Armed with the location of Final Provenance, the PCs are ready to head into the end game. However, getting there means having to deal with an Imperial blockade and solving an ancient mystery surrounding the Kwa and their Infinity Gates…

Episode VI: Gates of Infinity

As the Galactic Civil War rages on and the REBEL ALLIANCE loses ground, a desperate situation arises on the edge of known space.

The crew of the VALKYRIE has discovered the truth about the Infinity Gates: they are weapons, and the evil Trintignant will use them to control the galaxy.

The gates can be controlled from Bamaru, still held in the grip of the Empire. The race is on to prevent widespread destruction and save life itself….

Synopsis

For two weeks, the crew of the Valkyrie has recovered on the planet Ji-Antai, at Bastion’s refuge. The Empire still controls Bamaru, meaning they’ll have to deal with both the occupation and a defensive fleet in orbit.

While the group waits for General Bel Riose to arrive and tries to come up with a strategy, Nereida takes the opportunity to continue training Lorelei. Silverbird takes a chance and opens up to Rage about her past with Trintignant. She was converted into an ancillary when she was a child, but rather than overwriting her personality like the others, Trintignant wanted to experiment with having a daughter. She doesn’t remember anything about her life before being Silverbird, but under Trintignant’s guidance she learned how to be a slicer.

When he abducted Prad Lay’s leader Kyla Vene and experimented on her, her escape gave Silverbird the chance to get away. She hid and used her skills to keep herself safe. Now, though, with everything the crew learned on Xantor, she knows that avoiding Trintignant isn’t enough. She’s certain that whatever his plan is, he’ll use the weaponized Infinity Gates to carry it out, placing millions of lives in jeopardy. They need to confront him and stop him from reaching Final Provenance.

Rage brings her in front of the group, and she outlines a plan. Trintignant can distribute his consciousness to his ancillaries, but he exists as a single being that can be killed. His range is also limited, and though it can be extended using special relays, none of those relays can reach Bamaru—meaning he’ll have to make the journey there himself.

One of her old relays, the ones she used to remotely slice across the galaxy, is within range of Bamaru. If the group can get her there, she can use it to get them intelligence on what the Empire is doing on Bamaru. The problem: she sold it to pirates a while ago, after she moved her operations elsewhere. She doesn’t imagine they’ll be willing to just let them use it.

However, as Mara points out, once they have the relay they can fake a signal to the Imperial forces and try to redirect the fleet elsewhere with falsified reports of a rebel fleet. With that out of the way, the team can reach the planet’s surface and start searching for Final Provenance.

As it happens, a messenger arrives seeking Bastion’s help. A nearby village has been taken over by pirates. Bastion has helped these people before, but this time he has backup in the form of the Valkyrie‘s crew. They arrive to find a familiar face: Jado Prinda, once the “Pirate Prince of Bamaru,” now roughing up villagers for fun. They handily dismantle his operation and then grill him about the pirates at Silverbird’s old relay. He’s more than happy to tell them everything he knows at lightsaber point.

The next morning, the Caelestris arrives. The crew makes contact with General Riose and updates him on their plan. However, he reveals that he can’t give them support: not only is the Caelestris in bad shape after the fight with Kandri Vondar, but he’s been recalled by the Alliance. He needs to own up to their actions—they did technically commit mutiny when they stole the ship—but he also needs to inform High Command of the threat posed by the Infinity Gates.

The Valkyrie team decides to take Jado’s ship to the relay, since the Valkyrie itself will be easily recognizable to the Imperials in the Bamaru system. Riose takes the Valkyrie with him and promises to send support as soon as he can.

The crew arrives at the relay to find that it’s already been hit. Fearing Trintignant anticipated their move, they investigate, only to find that the pirates have been neutralized by another familiar face: Bix. He and his new droid “family” decided to follow the crew’s example and fight against injustice, which happened to lead them here. He readily agrees to help and even offers to lend his own ship, a heavily-armed corvette, to their efforts.

