USH'S STAR WARS GAME- CAMPAIGN II EPISODE VI (LIGHT SIDE)- Missing Links

I've done some backwards digging and am putting together a whole timeline of events.

We begin a really really long time ago:

Event 0 :The only known usage of the SnK (To Break a Planetary Siege)

Event 1: The Writing of the Scrolls of Bandomino (A listing of Sith Victories, including the SnK usage) Knowing what might be on these scrolls is our only hint to the existence of the SnK.

The goal is to find the scrolls and use the list of victories to try and find where the SnK was last used, or find some pattern.

Event 2: Darth Malphas obtains the Scrolls.
He was also seeking the SnK and devoted a large amount of effort into finding them. He sends his trusted apprentice Darth Kazan after the SnK and other important stuff. His path is what we really need.
(Saar says that Adelmo is unwittingly following this path, so if we can follow this path as well, maybe we can shortcut her.)

Event 3: Darth Malphas is trapped on Alambritis, splits the scrolls in half and hides them throughout the Galaxy with the aim of retrieving them later.
-We have been looking into various ways he could have done this, including using smuggling operations.

Event 3.5: Alambritis ends up being a Sith victory. Malphas builds the Ancient Sith Bunker of Death while on this planet.

[END OF MALPHAS STORY AS WE KNOW IT]

[ENTER: Adalmo, Kuylen and Lennah]

Event 1: The three Sithketeers begin hunting ancient Sith artifacts. Kuylen is interested in finding the Mausoleum (heh) and Adalmo is interested in the SnK. Kuylen things the SnK is a stupid myth.

Event 2: The Sithketeers split. Kuylen finds what he is looking for (the Astrolabe) and goes his own way. Adelmo and Lennah continue working together.

Event 3: In investigating Malphas Adelmo finds Alambritis. Lennah goes looking for the Sith Bunker of Death, disguising his projects as building construction sites. {13 years ago}. They find the bunker, and investigate.

Event 4: Something happens between Adelmo and Lennah. They split. Lennah goes into seclusion (perhaps hiding)

Event 5: Adelmo is pissed, she finds Lennah and burns his brain out. However, she does this quietly so that a decade passes before anyone looks for us.

Event 6: 6 Months after Adelmo burns Lennah, Saar visits Lennah's hideout. We don't know what he does with this information.

[At this point the order of things becomes a bit questionable]

Event: Adelmo finds one half of the Scrolls. She did not know they were split in two. One half of the scrolls is useless to her. (This may have caused the Lennah Brain BBQ)

Event: Adelmo experiences the Sith Switch (as Saar says). She goes from being meticulous and careful to blatant. We don't know why this happened but we can surmise that it is because she is getting closer to the second Scroll.

Event 9: KK goes on her destructo-spree. This is where we enter the story, investigating Katai.

[ENTER HEROIC JEDI PROTAGONISTS!]

Events Many: We do our thing for a while. Track down KK. Capture her. Do other heroic stuff. We even run into Adalmo. We learn that she is after the SnK.

Events Of this Episode:
We go see Saar.
We go find Lennah
We go see Saar again (he gloats and is generally annoying)
We go find Malphas' bunker by following Lennah's trail.
Bunker problems.
From the bunker we get a bunch of old Sith computer information. This data is corrupted and difficult to trace but we are trying to decode it to follow the smugglers path as they went to go hide the scrolls.
We go back to Saar (again) [Currently in progress]

[SCENE]

Thoughts:
OK. We actually do know more than we think we do. We are in a pretty decent spot. Not amazing, but not in the dark.

A few things we've learned about Adalmo. Crazy, yes. Psycho, absolutely. But also limited in vision. Saar says she has a utilitarian viewpoint of history. If it doesn't directly help her, she doesn't care. She doesn't want to put the whole picture together, she just wants the Scrolls. As such, we have an informational advantage.
She may have taken something from the bunker. We don't know that. BUT, I think it is safe to assume that she didn't take the computer information that we have. Why?
1) She was here during her secret, leave no trace phase. If she took it, it wouldn't be there for us to grab.
2) She probably would have thought it irrelevant. Its complex, big picture stuff. Not a neon arrow that says "SnK This Way!"
3) Even if she has the information, we don't know if she could have decoded it. KK is a tech genius yes, but it took all of us and some specialized equipment.

Other things:
The trail of Kazan.
Saar said that Adelmo doesn't realize that she is actually following the trail of Kazan.
One of our big questions is, if Alambritis was a Sith success, and Malphas didn't need to hide the scrolls, why didn't he go and get them, or continue to go after the Snk?
Maybe the answer is, he did. Or at least he sent Kazan. Maybe he didn't need to go get the scrolls again, he already had all the information after all. Maybe he just sent Kazan to go directly to the SnK. If so, we have a huge advantage.

This advantage/plan is twofold.

