Tabletop Squadron Transcript, Season 1 Episode 43:
Gigoran Warfare

Transcript by Tyler (Twitter: @Tyler_MoonSage)

## Intro

NICK: Hi everyone, and welcome to Tabletop Squadron, a Star Wars: Edge of the Empire actual play podcast. I’m Nick, your game master. Every other Thursday our story follows a thief, a bounty hunter, and a slicer as they explore the galaxy helping a mysterious benefactor and each other.

First off, we have a new patron! [air horn noises] Megan B, welcome to the crew. We see that you brought your own tools. That will probably come in handy as our main mechanic seems to be doing it more as a hobby. Sincerely, thank you so, so much for supporting our show.

One other announcement this week. We did a spur of the moment Twitter drive and hit our goal pretty quickly. Thank you for that. as a reward I have recorded myself singing a parody of my own composition, Harley the Hutt, to the tune of Shia LaBeouf. It’s art… That’s all I’ll say about that. expect that to show up on our social media platforms in the near future if it hasn’t already. So um… thanks for that as well. Remember, you did this to yourselves.

Music this week is Play Dat Soul by Ménaje Quad and Main Stem by U.S. Army Blues.

So let’s get into the episode.

##

NICK: Hello! Welcome to Tabletop Squadron, Episode 43. I’m your host and game master, Nick. It’s a lovely summer evening. By the time this comes out it will hopefully be fall, but we’re in Texas so it probably won’t be. It will probably still be hot and terrible.

LAURA: Fall is a place in your heart, okay?

CAMERON: [laughs]

NICK: It can’t be fall if the souls of my shoes stick to the concrete because they’re melting.

LAURA: I don’t know what to tell you. Just pretend more.

NICK: And then I fell, so I guess we’ve got that going.

CAMERON: You obviously need to spend more time in the Halloween sections of Michael’s and Joanne’s.

NICK: [laughs]

LAURA: Yeah.

HUDSON: So like, for—What’s that time change thing called? Daylight Savings Time.

[laughter]

LAURA: Oh. I thought, I was about to say, the first day of pumpkin spice?

NICK: Yeah, the autumn equinox.

HUDSON: No, Daylight Savings Time. I was thinking like, how do you remember it, and I was like… fall backwards, spring forward.

NICK: That’s actually correct.

LAURA: Yeah.

HUDSON: Okay. I did the opposite the other day and I was like—

NICK: Spring backwards—

CAMERON: –fall forwards?

[laughter]

HUDSON: Yes.

NICK: Oh no. [laughs]

HUDSON: That’s what I was doing over and over again. I was like, [gritted] this doesn’t sound right.

[laughter]

NICK: So, everybody go around the table, introduce yourselves and see who you are playing today, starting with Cameron.

CAMERON: [smiling] I need to see who I am playing today. I feel like I need to draw a name out of the hat to figure it out. But okay, I’ll just use the sheet in front of me then. I’m Cameron, and I’m playing Karma Nailo, a Nautolan bounty hunter.

NICK: Awesome. Next up, we’ve got Hudson.

HUDSON: Hi. I’m Hudson, and I’m playing Tink, a vibro-axe wielding Gigoran slicer.

NICK: Ooh, a new modifier on there.

HUDSON: For now.

NICK: For now? [laughs] Okay. Are you gonna lose it?

HUDSON: I just switch things up every once in a while. I can’t get, you know…

NICK: Oh, okay, I see what you’re saying. Okay.

HUDSON: …can’t get too used to it.

NICK: And last but not least, we’ve got Laura.

LAURA: Hi. I’m Laura, and I play Xianna’fan, a Twi’lek smuggler.

NICK: Awesome! So, before we do the recap, let’s start off with the Destiny Roll~!

LAURA: Two light side.

CAMERON: Two light side.

HUDSON: Two light side.

NICK: Oh no.

CAMERON: Woo!

LAURA: Oh shit.

NICK: This is actually very good for you all…

CAMERON: This is gonna be so helpful, if we remember that we have them.

NICK: …seeing as you are about to go into a large combat. So, when we last left off, you all were about to start a large military conflict. You all drop podded sort of successfully onto the planet Fygo, the city of Sart, which is currently under siege by a star destroyer. You met up with Neato, the grizzled Rodian mercenary. You tried to convince him to come and work for Sentinel, but Neato refused to do it until after he had kinda settled this whole battlefield situation going on. You met with the general of the resistance, General Karthage, who gave you a small contingent of soldiers to help you basically just sew distraction and destruction amongst the Imperial forces. Tink, you broke off with Neato and Specialist Talon and Specialist Kevin to go to the, basically it looked like a technological university, and it was on the far side of town and your plan was to disrupt communications. Xianna and Karma and HK and Weathers and Smith all went to the beach, again somehow, and went to try to disrupt the artillery that was making a push up onto the land to try to get in range of the shield facility that’s protecting the entire city from orbital bombardment. [breathes]

LAURA: And Xianna’s swimming. Heh.

NICK: Yes. Xianna and Weathers and Smith are currently underwater. So, we’re gonna open exactly where the last episode left off. Karma, you have the first of the mobile artillery platforms in a target lock with your rocket launcher ready to fire. HK is on the roof of a nearby building with his rifle aimed at a group of stormtroopers ready to provide covering fire and a distraction. Xianna, you are underwater with Smith and Weathers as your trio prepares to detonate the thermal detonators that you planted on the still floating artillery craft in the bay. They are rapidly approaching the point where they will not sink once you detonate the charges, so you know that you’re in a hurry here. Xianna, as you breathe in through your rebreather you notice your lungs start to burn and know that your apparatus is failing. Tink, you are at a terminal a district away in the communications building ready to interrupt Imperial communications and stop any reinforcements overhead. Everybody hears over the coms HK talking to himself. It almost sounds like he’s singing. “So many organics, so easy to vent. So many organics, soon their lives will end.” A lot of things are going to happen really fast here. Who goes first?

CAMERON: [giggles]

LAURA: God, I love Hank.

NICK: [laughs]

CAMERON: Order wise, since HK is trying to provide the distraction it makes sense for him to go first, then for Xianna and Smith and Weathers to blow the water craft as another distraction to get everyone to turn around that way, and then Karma will rocket launcher the one on land.

NICK: Okay. You wanna tell HK dramatically to take the shot?

CAMERON: “HK, fire at will.”

NICK: You don’t hear a response. He just starts shooting. I’m gonna need you to make a roll for HK for me.

CAMERON: Okay.

NICK: We’re about to break out all his talents.

CAMERON: Oh boy.

LAURA: Pew, pew, pew.

NICK: I’ve not talked about this, but I designed HK for two things, and one of them is this.

LAURA: What’s the other one?!

NICK: [smiling] Screaming suppressing fire and shooting at the walls is the other thing I designed him for. First of all, HK starts with two yellows and two greens. This is long range, so it starts with three purples. Now, Precise Aim: Once per round, Hank may perform a Precise Aim maneuver. Suffer strain equal to the ranks in Precise Aim to reduce the target’s melee and range defense by that number. He has 1 point in Precise Aim, so he’s going to spend that strain to reduce the stormtroopers’ range resistance, which they have. Targeted Blow we’ll use in a second. Then he’s got a bunch of lethal blows, which may come up, and then Quick Strike, so I get a blue die because no one else has acted yet.

CAMERON: And he’s gonna aim, so he gets another blue die?

NICK: And he’s gonna aim, mm-hmm.

CAMERON: So two yellow, two green, two blue, and three purple?

NICK: Yeah, that sounds about right.

CAMERON: HK got five successes and two advantages.

NICK: Cool! Also, do you wanna flip a destiny point so he can activate his targeted strike?

CAMERON: What does that do?

NICK: His Targeted Blow: After making a successful attack you can spend a destiny point to add Agility to damage to one hit.

CAMERON: Okay. His Agility is 4, right?

NICK: Yeah.

CAMERON: Yeah, let’s do that.

NICK: Yeah, okay. It was how many successes?

CAMERON: Five!

NICK: Five successes, so that’s 14 damage, plus 4, so that’s 18 damage, which is gonna be four stormtroopers out of the ten that’s on the beach. [laughs]

[bouncy techno jazz music starts]

So yeah, you tell HK to take the shot and he just starts shooting. We get the image through… So he doesn’t have a scope, but it’s through his rifle vision which is very yellow and lit up with red silhouettes of these stormtroopers, and he has one centered in the shot and he takes the shot, and Karma, from where you are you can kind of see the beach, and this shot just… the stormtrooper is just gone and there’s a little cloud where the stormtrooper used to be of like vapor.

CAMERON: Ew.

NICK: Yeah. You can see the stormtrooper, really when you look, got blasted down the beach and is like sliding into the water, and then quickly there’s another shot and another stormtrooper goes sliding, and another shot, and another stormtrooper goes… and it takes three, because each one has less than a second in between, and the stormtroopers start to panic and run for cover and try to get behind the artillery. Ten there’s another shot and one that was mostly behind cover gets hit in the leg and falls back out of cover and then another shot takes that one down where they’re standing. So yeah, sufficiently distracted, I think at this point. What next?

CAMERON: “Xianna, do you wanna set off the fireworks?”

LAURA: “Oh. Okie!”

NICK: Blub, blub, blub, because you’re underwater.

CAMERON: [laughs] But she can hear me at least.

LAURA: “Okie!” [through underwater sound effects]

NICK: So, you detonate the explosives?

LAURA: I’m assuming I have a button?

NICK: Yeah. You and Smith and Weathers all have buttons on little dooblies that you can hit.

LAURA: I hold up fingers and do a 3, 2, 1, button thing so that they can see.

NICK: Yeah. Their crew cuts are floating in the water, and they hit the buttons. We get the shot from like an aerial helicopter shot and there’s these three landers, they look like large troop carriers with like the Lambda thing on the front but they’ve been floating in the water, and they have the big cannons on top, and you see the one furthest from Xianna and Smith and Weathers explode just into a fireball, and then very quickly the second one does, and the third one goes off and it doesn’t completely engulf it and it continues to go forward but much more slowly. Now the stormtroopers are hiding from a sniper, behind the artillery, and also looking behind them as a large chunk of their firepower is turned into a literal fire. Good work.

CAMERON: I’m gonna take aim at the artillery one on land closest to me and I’m gonna fire my rocket launcher.

NICK: Go right ahead.

CAMERON: What’s my difficulty on my rocket launcher attack?

NICK: You are also long range so it’s gonna be three purples.

CAMERON: I am aiming. The artillery has not gone yet this encounter, so I get another blue die?

NICK: Yep… I used it, so you can use it. [laughs]

CAMERON: It hasn’t fired anything recently. Four yellows, two blue, three purple.

NICK: Wow, you’re good at shooting.

CAMERON: I am. That is a triumph, two successes, and three advantages.

NICK: Okay. We’re not gonna go into the whole ‘does a rocket launcher beat a space ship’ conversation, because I don’t think the rules hold up super well to that. this was an ambush with an anti-tank missile designed to take down an artillery thing. You blow it up.

CAMERON: Yay.

NICK: Is there anything you want to use that triumph for?

CAMERON: Hmm. So on the ground there’s still one artillery and six live stormtroopers?

NICK: Yup.

CAMERON: I want to use some of my advantages to give the stormtroopers black die because I just blew up something right next to them and that’s gonna make it harder for them to both pinpoint where things came from and just like life in general.

NICK: Yeah, I think that’s narratively appropriate. There’s smoke and sand and shrapnel in the air.

CAMERON: And fire!

NICK: And fire, and… they don’t—everything’s exploding, so they are pretty pinned down. Now, stormtroopers are special forces, scary people, but no amount of training is gonna necessarily prepare you for being actively blown up. So, yeah.

CAMERON: Do y’all have any ideas for the triumph?

HUDSON: Can a piece of shrapnel take out a stormtrooper?

CAMERON: {Assume you could use} a triumph to take down a…?

NICK: Yeah.

CAMERON: Giant piece of shrapnel falls from the sky and squashes one of the stormtroopers!

NICK: [laughs] Okay, yeah. It’s the stormtrooper that was closest to the artillery piece you exploded.

CAMERON: It was the stormtrooper who was acting like a Sim and was just waving their hands in the air, pointing at the fire, yelling ‘fire.’

NICK: What do Sims yell when there’s fire? What’s the Simmish?

CAMERON: I don’t know. They just yell, noise, ‘aaaah,’ and then they have the little speech bubble around their head that has flames in it and they’re just waving their hand and standing right next to the fire… and then it slowly engulfs them.

NICK: Wow.

CAMERON: I played Sims a lot.

NICK: That game’s dark.

LAURA: It does get dark. I made some pretty messed up houses in the Sims.

NICK: [laughs]

HUDSON: As the piece of shrapnel falls from the sky, the stormtrooper looks up and says, ‘oh brother,’ like Looney Toons?

CAMERON: [laughs]

NICK: Wow. Yeah, this dark war-torn landscape I’ve tossed y’all in, we’re definitely aligned tonally. [laughs] This is good. Yeah, so you do that, leaving five stormtroopers, one fully functioning artillery piece, and one semi-functioning artillery piece. Xianna, as you go to give your two very muscly commandos a thumbs up your rebreather cuts out. You are about 20 feet below the surface of the water, and you are now breathing water. It hurts.

LAURA: Well yeah. [laughs] Xianna’s eyes get real big and start pointing at the rebreather and I guess just starts trying to… Oh, do you think the first reaction would be for her to go grab one of theirs or start swimming?

NICK: Oh, I didn’t even think of that.

CAMERON: Oh no… [laughs]

NICK: Well, in my head I had it going a certain way, but now you’ve raised other options that are also fun. I think that’s probably your call.

LAURA: Yeah. I think that would be Xianna’s first reaction. She swims up to whichever Smith and Weathers is closer and just tries to grab their rebreather. Heh.

NICK: Okay.

LAURA: She’ll give it back, just…

NICK: You’re gonna have to make a Brawl check to do that, but before we do we’re gonna cut over to Tink. Tink, you are sitting in a beanbag chair, I think, in front of a large computer terminal. There are other terminals around at which are seated Specialist Talon and Specialist Kevin. They are all looking at you expectantly. You just got into the main system. You sliced into it, you had no problems, and you’re looking at what you’re going to do, and as soon as you do that you know that on the roof of this building are a bunch of radio receivers and electronic surveillance systems, because that’s what they were training in at this building, and they all light up at once. You see a ton of transmissions immediately start beaming towards the atmosphere, and while those transmissions are close to instantaneous, the encryption that the Imperials use and everything means that there’s a slight delay, and you have a chance to interrupt that if you so chose. You can tell from the coms and the explosions and everything that you see that the battle has started. What do you do?

HUDSON: I want to do a couple of things. The first thing is I want to temporarily interrupt the transmissions so that they’re not getting there on time and they’re all kind of wobbly-dobbly.

NICK: Okay. Are you trying to completely stop them so it’s silent or are you just trying to make them so that people can’t understand what’s going on?

HUDSON: Can’t understand what’s going on.

NICK: Okay. That’ll just be a hard check then. That would be Computers. You can have a blue die because Talon and Kevin are backing you up.

CAMERON: You have the two blue dice for your outlaw tech data breaker?

HUDSON: Not for this.

CAMERON: It’s a Computers check if he plugs it into the computer.

NICK: Well, so like, he plugged it in to get into the computer, but now that he’s fully in he’s not really hacking so much as maintaining the surveillance system.

HUDSON: Yeah.

CAMERON: Okay.

NICK: If he tries to later infiltrate the star destroyer I would say you could use it again, but for now.

HUDSON: So this is the first thing I do, so I’m gonna roll. Six advantages, one success.

NICK: Interesting. So, we see the whole board light up. It’s Star Wars, so it’s not really like a full LCD computer screen, it’s like a bunch of different lightbulbs like an old scoreboard or something that like show the transmissions going. On the side there is a little computer screen that you’re using. Neato, who’s standing at the doorway with his disrupter rifle, turns around and says, ‘Hey chum, what do all those lights mean? Looks like the canaries are starting to sing, eh?”

HUDSON: “It means I own them.”

NICK: “I don’t see what your ownership has to do with the situation, but those lights are getting pretty big.” And then they immediately all cut out, because you have control. It’s been scrambled. You have so many advantages. What would you like to spend those on?

HUDSON: I’m gonna crack my knuckles. “You thought that was cool? Watch this.” I close my eyes… [laughter] and I wanna upgrade one of my purples to a red on the next roll because my eyes are closed…

NICK: Okay. I’ll flip a dark side point to do that. Sure.