Using the relay and Silverbird’s information about Trintignant’s forces, Rage estimates the likely paths that Trintignant will take to reach Bamaru. He finds a bottleneck where all those paths overlap and then remotely slices into the Empire’s communications systems. He sends reports of rebel fleet activity at those coordinates and falsifies orders for the Bamaru defense fleet to intercept and engage. Silverbird doesn’t know if they’ll be a match for Trintignant’s flagship, the Clockmaker, but at least they should slow him down. She figures they have a few days until Trintignant reaches Final Provenance.

With everything in place, the crew makes for Bamaru.

On their arrival, they discover that Bamaru has been largely strip-mined for resources. Mara successfully pilots the corvette to evade the lone patrol ship left by the Empire. They land at an unmarked shanty town to discover it’s populated by refugees who fled Imperial persecution. The refugees are led by Nomi Chalu, the former Captain of the Bamaru Marshal Service whose daughter they rescued from Jado years ago.

She catches them up on the injustices the Empire has wrought, with Eka Othaffin now in charge of the marshals and using them as the jackboot of the Imperials. However, they’re interrupted by the arrival of the marshals investigating reports of an unauthorized landing. The Valkyrie team confronts and captures them, preventing them from reporting back about their presence.

When the crew asks Chalu about Final Provenance, she tells them that the Empire made a thorough seismic survey of the planet before they started strip mining it. She introduces them to some miners who fled, and they tell stories of an area that was locked down by the Empire. No mining crews were allowed anywhere near it. Rumor has it that the miners who were assigned to that area were never heard from again.

The crew is relatively certain that’s where Final Provenance is located. However, that area is heavily guarded and entrenched, with any outright attack likely to end in failure. They come up with a bold plan: lead an assault on the city of Tordega, seat of the Imperial occupation, and start an uprising among the miners, all of whom are primed to rebel. That will peel off the guards from the mining site and allow the Valkyrie team to access the site with a minimum of fuss.

The assault goes well, with the Jedi Knights leading the uprising while Rage and Ma’lona infiltrate the Imperial command center and destroy the comms tower. The team stays with the rebels until they have control over most of the city. They even manage to negotiate a standoff at the marshals’ headquarters in the city, and Eka Othaffin surrenders to them. After a full day of fighting, the only holdouts left are the Imperial governor’s residence and the army garrison.

When the crew and Silverbird arrive at the mining site, they discover it’s now only defended by the miners themselves, all of whom are easily convinced to lay down their arms. They’re introduced to the mining foreman, an Imperial bureaucrat with no military interests, and to an archaeologist who’s been investigating the “strangest find in the sector.”

They show the crew to what they call “the pod,” which is a massive sphere buried in the crust of Bamaru. However, the group is unable to open it, despite trying for several hours.

Then the Clockmaker arrives.

It soars in over the excavation site and uses a massive tractor beam to pull the sphere and the surrounding strata out of the ground—the same way that Trintignant removed the vault from under the palace on Ord Gimmel. The sphere is raised up into the Clockmaker. Dozens of servitors swarm in, accompanied by Kandri Vondar, an ancillary, and an unfamiliar individual wielding a lightsaber pike. A standoff ensues, but through the ancillary Trintignant is successful in unlocking the sphere using a crystal recovered from Ord Gimmell.

As soon as he does so, Bastion uses the Force to collapse the remaining strata around the sphere, blocking off or destroying most of the servitors and giving the team a moment to enter the sphere before anyone else can.

Each member of the Valkyrie team finds themselves standing alone in some manner of simulacrum based on their own memories, dreams, and regrets. However, not all of them are alone.

Bastion is confronted with his greatest regret and failure: not being there when the Jedi Order was destroyed. He’s in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, witnessing its fall at the end of the Clone Wars. A figure in a black hood wielding a blue lightsaber is about to slaughter a group of Padawans, and Bastion steps in. They fight a grueling duel, with Bastion calling upon his own rage and sorrow to finally gain the upper hand. He slays the man he recognizes as Darth Vader, but very nearly falls to the dark side in the process.

