It was a day not unlike this one in Worcester, sometime in the winter of (IIRC) 1992-93. A few of us were hanging around the house on Lee Street that was sort of GweepCo Central that year. I don't remember now exactly who-all was there. I know Andrew Petrarca and the late Derek Bacon were on hand, and I think Truss (all of whom lived there); possibly also Jer, and maybe Seann Ives, my old gaming compadre from high school (who ran the epic Shadowrun campaign I've mentioned in these parts before). We were all a bit bored of the usual time-killing measures, and someone suggested that we dig out Derek's WEG Star Wars books, roll up some characters, and have a quick game.

Somehow or other I ended up getting talked into being the GM for this endeavor, so I sort of sat off to one side racking my brains for an adventure seed while the others made their characters. At this point, one of them decided coming up with an entertaining Star Wars adventure on no notice whatsoever wasn't an adequate challenge for me and decided to set me a trap. Ah, friendship.

The way this was done has to do with the way the West End Star Wars game was configured. Some of you are probably familiar with it, others may not be, so a little background may be in order. This was the early 1990s, remember, and the game dated from the late '80s. Back then there were only the three movies and a bare handful of supplemental materials. The "Admiral Thrawn" trilogy hadn't even finished coming out yet when we played this game, and the RPG we were playing was published in 1987, long before. The vast and mystifying profusion of tie-in novels and comic books, the so-called "Expanded Universe", hadn't happened yet.

As such, the game was based almost solely on the films themselves, with only Brian Daley's Han Solo books, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, and a scattering of other supplementary materials to draw on, and that informed its tone more than a little. West End Star Wars didn't... take itself as seriously as the later Wizards of the Coast products based on the license.

One of the things that the West End game had was prefabricated characters templates that could be used to speed up character generation. These were sort of more than the usual classes/archetypes, but a little bit less than fully pregenerated characters. Some reflected the characters from the original films (there was a Smuggler character who was basically Han Solo, and so on). Others were extrapolations based on the logic of the game setting (such as the one that was called something like Alien Student of the Force, which was a non-human character who could use the Force, but not in the ways Jedi characters did). Some of these were useful!

Some of them were not.

Andrew decided, for reasons of boredom and perversity, that his character would be based on the template called, if memory serves, something like Imperial Bureaucrat.

Seriously. Everyone else is making fugitive Jedi, space cowboy gunslingers, droids, and all the usual sort of anti-Imperial riffraff, and Andrew decides his character is going to be a low-ranking Imperial customs official. Named, in anticipation of the grand Star Wars tradition of naming characters after their personality traits (Cad Bane, Agent Kallas, et al.), Blandwell Nerdley.

In retrospect, it may be that Andrew didn't particularly want to play Star Wars that afternoon.

So, fine. You have to work with what the players present you, after all. The adventure started out in a seedy spaceport town somewhere on the Outer Rim; not Mos Eisley-grade seedy, it did have an Imperial customs office, but still pretty seedy. Customs Inspector Third Class Nerdley's assignment was to vet a civilian freighter making port and ensure that it carried no undeclared contraband. Ordinarily he didn't leave the office, but the field personnel were short-staffed due to an outbreak of $SPACE_DISEASE and, well, needs must.

Of course, things went sideways in short order and he found himself semi-rescued, semi-kidnapped by the crew of said freighter, who were of course undercover Rebel Scum carrying out some nefarious mission or another, and poor Customs Inspector Third Class Nerdley found himself a fugitive, wanted by the Empire for crimes he certainly didn't commit. It was all a terrible misunderstanding, of course, but how to go about proving that to the authorities without getting shot in the process? This was the conundrum that confronted poor Customs Inspector Third Class Nerdley.

A sequence of "side quest"-type adventures followed, the details of which I have largely forgotten now. The whole purpose of those was to embroil poor Nerdley further, implicate him in so many Imperial crimes he could never work his way back to his comfortable dead-end job, and possibly induce in him something like Stockholm syndrome. The only thing I remember about them now is that one of them involved a Jabba the Hutt-style underworld figure based on an AD&D beholder and affectionately called Eddie the One-Eyed Slimeball.

