I had a game idea that I was working on, got half way into writing it and realized I was reinventing the wheel, so I co-opted the old WEG game Crisis on Cloud City and seasoned to taste. A mad AI trying to take over and eliminate all fleshling inhabitants. Lots of body horror, a nonstop flow of murderbots coming out of the woodwork to harass the players with and that sort of thing. Fun times, right?

Also, we were hitting the point in the campaign timeline where Empire should be happening. I've done the Battle of Hoth before, so I didn't want to do that - but what, I thought, if they were on Cloud City at the same time Vader was setting his trap for Luke. I had no intent to have the two story-lines overlap beyond "Okay, we have to keep our heads down and be very quiet while we stop this because that's the Emperor's Strong Right Arm wandering around." Oh, did I mention that all the players were Jedi? So yeah, I thought for a game it might be fun to take away their Force Abilities - or at least for them to not use the Force, lest they alert the Dark Lord of their existence.

So midway through the game, one of them is overlooking a vista waiting for their contact to make a move when she spots some activity on the landing platform waaaay below them. A squad of Wing Guard come out on the platform, followed by a black fellow and a bald white dude and some guy in battle armor. They were able to quickly peg who that Fett guy was (not much point making a name for ones self if people cant make a streetwise roll to figure out who you are). And then the reaction of the players when the shuttle touches down and Vader rolls out was worth the price of admission alone.

Yeah, but that's not the fun bit of the story.

So the game unfolds, the players keeping very low key - or at least as low key as they can. They deal with the Murderbots, gather all the Plot Coupons they need and strike out for the Central Computer Core for the city to stop the AI. And of course where else are you going to put something like that but on a long skinny platform over a yawning abyss because Star Wars - the central air shaft (up about 30 levels from Luke and Vader's showdown). This of course gives them a ring side seat for the epic throwdown. As they sit and watch, balanced on this catwalk the width of a skateboard, the impulsive one of the group gets out the Murderbot droid head that she wound up with earlier and says "I throw it at Vader"

Everyone else goes "Wait - what?!?"

"Yeah, I try and hit him with the droid head!"

Well, he's technically out of range for a grenade/thrown attack, being a pretty healthy distance across the shaft, but they do have a pretty serious elevation gain. As this is a game of Yeses, I say "Okay, we'll go with a difficulty of extreme, and this is an attack, so any ranks of Adversary would apply. I have no idea how many ranks of that he would have, so just upgrade ALL of your difficulty dice."

*throw*

*swish*

* BONG! *

Despite rolling against all those black and red dice, she managed to succeed, bouncing the droid head right off his helmet and giving Luke an opening to land a pretty good shot in. Only one despair ("He takes a moment, looking STRAIGHT at you. Congratulations - you are now on Vader's To Do list") and a triumph ("Fortunately the entrance to the Computer Core is right there, so you can easily scurry out of sight and get away!"). And since I didn't actually want to end the campaign right then and there, Vader was too busy to send some grief their way. It was easy to justify with the thinking that Vader still has much bigger fish to fry standing right in front of him.

I'm not sure where I'm going to go with the repercussions of this - having the Dark Lord hunt them personally is pretty much "Rocks Falls, everyone dies", and that's no fun for anyone - but they might get bumped up the priority list for the Inquisitor that is after them. Like straight to the top, Duty Wanted Level mechanics be dammed. But still, everyone had a blast, it was a pretty epic game (especially as they still had to save Cloud City from impending AI takeover), and it did get them hooked up with Luke later down the road (which they had been lamenting not having another Jedi in the ranks to talk with and/or complain too). So all in all, a fun night, so I count that as a success!

11 hours ago, Desslok said:

I'm not sure where I'm going to go with the repercussions of this - having the Dark Lord hunt them personally is pretty much "Rocks Falls, everyone dies", and that's no fun for anyone - but they might get bumped up the priority list for the Inquisitor that is after them. Like straight to the top, Duty Wanted Level mechanics be dammed. But still, everyone had a blast, it was a pretty epic game (especially as they still had to save Cloud City from impending AI takeover), and it did get them hooked up with Luke later down the road (which they had been lamenting not having another Jedi in the ranks to talk with and/or complain too). So all in all, a fun night, so I count that as a success!

