Hi there. I've ordered the Beginner Game, but I've not received it yet.

I was hoping to get advice from the players/GMs who have had a chance to play past the beginner box.

We'd like to keep the characters we start with, but want to personalize them to better fit what the players want. We're going to keep the character class and stats until we get the full rules and can recreate the characters with the full character creation rules.

I'm going to let the players switch species and gender (my players are all female), and they also want to make up their own background stories.

I've told them that any story will work, but they just need to have it end where they are on the run from Neemo the Hutt on Mos Shuuta. That was easy enough to figure out from the preview information I've seen.

I'm just wondering if this will cause issues in the story. Are there points where the story will call up something specific about a character or his backstory?

I haven't read the followup adventure (Long Arm of the Hutt), but the beginner box does not depend on the character's backstory at all. As you gave said, they just need to be on the run from Neemo and that's the only key point.

As for switching species. It's clear that the pregens do not follow the conventions of character creation from the core game so switching out the species will not harm anything.

If it helps getting your players more involved in the story, go for it.

Sweet. That's what I was hoping. I did not want to get to a part where they smuggler runs into his old girlfriend and have my 10 year old be playing the smuggler as a little girl.

She had the idea that her character is a slave in the palace, and is about to be forced into the arena to fight to the death against her wookie friend named Fuzzy. A bounty hunter in training (who is not cut out for her line of work) will spring them from the cells before the fight with the help of her malfunctioning medical droid who is trying to avoid a memory wipe because it keeps singing nursery rhymes while working on patients.