1) If we find the second half of the scrolls, we can effectively prevent Adelmo from ever getting the SnK, as she needs both halves to find it.

2) If we can find out what Kazan was up to, we could perhaps find the SnK without needing the second half of the scrolls and shortcutting Adelmo’s path.

2.5) This does presuppose, however, that Kazan found the SnK. We do know that Malphas wasn’t very mobile. He didn’t go sprinting all over the galaxy, thats why he had Kazan. So if Malphas continued his search after Alambritis, Kazan would have been the one to do that.

However, I’m not sure how to pick up Kazan’s trail.

That's all very awesome. Just a quick correction- an understandable name mix-up in the middle there. As you say, Malphas was not known for being very mobile; it was of course Kazan on Alambritis who built the bunker.

Ah, yes. Malphas is stuck on a different planet whose name I am forgetting. Kazan is the one on Alambritis.

Very nice summary Tptmanno1, it really helps to see a lot of this summed up in a single post.

It also answers Ush's question from the last page I think. We're following Kazan's path as much as Adelmo's, but she doesn't know it. So if we can find out Kazan's full story we can jump ahead of Adelmo.

I think Malphas just had a very Palpatine style of ruling, he sits on the throne, dictating his policies, while his subordinates carry them out.

We should maybe come up with a list of ideas on what to ask Saar about, go in there with a game plan. See if we can get more info about Kazan out of him.

Great job, TP! Now, any ideas on what questions to actually ask? Saar is a rhetorical minefield.

Well, if we know the whole story we know how to shortcut it.
Our current goal is to try to narrow down the planets that Malphas sent the second half of the scrolls to.
Also, if there are some leads on picking up Malphas' trail after Alambritis that would be good to know.

The current "story" that Saar is telling us is the one that begins with Kuylen, Adelmo and Lennah and ends with Lennah's fried brain. So I think the crux of that story is learning what Lennah did to piss off Adelmo. Maybe we can learn when he went into hiding and what he was doing right before it.

I think the moral of this whole episode (and the hint in the title) is that knowing the whole story and filling in all the pieces to the timeline will give us the advantage over Adelmo.

So 3 goals with Saar.
1. Narrow down the list of planets.
2. Learn about Malphas' journey
3. How and when did Lennah piss off Adelmo.

I think this is the order of our goals as well. Because if we get to the scrolls first we can stop Adelmo. Then we can try to get to the SnK, and then we can learn about Lennah and perhaps learn how to deal with Adelmo.

Meanwhile, we should also be keeping an eye on external news of the galaxy to see if Adelmo is up to anything. She's being obvious so we should be able to tell if there were any major terrorist-style attacks on major historical locations. (I also think that this is what Saar wants with the news, to try and find Adelmo)

Indeed- the relevant point here is what caused Adelmo to 'deal' with Lennah; you can put it down to general Dark Side evil but a. that's very simplistic and b. look where Lennah was- this was no spontaneous act. Adelmo made effort to track him down.

And in reference to the news- you may indeed also what to keep considering what Saar's game is.

There is probably some event or chain of events Saar is keeping an eye out for, perhaps he is even keeping tabs on Adelmo's progress by what he finds.

I think we know the 'when' of whatever Lennah did to Adelmo, around the time he went into hiding. The how or what is probably something he took or withheld from her. We could look into Lennah's Sith collection and find out if anything was taken.

From what you know of Adelmo's methods, what would have happened to Lennah's Sith collection if Adelmo thought there was something useful in it?

It would have been completely destroyed, good point.

We're gonna need to gather more information if we're to figure out what Lennah did to anger Adelmo.

It just occurred to me that Lennah alone came to Saar after Katai came to Alambritis, after they discovered that half of the Scrolls were missing. Is it possible that Lennah took the information that Saar gave him and did't share it with Adelmo? That she killed him because he withheld information?

Thats a good point.
Wait, Saar said he had no desire to leave the prison. Maybe hes lying, but maybe he did something to Adelmo and wants to be protected from her?

Much to think about indeed!

Right now, however, your comms systems are beeping- someone is getting in touch.

Xeth will answer the call since he has quietly mused while the others chatted via hologram where this could possibly be going.

"Xeth speaking."

"Now who could that be?" Jelena says to Essallin before joining the hail.

That summary really helped me out. I wasn't sure what was going on binary in the first place.

Denzral will listen to the call.

Well the reason you've been waiting so long will now become clear. In fact you guys have been pretty busy- just not with anything I wanted out in public.

The communication you guys just received is a distress call. It's a high-band emergency message- text only and sent over a long range. Your ships are picking it up because you are hooked into that particular network- it's a Bureau distress call.

