Playing – Scum & Villainy Finale!

After 23+ sessions, the Star Jammers (Scum & Villainy) story arc came to a close.
This was a goal of mine this year, to see a game I was running to a conclusion.

We managed to reach the big epic ending episode with enough left hanging to maybe return to clean up those bits. I’ve got a few mixed feelings I’m still working through …

• The Player Characters had pretty much maxed out their primary and a few secondary abilities and we discussed options for other things XP could be spent on or even bumping maximums in one group of abilities. As was, creating meaningful challenges was getting more difficult.

• Two Player Characters were on the cusp if being Trauma’d out of the game. I felt surprisingly good about that, having pushed them to their limits and there were consequences that came calling.

• The main plot had been completed, a War Sun stopped from completely fulfilling it’s objective of obliterating the capital of the sector and establishing a blockade to the Core Worlds.

• But it was messy. Once the players had committed to their plan to sneak aboard the War Sun, we started a clock and gave a deadline, a deadline that was regularly announced as an internal alert “X minutes remaining before detonation”. In the end, the Player Characters missed it by just minutes. Meanwhile, they had caused some mayhem and destruction so the full effect was reduced, destroying half the moon instead of all of it. They escaped with a couple of rescued captives and a plot device needed for a secondary story. Still, it felt like a hollow victory.

• There are still multiple consequences and plot lines left to resolve, including who survived the War Sun attack and how this will change the day to day of the sector. Plus, would it still even be the same Player Characters or would it be better to retire them for the next Arc / Series.

• Some named rivals and enemy NPCs appeared, but they just didn’t fully click while others never appeared.

• I still struggle with not making this into a D&D game, replacing hit points with ticking clocks, but I believe that I am better at it now than I was a year ago. We pushed the framework into some shapes it wasn’t intended for but made it still work.

In any case, we’re taking a break from Scum & Villainy for a bit, with the potential for a much shorter story arc to bring some closure.