SW Adventure The Jewel of Yavin

Star Wars – Adventures

Edge of the Empire

The Jewel of Yavin

Running the Game

5 sessions 29th June 2018 to 24th August 2018

The characters are contracted to steal a gemstone. What could go wrong is the call for adventure…

The story opens with them arriving on Yavin as part of a deal to pay off some debts as well as earn a little cash on the side. The agent with the job wants them to steal a Jewel known as the Jewel of Yavin, a rare and expensive item, as a three part operation. First they need in infiltrate the Jewel’s auction, ramp up the bidding and steal the winning bid. Next they need to steal the Jewel before the theft of the money is discovered. And three they needed to escape with the money and the jewel with the organiser of the whole operation.

They were told by their agent, that they needed to sort out the first two on their own while they sort out their exit. The first two needed to be done consecutively or they would not have time to plan the other. They were given a list of attendee’s to the auction event, the location the jewel in a museum and an easy way to get entry into the event if they “win a race” in some cloud cars.

This was meant to be a intricate planned robbery, with multiple side stories learning about all the bidders and how to get them to increase their bids. They were given a short time frame, a couple of days with the cloud car race being run a couple of hours before the auction, and the escape set for a couple of hours after the auction. A little wiggle room for change in circumstances, or improvisation, but not alot of spare time to the pre-auction time.

To start with this time crunch, my players decided to go to a bar and have one of their number pretend to be “Ali the Hutt” the crimelord (from a previous storyline) to get immediate service and free food. This worked out, but caused complications later. After wasting half the first of two days in the bar they moved on to the cloud car race and spent the rest of the day investigating the other races in trying to undermine and sabotage their chances. They got caught up with the sabotage planning for race and less about why they were trying to win the race, that they were risking imprisonment for their behaviour.

The character who had pretended to be “Ali the Hutt” was taken by the security forces to meet with the governor of cloud city “Lando” and was presented with the atrocities she was claiming to have done and figured out that pretending to a a crime lord the Hutt’s were associating crimes they didn’t want linked to themselves was a bad thing. She spent hours dining and talking managed to score a ticked to the auction as his guest. Which was the whole reason they were doing the race was to get an invite to the auction. And this was the end of half the time they had allotted to prepare for their run.

They did not do any legwork on the targets, nor the location of the Jewel and had to be forceably told by me as the GM that they have wasted half their preparation and investigation time not doing any prep. Then I had to listen to at least half an hour of objections on how they wanted to continue to undermine the competitors in the cloud car race up to the start of the race. They felt I was not being fair as a GM to remind them about the actual story they were ignoring and the time frame left bring half a day. So under player objection they have a half hearted attempt at casing the museum, getting plans of the place, then running out of time they start the cloud car race they no longer needed to win using up the last of the heist prep time.

They spend most of a session doing the cloud car run, with the characters splitting their forces to work with a couple of the races to give them more options on winning. Luckly the teams they had sabotaged were not the ones they chose to race with, and that none of their interference was lethal so the authorities while suspicious were still gathering evidence and put their ship on lockdown for possible cheating due to their bets on the race outcome, and their actions to date. This was not discovered till later in the game, as they had not thought to go back to their ship.

So after a simplified race sequence, due to all the time spent elsewhere and too few characters actually in the race, they managed to win. I did have the non participating players roll for the non-player characters in the race, but skipped a few segments as it reminded me too much like the pod race in episode one. The whole race would have been tedious, keeping to the highlights we managed to have fun if it did drag a little near the end. They were given a back account with the winnings (locked out till the investigations were complete) and went from the winners circle to preparation for the auction event. If I was to run it again I would most likely skip the race as it does not really add to the story and the players wasted more time on it than they should have.

So they then moved onto the Auction event, which they now had two tickets needing only one for entry and had to interact with the all the bidders without anything but the description of them in the auction room. So they split up to talk to the various people one on one during the bidding war and with a lit of fudging from me giving them pointers they should not have had due to lack of investigation, they manage to get the bidding up. While this was nowhere near where it could have gone if they had actually done the run’s homework and really played all the contenders against each other. They got about 10% of what they should have been able to score.

So just by accident, they teamed up the notorious force user in the party who had a file dedicated to him in imperial intelligence, with the imperial intelligence agent for the sector. So while the others were busy trying to get a better price for the Auction, the force user was lead outside and captured by Imperial Stormtroopers and taken to their shuttle for interrogation and easy transport off world.

