A Failed Review of the Ultimate Alien Anthology

 

 

"Boots off the counter, sir!"

I have, by hook and by crook, come into possession of another copy of the Star Wars Ultimate Alien Anthology (the first RPG book I ever owned, and then sold). For old times’ sake I wanted to give it a read and write something about it for the blog; it’s legitimately terrible. I say that with some amount of affection but that doesn’t stop it from being bad on just about every criteria you can judge it on. 13-year-old me didn’t care, of course, I barely knew what TTRPGs were when I got this as a birthday gift. 

I’d considered for a moment doing a Marsworms-style alien-by-alien review series, but abandoned that very quickly when the double whammy of Star Wars’ bedrock dependency on “stock-character-as-species” combined with a book that is trying to convert all that into RPG material without the page space or editorial leeway to expand on anything would result in a review where most of the entries would be “they’re just a type of guy and there is fundamentally nothing interesting or engaging about them.”

Then I considered taking advantage of that type-of-guy-ness and reverse engineering all those aliens to Mothership NPCs, but that fell prey to a similar issue; Star Wars aliens are already stock characters, so translating them into stock characters is redundant. I could do it, and probably pretty easily, but I don’t think the end result would be all that interesting.

Then I was was spurred by an aside of Austin Walker’s in A More Civilized Age, where he talks about how Star Wars is historically and presently disinterested in portraying culture. That aside lives rent-free in my head, because I suffer from a particular kind of cognitive dissonance where the cantina scene in A New Hope is simultaneously my canonical conceptualization of What Sci-Fi Is and one of the most egregious examples of what I hate in the genre. But it got me thinking - if I were to compile the scraps of Star Wars cultural world building that exist (for example, in this book), could I remix them into a single actually interesting fictional culture (or group of neighboring cultures)? Even if I couldn’t, what patterns would I find in the corpus? It would be an interesting look (well, for a given value of interesting) as to what gets classified as the Other in Star Wars when one strips out “stock-character-as-species” from the equation.

Well, that fell apart swiftly as well, for similar reasons: there’s only the barest crumbs of material to build with in this book, which means that any sort of transformative synthesis is more work than it’s worth. Source material that doesn’t support that sort of reading filtered through a book that doesn’t have the space to do it justice even if it did. Everyone knows Star Wars doesn’t give a shit about this sort of stuff, Austin was stating a truism that we all, to some degree, already know. But man, it really sinks in when you try to read a Star Wars book and you’re specifically focusing on those details. It’s like watching the rubber pseudoflesh rot off the animatronic.

So, in lieu of all that, I’m just going to do a regular-ass ol’ review of a book from over 20 years ago that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

The Regular-Ass Review Portion

The UAA was published as part of the Star Wars Saga Edition RPG, being the adaptation of D&D 3.X. It was released between Episodes 2 and 3, and so doesn’t include aliens from Revenge of the Sith, Clone Wars, or the tail end of the old EU books. Still, it includes over 200 species from the films, novels, some games, and some ported over from the WEG RPG. Not all of them are created equal.

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What in the actual hell is Kit Fisto doing on the cover. What is this stance? Who approved this? 

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I’ll give the book credit for having art for all 183 aliens, split into lineups of 4-5 species at a time. I appreciate that the artists have distinct enough styles that, if you showed any two lineups side-by-side it’d be clear that they were made by different people without being particularly distracting. They don’t get a lot of room to play around, all the poses are pretty stiff, and many of the designs are aggressively mid even by rubber mask alien standards, but still.

**

Layout is what you’d expect for the era: two column with small text and standardized templates for each species: overview, personality, physical description, homeworld, language, example names, age grades, adventurers, species traits, and commoner stats. Then there are some prestige classes and feats at the end.

Age and commoner stats are 3.X-isms I am exceptionally glad people stopped wasting page space on. Like at the very least if you're going to have all this cruft, have the decency to use standardized keywords like MtG.

**

Overviews are very inconsistent in terms of length, with some species getting over half a page and some getting barely a paragraph despite the book being long enough (223 pages) that you could conceivably dedicate an entire page to each if you were smart about your spacing and cut out the cruft.

