shootingwomprats
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Joined: 11 Sep 2013
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 Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2025 11:18 pm Post subject: GG16: TOR Addendum, Alliance (Onderon, 3627 BBY) |
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For the last week+ I have been working on the Galaxy Guide 16: The Old Republic Addendum, which will cover storylines and materials after "The Rise of the Hutt Cartels" through the latest storyline, "Onsalught". Below is one section I am pretty excited about and thought I would post and see if anyone wanted to comment or make suggestions.
| Quote: | Alliance (Onderon, 3627 BBY)
The Alliance came to Onderon like weather: briefings carried on jungle air, orders written to vanish when the job was done. Officially, the Republic requested “advisors and support” to secure a refueling stop on the push to Corellia’s Meridian Complex. Unofficially, everyone understood the truth—if Onderon’s corridor collapsed, the next battle would start without the fleets meant to fight it. The Alliance answered because it exists for moments exactly like this: when two flags won’t share a table long enough to survive, Odessen brings a third chair and tells both to sit.
Day one doctrine set the tone: no occupation, no speeches, no signatures left behind. The Alliance would lend eyes, timing, and a knife in the right place—then leave the capital standing. The jungle would remain the jungle. The city would wake to the same skyline it had yesterday. And the fleets would lift with their tanks full.
Why Here/What Happened
By 3627 BBY the Alliance had burned through labels—resistance, Eternal Alliance, coalition—and learned which parts of itself survive each season. Odessen’s five pillars stayed intact: Alliance Intelligence to make the plan invisible, Underworld Logistics to feed the plan, Military Operations to build and execute the plan, the Force Enclave to keep the plan from corroding the people executing it, and Science & Research to make sure the plan’s tools worked tomorrow as well as today. Onderon was the first time since Zakuul that all four would work in the open and still try not to be seen.
The summons arrived as conflicting reports from Iziz: a flattered king, a furious senate bloc, and Imperial technicians asking suspiciously specific questions about anti-orbital batteries. The Alliance Commander didn’t bring an army; the Commander brought a shape—a joint cell small enough to pass for an advisory team until it had to be a spearpoint.
Politically the capital wobbled. In the jungle belts, the Untamed lit beacons that might mean parley or challenge depending on the wind. In orbit, refueling stacks were scheduled down to the minute and could not slip without breaking Corellia’s defense. All three clocks ticked toward the same hour.
Organization & Command
Alliance presence on Onderon is a compact command layer with a long reach. The Commander sits at liaison distance from Republic sector command and palace officials, flanked by Aygo’s planners (Military Operations), Intelligence handlers (Alliance Intelligence), Hylo’s quartermaster (Underworld Logistics), a pair of Enclave mediators (Force Enclave), and Dr. Oggurobb’s field lead (Science & Research). Orders flow in conditional language—if the guns don’t track by 0800, if the convoy hits red at marker nine, if the Untamed light black pitch—because certainty is expensive and time is short.
Pillar Subsections
Alliance Intelligence (The Quiet War)
The part of the Alliance that breathes in whispers and exhales hours. It began as Lana Beniko’s web—slicers with antique ethics, smugglers who owed her favors, Senate aides who despised losing—and Theron Shan tempered it into a service. Umbara shattered furniture and friendships; the rebuild put humility back into the org chart: fewer grand plans, more specific lies, and cells that could burn clean without lighting Odessen.
The culture is ritualized paranoia with a sense of humor. If an analyst says “coincidence,” three handlers buy her lunch out of pity. Field teaches the Noise Shield—make what matters look like weather. Forge a distress call to nudge a patrol off their timeline. Dress an Alliance tender in pirate paint and let it “steal” cargo you meant to move. When the report lands on the enemy admiral’s desk, it should read like bad luck and poor maintenance, not craft.
The Directorate cuts three ways: Analysis (patterns and prophecy reconciliation with the Enclave), Field (handlers, cut-outs, deniable auxiliaries), and Technical (signals intrusion, transponder forgery, counter-forgery). A fourth wing—Counter-Subversion—keeps the house honest. Assets are as mundane as most miracles: starport ledgers, customs rosters, dock gossip across three ports, and recon teams built like scalpels—two slicers, four shooters, one medic, one miracle.
Onderon Tasks: Blind the Iziz battery crews’ targeting picture, ghost the Eleventh Fleet’s timetables through Onderon → Mek-Sha, and turn every accident into help. Allies: Hylo’s quartermasters, Republic staffers who want credits to equal fuel. Adversaries: Cipher remnants, palace whisperers with clean boots, and the tempting lie that one more secret fixes everything.