Terrorist strike planet Robine. Attackers wielding lightsabres. Agents down. Requesting urgent assistance

Those of you with Savoir-Faire know- Robine is one of those worlds that makes its fortune out of the leisure industry, particularly gambling, as best exemplified by its great Golden Tower, hosting every game of chance of note in the whole galaxy with facilities for every significant species. It is owned by self-made megarich Galen Marek; the upper floors are noticeable for the insanely high stake required to be admitted.

Now, it's a big galaxy and it's not hard to find gambling joints. But Robine is not in Hutt Space- it's not exactly Republic central but it's within 'civilised' space. It's fully licensed and everything; there are no shady crime overlords around every corner. Well, ok- Merek almost certainly has a shady record but no-one can prove it. It's more like Vegas- everyone knows it's a bit seedy, but it's relatively legitimate. No guns allowed inside the Golden Tower.

Why would someone want to attack that place? Well, it's very rich. The other notable thing about the Golden Tower is its defence network- every so often, some disgruntled punter takes a pot shot, sometimes from a ship in orbit. As well as heavy internal and external security, it's surrounded by anti-air guns and an defence shield. Like its shining golden exterior, this is as much showing off as anything else. So, money is always a motive... though attackers with lightsabres? That's unusual these days, due to evolution some of you guys have seen; the galaxy got tired of dark siders running around blowing up what they liked, which is why the Bureau and its tracking network was voted into existence. Incidents like this get reported very quickly. This is a very high profile target- the attackers must have been after a big score.

All of this has been going through your head, but only as you guys have dropped out of hyperspace and reset your co-ordinates. Robine does good business with a lot of worlds in neighbouring sectors. One of them is Alambritis. You're virtually next door.

You're trying to raise a channel with the source of the distress call but it is clear they somewhat busy. As you close in, however, you pick up an audio 'sequel' to their original distress call.

“This is Bureau Transport Vessel A27C. Bureau Agents have been caught in an attack by terrorists employing both lightsabres and starfighters. We have no contact with ground team. Enemy action is indiscriminate. Situation extremely serious. Urgently requesting immediate back up.”

A vessel with ground team deployed? This isn't just some bored agent at an immigration post whose suddenly trouble in the midst of his patch- this is an active Bureau operation, which has presumably gone horribly wrong.

You're starting to see news pictures now, though they are not good quality at this range. It definitely seems like the Golden Tower was the target, and you guess that defence system wasn't so good after all, because the Tower is on fire. So are several parts of the surrounding city. At first it looks like its because someone has been ground strafing and proton torpedoing the area- and the Tower- with starfighters. On a second look, you confirm that that is definitely what has happened.

It's the addendum to the distress signal that really raises the stakes though.

“Confirm leader of enemy ground team is wanted terrorist Nume Rand. Enemy starfighter leader is mass murderer Galder Starkiller.” Destiny, it seems is having its moment.

You finally make contact with the ship's comms officer as you are nearing your exit point.

“We have heavy ground casualties,” he is reporting. “We think they've pulled out from the ground... it seems their target was Merek but we have no idea...” An alarm is sounding. “They're making a run on this ship! Torpedoes incoming!”

The link goes dead. 30 seconds to target.

The stars streak back to normal space as you exit hyperspace. You virtually collide with the target ships which blur past your viewscrens as they make their exit run. In orbit, you can see the grey transport ship of the Bureau, intact but lurching to one side.

Three enemy ships- a light fighter, a heavier fighter and a larger transport/smuggler vessel. Looks like they've taken a bunch of fire, but all they have to do is get to the edge of the gravity well and they'll be off into hyperspace.

It takes Pilot rolls to wheel around and give chase in time- but you're all excellent pilots and it goes fine. The chase is on.

Sunda's already on the comms. “This is Sunda Zannashar of the Jedi Order. Power down your ships' systems and prepare to be boarded!”

The sheer heartpounding excitement goes on here:

http://www.killermovies.com/forums/f7/t610907.html

HELL. YES.

Strategic talking?
I will take it on the honor (cough) of the dark siders to allow our planning to be in peace. Regardless this is mostly number crunching so it should work out.

The way the rules are working is that when we attack, we get a die pool equal to our pilot rating. (we all have pools of 8)
From that, we subtract any difference in distance, so minus 4 or 3
Then we subtract their total maneuverability. What this means ( I think) is that its really hard for us to hit anybody.
So we need to be smart.

(I forget everyone's ship name so I'm going to be referring to the ships individually)
The Sunlit Dancer needs to go after Spearhead. The canceling out of the maneuverability rankings makes it the best choice, you get 4 die, which is more than anyone else would get.

Nexus Grin, goes after Paladin, as thats the next highest maneuverability score, plus your extra thrust means you can close on them faster.

Me and New Beginning go after Free Flyer as we have the lowest maneuverabilities, so by teaming up we can get more chances. They also have the highest armor.

I think if we play smart we can actually do some real damage.

I was also thinking about the possibility of everyone teaming up on one ship so we get at least a partial victory, but lets see how the first turn goes.