"It belongs in a museum!" (Vaya Q&A)

[Vaya Mer'darrow]

I'm procrastinating instead of working on something, so maybe I'll say more unprompted later, but I thought I'd throw this up.

This game was grand for me, I got a great opportunity to chase something the character was good at doing and was personally meaningful when I got the hint about the MOON TEMPLE. Everything else flowed excellently from that, with some fun curveballs along the way. It also fell during a time when I have more time to post than maybe even I did during those games that fell during summer break, so I was able to sink my teeth into it a lot.

[Bowze Coppa]

Was nice playing with you!

What your opinion of the CIS?

[Sacha Ordo]

I really wish Sacha and Vaya had more interactions! They had a shared interest in history and archaeology that it would have been fun to explore more.

That said, what curveballs did you get? Did any really change the trajectory of the character? And what do you see for Vaya's future?

[Dove Gray]

Vaya! <3 Was fun to read the sneaksy Balosar archaeologist who was also an excellent crook. 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.

What made you decide on Balosar? What specialization was Vaya actually, I was never quite sure? xD

Was she resorting to a life of crime to pay down her student loans?

[Elaranu]

Thank you from that boost for the final push on the CIS ship out of nowhere. Sad I wasn't there to interact and help at that point, but it is nice having things interact like that.

[Daunt]

Vaya's defining moment from the past?

Highlight of the game?

Moment of despair?

Most unscientific/dumb In character thought?

[Vaya Mer'darrow]

Gonna take these a few at a time, probably will double-post. It's my own thread, I do what I want!

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:

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!

[Verse Aura]

1 to 10, how annoying/despair inducing was Verse's cunning 1 antics to Vaya?

[Vaya Mer'darrow]

I really wish Sacha and Vaya had more interactions! They had a shared interest in history and archaeology that it would have been fun to explore more.

Oh man, Sacha was into archaeology??? I never knew! I always feel like I don't have enough time to post, so I don't spend a lot of time looking at other threads, and tend to miss things... c'est la vie.

That said, what curveballs did you get? Did any really change the trajectory of the character? And what do you see for Vaya's future?

As I think I've said in a couple of places, the fact that there was actually an archaeological objective in the game (Jedi temple on the moooon) was more than I hoped for. I went in with every expectation that my spiritual quest and archaeological background would be flavor and set-dressing to whatever crime/rebellion/Jedi-adjacent adventures I had. But then on Day 1, a random meeting thread I had set up on a whim with Verse led to one thing led to another led to me finding the first in a trail of breadcrumbs that defined the game from then until D6, when I actually found the temple.

And then when I found the temple, it wasn't at all what Vaya/I was expecting! As Vaya complained a couple of times in character, instead of an enlightenment-granting transcendent ruin, it was a perfectly practical and highly useful intact secret base. Better in every way than what she thought it would be, except for her spiritual development. Which led to lots of good stuff about what she really wanted and was she going about it the right way, the journey is the destination, etc. Probably actually better than if she had found exactly what she was looking for -- writing a frustrated searcher is probably more fun for me than writing someone totally at peace with nothing more to do!

For the future, she's got some generic leads on Jedi/Force sites that the Empire might want to pillage, that she can quest to get to first, and maybe one of them will have that peace and tranquility she wants. She's got friends among the living Jedi and the burgeoning rebels, but full-time insurgent isn't her calling, so she'll hope she's not being selfish by trying to preserve Force/Jedi legacy while seeking spiritual peace.

She's also got a very specific lead she helped Verse find to some kind of rad Vergence place. That's probably her first epilogic stop. Hopefully, Verse isn't about to get murdered by Vader, it will be a very much more somber epilogue if so!

[Vaya Mer'darrow]

Vaya! <3 Was fun to read the sneaksy Balosar archaeologist who was also an excellent crook. 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.

Ty I had a grand time with this game. And tradecraft.

What made you decide on Balosar?

Balosar was sort of a whim? I had settled on the broad strokes of the backstory (ex-Imperial archaeologist chasing Forcey stuff) and I thought of the additional angle of being a non-human in Imperial service or possibly an undercover-as-human-nonhuman in Imperial service? I went back and forth on whether or not that was an unnecessary fillip. I definitely decided the undercover part wasn't necessary, and never ended up including any anti-Balosar prejudice.