Rage relives the day his family was forced to flee their home in Chiss space, when he was separated from them and left with uncertainty. He refuses to abandon them this time, and then finds himself in a snowy, burning village. He witnesses a young girl being carried off by servitors and brought to a waiting ancillary. He intercedes, saving the girl and fighting off the aggressors. When the smoke clears, he discovers Silverbird standing nearby, and she explains that this was her own past.

Ma’lona is back at Bunko Bolbu, where her mother tells her that life at Bolbu the Hutt’s side is much better than her life with her family. Ma’lona is then dropped through a grate in the floor and finds herself in a tropical forest, engaged in a sniper duel. She wins handily… only to discover that her opponent was really her own father.

However, El’orica’s spirit appears and explains that everything here is an illusion—real and dangerous in the moment, but ultimately not a reflection of reality. She believes it’s a security feature, using a vergence in the Force to create a maze based on the occupants’ thoughts and feelings. Sure enough, when Ma’lona accepts that nothing is real, the illusion dissipates and she finds herself standing on a winding, silver pathway suspended over a black void. El’orica offers to help guide her towards her friends.

Mara witnesses her last fight with her father, before he died in a racing accident. Then she walks a hallway of memories, leading her to an unexpected place: the bridge of Kandri Vondar’s cruiser as she watched Mara steal the Star Destroyers that were meant to be hers. Vondar speaks, describing the odd mixture of pride and anger she felt, and blames Mara for forcing her into a position where she needed Trintignant’s help to keep her dream of a free Outer Rim alive. Mara responds that Vondar made her own choices, and the two ignite their lightsabers.

The duel is vicious and quick, with both fighters giving it their all. However, Vondar manages to get the upper hand and strike down Mara. With her last breath, Mara tells Vondar, “You’re still going to lose,” before Vondar buries her lightsaber in Mara’s chest. Mara Bell dies a Jedi Knight.

Nereida finds herself back with her old master, Balek, trying to fight off the Inquisitor. Balek tells her to run, but she stands her ground. Together, they’re able to defeat the Inquisitor. Nereida turns to Balek and apologizes that she wasn’t ready before. Her master comforts her and says that it had to happen this way, so that she would be able to train her own apprentice. Then he sends her away for good.

She finds Lorelei, who is reliving the attack on Trintignant’s outpost that revealed her father had been transformed into an ancillary. Nereida helps guide her through, and the pair wind up in a cold, broken down palace. They’re confronted by the figure with the lightsaber pike, who introduces herself as Alaxel of the Catakorizo, a guild of dark side assassins. She claims that Master Balek once hunted the Catakorizo to the brink of extinction, slaying Alaxel’s master, and she vows to have her revenge on Nereida as “the scion of Balek.”

Alaxel holds her own against Nereida and Lorelei in a straight duel. Nereida is able to distract Alaxel long enough for Lorelei to get behind her, and master and apprentice strike down their foe together.

Ma’lona finds Bastion, then Rage, but as they’re searching for everyone else they feel Mara’s death in the Force. They find her body at the same time as Nereida and Lorelei, drawn by the same disturbance. Rage picks up Mara’s body, and El’orica guides them to the center of the maze.

There, they find a familiar blue crystalline control panel, similar to the one they found on Kom Ombo. Vondar is there, heavily wounded from her fight with Mara. She opens her mouth to speak, but Ma’lona fires a blaster bolt into her face.

The control panel activates. El’orica’s holocron begins to glow orange, and a rough, unknown voice emanates from it: “Choose thy desire, exile or absolution?” They all feel a wrongness in the Force.

The group concentrates through the Force, trying to sense El’orica. Their combined strength overrides the dark presence hiding in the ruin, allowing El’orica to break free. All the crystals return to a blue color, and the image of a reptilian individual appears in front of the console.

She introduces herself as Walking-Life-Through-Eternal-Sunrise and welcomes them to Final Provenance.

