Sorry about the wait time here, but I was interrupted by the holidays. First post is up though!
HeySeuss Member
DJ Hot Carl
- Last Seen: 2 mos ago
- Joined: 11 yrs ago
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7 yrs ago
Hot dogs are already cooked. Might as well just sear them to add flavor.
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7 yrs ago
I love it when I catch up on my posting.
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7 yrs ago
If you take college seriously, it opens doors. Harvard and Hopkins makes it easier, but you can do well anywhere.
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7 yrs ago
Prefer to brainstorm on Discord for that reason.
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7 yrs ago
Windows 10 is very much like a German prison camp guard, "Ah, I see you are tryink to escape work fifteen minutes early, Herr Colonel Hogan, here ist an update zat vill stall you!"
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Bio
Most Recent Posts
Rothana was as hostile as it got. A pro-Republic, anti-Sep planet fully on board with the Empire. It was hard to argue with the hand that feeds, and Rothana did big business as a subsidiary of Kuat Drive Yards.
So an agent, even one with a legitimate diplomatic cover as a Senator's entourage, in this case his driver and pilot, kept a low profile.
Much of his work here was not the usual; in those instances, he would rub shoulders with swoopers and smugglers, fellow Huttese speakers, and form some bonds and maybe start the process of establishing information brokering with them. Rothana, however, was a fortress world of the Empire, and so it required a degree of delicacy.
It was a heavy research world, so surveillance was a given. And while Clang was a pilot first, he knew through previous experience how to identify undercover surveillance and then had the benefit of training for this role. It wasn't a volunteerism thing; they had to pry him out of an X-wing cockpit and transfer him. But it was an important job and senators needed good pilots too. The trick here wasn't watching for surveillance, it was identifying the surveillance and its quality without giving any indication that they were actually aware of it. It was the cat and mouse game, and the Rebels working for Senator Ordo were content to catalogue the extent of their tails for if and when they needed to do something about it.
The Rothanans were so heavy on security that the supply of counterintelligence agents, especially their best, could not keep up with demand. It was a droid heavy surveillance net. Omnipresent, but automated and therefore vulnerable. On the other hand, despite the puckered, monocultural nature of the New Order, with its uniforms, marching in lockstep and everything running on time, there was still a seamy underbelly; it was, after all, the Outer Rim. It was muted compared to a Hutt-run planet, but the gamblinng dens, prostitution, loan sharking and smuggling of things, mostly drugs, continued unabated. In fact, Rothana probably had more of it before, because the Empire clamped down on people's lives and that miasma of fear led to people seeking their diversions a little harder...particularly on a company world where the company culture was also relentless and highly competitive.
And so his mission was to run back and forth. Someone needed takeout food? Clang. Someone needed any sort of shopping? Clang. The others were involved in driving, dropping off and running errands, and this was how they were able to notice patterns in their surveillance as well as lay down their own patterns, recon alternate routes that broke from the pattern if needed and, essentially, put their tails to sleep. Meanwhile, Clang made slow contact with guarded locals that were always worried that they might be talking to someone that was stooging for the Empire.
With a little luck and persistence, he'd already started to patronize a couple of these holes, the sort of seamy places that garnered little attention but where business was inevitably conducted. Then, with consultation with Leto, he'd started buying up the debt of a few low level types to start gathering information in exchange for easing their debt, slowly but surely.
Eventually, they got what they wanted, a contact with one of the local rebel groups through a local underworld lowlife after a bit of cat and mouse. The Senator was here to inspect Rothana's new line of small shuttle craft, a proposed upgrade to the old LAAT/i dropship, and the Senator was in a committee that could theoretically fund such a thing, but the real job was to establish lines of communication with local Rothanan resistance cells. After the Kamino uprising, Rothana fell out of favor, and there were hard feelings about it as other companies, core worlds more entrenched with the Empire, received more and more of the business.
A meeting now and, perhaps, down the line, smuggled equipment for the Rebels? Perhaps an underworld buy. It was all possible once Senator Ordo or one of his functionaries had a high level enough meeting where they'd work to bring the local into the Rebel Alliance fold.
