Ep 1 — Space Pirates!

This is an actual-play report from a tabletop roleplaying session set in the Star Wars universe and using game mechanics from Samsara. It takes place during the High Republic era, when Pathfinder teams are exploring the Outer Rim…

We open on a star field full of strange distortions and rainbow refractions. Suddenly, a lithe little Jedi Vector streaks into view, three ragtag pirate fighters in hungry pursuit! Just as the closest pirate gets a lock… it’s hit by heavy weapons fire from a nearby tower ship, The Lamplighter.

“Watch your six, kid!” Captain Zel barks over the comms. “I’ve got my own problems.”

Wo Dan, Jedi Knight, keeps his thoughts to himself as he dives toward a makeshift space station, looking for cover. He spots a few pirate ships that have already latched onto the hull. Inside, Babel the Wookie roars and charges into battle against the boarders. He’s backed up by Ton-Fa, a grey-haired Mandalorian who’s seen enough death for two life times. She puts her helmet on and sets her blaster to stun.

This is where we paused so players could choose their characters and learn the basic game mechanics. Then, we tried them out…

Outside, Wo Dan turns the tables on his pursuers and slags one of the pirates before flying through the wreckage like a pro. Unfortunately, the burning engine block smacks into his cockpit and cracks the transparisteel. The cabin starts loosing air. “Lamplighter One! I need a pick up!”

“I’m a little busy,” Captain Zel replies as The Lamplighter strafes the pirate mothership, trying to stay in close to avoid its turbolasers. “Fly over here and I’ll scoop you into the hangar.”

“That sounds dangerous,” Wo Dan replies, air hissing in the background.

“It is dangerous!” Zel confirms. “How long can Jedi hold their breath?”

“I think I’ll land on the station.”

On the station, Babel’s up to his elbows in a control panel, trying to close the bulkheads and trap the pirates. A crowd of bedraggled castaways huddles behind him, avoiding blaster fire. By the time he untangles this rat’s nest of improvised engineering, Ton-Fa’s way behind enemy lines and gets cut off, trapped behind the bulkhead with the pirates!

Babel swears in Shyriiwook. His trusty comms droid, JK-9, decides not to translate. Instead, Babel sends them down the corridor, ushering the castaways to safety while he races to rescue his friend. The sounds of battle thunder through the bulkhead as he works… This is taking too long. He draws his blaster and slags the control panel.

The bulkhead hisses open. On the other side, Ton-Fa stands in a hallway full of hog-tied, stunned, and/or sedated pirates. She’s putting the finishing touches on the last of them, punching him hard in the face. She turns around and looks at Babel like she hadn’t even noticed she was trapped.

“Where’d everybody else go?” she asks.

At this point, we paused to go back in time an hour or two. I’ll be using this in media res thing a lot. It allows me to give everyone a narrative goal we can all work towards together, getting everyone in place for the events we’ve just set up.

An hour or two earlier, The Lamplighter hurtles through hyperspace, having just picked up the last member of its crew. Normally, a Pathfinder team includes two Jedi (one master and one padawan), but somehow they’d been assigned a lone knight. Captain Zel was glad not to have a Jedi Master breathing down her neck, so hadn’t questioned it.

She’s sitting at the helm, wondering if that was the right decision, when a dozen different distress calls erupt from her console. They’re in a dozen different languages (none of them Basic) and directed to a dozen different worlds (none of them in the Republic). They’re not just asking for help… they’re also warning her to stop. Immediately.

Better safe than sorry. The Lamplighter drops roughly out of hyperspace. The stars outside are strange: distorted and shimmering, casting rainbows as far as the eye can see. Zel’s never seen anything like it. Parked in front of this anomaly is a raft of derelict starships, bound together by their airlocks and a lot of jerry rigging. This is the source of the distress calls.

The blue hologram of a half-snake humanoid alien appears as, one by one, the rest of the crew joins Zel on the bridge. He introduces himself as Rattler Dorn and asks a lot of pointed questions about how many people could fit aboard The Lamplighter. Captain Zel assures him they are currently at capacity, but offers to summon help from the Republic.

“We don’t need no Republic out here,” Rattler Dorn assures her, “but we’ve got a lot of sick and injured people down here.”

Ton-Fa and Wo Dan insist that they help. “Fine,” Zel concedes. “Take one of the shuttles over and do what you can.” As soon as they’re gone, she starts scanning the derelict ships for salvageable parts.

Babel launches a comms relay into space before setting out with the others aboard the crash shuttle, a glorified tugboat with over-sized engines and suspiciously thick armor. It’s just one of several shuttles in The Lamplighter’s hangar. They quickly cross over to the largest of the derelicts, a freighter at the very center, the only one with a still-functioning reactor.

A bedraggled mob is waiting for them. As the shuttle door opens, it seems for a moment like they might rush the protagonists and take it. Babel tries to hold Ton-Fa back, but the Mandalorian insists on handing out medicine and checking people’s injuries. The tension only increases when a many-armed Ardennian girl picks Babel’s pocket and JK-9 chases her through the crowd. Someone tries to shoot the droid, but Wo Dan disarms them with The Force.

A wiry, old spacer named Ephram calms things down and offers to take Ton-Fa to the infirmary, where they find an injured Mandalorian who drops some Ton-Fa backstory. He calls her “The Scythe” and accuses her of going soft. While they trade barbs, Ephram asks Wo Dan if he’s a “skywalker.”

“It’s a common surname,” Wo Dan replies, “but I’m a Jedi.”