HUDSON: …and I try to perform a man in the middle attack. I intercept messages and send my own messages that say everyone lay down your weapons.

NICK: Oh dang. Okay.

CAMERON: [laughs] You’re getting so computery.

NICK: Yeah. It’s almost like Hudson has—

HUDSON: In the middle of an attack, like, that’s self-explanatory to an extent, right?

NICK: Yeah, yeah. No, I think that’s cool. I like using actual hacking shenanigans in the show. I think that’s fun.

LAURA: You mean two people typing on one keyboard isn’t real hacking?

HUDSON: [laughs]

NICK: Well, I mean…

HUDSON: It’s called pair programming.

CAMERON: I mean, that’s how you type faster, but…

LAURA: Is that not how you type faster…?

NICK: This one will be hard again, so that’s two purples and a red now. You can use your outlaw tech data breaker because now you’re actively trying to get into their system.

HUDSON: So two blues, or three, because you gave me a blue.

NICK: Yep, you have three blues. You are very good at this.

HUDSON: [laughing] I do it with my eyes closed because I want to be really cocky and show off to everybody in the room.

[laughter]

NICK: I’m hoping for that despair. Tink is better than Hudson’s hands are big for dice.

HUDSON: Okay. I have a triumph with a success, two additional successes.

NICK: Okay. Hmm… Be thinking about that triumph. I think… Stormtroopers are some hard cases, right? If they’re currently under fire and you’re able to hijack their transmissions with a command, I would assume it would be like an automated command rather than you recording something?

HUDSON: Yes.

NICK: So, you’re gonna sew a bunch of confusion, but they’re not necessarily all immediately gonna give up, right? So I think a couple of them lay down arms, a couple of them stop looking for whoever’s shooting at them because they’re busy trying to confirm the orders, so you have definitely thrown them into disarray on the ground but they don’t all immediately just stop fighting. Anything you wanna use that triumph for? It can be kinda unrelated to what you were doing.

HUDSON: This is definitely unrelated to what I was doing.

NICK: Okay?

HUDSON: I send one more message that says, ‘Code Macarena! I repeat, Code Macarena!’ Just to fuck around.

[laughter]

CAMERON: [giggling] That’s your triumph, is you said that? Okay.

HUDSON: [laughing] yes.

NICK: One of the stormtroopers says, “Well, you heard the orders,” and walks out onto the beach and starts doing the dance.

HUDSON: [laughs]

NICK: And then is immediately cut down by Hank and dies horribly.

CAMERON: So I get to cross off another one?

NICK: Yeah. Good job, you used your triumph to—

HUDSON: Kill a stormtrooper inadvertently?

NICK: –to kill a stormtrooper. Mechanically that makes perfect sense.

[laughter]

LAURA: Wow.

NICK: Narratively we’re getting a little interesting with it. This is fun. This is good.

[giggling]

NICK: Great. Neato, from the doorway, says, “Ah, the old Code Macarena trick, a classic!” And we cut back to the beach. Xianna, you are currently trying to fight a commando for his rebreathing unit. I think that’s a Brawl check against a commando.

LAURA: Okay, but what if I use Agility?

NICK: I think you could argue that it’s Skulduggery, like that you do it sneakily, in which case it would be against his Perception instead of against his Brawl, which might be good.

LAURA: Okay. So then, basically try to pickpocket from his mouth.

CAMERON: [laughs]

NICK: yeah. You’re good enough at that. I would accept it.

LAURA: Pickmouth. I don’t like that. [laughter] Anyways, I am gonna flip a light side point for that.

CAMERON: Xianna starts panicking, points to her mouth, swims over, and then sneakily steals someone’s rebreather. [laughs]

NICK: Or it’s just like, so quick.

LAURA: Well I do it right as they say Code Macarena, and you can tell in our eyes we all are, like, that flash second of ‘aw shit, I wish we were on land to do the Code Macarena. We know what this is. We’ve been waiting.’

CAMERON: Yeah. Because Karma had the Imperial com, so she patched it into our group com, so we can all hear, so we all heard Code Macarena and we’re all thinking… that was Tink.

NICK: Yeah. Well, and I think, it’s Star Wars so you can have dual channels open, so you can hear the slightly distorted voice of Tink on the Imperial coms, because that one I think was Tink just talking into a microphone.

HUDSON: Yeah.

NICK: And then you can also hear him talking over your squad channel. His Perception is going to be two reds against you.

LAURA: I’m just trying to remember all of my stuff, because it’s been a while.

NICK: I’ll give you a black die because you’re underwater trying to do this.

LAURA: Fun. I’m just gonna go ahead and take that away.

NICK: [laughs]

LAURA: Because I have something…

NICK: You gotta tell me the name of the talent.

LAURA: Oh wait, no, that’s Streetwise or Knowledge.

NICK: Oh no.

LAURA: That’s for Stealth and Coordination. Uh… Bypass Security!

[laughter]

NICK: Maybe not. I think you’re still probably going to be fine, though.

LAURA: Yeah. I think that’s the one thing that I don’t remove… Oh wait, no. Remove black die per rank of Convincing Demeanor. That includes Skulduggery.

NICK: Nice.

LAURA: Ha. What was the difficulty?

NICK: Two reds. You can pickpocket underwater as good as you can pickpocket on land. That’s impressive.

LAURA: Yeah.

NICK: If there’s a despair, he will shoot you.

HUDSON: [laughs]

CAMERON: Underwater?

NICK: Yup. They work once underwater.

LAURA: I got three successes, two advantages.

NICK: Okay? You snatch the rebreather out of their mouth, and you can see, whether it’s Smith or Weathers, they have this moment where they don’t notice, it’s so fast. Do you want to use your advantages that you put your rebreather in his mouth or do you want it to be that he doesn’t freak out and try to take it back from you?

LAURA: That they don’t freak out and I’m able to put my hand up and do a little countdown and then hand it back to them after a few breaths, and then motion that we’re going back up.

NICK: Okay.

LAURA: So that hopefully they understand that like, hey, I’m being an asshole, but I’m not gonna let you die?

NICK: [laughs]

CAMERON: Hey, sharing is caring, okay?

LAURA: Sharing is caring. Please let me live.

NICK: Okay. Yeah, I think that would account for how successful you were on this roll. However, swimming back to the surface while alternating who can breathe and who can’t I think is very challenging. I would like an average difficulty Athletics roll to see how good you do making it back to the surface.

LAURA: Oh… boy.

NICK: Really hitting you on those Brawl checks tonight, aren’t I?

LAURA: Yeah.

CAMERON: All the Brawn.

NICK: Brawn, that’s what I meant to say.

LAURA: [long pause]

CAMERON: [giggles]

NICK: [laughs] What’s that dice pool there, Laura?

LAURA: It’s a single green. [laughs] I have a 1 in Brawn and I have nothing trained in Athletics, because everything I do is Agility based. Pretty much if I do a skill it is Agility or Cunning, every so often Presence, but…

NICK: I need to get you into a fistfight at some point.

LAURA: Two failures and a threat.

NICK: Okay. This is really difficult. I think the swimming before… You’re okay at swimming, but you probably breathe pretty heavily because you’re used to having a rebreather, and suddenly now that you have to control your breathing and everything you realize how much physical effort it is, and you start to see some spots, and your lungs start to hurt. You’ve kind of established a cadence with the commando that you’re sharing with on how long you take it back and forth, and on one of the times you take an extra breath but the commando, without thinking about it, pulls it back, so then you kind of inhale some water and your vision starts to get darker. You get a shot kind of even with the water level of the choppy waters of the bay being disrupted by the recent explosions that we’ve had, the reflection of the fireballs of the rapidly sinking artillery platforms, and in the distance kind of out of focus on the beach you can see stormtroopers diving to the ground away from the exploded things on shore and just kind of random blaster fire from the roof of a nearby building as Hank keeps people pinned down, and then the water surface is broken by one of the commandos, and then there’s a long four second pause… and then the water is broken by the other commando dragging Xianna, who doesn’t have the rebreather, and starts coughing into the air. You all are on the surface of the water. You made it. Xianna, take 4 strain.

LAURA: Yup.

HUDSON: Makes sense.

NICK: That was difficult. And at this point, the stormtroopers are going to recover from the initial shock of this ambush attack. There are four left on the beach, one of which is still kind of just pinned down by all the explosions and everything that’s going on, that’s part of the confusion of them getting conflicting orders, but three of them managed to rally together behind the last non-exploded artillery and they take a shot at I think Hank’s position because he’s the one that they’re most likely to see, because he’s still shooting. That distraction has worked pretty well. Really this whole ambush has gone off a lot better than I expected. So, they’re going to be shooting at Hank’s position. They have two yellow and a green. It is long range so it’s a hard roll, and they also have a black die because he is in cover.

CAMERON: And they have a black die from all of the smoke.

NICK: Yep, and they have a black die from all of their distractions and things. Probably not smoke, because their helmets filter smoke, but not toxins.

CAMERON: And fire!

NICK: yeah, and just general shellshockedness probably. Let’s go ahead and roll that and see if they manage to hit our robot friend.

CAMERON: One success, one triumph, and one threat.

NICK: Oh, they got a triumph. Let’s roll a crit~! The threat is I think whoever shoots at them next will have a blue die.

CAMERON: A 48. Head Ringer: +1 difficulty to Intellect/Cunning checks until the end of the encounter.

NICK: Yeah, that’s gonna be real hard for Mister ThinkBot over there. But they had one success?

CAMERON: Yeah.

NICK: So that’s one success, they do 8 damage, that’s 9 damage, so he takes 5 damage. Ooh, that still hurts him very bad. He’s not happy about that.

CAMERON: And then mark down that he has a crit.

NICK: So the stormtroopers hit Hank’s sniping position, and you hear the sound of blaster fire hitting metal over the coms, and you hear Hank say, “Oh, that was unexpected. Alright you stormtroopers, I’ll show you what’s up,” and he jumps off of the roof of the building and there is a very loud clang. Karma, you can see him try to superhero land but his leg gives out, so he keels over but he gets up pretty quick. He looks pretty damaged, there’s a lot of sparks coming out of his torso, and you can see that there are some holes kinda near to where you repaired his armor from where he got shot the first time when his processor was cored out, but he is leveling his gun at them. we’re gonna jump back to Tink. Tink, what are you working on right now while you’re slicing?

HUDSON: Well, I’m seeing if there’s anything that I can steal to benefit me later on , like secret codes or accesses.

NICK: Are you trying to actively attack the Imperial network at this point?

HUDSON: Yep.

NICK: Okie-dokie. First thing you’ll have to do is get into the star destroyer. You’ve done that before.

HUDSON: Mm-hmm.

NICK: You have a black die on that that you can’t remove with your data breaking thing because it’s from the fact that you have left a signature in star destroyers every time in the past.

HUDSON: Okay. Even if I have the skill it doesn’t matter?

NICK: Yeah. This one ,because it’s so situational, this one is mostly if you get threats I’m gonna make you do that again, because I like doing it and it makes me happy. So that black die will stick. The other black die, because you would have at least one more, from trying to remotely access a military data base in space, we’re gonna take that away with your skills. So, you only have one, and you still have three blue dice because of your setup here. Let’s see how you do.

HUDSON: What’s the difficulty?

NICK: We’re gonna go hard.

HUDSON: So hard with a black die?

NICK: Yep.

HUDSON: One success and eight advantages.

[laughter]

NICK: Laura looks so pleased.

LAURA: [giggles]

NICK: Well, so you get in. Would you like to use those advantages to just give everybody a blue die on the next thing they do?

HUDSON: Yep.

NICK: We’ll just say that you are doing so well that you’re pulling strings throughout the system, distracting stormtroopers with bursts of static in their coms, maybe throwing off the propulsion of these artillery pieces a little bit more, things like that. if you could flip me that dark side point, though… As you are doing that, you do get into the star destroyer, it takes a while with just one success so we’re not gonna give you the time to immediately start casing the joint so to speak. That dark side point was, the entire building is shaken? Shooken? Shook?

LAURA: It’s shook! Heh.

NICK: So shook!

LAURA: Been shook!

HUDSON: Shaken.

NICK: The entire building begins to shake—

HUDSON: Oh yeah.

CAMERON: [laughs]

NICK: –as it takes a large impact, almost as if something has fallen from space and hit the roof of the building. This would be a good time to mention you’re on the fourth floor. It’s a five story building. Neato flips a toggle on his disrupter rifle and you hear it begin to charge. [power-up noise] “Well chums, it looks like we might have company,” as you hear the booted feet of stormtroopers on the roof as a patrol is making its way down the stairs. Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe it’s not, maybe it’s Maybelline. Yeah, so you’ve got that going on. Do you stay focused on your slicing, or…?

HUDSON: I think I take my vibro-axe and I absolutely smash every computer in that room.

NICK: Ohh! Okay.

CAMERON: Go full Kylo Ren on this room. [laughs]

HUDSON: Yes. Does that throw a wrench in some stuff, Nick?

NICK: No.

LAURA: You threw an axe in it. Ha-ha!

NICK: Yeah, quite literally. So like, peek behind the GM curtain here, I was expecting you to continue to try to slice while Neato tried to defend you, but if you wanna smash it so there’s no backtrace and fight your way out, that’s an option too, like 100%.

HUDSON: Yeah, let’s do that.

NICK: So then, that went internal, and I wouldn’t even have looked surprised, I would have just rolled with it, but then my thinking is… Is smashing all the computers to remove any trace of you a Skulduggery check, or a Computers check, or a Melee check? [laughs]

HUDSON: I think Melee.

CAMERON: I would say either Melee or Computers, because Melee for axing good but Computers for knowing where to hit.

NICK: For axing the correct things.

CAMERON: Yeah.

NICK: Which are you better at, Computers or Melee?

HUDSON: I’m the same in both as far as the number of yellow dice I’m going to get, however in Computers I’d be better in because I get my skill tree stuff.

NICK: Alright. You wanna do Computers just in case?

HUDSON: Yeah, let’s do that. yeah, sure.

NICK: So, you are smashing around but you’re not just trying to demolish everything, you are like cutting the hard drives in half on this thing. You are being very surgical. As Kevin and Specialist Talon, I think that they’re typing away like ‘oh man, we got into the database, look at all this stuff,’ and their screens start to flicker out as you just start wailing on stuff.

HUDSON: [laughs]

NICK: Talon goes, “What are you doing?!” Roll the die.

HUDSON: What’s the difficulty?

NICK: Average? You have a big old vibro-axe. I feel like making a computer inoperable is not that hard.

HUDSON: And I get a blue die because everyone got a blue die from my last advantages?

NICK: Yeah, from all of your advantages. I feel like eight advantages is like, everyone gets a blue die for the rest of the session, whatever. [laughs]

HUDSON: Six successes and a threat.

[laughter]

HUDSON: You should see this dice composition. It’s magnificent.

NICK: So, the threat is going to be that this takes a little longer than expected, so the stormtroopers are gonna get to go first when they get to you. the six successes is that this entire thing is completely shredded to hell. No one’s gonna be able to track anything about you through this system, including the star destroyer that you got into.

HUDSON: Wouldn’t it also mess up their coms, since that’s what’s controlling their coms?

NICK: Yeah, we’ll say that.

HUDSON: I feel like that just more makes sense.

NICK: Yeah. You had such complete control, you’ve been so successful with this that you have them all patched through you, and I think that they are shut off, at least for now, they may come back up later as they figure out what the heck happened. So, with that amount of successes on that slicing check, if you wanted to remove a piece of this computer that you would find useful later and take it with you, you could.

HUDSON: Sure.

NICK: What piece of the computer do you take?

HUDSON: A group of USB keys in a little container.

NICK: Okay. You slam the axe into a piece and it just flies up into the air and you just grab it out of the air. ‘Ooh!’ And you—

HUDSON: –pocket it.

NICK: And around this point you hear the clomping of stormtroopers coming down a set of stairs and you hear, ‘Hey, it looks like there’s some people in there. Let’s investigate.” The stormtroopers start heading towards you.

HUDSON: “There’s no people in here!”

NICK: “Hey, they say there’s no people in there.”

And Neato says, “Investigate this, Imperial scum!” and he starts shooting down the hallway.

“Hey, I think there is people in there!” [smiling] And we’re gonna cut away. So, as that is going on and the stormtroopers start a gunfight, we’re gonna cut back to the main beach. No communication went out from the ambush. Nobody heard from the star destroyer that this ambush was happening. Communications were cut, but they heard some gargled thing. I think you managed to make it sound like a communications error, so they’re kind of troubleshooting rather than sending reinforcements. We are down to four stormtroopers on the beach, one artillery piece, one partially moving artillery piece in the bay that is shooting sparks into the water, and Xianna… You are being held above water as you cough by a commando and the other commando is there. What do you do?

