we were recruited to go look for someone, or something
You people might have been recruited. Me, I'm sitting this one out. Talov's proposition made no sense at all, and his timing was
awful.
We had just followed an npc (Dendo) to an establishment of questionable repute. (Thought it was a bar, reading back over the log apparently it was a chop shop. So, ill repute.) He obviously has some sort of shady deal he wants to propose. So I prompt him to let us know what he has in mind...he talks to the shopkeeper who then goes to lock the front door. Our npc begins explaining, basically, that he thought we might be good recruits for what he has in mind because it looked to him like we were trying to evade the Imperials back on Vitaan.
And then immediately somebody totally else we don't even know who happens to be there (Talov) interupts and tries to get us to go with him instead. Dendo shuts up completely. The timing
totally makes it looks like Talov is either an Imperial agent or local authority who thinks he's stumbled onto a Rebel conspiracy and is trying to lead us off somewhere to be safely arrested.
To entice us to go along with him, Talov then proceeds to give a story that makes no sense at all. He's looking for some human...gives a fairly generic description and asks if we've seen him. At the time, my first reaction was to respond with "Uh...yeah, I've seen about a dozen people in the past few days who match that description. In fact, I personally meet half your criteria. Are you looking for me?"
So apparently he's been looking for this person "all day with no luck" and wants to know if we, who've literally just walked out of the docking bay from having arrived on the planet, have seen him. Obviously we haven't. And he knows we haven't, and he knows we just got there. He even says so: "Of course I wouldn't expect you to know much, having arrived recently."
But he wants our assistance anyway, and eventually admits that he's really looking for "muscle" in case we run into any "unsavory types." He then basically admits that he lied to us, and that he wasn't really looking for his friend because he knows perfectly well that he's at the cantina "just up the way." So he knows where his friend is, and wants the 6 or 7 of us to either show up and do the shooting for him, or bluff our way out of having to shoot by threatening to.
Ok. So we'll be either shooting or threatening
who, exactly? We don't know who this person is, and we don't know why he's being held against his wishes. Talov appears to know, but has already lied to us once, and doesn't seem interested in telling us who has his friend or why. The most obvious explanation, of course, is that he's being held by some local criminal group, but Talov is unwilling to go to the authorities, because he and his friend are also criminals and presumably some sort of deal they were involved in went bad. This is Tatooine. The local criminal syndicate is the Hutt family. Even the Empire mostly leaves them alone. Do you want to upset them? Probably not, and that's why Talov's trying to recruit offworlders who don't know any better.
Even if that's not it...just look at the situation: Does it make sense for us to follow a complete stranger to some unfamiliar place on a strange planet to threaten people we don't know to recover somebody who's apparently being held for reasons he doesn't want to explain? It's either a setup, whether by authorities looking for criminals, or con artists looking to lead people off somewhere to be robbed and murdered...or he's looking for people who are new to the planet because what he has in mind will seriously annoy somebody that anyone familiar with the planet would know better than to annoy.
And through all of this, our npc that we came in with has been totally silent, because he knows it's a bad situation and he wants nothing to do with it. The whole scenario completely fails the common sense test, and anyone with a hint of insinct for self preservation would have nothing to do with it.
Talov may as well stand outside with a sign that says "I have candy. Get in the van. And by the way, I stole the candy from the mafia. They won't mind if you eat it, and I won't molest you. Really."
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Topic: Episode I: The Unsung Heroes (Bay 12 Star Wars RPG) (Read 28587 times)