Alright, so....

I know there are some problems with this module, though it's otherwise been a blast for far. Namely, the big concern lies around the traitor kidnapping Hase and all the things that revolve around it.

Except for some piloting checks in the beginning, the module does a good job of making sure it provides results when it calls for rolls; either rolling won't really let you win, but it'll give you benefits or it's one of those "roll until you succeed" things, but you get a cumulative threat for each attempt with a nifty array of options at the end. I really like those, actually. That seems to go out the window at the end of Act 2, when you can succeed at a Hard (CCC) Vigilance check to notice the traitor lurking in the background... but all it does is change the narrative blurb from "Surprise! Things happen" to "That thing you saw coming but can't stop happens!". Then, to add further insult to injury, the game throws you into a speeder chase that's easy to win and then... what, stops it short with a few blaster shots? How is that guaranteed to stop my PCs? They get shot at all the time.

How do I make these feel more involved and reward success without saying "congrats! You've solved the puzzle, beaten the module, get all the XP, now let's have some tea!" In other words: please help me either cut these out and feel good about it or provide an alternate scenario for success that actually rewards the PCs with something rather than just changing the wrapping that goes on the "you ultimately lose" present.

So far, my idea is that, if the PCs succeed on their Vigilance check, they can "wing him" as he jumps for Hase, giving him a few wounds or a minor Critical Injury... but it takes 2 days to get from Act 2 to Act 3 and the PCs don't een fight Var... so I think that wouldn't work?

For the chase... I have nothing. Succeeding means they catch up to him; it's fun to roll dice and create a scene, but ultimately the PCs have to lose. I guess I just have to make it not arbitrary? What if he's laid traps and he blows up the PCs transport, knocking them down and winding them for a few minutes?

I have to agree, the adventure is ridiculously railroaded, and one way or the other, letting the PCs win the chase cuts short the entire third act. The thing with making the chase harder is that clever players could still find a way to beat him. When I GMed it, I made the chase extra hard, but they managed to catch up to him, blow out his hyperdrive and then shoot him down with an X-Wing. He only managed to escape with a lot of luck with stealing said X-Wing when the pilot investigated the crash site.

An option could be that if the PCs catch him during the chase, they find out that Var already managed to break through the comm blockade with his ships hypertransceiver, but only transmitted to a secret terminal in his mansion on Ord Radama, giving the PCs time to reach it before the empire finds out. Then the players could proceed to the third act, albeit you'd have to maybe change it up a bit.

The best thing is, in act 3, there's another chase that the PCs are "supposed" to lose, or else the big showdown at the end doesn't come to pass...

Fun... and I have not one but TWO pilot PCs and a few high Agility characters on top of that. I really don't want to completely cut them off, but I also want the adventure to proceed more or less as planned. It doesn't have to, I guess, but chasing Var down in the jungle and beating him to death is very anticlimactic. I try to avoid that.

I think your suggestion is a neat one, though everyone else, please feel free to keep them coming... I'll need all the help I can get with these guys!

(Don't know if I should mention, but this is fairly detailed PbP game, so some "hand wave" type solutions might not work for me...)

Time to get creative and chop that railroad to pieces. You're the GM, basically, God. If they players get creative and win, let them. What happens if they players keep Arda I? What happens if they outsmart the enemy? Are there any complications? What happens after they win? I "Frankenstein" modules all the time. Take the good parts that are fun, nix the parts that suck. Sorry if that isn't very specific, but you can do whatever you want.

Indeed there are a lot of things that enhance the narrative and it is worth altering chunks of the book narrativeto better fit the campaign. The books are very general because the gm is expected to change it. For example

-what is this agent looking to smuggle out of the base? Is there something special, like listed locations of refuge worlds that may be of value?

-is the agent working alone? Perhaps the agent was waiting for an imperial team.

-is this agent a distraction? Maybe there is a second agent who is being covered for, but the capture of this betrayed soul might lead to the target

11 hours ago, LordBritish said:

Indeed there are a lot of things that enhance the narrative and it is worth altering chunks of the book narrativeto better fit the campaign. The books are very general because the gm is expected to change it. For example

-what is this agent looking to smuggle out of the base? Is there something special, like listed locations of refuge worlds that may be of value?

-is the agent working alone? Perhaps the agent was waiting for an imperial team.

-is this agent a distraction? Maybe there is a second agent who is being covered for, but the capture of this betrayed soul might lead to the target

Good thoughts. Between this advice and @Klort 's ideas, I'm starting to settle towards "let them catch Var, but give them a reason to still go to his home town". There, they can learn more about why he betrayed the Alliance and still meet that Imperial agent...