LAURA: I mean, Xianna’s a little panicky right now. “[coughs] Beach! [coughs]”

NICK: “Well that’s not very polite. I just saved your life.”

LAURA: “No, beeeach! [coughs] I am… [coughs] drowning!”

NICK: “Damn Smith, did you hear what she called you? That’s so rude. Let’s head to the beach.”

“Yeah guy, I don’t know.”

LAURA: [whining and coughing] “Yes! Beach!”

NICK: “I just don’t think we know each other that way.”

CAMERON: [laughs]

LAURA: “No~!” [laughs]

NICK: [smiling] Smith is swimming with one arm.

LAURA: “Please, I have so much water in my lungs!”

NICK: So yeah, you swim towards the beach as gunfire erupts from the small gunfight going on. Karma, what are you doing?

CAMERON: I would like to have reloaded my rocket launcher.

NICK: I think enough time has passed that you could reload.

CAMERON: And shoot the other still fully functioning artillery.

NICK: Okay. Roll up that check. You will have a black die because you are shooting through smoke and fog and mess and things.

CAMERON: But I get a blue die from Tink’s crazy amount of advantages.

NICK: Yep.

CAMERON: I’m aiming, so I get another blue die.

NICK: Yep.

CAMERON: And it hasn’t gone in combat yet, so I get another blue die! [laughs]

HUDSON: [laughs]

NICK: [huffs] Okay. [chuckles]

CAMERON: It hasn’t! And it’s still long range.

NICK: Yep, unless you move up.

CAMERON: I think I’m—Actually, I think I’ll do that. I’mma move up.

NICK: Okay. Give me the action sequence of Karma finishing the reload and running to a new firing position.

CAMERON: So, Karma shoots the first rocket, I think the rocket launcher has more kickback than she’s used to as it’s significantly higher powered than her carbine, but she fires it, sees the explosion, smiles slightly, drops down, starts reloading it, hops back up about the time that she hears the metal getting hit noises of HK getting hit and sees him jump off the building, shakes her head, hops through the window and starts running up to where she can see, because the artillery is higher, but it’s still smoky enough that she can’t really make out any of the stormtroopers, and then puts it up on her shoulder and aims it and fires.

NICK: Okay.

CAMERON: A triumph, one success, and three advantages, which I think is the exact same thing I rolled last time.

NICK: Huh. Feels like it, doesn’t it?

CAMERON: Yes.

NICK: So, the rocket strikes squarely in the middle of this landing thing, and it goes up in a big oily fireball. You know that wet-looking fire that they use in action movies sometimes? It does that, just viscous and flowy and very globular.

CAMERON: [snickers]

NICK: That’s a weird word.

HUDSON: Yeah.

CAMERON: Yeah, but it works.

NICK: Yeah. Do you want to use your triumph to take out one of the three remaining stormtroopers or do you want to use it for something else?

CAMERON: I want to take out one of the additional stormtroopers. The fire happens, Karma takes the rocket launcher off her shoulder and just chucks it forward into the smoke a little bit and hits a stormtrooper who falls and hits his head and dies. [laughs]

NICK: Are you that close to the stormtroopers?

CAMERON: Well, I’d been to the side, shot the one closest to me, and then approached.

NICK: Oh, so you ran around?

CAMERON: So probably came up almost even with the first blown out one so that now that the rocket launcher, I’m out of rockets, I can switch to my carbine and be within medium range of everybody.

NICK: Rather than it being like an accident, can you just use it like a baseball bat and like take this person out?

CAMERON: Sure. Yes. I guess she’ll use her sword melee skills with a rocket launcher and just swing it.

NICK: Okay. Sure.

CAMERON: And conk him on the head.

NICK: So it’s one of the ones taking aim at Hank who is just spouting obscenities as his gun cycles up. One of them has taken cover on the other side of the wall that you were using and is kind of blown back by the force of the rocket going off and then you just smash them over the head with it and they go down.

CAMERON: And then I take cover, behind the shell of the first one.

NICK: Sure. Yup. HK is probably only about 10-15 meters away from you, because you’ve run towards him. HK is not taking cover. HK is just a big, glowing beacon of angry droid at this point. Around this time, Xianna, you make it to the beach. We see Weathers stride purposefully up the beach, water streaming off of his tanktop and combat pants, and it looks very much like a propaganda add for like ‘Join the Military’ as he strides up and pulls a carbine out of somewhere and starts walking towards the combat. Then Smith strides up onto the beach with your arm thrown over his shoulder, and as he gets up out of the water he lets go of you to grab the carbine.

LAURA: Xianna just falls face forward into the sand and just does the very pathetic crawl up onto the sand and then just flops back down, and has like tears in her eyes and her face is reddened so her cheeks are more of a plum than a violet. “Ugh! I was saying beach, not bitch. There was no T in that word. [groans]”

NICK: Smith looks down and goes, “Oh… Hey, are you alright? You look pretty bad.”

LAURA: “No! I was drowning. My rebreather was out. That is why I took yours, or his, whichever’s I took.”

NICK: “Well I got that.”

LAURA: “Yes! So you took it a few times while I was still breathing.”

NICK: “We were only like 20 feet underwater. It wasn’t that far.”

LAURA: “I don’t swim good. I did not learn to swim until I was an adult and I am not very strong. I am so, so sad and so small.” [resists giggling]

CAMERON: [laughs]

LAURA: “I just want to sit on the sand. I like the sand.”

NICK: Smith primes his carbine and—

CAMERON: I think you mean he cocks his blaster.

NICK: Nope. He primes his carbine.

[snickering and laughter]

LAURA: He puts a nice primer layer on it.

HUDSON: heyo.

NICK: And says, “Okay little friend, well uh, legs and lungs. Let’s go.” They start to head up the beach towards the remaining stormtroopers, covering each other tactically.

LAURA: She pushes herself and sits up and is wiping the tears from her face. ‘Legs and lungs? What the fuck does that even mean?! [sobs] I am so done with today.” She starts shakily getting back up and just starts trudging after them.

NICK: Yeah. So you head up the beach, Xianna?

LAURA: Yeah.

NICK: Okay. I think at this point HK just starts laying down suppressing fire. There’s only three of them left at this point. They have taken cover in the burned out remains of the last artillery piece. So, Xianna, as you’re running up the beach we get the shaky cam behind you like they do in beach landing scenes as you scramble up the beach, and there’s all this blaster fire around you, all these red bolts flashing through the smoke, and as you clear the smoke and you’re near enough to see the stormtroopers you can see that all of the blaster fire coming in your direction is Hank just laying down a curtain of destruction.

LAURA: “Haaank! Hank, stop it!”

NICK: “Suppressing fire!”

LAURA: “No, not at me! Other direction, please!”

NICK: Roll me a force die, would you?

LAURA: One light side.

NICK: “Secondary user recognized. Redirecting suppressing fire.” He focuses in on where the stormtroopers are, pinning them down, giving them all black dice. I’m not gonna make him roll to shoot for that. that’s fine. So Xianna, do you want to help engage in this situation? They don’t have cover against you because they’re pinned down away from HK.

LAURA: Yeah. “Thank you, Hank~!” And then pulls out her blaster and shoots the closest one.

NICK: Cool. Roll me. Do you think you got to within close range of them under the cover of the smoke or are you still out at medium range?

LAURA: Uh, probably close.

NICK: Sure. I’ll give it to you. [laughing] There’s so much just noise and explosions. You all have done a very good job at guerilla warfare. I’m impressed.

LAURA: Would we say I could aim?

NICK: Sure.

LAURA: Okay.

HUDSON: Should we call it Gigoran warfare?

CAMERON: I like that better.

NICK: Gigoran warfare? Officially, now, yes.

LAURA: Okay, three successes.

NICK: Okay, that’s 8 damage. You take down one of the stormtroopers pretty easily.

LAURA: Nine damage.

NICK: Nine damage.

LAURA: For mine, yes.

NICK: You take down one and a half stormtroopers. [laughs]

LAURA: Yeah!

NICK: Uh, good job? I think you manage to shoot one out of cover and drop another one leaving one and a half stormtroopers remaining. We are getting pretty close to the end here. I think that the injured stormtrooper buckles down behind cover. The last stormtrooper being surrounded just breaks and runs, and Smith and Weathers take them down before they can get away, and the last injured one just keels over at this point. Hank walks up and just kicks them in the head and knocks them out. You are now on this smoking battlefield, and we cut back to Tink. Tink, there are approximately six stormtroopers in cover at the end of the hallway just shooting into this room right now as Neato just… says stuff, and shoots back, just a lot of incomprehensible language at this point. What do you do?

[peppy jazz music starts]

HUDSON: “Neato, run towards them and then slide on your knees. I’ll leapfrog.”

NICK: “Copy that, the old one-two!” And he takes off.

LAURA: [laughs]

NICK: Kevin looks at you and goes, “What?!”

HUDSON: “Don’t worry, I’ve done this… bef—Don’t worry.”

CAMERON: [laughs]

NICK: Specialist Talon goes, “I am extremely worried.”

HUDSON: I start running, sprinting.

NICK: Yeah. Neato is already heading down the hallway saying “Time to fade away, friends, before you end up in the hoosegow as I… shoot you, quite a lot.”

[laughter]

HUDSON: I like that.

NICK: Yeah. He’s just firing. His rifle doesn’t fire very fast, but even if he doesn’t hit them bits of their cover disintegrate so they’re rapidly pulling back. As he gets half way down he slides on his knees dramatically and he goes, “Now Tink, take to the skies!”

HUDSON: I’m holding my vibro-axe with one hand and with my other hand I put it on his shoulder and leap over him and go and slash a stormtrooper.

NICK: Yeah. Roll me a Melee attack, and you can have a blue die for being like real cool.

HUDSON: What’s the difficulty?

NICK: Average.

HUDSON: I almost grabbed two reds.

CAMERON: Yeah, don’t do that.

NICK: I mean, you can if you want.

HUDSON: Two advantages and three successes.

NICK: How much total damage is that?

HUDSON: Plus 3, so that’s 9.

NICK: How many advantages?

HUDSON: Two.

NICK: What’s the crit on your axe?

HUDSON: One.

NICK: Would you like to crit?

HUDSON: Yes!

NICK: Your axe is crit 1?!

HUDSON: Yes, because I have Monomolecular Edge.

NICK: You should crit constantly.

HUDSON: [laughs]

LAURA: He often doesn’t get advantages.

NICK: Oh.

HUDSON: Yeah, I don’t get a ton of advantages.

LAURA: Or we’ve forgotten.

CAMERON: Do you have a d100 down there, Hudson?

HUDSON: No.

CAMERON: You may roll your crit.

NICK: Well, if they’re just stormtroopers, you can just kill one if you want.

CAMERON: But it’s more fun to roll a crit.

HUDSON: I wanna see what happens if I crit them!

CAMERON: See what the crit is at least.

NICK: Okay.

HUDSON: Sixty-three.

LAURA: Slightly Dazed: Disoriented until end of encounter.

NICK: That means they have a black die to all their actions. So would you like them to be mildly inconvenienced or would you like to kill them?

HUDSON: I’ll kill them.

[laughter]

NICK: Okay. I’m glad we’ve gone on this journey together. So, yeah, that’s 9 damage. That’s two plus another one for the crit, so you take out three of them just very quickly.

HUDSON: Out of how many?

NICK: Yeah, about that… So, you slash down through one, slash another, and on the backswing you conk one in the head with the butt of your axe, and you look up, and in the time it’s taken you to do that Neato slides the rest of the way into the hallway, just like [long squeak].

HUDSON: Like under my legs? [laughs]

NICK: Yeah. [laughs] And we get this shot of him rocker posed holding his rifle like he just did a cool power slide with a guitar.

HUDSON: This is ridiculous.

[music fades]

NICK: Yeah. You’re the one who leapfrogged into combat.

LAURA: [laughs]

HUDSON: That’s true.

NICK: And you’re posed with the axe planted, and then the camera zooms out and shows like 15 stormtroopers in this hallway all aimed at you. Neato stops, and everyone’s just kind of stopped as these three stormtroopers fall to the ground. Neato says, “Tink…? I think we should head back… towards cover.”

HUDSON: “We can take—Ohh.”

CAMERON: [laughs]

HUDSON: And I see how many there are. I start running the other direction. I don’t even answer.

[laughter]

NICK: The stormtroopers in unison, you hear a bunch of them go, “Hey!”

Neato goes, ‘Hey yourself!” and shoots one of them, and then we just get this thing of all this blaster fire going as you and Neato run back towards the hallway. So, we cut back to Karma and Xianna and Smith and Weathers and Hank who is gouting sparks out of his chest. You all hear on the coms Neato saying, “We’re under heavy fire over here. A little help would be appreciated.”

CAMERON: I pick up my rocket launcher and I form a cross with it and my sword across my back.

NICK: That is very cool.

CAMERON: I want this for later. [laughs] I’m keeping this rocket launcher.

NICK: [laughs] Smith winks at you. “Yeah, conserving resources, not a bad idea.”

CAMERON: “Well I don’t want anyone else to have it.”

NICK: “Well, and it was our last rocket launcher.”

CAMERON: “Mm-hmm.”

NICK: So, are you all heading towards Tink and Neato and the rest of the group?

LAURA: Yes. Everyone turns around and Xianna has her blaster in one hand and two grenades in the other. [laughter] She’s like, “Okie, we go.”

CAMERON: “So that one’s still moving though.” Karma points to the sparking, still damaged artillery piece in the bay.

NICK: Yeah. It’s still kind of rolling up the beach.

LAURA: “Yeah, well, I almost drowned, so we did what we did. Let’s go.”

NICK: And as you’re discussing logistics, also your coms are filling with blaster fire, and you know that Tink is not super close, we get a kind of zoomed out shot of all the smoke and fire, and the sky is turning the dark purple of evening at this point, and you all hear this whistling noise, and you look up and you see… it’s gotta be 20 drop pods, Imperial ones, falling in the sky in a synchronized curtain line, each one slightly behind the other, and they are falling directly towards the shield facility. We get this long silence as they shriek in and then you hear the [rapid repeated impact] as they hit, and you see a couple of buildings list and start to fall as they land. Your coms just go haywire with Imperial communications that you can hear and the militia in the area all declaring that they’ve made contact at once and the main shield facility is under attack.

LAURA: Xianna just shouts out, “Okay, I’m just gonna go get Tink. Bye,” and starts running off.

NICK: [smiling] I think that’s where we’re gonna end the episode.

[laughter]

ALL: Ba-naaa~!

## Outro

CAMERON: Thanks for listening to Tabletop Squadron. If you’ve enjoyed our show please consider logging into iTunes and giving us a five-star review. Five-star reviews will help new listeners to find the show and will make the squad giggle like school children when we read them. If you’re so inclined, you can also help support the show through our Patreon which can be found in the show notes, on our website, and basically anywhere we post things. We have all sorts of Patreon levels including some of my favorites: Bantha Buddy, Tarkin’s Underwear Drawer, and Build-A-Beru which all have fabulous rewards and super great names.

Xianna’fan is played by Laura Penrod. She can be found on Twitter at @cheerio_buffet.

Tink is played by Hudson Jameson. He can be found on Twitter at @hudsonjameson.

Karma Nailo is played by me, Cameron Robertson. You can find me on Twitter at @midnightmusic13.

Our game master is Nick Robertson, and you can find him on Twitter at @alias58.

Our intro song is Space Jam by Pablo Ribot.

Additional music by James Gunter.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram at @Tabletop_Squad, and join our Discord and share all of your food and cute pet photos with us. We also sometimes talk about Star Wars. You can find the link to join our Discord on our website and in our pinned tweet. See you next time.

Tabletop Squadron Transcript, Season 1 Episode 42:
Infiltration Station

Transcript by Tyler (Twitter: @Tyler_MoonSage)

## Intro

NICK: Hi everyone, and welcome to Tabletop Squadron, a Star Wars: Edge of the Empire actual play podcast. I’m Nick, your game master. Every other Thursday our story follows a thief, a bounty hunter, and a slicer as they explore the galaxy helping a mysterious benefactor and each other.

Not a ton of announcements this week, space friends, just a friendly reminder that if you leave a review for the show on iTunes or back us on Patreon I’ll read your name in the intro and say something nice about you.

Music this week is Susie the Cat – Boss by Checkie Brown and The Third man Theme by Rat City Blues Brass.

Now let’s get into the episode.