Underworld Logistics (Hylo’s Kingdom)
Is a polite name for Hylo Visz’s empire of favors. It began long before Odessen—back when blockade-running was faith and fuel both—and hardened into a branch because an army that eats and moves is an army that lives long enough for Intelligence to be brilliant and Ops to be brave. Hylo’s heretical philosophy: logistics isn’t a ledger, it’s a conversation with people who know how to say yes.
Culture is part dockside union, part confessional. Captains get paid in credits and weather windows. Stationmasters get quiet repairs and a promise their names won’t end up in anyone’s speech. Accountants hold ledgers like knives and memories like saints. Logistics people know who broke quarantine, who lies to scanners, and who takes a bribe only if it saves lives. When Hylo taps a chart and says “we go around,” she doesn’t mean faster; she means possible.
Commodore of Supply (Hylo) with cadre chiefs for Fuel, Food, Arms, Transit, and Accounts (the one with the revoltingly accurate memory). The Shadowport Network quilts together independent captains, fence-masters, and station bosses who owe the Alliance and can prove it. Assets are fast tankers that look like pilgrims, container tugs with two sets of plates, cold storage on worlds that swear they have none, and ledgers that can buy the last customs waiver on a bad day.
Onderon Tasks: stage fuel and coolant where the boards won’t see them, split convoys into noise and payload, roll the depots the instant the last tanker clears. Allies: independent captains who like getting paid twice and noticed never. Adversaries: embargo officers with spotless boots, auditors chasing promotion, pirates who smell hunger.
Military Operations (Odessen War Room)
Operations began as a rumor with a map. On Odessen, scattered veterans from both flags traded hand signals and bad coffee until someone started pinning colored tags on a star chart and making the chaos behave. That someone was Admiral Bey’wan Aygo—ex-carrier captain, survivor of too many quiet retreats—and the doctrine he hammered out is still the backbone of every plan: terrain and timing beat tonnage. Ops did not change when banners did. Resistance, Eternal Alliance, coalition—labels slid past while task groups kept landing on the right deck at the right hour.
Culturally, Ops is blunt and superstitious. A detachment commander will knock a knuckle on the hatch before final brief and scribble a new exfil every time Intel says “should be fine.” They prize initiative but hate improvisation that forgets supply lines. A perfect operation leaves the enemy reporting weather: a storm that struck one junction, one hour, then left nothing to shoot at but fog. You will hear three dialects in the war room—Republic brevity, Imperial severity, pirate profanity—and see them get along because failure has one accent.
Structure is compact. Aygo sits a tier up from a joint cell—Ops, Intel, Logistics, Enclave liaisons within arm’s reach—and builds each Task Group like a tool roll: Recon to find and blind, Assault to breach and hold, Support to keep hearts beating and hulls from melting, Fleet Liaison to turn orbit into a promise. Assets skew quiet and portable: sapper kits in satchels, jammers that make a battery room read like thunder, corvettes with transponders that lie convincingly for forty minutes. Ops never brings more than it can carry back to the ship.
Onderon Tasks: keep the Onderon → Mek-Sha → Corellia corridor open, break Savik’s interdiction without “owning” Iziz, hit hinges not fists. Allies: Republic sector command, palace officials who value living citizens over triumphant communiqués. Adversaries: Savik’s technicians, hourly mercenaries, and the clock.
Force Enclave (Sana-Rae’s Circle)
The quiet center of a loud coalition. Sana-Rae—Voss Mystic, patient as winter—built it as a place where power and restraint could share a room without reaching for old arguments. Jedi healers, repentant Sith, Voss interpreters, and unaffiliated sensitives gather under bare lights and talk about outcomes. The Enclave’s theology is simple and relentlessly practiced: balance is something you do while moving.
Day to day, the Enclave is less temple than clinic and workshop. Liaisons carry portable rites: breathing before breach, grounding after contact, memory-binding when loss threatens to rot discipline. Interpreters never publish a vision alone—two voices read the same sign and argue it into orders. A good reading changes a timeline by an hour and saves a platoon. A great one changes nothing because a fight that was going to happen never does.
Organization is a Council of Practice—Sana-Rae, a senior Jedi healer, a Sith adept who teaches decisiveness without cruelty, and a paired Interpreter team. Field liaisons embed with task groups and have standing authority to veto a timetable if a forecast says catastrophe—and to propose a path that still takes the objective. Their assets are people and patience: no super-weapons, no grand ceremonies, only a list of small habits that keep a coalition from eating itself.
