Star Wars Wedensday - Podcasts: Blazing Chain & Talnar's Rescue

This week's Star Wars Wednesday is a bit delayed, once again. No good reason, other than holiday prep and forgetting to post at the last minute. I have even less of an excuse, as I planned to reference my most recent appearance on the Order 66 podcast, and a live-game recording of my popular adventure Talnar's Rescue over at the Threat Detected podcast.

For those who may not be familiar, Order 66 is the long running podcast dedicated to Star Wars Saga Edition. I've been on a number of times, but this one was the first time where the focus of the show was specifically on an aspect of the Star Wars universe I created. There have been episodes based on books I was one of the authors of, but thats a bit different.

In this case, it was the brand new Force tradition I created for the Unknown Regions supplement, causally known as the "scout's" book. The tradition is the Blazing Chain, and it is essentially Force using, non-lightsaber wielding pirates. The show gets into a lot of detail, including lore and game mechanics discussions, so I won't go into specifics here. You can listen here instead.

For those who would like to hear one of my adventures in play, the Threat Detected podcast recently started playing an adaptation of Talnar's Rescue. I originally wrote the adventure for Star Wars Gamer magazine, under the original core rules for d20 Star Wars. Wizards of the Coast updated it to the Revised Core Rules and posted it as a free adventure. I've never found the time to update the adventure to Saga, but I've given out advice from time to time on it. You can hear Threat Detected's take here. As you might expect, I haven't had a chance to listen yet, but it's in the queue. Also, they recently interviewed Saga co-creator and developer, Rodney Thompson.

If you are intereted in more of my interviews, you can find them here.

Comments

[ShadowAcid]

I've always loved the Talnar's Rescue mission. It's my go-to Star Wars adventure for running at cons and for one-shots with new groups.

There are always a few things that seem to happen or that I tend to do so that things flow more readily when I run it:

1) I seem to always take out the bridge chase and fight. It was a flop the first time I ran it and there is too much risk that the PC's will rescue Talnar early and end the mission early. Unless, I become too heavy handed a GM and railroad things in a way that make the players unhappy at me.

2) In the Naalol City cantina I never bother with the weapon search. It's always been too much hassle for the players and really just seems to annoy them. I think I was told once that "Han and Luke never would have been searched in the movies."

3) In the final scene with the Oquan the PC's are always too suspicious to go to the docking bay. They usually want to set the location of the meet on their terms so I let them. The catch is that the Oquan show up with several hover trucks. One holding Talnar (which the leader shows to the PC's) along with one other truck that holds droids (which he also shows the PC's to confirm their presence). All the other trucks hold as much storm troopers as I want, and one of them always holds an AT-ST that busts out to become the Big-Bad for the end fight.

Overall it's a great set-up and solid premise and is good for new gamers who are familiar with Star Wars. I've run it in Saga a few times and in some other systems depending on my prep time and desire of the group and it has always been very easy to adapt.