Starting Location Discussion

Ok everyone, this thread is to workshop the starting location and how you might have acquired your skills and possibly some unique starting equipment. This is how I visualised your home.

A series of caves built into a mountain surrounded by a lush verdant rainforest. There is a constant supply of food that can be trapped, gathered or perhaps even farmed. There is also a fresh water supply in the form of a river that runs through the cave system.

Burried in the caves is the light speed capable shuttle thst your master used to "save you". It is quite large at least s3, and has technology such as computer consoles and the maintenace of which could be used to give you an understanding of mechanics.

The Master's custom Jedi Space ship is also hidden in the cave system. It is a 1-2 man fighter and could have been used to teach some of you piloting skills.

There could be a supply of blasters that Master Selak uses for training purposes. I doubt that he would just give them to you though. How would you have acquired one? Steal from your master?

The sole colony on the unnamed planet is on the other side of the planet. You haven't had any contact with it yet.

Alien species? There are definitely going to be some. However, I am happy to hear your thoughts as to their level of technology and whether Master Selak would have permitted you to contact them givdn that his entire purpose is to train you as secretly as possible.

If anything sounds odd or you can think of some additional details thst might make this a better experience then please post away. Have at it!

That is the setup I was basically imagining. The shuttle is buried in the caves, we live in the shuttle, using its technology to not die more easily. Nobody -wants- to live in a cave, especially not a man who wants the 9 children with to survive to adulthood. Converting the shuttle to a home gives us all the advantages above, including guaranteeing -clean- water which is a very different thing than fresh water, believe me.

I, personally, would like to see the shuttle permanently grounded so that we can't take our home with us when we leave. It makes things harder, game mechanics wise (a plus in my opinion) and it makes sense narratively. If we have a shuttle to start with then when something bad happens we can just peace out in our childhood home and take all our stuff instead of having to leave it all behind. But I do understand that getting to the colony for another ship would be literally impossible if it were on the other side of the planet, without a speeder or something.

Speaking of the colony on the other side of the planet, I hope it's pirates. Like, not even as nice as Mos Eisley was, just a straight-up pirate gang has there base on this planet and they're not even the sort of pirates that pretend to be honorable.

I couldn't tell you either way about the natives on the planet. I guess if I had to choose I'd go one of two ways. Either bronze age so they can't help us out or they -used- to be spacefaring until the aforementioned colony above took over their city, turned it into their base and enslaved them. One of the two would be good for me.

I personally feel like the location and nature of the planet in general warrants a little more delineation...

About all we've heard is that it's "beyond the Outer Rim"/ beyond the reach of the war. That's a fine statement to make, but if it was as easy as just flying a little bit farther away, wouldn't more have done it? How are we not detected by the Inquisitorious these 12 years?

Are we in the Unknown Regions, where there's no stable hyper-lanes, which means Selak might be a little crazy to have taken us out here, but could explain why the planet is so empty and we haven't been sought by the Inquisitorious?

Are we in the Rishi Maze, where just no one goes because of the time necessary to navigate most of it? Or is it maybe a Darkside Nexus like Dagobah and that helped shield our presence?

Anyone else interested in this aspect?

If it's such a tropical paradise why is there only one settlement on the entire planet? This could easily be a result of its galactic location, but we don't know and I think it's worth defining.

I think it being a Darkside Force Nexus, could present an ongoing Morality challenge to us: ie if any Force check receives +1 automatic black pip, we're tempted to seek that Darkside Power all the time?

A dark side nexus would be interesting but then we'd all be assholes by now, wouldn't we? Lol, it does make me smile a little bit that we leave home and as soon as we make the jump to lightspeed we're all changed from Hot Topic to Old Navy. That being said I don't mind the idea at all. I also like it being in the Rishi Maze. A lot. It would also explain why the Inquisitors wouldn't have found us. It would present us with a serious challenge for getting back to anywhere the Empire reaches.

Zepharo would just go and ask Selak to use one whenever he wanted to go on an excursion/needed to go hunting.

Selak would presumably be aware of Zepharo's struggles with "standard" Jedi skills and training by now, so maybe it's a chance to get a little insight into the Master?

Does he try to force Zepharo to become someone he clearly is not, for 12 years? Or does he allow the devaronian by now to pursue the Force where his strengths lie, even if it's a little outside the bounds of "normal" Jedi training?

