to the entire Jedi Order, they've already made a lifelong ally in the form of Colonel Panaka (though his life won't be all that much longer, now,) the Queen of Naboo, and Ackbar. They're getting more and more competant people all the time, but the heroes being saddled with incompetant help is also a nice plot point, especially when the incompetant outranks them.

Basically, when thinking about what he's doing with the New Republic's military, think of the vitriol with which Shep hates Robert MacNamara. Borsk is the Republic's MacNamara. He's looking at "how cheaply can we maintain order." Except he's not scrapping the old stuff, he's just putting it up on a shelf up high in case of emergency. He's not planning for someone else to come and take what was on his shelf five-fingered discount, but that's because he's not a military man, and he fired the best military man in the fleet (out of an airlock,) with the rest of the best military men resigning in protest.

Ah... it would be practically impossible for Fey'lya to remain in control of the New Republic if he'd openly murdered a military leader. Or was that a metaphor? Sorry. Never mind.

It was a metaphor, sorry. He didn't have Ackbar shot, he couldn't have. But he did succeed in getting rid of him, and most of the old military sentients with him.

Anyway, the question then is: didn't someone hang around to advise him? Something like "At least put a decent security cordon around the mothballed shipyards?" Even to Fey'lya that's liable to seem like a good idea; it's not as if he's normally in the practice of encouraging thieves.

He's basically ignoring the generals if their advice doesn't line up with that of his beancounters. He would have allocated a decent security cordon, though - a full-sized Nebula-class Star Destroyer is pretty damn decent! No pirate in the galaxy (short of Tyber Zann, but Borsk can be forgiven for not anticipating a threat that's completely black) would take on a Star Destroyer for the hopes of seizing a ship they can't possibly sell or staff.

It's just not going to be sufficient when a credible claimant to the title of Dark Lord of Sith comes calling with three Imp-IIs and assorted Interdictors and comm-jammers.

And you can still have Fake Vader boarding a ship that's guarded by meaningful security forces (which makes him more credible as opposition), or that has a scuttling charge to keep it from being captured (which Fake Vader disables by neck-crushing the guy with the clearance to set it off). This does not make your plot worse; it makes it better, because it makes your "Vader" more credible. The real Vader could deal with much more serious opposition than one lousy X-Wing squadron.

I agree. That's why I've upgraded the defenses.

Booster Terrik's not some random private citizen, he's the guy who combines all the slickness of Lando Calrissian with all the luck of Han Solo and all the military brilliance of Ackbar.

Meh. OK, granted, but still. Tyber Zann's no pushover either. If Terrik can find a superlaser to refit a relatively normal capital ship, Zann can do it for a supercapital.

Booster had the New Republic's help in refitting his Star Destroyer, too.....

But yeah, I get you.

Basically, I'm employing Occam's razor here. If he already knew he was going to go dark when he got Eclipse, why would he abandon it for the Empire to reclaim when he could simply take it and run.

If that's what he was planning, fine. Is there evidence that that is what, or should be what, he was planning?

There's no evidence it isn't what he was planning, and there's good reason it should have been what he was planning. After all, he knew just how much heat he was getting on him by pissing off both the Rebellion and the Empire at the same time. He knew that if anything could have united them, even temporarily, it would have been squashing him. Hence, going dark for twenty years and letting eveyone think he was dead.

How does it preclude it? I am not obliged to contact Timothy Zahn whenever I want Borsk Fey'lya to do or say something in my game any more than I am obliged to contact George Lucas when I want Luke Skywalker to do something.

Rather, I am simply obliged to play the characters as if they were sane, rational actors (unless they're not sane, rational actors,) coloured by their emotions, prejudices, prides, personal beliefs, and values... I just have to not violate it.

Note: "Expand" != "expound."

Right, sorry.

Anyway. I think it makes more sense to stay visibly faithful to the character's behavior, where there is precedent. Fey'lya spent much of the time between Endor and the Vong in power in the Republic. Did he ever gut the New Republic's military so thoroughly as you're having him doing, purely to make it marginally more convenient for your powerful supervillains to walk over his forces, so that they won't have to stretch their muscles to do it?

He completely bungle-fucked the Yuuzan Vong situation, up to and including letting the Jedi get taken apart for the early stages of it and keeping all of his military towards the core worlds like a pussycat. Fucking up royal is entirely faithful to the character's behavior. I've just changed the means of that fucking up royal from abject cowardice and betrayal to libertarianism and "you don't represent me, don't claim you do."

Well frankly, it's because it's already happened. The Republic's military has been downsized, Lusankya and many other vessels are being put in mothballs, the MC80s and MC30s are flying back to Mon Calamari to be delivered back into the hands of their true owners.

OK, OK, if you're committed, you're committed, and I wish you'd said so earlier. Still kind of a plot hole, but there's only so much to be done about that.

I don't think it's really that much of a plot hole... Since when has "Borsk Fey'lya fucks up royal by a combination of arrogance and stupidity" ever been out-of-character?

But I think you should at least put some decent guard forces around the targets Fake Vader will be hitting, if only to make him look dangerous. Any fool can yoink a battleship that's unguarded. It takes a galactic-level badass to crunch through an entire task force in the process.

Borsk is cheap, too. He wants to avoid massive military expenditure, and assigning a task force to guard a mothballed task force makes very little sense. Assigning one ship to guard a mothballed task force makes more sense, especially if it's of the class of the bestest and newest ship in the fleet. (Remember, he's not got all of the mothballed ships in one place. He's got about a half-dozen or so mothballed fleets floating out there. This is a "just in case" to prevent exactly this sort of thing from getting someone his entire fleet.)

Of course he doesn't want to get near them, but eventually he'll have to when they hunt him down like dogs. It's not impossible they might just vape him in space, but if they decide to get him the hard way, I'd like him not to go down like a chump? Obviously, his forces will be annoying and dangerous, but it just feels wrong if the BBEG goes down like a chump.

