So I'm getting my group of players together to run a mercenary campaign. I'm thinking of giving them a beat up Correllian Corvette and about 6 hyperspace capable fighters along with 70 or so ground troops to run as a Mercenary company for the Empire and others.

basic premise/plot change was

"Rebel Base on Yavin would be blow up, Death star got destroyed a few weeks later by rebel sabouters in a last ditch effort to stop it. Emps was onboard at the time, in the power vaccum Grand Moff Tarkin and Vader Assume a mutual power role. The destruction of the death star along with a accompanying imperial fleet left the imperium a bit kneecapped loosing many of the outer rim areas to independants and criminals. The unified rebellion is scattered but the Imperial Army is working hard to try to bring the seperate rebellious sectors under controls and has began to subcontract to mercs to help them secure planets and bring them down."

So i'm sending them to some backwater system that a Imperial Admiral is trying to bring back into the fold. I was looking for ideas for missions for the Merc's in this system.

The major planet has about 2 billion people on it, there is two other planets that people can stand on without a survival suit. Both are rather wastelandish. One of them will be basically useless, the other was going to have some rare minerals on it. There is a few other planets and plenty of moons.

Imperial presence is a Star Destroyer and supporting fleet, a small army of stormtroopers is on the main planet. Everywhere but the main planet is up for grabs. Rebels assault convoys, disrupt mining operations, and generally are stopping the system from functioning.

The rebels are decentralized, but they have a small fleet, and a hidden base somewhere.

The Admiral of the Imperials hates this post and he's not below doing some evil things to root out the rebels. One of my ideas was having the Merc's pose as one group of rebels attack another group's village to set them against each other. Another idea was to have them attack a supply convoy to the system and make it look like the rebels. The problem is, there isn't much for the Empire and even the Merc's to attack head on. Its much quicker at least in the mind of Admiral to make the rebels look bad and turn to fighting each other.

Any Ideas would be good! Not much of the system is fleshed out.

Plot wise you've got a lot of work ahead of you... though as I'm doing the leg work for a similarly styled campaign, I have a few ideas that may help:

1) Make it a sector, not just a couple planets.

This allows for a much bigger playing field and opens up far more adventure options. You can keep the players from just going bonkers by having one of the opening scenes of the campaign be a reprisal against a rebel group that raided the BoSS office and wiped the sectors nav charts save all but a handful of worlds near the sector's primary entry route. This will allow you as the GM to guide the players by giving them access to nav-charts as needed by the campaign (indeed whole adventures can be based on getting charts to feed back to the Imperial fleet and BoSS) and encouraging them to move through the sector rather then bounce around it.

This also helps explain the Merc angle. The players are "local talent" that are already at least a little familiar with the lay of the land. Any Imperial force would be coming in totally blind by comparison. So contracting the players to spearhead Imperial operations makes some sense.

Having it as a sector also gives you plenty of different worlds with different flavors, hopes, dreams, and opinions on the Empire. Keeps things fresh, and keeps your options open. Planet 1 might be openly in rebellion, Planet 2 might still support the Empire and want help crushing an insurgency, Planet 3 might be a wild land with nothing but secret Imperial research base that's been radio silent and isn't quite sure what to make of these mercs, and so on...

2) Have the players make (or be assigned) interesting and diverse characters...notice that's plural. Kinda like Star Trek, (*hiss*) you'll need to divvy up the responsibilities. BUT also like Star Trek, Lt. Cmdr. Data isn't in EVERY episode. Some episodes just don't call for his specific talents. The resolution for this is to have each player get three (a good round number, but you can go with more if you like) characters that each fill a different job. So one player might have the 1st Mat

e, a Senior Field Medic, and a Junior Flight Officer as his characters. Player 2 will have the Fighter Wing Commander, a Senior Marine, and a Junior Sensor/Comm officer. Player 3 Is the Marine Detachment Commander, a Fighter Pilot, and a Junior Naval Tech as his, and so on.

The idea is to make it so that for virtually any adventure you want to plan, everyone will have a character ready to go.

3) Obligation... obligation everywhere....

Make everyone take an obligation, even if you never plan on having them roll for it. These are Mercs, not regular Army, so they've all got skeletons in their closets, in some cases quite literally. The idea here is to establish backgrounds and interaction points for the crewers with each other and the outside world. Some might be simple, like Player 3's Marine Commander being in trouble with his old bounty hunter team, who can now cause trouble for the ship at large. Maybe Player 2's Fighter Wing Commander also happens to be secretly responsible for the death of the family of Player 1's Senior Field Medic.

This will give you points for both developing your own adventures, as well as a way to get the players to start playing off one another. The day Senior Field Medic goes down behind enemy lines with a wounded Wing Commander could prove VERY interesting.

4) Death is a thing...

As an added bonus, with everyone having multiple characters... you won't have to pull punches you normally would. Imagine if TPM was a game, and Anakin and Qui-gon were run by the same player. At the end of the Adventure when Qui-gon gets killed, it works. The player doesn't have to get mad, he's got a Jedi-in-training ready to go when it comes time to play the next adventure about Attacking Clones...You'll be be able to do the same.

By extension you can have more fun with the players too. If a player's Junior Technician also happens to be a Rebel Informant, you can go in from day one knowing that eventually you'll run an adventure where he shows his true colors and maybe leads a team of rebels who take over the ship. If the PC-now-NPC gets killed when the players liberate the ship, oh well... if he escapes, you've now got a new villain that can turn back up down the road. And the player gets to feel less like a character died, and more like he helped write the story.

5) Of Minions and Derp...

Make the following character templates and thank me later:

1. Minion Crewer: All Abilities 3. Grouped Ranks in any 3 skills pertaining to their function. (So a Marine would have Ranged Hvy, Discipline, and Melee). It's not the most perfect thing, but it makes it easy to grab some allied minions on the fly.
2. The Ship: A single Rival-grade stat block that covers every noteworthy job on the ship. So when you need someone to shoot the cannons, or check the sensors, or something and a PC isn't available, you've got one consistent stat block to go to without ever having to ask questions like "how many minions are operating those guns?"
3. The Specialist: A derivative template to apply to The Ship to allow the break out of a named NPC as needed. Probably something like: Rival, all Abilities 2 except for a pair that are 3s directly relating to the job. 6 ranks to apply to any 6 skills or less relating to character's job (may not exceed 2 ranks in any one skill). Two tier 1 talents from the same tree. This way if an NPC keeps showing up and needs stats of his own, or a PC gets killed, and the player wants to convert that named NPC into a PC, you've got something more detailed to work with.

6) On the matter of XP

Ok, so how do you level up... I've been kicking it around and here's the best solution I've got. You award an above average amount of XP, preferably divisible by 3. The players can distribute it among their three characters as they wish... understanding that poop is gonna happen eventually. So if they wanna super advance the Wing Commander and ignore Marine and Comms guy, that's fine... just remember that fighters get shot down all the time, and adventures will occur where bringing along Wing Commander might be a bad idea...

That's all I got now...

Well I do have a sector in mind, my idea was to make the outer rim into a kind of Space 1960's-1990's Africa (Complete with independent colonists in short shorts) with all the strife and war for mercenaries. I was starting in a single system to make them have a small start to their escapades as soldiers of fortune, because there wasn't going to be a real overall enemy (Atleast at first) But I have to say the idea of making them roll up the key staff of the company and some lower personnel could be good. Actually all of the advice is awesome and I'm most certainly going to use a lot of it. Thanks man!