She explains that, long ago, the Kwa used the Infinity Gates to access hyperspace and move between worlds in a single step. It was based on their understanding of the Force, what they called etherium. They used this technology to explore along the rim of the galaxy, finding species who loved exploring and culture and uplifting them. However, they chanced upon a species known as the Rakata, deep in the area now known as the Unknown Regions.

At first, the Rakata seemed like exactly the kind of species that the Kwa sought to uplift. However, once they came to understand etherium, the Rakata were able to twist and corrupt it to their own ends. They used the Kwa’s own technology to violently overthrow them, invading their homeworld and overrunning it in a matter of hours. Their ultimate goal was to enslave the entire galaxy.

It soon became apparent that Kwa civilization was doomed. Two plans were proposed: the first, by Sunrise, was to try using the Infinity Gate technology to reach a new galaxy, and then close the gate behind them. They would lose the galaxy, but they could start over somewhere new.

The second, by a Kwa named Light-Brought-In-Good-Faith, was to change the foundations of the Infinity Gate technology and turn them into weapons. They could use it to destroy the worlds that the Kwa already took over, costing billions of lives but stopping the invasion.

In their desperation, the leaders of the Kwa agreed to Faith’s plan. Sunrise went into exile to complete her own project. While she never found out the details, she knows that the weapon was used only a few times by the Kwa before they were overrun. The Rakata then turned that weapon on the galaxy and used the fear of it to enslave countless races. Eventually, they found Sunrise and her team, and attacked.

Sunrise and her people escaped into the new gate. The image of Sunrise has no idea whether she succeeded or not—she was made by Sunrise just hours before the Rakata arrived, and there was only a small chance the gate would work as intended.

However, she has a dire warning. Where once the Infinity Gate weapon could be contained to a single planet, the degradation of the entire network means that the destructive power will chain-react with other planets. If Trintignant means to activate the network—a fact she learned based on Alaxel’s and Vondar’s journeys through the defensive maze—any world connected via etherium will be destroyed.

“If etherium is the Force,” Lorelei realizes, “then all worlds will be destroyed.”

Because Trintignant has the key, he can activate the weapon whenever he reaches the center. Sunrise reports that he’s currently attempting to get through, using his ancillaries as fodder in a war of attrition against the maze. To prevent the weapons from being fired, the team must destroy Final Provenance by dropping it into Bamaru’s sun.

They agree, and Sunrise guides them to the maze’s exit. They emerge and face token resistance from Trintignant’s forces, but they quickly escape. The ancillaries, it seems, are single-minded in their focus on getting through the maze, and the rest of the servitors aboard the Clockmaker are currently defending it against an attack by the Alliance.

Once the team exits Final Provenance, they’re contacted by General Riose. He’s rallied some ships to keep Trintignant occupied, including the Star Destroyer Valhalla that they stole from the Empire. They update him, and he tells them that once they’ve redirected the ship into the sun, he’ll send the Valkyrie to pick them up.

After fighting their way to the control center, they find Trintignant—the real Trintignant. He was once a living being, though his shape has long since been consumed by machines. He’s wired himself into the core of the Clockmaker.

Rage and Silverbird set about slicing into the core. Trintignant fights them, but Rage is able to lock him out. However, he soon realizes that the voyage from their current position to Bamaru’s star will take too long: Trintignant’s ancillaries will reach Final Provenance by then.

So he reverses the Clockmaker‘s tractor beam and fires Final Provenance into the sun.

As it recedes, Silverbird takes the opportunity to speak directly to Trintignant. She tells him that she’s finally risen above his influence, and she won’t be afraid anymore.

“As long as you live,” says Trintignant, “a part of me will, too.”

Then Ma’lona shoots him in what’s left of his heart. He dies, and so does the Clockmaker.

In a race against the exploding ship, the team barely makes it to the landing bay to board the Valkyrie. La’tala, Redar Typhe, and Vissica Cavisek are all waiting. They’re devastated to learn of Mara’s death, but there’s no time to mourn. Redar takes her body to the medical bay while everyone else piles into the cockpit to blast out of the danger zone.

