Thinking about dystopian settings recently dropped me back into Blakes' Seven. Ever heard of it? think a small band of freedom fighters against 1984 in space. The heroes (six, with a computer) have acquired? A vastly superior spaceship to take on the "Federation".
They do not always win. In fact, they almost always fail. There's an aura of pessimism pervasive in the show where anyone can die, victories are short-lived, and inevitably the villans always have the upper hand.
I find myself wishing I wasn't already running a campaign so I can run this one. And I can easily adapt it to Star Wars, with a few thoughts on modifying setting and setup conditions.
+Players start as convicts on a penal ship. Instead of getting credits to buy items and equipment, give them what, 50 more experience points? They will begin the game unarmed, unequipped, and have to rely on stealing weapons and overcoming guards. Eventually they're sent as expendable borders on the ship that has killed the previous boarding party and make their escape that way.
+Their advanced ship they steal might just be the Liberator itself lifted from Blake's seven and dropped into the Star Wars universe. Stranger things have happened. If not, might call it a Silentium construct of some kind.
+The 300 senators were all killed by the Empire, and the Skywalker twins were discovered by the empire and raised to be Vader's apprentaces. Mon Mothma is dead and the light of the rebellion has been extinguished before it even flared up. I'm thinking instead of sending
Travis
a Kallus knockoff
Luke Skywalker as an inquisitor from FoD after the player as their nemesis.
+Weapons have Genelocks, security is everywhere on the core worlds. They step into 1984 when landing on anywhere like couruscant. Alderaan is the only place that is remotely friendly, and even that is under the threat of...
+The Death star is operational and terrorizes the outer rim into compliance, working completely as Tarkin intended it to.
+Aliens are heavily persecuted, driven into the rim which pretty much serves as Prole land in this 1984 analogy.
+Traitors, turncoats, observers, spies, and prepared agents means there's a good chance the player successes will be undermined, the empire is ready for them, and the players are dancing to the tunes of their advesaries who are out to destroy them.
For some reason I'm motivated to make this a very hard campaign, almost asking players to have secondary characters ready for terribly things to happen to their primaries. This will not be pretty, and the "end" of the camapign is going to be the last hurrah for this band of rebels. They'll take the not-Liberator on a suicide mision to couruscant to kill the Emperor, or something. The player characters are not expected to all come out alive, but the result of the mission will be to break the supremacy of the Empire and kick-start the rebellion that should have happened.
So. any thoughts on how such a campaign would be run?
I already know I'd have to warn the players about the pessimistic setting, that it's a deliberately difficult campaign and not to take player death and hardship personally. But it seemed like an interesting idea, and certainly something different than most other campaigns.
:D
