Hi All,

As the title suggests, I'm a relatively new GM and need some advice from the seasoned veterans here on how to tie together the published adventures to make a larger campaign.

When I say I'm new to the GMing game, I've actually been doing it for just over a year now. In that time I've run a couple of One Ring games and have spent most of this year running Vampire the Requiem. On all three instances I have relied on the published adventures so my experience creating stories / campaigns of my own is still limited.

As our group are all big Star Wars fans, we are looking to play Edge of the Empire as our next game. The players are all excited and, as a GM, I feel spoiled by the amount of high quality adventures available.

I still have a good few weeks of our Vampire game left so I'm not in a major rush but what I'm ideally looking to do is link the majority of the published adventures together somehow. Having only started reading through them, I'm considering adapting the beginner game as an opening session to bring the characters together, them move on to Long Arm of the Hutt, Debts to Pay and Trouble Brewing. The plan is to eventually build up to the larger adventures Beyond the Rim and Jewel of Yavin.

Before I start on this mammoth task, has anyone attempted this before? My main concern is that it will prove too difficult or forced even to put all of these together, particularly as they don't seem to be designed to link with each other (from what I've seen so far).

Other concerns are:

-The players may become far too overpowered by the time we reach Beyond the Rim for example.

-Changing adversaries to link to previous adventures may have a knock-on effect with the later ones, rendering them useless, or at least a pain for a GM to adapt.

-The overall campaign will prove to be far too long.

So, what are people's thoughts? Am I being too ambitious? Would a couple of the smaller adventures along with one of the larger ones be a better idea? As I haven't run any of these yet I don't have a good grasp of how how quickly my group will get through them. Particularly as my guys have a tendency to going on massive tangents and blitz through pages of content in equal measure.

Any thoughts or advise would be much appreciated. Whatever happens, I'm really looking forward to running the game.

Many thanks!

I think the order is perfectly fine, you could even have a few off the cuff evenings to link the adventures together, perhaps the players have to smuggle something from Ryloth to Cloud City for example.

If you think the players are overpowered then you have a few tools. You can simply add a talent called adversary, which adds a setback to dice for each rank of adversary. You can also add some wounds, soak or a few talents that seem about right. You can also add complexity buy adding more things going on, combat in a factory while the players are on the conveyor belts that go into large machines.

Now, can you be too ambitious? Mate, you can never be ambitions enough!! Exagerate everything, blaster shots don't just miss, they dance around the player missing narrowly and expertly hitting the cover he is hiding behind. The monster isn't just a cat like creature, it is a lithe form with a huge mouth that is full of 5cm long teeth and talons that would take your heart out of your chest and hold it still beating.

it will prove too difficult or forced even to put all of these together, particularly as they don't seem to be designed to link with each other.

Not every game necessarily has to be some part of some Babylon 5-ish big overreaching arc. Sometimes the only linking factor are the players. That said there are NPCs that could act as returning characters, providing a sense of continuity. The downtrodden spice miners from Long Arm of the Hutt could be a good source of smuggling, the Duke Piddok could be a source of weapons, and Maru Jakkar could be an in to Black Sun for future work (someone who might point them towards the opportunity on the Wheel or the heist on Cloud City).

-The players may become far too overpowered by the time we reach Beyond the Rim for example.

True that the game is designed for lower level characters, which leaves you with two choices: beef up the NPCs to be more of a challenge or move the game up in the playlist. Move it to right after Long Arm.

-Changing adversaries to link to previous adventures may have a knock-on effect with the later ones, rendering them useless, or at least a pain for a GM to adapt.

I cant think of any one bad guy that's so vital to any of the stories that it couldn't be changed about. without too much difficulty.

-The overall campaign will prove to be far too long.

Six games is too long of a campaign? Good lord man - I've had campaigns run for YEARS! Six games will just barely give the players time to get their feet under them and to know the characters!

Before I start on this mammoth task, has anyone attempted this before? My main concern is that it will prove too difficult or forced even to put all of these together, particularly as they don't seem to be designed to link with each other (from what I've seen so far).

Other concerns are:

-The players may become far too overpowered by the time we reach Beyond the Rim for example.

-Changing adversaries to link to previous adventures may have a knock-on effect with the later ones, rendering them useless, or at least a pain for a GM to adapt.