"Jojako Harlush at the Rokarokatusawa. He wants a time to meet." He reported the others in the common area of their starship, which was, in addition to being fast and stately for the purposes of a Senator, also shielded from eavesdropping. Clang spoke Huttese; it was a lingua franca in the parts of the Rim he came from. His squadron, the Intruders, spoke it in the X-wings, to the despair of the core worlder military command establishment. It was a collection of pirates, smugglers and other ne'er to do wells, but once in X-wings, they also took to the hit and fade nature of the war. There was a bit of a twinge of loss that he felt over being transferred, but he shoved that well down to the back of his mind.
"That translates to the Brain Damage Bar," he added, with a grin.
@jackdaw@ethanjory@gunther@captainbritton@sanity43217@jester
So an agent, even one with a legitimate diplomatic cover as a Senator's entourage, in this case his driver and pilot, kept a low profile.
Much of his work here was not the usual; in those instances, he would rub shoulders with swoopers and smugglers, fellow Huttese speakers, and form some bonds and maybe start the process of establishing information brokering with them. Rothana, however, was a fortress world of the Empire, and so it required a degree of delicacy.
It was a heavy research world, so surveillance was a given. And while Clang was a pilot first, he knew through previous experience how to identify undercover surveillance and then had the benefit of training for this role. It wasn't a volunteerism thing; they had to pry him out of an X-wing cockpit and transfer him. But it was an important job and senators needed good pilots too. The trick here wasn't watching for surveillance, it was identifying the surveillance and its quality without giving any indication that they were actually aware of it. It was the cat and mouse game, and the Rebels working for Senator Ordo were content to catalogue the extent of their tails for if and when they needed to do something about it.
The Rothanans were so heavy on security that the supply of counterintelligence agents, especially their best, could not keep up with demand. It was a droid heavy surveillance net. Omnipresent, but automated and therefore vulnerable. On the other hand, despite the puckered, monocultural nature of the New Order, with its uniforms, marching in lockstep and everything running on time, there was still a seamy underbelly; it was, after all, the Outer Rim. It was muted compared to a Hutt-run planet, but the gamblinng dens, prostitution, loan sharking and smuggling of things, mostly drugs, continued unabated. In fact, Rothana probably had more of it before, because the Empire clamped down on people's lives and that miasma of fear led to people seeking their diversions a little harder...particularly on a company world where the company culture was also relentless and highly competitive.
And so his mission was to run back and forth. Someone needed takeout food? Clang. Someone needed any sort of shopping? Clang. The others were involved in driving, dropping off and running errands, and this was how they were able to notice patterns in their surveillance as well as lay down their own patterns, recon alternate routes that broke from the pattern if needed and, essentially, put their tails to sleep. Meanwhile, Clang made slow contact with guarded locals that were always worried that they might be talking to someone that was stooging for the Empire.
With a little luck and persistence, he'd already started to patronize a couple of these holes, the sort of seamy places that garnered little attention but where business was inevitably conducted. Then, with consultation with Leto, he'd started buying up the debt of a few low level types to start gathering information in exchange for easing their debt, slowly but surely.
Eventually, they got what they wanted, a contact with one of the local rebel groups through a local underworld lowlife after a bit of cat and mouse. The Senator was here to inspect Rothana's new line of small shuttle craft, a proposed upgrade to the old LAAT/i dropship, and the Senator was in a committee that could theoretically fund such a thing, but the real job was to establish lines of communication with local Rothanan resistance cells. After the Kamino uprising, Rothana fell out of favor, and there were hard feelings about it as other companies, core worlds more entrenched with the Empire, received more and more of the business.
A meeting now and, perhaps, down the line, smuggled equipment for the Rebels? Perhaps an underworld buy. It was all possible once Senator Ordo or one of his functionaries had a high level enough meeting where they'd work to bring the local into the Rebel Alliance fold.
