A little off topic, but somewhat related as an idea:

In my latest campaign I started to make use of the star wars essential atlas in a new way with the goal to control where my players may go from the start. I took a map of the sector they were in and made a player's map from it, with only the planets and routes on it, that their navi-comp knew. They could only use those routes. It really made them hunt for navi-data, hitting spacer bars and making contacts to increase their range. And they really cheered when they discovered a secret shortcut in an abandoned freighter.

Okay, that is pretty awesome. I may have to borrow that one, especially in an Old Republic campaign and/or in an unexplored regions type of game.

Or, ya know, just having a faulty navicomputer. . .

In a campaign I recently started, the group as a whole didn't want a ship. Only one of the players actually wanted a ship. So I gave him one. At the beginning of the first session, he "won" it in a card game. Oddly, though, the character doesn't know how to gamble, and he has the barest inkling of how to play that particular game and yet he won an entire ship. The ship is a slightly older YT-1300 - nothing fancy.

Lucky, right? Nope. The ship was pawned off on him by its owner who was fed up with all of its problems. The ship is haunted. (Literally... by its first owner, a Jedi who was murdered on board. The most recent owner has no idea of its past, he just knows it is an accurséd ship and was high time he got rid of it.)

The ship is also needing some repairs before it can go anywhere. And that leads into a few misadventures planetside while they scrounge up the parts needed to make her spaceworthy. It also holds a few secrets that will likely lead to trouble down the road...

This is the type of stuff that makes the start of a campaign interesting. My hat is off to you.

This is the type of stuff that makes the start of a campaign interesting. My hat is off to you.

Thanks! The players, really, come up with this stuff -- I just roll with it and work it into the story as I can.

Another one of the players created a human tech and decided he was the ship's mechanic... and bartender. So, early on he was scrounging the spaceport and junkyards for parts to fix the engine, he rolled a failure in his search, but also a couple Advantages. I told him he found some decent parts that looked useful, and he took them back to the ship. He couldn't figure out how to make them fit in the ship's engines anywhere, but he did manage to start building a still out of the stuff. He proclaimed it a success!

Later on, a few sessions in, they found a secret storage compartment while "exploring" the hunk o' junk freighter they were saddled with. Therein contained a deactivated protocol droid, very similar to your C3PO type. The droid was a mess, though. It had some old blaster scoring on it and had to be put back together. The droid is actually the character of a part-time player I have. I had the others find it the session prior to the part-timer joining in, and I delayed them fully fixing it till the following session. The "new" player showed up to the game and patiently sat and watched the others play. As soon as they managed to put the droid back together and turn him on, the part-time player yelled, "look out, Master!" and then went dark again until they could fix him some more. Unfortunately, trying to fix him some more erased some of his memory... the pertinent memory of the droid's final hours and what became of his Master. A mystery!

This was all part of the character idea the part-timer and I worked out ahead of time. He was the Jedi's (the original owner of the freighter) personal protocol droid and "squire." The Jedi knight was a loner sort and didn't want a padawan. But his droid served him well for conversation, and sometimes, training. The droid has his old master's backup lightsaber in a hidden compartment in his right leg. I gave him the combat skill Lightsaber (Brawn) (until the Force and Destiny book tells us how to do it differently). I told my player I probably shouldn't hand out fully functioning lightsabers, so we made a deal. The lightsaber is shoddy. As I said, it was his master's back up saber. He can use it, but all Difficulty dice are upgraded to Challenge dice and I can use Threats to "break" the saber, requiring it to be fixed before using it again.

The player, once turned back on, explained who/what he is and who his old master was (without going into too much detail -- he claims partial memory loss, but being the "squire droid" of a Jedi, he just doesn't want to reveal too much). He has things to learn from the other players as well. It seems whatever happened to him and his master happened during the Clone Wars and he's been deactivated, and stuffed into a hidden compartment in pieces, ever since.

It's a fun game so far. The other characters include a twi'lek dancer/spy/thief with an emphasis on thieving (that girl loves to burgle!), a gungan blackmarketeer with a scarred face, an eye patch, and a decidedly Rastafarian personality, a human thug/enforcer/bodyguard whose boss was recently a victim of an ongoing turf war, and a Force-sensitive human bounty hunter.