Star Wars RPG ideas

[pawsplay]

thanks for all the great feedback!
It helps a lot but I prefer to keep things in canon. I know that sounds really anal, but I like the idea of my characters not doing galaxy changing events but rather accomplishing some small scale missions.

I think that's an appealing playstyle, personally. However, it's important to realize that it diverges significantly from th tone of the movies and even the majority of the novels and other tie-ins. Star Wars is in original form is melodramatic, baroque, grand, swashbuckling. I like the idea of a small mercenary unit or a squad of X-wing pilots adventuring, but it's a Star Wars variant, like running DC Adventures game based around the exploits of the Gotham City Police is a variant on DC superheroes.

 

[Salcor]

This is one of the reasons that I like the Knights of the Old Republic setting. There is canon, but it is not the overwhelming behemoth that is the Rebellion era or the Clone Wars Era. Another good time to play is the Dark Times/Force Unleashed era. Unfortunately I have not been able to run this campaign yet but I was thinking of a campaign set in the KoTR era that is based off the Dungeon Savage Tides adventure path. Essentially the characters would be sent to the unknown region to research an item found by a jedi family tied to the explorers guild. This would lead the characters to discover a living planetoid that had ruins from a couple ancient civilizations on it (the Rakatan and kwa). It is was the site of an experimental infinity gate to travel to another galaxy. The planetoid was a seedling of Yuuzhan'tar which happened to get trapped in a darkside nexus. The Kwa managed to tap into the seedling and use it to connect to the Vong's galaxy. The Rakatan discovered the site and took it over, and used this technology along with the darkside energy to create some deadly new weapons. However, after the Infinite Empire fell the site fell into ruin, but the connection to the Vong galaxy was still over. Some Vong pathfinders discovered it, and was attempting to use it to open a connection to their galaxy, but due to their lack of force connection they could not access the systems.

Salcor

 

[NMC]

Star Wars RPGs fall apart faster than just about any other RPG I've ever seen, because people come with different expectations.

My experiences have been different, but I think these are still good points.

I first started playing Star Wars with modules from West End Games, and I think those were nicely integrated with the canon, so that probably colored my expectations. Even so, it was the novels and comics that aimed for plots bigger and better than those of the movies--such as Dark Empire and the entire New Jedi Order series--that reaffirmed my bias. In those, the events were so grandiose that what happened in the films seemed to be of little consequence, and that soured the experience for me.

In the same way, I think one can turn off players by not respecting the canon, but I've never had a player complain because a campaign did respect it.

It's a good point, though, that most players expect epic moments. The trick, of course, is to provide those moments without outdoing the films. A good examples of this is the old adventure Black Ice, where the heroes have a chance to take on a Torpedo Sphere that is attacking their base. While not quite as big as either of the Death Star engagements, that still provided a really cool moment. Another example is Strike Force Shantipole, where the heroes can save the prototype B-Wing fighter from falling into Imperial hands, thus contributing to the accomplishments of the Alliance as a whole.

-Nate

 

[jefgorbach]

of course one thing to remember is even in the movies, the Luke's party didnt act alone ... there were ALWAYS an unknown legion of other rebels at all levels working alongside them even/esp during the epic death star battle.

Perhaps its your unsung PCs who recovered the plans and/or relayed them to Princess Leia in Movie4 which alerted the Rebels to the Death Star's very existence and the means of its destruction?

Perhaps they were one of the numerous other Xwing pilots in the final assault whose own heroic actions went unnoticed by Cannon simply bc the Movie focused on Luke's group.

Its a massive galaxy full of tales untold by the movie's plotline.

 

[NMC]

I played in a campaign once that ended with a great example of that kind of adventure. The heroes snuck into a top-secret facility and stole a few X-Wings; only once they'd jumped to the rendezvous point did we learn their destination: Yavin IV. We delivered them just in time for the big fight.

The old Secrets of Naboo supplement has another good example of this, the adventure "Peril on Naboo," in which the heroes have their own assignment in the middle of the events from Episode I.

-Nate