They succeed. As they watch the Clockmaker detonate, they reflect on the sacrifices that led them there. Hi-D approaches them and reveals that Mara recorded a last will and testament, leaving the Valkyrie in Rage’s care.

The team remains at Bamaru for two weeks, helping to stabilize things with the Alliance and waiting out the governor, who remained locked in her mansion. They hold a Jedi funeral for Mara. Word arrives that the Emperor has been killed in a battle on the other side of the galaxy. Upon hearing this, the governor surrenders herself to General Riose and the Jedi.

Two years pass.

The Valkyrie team stayed together through the rest of the war, but after the signing of the Galactic Concordance, they went their separate ways. Ma’lona returned to bounty hunting, working for the New Republic’s Zerek Commission to locate and arrest Imperial war criminals still at-large. Nereida and Bastion took Lorelei to the site of an ancient Jedi temple and began restoring it, intending to rebuild the Order. Rage and Silverbird joined Zyrus on Mon Cala, working with him at his shop.

Now they all reunite on Mon Cala for the anniversary of the war’s end. Over a banquet dinner, Zyrus announces that he’s leaving to travel the Outer Rim again. He was heartbroken when he heard what happened to Mara, and he wants to honor her memory by seeking out those in need and lending his services. He leaves the shop to Rage.

That night, the team sits under the light of hundreds of fireworks, looking forward to the future.

Behind the Screen

Bringing a story back to end where it began can be emotional. It shows the characters, and by extension the players, how the world didn’t stop growing and changing just because they left. But some things are the same by necessity, and experiencing them again after so long just shows how much the characters have grown and changed themselves.

At the start of Episode II, when the group had to decide whether they would stay on Bamaru or leave, I came up with a series of events that would occur on Bamaru in the next few years. If the group chose to leave, the events would always resolve the worst way possible for Bamaru’s citizens, on the grounds that the PCs were the only ones who could really solve these problems. So when the group returned in this episode and found the place in the pits, it was in a real sense the direct consequence of their choosing to leave.

Of course, they did wind up fixing everything in the end, which is what heroes do.

To say that this was an emotional ending would be underselling it. It was the culmination of three years of storytelling, and wrapping it all up took a titanic effort. It only took seven sessions, though, mostly because of the pace required by reaching the climax of the story.

For starters, we had a character death at the most unexpected moment. Mara had consistently cut through all opposition like a buzzsaw. Since I knew that her fight with Kandri Vondar would be one-on-one, I took pains to build the encounter fairly. In retrospect, I absolutely succeeded: blow for blow, they were evenly matched.

But when it came to the combat, the dice favored Vondar. Mara fought her hardest, but it wasn’t good enough to beat a fallen Jedi Master with decades of experience. Pris took it well, but it was a shock to the whole table—especially considering it happened in the second-to-last session.

There was also designing all those encounters to both show how far each character had come and test them. Some, like Ma’lona’s and Nereida’s, were deliberately similar to previous trials they had faced, but with an updated twist. For Ma’lona, the twist was having El’orica there to help guide her, while Nereida was forced to see her master’s actions from the perspective of someone who had taken on her own apprentice.

While nobody failed the maze (except, arguably, Mara) Bastion came close. Compared with Mara vs. Vondar, Bastion vs. Vader was a more drawn-out affair. I used the stats for Vader presented in Dawn of Rebellion, and I didn’t pull any punches.

Bastion eventually won, though Thom and I had a long talk about it afterwards. He said that Bastion was utterly shaken by the realization that the only way he could have stopped him during the sacking of the temple was to give into the darkness. The price, he decided, would have been too high. Bastion briefly put aside his saber and mask, until he felt Mara’s death in the Force and realized his duty in protecting the Jedi now extended to this new generation.