##

NICK: Hello! Welcome to Episode 42 of Tabletop Squadron, the answer to life, the universe, and everything. I’m Nick, your host and game master. We’re gonna go around the table, everybody introduce themselves and say who they’re going to be playing today, starting with Hudson.

HUDSON: Hi. I’m Hudson, and I’m playing Tink, a Gigoran slicer.

NICK: Ooh~ Up next we’ve got Cameron.

CAMERON: Hello. I am Cameron, and I am playing Karma Nailo, a very smart mouse.

NICK: Oh, I get it.

CAMERON: Yeah.

NICK: Because you’re referencing the classic Douglas Adams novel.

CAMERON: Indeed, I am.

NICK: Wonderful.

HUDSON: Oh—Is that the… little house on a prairie?

NICK: Yep, you got it.

[laughter]

LAURA: Holy shit, Hudson!

CAMERON: What?!

LAURA: What?!

HUDSON: [laughing] I was joking.

CAMERON: Okay, that’s Laura Ingalls Wilder.

HUDSON: [laughs]

NICK: And last but not least, we’ve got Laura.

LAURA: I’m Laura and I play Xianna’fan, a Twi’lek smuggler. I was gonna say ‘and thanks for all the fish,’ but I feel like just nothing can go after what Hudson just said,, [laughter] so it doesn’t seem funny anymore.

HUDSON: I ruined it.

LAURA: You did.

NICK: No, you made it best.

HUDSON: [laughs]

LAURA: I don’t know…

NICK: So, before we get started with the episode, let’s go ahead and do the Destiny Roll!

CAMERON: One dark side.

HUDSON: Two dark side.

LAURA: Two light side.

CAMERON: Thank you, Laura!

NICK: Why? What’s wrong with some dark side points?

CAMERON: I just don’t want all dark side points, because we’re actually gonna roll this episode.

NICK: Maybe!

CAMERON: We’re probably gonna get shot at, so we have to roll this episode.

NICK: Maybe.

CAMERON: Probably.

HUDSON: We need more planning time.

CAMERON: [chuckles]

NICK: So, jumping into what happened last episode… You walked across town with Neato, found the resistance militia in the city of Sart over by the shield generation complex, came up with a battle plan, decided that Tink was going to split up with a group of engineers to try and do something technology related, and Karma, HK, Xianna, and Smith, and Weathers, the two Sartian Human commandos, were going to try to go behind enemy lines and blow up the enemy artillery and maybe steal one.

CAMERON: Yeah. Let’s steal their cannons.

HUDSON: And Neato’s with me.

NICK: And yup, Tink has Neato. Am I forgetting anything?

CAMERON: The general was not impressed.

NICK: No. General Karthage was not impressed.

HUDSON: We’re an S-Corp, right?

NICK: [laughs]

CAMERON: We are an S-Corp. ADD Enterprises, Afternoon Delight Depot.

NICK: Karma and Xianna and Hank and Smith and Weathers, as they walk into a large white canvas tent, there are weapons racks on the walls, and Smith and Weathers grab a couple of heavy blaster pistols and start slotting them into their belts. Weathers says, “Look, grab anything you think is important.” He grabs a big backpack and starts putting satchel charges in it. “Obviously we’re gonna need these, but the world is your oyster. We’re only getting one shot at this. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, as the general would say.”

CAMERON: “All of y’all, rebreathers, we’re going swimming. HK, not you, no rebreather.”

NICK: “I will not need one as I do not have lungs and I will not be going in the water.”

CAMERON: “Correct. Somebody’s gotta cover our exit.”

NICK: “Okay.”

CAMERON: [laughs] “Thank you for the acknowledgement, HK.”

NICK: “Acknowledged.” Xianna, do you grab anything special? Basically you can ask for any kind of weapon you want and it’s probably in this tent. They have military grade hardware here.

LAURA: Xianna grabs some grenades…

NICK: Okay.

LAURA: …that are already on my character sheet, so I’m just gonna wipe away the little line through them. Ha-ha. Then, some thermal detonators?

NICK: Sure.

LAURA: Can I have four?

NICK: Sure.

LAURA: Cool.

CAMERON: Hello, yes, I would like a rocket launcher, please.

NICK: There is one.

CAMERON: Is a rocket launcher Ranged: Heavy?

NICK: Yeah.

CAMERON: Okay. [laughs]

HUDSON: But there’s no rockets, just potatoes.

CAMERON: Aw, that’s fine.

NICK: [laughs] Yeah, there’s a rocket launcher with one extra rocket. It looks kind of like a stinger missile launcher looks, if you know what that is, but basically it’s a big tube. You know those carpentry angles they use that’s like a metal ruler with a crossbar with the level in it?

CAMERON: Yes. Yeah.

NICK: That’s basically what this rocket launcher looks like, just make it swooshy and silver and blue.

CAMERON: Okay, and if it has an extra rocket then I would have two rockets total?

NICK: Yep, two shots, that’s all they have. There’s a few blank spaces where you can see there were a couple more of these, and Smith walks up and shakes his head. “Yeah, a couple of the other commandos thought they could take out the artillery from the edge of the bay and we never saw them again. I guess it didn’t work since we’re still getting bombarded.”

CAMERON: “Alright, well be on the lookout for those rocket launchers. I would like more rockets if we see them.”

NICK: “Okay. I’ll see what we can do.”

CAMERON: “Just as we’re walking, just keep an eye out.”

NICK: HK looks at the walls and says, “Evaluation: I have no need for these organic weapons as I am already fully equipped.” His gun barrel spins a little bit in his hands and then he just kind of goes back to standing there. They all grab rebreathers. Do you want anything else?

CAMERON: Do they have any visual equipment?

NICK: They’ve got like electro-binoculars and stuff.

CAMERON: Yeah, let’s grab a pair of binoculars.

NICK: Sure.

CAMERON: Just for viewing.

NICK: Xianna already has her scanner goggles.

LAURA: Yes. Xianna’s also like, on some of her pockets that, sometimes you can see the pocket, sometimes you can’t, but it looks like she’s zipping some of the pockets up. Heh. Although I guess zippers don’t really exist in Star Wars.

NICK: She’s just running her fingers along them and they’re sealing, however that works.

LAURA: She’s sealing her pockets in some way.

CAMERON: She’s closing up the Ziploc on all of her pockets. [laughs]

LAURA: Yeah, she’s sealing them because she does not want the granola bars in her pockets to get damp.

CAMERON: That would be gross.

NICK: Yeah, her concern is the granola bars.

LAURA: Well yeah.

CAMERON: Yeah.

LAURA: And also all the drugs.

NICK: [laughs]

LAURA: You know, and the binders. You don’t want them rusting.

CAMERON: And you don’t want the fuzzy binders to get wet.

LAURA: Yeah, because it’s really hard to dry them and not get the fur matted in a weird way. If you’ve ever thrown a fuzzy blanket into the dryer and it gets matted it’s just never fun.

CAMERON: Mm-hmm.

NICK: So, you trot back outside. Weathers has his backpack with satchel charges, he’s got his two pistols and his carbine, he looks pretty much set to go. Smith has the same general load out but he doesn’t have a back pack on. They slap a couple of scout helmets on, so they’re the ones that have the plasteel rings and then the soft cover on the top, because that makes sense for a helmet.

CAMERON: Yeah.

NICK: It’s Star Wars. It’s like the ones that they wore on Endor. They buckle them on and they don’t salute, but they stiffen straightly like they were going to salute and then remember that you’re not the boss of them. “Alright. What’s the plan?” We’re gonna cut away to Tink and Neato as they walk into this very large shield generator facility.

So, the whole facility, Tink, is metal gangplanks and ladders, and there’s a big, glowing electric core that’s in the middle. It’s got spinning concentric rings in a blue-green light in the middle. It’s some sort of reactor. You can see 70s style computer panels lining it at various levels. You can see a group of engineering looking types a few levels up on one of these gangplanks. You can’t hear them over the hum of the generator, but they’re obviously having an argument and pointing at it. Neato says, “Well, it looks like it’s time to go find us some patsies, chum.”

HUDSON: “Alright. They look patsy enough to me.”

NICK: “Lead on, McDuff.”

HUDSON: I walk up the stairs toward the engineers, and when I get close enough I say, “Alright twerps, we’re going in!”

NICK: “Hey…! What? Who are you?”

HUDSON: “Sorry, sorry, bad start. I’m Tink, and—“

NICK: ‘The Gigoran slicer~’

[laughter]

HUDSON: ‘I’m Tink, the Gigoran slicer~!’

NICK: [laughs]

HUDSON: “I’m Tink. As you can see, I’m a Gigoran, not a Wookie, a Gigoran. Get it right.”

NICK: ‘I thought he was a Woo—“ “Shut up, man!”

HUDSON: “Nope. Nope.”

CAMERON: [whispering] White Wookie. White Wookie.

HUDSON: “I’m a Gigoran, and I’m a slicer, and I’m here to recruit the cream of the crop to help us on our mission!”

NICK: Well, I don’t know about that. our job is to keep the generator running so we don’t get bombed into our component atoms from orbit.”

HUDSON: “That was your job. Now it’s not.”

NICK: “Under whose orders?”

HUDSON: “Neato?”

NICK: “… What?”

HUDSON: “Tell them whose orders it’s under.”

NICK: “Yeah! It’s under the orders of the main fizz bang, the leader, the generalissimo.”

“… What?”

“General Karthage. She said we can take two of you on a mission that totally won’t result in our impending demise.”

HUDSON: “Who wants to come~?”

NICK: “My job is to replace the batteries…” It’s a very small person with big, thick glasses that was talking, and he climbs into an air vent and disappears.

HUDSON: “Not you, punk! Oh—They’re gone.”

NICK: So you’re left with three engineers. They’re all Human. There is a very skinny, lanky man with blonde hair and what looks like he’s trying to grow a mustache but it won’t grow out. He’s the one that was talking to you originally. There is a very, very pale man with long, long, long dark hair that goes down to his waist. He is studiously studying his fingertips and won’t make eye contact with you. Someone shoves him to the side and says, “I volunteer.” There is an average height woman wearing what looks like padded scientific armor, so it’s like battle armor but it has extra pockets and things and you can see technology stuck in different places. ‘If we’re finally gonna push the Imperials out of our city, I want in.” She starts to salute, realizes none of you are military and stops. She grabs the guy with the wispy mustache and says, “So is he!”

“Wha–? Uh… Crap.” [chuckles]

HUDSON: “As Neato would say, I like your moxie!”

NICK: ‘Yes! They’re mo—Aww, you beat me to it.”

HUDSON: [laughs]

NICK: So, she straps on a helmet and says, “Specialist Talon reporting for duty, and this is Specialist Kevin.”

HUDSON: “Ha!”

NICK: “Yep. My name’s Matt Kevin. Thank you. It’s a family name.”

HUDSON: “It’s a… It’s a name.”

NICK: “Well, I guess you said you said you needed two. That’s us. We’ll just leave the other two here. Hopefully the generator won’t explode.”

HUDSON: “Get some pep in your step. Come on.”

NICK: “That’s MY line!”

HUDSON: “Listen, you’re rubbing off on me.”

NICK: “We could sit here bumping gums all day, but we found ourselves a real button man, a real ringer. We’re gonna go out there and take it to the Imperials.”

Specialist Talon goes, ‘Umm… What?” She looks at Tink.

HUDSON: “Listen. Neato’s gonna say stuff, and you won’t always understand it, but just know it’s 110% positive energy.”

NICK: “Either way, grab your heaters and let’s go!”

She says, “What?”

“Heaters. Your boom sticks. Your death dealers.”

“Oh, my gun?”

“Yeah! Grab your heaters!”

HUDSON: [laughs]

NICK: She goes and she grabs what looks like two service pistols off of a workbench and tosses one to Specialist Kevin who almost drops it but slots it into what looks like a work belt that just happens to have a pocket that fits a blaster pistol in. Talon says, “Okay, we’re ready to go, but you still haven’t said where we’re going or what we’re doing.” And we’re gonna cut back to Karma, Xianna, and HK. Did you all leave the camp?

LAURA: Probably.

CAMERON: Yeah.

NICK: Alright. You’re walking, or I would assume you’re like hustling through the alleyways.

CAMERON: Yeah. We’re doing the video game run while you squat so that no one sees you.

NICK: Yeah, from cover to cover, and covering each other, right?

CAMERON: Yeah. Doing all sorts of weird hand signals.

NICK: There’s just a lot of waist-high walls that you can dramatically slam your backs against into and then peek over for cover.

LAURA: There’s definitely a shot of someone doing an actual hand signal of ‘okay, two of us are gonna move ahead,’ and then Xianna looks to everyone and does a hand symbol and then moves, and everyone’s like ‘that didn’t mean anything. Right?’

NICK: [laughs]

CAMERON: [laughs] ‘Wait. Where is she going?’

LAURA: ‘I’m pretty sure that was something highly inappropriate she just did. What?!’

CAMERON: [laughs]

NICK: [laughs] Weathers goes, “Was that aimed at us, or is she just talking about her plans after this?”

CAMERON: “Definitely the plans after this. Come on.”

NICK: ‘Oh, okay.” They take off.

You’re hustling through these alleyways and HK says, “Tactical Evaluation: We are beginning to approach enemy incursions. What is the plan?”

CAMERON: “So we need to get to the cannons. We need to get behind the line and then go take a swim.”

LAURA: “Are we going to sneak past them or shoot our way through? My vote is sneak, but um…”

CAMERON: “I mean… I like sneak, killing if necessary. I would like to not draw more troops to this area.”

NICK: So, Weathers jogs up, and you’re peeking around a corner, and you’re beginning to see single scouts riding swoop bikes around. They’re a lot closer than they were before. Weathers ducks back around the corner. “So, are you planning on swimming with that rocket launcher, or…?”

CAMERON: “Yeah.”

NICK: “Okay… if that’s the plan.” Go ahead and roll me a Stealth check, please.

HUDSON: First roll in the last two and a half hours of this campaign!

CAMERON: Nice!

NICK: Hey, you know, we’re telling stories here… and sometimes I forget the dice exist.

HUDSON: [laughs]

NICK: I’m gonna start making you roll Education to understand what Neato’s slang means.

[laughter]

LAURA: What was the difficulty?

NICK: This one’s gonna be hard. You are trying to get past military patrols. Also, I wanna flip a dark side point. Upgrade that difficulty for me, please. Two purples and a red.

CAMERON: Okay. Can I give us a blue die? I can see heat signatures through walls with my scope on my blaster.

LAURA: And I have scanner goggles.

CAMERON: To assist with just avoiding things around corners and stuff.

NICK: Let’s do it this way. You won’t have the blue die, but if you with your heat scope and Xianna with her scanner goggles are taking point and telling people when to go and not go, I won’t make the other three roll.

CAMERON: Okay. That seems fair.

NICK: Because HK will absolutely fail that check.

CAMERON: Yeah, okay.

LAURA: Okay.

NICK: Does that seem like a fair trade?

CAMERON: Yeah.

NICK: Okay.

CAMERON: Karma has three successes and one advantage.

LAURA: One success, one advantage.

[smooth digital jazz music starts]

NICK: Nice. You are pretty capable of getting around these stormtrooper patrols. They are not expecting a small unit to be moving towards them. They’re expecting organized and large resistance. So, describe to me you sneaking as a group past several patrols of troops in quick succession.

CAMERON: As you mentioned, HK is not sneaky, so I think it’s Xianna and Karma are being incredibly sneaky and talented and moving like ghosts, and Smith and Weathers have a lot of training, they’re doing good at the same time. We keep getting lucky with like, a loud noise happens as HK clunks across an alley or something. We have to walk on metal where his metal feet would make a lot of noise, but stormtroopers are walking past at the same time so the feet sounds, like…

LAURA: Or timing it to a cannon blast, or just doing that really typical thing of Xianna picks up a rock on the ground and throws it so the stormtroopers look a different direction so that they can have HK just walk by.

CAMERON: [laughs]

NICK: Heh. Okay. You do that. You end up… The bay is surrounded by a wide boulevard, and there’s a low brick wall, and then sandy sloping beaches that go down to this quiet bay. You notice that you’re able to get to the far side of this road and you are in a small café up against the walls behind a shattered window, and you all crouch, and you get a call directly to your com units from HK so it’s not out loud but you can hear it. “Irritated Statement: We’ve been doing a lot of sneaking and not a lot of ventilating organics.”

LAURA: “Well—[exhales] Hank, you have to sneak first and then kill later.”

CAMERON: “If you had a sword this wouldn’t be an issue. Swords are quiet, as long as the screaming doesn’t—You know, swords aren’t that quiet, but swords have the ability to be quiet whereas your blaster does not.”