But at some point I was reading the Balosar writeup and I recalled the shadowrun-like dystopia that was the Balosar homeworld, and the rest of her backstory/early motivation (do whatever it takes to escape said dystopia) came together. It didn't hurt that when I started playing around with builds and found I could do a very satisfying Int 4 Cunning 4.

I didn't realize that having antennapalps would also give me another piece of mannerism to mix in with voice/face/gestures, but that was definitely a bonus!

What specialization was Vaya actually, I was never quite sure? xD

Analyst! I didn't actually look very hard at alternatives before game, probably because I'm much more familiar with the AoR stuff and the others are EotE. Now that I'm looking at postgame XP and therefore Scholar and the literal Archaeologist, I think I made a good choice. Scholar's a little too hyperspecialized (maybe just because it suffers from "in the first book before we got into the groove of game design" weakness), Archaeologist is a little more two-fisted.

And neither has valuable facts, which I really cannot overemphasize how much fun it was to have! All the fun of being very powerful, with none of the worry that I was hogging the spotlight, because I couldn't actually do it alone, or myself!

Was she resorting to a life of crime to pay down her student loans?

Basically. 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.

[Vaya Mer'darrow]

Thank you from that boost for the final push on the CIS ship out of nowhere. Sad I wasn't there to interact and help at that point, but it is nice having things interact like that.

Yeah! Like I said, Valuable Facts was fun, it gave me an into a lot of different scenes, so I got to interact with more parts of the game than I might have otherwise. Sadly I didn't get to talk to Ela in person at that point. Maybe someday Vaya will get to be curious about Chiss!

Highlight of the game?

I don't know if I can pick out one singular moment. As I've said, the Temple hunt was the defining thread that tied the whole thing together as far as Vaya's story went. Successfully liberating the Chaldi was an exciting and triumphant bit of action, with an interesting dilemma with Tirali afterwards. The proper climax was probably passing through the false wall of the Moon-Temple to see its interior, and then the bewildering denouement of finding it inhabited, and what that meant.

Moment of despair?

In-game her lowest moment was running into the Inqusitor. Dapper randomly threw him into one of Vaya's many library research threads, doing a random "papers please." I realized that having Discipline 1g and Cool 2g, Vaya was entirely vulnerable to interrogation. So in-character, she suddenly realized that, despite all of her ability to think quickly and flim-flam, she would fold like a wet napkin and betray her Padawan friend if push came to shove. That was pretty harrowing. It felt like ahw narrowly escaped intact in that thread, but in a way where I wasn't sure if a) she had actually escaped, b) Dapper was going easy on me, or c) the Inquisitor was trying to lull her into a false sense of security.

That was D5 afternoon, and she spent a lot of the rest of D5 in a funk -- trying to convince Juri to not tell her her (previously much desired) secrets because she couldn't be trusted to keep them, confessing her almost-betrayal to Petrus, etc. The latter featured a run-in in which she faced similar random harassment from 13th and Petrus prompted her to help rescue some other people from interrogation, which was a cool thing that came together and helped her process. In many ways the Night of Long Knives (the worst had happened and she and her friends had escaped!), and the subsequent d6 event redeeming the Inquisitor (he wouldn't be after her any more!), was a load off her mind.

Most unscientific/dumb In character thought?

Probably in my thread with Dove. I'd worked out pregame connections to some of the Friends apartment but not others, and then realized it was kind of weird that I hadn't worked out anything with the other ones. So I decided to give a smart and socially apt character a blind spot, and that she'd avoided Dove because she was off-putting in her Bondesqueness. Intimidatingly cool? Intimidatingly attractive? Did Vaya want to be her, be her friend, something more?

Then whenever she got off-put or flustered around Dove, I had her think Wait, is this tradecraft? Is she using tradecraft on me? Which I think is pretty dumb. I was entertained.

[Vaya Mer'darrow]

1 to 10, how annoying/despair inducing was Verse's cunning 1 antics to Vaya?

She managed to never actually ruin anything, so definitely less than 5. Her cunning 1 was less of a problem than general typical Padawan getting-in-over-your-headness. As you might have picked up, Vaya eventually just started using it to entertain herself at Verse's expense.

[Venator Praedae]

So what brought you on to make an Indiana Jones type of character.

Shame we didn't hang out more than just that boat heist. It may have been an interesting time.