-The overall campaign will prove to be far too long.

Great ideas. This sounds like it'll be a great game.

The games aren't overly designed to be linked together, but they can be. I'd recommend buying all of the adventures and looking them over. You can find places where you can mix them up. For example, in the Arda I adventure there are a few spots where they say it would be a good place to expand the adventure. For example, after the characters first arrive at the base, before the adventure proper kicks off, it suggests you could send the players on more missions. This way they'll feel more like a part of the Arda group and not outsiders there just for a mission. I once had a GM who did this with D&D adventures and it worked to great effect. You can weave your own story using the set pieces that already exist.

Don't worry about players becoming overpowerd. I'm currently running Arda I for a group with around 400 earned XP, so I had the same fears. What I'm doing is adding a couple extra enemies in the fights and increasing most of the difficulties by a die, if needed. The neat thing about this game is that while players become more deadly, they can still die just as easily. A few ranks of dodge or better defenses only go so far, and most of those defense talents cost strain so players are punished if overly used. As for skills, throw in more setback dice, don't be worried about upgrading with force dice, and artifically increase challanges to keep things intersting for players. The dice can always roll funny, so a hard roll for a player with 4 or 5 dice can still just as easily end up as a failure.

Don't worry about campaign length. At worst, people become distracted by something new and want to play a different game. At that point you find a natural transition and change games. At best, they'll love your game and you'll run out of book adventures and need to slow things down while waiting for the next one to be published.

I will ask, is there a time limit on how long you want to play this campaign? How long the book adventures take really depends on the group. In general, my group seemed to play each act in the book adventures in 2-3 sessions. Although, that depends on how straight forward they are and how easy it is to be side tracked. In BtR there are plenty of places for players to be distracted by exploration for a session or two that are just glossed over in the book. In Arda there are places where role playing takes over, and if you act it out over just rolling the dice it can take longer.

If I were you, I would be ambitious and run though all of the book adventures. If you can afford picking up all of the books, I'd do that and read them all over. You can start getting ideas on how to work them all together in a seamless storyline.

This is actually quite relevant to my interests. I am a fledgling GM myself, having only run an aborted WOTC Saga game during High School and an aborted Lord of the Rings D6 campaign for my family a year or so later. Having picked up the EOTE Beginner kit and GM Kit, I am more than enthusiastic about getting started but want to run mostly pre-made adventures until I get my feet wet so to speak.

OP, My plan is to use the official adventures in a chain. I'm going to run the Beginner game and Long arm of the Hutt with the pre-genned characters, because most of my group is super new at this sort of thing. Then we'll make custom characters and my plan is to run Beyond the RIm, then Jewel of Yavin. In between those adventures, and in order to tie everything together, my plan is to use smaller adventures like Debts to pay and fan made ones from the page here http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/85616-compiled-resources-list/ depending on the track my players seem to take.

Best of luck with the plan and do keep us posted, it would be great to compare notes with someone else doing this. I'll be starting in January, since that's when schedules clear up for everybody. Starting a topic on this in the Game Masters forum might be good as well.

I think the order is perfectly fine, you could even have a few off the cuff evenings to link the adventures together, perhaps the players have to smuggle something from Ryloth to Cloud City for example.

If you think the players are overpowered then you have a few tools. You can simply add a talent called adversary, which adds a setback to dice for each rank of adversary. You can also add some wounds, soak or a few talents that seem about right. You can also add complexity buy adding more things going on, combat in a factory while the players are on the conveyor belts that go into large machines.

Now, can you be too ambitious? Mate, you can never be ambitions enough!! Exagerate everything, blaster shots don't just miss, they dance around the player missing narrowly and expertly hitting the cover he is hiding behind. The monster isn't just a cat like creature, it is a lithe form with a huge mouth that is full of 5cm long teeth and talons that would take your heart out of your chest and hold it still beating.

Just a note, adversary does not add setback dice, it upgrades the difficulty of combat checks. That short range blaster shot against Adversary 3? Its not 1 purple die, it is now 2 red (first upgrade to 1 red, second upgrade adds a purple, third upgrade changes the new purple to red).

Just check in with your players about what they're looking for in terms of how long a campaign they want.

When I started with our current group playing EOTE, I was looking to GM the kind of epic, years-long campaign that I've always heard about.

