Stat-ing up the Neimoidian Bounty Hunter

I've picked a name for my Neimoidian bounty hunter, La'ow Houd. I have also modified some rules to allow him to be a bounty hunter. According the rule book, they need to 1d10 vitality per level. That means only soldiers become bounty hunters. Judging by The Mandalorian, any boob with a weapon and drive can call themselves a bounty hunter. 

As a Neimoidian, he doesn't have a long tradition of bounty hunting. La'ow is a hunter of data which sometimes involves people. He observed the Mandalorians at home as a trade representative and spy. He has collected many items from Mandalor, but most of it is the not equipment of a hunter. He appreciates their arts and beliefs but doesn't try to emulate their combat style. 

Not all bounty hunters look like this. 

He does have some tricky items that the Mandalorians perfected, the whipcord, a smallish jetpack and the flame thrower. The whipcord and flame thrower are stock Mandalorian weapons in his gauntlets. The jetpack is a modified Tankerenian hoverpack for picking fruit. It can't exactly fly, but it can allow swift jumps and can save him from a short fall. 

He wears light armor which is similar to Rebel combat suits, although customized to his liking. He often wears a short cape and high riding boots in and out of armor. 

He has a light repeating blaster rifle and a heavy stunner. The heavy stunner is specifically designed to shoot like the LR blaster, but with no damage just the stun effect. He also carries a stun baton and sometimes uses electro-nets.   

La'ow has a variety of tools for breaking into systems without a droid. He also has a couple of holographic projectors which stick to surfaces. One of them will project a distortion over his body, so he can appear as a holograph. He must set this up first, it doesn't work on the fly as it requires specific viewing angles to work convincingly. 

At great expense, he managed to get his hands on two lightsabers which he had on display in his sailboat. No, he did not kill Jedi or Sith. He bought them from some really dangerous people. He does not use them as he is unskilled. He has a variety of trinkets from Mandalor, Jedha, and Coruscant which are made of kyber crystals. La'ow thinks they are object de art and it has not occurred to him that they could have any other value or purposes. 

Statistically, I have decided that Neimoidian's have a +1 Dexterity and Charisma, and a -1 to Strength and Constitution. They receive a bonus rank of swimming and the bonus feat Cautious. La'ow is an 8th level Noble and 4th level Bounty Hunter. As an isolated Noble, he can only call in favors from Bergel and Green-5. He is not well known on this planet. 

His ship, the Gallant, is a heavily modified YT-1300 transport. It is not fast, stealthy or very combat-effective. It does have great hover and low speed maneuverability so he is able to deploy his cargo from the starship to the water.   

The cockpit is located between the mandibles and the dish is located on the bottom, in place of one of the guns. The top of the ship has a gun turret and a 12 meter tall sail like cargo bay in the rear. The turret cannot shoot backwards because of the cargo bay. There is a nasty surprise at the top of the sail, a mine launcher with 5 mines.   

The ship is much slower than other YT-1300's as a quarter of the engines are missing to allow the Gallant to carry the large sail shaped cargo bay. La'ow owns a staysail ketch and needed the modified design to carry it. The cargo bay is large enough to enclose the whole boat with the masts and 4 sails deployed. The whole boat is 12 meters long and is crew by light droids. While the ship does have crew quarters, La'ow often sleeps on his sailboat.  

Here is a test image from my phone of his ship. Sorry about the lightness, it's a photo of a pencil drawing taken under fluorescent light at night. 

Like I said, this bounty hunter is non-standard. 

Testing New Tech with Sketches

I bought a new phone, a Moto G Stylus and new Kindle Fire then started working at a place where neither are allowed. That's ok, it gives me time to draw. 

The first image was a warm up for pen work. Just some designs. Perhaps, they are windows, dias* or portals. (* I'm not sure if the plural is "dia", "dias" or "diases".) 

The next two pictures are of towers. Each tower is drawn in profile and then top down. The profile is 1 square equals 10 feet while the overhead view is in 5 feet per square. 

i didn't like how the arrow slits looked and completely forgot the side door. 

These towers are strange because the exterior of the castle is to left and there is no windows on the ground floor. I need to draw in stairs next. I love the detail on the doors. There is a main door plus two gates to bar it from opening. In this rendition, the fifth floor has no windows at all. 

Both need a top floor.

Anyway, it's late at night. That might explain the strange pink cast to the images. I didn't use a flash.  

Adding complexity to a Star Wars Campaign - World Building

I'm running a Star Wars campaign on the very distant planet of Tankeren. I need to know some stuff about Tankeren to create this setting.

The map was created using The Planet Map Generator by Torben Mogensen. Tankeren is largely Earth-like, just a bit more arrid on land owing to the equaralterial nature of the land masses. The map really isn't that big, its only for show. 

What about the people? Here is what I know so far: 

1. Tankeren was a member of the Republic. 
2. The inhabitants are tribal in nature divided by waves of colonization, there were no native inhabitants.  
3. Tribes revolve around each wave of colonization.  
4. The population is heavily mixed up with all species having at least some presence on the planet.
5. There is no majority species. 
6. The Separatists had no problems seizing the planet. 
7. The planet is agrarian, but has a lot of technology. 