The easiest fix is that the PCs work out that Var is the spy but when they go tell the command staff Var has already slipped away, maybe taking a hostage or maybe not. This would avoid the potential for Var getting captured but unfortunately also cut out the cool speader chase.

The one thing I never understood is why it was so hard to find Var's historical home, but that is another problem...

If Act III hinges on the traiter escaping - which I believe it does (I've skimmed the module) - then don't provide the PCs a chance to catch him or run a scene where they cannot stop him but should reasonably have a chance to in context (e.g., as Act II sets it up).

When I run this I'm planning on having him just escape off screen while the PCs are reporting or wrapping up the investigation (depending of the PCs tip the traitor off while investigating). He may or may not take a hostage but probably will. If the players are clever and trap the traitor and he cannot escape off screen then I think I'm going to have a droid waiting at his ship that takes off with all the intel needed for Act III to happen.

Generally I agree with what was said, the adventure lacks something, and this is why I used it to mix up my pre-rebellion F&D campaign.

I have gotten into a situation with act 2, as two of the characters have Warde's Foresight (Chronicle of the Gatekeeper), and I am allowing to get hints from objects, facilitating the party to speed up the investigation.
Var ran away but the party caught up to him, and now he holds a minor hostage. I will make sure to adjust this with complication with resistance command, who were not in the loop on the investigation.

Except that, I had to upgrade the battle in act 1 a lot, so it would be a challenge for Knight level jedi.

To get away from this whole mess I tangled this arc in the campaign a bit. There were two traitors, one in act 1 that got killed off screen, he was with the empire. Var is a mole for an underworld rival of some minor underworld forces the party recruited. Act 3 would probably be conjoined with Act 2 of Chronicle of the Gatekeeper.

Hopefully folks are still reading this thread... or my response will bump it up into the first set. I am preparing to weave this adventure into our new AOR campaign.

Question on Onslaught at Arda I: How are the Z-95's of "Rust Squadron" supposed to escape Arda in the first act? The ones listed are NOT the "Heavy Z" upgrades (from Stay on Target), and LACK HYPERDRIVES ??

I was thinking that maybe, to pay homage to the "acts of desperation" common to rebel campaigns, that perhaps Rust Squadron sacrifices themselves against the TIE squadrons - allowing the ships WITH hyperdrive (Dust Squadron and the PCs ship) to escape? Allow the PCs - esp those without a "crew role" on their ship - to run minion groups of Rust Squadron against the TIEs?

On 12/23/2019 at 1:21 PM, Khyrith said:

Question on Onslaught at Arda I: How are the Z-95's of "Rust Squadron" supposed to escape Arda in the first act? The ones listed are NOT the "Heavy Z" upgrades (from Stay on Target), and LACK HYPERDRIVES ??

I would say that almost any large ship could accept a docked starfighter or two. It's not ideal for either ship, so if the roll becomes important, throw some Setback on it, but in a narrative situation, once the evacuation is complete (or as complete as it's going to get as the base is overrun), the starfighters need to skip out at top speed, trying to reach a capital ship before it makes the jump to hyperspace.

Heck, given the listed times to make long-distance jumps, even hyperspace-capable fighters will want to dock with a larger ships most of the time. Sitting in the cockpit of a Y-Wing for weeks on end would literally drive a person insane. Missions requiring jumps of longer than a few hours would almost certainly be launched in stages. You could probably load an entire squadron into a GR-75 transport, launch that from the base, and brief the squadron en route. Drop out of hyperspace a relatively short distance away from the target (by "relatively short," I mean in the middle of nowhere, well outside of the star system), the starfighters deploy from the transport, and then make the short jump, strike hard, and then jump back to the transport. Dock with the transport and get the heck out of Dodge. This would also allow for greater secrecy, as the starfighters wouldn't retain the navigational data to return to the Rebel base. They would have the coordinates to the target and the deployment area. By the time a captured starfighter's computer could be analyzed, the transport would have been gone for hours.

EDIT: If you wanna get REAL generous, you could say that all ships have magnetic docking clamps, so that almost any ship could carry another if absolutely necessary. I like the mental image of an A-Wing and a Z-95, belly to belly, with the A-Wing pilot cussing out the other, utterly incensed that he has to try and carry him out of this mess.

Hi all,

I’ve just read through Onslaught at Arda I, and here is my opinion.

