Only Two Ways Home is a site-based heist / adventure for use with the Star Wars Edge of the Empire roleplaying game. In this scenario, an opportunistic Crew of interstellar misfits agrees to help the Galactic Imperial Navy bring a renegade commander back to face justice for his crimes.
Only Two Ways Home touches on and explores several key motifs that are encouraged by Edge of the Empire. While a wide variety of characters with varying Motivations will find this Heist interesting, those with the character Motivations of Religion/Spirituality, Droid Rights, and Support the Empire will find it especially so.
The title of this Heist comes from a quote from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now!. It describes the sentiments of the primary antagonists of both the film, Colonel Kurtz, and this scenario, Captain Kitano. The previous acts and deeply held moral convictions of these men have left them with a choice of only two options moving forward: victory, or death.
June 5, 2013
Only Two Ways Home
About C. Steven Ross
Triumph & Despair 
June 5th, 2013 at 11:52 pm
Fantastic. Took a quick look – can’t wait to play it. Will likely be spread across our next two Saturdays. Wow! Thanks! I’ll let you know how it goes.
June 10th, 2013 at 7:36 am
UPDATE: There was some trouble cropping up related to embedding certain fonts into a PDF that caused the proficiency die symbol to look like an O. It is fixed now.
June 23rd, 2013 at 11:27 pm
We ran this on Saturday night! And spoilers ahead!
Unfortunately, the vagaries of a fully open-ended adventure meant my PCs picked a near-optimal route through the adventure and did not experience nearly as much of the lore as I would have liked. They asked for codes that would help obscure them from the Agarix, and succeeded. On jumping into the system (in the cloud) they cleverly probed each site in an optimal fashion, getting some help from a number of hilariously good rolls.
Finding the Agarix near a moon, they moved in and used some codes to open an external access port to the turbolifts. They then won a roll to open up the computer room, hacked in, and got a number of triumphs to fool the computers into a practice scenario mode where they would neither hyperspace, nor react to commands. While they faced some despair, including a leak in the gas containment, they used it to their advantage to further break into the Hyperdrive Chamber and sabotage it to prevent any possible escape.
Overall, I absolutely love this kind of adventure, and on another night they would have gone through a number of inopportune mishaps, I’m sure. But they loved their time in this one.
We followed up with a random event rolled out of your events so far – Rogue Event 4, which worked beautifully to soften up their ship for some later adventures. Thanks so much for your content!
June 24th, 2013 at 8:10 am
That sounds awesome! I’m really happy to hear that you had a good time with it and it sounds like your guys came up with some really clever tricks to get the job done!
There’s way too much going on aboard IEF Agarix for any Crew to fully explore in just one session. I intended the heist to be that way; to do the extra work and design more than is needed so that real choice and real consequences can be felt. Every Crew then wonders what else was in store? What else could they have found? What else is out there? thus encouraging exploration and self-discovery over a flat, linear sequence of events.
September 22nd, 2013 at 11:17 am
Thanks for sharing this awesome adventure! I’m looking forward to running it as an intro before beginning a sandbox style campaign. I was curious though on ways to get the players aboard the Agarix once they’ve discovered it. In the material it is kind of glossed over that somehow the players will find themselves aboard, but I’m concerned that my players are relatively inexperienced with the Star Wars setting and might be at a loss for ways to board. I’m even somewhat at a loss, and I could see the adventure getting ‘stuck’ at this point if we can’t think of a good way to get the crew aboard, especially undetected.
What methods have you seen your groups use to board the Agarix successfully (or unsuccessfully)?
Thanks for the help as well as for all the fantastic material you’ve been sharing on your site!
September 22nd, 2013 at 2:20 pm
Thanks so much for the kind words! I hope your group has a great time with this heist.
This one has been ran be myself and others quite a few times and no one has ever had a group stall out at this point, but I do understand your concern. When running this heist, keep in mind how the main Nemesis, Captain Kitano, is feeling, not to mention the crew of the Agarix. He’s on the run from the Empire, cut off from supplies, and probably eager to make allies.
Here are a list of things I’ve seen or heard groups do to get on board:
– pretend to need a landing for emergency repairs
– run into some trouble during the search and legitimately need emergency repairs
– claim they are carrying medicine and need refueling
Here’s also some other ideas I had:
– pretend to be Alliance liaisons offering sanctuary
– ram the ship at high speed and crash into the hanger
– sneak past sensors covertly, or just bully their way close, so as to forcefully board the Agarix
Lastly, be sure to checkout my Hangouts Interview #2 , if you haven’t already, where I talk to some guys who ran and played in Only Two Ways Home.
July 26th, 2016 at 10:16 am
Thanks again for this. Just started GM’ing a new group and gonna try this out. (along with some of your other classics)
July 26th, 2016 at 10:18 am
You’re very welcome! Would love to hear how it goes for your group.
January 7th, 2018 at 6:37 am
Hi there, I just want to let you know our GM ran this one for us yesterday and we had a lot of fun with it! We had only one session, so I think we did not explore all of it, but it was really cool.
In case you are interested, how we boarded the Agarix: (SPOILERS AHEAD OF COURSE)My slicer enigneered a fake location of a droid factory and a bunch of fake deactivation codes for Imperial droids and also some fake Holonet news about a group of smugglers who stole said codes. Then we went in pretending to sell the codes to Captain Kitano. We almost got to the point of just selling him the bunch of worthless crap for 40.000 credits (Lt. Catmus was already going for it but waiting for final approval from Kitano), but then decided we could not risk to wait very long. We then sliced a turbolift, got into the brigg, found Marek, stunned him, put him and his body parts in a box and got him back on our ship. We then looked through is artifical brain thingy, found some access codes and went straight to the room where the 4 poor guys on drugs were doing the calculation.
After a short discussion we stunned the 4 people, replaced the hyperspace route for the next jump that they already calculated with a jump to the place where the Praetorian was waiting. Then we got the hell back to our ship, got rid of the tractor beam, flew out of the Hangar and got a secret message to the Praetorian and then made a fake communication to the Empire telling them we found the Agarix and they better get to this place asap. Which lead to the Agarix immediatly making the jump and thus ending up right next to the Praetorian ;) . We then followed them and chased Kitano who had gotten away in a rescue pod, which lead to a fight with him. We were able to shoot him almost dead and deliver him to the Admiral.
We had no force sensitive character, but we definetly had the feeling something was very threatening on the Agarix. We also saw the temple room with the sword and the obelisks and we were all like “what the kriff is happening??”.
So anyhoo, Thank You for this very cool scenario!
January 7th, 2018 at 6:41 am
(Damn it I forgot something: I love it when a scenario has a really cool title and this one rocks! Also sorry for all the typos I made in my first comment.)
January 7th, 2018 at 7:33 am
Wow, thank you so much! It means the absolute world to mean to hear that people have used my work and especially that they had a good time. This really makes all the effort worthwhile. You’ve made my day!