To some players in RPGs that would be fine; to others it would not. It's more realistic to have fragile evil overlords whose main security is their minions, and some people like that. But other people like the classic adventure story; being a fan of Galactic Patrol (which is in some ways the prototypical science fiction adventure story, complete with a form of "levelling up," I can't say.

Well, the last time the bad guy went down like a chump, they seemed to be greatly dissatisfied with it. So, I'm nixing the chump bad guy.

After all, Palpatine was just a frail old man... Until he busted out a red lightsaber and personally waxed four Jedi Masters in three seconds.

Well... as portrayed, Palpatine was just a frail old man till he started crapping lightning from his fingertips and torturing Luke. But yeah, I take your meaning.

The implication was that, without being betrayed unexpectedly, Palpatine was more than capable of taking care of himself - if Luke had killed Vader, or tossed him down the shaft or something, Palpatine would have gotten up and opened up a jumbo-sized can of Sith on Luke's ass. He was just showing off by torturing him with lightning, and it proved to be his undoing when Vader got a willpower save re-roll Vs. Dark Side thanks to watching his son get tortured and it came up natural 20. (Followed by him hoisting his boss overhead and heaving the old bastard down a reactor shaft.)

I am not saying that's not true, however, I am saying that the ability to destroy a planet is not insignificant. No more, no less. Less powerful and cool and useful than the Force, yes, but not insignificant.

OK, but the point was something a little different. Vader's boasting aside, the fact that Vader (or Luke, or Fake Vader, or Palpatine) was strong in the Force made them a huge threat by itself even independent of whether they had a supership capable of wrecking continents in one shot.

You can exploit that. Darth Oster (did I get that right?) can be using the Force to guide him to targets ("I have foreseen it") and striking at just the right targets with his fleet of destroyers (which are capable of glassing planets; it just takes a little longer). Meanwhile, Zann is taking the brute force approach: mass industrial production of heavily armed ships.

Dude, we're reading the same page from opposite sides of the table and thinking the other isn't reading it. We're on the same page here; I'm not saying that Darth Oster (yes, you got it right) isn't powerful, he is. That's how he's having Cracken's men (and their Imperial and criminal counterparts) hunted down like dogs, and it's a big part of how he's finding the mothballed fleets.

It's already happened. You might as well argue, during ESB, why not have Tarkin just blow up a moon of Alderaan to make his point instead of blowing up all of Alderaan.

Umm... you could have told us that earlier...?

I am sorry. I thought it was clear which was stuff which had already happened and which was too soon to be set in stone, and what was not. My bad.

You guys are the only ones who think so. I don't know why, I wish you'd come 'round. All of my players love my expounding on Borsk Fey'lya as a libertarian with an agenda that does not include them or a vast number of old military ships.

I can think of some good reasons for us to have a problem with your plot that your players do not.

I'm not asking you guys to play, just how I can make it more cool for my players.

I'm not interested in people taking the pre-sets that I've already made and saying "this is no good," I'm interested in advice of "okay, here's how to make this work better."

Part of the problem is that you never made it clear which bits are pre-set and which aren't. So people will criticize the old stuff as much as the new.

My bad. I thought it was clear, it isn't. For the record, the players are at Mon Calamari (with one player on Corellia,) and are converging on Courscant. The players at Mon Calamari have Ackbar and Home One with them, and are luring him to Courscant with a combination of a chance to see Luke, Leia, and a couple of the other old guards and to help track down a slaver that was caught and released on bail and promptly skipped town, while the one on Corellia will be hyperspacing to Courscant with Wedge Antillies and Han Solo (or possibly Corran Horn,) to track down Wedge's kidnapped daughter and the Jedi's stolen shuttle (stolen as the getaway ship for the kidnapping.) Yes, the slaver and the kidnapper are one and the same. They've already seen two Zann-consortium vessels, but they have no clue about Darth Oster.

Another problem is that you've made so much of your plot pre-set that you don't seem to be willing to change any of it. Which makes it pointless for anyone else to talk to you. I mean, when it comes to making up random individual actions, you'll do fairly well on your own. It's quite obvious what both new warlords need to do:

Secure not only ships, but the industrial base to support them. Fake Vader needs this because he has nothing; Zann needs this (in your plotline) because he has nothing but the ships and troops he started with twenty years ago. Ideally, either of them would like something like the Star Forge from the KotOR era; since that got blown up, the next best thing would be to go looking around the Corporate Sector for backers with lots of industry but relatively little political power (since they were on the losing side of the Clone Wars).

Not-Vader, planning on simply usurping control of the Remnant in true Vader style, but carving up some support from the CSA isn't a bad idea. Zann's plan is the same as last time - pick on the Hutts and nonaligned Rim Worlds that nobody will care about. He carves up the Hutts and starts tapping into their financial streams, and takes Mandalore so he can use MandalMotors for himself...

Play off existing factions against each other. Undermine the Republic's defenses using their own agents (maybe Dark Side agents of Fake Vader, or spies hired by Zann, are acting in secret on Coruscant to encourage Fey'lya to act foolishly, creating a Wormtongue/Theoden dynamic). Find forces outside the current galactic order (the Chiss? I don't know...) and either ally with them or use them as threats to manipulate their main enemies into giving them more time to build up.

Now see, that's good. Having one of Borsk's top advisors being one of Zann's old 'sleeper' men who reactivates in a position to give Fey'lya some really bad advice... And you bet your ass Fake Vader will have his dark-siders running around playing up plots left and right...

Identify and neutralize anyone who is aware of their activities before they're ready to move openly. This is where the PCs come in, obviously...

