Thursday, January 27th 2011

Players: Marc, Jerome, John, Fred

As a Lady Blackbird mod, this game retained Keys, Secrets, Traits, and other mechanics from its source. However, the specifics of the characters, setting, and other details were changed to reflect a Star Wars universe setting.
Our adventure took place in the time of the Republic, an unknown number of years prior to Episode I. Three Jedi and one prisoner taken on parole as their guide were sent to the Outer Rim planet of Kondu. Kondu is one huge junkyard, and the entire planet is more or less inhospitable to life without careful environmental precautions. We traveled to this planet via our Jedi starship, the Blackbird, and began our hunt for Ordo Vallus, a former Jedi gone rogue.

Marc played as Chani Zosar, a Jedi Councilor and leader of the expedition. As a high-ranking member of the Jedi order, she possessed the most diplomatic training and was generally reserved in her approach to situations. Ordo was once her padawan.

Fred was Colonel Vaud Hurkoon, a former Republic commander and Jedi Guardian sent to protect Chani during the mission. Quiet, strong, and steadfast, he turned out to have something of a dark side… but his eye was always on the safety of his charge and the success of the mission.

Jerome took on the role of Franter Nord, a free-wheeling Toydarian paroled by the Jedi to be their escort on Kondu. As a native of the planet, Franter possessed a unique knowledge of its culture and people. His connections proved invaluable to the mission, but of course, his help doesn’t come for free…

The fourth possible character was Cade Crito, Vaus’d headstrong apprentice. We used this character as a supplemental member of the party, but did not generally roleplay him. John was the GM in this session.

I’ll leave some of the details out here for brevity’s sake, but the gist of the mission was thus: We arrived to find a blockade imposed by Bakka the Hutt. After unsuccessful attempts to negotiate and intimidate our way past the crime lord, we ended up landing our damaged vessel at the factory port of one Zoson Bartu, an old friend of Chani’s and a local manufacturing mogul. A jury-rigged delivery transport carried us across the planet as we found more information about Ordo. We visited Moton, an outfitting guru in the junk wastes, and Roxanna, Franter’s promiscuous sister. Various clashes with rogue droids and Bakka’s thugs eventually led us to a terraformed compound full of peaceful but slightly off-kilter followers of Ordo. Ordo himself was drawing out their Dark Side energy and storing it in his body, in an attempt to rebuild the world as a green paradise. He suffered from at sort of “dark side werewolf” syndrome, whereby he occasionally lost control of all the dark energy in his body and went on various sordid sprees. After a bit of diplomacy fell through, a clash ensued, in which the Colonel turned Ordo’s followers against him and attempted to forcibly capture Ordo, despite Chani’s protests. Ordo was encased in carbonite and taken back to the starship. In the epilogue, Franter ditched his Jedi companions and tried to recoup his old fortunate on Kondu, to little avail. Chani was deeply troubled by what she witnessed on the planet. Vaud and Cade both moved a little closer to the Dark Side, but ended up no worse for the wear.

A fun game. I was initially concerned about prefabricated characters, but there was a fair bit of flexibility in the system, which allowed for some customization. I’ll leave it to my comrades to provide further commentary. Thanks to John for putting the playset together: excellently done.

If you guys dig LB you should check out this thing I put together after a particularly bad session of The Pool and I was asking myself "Why is Lady Blackbird so much more fun than The Pool?"

http://www.gamedevblo...­

The sad thing is, after I played it a few times I lost interest, because it needs a GM and if I'm going to GM a game I'd really rather run In a Wicked Age.

Oh, and if you like Star Wars one-shots, you might hate this thing a friend of mine made, which is kind of an anti-Star Wars one-shot. (But I loved it.)

https://docs.google.c...­

I really enjoyed this! John did a fantastic job with the modification and with running the game for us, and Marc and Jerome's characters were great drivers for the story. Being new to RPGs overall, this was actually the first time I've ever played with any sort of GM. The story was still mainly driven by the characters, though, so there was still lots of freedom. Also, the game mechanics with regard to XP, dice, and character advancement were meaningful enough without obstructing the flow of the story.
Thanks for a great game, guys!

Thanks to all you guys for your leap of faith, playtesting a total stranger's game. It was a real help to me and revealed issues in the text, but more importantly it was also a lot of fun.

Fred, I had no idea you'd never played a game with a GM before. You're the first person I know of who came into tabletop via the GMless story-game route. Very cool!