**

If there is a recurring theme to be had in the species overviews, it’s that first contact scenarios tend to go absolutely belly-up in Star Wars. Everyone’s getting conquered by their neighbors, or destabilized by rapid technological advancement via contact with the greater galaxy, or exploited by offworld economic forces, or enslaved by the Empire, so on and so on. It’s the antithesis of Star Trek and its Prime Directive, not only in content but in how much focus is given to it. This all comes with the territory of Star Wars as a Wagnerian Western, no surprise there, and I point it out primarily for how good it serves as a teaching example of how narrative focus and bias can elide or silence themes that are explicitly in the text.

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In a turn of opinion that would likely shock and appall 13-year-old me, rereading this book has brought me round to the idea that Star Wars shouldn’t have aliens at all. Or at least you would lose nothing with an all-human cast. 

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It's an odd experience to go through this and see everyone put on the same level of importance vis-a-vis their positioning in the galaxy: extras in the movies, big players in the novels, weirdos from comics no one remembers and some more weirdos from WEG modules are all treated with more or less the same amount of attention, to the point where if this book was the only exposure someone had to Star Wars, they'd probably be disappointed in how many entries are one-offs in the actual franchise.

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Playing as the Yuuzhan Vong get an entire appendix (entire = 3 pages); I still remember being shock-and-awed by feelings of "oh shit there's this huuuuuuge thing going on after Return of the Jedi!", because when you're 13 getting that info from secondhand sources like this or the Essential Guides series it sounds so, so much cooler than the actual content. Got a real oral history type thing going on, severed from the EU novels.

Anyway, the YV are what happens when you have a potentially good setup and then coward out: they should have been fucked up modular fleshbeast chimeras bearing no resemblance to anything else in the franchise, and that version of them absolutely should have shown up out of nowhere during the Takodana battle in Force Awakens. 

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Instead of the usual shotgun-commentary on the aliens themselves since there are so many of them, I'm just going to do 12 that I like (from this book specifically) in no particular order. You could get a solid fantasy setting out of these ones, I think.

Ithorian - Fucking iconic. Instantly recognizable silhouette, they live in giant floating cities above the planetwide jungle they worship as a god. If Ithorians aren’t in your top tier we cannot be friends. 

Caamasi - They have a one-note deal as the super-nice empath guys who are friends to everyone (and are predictably fucked over by the Empire), but to the point of other species using their name just to denote far-away friends, and this one works for me. The empath thing is sufficient justification for Star Wars: yeah, if you can feel other people's negative emotions you're going to try and avoid being a jerk.

Togruta - Canonically (according to this book), Ahsoka (who did not exist at the time it was written) has echolocation, eats live alien rats by snapping their necks with her teeth, and has to deal with microaggressions insinuating that she is venomous. Stop being cowards, Disney! Let Ahsoka eat alien rats! Anyway, striking design, the rat thing is a fun bit of weird, there's some broad motions at a collectivist society and having to avoid major predators on their homeworld, which are not developed but are at least something.

Kel Dor - Yes, they look like a shriveled ballsack with a gas mask; No, I do not care. I’m with Filoni on this one, Plo Koon is sick. Picked Kel Dor as my PC in Jedi Academy. Sure, they don't have a whole lot going for them from a lore perspective but they are cool fucked-up guys in space and sometimes that's enough. Also apparently they're related to the Tognath from the Disney films i.e. those two cool motherfuckers that Saw has in his crew.

Jawa - They deserve better. They’re weird little guys who love garbage, they should have some incredible goblinmode fits, not just uniform brown robes. Obvious squandered potential. Gimme the garbage goblins. Star Wars is nearly 50 years old, and the idea of having the signature Weird Little Technically Savvy Guy alien pop out of a maintenance hatch and go “No can do, bossman, the flim-flam’s been shmeckledorfed” is still fully beyond the series’ imaginary. What are we even doing.

T'surr - Deepest of the deep cuts, these guys first appeared in some kid-focused books published by Scholastic which I had never heard of before looking up where they first appeared right at this moment. They're big fucked up blue bad guys and you know what, why not. Fucked up space orcs. The color and the being huge give me vibes of the Koloss (though they would not come later and this is me projecting into the past like it's fucking New Sun), which are one of Sanderson's creations that I really like.