"Jojako Harlush at the Rokarokatusawa. He wants a time to meet." He reported the others in the common area of their starship, which was, in addition to being fast and stately for the purposes of a Senator, also shielded from eavesdropping. Clang spoke Huttese; it was a lingua franca in the parts of the Rim he came from. His squadron, the Intruders, spoke it in the X-wings, to the despair of the core worlder military command establishment. It was a collection of pirates, smugglers and other ne'er to do wells, but once in X-wings, they also took to the hit and fade nature of the war. There was a bit of a twinge of loss that he felt over being transferred, but he shoved that well down to the back of his mind.
"That translates to the Brain Damage Bar," he added, with a grin.
@jackdaw@ethanjory@gunther@captainbritton@sanity43217@jester
With the characters we have on board, I think we can start discussing how to set the first scene.
Also, I think we will eventually need specialists like slicers and so forth but we can add them later.
Also, I think we will eventually need specialists like slicers and so forth but we can add them later.
So far cool with the character sheets provided.
Name: Lieutenant Kerrick "Clang" Shan
Species: Human
Faction/Unit: 6th Special Personal Security Detail, formerly of Blue Squadron, Independence
Location: TBD
Synopsis of Role: Experienced starfighter pilot with combat experience at Turkana and in Operation Skyhook seconded to the 6 SPSD to provide support duties. A former Outer Rim swoop ganger, he can fly a light freighter, starfighter, any sort of speeder and does not look, in any way, military.
Species: Human
Faction/Unit: 6th Special Personal Security Detail, formerly of Blue Squadron, Independence
Location: TBD
Synopsis of Role: Experienced starfighter pilot with combat experience at Turkana and in Operation Skyhook seconded to the 6 SPSD to provide support duties. A former Outer Rim swoop ganger, he can fly a light freighter, starfighter, any sort of speeder and does not look, in any way, military.
The Rebellion doesn’t look so glamorous from the mud-side…
Guidelines
- Discord Chat for the RP. - to plot, collaborate and otherwise make things interesting.
- I want only a couple things over in character sheets - a name, a faction (empire, rebel, smugglers, etc) a location (System, Planet, City, etc.) and maybe a one sentence summary of the character. Yeah, because we need to be writing posts, not character sheets, and this way we can quickly -add- essential characters.
- Please use one sheet for all stubs, character and lore.
Character Stubs
The whole point of this system is to quickly introduce a character's name, faction, species and a quick summary of who they are in order to get them into the fight quickly. We're doing away with large sheets as an experiment. You can even write this stuff -after- you make the first post.
Name:
Species:
Faction/Unit: (ex. Rebel Alliance, 2nd Uslam Liberators or Imperial Navy, CO ISD Reprisal)
Location:
Synopsis of Role: (One sentence, keep it moving. Ex. Combat Engineer with the Uslam Liberators or Starship captain with 19 years of Imperial Navy experience.)
Species:
Faction/Unit: (ex. Rebel Alliance, 2nd Uslam Liberators or Imperial Navy, CO ISD Reprisal)
Location:
Synopsis of Role: (One sentence, keep it moving. Ex. Combat Engineer with the Uslam Liberators or Starship captain with 19 years of Imperial Navy experience.)
Lore Stubs
The whole point of this system is to quickly introduce a location, unit or faction. This allows you to quickly create a reference item for the lore. We will work on a way to organize all this as we move along, but please add this to your character stubs.
Name:
Type: (Location, Company, military formation, etc)
Faction/Unit: (ex. Rebel Alliance, Empire, Corporate)
Synopsis of Role: (One sentence, keep it moving. Ex. Rebel base in the asteroid belt or Imperial Star Destroyer serving as fleet flagship.)
Type: (Location, Company, military formation, etc)
Faction/Unit: (ex. Rebel Alliance, Empire, Corporate)
Synopsis of Role: (One sentence, keep it moving. Ex. Rebel base in the asteroid belt or Imperial Star Destroyer serving as fleet flagship.)
