Star Wars - Lok
Hi all,
Been going around tending to unfinished projects tonight. Finally decided to finish this one up...those of you that browse the sci-fi section may remember the WiP thread [link]. Probably could really use a couple more hours of work but I don't think I'll ever get back to it so I'm calling it done. Seems unlikely this will be a featured map but I'll post the basics again:
Creation: Originally drawn in pencil on 8 1/2" x 11" paper (really old, low-quality tractor-feed printer paper) and later inked and scanned. In Photoshop I moved things around, cleaned up outlines, etc. and then painted under the outlines.
Background: This was run as an introductory adventure leading into Wizard's free Dawn of Defiance campaign...sort of an alternate opening sequence. The party was, for individual reasons, more or less stranded on the planet Lok - which is in the Outer Rim near Tatooine and is an even more unpleasant place to be.
In their hour of need they ran into a smuggler named Sirona Okeefe (the aunt of the someday-to-be-famous Platt Okeefe, who was only three at the time of the adventure). Sirona's ship, the Banshee, had been forced down in the badlands by pirates and she had been taken prisoner. She managed to escape and make it to town but now needed the heroes' help getting Banshee back from the thugs.
They found the crash site, where she (and the thugs) had left Banshee, only to find the ship missing. They sort of expected that. They didn't expect to be able to follow Snorbal (just think Bantha and be done with it) tracks all the way back to the thug's hideout. A successful raid on the largely undefended base put their eager hands on the ship again.
During repairs, of course, the thug boss (who had been in town with a posse looking for the escaped Sirona) came back with his gang and a firefight ensued. Fortunately the heroes had managed to get one of twin laser cannon working again and were able to bring superior firepower into the fight. Afterwards they finished repairs and headed into the black.
Sirona could take them as far as Tatooine; or, if they could help her with a simple "milk run" pick-up job, she'd take them all of the way to the Core World of Brentaal. Needless to say, everyone had a bad feeling about that...
This map is a sketch of the world, a zoomed-in region, and then several points of interest: Hadley's hope, a forlorn colony; the local Imperial outpost (they just got a new AT-ST!); Smuggler's Head, Jabba's local base; and the Banshee crash site.
Fans of Aliens might note the inspiration-cum-blatant-rip-off of the colony from LV-426. I was inspired by the idea of a colony ship reaching the end of its journey, realizing how sorry their chosen planet was, and having to put down and tear up the ship they came in for housing anyway...because they couldn't go home again. Once I started sketching the map I figured, what the heck, might as well name it the same.
The rest of the town is built from adobe, rock, and other local materials. There isn't much on Lok except sulphur, useful in many industrial processes. The "seas" are actually just sand...sulphury sand. They're several hundred meters below the level of the windblown rocky surface of the planet. The wierd "fingers" of rock you see are just that. Some of them extend for kilometers into the "sea". In between them are what the locals call "get downs", steeply sloping banks of rock and sand that lead down to the sea floor below.
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