Arcona - These guys actually have enough material to qualify a basic fantasy culture: communities of large extended families, men acting as primary domestics, group decision making, common use of noisms in even casual speech, and a society that was nearly destroyed by the introduction of highly addictive drugs by outside forces looking to economically exploit them (a la opium in China) - there's stuff here to work with, and they're not Just One Thing. Welcome surprise, I wouldn't have put them on the shortlist before now.

Hutt - As far as giant space slugs go, not a great design compared to the wild shit that earth slugs can get up to. As far as coding, not the greatest. But they do have a lot of interesting parts: an ancient space empire that's not a particularly great place to live but has remained functional for longer than anyone else, mafia-style inter-clan politics, profiting off of the dysfunction of their neighbors. Yeah they're "what if the idea of a drug lord was also a slug", but they're closer to the drug lords in House of the Scorpion - they're so well-established and so entrenched that they can operate in the open and no one else can do anything about it. Good antagonist fuel.

Noghri - God, could you imagine if Leia rolled up in Force Awakens with a couple of Noghri bodyguards? People would lose their shit. And for good reason, Noghri are cool. They have a good gimmick (planet was fucked by space battle during the war, Empire rolled in and basically extorted service for ecological aid that never came), they give Leia something cool to interact with that's specific to her, you can easily get some good comedy out of them (they are serious little guys, good to play off of), they're all-around solid. 

Ortolan - Apparently, Max Rebo is supposed to be playing the organ with his feet, but you can’t see it because of how he’s positioned. Anyway, a fat little blue alien elephant guy is a fun muppet alien and you gotta have one good muppet in the crew.

Duros - I love that they’re just Gray-ass Grays. They have a very vintage 70s sort of vibe, inherited from back when Star Wars drew from sources that weren’t Star Wars - “here are the Grays, they were one of the first species to start exploring the galaxy and they absolutely obliterated the environment of their homeworld so nowadays it’s basically just a giant radioactive dump.”

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So there we go. Not a good book, Star Wars is fucking weird, sometimes you have to go through four drafts before something clicks. I'll save the one-by-one reviews for a better book.

Star Wars Movies that Don't Exist and Never Will

Since I am listening to THREE different Star Wars podcasts right now, this was an inevitability. As there is nothing Disney likes more than announcing projects that will never happen, I figured I could score some points by not wasting anyone’s time with false theatrics and skipping directly ahead to the part where they don’t exist.

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1. The film focuses on a Sparticus-style slave revolt against the Hutts, led by Baduk the Klatoonian . The film follows the revolution over several years from the initial colosseum riots to the capture of the planet’s chief overseer, but ends in tragedy just short of success; Republic security forces and a detachment of Jedi are deployed against the revolutionaries, breaking their war effort before they are able to secure the planet’s primary spaceport. At the very end, as clone troopers fresh from Kamino dig mass graves for the revolutionaries, we learn that the Republic gauged that the Hutts’ continued cooperation is more valuable to the war effort against the Separatists than a new and unstable polity. “It has never been the Jedi’s role to free slaves,” one of the knights says matter-of-factly.

** 

2. A non-combat rebel cell runs Bochi’s Salvage and Repair as a front for distributing fake transport visas to people fleeing the Imperial occupation of their planet. The only human characters featured are the Imperials: everyone else is an alien. Trio of main characters: a twi’lek, a droid, and a vratix. (We will be throwing a bone to the boring assholes with the purse strings by having a basically-just-a-human alien as one of the leads, but she’ll be playing against typecasting: no one ever thinks about the twi’lek ex-dental assistants.)

Central to the plot is an attempt to smuggle an entire family of Force-sensitives onto an approaching cargo freighter while dodging the investigation of suspicious Imperial bureaucrats. While the family does escape, the film ends with the cell splitting up and going to ground, having lured the Imperial investigators into a trap with a jury-rigged spaceship engine. 