LAURA: “Wait. Karma, do your swords scream?”

CAMERON: [laughs]

LAURA: “Swords are pretty quiet I feel like.”

CAMERON: “No. I was more talking the people that you were… stabbing.”

NICK: “Verification: Vibro-blades do make an extremely high-pitched whining noise.”

CAMERON: “But it’s—“

LAURA: “Okay, but would you classify that as like a scream?”

CAMERON: “And it’s still quieter than a blaster.”

NICK: HK just kind of bobbles his head like ‘yeah, I guess you got a point.’

[music fades out]

You look up over this shattered windowsill and you see that two of these sort of modified artillery platforms have actually made beach landing and the other three are probably still 100 meters out in the water but are slowly moving forward, so these are slowly grinding their way up the beach. They’re maybe going like 3 kilometers an hour. It’s not very fast, but they are moving and then pausing to fire periodically. From here, the noise of them firing is extremely loud. It leaves your ear cones ringing, Xianna, and people with ears, they are ringing. HK’s audio receptors are ringing. Whatever.

CAMERON: [laughs]

LAURA: The phones are ringing. The bells are ringing. Everything is ringing.

NICK: Yeah. It’s very ringy. So, you’re able to see that these artillery platforms, two of them have made beach fall. There are probably about ten stormtroopers scattered around. They’re more focused on trying to make sure that the sand doesn’t gum up the repulsers. It has a full contingent of repulsers that you would see a star ship using, but they seem to be misfiring, not at full power, and they’re barely keeping these things off the ground at all. if there is a sand castle, this thing will crush the sand castle because it is too low. So, Weathers ducks back down, you can see sweat streaming down his face, and he says, “So, we’re here. You gonna use that rocket launcher and then we run, or what?”

CAMERON: “Yes. Okay, let’s split up the explosives, because they’re all in the backpack right now. Everybody take some. These are to blow up the ones in the water. We split.”

NICK: “Okay.” They pass them out. There’s enough for everybody to have two. Do you give some to HK too?

LAURA: Well, we don’t want him to feel left out.

CAMERON: “HK, do you want some? You could go place them somewhere on land.”

NICK: HK looks at you all. One of his optical sensors blinks out and then blinks back on. “Humorous Laugh: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

CAMERON: “Okay, so that’s a no. Alright.”

HUDSON: [laughs]

NICK: “Yes.”

CAMERON: “Oh, yes? It’s a yes?”

NICK: “Yes. Please give me the explosives.”

CAMERON: “Oh okay.”

NICK: “I will take all of the explosives.”

CAMERON: “No, not all of them. We need some, too. Sharing is caring, buddy. We’ve talked about this.”

NICK: “Acknowledged.”

CAMERON: “Here you go. Here are your bombs.”

NICK: “Ha, ha, ha.” He straps them to his waist.

CAMERON: “Okay. We do need to work on your evil laugh. We can work on that later. Alright, so you three,” she says pointing at Xianna, Smith, and Weathers, “if y’all wanna go take the farthest two of the water ships and blow those up, as soon as I fire this rocket launcher they’re going to know where I am, so if y’all wanna get in the water now before everyone turns around and looks at me, that might be a good move. I will try to take out the two on land and then swim to the one in the middle.”

LAURA: “Okie.” How far are we from the water?

NICK: It’s probably 30 yards of beach.

LAURA: Okay.

NICK: No one is particularly looking at you all, and you are not directly in the path. You’re able to get further off to the side. I would either need another Stealth check or a force die roll on is anyone looking at you.

LAURA: I’ll do another Stealth.

NICK: Okay. It’s the same difficulty. It’s hard, with—How many dark side points do I still have?

CAMERON: Two.

NICK: Yeah, we’ll flip that again.

LAURA: I don’t fall prone, so we’re good there.

NICK: Aww.

CAMERON: [chuckles]

LAURA: Four successes and a threat.

NICK: And a threat. Just one threat?

LAURA: Just one singular threat.

NICK: One lonely threat.

LAURA: The water is very cold.

[laughter]

LAURA: Xianna sneaks onto the beach and then starts getting into the water and then just yells back as she starts running back up the beach. “No it is too cold! Too cold! No, no, no!”

CAMERON: [giggling] I was gonna say your head tails shrink.

NICK: [groaning and laughing] That’s not how those work.

CAMERON: [laughs]

HUDSON: [laughs] That’s only Sabos’s.

NICK: Ugh…

CAMERON: [laughs] Ew.

NICK: So for your threat we’ll say Xianna and Weathers and Smith all run down the beach, you dive in. Xianna, as you dive in, the water hits your rebreather that you have tucked into your mouth and you take your first breath and it tastes very ozoney as you breathe in.

LAURA: Yeah, yeah, okay. Cool.

NICK: Like, the balance is maybe off on it or they hadn’t scrubbed the filters, I’m sure it’ll be fine, as you swim deeper into the water, but you’re able to make it all the way through with no problems. So Karma, did you stay on land and then you were gonna shoot the rocket?

CAMERON: For the moment, yes.

NICK: Okay.

CAMERON: “Okay, HK, I need you to serve as a distraction.”

NICK: “Affirmative.”

CAMERON: Okay. You said that there were two that were coming up on land? They were kind of slowly making their way up the beach?

NICK: Yeah.

CAMERON: Okay.

NICK: And the other three are approaching land, they’re just further out.

CAMERON: They’re just still in the water. Okay. “So what I wanna do, I’mma need to shoot one of these and then I’m gonna need to reload the rocket launcher before I can get to the second one, so I will shoot the far one, then if you could lay cover fire while I get the reload happening I’ll shoot the second one.

NICK: “Affirmative. Would you like my tactical placement in the same building or just setup a crossfire?”

CAMERON: “Probably crossfire.”

NICK: “Affirmative.” And he just takes off. He runs out of the building. He stays pretty low, he’s pretty quiet. Xianna, you can still hear, over the coms you hear a crackle of “Tactical Statement: Give me 45 seconds to create a crow’s nest.” You see him start climbing up an interior building staircase.

CAMERON: I think we probably patched Smith and Weathers into our group coms as well so that when they’re in the water they’re not accidentally blowing up one of the cannons while the other person is still right next to it.

NICK: Yeah. From Smith and Weathers you just hear, [long inhale] bubble-bubble-bubble.

CAMERON: [laughs]

NICK: Because you can’t talk underwater, that’s hard, but they can hear.

CAMERON: Yup, but they can hear.

NICK: Yeah. We’re gonna cut back to Neato, Tink, Talon and Kevin. So, you are leaving the military camp and Neato says, “So, what was the schematic again? What’s the plan? What’s the fizz bang? What’s the wizzle-wozzle?”

HUDSON: “I was hoping that we could collaborate on that.”

NICK: “Not inspiring a heaping helping of confidence there, chum.”

HUDSON: “What I meant to say was, we’re going in!”

NICK: “What does going in mean, exactly?”

HUDSON: “Well, I’m glad you asked, I was ready for this moment. What we’re gonna do is jam their communications, Step 1. Step 2, shut down all of their weapon systems. Step 3, profit.”

CAMERON: [laughs]

NICK: Kevin goes, “Man, I like the profit part. Are we privatizing here? What’s going on?”

HUDSON: “We’re an incorporation as I might have mentioned earlier.”

NICK: “S-Corp, right?”

HUDSON: “yes. Yes!”

NICK: “Okay.” [laughs]

HUDSON: “You could be a part of it too if this goes off well.”

NICK: “Nah, this is starting to sound a little pyramid schemey.”

HUDSON: “if you want to come to my house I’ll talk to you about Tupperware, but now is not the time.”

NICK: [laughs] Talon says, “Hey, if we could focus, we’re going into a life or death situation here. If your goal is to try to attack the electronic infrastructure of the Empire, the only bet we have is the technological sector to the west of the bay. I’m assuming that’s where you’re taking us.”

HUDSON: “Yes, that’s exactly where I’m taking you and you’re actually incorrect; life, death or purgatory are the three options.”

NICK: [laughs] Talon and Kevin fall into step behind you and Neato, Tink, and Neato says, “Alright, let’s get to stepping, chums,” and you take off into the city. Are you trying to be sneaky? Are you trying to be fast? What is your plan here, Tink?

HUDSON: We’re trying to be fast and sneaky!

NICK: Alright, roll me a Stealth check, then.

HUDSON: What’s the difficulty?

NICK: It’s hard. Flip me my last dark side point there.

HUDSON: You’re right it’s hard.

NICK: God damn it. That was good! [subtly sarcastic]

HUDSON: So it’s a red?

NICK: Two purple and a red, but what we’ll do is I’ll give you a blue die for Neato being with you, because he is very good at this and he is used to being with people who are not as good as him, namely Talon and Kevin, so he’ll help you compensate.

HUDSON: Hold on, I gotta parse this…

NICK: [chuckles]

HUDSON: A triumph with two advantages. [laughs]

NICK: Yep… Well… Um, good. Great. Okay… So, with your triumph, would you like to spend the triumph that you see them before they see you?

HUDSON: Yes.

NICK: Okay. You are running along this alley and Neato stops to help Specialist Kevin get up after he’s tripped, and he turns and he goes, “Wait, that alley has an ambush.”

[laughter]

[slow plucky music starts, turns into peppy jazz]

NICK: You turn around and there’s four stormtroopers who are setup with sandbags and guns in the alley that you turned down. They’re not touching their guns, they’re leaning against a wall talking. That’s the triumph, so they don’t just shoot you in the face immediately. But yeah, we’re gonna need you to go ahead and roll initiative. You’ll get one action before they start doing stuff. The current layout, you’re in the head of an alley, they see you, they’re not next to their weapons. You’ve got Specialist Talon right behind you and then Neato and Specialist Kevin are about 20 meters behind you.

HUDSON: So Vigilance?

NICK: Yep.

HUDSON: Okay.

CAMERON: What do the other buddies need to roll?

NICK: Neato is two yellows and a green.

HUDSON: Three successes and an advantage, unless there’s difficulty, which I don’t think there is in initiatives.

NICK: Nope, there isn’t.

HUDSON: Okay.

CAMERON: Neato has four successes, one advantage.

NICK: Oh shit. The two kiddos are both a green and a yellow.

CAMERON: Kiddo 1 is two successes, one advantage.

NICK: We’ll just have them both go on that one.

CAMERON: Okay. What are stormtroopers?

NICK: There’s four of them, so… These are shore troopers, so two yellows and a green. They’ll go as a group.

CAMERON: Three successes.

NICK: Ooh boy. Neato goes first, then Tink, then stormtroopers, then the kiddos. Alright, so Neato goes, “Wait, there’s an ambush down there!” and like drops Kevin, because he was half holding him up, just lets him go, he falls flat on his face. He goes running around the corner and he does a baseball slide and pulls his rifle up and goes to shoot between you and Talon and try to hit them. I’m going to need three yellows. It’s an average difficulty, because he’s medium range, but add a black die because he’s shooting through his friends and doing a super cool thing.

HUDSON: [laughs]

CAMERON: Can he aim for a blue die?

NICK: Sure.

CAMERON: Two successes, one threat.

NICK: Two successes, one threat.

CAMERON: Yes.

NICK: So, his rifle does, we’ll say it does 10. He shoots through two of them and they disintegrate into dust, and he keeps sliding and slams up into the wall of it, because he basically bet it all on being able to do that before anything happened. “Take that, you Imperial fucks.”

[snickering and laughter]

NICK: It’s Tink’s turn.

HUDSON: Alright.

NICK: The stormtroopers are currently scrambling towards their weapons. Two of them are dust.

HUDSON: As I am very skilled in melee, is there any way I can get around them to get behind them?

NICK: They’re like in a dead end alley with cover lined up, but you’re at medium range, so you could go medium to short and short to engaged if you spend a strain to do a double maneuver, so you could get right up on them. Behind them, not so much, but you could get within melee range of them.

HUDSON: That’s fine. I would like to get within melee range of them.

NICK: Okay. So, describe how you sprint down this alley at these dudes.

HUDSON: So, scream at the top of my friggin’ lungs, run with my axe in the air, and go and whack one of them.

NICK: Okay. Do you like jump over the cover or just stand in front of it and do a long swing?

HUDSON: I jump over—You said the cover, you mean like the sandbags or whatever?

NICK: Yeah, yeah.

HUDSON: I jump over the sandbags, do a summersault, and then whack sideways.

CAMERON: [laughs]

NICK: Nice. Okay.

HUDSON: So I took a strain.

NICK: Yep. That’s fine. So, go ahead and do your attack then. Difficulty is average. You know, you would think that stormtroopers would have Melee Defense considering that they’re usually fighting technologically inferior planets to them. That’s why the Ewoks wrecked them so bad, because they have no melee defense.

LAURA: Yeah.

HUDSON: Three failures and three advantages.

CAMERON: What?!

NICK: Huh…

HUDSON: [laughs]

NICK: I’m gonna be honest. I thought this fight was gonna be over very quickly. Um…

HUDSON: Not quite. I get captured, apparently.

[laughter]

NICK: So, you fail. You try to hit them and they just are actually pretty good at hand-to-hand combat. The two of them spread out so they’re on either side of you.

CAMERON: It’s hand-to-axe combat.

NICK: Hand-to-axe combat, my bad.

HUDSON: [snickers]

LAURA: Get it right.

CAMERON: Gah.

NICK: Gosh! There’s a whole chapter about hand-to-axe combat in Edge of the Empire. [laughs]

CAMERON: Exactly.

NICK: So, they spread out. One of them gets behind you and basically just interferes with your swings as you try to attack, and they work really well as a team. It’s like they’re some sort of trained military unit or something. Who’da thunk? Now it’s the stormtroopers turn, and they are going to shoot at you a whole bunch.

HUDSON: Bring it.

NICK: They’re a green and a yellow. It’s easy difficulty because he’s at engaged range to them, and they have carbines so they don’t lose difficulty for being that close. They’re gonna aim… Yep.

CAMERON: One success, one advantage.

NICK: Well, that’s 10 damage, Tink.

HUDSON: [pain groans]

NICK: They just pepper you with bullets. Don’t forget to subtract your soak.

HUDSON: Oh, thank you.

NICK: You’re welcome.

HUDSON: Wait, 10 damage, so I get 7 damage, so 10 is what’s left. Ugh.

NICK: Yeah, that’s bad. Don’t charge gunning placements with an axe and no armor maybe, but also keep doing it because it makes me happy as a GM.

HUDSON: Alright!

NICK: Yeah! So, they shoot you a bunch, and the two specialists are just like ‘ahh, what are we gonna do,’ because their thinking is if you and Neato die they’re stuck behind enemy lines without really any idea of what’s going on.

HUDSON: Typical specialist.

NICK: [laughs] Right. So, Specialist Kevin ducks behind a corner and takes cover and doesn’t do anything.

CAMERON: [huffs]

NICK: Talon draws her blaster pistol and runs up to close range with them and ducks behind a crate, so she uses her maneuver to take cover, and she pops up and she shoots at the stormtroopers. She yells, “Tink, get down!” and starts spraying.

HUDSON: I get down.

NICK: Yeah.

HUDSON: Get down tonight~

NICK: [laughs] So she is a green and a yellow.

CAMERON: Three successes, one advantage.

NICK: Dang. How much does a light blaster do, 5?

LAURA: Five.

NICK: Aw, she almost gets two. So, she shoots and she hits the one that was about to shoot Tink again in the back of the head, and the stormtrooper just drops and there’s just one left. It is Neato’s turn again, and we just get a shot of, he’s still leaning against the wall, he brings his blaster rifle back up, and we get the slow motion deep breathing and heartbeat noise, the [heart beats, pulsing, laser fire] and he shoots the last stormtrooper, hopefully.

CAMERON: Four successes, two advantages?

NICK: Dang! That last stormtrooper, Tink, you start to duck when Specialist Talon yells at you to duck and you’re singing some sort of anachronistic disco-related song while doing it, and Neato, the bolt from his disrupter rifle almost parts the fur on the top of your head and hits the stormtrooper. He gauged how fast you were ducking and fired to hit as soon as you were out of the way. The stormtrooper, you get a second of him going “Ahhh” and you lock eyes through the helmet of this stormtrooper, and then you watch from the chest out as he just turns to a hollow yellow outline of himself, and then that dissipates and then there’s a small cloud of dust and the stormtrooper is gone.

Neato stands up and says, “Wow, you’re one tough cookie, Tink. I haven’t seen somebody take that many blaster bolts since the Clone Wars.”

HUDSON: “I sure can take a blaster to me.”

NICK: “That’s not something to be proud of, friend.”

HUDSON: “Oh, I mean, like I’m resilient.”