Diplomacy is dirty work these days...
TL;DR Summary
- FOOKIN DISCORD MATE!
- Star Wars
- 0BBY (Before Battle of Yavin, or that is to say -- Episode IV)
- Going with a really short sort of character sheet, rather than some long production. See Characters Tab for more detail.
- Rebellion Era - Far from Yavin, far from Scarif. Closer to Nar Shaddaa. Downside? Fringers. Upside? Far from Alderaan and open mic night at the co-op.
- The characters are 'diplomatic support specialists' which is to say, the retinue of a Senator Dona Ordo of Uslam, a Rebel Sympathizer that uses their status to help quietly rally and organize disparate anti-Imperial groups in the Outer Rim, which they are a native of. While there might be some people with significant social skills, Ordo's mission can be murky and dangerous, which means that they have, ideally, bodyguards, pilots, slicers and experienced spies in their group.
- Reserving the right here to turn down types of characters, like Mandalorians or Jedi or Human Replicant Droids, on the idea that without a very good back story and strong sense of the character, it's just a gimmick.
- The characters' decisions will affect the outcome.
- Multiple characters allowed, particularly in terms of opponents, neutrals and so forth.
In Character Info
The Republic has fallen and the Empire has risen in its place, having undermined and manipulated its way into power -- what seemed rational and logical turned out to be a manipulation. The Jedi are gone, the law no longer protects and the military no longer defends. The Empire has turned everything into an instrument of oppression under the New Order.
Still, there has always been resistance, even through the dark times. The young take up the fight against the tyranny, filling the ranks of the opposition to the Empire with a generation that does not justify the Empire by claiming that the Republic was more corrupt, worse and so forth. Some are idealists, others have their backs to the wall. The Empire creates its enemies -- the harder it squeezes, the more people consider banding together against the Empire. And now the Empire's enemy has a name.
The nascent Rebel Alliance is an attempt to organize disparate groups fighting the Empire from the shadows and also to undermine Imperial control of communications between worlds and provide a quiet channel of communications between factions. The Empire is aware that there is a diplomatic effort ongoing, and while it might not be ready to directly stamp out someone like Senator Mon Mothma, it has no problem with arranging accidents.
That means diplomacy is a high risk operation. But it's necessary.
That's where 6th Special Personal Security Detail (PSD), Alliance Diplomatic Corps, comes into play. Organized in a similar way to Intelligence's operations directorate, PSDs are intended to provide specialized skills to support the diplomat...that can range from bodyguarding, to intelligence gathering, counterintelligence/surveillance, to recruiting agents on planet, assassinations and smuggling and anything else within the scope, thus 'special,' a term that encompasses a lot of unconventional capabilities.
It is dangerous work, covert in nature and with a higher than usual risk profile because often the diplomats themselves are known to the ISB and the Ubiquitorate. These teams have two very simple mandates; keep their principal alive and complete the mission, doing whatever it takes for both.
Still, there has always been resistance, even through the dark times. The young take up the fight against the tyranny, filling the ranks of the opposition to the Empire with a generation that does not justify the Empire by claiming that the Republic was more corrupt, worse and so forth. Some are idealists, others have their backs to the wall. The Empire creates its enemies -- the harder it squeezes, the more people consider banding together against the Empire. And now the Empire's enemy has a name.
The nascent Rebel Alliance is an attempt to organize disparate groups fighting the Empire from the shadows and also to undermine Imperial control of communications between worlds and provide a quiet channel of communications between factions. The Empire is aware that there is a diplomatic effort ongoing, and while it might not be ready to directly stamp out someone like Senator Mon Mothma, it has no problem with arranging accidents.
That means diplomacy is a high risk operation. But it's necessary.
That's where 6th Special Personal Security Detail (PSD), Alliance Diplomatic Corps, comes into play. Organized in a similar way to Intelligence's operations directorate, PSDs are intended to provide specialized skills to support the diplomat...that can range from bodyguarding, to intelligence gathering, counterintelligence/surveillance, to recruiting agents on planet, assassinations and smuggling and anything else within the scope, thus 'special,' a term that encompasses a lot of unconventional capabilities.
