Ardana “Dia” Passik – Former Holovid Celebrity
We’ve got another character concept for you for Fantasy Flight Games’s Star Wars Edge of the Empire roleplaying game. This is actually a character concept that I played in a play by post game during the game’s beta period. In that game she was a Politco. However, once Far Horizons came out, I knew she needed to be rewritten as an Entertainer.
Species: Twi’lek
Career: Colonist
Specialization: Performer
Obligation: Betrayal (+5 magnitude)
Motivation: Comrades
Brawn 1
Agility 3
Intellect 2
Cunning 3
Willpower 2
Presence 4
Wound Threshold: 11
Strain Threshold: 13
Soak Value: 2
M/R Defense: 0|0
Skills: Charm 2, Coordination 1, Deception 1, Leadership 1, Negotiation 1, Streetwise 1
Talents: Distracting Behavior 1
Equipment: quickfire blaster pistol (Ranged [Light]; Damage 5; Crit 3; Range [Short]; stun setting), heavy clothing (+1 soak), 2 stimpacks, hand-held comlink, datapad, backpack, 6 credits
Background: Ardana (Dia to her friends) Passik was born into an entertainment family on Imperial City, and she grew up in front of a camera. By the time she grew into a young adult, she was already a fairly successful and recognizable commercial holovid actress. She enjoyed the recognition and fame that came with her choice of career, and she took full advantage, pushing herself higher and higher into the social stratosphere. Whether she had actually earned it or not was irrelevant.
But this all came crashing down around her ears when her contract with the studio came up for renegotiation. A small time crime lord had become obsessed with the young Twi’lek and wanted to buy her contract for an undisclosed sum in order to have her come and live at his growing palace as an entertainer. Her manager agreed, effectively selling Dia into glorified slavery. Instead of suffering the indignity, she fled Imperial City and to the Mid-Rim.
This is where her life took another drastic turn.
Desperate for money, she began to dance in a small cantina to survive. But it wasn’t long before someone recognized her and offered her a more lucrative job. The planet was under heavy Imperial occupation and a local resistance group needed new blood, and having the young former actress in their ranks might help to raise flagging morale. Given a choice between dancing for drunk, handsy spacers and doing something that might actually matter, she agreed. Besides, she figured it was only a matter of time before either her manager or the crime lord that had bought her contract started sending people to bring her back, so having some backup wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Her first mission was a disaster. The leader of the cell was killed in an Imperial ambush and several others were captured. However, instead of scattering, the rest of the men and women started to look to her as a de facto leader, her charisma and spirit helping to keep them energized and focused. Over the next few months, she changed completely, from a spoiled wannabe aristocrat to a fighter that truly believed in the cause of the resistance, even becoming romantically involved with a young man in the cell named Rayne Lien.
This of course made it all the more bitter when this Rayne betrayed the cell for a full pardon. Dia barely escaped with her life, and the rest of the members were killed. She fled to Nar Shaddaa, knowing that she could easily stay off of the radar there. She’s used her skills to get by, dancing in another spacer’s cantina for money, but also networking with some people to see where the planet’s loyalties truly lie. She wants to take down the corruption of the Empire to honor the memory of her fallen comrades, and to make up for her own failure in letting her emotions blind her. But she’ll settle for taking down Rayne.
Design Notes: Dia is a strong social character, able to use her charisma and social graces to cut through situations that others might not be able to. She is not a front line combatant, but is able to serve in a strong support role with her Distracting Behavior talent, able to suffer up to 3 Strain to cause the same number of NPCs to suffer an automatic threat on all of their checks with no check involved on her part. She can put herself into a tough spot if she’s not careful managing her Strain, but an automatic threat per roll is a powerful ability, and the more ranks she has the further away she can do it, and the Performer does provide some interesting options as far as recovering Strain is concerned.
As far as advancement is concerned, the Performer’s capstone abilities are all very nice and would fit for Dia. But she could also get some mileage out of the Politico specialization as a secondary career. In fact, Politico was her original specialization when I first played her back in the days of the Beta. Scathing Tirade and Inspiring Rhetoric both give her other options in combat to play with strain thresholds, something that is often overlooked. Otherwise, the Mercenary Soldier specialization would provide some interesting direct combat options while also bolstering her Leadership abilities. I’m sure there are plenty of other specializations that could be combined with this concept to take the build into different and interesting directions, based on how you want to play her.
I hope you have fun playing Dia. I know I certainly did.
Ben Erickson