Yep. And one of Zann's problems is that he's mistakenly identified one of the player characters as someone who is aware of his activities. He doesn't realize she has amnesia.
__________

This is what's essentially going to happen, but I'm starting the New Republic off in a seriously tight spot. They'll have to go to the Mon Calamari, hat-in-hand, to get their warships back, and even then they're going to be stuffed; enter the players. If nessessary, they could capture Kuat and/or Fondor and seize the starships under construction above them. Though they're staunchly Imperial worlds, they're in the frigging middle of the New Republic, far away from either Tyber Zann or the rest of the Remnant. It would constitute a violation of the Gavisrom-Pellalon treaties, but by the time it gets this desperate that document will be worth the flimsiplast it's written on.

Huh. Or they could try to form an alliance of convenience with the Imperial Remnant against Zann. I mean, Vader had a mixed reputation in the old Empire. People like Pellaeon did not like him and wouldn't want to be conquered by him. Especially not if he's back and wants to find someone to blame for all the crap that happened since Endor.

While this is true, I expect not-Vader would have put Pellaeon very high on his shit-list, simply for being a voice of reason. Pellaeon's either going to be in hiding or dead by the time anybody realizes that they should try to make an alliance with part of the Remnant against the rest. As for not-Vader, he's showing typical Vader generosity; failing each other in the past does not concern him (just like asteroids); just do not fail him.

Sort of a logical predecessor to either the alliance they formed against the Vong, or against the rising threat they faced in the Legacy era from the New Sith Empire or whatever they called themselves (I know nothing about the Legacy era, really).

It seems very plausable that It could wind up with a half-dozen or so holdout Remnant Star Destroyers (and attendant support ships) hyperspacing into Republic space for sanctuary.

While you've got a point, I should point out that Tyber Zann's ownership of battle droid technology is primarily because he has the plans to fabricate an automated Destroyer 2.0 plant, not because he's found an old Confederacy shipyard. I mean, it's possible he could do so, but it would have had to have been very secret for Palpatine not to know about it... It's also not impossible he could have kept a read-out of Eclipse and could incorporate and fashion it's superlaser if he found a shipyard capable of producing Malevolance-class Star Dreadnoughts...

Actually, that would be like him - he's very fond of dual axial weapons. Use the super-ion-cannon to bring down a ship's or planet's shields and then follow up with a blast from the Eclipse-class superlaser.

See, that works! It doesn't ignore the canon problem with the Eclipse, and it allows you to explain where Zann's been all this time... he's been building up the assets to make another bid for galactic conquest, including a duplicate Eclipse... or Eclipses.

The more I think about it, the more that idea is growing on me, I admit.

Think about RotS, which was more climactic; the battle with Palpatine, or when Obi-Wan just pulled a blaster to him and gunned Grevious down. Grevious went down like a chump, like sword guy from Indiana Jones, which made him a bad final battle.

What? Obi-Wan almost died going up against Grievous, mano a manos. The blaster was just the climactic resolution of a long fight scene...

Don't you mean 'mano a machina'? All right, I get your meaning - but still, Indiana Jones. Sword Guy. Sword guy swings his sword around, Indy just shoots him. What was all set up to be boss fight gets taken down in a comedy shot. That's cool for a lesser guy, but not a main villain.

And while it may be stretching things to have him retain Eclipse, it's less stretching than that "oh and by the way, he discovered some lost CIS warship that, despite being the better part of a century old, is still powerful enough that it's the most powerful ship in space today."

People have been reactivating old Clone War droid foundries for a very, very, long time in Star Wars. It's traditional. The Separatists had quite a bit of industrial capability that never got tracked down and destroyed; that much is canon. That people can use that capability to make ships that can compete in the modern galactic naval environment isn't really all that surprising. I mean, the Geonosians drew up the plans for the Death Star. The Death Star would certainly be a valid naval weapon in 20 ABY, if anyone could build one.

I don't get this, there's a fucking thread on page one where I showed that the Republic has a class of Cruiser they successfully kept in service for THREE MILLENNIUM but a century old CIS factory is unbelievable.

My apologizes, I appear not to have read that thread.

[Srelex]

And why not? At the height of it's power, the Zann Consortium could easily have fucking conquered the Galaxy. Zann decided that with all the headache of the civil war, though, it wasn't the ripe time. He's certainly capable of picking off Rim worlds with financial and industrial might - like Mandalore for it's shipyards and MandalMotors, and Hutt space for their money.

What's your justification for this? Especially when Zann's forces mainly consist of mercs who could be easily paid off by a government with larger coffers?

[ShadowDragon8685]

And why not? At the height of it's power, the Zann Consortium could easily have fucking conquered the Galaxy. Zann decided that with all the headache of the civil war, though, it wasn't the ripe time. He's certainly capable of picking off Rim worlds with financial and industrial might - like Mandalore for it's shipyards and MandalMotors, and Hutt space for their money.

What's your justification for this? Especially when Zann's forces mainly consist of mercs who could be easily paid off by a government with larger coffers?

The Empire's coffers were a little tight at the time, given that Zann was robbing them blind left, right, and center. That, and not all of his forces were, strictly speaking, mercenaries. Primarily his ground cannon fodder, the rest were more loyal.

[Havok]

I'm having questions about the plot feasability and pacing of my Starwars RPG game, and I was hoping for your help. Here's my situation:

You are full of shit. You just wanted people to ooooo and aaahhh at your plot and story. You aren't looking for help or advice and you ate certainly not about to question the feasibility of you ingenious story.

[ShadowDragon8685]

I'm having questions about the plot feasability and pacing of my Starwars RPG game, and I was hoping for your help. Here's my situation:

You are full of shit. You just wanted people to ooooo and aaahhh at your plot and story. You aren't looking for help or advice and you ate certainly not about to question the feasibility of you ingenious story.

Go yourself. You sound like you need a good self-pleasure session, anyway.


People telling me to change stuff that's already happened is kind of useless, it's not like I can go and rewrite things that have already happened in the game. Very few people are offering any kind of useful advice or even asking for clarification; those that are, I listen to and clarify for. Some - like you - clearly just want to rag on me, and all y'all s who just want to rag on me can go yourselves.