As before, Rage’s story was tied into Silverbird’s, though Cody was happy to have it be so. He was very satisfied with how that turned out, since he was the one who suggested Rage had a slicer rival in the first place. But it didn’t all turn out happy: Rage was grieving Mara’s death at the end. Cody and Pris had decided at one point that Mara and Rage had a secret romance going on; everyone else, it turned out, assumed the same thing.

Overall, though, the group showed how far they’d come. Their characters didn’t hesitate to dedicate themselves to Bamaru’s rebellion, and the players were just as committed to making sure Trintignant didn’t succeed. I deliberately made the stakes unclear until the very last session, when Sunrise revealed that Trintignant’s plan—which had been to selectively destroy planets and destabilize the Empire, giving him the opportunity to seize entire populations for experimentation—would have, in fact, imperiled the entire galaxy.

By that time, I don’t think the players really needed the nudge. Trintignant had already done a lot of personal damage to the characters, and they would have taken him down even if his plan was just to make the galaxy’s biggest hot chocolate.

I decided to do an epilogue session on the advice of my friend Anthony, himself a veteran Game Master. It allowed each player the chance to write their own ending for their characters, as well as to have some say in how the world will be shaped by their continuing lives. A few details:

• Silverbird left after a few years to find and dismantle Trintignant’s entire network—his relays, his outposts, and his ancillaries, if any survived. Rage helped her out, but he eventually returned to Mon Cala to keep up the shop. He kept the Valkyrie as a memento of Mara and the time they spent together.
• Nereida Harik finished training Lorelei, knighting her and sending her off into the galaxy to do good. She restored a forgotten Jedi temple on the planet Skarbarae, and Bastion once again took to the stars, this time to find students to rebuild the Jedi Order.
• Ma’lona continued to hunt bounties and explore Wild Space. Her ultimate fate is a mystery: one night, she suddenly appeared at Nereida’s temple. Then she took El’orica’s holocron and took off to parts unknown.
• Vissica Cavisek joined the New Republic Medical Academy, teaching a new generation of doctors.
• Bix and his droids served as a private military contractor for the New Republic until the war ended. At that point, they left to establish a free droid state called Ringa Droida somewhere in the Outer Rim.
• Mara Bell was not forgotten by history. A few years after the end of the war, a new racing circuit called the Corellian Comet was established, in her memory and that of her father. Light-years away, a stone statue of her stands at the entryway to Nereida’s temple, one hand on her hip, staring up into the sky. Master Harik uses her as an example to her students why they should be brave.

Episode VI lasted seven sessions. At final tally,  I wrote about 150,000 words worth of prep in the form of encounters, NPC profiles, and background for various characters and locations. It was only my second sustained campaign as a Game Master.

What would I change? Not a whole lot, if I’m being honest. I definitely learned more and became a better GM over the course of the campaign, but I did my best at every session. With what I now know about pacing, I think I could probably have wrapped this campaign up in about fifty sessions, but some of those diversions were both instructional and incredibly fun.

There were a few opportunities I think I missed, which I mentioned in previous recaps. They all boil down to wishing I had been more willing to deviate from known Star Wars lore and embrace natural breaks when they appeared. Also, I should have been bolder in roleplaying NPCs, particularly Silverbird. Her story was integral to the campaign at large, but for that reason it was heavy and daunting to act out.

Still, weighed against everything else I did in this campaign, those are small issues.

I’m very proud of what I accomplished here. In the end, it was exactly what we wanted it to be: a space opera adventure that brought in every aspect of the Star Wars universe that we all love, and that could conceivably exist alongside the movies.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this recap. Even if you weren’t taken in by the story, perhaps you read something that will help you—either by incorporating it into your own game, or making sure to avoid it yourself when it comes up.

I have ideas for a sequel campaign, but I’ve only just begun planning it, and this group decided to explore some non-Star Wars options. My next recap will probably be a breakdown of the Legend of the Five Rings beginner game, which we played after finishing this. I’ll be starting a D&D campaign in a few weeks, but you’ll have to wait until we’re done before I write about it.

May the Force be with you.