Once the Auction was over they charged off and rescued their lost force user with it all being recorded by the imperials. Then they went into the museum and proceeded to break out the jewel with very little planning and lucky rolls, and to be honest more fudging from me to make it happen as I didn’t want it all to fall apart due to lack of planning, you can only help so much before it feels like no one is playing the game.

So completing the heist of the jewel with intervention from a lost jedi who was at the auction as one of the attendee’s (another missed opportunity) they pull lightsabers and discuss the jewel while levitating them both up infront the guards and camera’s further compromising their secrecy.

Once that was done, and as the GM I reminded them the first task was to steal the Auction winning bid (after getting the bidders to increase it) they took off after the banking robot dealing with the transaction. This required major fudging on my part, I should just have let the money get away due to no planning or information gathering but I had them spend a destiny point and get lucky.

Once they got the cash, then the agent who hired them betrays them (much like a shadowrun) and they are forced to fight back to their starship, finding it locked down, send some of their team to the starport control to undo the lockdown order, which they do with force. They escape with the Jewel destroyed by the Jedi and the funds technically unavailable as the account it transferred to was not hidden well enough to not get locked down straight away by the banking system (they did not get access to the funds as part of the advenure, dividing their spoils without actually checking to make sure they got it) so they made it off world and concluded the storyline without dealing with the agent who betrayed them.

This adventure was fun to run and would happily do it again with another group, or even convert it over to my Shadowrun game with little difficulty. The cast of characters in this story is amazing compared to nearly every other adventure I have run from Fantasy Flight Games. The characters are really the game and it was a shame my players missed the opportunity to interact with most of them.

Episodes of the adventure:

• Introduction (18 pages)
• Odds and Opportunity (34 pages)
• The Greatest Caper (23 pages)
• Escape to the Clouds (12 pages)

Bespin Contents

Set on Bespin, you get to meet the following characters in the adventure (Rival unless specified):

• Arend Shen – (nemesis)
• Aris Shen – (nemesis)
• Marus Grayson – male human (nemesis)
• Captain Bialar Sells – male human (nemesis)
• Baron Administrator Lando Calrission – Human Male (Nemesis)
• Lobot, Cyborg Bureaucrat – Human Male (Nemesis)
• Wing Guard Officer – Human (minion)
• Wing Guard Sergeant – Human
• Ugnaught Laborer
• Lutrillian Merchant
• Tabarith’s Thugs
• Bhurra, Lutrillian Thug
• Burr Naxis – Male Defel
• Gantel Dro – Male Defel
• Kaltho the Hutt (Nemesis)
• Shreya Ordassa – Female Togruta (nemesis)
• Mil Mikkir – Male Chagrian (nemesis)
• Pos Podura – male Twi’lek (nemesis)
• Elaiza – female human (nemesis)
• Vorse Tabarith – male human (nemesis)
• Zekra Fol – female human (nemesis)
• Government Security Droid
• Gerrol Hunn, Male Corellian
• Chara Tull, Female Human
• The Carbine, male Near human
• Garulo, male Xexto
• Yarryn Rayzer, male human
• K4-76A, modified security droid
• Tibannuck, creature
• G-100 Remote Banking Droid (nemesis)
• Private Security Guard (minion)
• Security Droid
• Shen’s Goons (minions)
• K4 Security Droid
• Yacht Crew (minion)
• Bespin Defense Force Pilot (minion)

New Vehicles

Vehicles introduced in the adventure:

• Storm IV Cloud Car x2
• Velkers, creature
• Arrow-7 Airspeeder, Customised
• The Venture, Courier-Class Yacht

New Vehicle Modifications

Vehicles modifications introduced in the adventure:

• Augmented Buffer
• Maneuvering Thrusters
• Repulsorlift Enhancement
• Upgraded Firepower

Concluding Thoughts

This adventure would work in a casino else where as well as a good grounding for setting more storylines in Clopud City at Bespin.

I like the rules for the race, it was quite cinematic, and I can reuse this in other scenarios quite easily.

It was hard to get a group of people involved in who wanted to work on other things. It really needs a balanced group able to take on multiple roles and follow different leads at the same time.

Content Updates

• 2021-08-01 – Updated layout and links.
• 2020-04-27 – Structure and content.

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