[Ritterin Sophia]

You know I was going to do a point by point regarding your justifications for your campaign, but it's become clear to me that Hav's right. For one you seem to think Mandalore and MandalMotors are of any importance when the Empire has companies like Kuat Drive Yards in it's employ. Another point is your harping on age, according to Leia if someone takes care of themselves the equivelant of 50 for a human in the upper part of Galactic Society is around 120 yrs of age; Cracken could expect to be able to serve the NR at least until 75ABY.

[ShadowDragon8685]

You know I was going to do a point by point regarding your justifications for your campaign, but it's become clear to me that Hav's right. For one you seem to think Mandalore and MandalMotors are of any importance when the Empire has companies like Kuat Drive Yards in it's employ. Another point is your harping on age, according to Leia if someone takes care of themselves the equivelant of 50 for a human in the upper part of Galactic Society is around 120 yrs of age; Cracken could expect to be able to serve the NR at least until 75ABY.

Given that Mandalore and MandalMotors are large enough to produce capital ships in great supply, yeah, I'd say they're at least as important as Mon Calamari or Kuat. That's canon, BTW, don't even try and say it isn't. What makes them good is that nobody thinks they're important, which means it will come as a big surprise when a ship large enough to go toe-to-toe with an ISD shows up out of nowhere.

As for the aging thing, I was unaware that humans a long time ago, far, far away, had any tendancy to live any longer or age any slower than humans now do. This is evidenced by the fact that Obi-Wan Kenobi was not all that old on Tatooine, but he was very obviously venerable.

[Shroom Man 777]

Tattooine is a bloody horrible desert and he was living as a hermit, eating rocks and drinking his own urine. Also, in Tattooine, he would not have access to fancy skin care products or facelifts or a healthy high-fat low-carb fastfood diet to prolong his life and longevity.

[Simon_Jester]

Sounds like a lot of ImpWank. Well-written or not, I think I'll skip it for the same reason I only watched RotS once.

Huh. Your loss, though I find your decision to dismiss it without reading it a bit odd. At a bare minimum, it has the virtue of being fairly well written, on a level I doubt you see every day.

I mean, you did watch Episode III once.

No, but he's expecting the Imperial Starfleet of old when he thinks about the Remnant. IE, the Empire that would watch battle lines, would want to conquer system-by-system instead of launching raids.

So... less than fifteen years and he's already forgotten Thrawn?

Security through Obscurity is kind of hard when you're orbiting the capital. It would be like hiding a military secret the size of an aircraft carrier moored at New York City. He's reckoning that it would take less resources to guard a mothballed fleet somewhere obscure - like say, the edge of the Courscant system, on the verge of interstellar space, far beyond the range of sensors - with one ship and starfighters, than to moor it up at Courscant itself, where it would be relatively easy to 'infiltrate' a strike team.

Well, if you're truly committed to doing it that way, that's another case where citing the Katana fleet as precedent makes sense: it took fifty years to find the damn thing even with the whole galaxy looking for it. If you really want security through obscurity that's how you get it... but I'm still not convinced Fey'lya wouldn't just park the ship under the guns of orbital defenses he's already committed to having in place. Securing Lusankya in orbit over Coruscant won't be any harder than securing Coruscant itself, and he's obviously going to leave enough assets in place to do that...

Sure it is, if the argument in question is "you seem not to have thought this through," which is the vibe I get.

I'm not sure I agree with that. See, I've had some remarkably bad ideas in my life, and some of them were ideas I'd thought over for a long time.

Unless you're some kind of legendary genius (hell, even if you are), once in a while you get a bad idea that grows on you. Pretty soon, you're so buried in the details of the bad idea that you can't let go of it; you've got so much time and energy invested in it that you're blind to its faults.

So if other people are pointing out problems they perceive with your idea, it may not be because they (falsely) think you haven't given it any thought. It may just be because they really think it's a bad idea.

Um... I agreed that one starfighter squadron was too light a defense for a mothballed fleet, even in Borsk Fey'lya's eyes, and upgraded it to a full, modern ship of the line with full starfight compliment?

Apologies; I hadn't actually noticed you doing that mixed in with everything else.

Although the more I think about it, the more him running his own Death Star II project with a slightly-less-ambitious full-sized Eclipse-class Super-Star Destroyer is growing on me.

Exactly. Building his own ship (using old industrial capacity or not) has enormous advantages: customizability, secrecy, the fact that no one else knows the exact blueprints of the ship you're using... you get the idea.

As I said before, I was hoping for less "this is wrong, that's wrong, this is horrible," ala Gordon Ramsey and Simon Cowel (wankers both,) but more "okay, if you're going to do this, then this would make more sense," - like what with increasing the guard on the mothballed ships, or "this would be pretty cool," like suggestions about how I can subtly nudge my players towards ways of subtly nudging Ackbar back into a positive frame of mind.

If you don't want an extensive critique of ways in which your story violates Star Wars canon... Hmm. I suggest a different forum: giantitp.com . They're more RPG-oriented, and it's a much less hostile environment.

You'll get more advice specific to RPG management, and less specific to "your plotline sucks!" Which I can understand your not wanting to hear, even (especially) if there's truth to it.

All right, though. You've got a good point. But I think it's a lot different from finding a battle droid factory to finding a lost shipyards. Now, granted, it's not impossible, but it would be hard, especially if Zann has been in deep freeze. Him being in deep freeze is very important, because if not he'd be a fucking ancient creaker by now... Although it's not impossible Urai Fen could have stayed awake to keep the candle burning.

You know, anti-aging treatments really ought to be available in Star Wars. I've never understood why they're not... if they exist at all, you can bet on Zann to get them.

Ah, others mention them. Maybe you should just keep Zann alive, in relative obscurity. He goes underground, yes, but he doesn't freeze himself in carbonite for decades. Maybe he fakes his own death or something?