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3. Set a few years pre-Phantom; two padawans mere weeks away from knighthood form an unlikely interspecies romance (let’s have some fun: a Caamasi and a…Sauvax). They are found out by a third party and reported to the Council, who puts the pressure on them to end the relationship quietly. Before they make their decision they are contacted by an anonymous figure, who reveals exactly how common these secret relationships are within the Order all the way up to the Council (If you ever wanted to know who Kit Fisto’s friend-with-benefits is, and whomst among us has not, this movie will provide you with answers.)

The pair are encouraged to go public with their story, serving as media figureheads and giving the whistleblower an opportunity to leak the data. The stranger frames this as part of their quest to reform the Order, believing it to be hypocritically focused on minor dogmas rather than actual institutional issues. The young lovers are persuaded, and decide to go to the media.

What follows is unfortunate, but predictable. The Order retaliates, using its considerable resources to bury the story and hide the leaks. The lovers are barred from knighthood, demoted to the Jedi Service Corps, and in an episode of spite that only Prequel Yoda could muster they are assigned to opposite sides of the galaxy.

But since I am a sucker for these sorts of things, we get a post-Endor epilogue where the two re-unite by coincidence / the Force; both of them respond to Luke’s call to any surviving Force adepts as he builds his academy. I want the audience bawling their god-damn eyes out over an elderly lobster-person.

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4. A character drama centered on an impoverished alien family on the Outer Rim as they weigh handing over their daughter to a passing Jedi knight. The family’s culture practices a native Force tradition centered on community and relationship (and is thus diametrically opposed to the Jedi and their repressive monasticism), but younger generations (such as one of the child’s parents) are more and more aligning themselves with the greater galactic supraculture in the hopes of eventually getting Republic membership to aid their struggling economy (this does not work out well). Offering up a new Jedi would be a step towards the betterment of all, or so they believe - encouraged along by the knight in question, who clearly has a horse in this race.

The Clone Wars are on the horizon, and with them the implicit doom.

(I originally wrote this before The Acolyte came out; fuck the Jedi)

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5. A war movie, all blood and guts and mud and wetwork. Rebel intelligence agents attempt to lock down an alliance with the inhabitants of a logistically-vital world, and find themselves dealing with alien partizans who have been fighting offworld incursions for generations and are none too happy to offer their support to the Republic’s government-in-exile. They’d fought the Hutts for centuries, and the Republic didn’t do shit for them. They’d fought against the CIS, failed, and then got invaded again by the Republic in retaliation. They’d fought against the Empire after the Republic fell. And now some liberal-ass core-worlders come along begging for help? Stuff it up your sphincter, Organa.

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6. A ship smuggling antiquities for gray market resale inadvertently ends up with a Sith holocron in its inventory. One of the crew members is just Force-sensitive enough to activate it, which then leads to a whole lot of fucked up Sith ghosts haunting a spaceship. The crew is picked off one by one, as is tradition, as the survivors attempt to scuttle the ship (save the Force-sensitive, who tries to exorcize it). As the survivors launch the escape pod with moments to spare, they look out the viewport to see that there’s no explosion despite what they did to the engines. With no-one at the helm, the ship enters hyperspace.

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7. An in-universe documentary about the New Republic’s war-crimes trials against Imperial officials. While the Herculean effort saw a good amount of success, the Empire was simply too big to bring its many millions to court; controversial amnesty declarations were granted to minor Imperial officials and bureaucrats, and eventually the Republic found itself unable to expend the resources needed to hunt down all those warlords who fled to the Outer Rim and Unknown Regions. That task was left to a panoply of paralegal and paramilitary groups, the most notable being the remnants of Wraith Squadron and other Rebellion-era units that merged into “Dumb Luck Division” under the command of Leia Organa.

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8. The version of The Phantom Menace where they get Michelle Yeoh to play Qui-Gon and they do not waste her talent. And you know what, fuck it, Ahmed Best gets to be a Jedi. Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are headed to Naboo to find out what happened to him. 

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9. The version of The Force Awakens where the attack on Maz’s Cantina is interrupted by a Yuuzhan Vong worldship jumping out of hyperspace in high orbit, at which point we leave the rails far behind us. We do not need them where we’re going.