Onderon Tasks: avoid avoidable bloodshed in Iziz and the jungle belt, keep coalition morale intact through Mek-Sha’s temptations, and put the right ships—not just ships—over Corellia. Allies: Voss authorities who care about results, Jedi who remember humility, Sith who remember oaths. Adversaries: fanatics of any color and operations officers who treat people like power cells.
Science & Research (Oggurobb’s Lab)
Began the day the Alliance needed something to work tomorrow that no manufacturer had built yesterday. Dr. Juvard Illip Oggurobb took a hangar, a mountain of salvage, and a thousand arguments, and turned them into a habit that saves more lives than any miracle: test hard, deploy conservatively. The lab’s theology is uptime. They don’t chase headlines; they sand battlefield edges smooth—half a pip off a recharge cycle here, a sensor ghost that buys thirty seconds there, a firmware nudge that turns a hunter-drone into a hallway ornament right when you need the hallway.
Culturally, the lab is a patient kind of audacious. Engineers tape checklists to their sleeves and superstition to their benches. The running joke is that S&R would rather win with five small fixes than one grand breakthrough, because five small fixes don’t explode when a lieutenant forgets step nine. Oggurobb calls anything that can’t be explained with a gesture under fire a “museum piece.” Miracles are allowed, but only after they survive a week of abuse and a night of spite.
Structurally, S&R works as a triad. Materials & Medicine handles stims, sealants, field repairs, and the grim art of keeping someone breathing long enough to matter. Systems & Signals owns comms, sensors, jamming layers, and the little lies that make enemy consoles believe in weather. Autonomous & Exotic plays with droids, captured boards, and anything that requires gloves, a fire blanket, and a waiver. Each cell keeps a Field Pair—one engineer and one medic/tech—who can detach with Ops on two hours’ notice to make a broken thing dangerous again or a dangerous thing stop working.
On Onderon, the lab became a hinge you weren’t supposed to notice. Systems & Signals mapped the city grid’s bad habits and built a “thunder layer” that nudged battery telemetry toward microweather exactly when Intelligence needed a watch officer looking the wrong way. Materials & Medicine tuned couplings and coolant for jungle humidity so refuel lines didn’t cough themselves apart at the pier. Autonomous & Exotic taught a captured Zakuulan board to lie for fifty heartbeats—just long enough to pass a handshake with Republic traffic control and keep the stacks green. S&R’s victory condition was simple and savage: the right ships arrive over Corellia, still flying, crew breathing, gauges honest.
The lab’s friends are the quiet pragmatists—Alliance Intelligence (clean inputs make clever outputs safe), Underworld Logistics (who can actually find the exact gasket a fix was designed around), medics who don’t want to write letters home, and captains who understand the holiness of a clean maintenance log. Frictions arise where they must: with Military Operations when a timetable burns the testing window, and with anyone—Jedi or Sith—who thinks prophecy pays for poor engineering. S&R smiles, shrugs, and sends the Field Pair anyway… after taping one more checklist to the crate.
Assets & Order of Battle
Ground: Recon pairs with low-profile EW packs that make a targeting array read like thunder; sapper kits that fold into a satchel; breaching tools sized for control rooms; medics practiced at pulling people out before alarm becomes identity.
Air/Orbit: Two corvettes with transponders that lie convincingly for forty minutes, a deception tender disguised as a pilgrim hauler, gunship cover enough to make pirates hesitate and Imperials miscount, and a picket that slaves to Republic traffic control for the refuel evolution.
Supply: “Religious texts” crates that rattle like munitions, fuel staged in the wrong warehouses for the right reasons, coolant that somehow arrived before anyone requested it on paper, cold storage with no listed owner.
Advisory: Enclave liaisons fluent in taboos and tempers; mediators who can say “we don’t cross that fire circle” in the Untamed tongue and make it sound like wisdom, not fear.
S&R Field Tools: low-profile EW pods that make battery telemetry read like weather, suture-gel that buys medevacs two turns of breath, “lying boards” that pass hostile handshakes for one precious window.
Allies & Adversaries
Allies (of convenience): Republic sector command who value ships over speeches; Iziz officials who prefer living citizens to triumphant communiqués; Untamed elders who demand respect in the right language; independent captains who like getting paid twice and noticed never.