Ok, so these people have loose alliances and don't do the representative government thing. What did they have prior to the arrival of the Separatists? A mess. What can I flesh out from these details?

Quite a few things actually. 

The planet is divided into 36 10° zones that
absolutely no one uses. 

Each tribe has an area called a Glide and two leaders called The Bearer and The Breaker. These are short hand terms for "The Cup Bearer" and "The Bread Breaker". Traditionally, the Breaker is a woman and the Bearer is a man, but that's all ancient history. It really doesn't matter who leads in the colonists opinion.   

Ok, what is a Glide? Initially, tribes controlled the land they lived on. But since these people were always technologically advanced, it made little sense to limit the tribes area based on where the houses were. They were also highly mobile using their TNK-101 transports to get around and as supplemental housing. 

A TNK-101 transport, civilian model.

The standard of a Glide was defined as how far a TNK-101 transport could safely glide in a disaster as per the specification booklet. It's about 603 KM (375 miles). This solves the problem of islands having one tribe per isolated landmass. Anything outside of the circle is deemed wilderness and the wave like nature of colonization caused many ribbons of wilderness between most settlements. When Glides are physically adjacent, a large landing strip and tower is built at that contact point. These facilities are used as data control points and as a site for celebrations. They are not militarized. A real world comparison would be an industrial park next to an airport. 

A map of the planet with the Capital Glide marked in red. It is to scale.

The Bread Breaker handles all issues of societal logistics; the distribution or trade of goods, the establishment of Glides, or anything else having to do with logistics. The Cup Bearer is responsible for all areas of social norms; agreements, contracts, honor, law, etc. Notice there is no chief executive or commander in chief. These roles would be taken on by either the Bearer or the Breaker as they saw fit. 

A Glide is the smallest area of control, while a Shield is the next level up. The Shield (or Continental Shield) is ruled by a Shield Breaker and Shield Bearer, who represents everyone on that Continent. The highest and least used part of government are the two Lord(s) and Lady(ies), two people who represent the planet to outsiders. These positions are alloted by tradition, economic power and in the past, might of arms. In almost all cases, anything higher than the Cup Bearer or Bread Breaker is a useless institution, having little to no local control of the Glides they represent. These high level institutions are run by the first waves of colonization and have little in common with the average person. They tend to get into fights among themselves which thankfully rarely trickles down to the citizens of the Glides. 

There are 4 Shields: East, West, Southern and Islandic. They were colonized in reverse order. 

As the Separatists took control of Tankeren, they realized the political situation was more complex than anything they encountered before. Green 5, the lead tactical droid came up with a battle plan to take the planet Glide by Glide called Green Glass Glider or G3xG5. He's a little haughty about his role on the planet. The idea was the droid army would be able to focus on one Glide at a time and this would probably result in a total depopulation of the planet, like a Glassing event. 

Green 5 is currently in charge of the droid army and directed by the Lord and Lady of the planet. They are trying to make the droids more like a police force, which doesn't work very well. It doesn't help that the Lord and Lady have different points of view. Green 5 is flummoxed by the wild, independent nature of the citizens. He spends a lot of time preventing his droids from entering combat situations. The current rioting is baffling to him because the rioters only attack droids if no other target presents itself. 

Green 5 has some conflicting programing due to the fact that Viceroy Bargel has ordered Five to take instruction from the leaders of the planet and to stop taking orders from the Viceroy. Green 5 doesn't see Bargel's organization as a separate power and the hapless droid often reports to Bargel as a matter of course. When he doesn't, he often shares information with Bargel's bounty hunter.  He has no idea that Bargel expects the droid to get himself and his robotic brethren killed when the Rebels or Empire arrives. 

Session 001 - Character Rewind

I forgot to post character sheets. It's Sunday and I am working on my Neimoidian bounty hunter, but I would like to share the player's initial sheets.  

These are photocopies of a character sheet I had on hand and I rewrote what the players did on their sheets. There are mistakes, either one of the players didn't write in languages or I missed it. 

In either case, these are available by hitting the Pregenerated Characters tabs above or from the links below. When the players share their updated sheets, I'll load those, too. 

Just to recap, there are 5 player characters. Nonin is a Devaronian force adept with a blaster. Talhana is a Zabrak force adept, also with a blaster. Malta is Rodian scoundrel and dreamer, with a tiny holdout pistol. Dex is a human handiman and fringer with a sporting blaster. And lastly is Lidda. She is a twi'lik solder with more weapons than anyone else. Click those links for the individual PDF files. 

The characters have made it to level two, but I wanted to show their initial stats from Session 000.  Click the link for a recap. The short of it is, all of the characters have far more equipment and funds now. 

These characters the players created are forcing me to change up the scenarios in Invasion of Theed. In dumping the players on a different home planet, the scenarios can't play out as described. That one I knew. The second change followed by an adjustment was the players wanted to be in a place like the worlds in The Mandolorian. Since they made that choice they changed their minds. They want lightsabres now. Not too hard. The final change I have to make is the final villains can't exist on the players homeworld for a variety of reason, but the primary is, as played the characters would see these villains as heroes. That just won't do.