I'm currently in the process of preparing to run an AoR adaptation of WEG's Far Orbit Project. In the prelude to the start of the campaign, the head mutineer and new captain of the Far Orbit has the following conversation:

Vedij mused for a moment. "Plainly we will have to take on crew or abandon the ship. I'd rather take on crew. I need this ship."

"Sir, perhaps the Rebels would buy it," offered the ops officer.

"They might if they had the money. Contrary to widespread reports, the Rebels have very little income. Their raids on our -- excuse me -- on Imperial shipping are limited to destroying isolated freighters and injuring the occasional escort..." Vedij's gaze focused on the far door as he reflected for a moment.

"Now there's an interesting idea," Vedij finished.

"Sir?"

"I think that I've just figured out how to finance our little operation," Vedij said.

Most canon and Legends sources agree that the Alliance was cash-strapped for pretty much the entire time prior to Endor. What's been puzzling me (for years) is how the Alliance can pay Rebel privateers (the premise for the entire campaign) if they're as poor as they're supposed to be? Large cargo freighters (and their cargoes) and capital ships are worth millions of credits. Even with a Rebel privateer only getting 25% of the full value of a ship, the numbers add up very quickly. In the campaign the players are supposed to rake in millions. They must, to keep operations going.

How is the Alliance coming up with the funds to pay privateers for their captures if they're supposedly so strapped that they're having trouble equipping troops and Rebel cells? At one point early in the campaign, if the players succeed, they can obtain a second Nebulon-B. Even heavily damaged it's worth a couple of million credits, which to the Alliance would be enough to equip hundreds of troops with blasters and basic gear. Then comes a convoy of freighters valued in the hundreds of millions. And so on and so forth.

So is the Alliance really 'poor'? I'm having a serious problem trying to get a handle on this inconsistency in the Legends.

Shadow, I don’t know much about the expanded universe but I have always thought of the rebellion as having a substantial income that was insufficient for their needs.

The United States military as well as most militaries are always wanting larger budgets because they do not have enough for what they want. The question is what do they spend their available money on.

The rebellion has the same problem. what should they spend their money on? Do they equip large numbers of ground troops with weapons (even though they don’t usually use large armies) or do the purchase a ship? If they can gets a ship for 25% of its value while having someone else risks their lives taking that form the empire than it is a steal. Not only do they get their supplies they deal a blow to the empire using only minimal resources.

Even if they had to take the capital ships they buy from the privateers and resell them it is worth it to keep the privateers going after the empire.

I've always felt that the Rebellion had an rather substantial income due to donations from millions if not billions of people supporting the cause. Let's also not forget that this would include rather wealthy individuals as well as middle and lower income people. However, there is a catch. However, the best source of weapons, gear, etc is most likely the black market where everything costs an arm and a leg depending on the demand for the items. So ideally the best way is to steal or hiring somebody to steal from the Empire, denying them the weapons and giving the Rebellion weapons at the cost of mere thousands.

At least that's how I think of things anways...

Well, I think you may have figured it out, right away. You said that the Alliance was CASH-strapped. Im going to just speculate that, when the Alliance would raid the Empire, they wouldn't swipe money or cred sticks...that kind of stuff can be traced. The classic 'Marked Bills', if you will. What the Alliance would steal is things they need...weapons, medical supplies, repair materiel, etc. Turning around and fencing some of that loot is going to have problems of its own. To quote Badger from 'Firefly', "The government stamp on every molecule of the goods...". I haven't read the Alliance book for SW, but the little write up in EotE states that the Alliance does a lot of barter. "Do this run, and I know a guy that can overhaul your hyperdrive...maybe give it a little extra kick, too." That may not seem like much of a payment, but given what you (as the GM) may have the players pay for engine overhauls...
I think the Alliance has money, but its not in 'liquid' forms of stacks of credits. Its in the form of weapons, bacta, MRE's, a spare compression coil for the engine, stuff that the players can USE and NEED, rather than what would be fun to spend.