I think the scenario (campaign, really) is pretty good and it receives an unfair bad rep. (Read: Writing RPG stuff is hard). It accomplishes what a published adventure module is supposed to accomplish, to present a story with all the ground work done. This allows fresh GMs to run a full adventure with confidence, and it gives experienced GMs a story to pick apart, adapt, and scavenge for their personal use. In this regard, Onslaught at Arda I is a resounding success.

It does, however, have its share of weird writing and design choices. For instance, it starts out huge and epic in the Act 1, with a Battle of Hoth-scale engagement, only to grow increasingly smaller and less epic in the following acts, until reaching the climax where the heroes are chasing a single Imperial bad guy to a hide out for a small-scale encounter with a handful of stormies and a single AT-ST. That is very odd design-wise, burning all the excitement fuel at the start to allow the story to pretty much trickle off towards the climax. I assume they tried to recreate ESB here, but that movies manages to go big-to-small because it went from large-scale & impersonal to small-scale and personal, while OaAI goes from large-scale and (sort of) personal to small-scale and impersonal. Weird.

Furthermore, the book has a tendency to repeat concepts, scenes, and characters, which I also find very strange. Every act has a speeder chase, for instance; none of which serves much of a purpose besides, an “Oh! Racing!” moment. This is like having a pod race in each of TPMs acts… And similarly, there are two major rebel spy NPCs in the adventure, both being human males, one in his late 30s and one in his mid-40s, both being ex-pilots, and both using a drinking establishment as their front (one impersonating a barfly and the other a bartender). The story also relies on continued deus ex machine NPC escapes… Again, very strange design choices.

On the reverse note, where reinforcing the story with a repeat of established elements would strengthen the tale, OaAI decides to cut itself up into unconnected parts. The greatest example of this the Imperial enemy harassing the Rebels in this campaign; there are three disparate imperial bad guy forces/commanders, one for each act… each threatening the Rebels, each fielding a Star Destroyer. Why weren’t this written to be one single imperial threat with a well-developed Nemesis commander that the PCs end up battling in the climax? There _IS_ a common thread running through the story, a single badie (i.e. the traitor) to focus the conflict, but the surface Imperial threat are three unconnected random Imperial forces. Yet again, this is exceedingly weird design choice.

Well, I shall stop rambling on here. And for the record, I _DO_ feel this adventure module, despites the design & writing weirdness, is pretty solid. Well done! (Again, writing good RPG stuff is hard).

Now, as for the traitor escaping in the 1 ^st Act, I think I found a very simple solution for this; one that only sacrifice the end-of-act speeder chase (which, as written, is pointless anyway since the story dictates that the traitor must escape), without changing the story in any way. Here it is: When the PCs arrive in the C&C to accuse the traitor, Hase participates in the meeting as a hologram instead of being there in person, with the traitor taking her away “on screen” so to speak. This way, the scene can unfold as written, but with the PCs having no chance to stop him (and there’s therefore no need for a deus ex machina to force him to escape). Hase -- a scholar of history, faiths, and cultures -- has gone on a mission to reach-out to the natives or investigate a Sith ruin or whatever, and the traitor has of course come along. He grabs her and escape… onwards to Act 2.

When it comes to the no-hyperdrive Headhunters escaping in Act 1, the text explicitly says that these ships must dock with a transporter to escape.

I hope this was helpful to at least some people here

(I'm going to have a blast adapting this thing to my Kathol Sector campaign, giving it a single Imperial badie to drive the story and swapping out Act 3 for something else that better fits my plans and which brings the drama to a stronger climax )

Once again hoping that folks are still reading this thread...

So, my players have managed to survive Act 1, albeit it did not go as written - as with most hard cover adventures. And they suspect there is a traitor in the midst of the Arda rebels.

On to Act II.

(1) Has anyone tried (successfully) to leverage the "Investigation" rules from "No Disintegrations" or the Sentinel book into Act II? I realize that the adv preceded those two books in publication, so those rules did not exist in official form when it was written. I have three PCs who have leaned into social characters (one Quartermaster / Agitator, one FS Emergent / Propagandist, and an Instructor), who also embrace non-combat challenges. So I want to "role play" this out while still adhering to some "roll play" to showcase their advanced social skills (relative to the Hotshot, Heavy, and Scientist).

(2) How have you managed the two parallel story arcs in Act II - the investigation into the traitor PLUS the somewhat-optional MMORPG side adventures to go fetch a McGuffin, etc? I like the idea that they are distractions to the investigation (or perhaps a relief to players who aren't keen on the investigation think piece), but I am definitively not comfortable with the suggestion that clues to the investigation can be found during those side quests. ex: "You found the old pirate base - and LOOK, someone has ALSO used it as a cache of secret and damaging information. What a C-razy coincidence!"