Maybe Selak has already identitied that Zepharo will never be a Jedi. Maybe he doesn't even train him anymore - except how to avoid the Darkside/manage his emotions, and just lets him be the grunt, hunter, big brother that's there and part of the family, does the more menial take, but not considered a potential Padawan any longer. Maybe even just considered to be a "Force Sensitive", not a "Force User"?

My thought was that Zepharo was about as old as you can be, to be selected as a Youngling by the Jedi (~12?), when he was picked up. And so whether it's a case of, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks.", or if truly "The Force manifests in different people in different ways, and you can't change that.", that's where he's at.

Just spitballing.

If it weren't a Darkside Nexus, wouldn't we all be Lights Paragons by now?

Nah, all teenagers are assholes by default, anyways. Lol, I'm really just kidding. I think a dark side nexus is good, Sith temple is even better.

Hey, this is fun!

I like the idea of the planet being in a Darkside Nexus, but if our Master knew that, would he really take that risk? I mean, the Nexus could prove to be a challenge to even him, right? I think the choice and location of the planet itself says a lot about our Master. It would be nice to have more info about his personality if possible, Arina. For the few bits we've heard of him, I don't feel that he would want to expose and raise us in a dark side nexus after seeing that the Jedi and the Republic falls.

As I said before, I overall like Cep's layout of the cave. It seems fine and makes sense.

If it is really that imperative for us to not have met many people outside the caves, maybe it's because the caves themselves can somehow mask our presence to outsiders, or non-sensitive people? We can't be reported if no one knows that we are there.

I also really like the idea about the natives being enslaved by a pirate colony. Maybe it happened fairly recently, a few years ago? Because otherwise, unless there was a very good reason for choosing this planet, he would be exposing ourselves all to danger. After all, we might have been able to make friends with a normal colony, but Pirates would probably snitch on us with a reward on mind or something.

It is weird that despite the planet being so lush, there is only a single colony. Could be that the sector itself is dangerous, very far away, or... Well, I think Arina mentioned somewhere that there are a lot of menacing animals. Maybe these animals need to live under the rainforest for some reason, and the colony is in this unusual big glade?

I think you could safely swap 'dark side nexus' for 'planet that's stupidly hard to get to' and it would be the same, effectively from a safety standpoint. I mean, you could get super crazy with an extreme planet but really any Earth sized moon around a big gas giant that had a powerful magnetic field would mess with sensors enough to hide from anything -but- the Force.

And a lack of useful mineral deposits could be the reason there's only one colony. So what if you can farm there if there aren't any heavily industrialized planets to sell your food to. Very few companies would be interested in a place like that. Or maybe the planet is on a death spiral away/towards the sun and in 200 years it'll be uninhabitable? That would keep the number of settlements down.

I like the idea of an old planet, one that is off the beaten path that maybe the hyperlanes to/from it have deteriorated to the point where to even get here is very challenging if you don't have updated or accurate charts.

There's nothing to say that there couldn't be a dark side vergence near the caves we're sheltering in, but maybe there's a moss or fungus that grows on the cave walls themselves that also helps to mask our presence here from people using the Force. Maybe, to couple with that, there are veins of ore or something that thread through the rock in this region of the planet that helps mask the entire cave system from sensors as well. So, quite by accident (the Force guiding him, Evelynn believes) our Master happened to find a place that was both hidden from ordinary searchers, shielded from the those using the Force to find us, and also had places where we could test ourselves, learn, and grow as Jedi.

Not sure how much you know about the Star Wars lore/timeline Lux, but by canon (not sure if Arina is observing this bit but...) in the 12 years we have been on this planet, Darth Vader and something called the Inquisitorious is busy going all over the galaxy, detecting Force Users and killing them. ALL of them. That they can find anyway. And I think the only canon ways known to have avoided being detected is 1. hiding on a Dark Nexus (Yoda), 2. a constant effort to mask your own Force signature (Obi Wan) - which we can't. 3. forsaking use of the Force (Kanan) - which we haven't, and 4. going constantly on the move and being a badass (Ahsoka, Maul) - which we haven't and are not.

That's why Selak would take us to a Dark Nexus, because we can't run, and he can't shroud all of our signatures, but a planet can.
"Menacing animals" are not enough to keep Vader away...