One of our players just let me know that he wasn't interested in a campaign running that long, that he wanted to arrive at a point of closure in the current storyline and move on after that. It's just a difference in play style which made sense once we talked about it.

I linked the adventures as well. I used Atalla(sp?) the Toydarian who works for Jabba in Long Arm of the Hutt as an ongoing contact to put the players in touch with other crime bosses and what not. I changed the name of the Hutt in the Trouble Brewing adventure to Bargos (the Hutt in the adventure from the GMs tool kit) and used Atalla to connect the PCs to Bargos for Trouble Brewing and when they complete Touble Brewing they can start the tool kit adventure. Then I will use Atalla to get them in touch with the Pyke Syndicate for the Under a Black Sun adventure which they will start in media res as in the adventure and I will fill in the How they got there portion as the adventure progresses. A few simple name changes here and there can go a long way to linking story lines.

Edited for horrible horrible grammar.

I'm a very newbie GM and was about to start a campaign and was looking for just this kind of advice on linking the published stuff together and was wondering how this all worked out for you?

I linked the adventures as well. I used Atalla(sp?) the Toydarian who works for Jabba in Long Arm of the Hutt as an ongoing contact to put the players in touch with other crime bosses and what not. I changed the name of the Hutt in the Trouble Brewing adventure to Bargos (the Hutt in the adventure from the GMs tool kit) and used Atalla to connect the PCs to Bargos for Trouble Brewing and when they complete Touble Brewing they can start the tool kit adventure. Then I will use Atalla to get them in touch with the Pyke Syndicate for the Under a Black Sun adventure which they will start in media res as in the adventure and I will fill in the How they got there portion as the adventure progresses. A few simple name changes here and there can go a long way to linking story lines.

Edited for horrible horrible grammar.

Lazarus effect on this thread...

I would be interested in seeing "flow charts" on how other GMs have managed tying the published adventures together, and what they have done to fill th gaps in between - so to speak. My new group started with Debts to Pay, but I changed Bargos to Teemo. They failed to save the mine and the miners, and Teemo got furious and put them in his dungeon. Voila! Opened up perfectly for Escape from Mos Shuuta and the Long Arm... will use PC Obligations to take them to Formos next and "Trouble Brewing"... After that I have yet to decide, but I think the Hutt in TB may become their Patron for future adventures and smuggle runs.

I ran my first Edge campaign like I ran Shadowrun campaigns. The group's infochant contact served as a fixer by setting the PCs up with jobs. If the group ended a pre-published adventure with one or more NPCs friendly toward them, those NPCs became contacts.

If you're at the point in your GMing career where you're only comfortable running pre-written adventures, I wouldn't burden yourself with trying to link them together. Think original Star Trek and treat your campaign like an anthology with one-and-done stories.

With my first run through, was also my second time GMing ever, I started with the beginners game, and Teemo the Hutt sorta of became the big bad of my campaign. If you start there you can pick up "Long Arm of the Hutt" which is the official follow up to "Escape from Mos Shutta", though I didn't do that. Instead I did "Debts to Pay" followed by "Under a Black Sun" and then I did a fan mad adventure called "Bendu's Shadow." Anywho, I read through the adventures and looked for key points that Teemo could stick his fat Hutt fingers in and cause problems for the players. The final session was the big showdown where the players finally found Teemo's new palace and went in to take him out. It was pretty epic and all the players seemed to really like it.

The best advice I could give to you is to be flexible, look at the adventures and choose the ones that you feel your players would enjoy most and then weave your single plot thread through it. Like others have said, not every session has to be part of a larger frame narrative, but can still be loosely tied to the overarching story.

I'd point you here where this topic has been discussed (and follow the link to the next thread as well):

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/230118-ffg-adventures-order-of-play/

I echo many of the thoughts above. Go:

- Escape from Mos Shuuta

- Long Arm of the Hutt

- Trouble Brewing (leading to a Hutt patron)

- Debts to Pay

- any other adventures utilizing the Hutt patron

Also, in case you're curious, I've reviewed many of the modules here:

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/222231-brief-adventure-module-reviews-ffg-weg-wotc/

I don't know if my group is on these boards, but if your PCs are Frank, Tengarak, Lars, TOM, Ryn, or Legs please skip this post.