For the edification of the curious, we spent the rest of Session 9 talking about the solution to the mystery. I present it here, with some comments on the ending.
It was all about the Neshak Diamond, of course.
The Neshak Diamond was a Sith artifact, left behind in the Great Hyperspace War. The Mandalorians claimed it and made it an heirloom of their kingdom. Ogyris stole the diamond from the Mandalorians, and secreted it ultimately on Shoul, never having the chance to recover it before being killed.
Everyone was racing for the Diamond. The armored mercenaries who dismantled the computer core were Mr. Temple’s own men: he wanted to secure the diamond and put it out of reach of the criminal and corporate elements. They had the location from the Red Serpent hideout; the Red Serpents themselves were working for a private gem collector. Zino was working for the station’s local Hutt, who wanted the diamond as a prize. The Ho’Din were unknowing puppets of GUR, which also had its own more skilled retrieval team. And a Mandalorian crew would eventually arrive in wrath.
A Sith cult on Mettawi station was both stealing bodies for use in potions and tattooing names on murder victims to use in calling up the ghosts of dead Sith wizards. They used a handheld hypnosis device to disable orderlies in the morgue; rather than the bodies disappearing instantly, the witnesses were frozen in place. Once the cult learned of the diamond, they would have pursued it as well, but they did not have the resources to become a serious contender; just an uncanny hazard for the faction in last place.
GUR wanted the Diamond because it was, in fact, the focusing lens of the superweapon on the Null-class ship: a seismic petrification ray. Although GUR was planning to sell the ship once it was fully operational, the young heir of the company considered running off with the ship and becoming a warlord.
In the event, with Jedi involvement ending here, GUR claim the diamond and repair the Null-class ship. They are unable to sell it at the price they demand until the Great Sith War, whereupon the Republic buys it. They use it a few times, but are unable to find a role for the planet-killer in a defensive war. Eventually it is mothballed, reverse-engineered, and used to develop the weapon that devastates Malachor.
As for the end of the campaign, it was abrupt but not untimely. I had intended a 12-session mini-campaign, but the characters only began taking an active approach to the central conflict in this 9th session. The whole team dying to a dungeon trap was shocking, but it took multiple consecutive bad decisions, some significant overspecialization during character creation that left them with low defenses, and truly prodigious poor defensive rolls.
Ultimately the campaign was too centralized, with a single story that relied on certain characters to survive. This was a rare experiment for me in running a story-based campaign, and TPKs are my most notorious campaign killers. For our next game, I will double down on making a sandbox resilient enough for multiple parties to engage, including, if necessary, starting with brand-new characters while maintaining the continuity.