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Well, there you have it. Part of what inspired all this is a conversation on A More Civilized Age, where the hosts digress for a bit about how Star Wars has consistently been disinterested in culture as a part of its world. The other part was rewatching The Force Awakens for the first time since 2016 and boy howdy did that movie not hold up. I am 100% serious that it should have been derailed by (a better version of) the Vong. 

 I really do go back to the well again and again for some of these topics, don't I?

Star Wars Clearinghouse

Doing some notebook clearinghouse and metal tidying, so here's a summary of the Skywalker Saga Dodecology.

Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Obi-Wan finds Anakin working on a spice freighter in the Outer Rim (alongside Uncle Owen, it ought be noted). Takes the boy under his wing, hoping that his potential in the Force might save the crumbling and corrupt Order. The first battlefronts of what would become the Clone Wars are opening up, interrupting their journey to Coruscant.

Episode II: The Clone Wars

Vignettes from the Wars, spanning several years. Anakin completes his training under Obi-Wan, starts a secret relationship with senator Padme Amidala, and is assigned an apprentice (Ahsoka). Campaigns on Geonosis, Nelvaan, and in interplanetary space are featured.

Episode III: The Dark Times

The wars have dragged on for over a decade at this point. Padme is pregnant with twins. Ahsoka knows about this and has essentially been adopted into the family at this point. Anakin becomes more and more vocally critical of the Council, the Republic, and the war effort. The Council, fearful of Anakin's legendary popularity with the public, attempts to blackmail him: this drives him toward Palpatine, who capitalizes on Anakin's desire to renew the Order and see the end the war. Anakin kills most of the Jedi council during Order 66 (no child murder), duels Obi-Wan to a standstill. Anakin is rebuilt as Darth Vader, Obi-Wan flees with Padme and Ahsoka. Complications during childbirth due to lack of appropriate medical care lead to Padme's death a few days later. Leia is put under the protection of Bail Organa, to be watched over by Ahsoka; Luke is sent to Owen and Beru on Tatooine, to be watched over by Obi-Wan.

Episode IV: A New Hope

Timeskip. Plot progresses as normal. Primary deviance is that Ahsoka is present (in disguise) as Leia's bodyguard. Obi-Wan and Ahsoka fight Darth Vader aboard the Death Star - both die. Everything else remains more or less the same, barring the psychological strain of Luke being responsible for the deaths of millions. Republic established as being both the Republic government-in-exile and the remnants of the CIS.

Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

Plot progresses as normal, save Luke's guilt over the events in the previous movie fueling his abandonment of Yoda's teachings. The revelation of Vader as Luke's father is a surprise to the audience more because of the moment of humanity for Vader.

Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

Plot progresses as normal. Luke wrestles with his despair; his forgiveness of his father is also forgiveness of himself. Luke vanishes from the public eye at the end, to collect as many remnants of the Jedi as he can and work towards rebuilding both the order and the galaxy.

Episode VII: Rogue Squadron

Timeskip. The Alliance pushes towards the core. Leia is the only one of the core three to appear. Rogue Squadron manages to open a path at Borleas with the help of smuggling kingpin Talon Karrde, allowing the main fleet to reach Coruscant. Mother-fucking space battles.

Episode VIII: The Hand of Thrawn

Leia is very pregnant with twins. Luke emerges from his travels a changed man. He lays out plans for building a new Jedi Academy and the gathering of new recruits. Thrawn shows up, wrecks everyone's shit. Luke and Han meet up with Karrde to see about using his intelligence network to hold off Thrawn. Luke gets googly-eyes for Mara Jade, she thinks he's pretty swell, they start a little wink-wink nudge-nudge, it's all good. Space battle against Thrawn above Myrkr, Thrawn held off in a last-minute victory.

Episode IX: Heir to the Empire

Leia travels to Honoghr and convinces the Nohgri to switch sides. Luke and Mara fight the mad Jedi C'baoth on Wayland. Final battle with Thrawn. Jaina and Jacen Solo are born in the middle of said space battle. Han dies. Thrawn is killed by one of his bodyguards, Captain Pellaeon assumes control of the Imperial fleet and retreats to the border of the Unknown Regions in the Galactic north. Luke and Mara move to Yavin 4 in preparation for renewing the Jedi Academy.