NICK: “Right, well uh, maybe next time don’t get shot.” He pats you on the shoulder where you’ve been shot and it hurts.

HUDSON: [groans]

NICK: “Alright. Maybe I should take point,” and you continue to jog off. We get a time lapse circle wipe, and Tink and the specialists and Neato all are jogging up the steps and it looks like a university building. As you go in Specialist Talon says, “Yeah, I used to go to school here. The government equipment is on the second floor.” You jog up and you find basically slicer heaven. There’s a whole bunch of terminals and signal boosters and everything that you could use.

CAMERON: Beanbag chairs.

NICK: Beanbag chairs. Talon says, “We can run support for you. we have signal interceptors and broadcasters up on the roof of the building. You can control them all from here. It’s your go. What are we gonna do?”

HUDSON: I look like a kid in a candy shop. I look around, and I try to figure out what to do first.

NICK: Heh. There’s a bunch of terminals but one big master terminal with an extra-large screen.

HUDSON: I go to that one.

CAMERON: [giggles]

NICK: Yeah. It’s password locked.

HUDSON: “I can get through this one,” as I roll for hacking.

[laughter]

HUDSON: What difficulty is it to get into this computer?

NICK: Hard. It’s a pretty decent system.

HUDSON: Before I do that, outlaw data breaker adds two blue dice for me. I’m just making sure I don’t have anything else I can use…

NICK: This is a security defense system, but that just removes black dice I think.

HUDSON: Exactly.

NICK: And I didn’t give you any because you’re in hacker heaven.

HUDSON: Five successes, one advantage.

NICK: Oh. Yeah, you’re in. you just make it look easy. You plug your data breaker in and run a routine and turn to talk strategy with Neato and it just runs in the background. You don’t even have to think about it.

HUDSON: Nice.

NICK: Neato says, “So, you’re going for the old electronic warfare. Not really my cup of tea, but I’m sure you can figure it out. If you could turn off the weapon systems, great. If you can interfere with the star destroyer up above, even better.”

HUDSON: “Listen. Did you even hear my plan? What was the first step?”

NICK: “I’ll admit that I only paid attention to Step 3.”

HUDSON: “Talon?”

NICK: [Neato] “Kill the Imperials!”

HUDSON: “That’s not—Talon, what was the rest, what was the first step of my plan?”

NICK: “Step 1 was take down their communication.”

HUDSON: “Correct. You get a gold star.”

NICK: “Step 2 was take down their weapon systems.”

HUDSON: “Yup.”

NICK: “Step 3 was…”

She looks at Neato and he says, “Profit~!”

HUDSON: [laughs] “That is all correct! You all get high-fives from me.”

NICK: As you say that, the password lock screen disappears off the terminal behind you and says ‘Welcome, master user.’

HUDSON: “Score.”

NICK: [laughs] And we are going to cut back to the beach. So, we get a sweeping overhead shot of these buildings that have been combed and burned out, but you can still see the hint of the idyllic city that they were before. Laying on top of a building a couple of blocks over from Karma is Hank. He is down on his front with the sniper rifle posted up on the top of the building. You can see that the rotating barrels of his rifle have retracted in and the main barrel has extended out quite a bit. There isn’t a scope on it that you can see, but there is a glowing, looks like Kit from Nightrider, a yellow progress bar that’s going up the front of the rifle and disappears and just is continually doing that, and Hank’s ocular receptors are turned off. He is aimed towards the stormtroopers. The camera zooms down to Karma who has her rocket launcher aimed out of the shattered window at these weapons platforms and the stormtroopers outside. Then it zooms to underwater where Xianna and Weathers and Smith are all swimming and are just now starting to approach the other weapons platforms. The swim wasn’t too long because they’re also moving towards you. Xianna, what are you doing?

LAURA: Swimming~

NICK: Kay. So you approach these weapons platforms, and…?

LAURA: So, the thermal detonators, would we be able to just place them like right above the water line and they work, or how high up would we need to place a detonator for it to be effective?

NICK: Do we think thermal detonators in this universe work like they do in some of the books where they’re actually nuclear warheads or do we think they work like they do in the video games where they’re just reasonably effective grenades?

LAURA: Por qué no los dos?

NICK: Small nuclear warheads. Affirmative. Okay. Yeah, you could put them like on the water line or even underneath and they would work. Underneath the explosion wouldn’t be as big, but you would assume it would rupture something.

CAMERON: Make it sink at least.

LAURA: Yeah.

NICK: You could also roll me a Skulduggery check to…

LAURA: Figure out the best placement?

NICK: Yep.

LAURA: I can do that.

CAMERON: While she’s putting that together, I still have wounds from when we fell. Yes?

HUDSON: [laughs]

NICK: Yeah. You all have those wounds.

CAMERON: Okay.

NICK: You didn’t, like, go see a medic or anything.

CAMERON: Just verifying.

LAURA: Yep.

NICK: I’m actually surprised Xianna didn’t just whip out the stim pack. She usually does.

LAURA: Well no, because it heals 5 wounds and she only has 3, so that’s not an effective use of a stim pack.

NICK: [laughs]

CAMERON: Yeah.

LAURA: Despite being Xianna, she still sometimes is pragmatic and understands resource management.

CAMERON: [giggles]

NICK: That’s very efficiency minded of you.

LAURA: What was the difficulty?

NICK: Hard. You’re trying to take out military grade hardware.

LAURA: Okay! [laughter]

NICK: I mean, you all are all at the point where if I’m having you do the thing you’re good at it doesn’t really matter what difficulty I set because you’re probably going to succeed.

LAURA: Two successes and two advantages.

NICK: Yeah, so you’re able to designate where to put these thermal detonators on these weapons platforms. I think with the thermal detonators you’re able to easily assure that two of these artillery things are well covered with that and the satchel charges. Are you hoping to stop them from moving or straight sink them?

LAURA: Straight sink them.

NICK: Yeah. You’d be able to, with 100% surety, sink two of them. The third one, you have some satchel charges and stuff left over but you’re not sure if it’s enough to actually take it down, between the three of you.

LAURA: Okay. I guess we’re going to completely destroy two and then do what we can with the third.

NICK: Okay. You’re able to do that. You can actually see as you’re doing this, we get the view of the three of you splitting up and placing your charges, I think Xianna takes point as far as pointing at where everything goes, and you can see that there’s a very clear line from where the water of the bay is very deep and where the beach begins, and if they cross that, even if you sink them, they’re gonna stay above water enough that they can still bombard the city and you’re rapidly approaching that line. So, as you get to the third one you’re able to put some on there, and then the choice is either to swim out of the blast range of when you set these off or stick around and try to arrange them just so on the third one to try to sink it, and I think you probably decide to swim away, right, so you don’t explode??

LAURA: Yes.

NICK: So, you wave them off and they look at you like ‘no, we can fix it,’ and you wave them off. We get a lot of frantic underwater gesticulation. You swim to the deeper water and you get out of the blast range, and we get this three-part panel of Xianna and her two hunky commandos treading water and all three of them are holding detonators and they’re counting down on their fingers from five, and Karma with her rocket launcher and it’s got a scope that’s blinking and the light goes red and she has it locked on one, and Hank has his rifle trained on a stormtrooper and the targeting reticle blinks red, and Tink cracking his fingers in front of this master computer and saying ‘alright, let’s make some problems…’ and that’s where we’re gonna end the episode.

CAMERON: [laughs]

ALL: Ba-naaa~!

LAURA: … Leeloo!

## Outro

CAMERON: Thanks for listening to Tabletop Squadron. If you’ve enjoyed our show please consider logging into iTunes and giving us a five-star review. Five-star reviews will help new listeners to find the show and will make the squad giggle like school children when we read them. If you’re so inclined, you can also help support the show through our Patreon which can be found in the show notes, on our website, and basically anywhere we post things. We have all sorts of Patreon levels including some of my favorites: Bantha Buddy, Tarkin’s Underwear Drawer, and Build-A-Beru which all have fabulous rewards and super great names.

Xianna’fan is played by Laura Penrod. She can be found on Twitter at @cheerio_buffet.

Tink is played by Hudson Jameson. He can be found on Twitter at @hudsonjameson.

Karma Nailo is played by me, Cameron Robertson. You can find me on Twitter at @midnightmusic13.

Our game master is Nick Robertson, and you can find him on Twitter at @alias58.

Our intro song is Space Jam by Pablo Ribot.

Additional music by James Gunter.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram at @Tabletop_Squad, and join our Discord and share all of your food and cute pet photos with us. We also sometimes talk about Star Wars. You can find the link to join our Discord on our website and in our pinned tweet. See you next time.

Tabletop Squadron Transcript, Season 1 Episode 41:
Not That Kind of Parade Ground

Transcript by Tyler (Twitter: @Tyler_MoonSage)

## Intro

NICK: Hi everyone, and welcome to Tabletop Squadron, a Star Wars: Edge of the Empire actual play podcast. I’m Nick, your game master. Every other Thursday our story follows a thief, a bounty hunter, and a slicer as they explore the galaxy helping a mysterious benefactor and each other.

Okay team, let’s get to it. First of all, we have a new Patron. Carter Mckendry, welcome to the ship. It’s been really fun talking to you on our Discord and you’re a super cool person. We greatly appreciate the support.

Also, our Twitter dice bag giveaway concluded this week. Congratulations to @JSmartPig, @RoyalBlade4, and @mboing. If you haven’t already, send the @Tabletop_Squad account a DM and we’ll organize delivery for you. Thank you to everyone who chimed in with your favorite Tabletop Squadron moments. The squad and I scrolled through and read them all, and they totally made our weeks. We were so happy to hear from everyone. While the dice bags are spoken for, please don’t hesitate to reach out and tell us your favorite moments anyway. We all love talking to people about the show.

Without further ado, let’s get into the episode.

##

NICK: Hello! Welcome to Episode 41 of Tabletop Squadron. I’m your hosting game master, Nick. Good to see you. It rained for 20 seconds earlier and now it’s done. We’re gonna go around the table. Everybody say who you’re playing today, and if you spent any experience since the last time we played go ahead and let the listeners know what you spent that on. We’re gonna start off with Laura.

LAURA: Hello! I’m Laura, and I play Xianna’fan, a Twi’lek smuggler. I put my points into Coordination. I remembered.

NICK: [laughs] Good work.

LAURA: So, I got another rank in Coordination, an Agility-based stat.

NICK: Now you can do those sweet flips.

LAURA: Yep.

NICK: Great. Up next we’ve got Cameron.

CAMERON: Hello! I am Cameron, and I play karma Nailo, a Nautolan bounty hunter. For my XP I bought a dedication talent on my Skip Tracer tree…

NICK: Ohh…

CAMERON: …so I upped my Agility to a 4.

NICK: Nice. So now you shoot real, real, real good.

CAMERON: Yes.

NICK: Awesome. And up next we’ve got Hudson.

HUDSON: Hi, I’m Hudson, and I play Tink, a Gigoran slicer. With my XP I didn’t do nothin’, fool, because I HODL’ed.

NICK: [laughs]

CAMERON: What?! [laughs]

NICK: No one—I hope no one gets that reference.

LAURA: I also hope you know that it’s a known meme now that you hold all your experience points and hoard it, and people will be like ‘what is he hoarding it for~?’

NICK: There’s all sorts of theories on the Discord about what you’ve been saving up for.

HUDSON: Is there really?

NICK: Yeah.

HUDSON: [laughs]

CAMERON: I feel like you’re not, though. You just occasionally are like ‘guys, I have 50 XP, what should I buy?’ You’re not hoarding it for a specific thing. You’re like, I just need to keep it, it’s mine.

LAURA: How many XP do you have right now?

HUDSON: Twenty.

LAURA: Okay.

HUDSON: So, that’s an okay amount to hold, because the next time I can get a big stat.

CAMERON: Yeah.

NICK: Hudson, Hudson… HODL.

HUDSON: HODL.

NICK: HODL.

HUDSON: HODL

NICK: [smiling] Alright. Before we get into the recap, let’s start off with the Destiny Roll~

CAMERON: Two dark side.

HUDSON: One dark side.

LAURA: One dark side.

CAMERON: Oh no. [laughs]

NICK: I win! I win the Star Wars… So, things that happened last episode: Xianna landed in a burning neighborhood. HK-67 started acting weird, but seems to have gone back to “normal,” I’m making air quotes. Karma splashed down in a bay…

CAMERON: Ha-ha.

NICK: …and shot the heck out of an Imperial sniper, taking their com link for tactical reasons. Tink was ambushed by a squad of stormtroopers and began to fight back but was rescued by Neato, the orange Rodian mercenary. The entire squad was able to meet up again and is headed for the shield facility on the far side of the city. Am I missing anything?

HUDSON: This is the same shield facility that’s in the Avengers, right?

NICK: No.

[laughter]

HUDSON: Okay, then we’re not missing anything.

NICK: Okay. Thank you.

CAMERON: Karma did get an awesome photo of Tink and Neato doing the movie poster pose.

NICK: Yes, a very fair point. We have a beautiful movie poster style vista of Tink clutching demurely at Neato’s leg.

CAMERON: Mm-hmm.

NICK: Anyway. Yeah, fan artists, get at us. So, we open on the squad hiking through the destroyed streets of Sart. Ahead, in the distance, we see a pulsing column of blue-green light that pierces the sky, aimed towards the shield protecting the city from orbital bombardment, but also trapping the people within. As the crew climbs over an abandoned barricade of blasted out speeders, Neato stands on top of the obstacle and offers a hand to help everyone over. “Well now, watch your slippers there, chums.”

CAMERON: “How many people you got here, Neato?”

NICK: “I spend most of my time doing guerilla work back behind the scenes, you know, doing the old shadow foot one-two, but probably about 50 or 60.”

CAMERON: “Oh! Is that including us already?”

NICK: “No.”

CAMERON: “It is including you, though?”

NICK: “Always including me.”

CAMERON: “Alright. Cool. Just checking.”

HUDSON: “Neato, who’s in charge around here?”

NICK: “You’re asking who’s in charge? That’s who I’m taking you to go see, the militia general. She’s a tough customer, but she’s been keeping her people together this whole time. You’ll like her. Her name’s General Karthage.”

HUDSON: “Alright.”

NICK: “You’ll see her here in a minute, I would imagine.”

LAURA: “Wait, so, but why do we have to go see her?”

NICK: “Let’s do a little bit of cause and effect, see. You want me to work for you. I won’t leave until this fight is over. We gotta finish up the hootenanny, don’t you remember?”

LAURA: “Okay, but you would not be working for us, you would be working alongside us on a different crew for our same employer. We would be coworkers.”

NICK: “I’m not particularly worried about your corporate structure. You won’t get me off this planet until we’ve kicked the Imperials to the galactic curb.”

LAURA: “I don’t think we are incorporated.”

HUDSON: “Incorpor—Did… Who—Did I do the paperwork? Karma?”

CAMERON: “Yeah?”

HUDSON: “Are we an S-Corp or a C-Corp?”

LAURA: “We’re not incorporated!”

CAMERON: “No—“

HUDSON: “I swear I incorporated us.”

LAURA: “Wait. What? I did not sign any paperwork.”

NICK: “That’s some real business savvy.”

CAMERON: “Are we on the board?”

LAURA: “Or am I am employee? Because I did not… [exhales]”

CAMERON: “You filled out the stuff.”

HUDSON: “You’re not on the board.”

CAMERON: “Why would I know?”

HUDSON: “Listen. I’m the business mind here, so I put myself on the board. I’m also acting president, vice president, and secretary.”

CAMERON: “Okay, then why don’t you know what class we are?” [laughs]

NICK: “Statement: I am the CIO and CEO.”

HUDSON: “You know, I might have put HK as the CIO and CEO, now that I’m thinking about it.”

LAURA: “Why does HK get to get on it?”

HUDSON: “Who’s smarter than a robot?”

NICK: “Statement: Because I paid attention during the meeting.”

CAMERON: “There was a meeting?!”

LAURA: “Okay. If Karma does not remember the meting I feel like I cannot be blamed for not remembering it.”

HUDSON: “I haven’t blamed anyone yet. I’m saying that me and HK had a meeting, it was mutually decided that we were going to incorporate, and it was an S-Corp.”

LAURA: “Were the rest of us there?”

NICK: “Remembrance: Tink said we needed to have a board meeting at the resort so that we could do a tax write-off.”

LAURA: “Oh. I did not go to that.”

HUDSON: “So, that actually backfired, because we ended up not paying anything at the resort, so we didn’t actually get that tax write-off, but that was a good idea.”