Adversaries (by habit): Imperial planners who believe a city is just terrain; technicians who dream in firing arcs; pirates who sell loyalty by the hour; senators who will throw a convoy off schedule for the sake of a perfect speech.
Outcome & Relevance
The Alliance arrived in the middle of a sentence. The king had been flattered, the senate goaded, and an Imperial scientist named Savik was already taking measurements that shouldn’t appear in a tourist brochure. The joint cell split attention: one hand in Iziz’s control rooms, one in the jungle’s etiquette, one on the refueling clock.
Intelligence made the first move—noise shields that turned reconnaissance into rumors. Ops put a slicer pair and a sapper cell where the city keeps its teeth. Logistics cracked open a Mek-Sha ledger and made fuel appear in all the wrong places at all the right times. The Enclave took tea with people who speak in oaths and asked which fires meant “parley” and which meant “trespass dies here.” When Savik tried to close her trap, she reached for levers that weren’t where she left them.
The morning after looked like prudence. Iziz still had a skyline. The Untamed still had their law. The fleets had their fuel. And the Alliance had a ship to catch.
At your table: the Alliance is the reason the obvious disaster didn’t happen. They are patrons with short deadlines, uneasy partners who will ask you to respect a taboo you don’t yet understand, or ghosts whose plan you stumble into and must finish. They won’t occupy the capital, and they won’t stay for the parade. They will, however, quietly decide whether a world wakes to ashes or to the ordinary indignities of politics.
Stat Blocks
Signals Forger (Alliance Intelligence): All stats are 2D except: Knowledge 3D, planetary systems 3D+1, Mechanical 3D+1, communications 4D+1, sensors 4D, Perception 3D, search 3D+1, Technical 3D+1, computer programming/repair 4D, security 3D+1. Move: 10. Signal forge kit, transponder spoofer, dataprobe, encrypted field slate.
Recall Agent (Underworld Logistics): All stats are 2D except: Dexterity 3D, dodge 3D+1, Knowledge 3D+1, bureaucracy 3D+2, business 3D+1, law enforcement 3D+1, Mechanical 3D, repulsorlift operation 3D+1, Perception 3D, con 3D+1, persuasion 3D+1, Technical 3D+1, computer programming/repair 3D+1, security 3D+1. Move: 10. Datapad and recall tags, toolcase, encrypted comlink, hold-out blaster (3D, 3–7/20/60).
Task Group Leader (Military Operations): All stats are 2D except: Dexterity 3D+1, blaster 4D, dodge 3D+2, Knowledge 3D, tactics 3D+2, Mechanical 3D, communications 3D+1, repulsorlift operation 3D+1, Perception 3D+1, command 4D, investigation 3D+1, Strength 3D, stamina 3D+1, Technical 3D, security 3D+1. Move: 10. Blaster pistol (4D), breacher kit, low-profile EW pack, encrypted comlink.
Interpreter Liaison (Force Enclave): All stats are 2D except: Knowledge 3D+1, cultures 3D+2, languages 3D+2, tactics 3D+1, Mechanical 3D, communications 3D+1, Perception 3D, command 3D+1, persuasion 3D+1. Move: 10. Order-slate, field comlink, truce cords, hold-out blaster (3D, 3–7/20/60).
Field Systems Engineer (Science & Research): All stats are 2D except: Dexterity 3D, dodge 3D+1, Knowledge 3D, planetary systems 3D+1, value 3D+1, Mechanical 3D+1, communications 4D, repulsorlift operation 3D+1, sensors 3D+2, Perception 3D, search 3D+1, Technical 4D, computer programming/repair 4D+1, droid repair 4D, security 4D. Move: 10. Field toolkit, dataprobe, signal analyzer, micro-slicer, deployable sensor decoy, hold-out blaster (3D, 3–7/20/60).
Encounter Seeds
Corridor Doctrine: PCs must keep a refuel stack green while Intel’s Noise Shield buys thirty minutes and the Enclave diverts an Untamed challenge into a tea ceremony.
False Weather: An Imperial AAR blames a “microweather anomaly” for a lost battery control room; PCs chase the forger who wrote the storm.
The Last Gallon: Hylo’s cadre chief offers a tanker’s worth of coolant—if the PCs can move it through Mek-Sha without turning on a single official light. |
_________________
Don Diestler
Host, Shooting Womp Rats
The D6 Podcast
http://d6holocron.com/shootingwomprats
@swd6podcast, Twitter |
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