I haven't read the Alliance book for SW, but the little write up in EotE states that the Alliance does a lot of barter. "Do this run, and I know a guy that can overhaul your hyperdrive...maybe give it a little extra kick, too." That may not seem like much of a payment, but given what you (as the GM) may have the players pay for engine overhauls...

I think the Alliance has money, but its not in 'liquid' forms of stacks of credits. Its in the form of weapons, bacta, MRE's, a spare compression coil for the engine, stuff that the players can USE and NEED, rather than what would be fun to spend.

That works for typical EotE and AoR small groups of a handful of people. Unfortunately, it doesn't work when trying to maintain a multimillion credit capital ship with a crew of a thousand.

If every purchase you make is multiple millions of credits (as most capital ships tend to be), having an extra few hundred thousand credits lying around isn't all that much. Ration packs are 1 credit each, but you have to buy 10 million of them, a few thousand credits lying around is nothing.

Consider your own life and what you buy. How much money do you need to pay for everything that you need for a week, a month, a year? Now mutiply those numbers by a dozen. That's the amount of money a small business needs to generate (in profit) in order to support a dozen employees. Now try multiplying it by 100. That's medium sized businesses. Try 1000. That's the edge of large businesses.

The Rebellion does that on a galactic scale. While every little bit helps (or costs), in order to truly matter, billions or trillions of credits need to be generated. Which is why the Rebellion will always be able to scrape up enough credits to matter to small operators that provide value (it's peanuts in the grand scheme of things), but will always be cash poor (they have bills the size of which most people can't even imagine).

Unfortunately, it doesn't work when trying to maintain a multimillion credit capital ship with a crew of a thousand.

That should tip you off that the Rebellion has some funds to spare. Bear in mind, they have a fleet -- even if they didn't buy the ships and instead stole them, the cost of maintaining those ships must be astronomical. We also know that they do buy ships from Incom. Consider the X-wings: not only are they buying those fighters in bulk, but they're replacing them as they're destroyed or damaged.

In truth, the Alliance probably has plenty of money if, say, they just wanted to ride around in cool ships all day. However, they're trying to take down the Empire, and going toe-to-toe with the dominant galactic power would require at least equal resources, including money and manpower, neither of which they have.

They especially don't have money to spend frivolously. I'm sure paying privateers is in their budget, but they'll be constantly looking for a deal, only paying the bare minimum, etc. The understanding with the privateers would probably reflect this, saying that they'll pay for results and the greater the results the better the pay. Private crews that are only doing work for the Rebellion wouldn't get a standing wage; that's reserved for actual members.

TCW has a series of episodes where the emperor essentially seizes control of the banking clan. Part of why the Rebellion would be cash strapped is the emperor very wisely seized control of the financial system. If you control the mechanisms that allow the transfer of large sums of currency the fact there are wealthy donors becomes irrelevant if there is no way to move the funds easily. You then have to rely on hard currency forms and time consuming manual movement of cash reserves.

Paying out money to privateers is an extremely cost effective option. The privateers gets a flat payout and what they can seize as payment. They also in turn are responsible for logistics and overhead costs.

Waging war is extremely expensive. Operational costs and logistics are enormous. Take a look at the per hour flight costs of typical military aircraft and it becomes apparent quickly why a rebellion in a galaxy with strict controls on fund transfer options would be constantly cash strapped.

Even with the control of the banks you have a hard time controling where every credit goes.

My 2 cents:

Wealthy planets and families like the Organas on Alderaan support the Alliance with fake accounts and straw firms. That one of tenthousands small transport company with barely 100 employees that nigh jsut breaks even? In reality a CR90 Corvette with crew, they even pay taxes to avoid suspicion.

The thing is, many in the Alliance are volunteers that require no or little pay, and planets like Mon Cal give you ships and service for free. That accumulates to quite a bit too.