LAURA: “I don’t think it was…”

CAMERON: “Eh. I mean, we have it for the future. What’s the corporation’s name, Tink?”

[laughter]

LAURA: “You didn’t just call it The Afternoon Delight, did you?”

HUDSON: “We’re ADD, the Afternoon Delight Depot.”

LAURA: “Why?!”

CAMERON: “What?!”

HUDSON: “Depots are hot right now.”

LAURA: “No they are not!”

HUDSON: “Yeah, like there’s the, there’s the, um…”

CAMERON: “Office Depot, and Home Depot.”

HUDSON: “Yeah. There, I didn’t even have to say it. You already knew.”

NICK: “Marketing Statement: We are always adding value.”

HUDSON: “That’s a great line. That’s what we came up with as our slogan, and we’re gonna make big, big credits.”

CAMERON: [laughs]

NICK: “Questioning Statement: What else did you expect from your CIO and CEO?”

HUDSON: “Exactly, and that puts me in the position of VP and secretary, and we’re all set.”

LAURA: “What?!”

CAMERON: “I still don’t understand why you were asking me about how the corporation was classified, then, if I wasn’t invited to the meeting.” [laughs]

HUDSON: “I thought you were there. You weren’t there. You know, that’s anyone’s fault. That’s not—I mean, I’m not assigning blame to anyone, I’m just saying you weren’t there.”

LAURA: “I’m putting the blame on you.”

HUDSON: “I don’t think that’s gonna help the situation at all.”

LAURA: “I think it will.”

NICK: “While I’m particularly interested in your corporate shuffle, chums, do me a favor and duck, please.”

LAURA: “Okie!”

NICK: The crew hits the deck and you hear (charge-up whoosh, release) and you all turn around to see a stormtrooper dissolve into dust at the corner of the street, like they had just turned the corner.

HUDSON: Ooh.

NICK: “The Imperials rarely travel alone, chums. We should probably be skedaddling.”

LAURA: “They do move in herds.”

NICK: “Give it the old hip-hop come on, friends. Let’s go.”

HUDSON: “If you ski, I’ll daddle.”

LAURA: “No. That’s not how that phrase works.”

NICK: “I’m particularly flattered, but we’re a little busy right now.”

HUDSON: “That’s not—“

CAMERON: [laughs]

HUDSON: [laughs]

LAURA: “He didn’t mean it the way it sounded like he meant it. He was meaning something else… Don’t worry. Or do worry.”

HUDSON: “I was taking apart your word, and I—Never mind.”

NICK: Neato shrugs and goes jogging off down the street. So, as you approach the base, you pass a line in the city where the large-scale destruction mostly stops. Large craters stop appearing in the streets, and you can see that the city of Sart was quite idyllic before the bombardment started. The buildings are all pale stucco colors with bright shutters. It looks like you’re outside the range of the artillery in the bay. The shield facility is another kilometer inland. The perimeter of peace, however, is quickly disrupted by the bodies of stormtroopers. It looks like the Imperials have tried to charge this position multiple times and failed so far.

Neato steps out ahead of the group and waves a hand around the corner of an alleyway, the entrance of which has been streaked with blood because bodies have been cleared out of the way to make sure that the passageway stayed clear. Neato steps towards the edge of an alleyway and there’s a sharp turn. He waves his hand around it into the space, and you hear him yell, “Heyo there, chums. If you could point your death dealers to the sky, we’ve got some allies soft-shoeing through the carnage.”

You hear the sound of shifting weapons and the soft call of someone saying, “It’s that military advisor. It looks like he isn’t dead yet.” You round the corner to see high piles of sandbags and durasteel girders twisted into anti-vehicular barriers. A handful of militia members man the walls with a heavy turret and some blaster rifles. They’re all wearing tan uniforms in various states of disarray. The militia members look scorched, dirty, and exhausted.

The voice from earlier comes to you from a lanky Human with dark hair and a data pad strapped to one arm. They yell to you as you approach the barriers. “Who the heck are you?”

HUDSON: “Well, we just actually remembered we’re an S-Corp, but we are the, um, Afternoon Delight Depot.”

LAURA: “No, that is not accurate.”

CAMERON: “Hey, we’re here to help.”

NICK: “Come on, chums, stop aiming at my friends. We’re here to end this little campaign.”

The head of this little outpost finally does aim his blaster rifle to the sky. “Look. Every time  you leave you take some of us with you and you usually come back alone. This is the first time we’ve ever seen you come back with different people. What happened to your contingent?”

Neato looks pretty sad for a second and wipes under his eyepatch. “They didn’t make it, but these ones definitely will this time. I’m very optimistic.” He starts to climb over the barrier. What do you all do?

CAMERON: “I too am optimistic.”

HUDSON: [cheerfully] “We haven’t died yet, have we?”

CAMERON: And I climb over the barrier.

LAURA: “No, I’m pretty sure one of us died, right?”

CAMERON: “Xianna—Xianna. Shh…”

NICK: The militia member standing on the barrier says, “You know, your best bet is probably back here with the rest of us, but I wouldn’t listen to that military advisor if I were you. He has a penchant for suicide missions, and it seems to be everyone else that doesn’t come back, not him.”

CAMERON: “I’m pretty confident in my team’s ability. Like Tink said, we haven’t died yet.”

LAURA: “And I brought extra drugs with me, so…”

NICK: The militia member just kind of shrugs. “Well, just try to take as many down with you when you go,” and steps out of the way and lets you pass.

LAURA: “Okay. It was lovely meeting you. Goodbye~”

NICK: The militia member doesn’t look at you, he’s placed his gun back down on the sandbags and is just guarding this alley, but another one of the militia members makes eye contact with you and then doesn’t know what to do and then smiles awkwardly and twiddles their fingers in your direction. “Well, bye~”

HUDSON: I do a princess wave.

NICK: Elbow-elbow, wrist-wrist?

HUDSON: Yep.

NICK: Nice. [chuckles] So, you continue another couple hundred meters through some twisting alleyways. You can see some choke points. Anybody who’s particularly military-minded would see, oh, these are great places to put explosives in case that first barrier gets taken down, or hey they could collapse this building to try to stop them. this is a pretty well-situated place. They’ve done the best that they could with basically being in a residential industrial area. So, you get through these winding alleyways and you come to an open area around this industrial shield facility. It’s a large dome shaped building probably the size of a small football stadium, and there’s open ground, gravel, and broken up pavement for about 60 meters in a perimeter around it, and that’s where the militia has set up camp. They have tents. You see people driving small speeders back and forth with supplies. A small group of what looks like volunteer civilians, honestly, they don’t have a lot of other options, standing in formation and learning to be militia members. Neato kind of waves an arm at you all. “Well, the command tent’s this way, chums. If we want to get down and dirty that’s the place to do it.”

CAMERON: “Great! We’ll follow you.”

NICK: Neato is walking through camp looking pretty self-assured and just generally at home in this kind of situation. He’s waving at people who greet him, and does a joking shadowbox thing with a large Human with a repeating blaster rifle, they joke for a minute and he ducks under a fake punch and laughs and keeps going. You come to this large pavilion. It’s made out of posts sunk into this gravel yard with camo netting draped over it just to create some shade, and there’s a holo-projector in the middle, and you see the commander of the militia. It’s pretty obvious that’s what she is. Everybody is either getting yelled at by her and then saluting and running away or trying to give her distance depending on what their position is. She’s wearing a soot-stained militia uniform. It’s got a general insignia on the shoulder. She has short cropped, dark, curly hair and a skeletal-looking prosthetic for her right arm which is missing, but it looks pretty functional if a little disrepaired at this point, and she is leaning over a holo-projector basically pointing at it with her presumably chief of staff. Neato walks up and says, “Greetings General, back from the front.” She just rolls her eyes and goes back to what she was doing. Neato looks a little deflated.

HUDSON: “Heya, General.”

CAMERON: Karma’s just gonna stand at ease at the entrance area to the pavilion.

HUDSON: “We’re here to win this war.”

NICK: “Couldn’t have said it better myself, chum.”

She rolls her eyes at Neato and says, “What exactly are you trying to achieve by bringing these civilians into my camp? We don’t have that many people. We’re almost out of supplies.” Neato just kind of shrugs helplessly.

CAMERON: “That’s kind of the point, actually. You don’t have that many people. Also, not civilian.” Flash bounty hunter badge.

NICK: “Great. You’re bringing more mercenaries into the situation. Thank you so much, Neato, the military advisor.”

CAMERON: “Not a mercenary, bounty hunter, different.”

LAURA: “Also, I am not a bounty hunter.”

CAMERON: “Yeah, that’s just me.”

HUDSON: “I’m not a bounty hunter, but I’m here… for this service.”

CAMERON: “Also, assassin droid?” Points at HK.

NICK: “Statement: I am the CIO and CEO of ADD Enterprises.”

LAURA: Oh, we’re an enter—[giggles]

CAMERON: [giggles] Dear lord.

NICK: “You brought an accounting droid?! Why does the accounting droid have a gun that big?”

CAMERON: Karma facepalms, because Cameron just did. [laughs]

HUDSON: [laughs]

LAURA: “Hank is actually very good at shooting people. I think it was first an assassin droid and then later reprogrammed for the accounting stuff. Also, I don’t actually think he is an accounting droid now that I say that.”

NICK: “Speculative Statement: I have always found that being an accountant is more a state of circuits than a programming function.”

CAMERON: “Hmm. We’ll see how it works at the corporation’s end of year reports. We’ll see how you’re feeling.”

LAURA: “Ooh! Do I get a bonus?”

CAMERON: “I don’t think we ever actually figured out if we were employed by the corporation, Xianna.”

LAURA: “Oh, well I don’t know…”

HUDSON: “Y’all are actually volunteer contractors right now.”

CAMERON: “Ooh…”

NICK: “Error. Secondary user receives zero bonus.”

LAURA: “Do I get benefits at least?”

HUDSON: “[laughs] No.”

NICK: [laughs]

LAURA: “You know what? I quit. I never even got hired in the first place, but I quit.”

HUDSON: “Okay.”

LAURA: “I think this is the first time I have ever quit an actual company.”

HUDSON: “You didn’t quit.”

CAMERON: “And you weren’t even actually hired. Anyway, yeah, General, we think that we could be of some assistance.”

HUDSON: “General, I think we could be of all the assistance. You can step aside now and—“

CAMERON: “Whoa. No~!”

LAURA: “No~!”

HUDSON: “Wait, wait, wait. Hank mostly can figure this all out.”

LAURA: “No…”

NICK: “Heh-heh…” The general pulls a cigar out of the front pocket of their uniform and puts it in. you hear a lightsaber igniting noise (whoosh) as they flick a lighter and it lights the cigar, and she takes a couple of puffs on it. “So, you think you’re in charge, huh?”

LAURA: “No.”

NICK: “Be my guest. What does it matter? We’re all gonna die anyway, right?”

LAURA: “Yes.”

CAMERON: “Eventually.”

NICK: “Neato, why have you brought these people here? Let’s just get down to it. I’m open to suggestions at this point.”

Neato says, “Well there, General, I figured with this crack squad of commandos we may be able to turn the tide against old Palpy.”

“Can you stop calling the Emperor old Palpy, please?”

[chuckling]

CAMERON: “I actually rather like it.”

HUDSON: “I like it, too.”

LAURA: “His name is Sheeven. We all know that.”

NICK: “Yeah, you gotta sock it right to Sheevie P!”

[laughter]

HUDSON: [groans]

CAMERON: “Okay, I’m not a fan of that one.”

LAURA: “Yes, Sheeven Theodore Palpatine. That is his full name.”

CAMERON: “General, look at it this way. You don’t care about us. We have guns and are willing to go shoot stormtroopers for you. what have you got to lose? If we die, no big deal, we weren’t here just a second ago.”

NICK: “Now that’s a perspective I can appreciate. On the other hand, you all look reasonably well-suited for this kind of fight, being scoundrels of every flavor that I can see.”

LAURA: “We blew up a destroyer at one point.”

NICK: “Wow.”

CAMERON: “That is true.”

HUDSON: “We did.”

CAMERON: “We do have a lot of experience.”

HUDSON: “I mean, it was mostly me, but like they were there.”

LAURA: “I am legally dead.”

NICK: “On purpose?”

LAURA: [laughs]

NICK: “You blew it up on purpose?”

CAMERON: “Yeah.”

LAURA: “Yes.”

NICK: “Oh… Okay. They blow up by accident more often than you would expect.”

CAMERON: “Actually! Actually, actually, hold up. Two of them, right?”

HUDSON: “No, just one.”

CAMERON: “Two.”

LAURA: “Well, we purposely blew up one on purpose.”

CAMERON: “We purposely shot one when we were with Val.”

HUDSON: “Yeah, yeah.”

LAURA: “We shot one. I don’t think we blew it up.”

CAMERON: “It had a big explosion. Was it 100% destroyed? Questionable, we didn’t stick around long enough to see, but we did make a significant dent.”

LAURA: “That is true.”

CAMERON: “I’mma count that as one and a half.”

NICK: “This Val person sounds like a real biscuit boxer.”

CAMERON: “Oh yeah, you’re gonna love her.”

LAURA: “Yeah.”

NICK: “I’m sure that we’ll get along like ham and mayonnaise, but before we do that, we need to get to the point. General, I have brought with me some special commandos. I found them out in the city. Don’t ask questions. The important thing is that they are all very good at what they do, and we are almost out of supplies, people, and hope. This is our only chance to do something to turn the tide.” Neato looks a lot more serious than he has since you’ve met him.”

CAMERON: “And we have a lot of granola bars and hope, and we’re here to help.” [laughs]

NICK: The general says, “Fine. What kind of plan are you looking at here?” She moves aside so that you can see the holo-map. The map has marks for the cannons that are in the bay and known troop movements. You see that the stormtroopers seem to be mostly moving in pods, groups of three to ten, and from the map movement they just appear in the city and then start to do a search pattern. You would know from your experience that has to do with the drop pods. No one is coming into this city any other way but getting hurled from orbit in basically a steel bloc. “We need to win this and push them out or we are all going to die. They have more resources, more people, and better weapons. The only chance we have is to show them that they’re spending more money than we’re worth ,and I am open to suggestions,” and she points at the map.

Neato looks at it and says, “I’m open to suggestions like your favorite diner at 2 in the morning, chums. The militia here has got sneakers, shock jockeys and bolters. If we could put all our porg eggs in one basket we could stick together and do something grandiose, or we could bundle up in these fox holes, or go for a picnic behind enemy lines. What do you think gets us the most bang for your buck, chums?”

LAURA: “Have you considered just placing bombs on all of their stuff? Just one big boom at once.”

NICK: ‘I’m all for the random shuffle explosion. That’s a lot of fun.”

LAURA: “Well, I mean, you know, it is a classic. Just didn’t know if you had already considered that one.”

CAMERON: “General, of the opposing forces currently on the ground, would you say that the cannons in the bay are the largest threat?”

NICK: You hear a large, rattling boom in the distance and the general gestures with her cigar. ‘Yes, the only reason that we haven’t been completely destroyed is that we’re out of range and they haven’t been able to get them out of the bay because of the shield. Now, getting rid of those would be pretty helpful, but we also have to deal with these stormtroopers.”

CAMERON: Can you describe the setup of these cannons? I was picturing like basically battleships, because it sounded like they were in the bay.

NICK: Yeah, they’re floating in the bay. They’re Imperial landing craft. Picture the allied landing craft from D-Day but a little bit bigger, and sealed, and with the front of one of those flappy wing Lambda shuttles that the Empire has stuck to the front of that with just a big ass artillery piece sitting in the back. “So, these cannons that are in the bay, they were troop carriers that the Empire originally brought in to subjugate us. We were able to boost the effectiveness of the shield and crash them, but they float, so they just attached the artillery pieces to the top and have started bombarding us. If they get those moving again we’re in big trouble.”

CAMERON: “Are they inside the shields?”

NICK: “Yeah, they’re inside the shields.”

CAMERON: “Can they shoot to the outside of the shields?”

NICK: “No they can’t. Pretty much the only way to get in or out is to crawl under the half-meter gap between the shield and the ground.”

HUDSON: “Or dig it deeper.”

CAMERON: “This question may seem slightly weird, but do you have any aquatic personnel here?”

NICK: “No, but we do have some rebreathers. Anyone can be aquatic with rebreathers.”

CAMERON: “Fair enough. How many would you say? Also, how many cannons are there?”

NICK: You would know that. There are five.

CAMERON: Five. Okay, thank you.

