Gonna take these a few at a time, probably will double-post. It's my own thread, I do what I want!
Bowze Coppa wrote: ↑Thu Feb 20, 2020 12:43 am
What your opinion of the CIS?
OOC, I quite liked the way they/we brought on screen some of the fractiousness that stories about the early proto-Rebel Alliance often had, and it was a fun plot engine for me. Vaya wasn't ever in a place where I thought it made sense for her to seek out the resistance of her own accord (she was just realizing that her flatmates were resistance agents the day everyone got run out of town!), so it let me have some of that fun without having to stretch myself to get fully involved. And we had some fun banter, even if we were just salvaging or freezing our butts off.
I do wish that the tension part had remained only IC, which we've talked about. I have some regrets that I didn't help more with that.
IC, Vaya struggled/struggles a lot with the idea of resistance. A combination of a) Empire bad, obviously, but how can we possibly stand against it? b) personal lack of physical courage (discipline 1g!) and c) in the middle of a spiritual crisis that was attracting a lot of her mental energy (more on that later). The Razing of the Enclave radicalized her, but she still felt doubt that anything could really be achieved. In a lot of scenes at Varo's Sword I positioned her as the skeptic, if increasingly less the cynic, partly because that felt true to the character and partly because I liked putting that perspective on-screen, so hopeful PCs could have something to play off of.
Because of all of that, the CIS' generally sneakier/more pragmatic/less derring-do approach seemed like a 'safe' way for her to feel like she was doing
something. Getting run out of town and participating in the Battle of Bankor has maybe shown her that there are things she can do to help, and the degree of victory it looks like we'll achieve makes success seem less like a fool's dream. But it's definitely not her comfort zone. We'll see how the last two events play out, but I imagine her role going forward will be "sympathizer who crosses paths often" more than "full-time officer," ala Lor San Tekka in the Poe comics -- in large part because of aforementioned ongoing spiritual crisis, which, again, more on that later.
Actually, maybe it makes sense to jump around to just talk about that, so:
Daunt wrote: ↑Thu Feb 20, 2020 8:06 pm
Vaya's defining moment from the past?
This was a big one! Vaya was an archaeologist who got semi-forcibly recruited to helping with evil Imperial efforts to study/seal off/hide away/destroy sites linked to the Force and the Jedi (think Project Augur from JFO). Before that point she had been pretty amoral, cheating her way into a scholarship to get out of the Balosar slums and hustling since to keep herself employed and secure. Working with the evil Imperial archaeologists had her doing a lot of ignoring the evil in front of her, until, while excavating a temple....
Then Vaya had... a moment. A moment of insanity, is the way she’s most comfortable describing it to others, when she talks about it at all. A hallucination brought on from chronic under-stimulation on a backwater world. But really it was a moment of clarity: briefly alone in a vast, echoing cavern, carved by ancient hands out of a sense of devotion to a mystic energy field, Vaya felt... something. Clarity. An epiphany. A connection to something larger. She realized, deep down, that she owed more to the universe than to take what she could get from it. Even now that she’s met Petus, a real padawan, she doesn’t believe what she felt means she could be any sort of Jedi. But she does believe she doesn’t have to be such a sleemo anymore.
So the big driving thing at the heart of her character was a pragmatic, amoral, academic, rationalist trying to come to grips with her own spiritual awakening. I was pretty sure from the start and became increasingly certain that I wouldn't ever make her force-sensitive, because it would be too easy an "out" to let her have ready access to the transcendent. I wanted to make her hustle for it, and didn't really expect her to find "it" in game.
I gotta go now, but, more later!
I think this is also my first time seeing a Balosar in a game, so that was pretty great too! Your posts were also very well written and an absolute joy to read. Particularly our scene together, but I'm probably biased. 
Her sudden departure from Imperial service didn't immediately put her in "on the run for her life," just "unemployed and without prospects," so she had slid into crimeworld to pay bills. She was in debt to the Shadow University, a mostly-undefined group of criminal archaeologists from the Dr. Aphra comics, when the game started.