Episode X: The Force Awakens

Significant timeskip. Luke, satisfied with his work, has handed off the Academy and has retired to a remote hermitage with Mara Jade. Rey, a jedi-in-training, is introduced as the new main character. Kyle Katarn, Corran Horn, Dorsk 81, Kirana Ti, etc are featured (at least in passing) as instructors.

Everything then goes all to shit as the Academy is sacked by an Imperial Remnant strike force, led by one Kylo Ren and the Knights of Revan. Rey barely manages to escape the assault, taking refuge on a rustbucket ship alongside Finn (Imperial defector), Poe (hotshot Republic pilot) and Rose (mechanic). They learn that the strike was one of several, all aimed at crippling a galaxy that had grown complacent. A man known only as Snoke has declared himself emperor and returned the Remnant to strength in the Unknown Regions. Rey and co. zip-zap around trying to find Luke's hermitage and avoiding Kylo and the Imperial Remnant (It's Avatar in space at this point, we're doing Avatar in space.)

Episode XI: The Last Jedi

Cannot be fixed.

For real, I have bashed my head against this wall for ten months now and I have to finally admit that i don't think it's possible. So much of TLJ is possible only by ignoring factors that lead into it, and in this setup I've written there are even MORE factors to deal with than went into the actual movie.

So the buck stops here. Substitute Avatar Season 2 for filler. Rey learns both the light and dark from Luke and Mara. There is a wound in the Force. The division of light and dark was never supposed to exist, and now the two sides devour each other in an eternal cycle.  Luke and Mara get an amazing final fight duet against Kylo Ren (who is Jacen Solo). The torch is passed for the final time to Rey. Last shot to bring balance.

Episode XII: Balance of the Whills

Rey goes to Korriban, site of the original wound in the Force, defeats Snoke (who might be channeling some Nihilus), and ends the cycle of imbalance. Form hereon there are no Jedi nor Sith, there is only the Force in balance.

Other notes 

• Liam Neeson plays Talon Karrde.
• The final trilogy might work better as a TV series. I am sticking to Avatar in Space.
•  I wanted to keep changes relatively in line with the current of the existing movies (hence why TLJ was a "give up" moment - fixing requires replaced in that case)
• Fitting Mara in the Rey trilogy was one of the more difficult things to manage. In old versions of this she was heading the search for Luke in disguise, Ben Skywalker had been killed by Kylo at the academy massacre (which of course eliminated the plot because Mara just insta-gibs Kylo on sight in that case.) and overall she just sunk the story.
• Consider this ghost exorcised. We're done here.

Play Report: "Oh my God, it's Grand Admiral Thrawn!"

At long last, I was able to gather my band of merry mercenaries again to run a one-shot of WEG Star Wars. Fantasy Flight games might have delayed my book three times now, but with REUP and +Jez Gordon 's rules essentials printout, we did just fine. Possibly better (those rules essentials are top-notch)

The group consisted of:

• Tekashi Kovax, twi'lek investigator
• Maia, togruta navigator
• Utini, jawa tinker
• Ka Vosent, zabrak pilot
• Dierak Higara, mandalorian mercenary
• Thogar Balor, mandalorian commando
• E-L0N MSK, assassin droid
• Kupu'rust'ponto, chiss doctor

An easy enough opening: the party are independent contractors hired by the Republic to either extricate or kill an Imperial warlord by the name of Admiral Russof Enterax, who has fled to the distant world of Yoon-Suin and taken up residence in the palace of the hutt lord Bago Oorunda of the Yellow City.

The party were to meet a contact in a city cantina and get further information, but they had barely gotten introductions out of the way when his head exploded.  stray shot from a blaster bolt, and the entire cantina erupts into chaos as the riot that had exploded outside decides to move inside.

Thogar flips the table to provide cover, knocking their contact's still-wrapped package into the middle of the room. Maia dives out to grab it, with E-L0N MSK providing covering fire. Imperial riot troopers start filing into the cantina, shooting at brawlers. The mandos and droid continue to cover as the rest of the party dashes past the counter and out through the kitchen. KRP grabs a tin of tea leaves from the kitchen on the way out.