Ephram dismisses him with a wave. “Never heard of ‘em, but the Ancients used skywalkers as their navigators. They guided ships through hyperspace by intuition. You could do it, too! You could get us through this anomaly!”

About this time, a new ship drops out of hyperspace… a pirate ship! It hails The Lamplighter. The blue, flickering image of a bug-eyed Gand, wearing an ammonia respirator and several stolen military medals, appears on the bridge. “I am Pirate Load Moab,” he declares. “Surrender or retreat!”

Zel’s counter-offer… She opens fire on the pirate ship. It disgorges dozens of snub fighters with mismatched parts. They swarm around The Lamplighter, but most head for the space station, intent on boarding and looting. The whole pirate thing.

At this point, we fast-forward through the events of the opening scene. Wo Dan damages his Vector and returns to the station. Babel and Ton-Fa repel the boarders and protect the castaways. Zel tangles with Lord Moab. We roll dice and pick up the action from there.

Wo Dan lands his Vector on the station, but is followed immediately by two pirate fighters that screech across the deck. Armed assailants pile out and open fire on the Jedi… who immediately closes his broken canopy. Then, he rotates the Vector and returns fire with his heavy guns, obliterating the pirates and their ships. And most of the hangar, which explodes into space! Wo Dan takes a deep breath and heads back out.

Babel and Ton-Fa manage to get back aboard the crash shuttle and join the battle, intending to push the pirate ship — The Cold Dead Hand — into the debris field. They’re partially successful. The shuttle gets stuck in the pirate ship’s hull and Lord Moab sends a pack of buzz droids to carve them up. Our heroes leave the engines on as they flee in the escape pod. The Cold Dead Hand lurches into the debris field and gets pummeled by wreckage.

Captain Zel hails Load Moab. “You’re ready to surrender!” he greets her, trying to look confident while things explode behind him. Zel bluffs big, insisting that she can detonate the crash shuttle at any time, but giving Moab the same choice he offered her: surrender or retreat.

I think Moab will pretend to concede, intending to make repairs before renewing his attack (mostly because we have some time left and I want to squeeze another action sequence out of this premise), so we make it a social conflict and roll dice. Captain Zel wins, but with two black dice, which means there needs to be a dark side outcome. I decide that the castaways overhear their negotiations and conclude The Lamplighter can’t be trusted.

The Cold Dead Hand withdraws, leaving behind a handful of pirate fighters still attached to the station. JK-9 intercepts comms chatter between the derelicts and alerts Babel to the fact that the castaways are planning to attack and seize The Lamplighter. They’re not too crazy about the Republic being on its way, either.

Wo Dan calls up Rattler Dorn and tries to negotiate a settlement, but Rattler refuses to admit he’s planning anything. He invites our heroes to send over a small delegation (of hostages) for a summit. Wo Dan counters that Rattler should send a delegation over to The Lamplighter. Rattler agrees to these terms with a suspicious degree of enthusiasm.

Still eager to make a profit on this farce, Captain Zel sends Babel out in another of her shuttles, a salvage vessel with an armored dome on one side and robot arms — with saws, clamps, and plasma torches — on the other. She calls it “the crab.” While he’s out there looking for salvage, the castaways disconnect one of their ships from the raft and send it towards The Lamplighter. It’s engines are noisy as hell, leaking radiation like Bothans leak stolen secrets. From his vantage point, Babel can see the trio of pirate boarding vessels hiding directly behind it!

Captain Zel dodges this unmanned missile and opens fire on the raft in an attempt to dissuade the castaways’ leadership, but one of the boarding vessels latches onto her quarters and starts burning through the hull. Wo Dan races up there on the turbolift that connects all The Lamplighter’s decks and is welcomed by blaster fire the moment the doors open. He ignites his lightsaber and sends every bolt back to its sender. All but one of his attackers drops to the floor.

The last mando standing is that asshole from earlier. The deflected fire just pings off his armor as he advances. Thinking quickly, Wo Dan knocks him backwards with The Force and jumps on him, using the Mandalorian’s own whipcord to tie him up. Then he takes him down to the med bay.

Out in the black, Babel has intercepted Rattler Dorn’s missile/ship and is slowly turning it back around toward the station. At the same time, he asks JK-9 to contact the Ardennian girl and direct her to an escape pod. The missile/ship punches right through the station’s central hub, knocking out their power and destabilizing the entire structure. Good thing the Republic is on its way.

Less good is the reception Zel received when she called for help. The Republic stooge she spoke with was a little too interested in Wo Dan and his Vector. It made the captain uneasy and, when Wo Dan gets to the bridge, they have words about it. Between that and their altercation with the castaways, everyone agrees it’d be in their best interest to be gone before the Republic arrives.

Wo Dan remembers what Ephram told him about “skywalkers” and offers to guide The Lamplighter through the anomaly. Obviously, Zel’s not super jazzed about the whole thing, but has no better ideas… so the Jedi takes the helm, listens to that tiny voice in his mind, and punches it! The stars streak past, hyperspace roils around them, but then they emerge safely on the other side. No one can catch them now.

Ultimately, I thought Samsara did a good job emulating Star Wars by encouraging lots of action beats and plot complications. We might need to level set on how dark a “dark side” scene needs to get, but I was otherwise quite happy with the session. There are five more episodes planned, so stayed tuned to find out what happens next week on Star Wars: Lamplighters!

Samsara was written by Daniel Bayn (that’s me), Star Wars is owned by Disney, and all art was created using Midjourney.