Hey guys!

Last session of Beyond the Rim tomorrow. I've been going over the book one last time and the final battle where you have to make all the repairs while at the same time the Imps start coming and you only have a certain amount of time before being overwhelmed. I truly find this section rather overwhelming as it seems like a lot of stuff to keep in mind, which I understand is standard for GM's but I'm still relatively new to larger scale events such as this.

So I ask, how did you guys handle the final battle where the PCs have to help the Isotech crew repair their corvette while at the same time fending off Imps?

As far as context goes, my party consists of three players. A disgraced ISB agent who is currently at the top of their hit list, a mechanic and a doctor. They managed to save Cratala, her staff, a number of miscellaneous survivors of whom are currently on a space-station a number of systems away after their cholganna escape, and lastly, Eyetee. Everyone else, including Harsol is dead as the result of a poorly planned assault on the Imps who arrived on Cholganna.

When I ran this adventure the battle before that, when the Yiyar clan and their Trandoshan allies attack, took an entire session and had by players barely making it. So when the time came for the final stretch, I simply skipped the stormtroopers invading. I had my players do the various repairs, having made a system to keep track of time, and when the dropships loaded with stormtroopers came in they knew it was time to go.

My reasoning for this was that it would have taken a disproportionate amount of time for some players to fight off stormtroopers while the others made repairs. Combat can take a while, but making a repair check takes 30 seconds. It would have been boring for the repair team characters to sit and watch the others fight, so I skipped it.

Yeah, the first part went almost exactly the same. The Yiyar attacked in force, it took an entire session and they barely made it. Thankfully I now have a number of days before we finish to run this last part through properly. It does make sense for the Imps to show up since my party are at the top of the Empire's hit list. So they're gonna wanna get em and get em hard!

I'm getting ready to run the end as well. Since the Imperials just invaded the Retreat I will most likely make the Scrapheap encounter Yiyar based with maybe some Imperial involvement in space during escape. It's sort of weird, if you don't watch closely the material is set up for you to have very redundant combats at the end of Act 2 and 3.

Once the imperials arrive per the timeline, the PCs must defeat a squad of storm troopers to reach the venue of the next repair. Lots of dice rolling, blaster bolts and triumphs. Set up a d100 table to see which PC takes damage when the troopers hit.

When I ran this some months ago, it ended up being very cool and cinematic. The party had a Wookiee Marauder, a Human Politco, a Jawa Technician, and a Human Smuggler. All but the Jawa were pretty good in a fight between skills and talents, plus we still had Harsol, and most of the Cholgana crew (The melee spec'd Wookiee suffered a severed limb crit--left arm--in a vibro-knife fight with a scout trooper back on Cholgana...so as part of their reward, Cratala fitted him with a cybernetic one...the player was so stoked!). They ended up taking out the Trandoshan before he was able to arm his thermal detonator...so that was used to take out some Stormtroopers later and collapse the scrap tunnel (triumph), blocking off part of the assault.

It ended up being a close blaster fight as half of the crew fought their way back to the PCs ship--a GHTROC 720 they managed to salvage a few days before (with the help of the Jawa PC who's only surviving clan members were living on this planet! and a Triumph) and negotiate with Reom's team to get it repaired and outfitted (Enter the Unknown had just come out a few days prior).

Some of the Cholgana survivors flew the PCs beat up YT-1300 (Yiyar clan gave it a serious beating on Cholgana...as in, I had them withdraw before they completely destroyed the ship and the whole party mid-air).

Since the party found all of the required gear to fix the corvette (again, with the help of the Jawa PC), the repairs went relatively easy....during the final chase, the YT-1300 got destroyed (or turned into a drifting hulk), and the PCs and the corvette were able to make the Hyperspace jump just in time.

Overall I had an awesome time running the adventure, and the players thoroughly enjoyed it as well.

I swapped my encounters...

I ran the scenario and minimized the Yiyar on the planet.. and made that encounter at the compound where the imp shopw up the main IMP encounter for the module.. then used the Yiyar in full force on the Corvette. I actually had the Yiyar get a few men on the corvette to cause close up havoc for those even trying the repairs.

Interesting for this thread to get revived over the last couple days as I plan on finishing the module tonight. =P

Here's what I did to help keep this organized. Using my plastic stands, I created two signs. I displayed the first as soon as Norta called in with the report on the TIE fighters:

Followed by this sign, showing all of the repairs that need to be done to the corvette:

I broke the time into "rounds" and let the characters try to perform any of the repairs on the diagram. When they all did their thing, I then marked off the highest number of minutes that they took on the first sign. I purposely put more boxes than needed so they wouldn't know how much time they had remaining. As soon as they passed a threshold, as laid out in the book, I had Norta give them another update. This helped to give them a sense of urgency in what they were doing.

After typing this in, I think I talked about this same exact thing in another topic Without the visuals, of course. So, sorry if I'm repeating myself.

Those look great, OggDude! Would you be willing to share? I too am rapidly approaching the final battle scene in BtR and I think these would be very helpful.

No problem!

BtR Signs

I included a few extras in there. I think I ended up with close to 50 pages of signs for this adventure

Your signs are a godsend, they'll be a perfect addition to my setup. Thanks! Also, tip o' the hat for the plastic sign holders idea, that'll be very useful too.