That still seems a hell of a lot harder to explain to my players than "Zann just didn't abandon the ship he already had," though. Seems to be violating KISS.

Hard to say. If you want the artistic freedom to give Zann whatever the hell weapons you want, go for the secret shipyard facility, because that place could be turning out anything. It also gives him a logistic support base, which is absolutely vital in war. And it gives the PCs a (relatively) vulnerable location to attack, if you set it up right.

If, on the other hand, you want to make sure the plot is so simple even a twelve year old can follow it (and there are reasons to do that), then "Zann didn't abandon the ship he already had" has its virtues.

But this would make him the preeminant power in the galaxy - not a contender, the front-runner. Nobody else is building Supers. Nobody since Isard's been that wealthy and powerful. The closest anybody would come would be the Planet-Crackers the totally new race I wrote in are building, but they're only Super-sized, they're not warships in any sense of the word and would fold up against even a cruiser.

I'm not sure I agree. See, you can tune the amount of industrial support Zann has out there to match the levels that the New Republic and Imperial Remnant. Maybe the place honestly isn't capable of turning out a supercapital in less than a year or so, and that ties down most of the yard space: so Zann isn't going to be building any more now that he has his flagship.

I suppose it's not impossible if it's a long and slow project that Urai Fen was running while Zann was under carbonite. Especially if the effort to do so is proportionately herculean to the construction of the second Death Star...

Proportionately, yes; it required a very large fraction of the Zann Consortium's resources, because Zann wasn't there to run the thing. His second had to handle everything, and his second may have been forced to spend most of the Consortium's assets on maintaining what he had, with relatively little left over for building up the hidden shipyard.

Dude, we're reading the same page from opposite sides of the table and thinking the other isn't reading it. We're on the same page here; I'm not saying that Darth Oster (yes, you got it right) isn't powerful, he is. That's how he's having Cracken's men (and their Imperial and criminal counterparts) hunted down like dogs, and it's a big part of how he's finding the mothballed fleets.

Good, but you said nothing about this that I can remember until this very post I am now replying to.

Yep. And one of Zann's problems is that he's mistakenly identified one of the player characters as someone who is aware of his activities. He doesn't realize she has amnesia.

Amnesia in fiction is notoriously reversible; Zann may just be genre-savvy.

While this is true, I expect not-Vader would have put Pellaeon very high on his shit-list, simply for being a voice of reason. Pellaeon's either going to be in hiding or dead by the time anybody realizes that they should try to make an alliance with part of the Remnant against the rest. As for not-Vader, he's showing typical Vader generosity; failing each other in the past does not concern him (just like asteroids); just do not fail him.

Pellaeon's pretty capable in his own right; I wouldn't put it past him to rally a fleet and stay shipside and mobile, where he's surrounded by men loyal to him and where he can escape "Vader's" attacks. He also knows about ysalamiri, and can use that to his advantage to prevent "Vader" from pulling scry and die tactics on him personally.

Pellaeon might make a good "competent neutral" to go with competent allies and enemies. He has no reason to hate the PCs, and no reason to hate them, and convincing him to weigh in on one side or the other might just decide the war, since he's in effective control of so much former Imperial heavy metal.

Don't you mean 'mano a machina'? All right, I get your meaning - but still, Indiana Jones. Sword Guy. Sword guy swings his sword around, Indy just shoots him. What was all set up to be boss fight gets taken down in a comedy shot. That's cool for a lesser guy, but not a main villain.

"Mano" is Spanish for "hand." "Mano a mano" means "hand to hand." Since Grievous had more arms than Obi-Wan, it's "Mano a manos."

But in Grievous's case, he got an extended lightsaber duel, a chase scene... I mean really, he got about as much awesomeness as any one character has a right to expect.

[Ghost Rider]

I'm having questions about the plot feasability and pacing of my Starwars RPG game, and I was hoping for your help. Here's my situation:

You are full of shit. You just wanted people to ooooo and aaahhh at your plot and story. You aren't looking for help or advice and you ate certainly not about to question the feasibility of you ingenious story.

Go yourself. You sound like you need a good self-pleasure session, anyway.


People telling me to change stuff that's already happened is kind of useless, it's not like I can go and rewrite things that have already happened in the game. Very few people are offering any kind of useful advice or even asking for clarification; those that are, I listen to and clarify for. Some - like you - clearly just want to rag on me, and all y'all s who just want to rag on me can go yourselves.

Amazing in all of the back and forth the only ones you are caring to listen to in any capacity are ones that are going "Good stuff, but change these possible details.", but even ignore some of their advice because it doesn't jive with whatever you must have. When others go "How the fuck does this motherfucker make galatic waves?!" your answer is

I will make it so.

You aren't asking for advice, you're just wanting to hear someone to pat your back and then give maybe a slightly possible changes because you will absolutely definitely not hear that your magnum opus here is third grade bullshit. Because your statement to Darth Yan was by far the most honest display of why people are laughing at you here. A clichè is nothing to strive for, and you are admitting this is your goal.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Given that Mandalore and MandalMotors are large enough to produce capital ships in great supply, yeah, I'd say they're at least as important as Mon Calamari or Kuat. That's canon, BTW, don't even try and say it isn't. What makes them good is that nobody thinks they're important, which means it will come as a big surprise when a ship large enough to go toe-to-toe with an ISD shows up out of nowhere.

No it isn't it's you making shit up. Mon Calamari isn't even on the same scale as Kuat, based on the number of slips the Mon Cal Shipyards had at max were able to produce one MC80 a year where the shipyards around the planet Kuat could do a thousand ISD in the same timeframe, the only two shipwrights that could do anywhere near the same were the Corellians and Fondor. Mon Calamari didn't have this capacity until somewhere between 70-130 ABY.