Weeks of telescoped gaming time later, things went from bad to worse for Nerdley when his Rebel rescuer/captors made contact with their superiors, who were in the process of arranging the larger mission for which their previous antisocial activity had been by way of preparation, namely: hijacking an experimental Imperial Star Destroyer configured to be operated by a mere handful of people. The advantages in this theft for the Rebellion should be obvious, given their chronic staffing problems. Of course, the automated systems were only a partial solution, they also needed to have someone on their team who actually knew how to fight a ship that size in case of any entanglements with the rest of the Imperial fleet. They were rendezvousing with the Rebel "case officer" managing their cell in order to pick up an NPC who would handle that part of the job.

Unfortunately, said NPC managed to get himself killed in a lightfight that broke out at the rendezvous between our heroes and the vengeful minions of Eddie the One-Eyed Slimeball, whom they had displeased in a previous adventure. It was while bewailing this fate, and the inevitable doom it would bring to the Star Destroyer caper, when their Rebel Command handler noticed the pale, nebbishy figure in the at-this-point-somewhat-ragged Imperial Customs Bureau uniform.

"Wait," said he. "Who is this?"

"Oh," said the captain of our Rebel crew, "he's nobody. He got tangled up in our job on $PLANET and we haven't figured out a way to cut him loose that won't get him killed, that's all."

"What is your name, nobody?" demanded the Rebel Officer, eyeing Nerdley very closely.

"Um... I'm... Customs Inspector Third Class Nerdley," the Imperial Bureaucrat replied.

The Rebel Officer recoiled in shock and blurted, "Not Blandwell Nerdley?!"

There followed a you-never-studied moment for the rest of the crew, in which the Rebel Officer chided them all for not knowing that Admiral Blandwell Nerdley was one of the finest officers of the Imperial Navy before defecting to the Rebellion. Unfortunately he was captured several years ago, and, the Rebel leadership believed, executed for his treason.

The Rebel Officer's theory was that instead of execution, it had pleased the Emperor to have this great, star-striding space hero's personality wiped and consign him to a grey and featureless existence as a minor functionary of the Imperial bureaucracy in some distant, out-of-the-way port of call, there to live out his days in humdrum rote busy-work.

Please note that I never specified whether the Rebel Officer's theory was correct, because that would have been godmoding. But that was what he believed, and so he assumed that the team's bacon (as it were) was saved, because surely the great Blandwell Nerdley could succeed where the luckless dead NPC had failed. Even if he claimed to remember nothing of any sort of spacefaring life, surely if he were placed at the helm of an experimental automated Star Destroyer, it would all come back to him, and he could then lead the expedition to glorious victory, retaking his rightful place as one of the greatest heroes of the Rebellion!

Godspeed you, Customs Inspector Third Class Nerdley. The galaxy is depending on you!

And you know, he didn't do too badly. Never remembered a thing about his previous life, if indeed there even was a previous life to remember, but with a few lucky dice rolls, the judicious expenditure of a few Force points, and an unexpectedly nice line in sheer, unadulterated bullshit on his part, Nerdley did in fact lead the expedition to victory. He even rather warmed to the part by the end of the ordeal. We may assume that he indeed went on to become one of the Rebel pantheon.

All without the slightest idea what he was actually doing.

And that's what happens when you decide you're going to play an Imperial Bureaucrat in an action game. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well played, sir. I'm convinced the biggest part of being a successful GM is being able to judo flip your players attempts at being 'clever.'

One particular time against a 'boss' they had been running up against several times, this character got close enough to use his shotgun in the hopes of clearing their escape route. Roll for damage. He got a 6 on his force die*. And another one. And another. After it was all said and done, his total was over 100 compared to the enemy's roughly 30 defense roll. With that much damage straight to the guy's health I ruled that from just the sheer amount of energy that he pumped into the guy at point blank range, he fried his nervous system and died from system shock. Chalk up another kill.

Me and everybody else were laughing our asses off while the guy who ran that character "But, but, but..."ed. "It was set for stun. IT WAS SET FOR STUN!" He didn't get a dark side point for it because he wasn't TRYING to kill the guy. It was just a very aggressive stun.

*(For those who might not happen to know how the old d6 system worked, it's kinda like the d20 system now, but instead of 1 d20+bonuses for your total it'd be x-number-of-d6s for the total. One of those d6s would be a 'force die'. If you rolled a 6 on that die, you'd add 6 to your total and roll that die again. Another 6, another roll. Repeat as needed.)

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes