The characters boarded the passenger ship “Silver Princess” after a few drinks at the space port outdoor cantina. After having mixed it up with murderous outback poachers, space port gangsters and thugs, and a Darkside Marauder, the group was looking forward to a short 10-hour trip to the remote planet of Dantooine, where their two Jedi comrades had already left for a few days prior. The party had a spacious passenger lounge to themselves (there were several such lounges on the ship), and after liftoff they settled in with their datapads to connect to the media center to pass the time.
Several hours into the journey warning alerts sounded, and the ship’s captain’s intercom voice commanded all passengers to strap into the landing seats near the center of the room until further notice. Soon, the vessel rocked from an explosion within the ship, and the captain announced that the escape pod bay had been destroyed by a mysterious blast. There would be no escape from whatever was going on.
Within moments more explosions were felt. The combat veterans of the group knew that ships were assaulting the Silver Princess, and panic set in when the blast doors to the room dropped with a smash. Kruk the Feeorin veteran of the Mandalorian War unstrapped from his seat in an attempt to reach the weapons locker, but found himself flailing around the room, bouncing off the walls, as the ship took a brutal shellacking from the attackers. Beaten and bruised and lucky to not have broken any bones, Kruk got back to his seat.
Soon the attacks stopped. Were they safe? Not by a longshot; the characters hearts sank as they realized the beaten ship was awkwardly entering a planetary atmosphere at frighteningly higher speeds than was normal. With various alarms still sounding, they found themselves pushed back into their seats by the momentum of the dive, and started feeling the air grow thin and hot. The life support systems were failing. They knew there was no way to survive this, as the lack of air and the heat mercifully eased them into unconsciousness. When the Silver Princess hit planet side, there would be no fear and pain.
In the hilly grassland of Dantooine below, the young Jedis Rokran and Lucia were on patrol in a speeder piloted by Cisco Patelli, a teenage son of settlers who did odd jobs for the Jedi Enclave. As they took a break and Cisco heated up a hearty Ibez stew with his camping gear, both Jedi sensed great coming of mass death from nearby. Looking skyward, they saw a flash and heard a boom, and realized a large starship was breaking through the afternoon clouds on a crash course for the planet. Blazing down at an angle, the crippled ship disappeared behind nearby hills, and with a sickening bang and shaking of the earth, a huge fireball shot up, and a huge wall of fire appeared beyond the hills, marking the skidding of the flaming wreck across more than a mile of landscape.
Rushing to the speeder, young Cisco fired it up as the Jedi leaped aboard, and they shot off for the area beyond the hills. As they rounded the gentle slopes of the foothills, they came around the flaming blast area and saw the long and wide trench created by the crash, and beyond that the main portions of the middle and forward sections of the craft lay in a huge heap of infernal wreckage, flames wisping up towards the sky. They knew there could be no survivors…
If you'd named the ship Flame Princess I'd be making a lamentation joke right about now.
ReplyDeleteD30: Ha ha. Considering the fate I had in store for the ship, names that included "flaming," "Exploding,"Crashing," and the like were right out!
ReplyDeleteI've actually been basing some ship names in the game on RPG things from the past. A Millenium Falcon type ship of importance to the players is the "Greyhawk." The Silver Princess is named after that old English module "Palace of the Silver Princess". You know, the one with the illusionary gang rape scene?