My suggestions of the Unknown Region and Rishi Maze address the issue of the Sector being dangerous, but they present their own narrative problems (very bad navigability). And I have troubles accepting intellectually that in a world with FTL travel, that you can get far enough away. The Dark Nexus is a very parsimonious answer, and presents a lot of interesting plot potential.

But yea, we can hand wave whatever, and it depends on how big of a theme Arina wants Morality to be too. The Dark Nexus could make it a REALLY big theme...

Now this is something quite important... even if we are in a Dark Nexus... it needs to be an unknown or largely unknown Nexus...

Vader and his Inquisitors would search most of the Dark Nexus in order to find relics or hidden power that they can harvest.

All of those reasons are why I thought Rishi Maze. Maybe there -are- no well known hyperspace lanes to this system? Some Jedi can pilot through hyperspace using the Force, Selak might be one of them. He's obviously skilled enough with sense to see the destruction of the Jedi coming, he might have just been following the will of the Force which dark siders seem to generally be terrible at because . . . trust issues? I am pretty sure that Sith would be bad at trust falls.

Still Rishi Maze and/or dark nexus. I'm good with that from a logic standpoint.

Just to clarify, that side must likely be Foresee, not Sense.

Sorry, i meant sense as in the Alter/Control/Sense trinity not the specific power, my bad.

I'm not a fan of this whole Dark Nexus thing.

And if the Inquisitorius was as effective as claimed, very few Force & Destiny characters would ever live past character creation.
They may be able to look everywhere in the Empire, but they wouldn't be able to look in all the places outside the Empire that aren't even on the map.

Plus, it's not as if Selak, who kidnapped us some time before Order 66 happened, would likely know all that much about the Empire, or that Inquisitors exist.

I feel strongly that canon should be a storytelling tool, not a shackle that limits what stories you can tell because of a technicality.

As for the planet... It's important to note that lush doesn't mean nice. Dagobah is a very lush planet as well.
It's been described as a rainforest, and rainforests aren't particularily welcoming to people.
It takes a lot of work and credits to turn that into farmland.
An explorer stumbling onto our world would note it's lack of valuable resources, it's aggressive fauna, the weird weather or magnetic storms or whatever, and cathegorise it as worthless, and move on.

I like the idea that the colony are pirates and/or slavers.
And maybe they arrived some time after we did, perhaps driven beyond the Outer Rim by Imperial expansion into that region?

Could even be Selak allowed them to enslave the locals, meaning that he could easily put a stop to it, but chooses not to for the sake of our secrecy (plus, he was never that good of a Jedi to begin with, which is why they kicked him out), which would probably cause a lot of anger and misplaced guilt among us once it comes out.

I think that almost goes without saying. A Jedi master, terrible or not, should have a -super- easy time imposing his will on a single planet if there's no organized resistance. Anything going on there that was bad was allowed to happen by default. And you're right that he had already demonstrated the desire to sacrifice others for the 'greater good'. There's a reason Jedi fall to the dark side. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Ha, yeah, I'm not that versed about the current canon. 😅 I would prefer to stick close to it though, to at least learn a bit. Still, I also am not against new mysteries being introduced by Arina - You said it yourself, after all, those are the known way. Not necessarily the only ways!

I know about the Inquisitorius but I am not familiar with how they actually operate. How do they find force users? I was under the impression that they relied on information gathering - The few episodes of Rebels that I watched seemed to indicate so, but I really don't remember that well. The dangerous animals would be a way to keep the colonists from the planet away from the cave, not necessarily Vader himself. Although they would be useful as fodder so we can run away... But I mean, that's likely not the Jedi way...

I also like Carabas's idea about Selak having a secret deal with the pirates, but idk, I guess we shouldn't know about stuff like that.

Or even less of a secret deal and more likes they have no idea he's there and he just ignores them because he's got better things to do. And the Inquisitors are presented as kind of . . . Hit and miss. They're either highly trained assassins that track down to recruit/kill any Force users they find.

There actually is a simple reason why they haven't gotten to us yet: we're, like, -really- far away. We're on the list but they just have to stop by Jedi Bob's house first and oooooooh noooooo he's not home, let's spend 5 years finding him . . . And they're only now getting to us.

Unless there's a plausible way they avoided them of course, which is what these ideas are about.
Because his vision of the future stopped after Order 66? Do we know that? Would he not reason that people would come after us?
These ideas being explored are full of storytelling tools and hooks, not shackles.