NICK: The general does the Tony Stark with the hologram hand motions and pulls up a troop list so that everyone can see. “Neato wasn’t wrong, even if it’s almost impossible to understand him. We have several specialized units that are from the original militia plus all of the civilian volunteers that we could find. We’ve got some shock troops that are pretty good at holding a line, straight forward combat, heavy weapons, they’re reasonably armored. We’ve got a platoon of them. we’ve got a small group of technical engineers and slicers for electronic warfare. They’re mostly working on keeping the shield running for as long as possible, but if you needed them we could do something. Then we have two or three infiltrators. Is it two or three?”

The chief of staff from outside the pavilion says, “It’s just two~ We lost Johnson~”

“Oh, so two infiltrators. Johnson’s probably still alive, but he wandered off. We don’t know where he went.”

HUDSON: “[scoffs] Typical Johnson.”

[chuckling]

NICK: The general kind of shrugs and shows you they’ve got a bunch of volunteers, they’ve got a decent contingent of shock troops, they’ve got some engineers, and then they’ve got a couple of talented infiltrators. Neato says, “So, we could either split up and use our strengths and divide and conquer and do different options, or we could stick together, take what resources we can, and try to do it all in one big bang. Either way, we need to decide before—“ and a louder bang than you’ve heard happens, like the artillery struck closer. “Well, speak of the dark side.”

CAMERON: [laughs]

NICK: He runs out of the pavilion and you see him talking to somebody. If you go chase him, he’s talking to a scout who’s saying, “I don’t know what happened, but the artillery pieces are moving. They’re starting to get out of the bay. It doesn’t look like they can fly, but they’re getting closer.” And there’s another explosion that levels one of the buildings in the alley you just walked through.

CAMERON: “I think at least some of us are going to need to take care of those.”

HUDSON: “Let’s do the big bang plan.”

NICK: “Which one was that? I wasn’t paying attention.”

HUDSON: “It was the second one where we get all our resources together and we all go in all at once and a big bang!”

CAMERON: “Oh, I was thinking the opposite of the splitting and making many mini bangs.”

LAURA: “I was thinking we would just put detonators on everything and then blow it up all at once. So one big boom!”

CAMERON: “So, still one big bang, but splitting up, so a combo effort.”

LAURA: “Well, many little booms that happen at the same time to create one big boom.”

HUDSON: “Like fireworks.”

LAURA: “We could also put fireworks in there.”

HUDSON: “I mean, we wanna give the kids a show.”

LAURA: “It is fun. Always a good idea.”

HUDSON: “As the leader of this operation—“

LAURA: “No~”

CAMERON: “[chuckles dismissively]”

HUDSON: “Alright.”

LAURA: “I feel like you… There’s so many other people who are more qualified for that.”

HUDSON: “Hank, what do you think?”

CAMERON: “He is the CEO.”

[laughter]

NICK: “Strategic Deferment: I think that we should all agree on the best plan of action as a group.”

HUDSON: “[groans]”

CAMERON: [smiling] “I mean, yes. What is your opinion?”

NICK: “Statistical Statement: The most effective plan has a 33.3% chance of success and is tied with two other options depending on Imperial resistance.”

HUDSON: “What is that plan, Hank?”

CAMERON: “Yeah, which plan is it?”

LAURA: “Hank!”

NICK: “Error. Error. Calculations lost.”

[laughter]

LAURA: “Damn it, Hank! Ugh. I told you, he is all buggy. Something is wrong with Hank.”

NICK: And then HK-67 stands up a little straighter and cocks his head at an angle you wouldn’t expect that neck joint to be able to go to. “Listen, we could really go either way with this one. We could all split up and probably at least one of us will die, my money’s on Tink, or we could stick together and try to just blow a hole through the middle, and then we all probably die, at an equal rate to Tink, if we split up.”

CAMERON: “So I think we’re all agreed on that. What I’m asking, HK, is which one would you rather do?”

NICK: “I don’t care. You meat bags are gonna die way before I do.”

HUDSON: “He has a good point.”

LAURA: “He does have a good point.”

CAMERON: “What I guess I’m asking—Where do you rank me and Xianna’s lives against Tink’s?”

LAURA: “Yes, because we do need to start some sort of tontine so that way whoever lives wins all the money. Also, Hank cannot go on the tontine seeing as how he will not die a normal death compared to the rest of us, but I am putting my money on Tink dying first.”

CAMERON: [laughs]

LAURA: “So, I do like the odds between me and Karma of me being the last one alive.”

NICK: HK straightens back up to standing at attention like he normally does. “Ranking Statement: Xianna is a secondary user. Karma is a primary user. Boss Man is a primary user but has low odds of living.”

CAMERON: [laughs]

HUDSON: “I think that answered your question.”

LAURA: “It did not, but sure.”

CAMERON: “So, here’s my thing. Tink, this is not to be taken personally at all, but you are not gifted with a blaster. I feel like that’s more of a fact than an opinion and we can all agree on it and just move on. So, where I think your strengths really lie are going to be in dealing with computers, or in close combat, but stormtroopers are much more likely to shoot you before they get into range of your axe.”

HUDSON: “What if I could throw my axe in a way that would cut off three people’s ears?”

LAURA: “Can you? And why their ears?”

CAMERON: “Okay. One, the ears, not gonna really slow the stormtroopers down.”

HUDSON: “It’ll distract them. they can’t hear out of that side now.”

CAMERON: “Nn…”

LAURA: “But they can hear out of the other side!”

CAMERON: “But also, now you don’t have an axe. That was gonna be my second point.”

HUDSON: “No-no-no, it comes back to me like a magic boomerang.”

LAURA: “Wait. Why does the boomerang have to be magic? Does it not just do that?”

HUDSON: “Because my axe is not a boomerang!”

CAMERON: “I don’t think you got that upgrade, for the boomerang axe.”

HUDSON: “I did not get that upgrade. I’m kind of pulling your leg a little bit. I didn’t get that upgrade. I’ll go with what you say.”

CAMERON: “Okay… So, I’m thinking, you can—“

HUDSON: [laughs] I like Nick’s face during all this.

LAURA: [laughs]

CAMERON: Nick is broken. We’re sorry.

NICK: [smiling] No, I’m planning a side adventure called Tink and the Magic Boomerang.

CAMERON: [laughs] “So, I’m thinking, if you took a couple of the other techies and went and did some cyber warfare, you could potentially interfere with the destroyer.”

HUDSON: “Can I name the group I take?”

LAURA: “Sure, why not.”

CAMERON: “Sure!”

HUDSON: “Alright.”

CAMERON: “I wouldn’t recommend incorporating them, I don’t think it’s worth it at this point, but…”

HUDSON: “No, there’s not really any kind of office or website to do that from this area of the war.”

NICK: “Suggestion: You could make them an LLC.”

HUDSON: “That’s… [sighs] No. We don’t have that… Just no.”

[laughter]

HUDSON: “What I’m gonna do is, I’m gonna take myself and Hackx R Us, my group, and we’re gonna go and we’re going to perform our mission.”

CAMERON: “I think that’s a great name, Tink.”

LAURA: “I don’t, but I think it’ll work.”

NICK: Neato perks up. “If you and the hackers are planning on taking something out of commission, there are some large radio dishes over in the technological sector. If you could sneak there in one piece you might be able to interfere with their communications.”

HUDSON: “Oh… I could do that. That’s old school stuff.”

CAMERON: “So, you’re super sneaky. General, excuse me, how combat-ready are your techies?”

NICK: “They can shoot? I wouldn’t put them on the front lines if I could avoid it. Also, if you could keep them from dying that would be great, because they’re the only thing keeping this shield running.”

HUDSON: “We’ll take all of them!”

LAURA: “No…”

CAMERON: “I don’t think you need all of them. I’m just thinking—“

HUDSON: “I want a battalion of 30 people!”

LAURA: “No…”

CAMERON: “Okay, that seems excessive.”

NICK: “That’s wrong for multiple reasons.”

[laughter]

CAMERON: “You just need a couple of the best, because you’re awesome, so you don’t need a huge team.”

HUDSON: “You’re right.”

CAMERON: “You just need a small team to assist you.”

HUDSON: “Yeah, it’s mostly me.”

CAMERON: “However—Exactly. It would probably be beneficial if you had some fire support with you, though, as they are not as martially gifted as you, and as we discussed you are close combat.”

HUDSON: “Yeah, you’re right. I need some snipers and tanks and…”

CAMERON: “You need at least one heavy shot with you.”

NICK: Neato is just like whistling and looking at the sky and stroking his blaster rifle.

CAMERON: “As you are trying to sneak through a city that we are unfamiliar with, I might suggest you take Neato with you.”

HUDSON: “Neato, would you like to join my battalion?”

NICK: “What a whiz bang suggestion, Karma!”

HUDSON: “Alright. Looks like I’m going out. Bye everyone!”

CAMERON: [laughs]

LAURA: “Okay, bye~!” The moment he turns around and starts leaving, Xianna turns around. “Okay, so 20 Credits Tink dies on this mission. Who wants to take that?”

NICK: HK raises his hand to a perfect 90 degree angle. “Calculating Statement: I will give you 2 to 1 odds.”

LAURA: “Okay, so, but do you want to bet, or…?”

NICK: “Yes.”

[laughter]

LAURA: “Okay, cool. I was not sure if you were just giving me the odds in order to have them.”

NICK: “Wait. I’m betting that Tink is going to die. You think Tink will live?”

LAURA: “No. I said Tink will die…”

NICK: “Oh. No bet.”

LAURA: “…so you would be betting for him to live.”

NICK: “No bet.”

LAURA: “What? Okay. What if we do the other way around? I’ll take that.”

NICK: “Bet.”

LAURA: “Okay cool.”

CAMERON & HUDSON: [laughs]

LAURA: “So 2 to 1 odds that—“ [laughs]

CAMERON: Oh gosh.

HUDSON: Xianna thinks I’m gonna live.

LAURA: So, Hank has…

CAMERON: It turns out HK actually has so much money that we just don’t know about.

LAURA: …Tink dies…

NICK: I have a plan if I need to get 40 Credits for this.

LAURA: …Xianna has that Tink lives.

NICK: Let the listener be showed that Laura is literally writing this down in like a bookie book in her lap right now.

LAURA: Oh yeah. So, I have bet 20 Credits on that one. Okay. “Alright Hank, we’ll see. I mean, I hope he lives now, because I have bet money, but…”

CAMERON: “I mean, I hope you had hope that he’d live before. Anyway. Now that they’re gone, we—“

LAURA: “Well no, if I was betting for him to die I would have wanted the credits.”

CAMERON: “[exasperated splutter and sigh]”

NICK: At this point Neato looks up and sees that Tink is just striding purposefully back towards the perimeter of the camp. “Wait, chum! Wait. The engineers are the other way.” And he runs off to go get Tink. While you’re having this conversation you see Tink and Neato gesticulating in the background and then they turn and start jogging off towards the shield facility where presumably the engineers would be.

The general says, “Well, that gets them out of my hair, and maybe they’ll do something helpful. You seem armed to the teeth and you have a cool coat.”

LAURA: “I do! It has many pockets.”

NICK: “I would imagine if the Imperials are starting to advance on this position they’re gonna have a lot of ground troops protecting their artillery. You can go behind enemy lines, I can spare you a few troops to help, or you can set up here and we can try to take them down with the defenses we already have in place. Up to you.”

CAMERON: “What’s your stockpile of explosives looking like?”

NICK: “We have Some. Are you looking for rocket launchers or satchel charges?”

CAMERON: “I mean, a rocket launcher would be nice, but also what I was thinking was, when I fell I landed in the bay with the cannons. I would like to, A, destroy some cannons, and B, potentially steal at least one cannon.”

NICK: “Steal a cannon…”

CAMERON: “So, if I could get at least a couple of folks to come with me, but particularly some of your sturdy combat troops, and some rebreathers, and some explosives, to go do that…”

NICK: “Hey, purple girl, are you going with her?”

LAURA: “Sure, why not.”

NICK: “Great. I can give you two of my strongest point men. Does that work for you? They can at least carry things.”

CAMERON: “Sure.”

NICK: “Alright. Smith, Weathers, come here.” Two tall, buff guys with crew cuts—one’s got dark hair, one’s got blonde hair—you’re not sure which is which and the general doesn’t bother to specify…

CAMERON: Eh, that’s fine.

NICK: …snap to attention. They’ve got blaster carbines, and unlike most of them they’re not wearing the long sleeve tan coats buttoned up. They’ve got cargo pants and combat boots and are wearing the really thin tank tops in dark brown.

CAMERON: Nice.

NICK: They snap to attention, and they say “Yes ma’am” in unison.

LAURA: “Okay, so which one of you is going to let me do a piggyback ride on the way there? Because I do not want to walk. Heh.”

NICK: The one with dark hair drops attention. “Heh. Yeah, yeah, sure,” and he holds out his arm for you.

LAURA: “Yes!” Heh.

NICK: As you grab it, he judo throws you over his hip so that you land… Do you land on your feet or do you land on your butt?

LAURA: On my feet!

NICK: Yeah, you’re super agile.

CAMERON: She’s very agile.

NICK: So you land like that and he looks super surprised and lets go quickly. “Oh, sorry about that… but no, I’m not carrying you through a warzone. I figured if you made it here you’d be pretty capable.”

LAURA: “But… [huffs] But I mean I am capable of doing it, but I do not want to~ Karma! Tell one of them to let me do a piggyback ride. I am tired~!”

CAMERON: “Xianna, you can walk.”

LAURA: “I am tired…”

CAMERON: “Take some drugs. It’ll be fine.”

NICK: What did I name them? “Yeah Weathers, she doesn’t want to~” says the other soldier. [laughs]

LAURA: “Look, do not make fun of me.”

CAMERON: “Soldier, I need three rebreathers and a bunch of explosives, now.”

LAURA: “And if you make fun of me again I will shoot you.”

NICK: “Sounds like we have an understanding.” He snaps to. He doesn’t salute.

CAMERON: That’s fine.

NICK: “The armory tent’s this way. Let’s just go collect everything we need,” and they jog off.

CAMERON: “HK, you’re coming with us, I guess.”

NICK: “Statement: This is acceptable.” HK jogs off after you all.

CAMERON: “I bet I can find you some organics to kill.”

LAURA: “HK, can you swim?”

CAMERON: “We’re not putting him in the water.” [laughs]

NICK: “Absolutely not.”

LAURA: “Can you float?”

NICK: “Not even a little bit.”

CAMERON: [laughs]

LAURA: “What about floating?”

NICK: “No.”

LAURA: “Can you like sink to the bottom and walk along the bottom of the ocean floor?”

NICK: “I can sink to the bottom.”

CAMERON: [laughs]

LAURA: “But then can you walk along the ocean floor?”

NICK: “No.”

LAURA: “I feel like I saw that in a holo-vid one time, like all sorts of skeleton pirates walked on the ocean floor to get where they were going. Could you not do that?”

CAMERON: “He just wants to be where the people are.”

NICK: So, we get a shot from General Karthage’s perspective. She gets down to the last two inches of her cigar and drops it into the dirt and stubs it out. We see karma and Xianna and these two soldiers. The two soldiers are moving at double time. Karma, Xianna and Hank are walking and bantering and joking. We see Tink and Neato running up the stairs to the door, and Neato goes to hit the door panel to open the door in the distance and it doesn’t work and Tink shoves him out of the way and does something that gets the door to open and they disappear into the factory. General Karthage stubs out her cigar and says, “The Force sure works in mysterious ways.” And that’s the end of the episode!

ALL: Ba-naaa~!

## Outro

CAMERON: Thanks for listening to Tabletop Squadron. If you’ve enjoyed our show please consider logging into iTunes and giving us a five-star review. Five-star reviews will help new listeners to find the show and will make the squad giggle like school children when we read them. If you’re so inclined, you can also help support the show through our Patreon which can be found in the show notes, on our website, and basically anywhere we post things. We have all sorts of Patreon levels including some of my favorites: Bantha Buddy, Tarkin’s Underwear Drawer, and Build-A-Beru which all have fabulous rewards and super great names.

Xianna’fan is played by Laura Penrod. She can be found on Twitter at @cheerio_buffet.

Tink is played by Hudson Jameson. He can be found on Twitter at @hudsonjameson.

Karma Nailo is played by me, Cameron Robertson. You can find me on Twitter at @midnightmusic13.

Our game master is Nick Robertson, and you can find him on Twitter at @alias58.

Our intro song is Space Jam by Pablo Ribot.

Additional music by James Gunter.

Follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram at @Tabletop_Squad, and join our Discord and share all of your food and cute pet photos with us. We also sometimes talk about Star Wars. You can find the link to join our Discord on our website and in our pinned tweet. See you next time.