It is dangerous work, covert in nature and with a higher than usual risk profile because often the diplomats themselves are known to the ISB and the Ubiquitorate. These teams have two very simple mandates; keep their principal alive and complete the mission, doing whatever it takes for both.
Out of Character Info
This RP is actually an idea I had for a slightly different Star Wars RP that encompasses all kinds of murkiness and danger. Covert diplomacy on behalf of an insurgency is as dangerous as it gets; the Principal, the Senator, is well known and under observation. In the current wars that go on worldwide in our era, diplomats are protected by a variety of specialists that are heavily armed and well trained, often Special Operations Forces (SOF) veterans. In the Star Wars universe, I feel that smugglers, slicers, and perhaps even an ex-padawan, specialized droids and bounty hunters might well be part of a Rebel diplomat's Personal Security Detail (PSD).
There are a couple roles we need filling first and foremost
- Senator Dona Ordo of Uslam. Uslam was once a Mando planet, way way back. It retains loan words and vestiges and a couple huge nerds that go and bother to learn Mando'a and something about the culture. Dona Ordo is not even gendered yet, because this is going to be a player character. Take it and run with it?
- Counterintelligence - Slicers, countersurveillance specialists, people that know how to swap cars and lose tails.
- Gatherers - People that can create/take advantage of local information resources to support the diplomatic mission. This can range from bribing people to sex to blackmail and combinations thereof.
- Shooters - Experienced, well-trained folks with heavy weaponry that function as physical bodyguards. If things go to shooting, it's going to get heavy and there's a window of time for escape, after which the Empire will have flooded the area with forces.
- Escapists - Drivers, pilots, resources that can be activated along with the shooters to create an escape pipeline for Senator Ordo.
- Others - Get creative.
Pacing-wise, let's aim for a couple paragraphs a go, keep it moving. Also, this RP will start fairly quickly, so there will not be a weeks long screening process once in OOC. If we go into OOC, we will work off a 'stub' system for lore that involves "just the facts ma'am" where we categorize items and describe them briefly. This includes character information.
There are a couple roles we need filling first and foremost
- Senator Dona Ordo of Uslam. Uslam was once a Mando planet, way way back. It retains loan words and vestiges and a couple huge nerds that go and bother to learn Mando'a and something about the culture. Dona Ordo is not even gendered yet, because this is going to be a player character. Take it and run with it?
- Counterintelligence - Slicers, countersurveillance specialists, people that know how to swap cars and lose tails.
- Gatherers - People that can create/take advantage of local information resources to support the diplomatic mission. This can range from bribing people to sex to blackmail and combinations thereof.
- Shooters - Experienced, well-trained folks with heavy weaponry that function as physical bodyguards. If things go to shooting, it's going to get heavy and there's a window of time for escape, after which the Empire will have flooded the area with forces.
- Escapists - Drivers, pilots, resources that can be activated along with the shooters to create an escape pipeline for Senator Ordo.
- Others - Get creative.
Pacing-wise, let's aim for a couple paragraphs a go, keep it moving. Also, this RP will start fairly quickly, so there will not be a weeks long screening process once in OOC. If we go into OOC, we will work off a 'stub' system for lore that involves "just the facts ma'am" where we categorize items and describe them briefly. This includes character information.
Yo!
Given the degree of interest here and in Discord directly, I'm gonna bump this out to OOC soon. I will have structure in place for character sheets and other lore, but I basically want to reassure people that I believe in a painless process here and don't intend to hand out some sort of beast writing assignment just to get a character worked up.
Please stand by!
Given the degree of interest here and in Discord directly, I'm gonna bump this out to OOC soon. I will have structure in place for character sheets and other lore, but I basically want to reassure people that I believe in a painless process here and don't intend to hand out some sort of beast writing assignment just to get a character worked up.
Please stand by!
Welcome to SWORD, hah!
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