Taking control of an Imperial Nebulon B

[CRMcNeill]

[Lord Zash]

Hi!

it's actually 2 PCs
they will probably take their R2 unit and maybe a Kreegan native as 'fake prisoner'
They are free to bring any other NPCs but I always run them a bit like they don't do much because I don't want to take the spotlight from my players.


Yep, a small Alliance rebel cell has come to their help on their sector:

6 X Wings
4 Y Wing
3 B Wing
1 modified Corellian Freighter

then there is a small insurgent fleet of the PC's home sector which has 1 of these cruises, yep like a Strike Cruiser docked in a secret location. Itself carries several fighters. The whole Shantipole adventure was about building a fighter powerful enough to take on Nebulon Bs and so I run it.

The Alliance has a few Nebulon Bs themselves so obtaining deck plans should be easy enough. I'll get a few from Far Orbit Project as recommended here. That's it CRMcNeill basically I'm imagine it as hold position. Might give them a scape way?

I think there will also be some vibe a la Obi Wan deactivating the Tractor Beam. Dude is walking alone in the Death Star and nobody cares ahahhaah



I'll have to come up with a way of rolling a few dices here and there to see how the combat is going outside in space while the main combat is inside the Nebulon (my players vs stormtroopers). Just as a narrative tool.
Don't want to run a full on space combat because I think pure 1st Edition doesn't really shine at that (unless is 1 ship against a couple fighters or really small encounters).

[Sutehp]

Something else that just occurred to me: are your players part of:
1) SpecForce (Rebel Alliance Special Forces);
2) SpecOps (Special Operations, which is a sort of "nominally independent free agent group" that specializes in "crazy/suicide" missions, see Galaxy Guide 9: Fragments of the Rim, pp. 14-21 for further details); or
3) their own independent cell entirely?

I'm just wondering how your PCs fit into the overall Rebel Command structure. And yeah, you'll need a way to sneak/disguise the PCs onto the Neb-B if they're going to sabotage it from the inside during the battle. That means getting Imp uniforms and proper codes at the very least. (Maybe even a new paint job for your R2 if it doesn't look new enough to be in Imperial service.)

Are your PCs trying to sabotage the Neb-B's shields from the inside? That would make the job of disabling the Neb-B alot easier for only 3 B-wings. It also has the advantage of giving your PCs added incentive to succeed, since they're essentially the linchpin of the operation: if the PCs can't get the Neb-B's shields down, then the plan fails and alot of Rebels wind up dying for nothing.

What role are the X- and Y-wings playing in the raid? Are the X-wings supposed to draw off the TIEs or are they doing close support of the Y- and B-wings? Are the Y-wings also attacking the Neb-B as they're ion-cannon-equipped bombers also? I'm not saying you actually have to run this combat, but it might be a good idea for the GM (namely, you) to game out how the battleplan is supposed to play out, so if something goes wrong, the PCs will have to deal with any complications as well as they can.

Also, for more info/in-universe adventures of SpecOps, take a look at Adventure Journal 13, pp. 132-165; Adventure Journal 14, pp. 85-121 and Adventure Journal 17, pp. 178-220. They're the adventures of a SpecOps team led by one T'Chaarek Haathi, a Wroonian Rebel agent with a very quirky personality whose off-the-wall antics during her missions are tolerated by her superiors only because they're so crazy-enough-to-work against the stolid and unimaginative Imperials. Her teammates are just quirky enough to like her; everyone else who has to deal with her thinks she's borderline (or even completely) insane.

The three stories above give alot of additional details about how SpecOps works, so you can use them in addition to what's in Galaxy Guide 9: Fragments from the Rim. And the adventures of T'Charek Haathi are hilarious to read as well, so here's hoping you enjoy them.
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Sutehp's RPG Goodies
Only some of it is for D6 Star Wars.
Just repurchased the X-Wing and Tie Fighter flight sim games. I forgot how much I missed them.

