Just fought an adult Zakkeg. Ouch.

It took my group a solid 30-45 minutes to take that thing down, and they only managed to bring it down by dealing it 5 critical injuries (we were using beginner box rules).

Yeah, that sounds about right.

We had one guy with a heavy rifle (auto-fire did not help), a guy with a Czerka Model 38 hunting rifle (EtU - a really good bit of kit) and two of us with blaster pistols. Yeah, we got ourselves in a little bit over our heads. The pistols did nothing , so we were really just taking pot shots to distract the thing (issuing boosts to the rifle-guys, setbacks to the monster, doing the 3-Advantage defence-stripping option when we got lucky). I got attacked once, did my double Dodge thing and still filled up my wound threshold in one go.

I don't think we did too much damage, but by the end we'd racked up something like 7 critical hits on it. Exhausting.

A little secret from the writing side of things: You're not actually supposed to fight those.

Now, I'm just a freelancer, so that's not an official opinion, and there's no real "supposed to" with how an adventure should unfold at your personal table, but I included an Immature Zakkeg as the real boss monster of Dxun, then realized players would probably get upset if there were only stats for the young ones, so I added in the second set of stats for the sake of completeness. That's why there's some text explicitly stating that it would be impossible for the PCs to fight a mature Zakkeg unless they wanted to do so. I also assumed that if the PCs were interested in picking such a fight, they would do so with the aid of high explosives or heavy weaponry, since such things are included in the Beginner Game rulebook.

Regardless of my intentions, I hope you guys had a good time, and I apologize if the fight ended up as a slog.

Awesome. Very glad you popped in and said hi.

My players are always looking for the biggest thing to take on. Plus, they really wanted to impress the beast riders (who already had the rider's respect). Naturally the riders warned them about the Zakkeg, and they had their mission.

Hey, RPG - if you build it, we will find a way to kill it.

And there's no need to apologise - the Beast Riders now think we're awesome!

Our GM told us we'd found tracks for both the adolescent and adult zakkeg and let us decide which to track (they weren't travelling together). We tested ourselves against junior and then decided to pick up the trail for the big guy the next day.

Hey, RPG - if you build it, we will find a way to kill it.

If there's anything I've learned GMIng, it's that the players will find a way to kill anything, statted or not, up to and including abstract ideas and plot hooks. Huge alien behemoths are small potatoes.

Anyways, glad it worked out for the folks who risked engaging the thing!