Vader is too busy trying to deal with Skywalker and explain his failure to the Emperor. But he is the head of the Inquisition. And nobody expects the Imperial Inquisition ....

Epic. Gives new meaning to the words "That's not true...that's impossible!"

You might also treat it as the party being one of several bystanders, a kind of "spiderman 1" thing: "This is Cloud City, you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!" So Vader might not get a solid read on them being more than just the rabble of Cloud City...yet.

But I never used The Force!!! Probably not my wisest character moment, but fun.

This is epic! My group has been asking to meet known characters, and I've always avoided it, but seeing canon things from afar (and interacting in your case) sounds fun.

Awesome!! I've introduced occassional known characters into my game. Name-dropped Grakkus the Hutt from the canon Marvel comics (Since many of my players read said comics, and the game often is set on Nar Shaddaa). One of the players took part in a podrace, and beat Sebulba in a very, very, very close race (Several rounds' worth of rolls, and Sebulba and my player ended up with the exact same total results. Came down to a tie-breaker roll, where the player had one advantage over Sebulba, but other than that an identical roll). They were on the same planet as Vader when the Empire started an invasion of the planet (Giving the players plenty of incentive to bolt as quickly as possible). And most notably, the Jedi Younglings from The Clone Wars are still alive in my campaign, since there was originally going to be a spin-off series about these characters. One of them, the Ithorian known as Byph, is actually working with the party now as the party's "mentor," after several, several game sessions (Literally from the start of my game to the end of "season 1") of the players hunting this character without knowing who they really were. This was a revelation that my players absolutely loved, and they've been really happy with the way I've included known characters so far.

In the game I was running (past tense), cad bane was one of my pc's uncle (he made multiple appearences), they met Jabba, Talon Kardre, prince xizor, Guri, and they tangled with Boba fett and emerged victorious thanks to having Cad Bane on their side. I had some home brew npcs that were similarly impressive. Oh and one of my pcs was the rightful heir to a 10% share of czerka and ended up riding off into the sunset as the new ceo of czerka when the pc got married in real life and dropped out of the game.

I have not brought any major NPCs into my games so far (though I frequently use past PCs), but they were a frequent feature in the campaign that got me into the system and RPGs in general. We were admittedly an overpowered pack of runts by the end, with a small army of brainwashed gundarks on steroids under the pilot and battle droids manufactured by my slicer/mechanic, three Force-sensitives (a Jedi, a Dark Jedi that was against the Sith, and a Grey Jedi), a tricked-out capital ship, and a trade empire in the Outer Rim with a defensive fleet. Oh, and my droid was allowed to body-swap and ended up as a giant lion a la Voltron with a ship's cannon in his mouth and enough armor to only be threatened by cruiser fire. By the end of the campaign, we had put Han Solo in carbonite and sold him to Jabba, the Rebels, and the Empire; we betrayed Jabba and the Rebels to sell Solo to the next buyer while killing off Jabba, Boba Fett, and Chewbacca; we fought against Vader and a squadron of the best of the 501st; we entered a four-way Mexican standoff between the Rebel fleet, the Emperor's fleet around the Death Star II, our forces, and the DSII operated by IG-88 (who was my droid's penpal!). Finally, we disabled the Emperor's hyperdrive between the combined force of the Rebels, the DSII and us, and boarded his ship with our army. Our army fought off the stormtroopers while we entered a four-part battle that concluded in our Jedi ascending to the Force to bind the Emperor so he couldn't jump to a clone and only my droid left standing (and just barely) to tell the tale. The rest were alive (barely), but they couldn't witness the finale. Fortunately, he had video playback!

It was an insane ending to an insane campaign, but we had a blast.

I loved your use of the events in cloud city! Really fun and awesome sounding.