[Zarn]

To my mind, it'll be the freighter that makes this possible. Fill the freighter with astromech droids in order to get a skeleton crew, make sure they're programmed with Capital Ships rather than Space Transports, the fighter compliment needs to knock out shields and whatnot in order to land the freighter.

If you've got a Spec Forces capable crew, they might be able to surprise everyone with their plan - such as getting a hive virus into the crew or whatever. Or being able to hack Imperial Fleet's crew allocation and get as many Rebel sympathizers onto the crew as possible.

[Sutehp]

[CRMcNeill]

Pulling this off with just two PCs against a platoon each of stormtroopers and naval infantry is going to be a heck of a stretch. I strongly suggest making them part of a team, which gives you plenty of mooks to kill off in the battle (and plenty of spare guns and power packs to pick up when your PCs run out).

And if the PCs are on a small freighter, then the obvious solution is a fake resupply shipment. Just make it part of the story that Intelligence has learned the schedule of a regular supply ship run that regularly meets up with the Nebulon for mail drops and personnel transfers. So that ship is somehow waylaid and either used for the infiltration or the PCs use its transponder and ID codes to approach and dock with the Nebulon.

And as far as whether or not the starfighters are enough to take on the Nebulon's TIE complement, that's immaterial, or atleast peripheral to the primary focus of the plot, which is the PCs. The focus of the story is what the PCs contribute to the battle, and anything else around it is fluff.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[Pel]

The X-wings can occupy the TIEs but you probably planned for that already. The B-wings and Y-wings should be able to disable the Nebulon with their ion cannons (and maybe some mag pulse torpedoes if you allow them), and you will need to disable this thing before the battle gets out of hand, because what if the Nebulon tries to run? They can certainly do so if unable to call for help and you didn't list an Interdictor, wheelbarrow, or Holocaust Cloak among your assets, so that's out.

I don't see the Imperials surrendering a warship under the circumstances you described. Most are not fanatics, but they also have no love for Rebel scum and won't want to face a firing squad courtesy of their zealous superiors if they just give up, so disabling the ship works on this level too. Once it's disabled, you'll have to stabilize it if still in planetary orbit, clear out all those pesky Imperials, bring at least a skeleton crew aboard, and repair enough damage to get under way before the Empire notices one of its warships is missing.

It's still doable, but you're players (and you) will have a long row to hoe.
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Aha!

[CRMcNeill]

If his alien cruiser is equivalent to a Strike, then it has more than enough tools to disable and immobilize the Nebulon on its own (ion cannon and tractor beam projectors), and likely enough crew to facilitate a boarding action in force once the Nebulon is disabled. The key appears to be keeping the Nebulon from getting out a distress call before this happens.

Something that does need to be addressed is why the alien cruiser doesn't just do the job themselves, as a Strike-equivalent would have more than enough firepower to do the job all on its own. A possible premise is that the alien race is willing to commit to assisting the Alliance covertly, but will take no chances of getting found out by the Empire. As such, they are the ones who insist that the Nebulon's long-range comms be disabled before they jump in. In fact, you could even have the PCs use the subspace comms themselves to send a signal to the taskforce - letting them know it's safe to jump in and attack - before disabling the comms.

And if nothing else, the Imperial captain could order his crew to abandon ship and activate its self-destruct once it's clear he's lost. Which would make an interesting final twist for the team as they fight their way back out trying to find an unused escape pod or get back to their ship (assuming it hasn't been commandeered by the Imperials).
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[garhkal]

[Lord Zash]

So... they did it!

5 hours session this week. It's been sweet and sour for me.

Sweet because the players absolutely loved it and complemented me at the end of the session. They loved the use of some maps (which I modified a bit from Far Orbit Project) and the general action oriented episode (last one had been planning, scheming, having big meetings etc.).

