To Hear Him Tell it: the Toydarian ‘Mastermind’

Back from the holidays and am sorry it’s taken us this long to get back to our own personal D6 Starwars adventure! In the preceding articles, I set the background about myself, some discarded D6 Starwars books and a pack of middle schoolers. Who would’ve thought anything could POSSIBLY go wrong? Right?

I introduced the setting as Farfin, the planet of the catlike Furghals. But, the story actually begins on Genon. This goes back to me reading the comic series, Crimson Empire II. Part of this story centered on the criminal empire of Grappa, the Hutt. Our adventure begins at Grappa’s end. Spoilers if you haven’t read it.

Grappa dies.

Yep, at the very end of the series, Grappa gets in too deep with some cannibal cultists and, when things go sideways, he ends up the guest of honor at a BBQ. So much for Grappa right? But for every action, there is a reaction right? And when a void has been left in leadership, there’s usually a mob trying to fill said void. This scenario set up several ‘reactions’.

POINT ONE: The ‘Hacker’

During the final day of Grappa, unbeknownst to him, his compound had been infiltrated. Stealthily, a conniving, resourceful Toydarian named Qudar had snuck in with a couple of his smuggler friends and was attempting the impossible: Hack the hutt!

Q, as his associates called him, was determined to make it in the big game of the Fringe underworld. And where else to start but at the top, right? To say the least, he was biting off more than he could chew and, as a first level character, had no hope of getting out of this alive. But this didn’t keep him from trying.

POINT TWO: CHAOS ENSUES

This was all a part of the GM’s plan to give them a thrilling opening to their adventure. You see, most of these first characters were not a team. So, to explain them coming together, I tossed them into chaos and gave them an insane McGuffin. The insanity was due to everything at ‘Grappa Central’ on Genon going into melt down when the presiding Hutt was taken away on a ‘dinner date’. Imagine what happens next. It’s every man for itself! A base full of criminals with no authoritative figure in site begin dismantling everything valuable. THUS, it made for a great escape.

POINT THREE: ONE LUCKY HEIST

Right before the insanity began though, our first character, Q, hacked into the right file. It set off alarms and could usually be easily tracked and the culprit exterminated. But before the security force could catch ole Q, they found themselves with a sinking ship and the rats fleeing as they always do.

Q happened into Grappa’s financial files and gleefully downloaded them thinking them to be his road to power and riches. Only one problem: they were heavily encrypted. But that’s a problem for down the road.

POINT FOUR: THE GETAWAY

Well, although his getaway was covered by the craziness of the Genon meltdown, Q had one little problem. His associates that were driving the getaway ship LEFT withoug him. Q was abandoned in the docking bay of Genon, high and dry. But, being a resourceful Toydarian, he quickly searched out and stowed away on one of the other ships leaving. This ship just happens to belong to a retired Shockboxer and current, hapless smuggler named Xeff (which we will cover soon).

Not being half as stealthy and smart as he thinks he is, he’s easily found out. In the end, all he has to negotiate for his life is an info stick with a fortune in Hutt financial info (or so he hopes). Appealing to the smuggler’s lower nature, Xeff spares his life for a ‘piece of the action’.

POINT FIVE: WHAT THEY DON’T KNOW MAY KILL THEM

What they will find out in the course of the adventure is that getting that info maybe harder than they think. First, Qudar isn’t an accomplished slicer (hacker). He apparently got lucky and tapped into the right files. Secondly and more importantly, what they tap into once the encryption is broken, may not be as good as any of them think.

But I’ll promise you this. It will be insanely entertaining.

POINT SIX: An Unwitting Casualty

One of the interesting background plots that we worked into all of this was the odd connection between the characters of my oldest and (at that moment) my youngest. Q hacking the files had a devastating effect on Flyp’s life, but we will get into that next time!

LOOSE END

BY THE NUMBERS

        Flight: Toydarians fly almost straight from the womb, and rarely use their legs for locomotion, if for no other reason than prefering to meet other species at eye level.

        Force Resistant: Toydarians minds are highly resistant to influence from the force, like many species from Hutt Space. They are immune to mind control and mind reading powers, although can be as easily effected by other powers as anyone else.

Story Factors:

        High Metabolism: Toydarians need to eat their specialised diet regularly and heavily, or else they lose their ability to fly within a day or so. However this is regained just as quickly upon them resuming their normal diet.

        Greedy: Toydarians are by nature greedy and deceitful, however this is not a massive disadvantage within the galactic community where the majority of people and species exhibit similar tendencies.

Move: 6/8 (on foot), 18/22 (Flying)
Size: 1.0-1.5 meters tall

Now, mind you, I expanded upon the allowable aliens list using the fledgling internet as my guide to a whole universe of possibilities. However, my son chose a Toydarian. His character was the most homebrewed of the group. Most of them lined up with one of the templates given in the 1E Rulesbook. But he wanted a Toydarian that wasn’t opened up in 1E AND he wanted to be a SLICER.

Both of these were nonexistant in the D6 rulesbooks and, seeing that Starwars was attempting to sell a D20 roleplaying game at the time, my only hope was homebrew and the young internet. And, I tell you. Charting a course through the internet with dial-up in those days and the SLOW download speeds was no walk in the park! But I discovered a whole new world without which I could have never run the game as well as I did.

Now, his pick for race was a surprise, seeing that this species was a weak sort, but quickly I began to see the appeal. First of all, Toydarians are FORCE RESISTANT. This makes their minds impervious to manipulation and reading due to force abilities. Now, the D6 system, at that time, was a little light on Jedis and force abilities. It looked terribly difficult and, since it should be rare, I had the players roll a D100 with an extremely high difficulty to determine if they had force abilities. Only one scored the prize. But I didn’t even allow Q a chance given his natural resistance to it.

But, looking at the range of numbers given, I began to understand. Toydarians rank high (at least 4D) in most Attributes. But they seem to peak a bit higher in Knowledge and Perception. He was building Q to be the intellectual mastermind! And, at times, this came off as a comedy of errors which we will get to later, but, in the end, he had developed himself into an intergalactic threat.

According to the old writeups, Toydarians were happier living in the low tech, but Q hated getting his hands dirty and really wished to escape the ‘dead-end life’ on his homeworld. His natural mind for business aided the crew, but his ambition almost got them all killed on several occasions. He hated Hutts (but who doesn’t) but seemed to get caught up with a few of them across the course of his lifetime.

My son was the first to push the idea of running this D6 campaign, so it all started with him. And, so, Qudar, the Toydarian, was the first actual character in the game. This would color all of the other characters, but that did not mean they weren’t unoriginal. By NO means! What comes in the next few weeks began in the minds of a pack of preteen boys. They grew and fleshed out in the game. What would be created in the end was simply JACKED UP!

NEXT: Flyp: Hoverboarding, pickpocketing son of an accountant!