As for the aging thing, I was unaware that humans a long time ago, far, far away, had any tendancy to live any longer or age any slower than humans now do. This is evidenced by the fact that Obi-Wan Kenobi was not all that old on Tatooine, but he was very obviously venerable.

So a hermit at the ass end of nowhere of a desert planet (sand does horrible things for the skin) trying to keep a low profile? Gotcha.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Tattooine is a bloody horrible desert and he was living as a hermit, eating rocks and drinking his own urine. Also, in Tattooine, he would not have access to fancy skin care products or facelifts or a healthy high-fat low-carb fastfood diet to prolong his life and longevity.

Hahahaahaaaah!

I imagine even a Jedi's patience will wear thin after the 700th night with Bantha Burgers for dinner.

Still, you'd think that if anyone was capable of aging gracefully on Tatooine, it would've been a Jedi Master.

Sounds like a lot of ImpWank. Well-written or not, I think I'll skip it for the same reason I only watched RotS once.

Huh. Your loss, though I find your decision to dismiss it without reading it a bit odd. At a bare minimum, it has the virtue of being fairly well written, on a level I doubt you see every day.

I mean, you did watch Episode III once.

Yeah, but Darth Flannel could force-choke my dog and kill my best friend with his lightsaber and telekinetically earthquake my house apart and I'd still watch a new Star Wars movie, even if it consisted of Luke Skywalker getting killed by a gigantic spike flying through the cockpit window of his X-Wing and then forty minutes of Han Solo being kicked in the balls by Moff Tarkin and Boba Fett followed by a graphic make-out between Leia and Emperor Palpatine.

No, but he's expecting the Imperial Starfleet of old when he thinks about the Remnant. IE, the Empire that would watch battle lines, would want to conquer system-by-system instead of launching raids.

So... less than fifteen years and he's already forgotten Thrawn?

Precisely. After all, Thrawn is dead. In the grave, out of mind.

Security through Obscurity is kind of hard when you're orbiting the capital. It would be like hiding a military secret the size of an aircraft carrier moored at New York City. He's reckoning that it would take less resources to guard a mothballed fleet somewhere obscure - like say, the edge of the Courscant system, on the verge of interstellar space, far beyond the range of sensors - with one ship and starfighters, than to moor it up at Courscant itself, where it would be relatively easy to 'infiltrate' a strike team.

Well, if you're truly committed to doing it that way, that's another case where citing the Katana fleet as precedent makes sense: it took fifty years to find the damn thing even with the whole galaxy looking for it. If you really want security through obscurity that's how you get it... but I'm still not convinced Fey'lya wouldn't just park the ship under the guns of orbital defenses he's already committed to having in place. Securing Lusankya in orbit over Coruscant won't be any harder than securing Coruscant itself, and he's obviously going to leave enough assets in place to do that...

Well, for one good reason, it's bigger than any Skyhook or space station. If terrorists could just make it break loose, there'd be no stopping Lusankya from nose-diving into Courscant, especially if they could make its' engines fire. Even if you shoot it apart, you've just made the problem worse; instead of one gigantic dagger plunging into the planet, you're showering it with all kinds of hellacious debris. Besides, securing it at Courscant adds new problems; as a civilian planet, the enemy could infiltrate large numbers of sleepers - heck, entire squads of Stormtroopers on a planet that big - and outfit them on the black market, then ride up the elevator and seize Lusankya. Then you're left with a choice of blowing it apart in orbit and showering the planet below with debries, all the while its guns will be shooting both at your installations and the planet itself, or letting them leave with it.

All things considered, I think he'd rather secure the ships away from worlds, let alone inhabited worlds.

Sure it is, if the argument in question is "you seem not to have thought this through," which is the vibe I get.

I'm not sure I agree with that. See, I've had some remarkably bad ideas in my life, and some of them were ideas I'd thought over for a long time.

Unless you're some kind of legendary genius (hell, even if you are), once in a while you get a bad idea that grows on you. Pretty soon, you're so buried in the details of the bad idea that you can't let go of it; you've got so much time and energy invested in it that you're blind to its faults.

So if other people are pointing out problems they perceive with your idea, it may not be because they (falsely) think you haven't given it any thought. It may just be because they really think it's a bad idea.

I'm certainly no kind of legendary genius. As for all the things people object too, though, I haven't seen any argument for them being any kind of monumentally stupid idea. There's a few that are a bit stretchy, but none that are monumentally bad.

Um... I agreed that one starfighter squadron was too light a defense for a mothballed fleet, even in Borsk Fey'lya's eyes, and upgraded it to a full, modern ship of the line with full starfight compliment?

Apologies; I hadn't actually noticed you doing that mixed in with everything else.

No problem.

Although the more I think about it, the more him running his own Death Star II project with a slightly-less-ambitious full-sized Eclipse-class Super-Star Destroyer is growing on me.

Exactly. Building his own ship (using old industrial capacity or not) has enormous advantages: customizability, secrecy, the fact that no one else knows the exact blueprints of the ship you're using... you get the idea.

Yeah. He could just be manufacturing a new Eclipse-class Star Dreadnought, too, or it could be something custom, like that Malevolance with the dual fuckoff cannons.

As I said before, I was hoping for less "this is wrong, that's wrong, this is horrible," ala Gordon Ramsey and Simon Cowel (wankers both,) but more "okay, if you're going to do this, then this would make more sense," - like what with increasing the guard on the mothballed ships, or "this would be pretty cool," like suggestions about how I can subtly nudge my players towards ways of subtly nudging Ackbar back into a positive frame of mind.

If you don't want an extensive critique of ways in which your story violates Star Wars canon... Hmm. I suggest a different forum: giantitp.com . They're more RPG-oriented, and it's a much less hostile environment.

