Thus far, my gaming group has a long history of racking too much obligation contending with crime lords in all the wrong way, playing at bounty hunting, and generally go down when they start imagining that they're the big fishes in the pond. I've just been planning adventures on a week to week basis, and it sticks to a Firefly-esque pattern of spending a single session on each world before they move on.
It's worked, but I was trying to mash up the ideas I wanted to combine into a future game, and, in a nutshell, I thought of two films and a game: Indiana Jones, Sahara, and Uncharted .
We've never gotten into the exploration / discovery feel thus far, and I wanted to run with those ideas and make a rollicking, high adventure game about discovery, ancient technology, buried treasure, and of course, there's always some crime lord, extremist group, or faction in the latest war who wants the goal for themselves. So I went for the first Timothy Zahn novels I ever read: Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command . The Katana fleet is ripe to repurpose around my less EU-savvy game group.
In a nutshell, The Katana fleet was created 40-ish years ago, numerous dreadnoughts all slave-circuited to the flagship to reduce the crew requirements for each vessel from 16k to 2.2k. The fleet was sent on a maiden voyage, and a hive virus drove the crew insane. Katana made a random hyperspace jump, and the rest of the slaved fleet went with. Nobody was able to track it, and no one ever made contact. Turns out the Jedi onboard, Jorus C'baoth, was able to resist insanity via calling on the Dark Side, but is now made in a different sort of way. He uses extreme Battle Meditation to control the minds of many surviving crew members and control their insanity.
The fleet arrived at a dangerous world in the Unknown Regions, and he gets most of the ships into orbit, where a meteor shower / asteroid collision / whathaveyou caused the flagship (and maybe a couple more) to crash on the planet's surface. During said event, the sole sane crew member tries to get a message out and finds the whole comm station of the flagship destroyed. He sends a good old fashioned message pod back to civilized space, but the propulsion system is damaged, causing it to take years to arrive.
Now the players are approached by a droid that wants help recovering the fleet. It seems he was a servant to an officer in the Republic / Rebellion / whoever the good guys are, who recovered the pod, but upon seeing the contents, his greedy lieutenant gunned him down and ran with the pod, hoping to sell it to the highest bidder. The droid just wants justice for his master, but the players are poised to get involved in a race to find the legendary Katana fleet.
Upon arrival at the world, the slaved dreadnoughts in orbit shoot their ship down, as C'baoth is more than happy to have his little world where he controls everyone's minds left undisturbed by the galaxy at large. Now there's a small army of survivors (and the next generation) out to get them on a hostile world, plus whoever else managed to get a homing beacon on their ship, and they'll have to deal with a mad old Dark Jedi to get control of the fleet via the flagship computer. Maybe the Rebellion / Republic is a few days behind them, and if they don't disable the ships in orbit, their fleet will get blown to hell by the orbiting dreadnoughts.
Anyways, that's the idea for one multi-session story arc in the campaign, and I'm fairly pleased with it, but I'm looking for more ideas for more adventures. Especially something on a less-grand scale than the 200 Dreadnoughts that make up the Katana fleet for them to cut their teeth on.
I've been skimming a lot of the novels that Sahara was based off of for inspiration, as well as the ancient civilizations of Star Wars (Rakata, Celestials, etc), but I thought I'd look for ideas here. Any thoughts?