The back alley looks to have already been deserted, and the party decides to head up to the roof of the tenements on the other side, to get a better view of the city.

The package is unwrapped to find that it contains an incredibly rare, incredibly illegal single-use skeleton key capable of burning through any electric lock. The group splits in two - one party (Tekashi, Maia, Utini, and E-L0N) make their way over rooftops to the Spire of Ten, a library. The mandos, pilot, and doctor make their way towards the spaceport, which was giving off an ominous plume of smoke. They are swiftly derailed by a probe droid and drop to the streets: it is handily offed, its parts scavenged, and they decide to go by sewer instead, navigating through Spacemaps Streetview.

There is, of course, a dianoga, but they manage to get past with only slight harassment and terror.

The other group find the library locked down due to the riots, and proceed to break in through a large stained glass window. This terrifies an under-librarian utterly shitless, and the poor lad's only response is to insist that they sign up for a library card. Some useful information is found by scanning through local news: the admiral shows up with Bago in public appearances all the time, but the local Imperial outpost seems to be run by his underling, a Lt. Staavirus, whom Bago holds in great disdain.

Spaceport group  manage to get to their location, to find out that the riots had spread to the commercial spaceport and at least one ship had its drive detonated. The others are either on fire or damaged. Firefighters are desperately trying to put out the fires, and one mentions that any incoming ships have been diverted to the next city down the coast.

A short commlink call gets everyone up to date, and the two parties meet up. They decide to attempt the Imperial fort to eliminate Staavirus first (and possibly steal a vessel), and easily manage to break into and hotwire a delivery truck landspeeder ("Happy Weequay Meats", for those asking.) and drive right up to the front gate of the fort.

It is here that Kupu'rust'ponto informs the guard that he is, in fact, Grand Admiral Thrawn (accompanied by Maia, his secretary - she was providing the assist bonus) here to see Enterax and deliver rebel agents picked up during the riots.

He utterly destroys the roll (cue Thogar's player delivering a "oh my God, it's Grand Admiral Thrawn!" in falsetto) due to both numerical superiority and ingrained Imperial racism ("Thrawn is Chiss, ergo all Chiss are like Thrawn"), the fact that this far out no one in the Remnant has actually met Thrawn and most still think he is still alive at this point.

With the Thrawn ex machina working splendidly, the party meets with Staavirus and demands an APC, a shuttle, and replacement uniforms. At this point (partially my own doing, for I front-loaded most of the prep for the session), it is a smooth sailing to the hutt's palace, having the guards haul out Enterax from the harem, and flying off back to Republic space with their hostage.

Notes:  The ending was a bit limp, but given that everyone had fun I shall forgive myself for it. That always has been my weakest spot when running my own stuff, and eventually I'll patch that hole. We may return to this plucky band in the future, but not before returning to the Distant Lands of DIY with Hot Springs Island in the next session.

Obligatory Star Wars SpoilerPost

This will begin with a different story.

In worldly matters my father held two things in utmost reverence: baseball, and Star Wars. He introduced me to the series, encouraged my love of it, and was ever there to listen to the ramblings-on of an over-imaginative and obsessive child.

He died early this year. (Cancer's a bastard, friends.)  No real need to say that it puts everything else into a different perspective, but I'll say it anyway.
In watching The Last Jedi, I was able to put into words a fundamental disconnect between the Star Wars I know and the one that sits on the screen before us. If you were to ask me to distill Star Wars, I would tell you "well, it's the perfect space adventure setting" (I cut my tweenage teeth on the Essential Guides series, and still have most of them, so I know far, far too much background information), or I would tell you "It's about the relationship between a young man and his father."

That's they key there, the thing that made the whole myth click with me, because Star Wars was such a fundamental part of my relationship with my own dad. Luke has to come to terms with both his father's humanity and mortality by the end - and that's now something I have personal experience with.

And Star Wars without that connection feels hollow. A stranger. I felt it with the Prequels, I feel it now with Disney, and I have reached a point of peace with it. Mostly. It won't come back. I could be chasing the next fanboy high but I know it's never going to happen again, at least not in the way it did back then.

Spoilers below the break.