The violations of canon do not concern me, Admiral. By it's very nature, canon gets violated the very moment a player character interacts with the world, even if by existing. What concerns me is to make sure the violations of canon are not too excessive (like saying that Lando somehow time traveled to 2010 Earth and escaped with a packet of Swiss Miss to give Luke an 'exotic drink'), and that the story is plausable and will be fun.

You'll get more advice specific to RPG management, and less specific to "your plotline sucks!" Which I can understand your not wanting to hear, even (especially) if there's truth to it.

And since I know at least one of my players frequents it, I can't post this kind of black stuff there.

And clearly the nay-sayers don't enjoy Star Wars the way I do. That's a shame, but they should stop poo-pooing my planned plot-twists because it's not their cuppa.

All right, though. You've got a good point. But I think it's a lot different from finding a battle droid factory to finding a lost shipyards. Now, granted, it's not impossible, but it would be hard, especially if Zann has been in deep freeze. Him being in deep freeze is very important, because if not he'd be a fucking ancient creaker by now... Although it's not impossible Urai Fen could have stayed awake to keep the candle burning.

You know, anti-aging treatments really ought to be available in Star Wars. I've never understood why they're not... if they exist at all, you can bet on Zann to get them.

Maybe anagathics are a brand of transhumanism that Lucas doesn't like? I do agree that Zann could certainly have secured plenty if they exist at all, plenty for both him and Sliri for that matter... Still, I can't see how his troops would've taken that. It's one thing to go into carbon freeze for your boss, it's another to get 20 years older whilst hiding.

Ah, others mention them. Maybe you should just keep Zann alive, in relative obscurity. He goes underground, yes, but he doesn't freeze himself in carbonite for decades. Maybe he fakes his own death or something?

That could work, too, I suppose. If he's started to thaw his boys to get back into the swing of things on the rim, it would also explain him unthawing the PC who wound up running from him and his operation, and maybe some of his Sith Army...

That still seems a hell of a lot harder to explain to my players than "Zann just didn't abandon the ship he already had," though. Seems to be violating KISS.

Hard to say. If you want the artistic freedom to give Zann whatever the hell weapons you want, go for the secret shipyard facility, because that place could be turning out anything. It also gives him a logistic support base, which is absolutely vital in war. And it gives the PCs a (relatively) vulnerable location to attack, if you set it up right.

If, on the other hand, you want to make sure the plot is so simple even a twelve year old can follow it (and there are reasons to do that), then "Zann didn't abandon the ship he already had" has its virtues.

Mmmmh... While I have some reservations still... "Zann's Secret Shipyard" is more cool than just the Eclipse, I think I'll go with your idea on this one.

But this would make him the preeminant power in the galaxy - not a contender, the front-runner. Nobody else is building Supers. Nobody since Isard's been that wealthy and powerful. The closest anybody would come would be the Planet-Crackers the totally new race I wrote in are building, but they're only Super-sized, they're not warships in any sense of the word and would fold up against even a cruiser.

I'm not sure I agree. See, you can tune the amount of industrial support Zann has out there to match the levels that the New Republic and Imperial Remnant. Maybe the place honestly isn't capable of turning out a supercapital in less than a year or so, and that ties down most of the yard space: so Zann isn't going to be building any more now that he has his flagship.

Right - which would make it important for him to capture, or convince, the planet Mandalore to throw in with him, so he can get access to their heavy fabrication yards, either to build supplementary ships, or to divert their fabrication power to his supercapital project.

I suppose it's not impossible if it's a long and slow project that Urai Fen was running while Zann was under carbonite. Especially if the effort to do so is proportionately herculean to the construction of the second Death Star...

Proportionately, yes; it required a very large fraction of the Zann Consortium's resources, because Zann wasn't there to run the thing. His second had to handle everything, and his second may have been forced to spend most of the Consortium's assets on maintaining what he had, with relatively little left over for building up the hidden shipyard.

Mmmmh. Right... I'm catching your drift.

Dude, we're reading the same page from opposite sides of the table and thinking the other isn't reading it. We're on the same page here; I'm not saying that Darth Oster (yes, you got it right) isn't powerful, he is. That's how he's having Cracken's men (and their Imperial and criminal counterparts) hunted down like dogs, and it's a big part of how he's finding the mothballed fleets.

Good, but you said nothing about this that I can remember until this very post I am now replying to.

Right, but you were seeming to imply that the ability to destroy a planet was insignificant next to the power of the Force; I'm saying it is not insignificant. Just like a pistol isn't insignificant next to a rifle; less powerful and useful, but not insgnificant since it'll kill you just as dead.

Yep. And one of Zann's problems is that he's mistakenly identified one of the player characters as someone who is aware of his activities. He doesn't realize she has amnesia.

Amnesia in fiction is notoriously reversible; Zann may just be genre-savvy.

You have a point there!
Still, he doesn't realize yet that she has amnesia. He is, however, trying to have her killed.

While this is true, I expect not-Vader would have put Pellaeon very high on his shit-list, simply for being a voice of reason. Pellaeon's either going to be in hiding or dead by the time anybody realizes that they should try to make an alliance with part of the Remnant against the rest. As for not-Vader, he's showing typical Vader generosity; failing each other in the past does not concern him (just like asteroids); just do not fail him.

Pellaeon's pretty capable in his own right; I wouldn't put it past him to rally a fleet and stay shipside and mobile, where he's surrounded by men loyal to him and where he can escape "Vader's" attacks. He also knows about ysalamiri, and can use that to his advantage to prevent "Vader" from pulling scry and die tactics on him personally.

Pellaeon might make a good "competent neutral" to go with competent allies and enemies. He has no reason to hate the PCs, and no reason to hate them, and convincing him to weigh in on one side or the other might just decide the war, since he's in effective control of so much former Imperial heavy metal.

Again, this is a very good point.

Don't you mean 'mano a machina'? All right, I get your meaning - but still, Indiana Jones. Sword Guy. Sword guy swings his sword around, Indy just shoots him. What was all set up to be boss fight gets taken down in a comedy shot. That's cool for a lesser guy, but not a main villain.