There was an hour or so of planning. They decided to create a commando including them 2, 2 other NPCs they love and their 2 robots (with a good excuse for their presence). They also had the help of 3 savage Kreegan which acted as prisoners. They approached the Nebulon B with codes they had obtained from a previous adventure. Nebulon contacted them and asked questions and they didn't do great on their skill checks (bureaucracy) so they were told to get to the main hangar and a small party of stormtroopers with an officer were waiting for them.
They dodged the officer's questions as best as they could avoiding an encounter I had prepared at the main hangar which would have been the failure of the mission itself. The whole bluff was based on a situation that had happened down in Zydar related to Pirates and Kreegan in the last episode, so it made sense that a bunch of stormtroopers might have encountered them.
If they had failed their rolls the officer would have immediately demanded them to remove their helmets and combat would have followed.

Finally, they got to the communications centre of the Nebulon via lifts (I ruled there is just one and gave them a map they had obtained from a contact in the rebellion in another previous episode). Once in the lift they killed the 3 stormtroopers that were coming with them and freed the hands of the Kreegans.

What followed was mental. All point blank / short range. It kinda felt like a mixture between the scene at the detention center from A New Hope and a bank robbery. Players loved it. As soon as the door opened one of them threw a smoke grenade and chaos followed. The Kreegan are ok with the smoke because their home world is almost a cloud of ash. They used the big stacks of computers and communications material as cover for their advantage (I gave everybody +2 if using that as cover wether they were PCs or bad guys). Once cleared they locked themselves there and the combat outside the Nebulon started.

Threw a special force group of storm troopers which came into the room with a photon grenade after cutting one of the doors with a thermal cut... I don't know if this exists in Star Wars but made for a great scene and one of my players decided to spend their force point.

Thing is this character has 6D blaster now... so that is 12D blaster... He finished those guys before they could fire . Player (of course) loved that.

I put a couple of challenges while they were holding the communications center and their R2 unit was jamming the system.

Finally the cruiser boarded the Nebulon (somehow) and that's were we left it.


Sour as much as the feedback from my players was 100% positive and I guess that what counts and I had a blast.

There was a moment I thought... I've created a beast. When the player doubled the dice to 12D, it was so epic and over the top, kinda Matrix style ... but at the same time I thought I can't challenge these guys anymore. And that puts in danger my story because there is a very thin barrier between me telling them that the Empire is dangerous and the Empire being actually dangerous.

I guess it falls on me as a gamemaster. It's hard to gamemaster from 0 with just a bit of guidance from this forum and no reference of 1st Edition (not into crunch really so 2nd Ed or more rules is not for us as a group) so will try to keep challenging them but I'm starting to think they are untouchable.

Oh well, we had an awesome evening


Now will need to read some of the advice here for prisoners etc. Also want to use that idea of a spec force/commando for future adventures

Thanks everyone for your input!

[CRMcNeill]

The easy explanation there is that the crew and troops assigned to low-priority systems in the Outer Rim aren't going to be Imperial elites. Once things start kicking off, the Empire will start to take notice and send more and more assets to your area of operation, and the challenges will scale up accordingly. Far Orbit Project has an entire chapter devoted to how the Empire scales up its response to the privateer campaign of the Far Orbit; it won't be analogous by any means, but it's a useful place to look if you want a general mindset as to how the various agencies of the Empire will approach a developing problem area.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[Pel]

Agreed. The Empire takes losing a warship very seriously, unless Vader lost it, and then everyone just looks the other way and quietly provides him with another.

Don't be too concerned about that 12D buffed blaster skill. Your players have a finite number of FPs, which don't refresh unless they spend them doing heroic deeds. Sounds like your shooter had this covered. Remember that Force Points are temporary boosts and if your players abuse them (consistently gunning down entire Stormtrooper squads in one round) you can always send in more troops a few rounds later. Maybe one of the bad guys has a FP too. Nothing like evening the odds if the players aren't feeling challenged or are running amok.

Sounds like you've got a fun game going. Please keep us posted.
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Aha!

[Sutehp]

[garhkal]

[CRMcNeill]