"Mano" is Spanish for "hand." "Mano a mano" means "hand to hand." Since Grievous had more arms than Obi-Wan, it's "Mano a manos."

But in Grievous's case, he got an extended lightsaber duel, a chase scene... I mean really, he got about as much awesomeness as any one character has a right to expect.

point taken.

Amazing in all of the back and forth the only ones you are caring to listen to in any capacity are ones that are going "Good stuff, but change these possible details.",

Well... Yeah. Because that's what I came here for.

"This is stupid, you're stupid" doesn't help me at all because in most cases, it's something that's already set in stone and going down whether or not you like it. I'm not writing fanfiction for your bloody pleasure, I'm trying to make the facts in my game jive as well as possible with what is already written by those who came before me, without hesitating to change facts to facilitate the game if nessessary for the enjoyment of the game.

but even ignore some of their advice because it doesn't jive with whatever you must have. When others go "How the fuck does this motherfucker make galatic waves?!" your answer is

I will make it so.

If George Lucas and Timothy Zahn came to my table (well, electronic table) and tried telling me I was wrong, I would be obliged to tell them both to stuff it. I'd pay their arguments more heed than yours, mind, but ultimately when given the choice between "Realistic" but un-fun and fun, fun wins out every time.

Tyber Zann makes galactic waves because he can. Because he has a fucking army of frozen Sith who will be loyal to him, he's building a droid army on top of that and recruiting the Nightsisters of Dathomir to his cause (again). Because he's going to have one of - if not the - most dangerous ship in space, and is making broad use of off-kilter technologies that will let him frustrate and stymie and best conventional forces unprepared for his technological innovations.

It's what the man does. He's done it before, he can do it again.

You aren't asking for advice, you're just wanting to hear someone to pat your back and then give maybe a slightly possible changes because you will absolutely definitely not hear that your magnum opus here is third grade bullshit. Because your statement to Darth Yan was by far the most honest display of why people are laughing at you here. A clichè is nothing to strive for, and you are admitting this is your goal.

By your definition, Star Wars itself is a cliche. If playing up the tropes that made a genre popular and fun are cliched, then I'd rather be cliched and be running a game that my players enjoy than some avant-garde bullshit that makes them seeth with annoyance and frustration. Fuck yourself. Sideways. With a tuning fork.

Given that Mandalore and MandalMotors are large enough to produce capital ships in great supply, yeah, I'd say they're at least as important as Mon Calamari or Kuat. That's canon, BTW, don't even try and say it isn't. What makes them good is that nobody thinks they're important, which means it will come as a big surprise when a ship large enough to go toe-to-toe with an ISD shows up out of nowhere.

No it isn't it's you making shit up. Mon Calamari isn't even on the same scale as Kuat, based on the number of slips the Mon Cal Shipyards had at max were able to produce one MC80 a year where the shipyards around the planet Kuat could do a thousand ISD in the same timeframe, the only two shipwrights that could do anywhere near the same were the Corellians and Fondor. Mon Calamari didn't have this capacity until somewhere between 70-130 ABY.

And this appears... Where, exactly? Since I doubt you'll find a G- or T- canon source detailing the exact production capacity of Kuat Drive Yards, you're going on C-Canon sources. So am I. Fuck yourself, fuck yourself with a corncob.

As for the aging thing, I was unaware that humans a long time ago, far, far away, had any tendancy to live any longer or age any slower than humans now do. This is evidenced by the fact that Obi-Wan Kenobi was not all that old on Tatooine, but he was very obviously venerable.

So a hermit at the ass end of nowhere of a desert planet (sand does horrible things for the skin) trying to keep a low profile? Gotcha.

Again: he's a Jedi. If anyone should be able to resist aging without medical intervention, it would've been Kenobi.

[Ghost Rider]

Ah, the moron replies the same as he has before.

Again, you are not doing anything except regurgitating your former responses. You deflect anything you dislike as notions of people who do not comprehend, understand, or unwilling to see your point of view. You simply blither how you cannot change what will be, because this entire line of thought is cemented in your mind. You are not trying to show them why they are wrong, you are telling them they are wrong. You keep expousing how we are not hearing you. You know the enviroment, and in fact a few people have tried to help in ways far above that then should've been given to this drivel.

This is a fundamental of all decent entertainment; show not tell. You are not showing, you are telling. Whether you want this listen to this honest piece of criticism is wholly up to you.

But a small tidbit, tell me...where did you find the size of what Mon Cal shipyard yearly construction? Because I would love to have a time notation or page number from the novels. Oh wait, there isn't one, thus your retort to Shatten is like most of your other retorts. The baseless ramblings of a man child who is angered that we are not recognizing your efforts.

[Havok]

I'm having questions about the plot feasability and pacing of my Starwars RPG game, and I was hoping for your help. Here's my situation:

You are full of shit. You just wanted people to ooooo and aaahhh at your plot and story. You aren't looking for help or advice and you ate certainly not about to question the feasibility of you ingenious story.

Go yourself. You sound like you need a good self-pleasure session, anyway.


People telling me to change stuff that's already happened is kind of useless, it's not like I can go and rewrite things that have already happened in the game. Very few people are offering any kind of useful advice or even asking for clarification; those that are, I listen to and clarify for. Some - like you - clearly just want to rag on me, and all y'all s who just want to rag on me can go yourselves.

Hey dick head, if you are going to post a thread asking for advice and help on a story and plot, DON'T PUT UP INFO THAT YOU ARE COMPLETELY UNWILLING TO CHANGE you pathetic simpering twit.

And really, after reading this, I would certainly consider your advice to go fuck myself, as you are clearly the authority on a good self-pleasure session.

And listen up you fucking idiot. You better learn, real quick, the difference between asking for advice and help and posting a thread just to placate your ego and the decisions you have already made.