Well it is about being 'cash strapped', not zero credit balances. Controlling the banks and how credits are transferred is very effective at depriving resources. If the Rebellion was forced into having to use hard currency or shell companies to juggle money that's a major impediment. The Empire wouldn't be able to completely sever cash flow, but limiting it greatly is a very cost effective way of impeding an insurgency.

I think that's the environment that exists in Star Wars, the Rebellion is forced to scrape to get by because of the currency restrictions so they have to rob peter to pay paul, cannibalize gear, etc.

When the Rebellion evolved into the New Republic, they issued their own currency that was exchangeable for Imperial Credits at rather unofficial rates. I would think that a lot of payment by the Rebellion came in the form of promissory notes/IOUs that also paid out interest when the notes were repaid with actual money.

As an insurgency goes on and becomes successful, it invariably will attract more resources as people/govts/etc on the fence in the conflict begin to hedge their bets and position themselves. I think that's reflected a tad in RotJ with the combined fleet and the launching of a conventional assault.

So I've been running the Perlemian Haul with my group who have all chosen to be EotE characters, which works fine. There is an NPC (or should I call him a GMPC?) that has hired them to steal the cargo of Freighter M226. The NPC, who is a Rebel agent unknown to the group, offered a 15% fee based on the value of the cargo. The Smuggler threw a good Negotiation roll which upped the percentage to 20%. I had already designated the cargo as being Weapons, Armor, Supplies and Gear for a full Battalion of Imperial Troopers (not Stormtroopers). I researched the Wookiepedia for the contents of a battalion and found several different forms of Battalions. I eventually chose the Line Battalion (essentially an Infantry Battalion) to determine the number of combat personnel and support personnel. I broke down the battalion to its base formations and assigned weapons, armor, and gear I thought were appropriate to each type. I also put together a list of supplies, gear and other items that I thought would be appropriate for general use by the battalion. All these items came from AoR and EotE core books. Values and Encumbrances are direct from the books.

After I did all that, I calculated the values and Encumbrances (M226 has 30,000 Encumbrance!!) and came up with a Total Value of 3,549,650 Imperial Credits. 20% of that Total Value is 709,930 Imperial Credits. Whoa, whoa, whoa.. that's way too much money to just hand over all at once to the PCs. So this Cash Strapped Alliance thread got me thinking a bit... what if I created a Promissory Note that detailed several ways that the PCs could be paid and created certain conditions to go along with that Promissory Note.

Then I remembered the War Bonds of WWI and WWII. I created two different types of bonds and inserted them into the Promissory Note. I also inserted a monthly disbursement option too. Under these options, the PCs would get a little bit of cash and then remainder be handled by the designated option. The catch is that all the PCs had to agree on the method of repayment. If they couldn't agree on one, they would get fairly large lump sum and forfeit the rest. I feel all kinds of giddy and can't wait to surprise my group with this.

If anyone wants to see what I have written up for all this, click the Dropbox links. Fair Warning, I had to create a bunch of things but feel free to comment on them (List the Item you're commenting when you do so, so myself and others who have these can make references).

• Line Battalion Gear Value (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ii3w464f0qsuu6k/Line%20Battalion%20Costs.pdf?dl=0)
• Promissory Note (https://www.dropbox.com/s/zsmsg0vbiaj66uw/PN-121.pdf?dl=0)
• Really Good Bond (https://www.dropbox.com/s/pld7bjvzonx0lww/PRRB%20091.pdf?dl=0)
• Normal Bond (https://www.dropbox.com/s/fioncdh82rb4ewl/RRRB%201634.pdf?dl=0)
• Disbursement Agreement (https://www.dropbox.com/s/me7yh65g7boyh16/DA%28PN-121%29.pdf?dl=0)

Edit: Added Dropbox links for above documents.

I haven't read the Alliance book for SW, but the little write up in EotE states that the Alliance does a lot of barter. "Do this run, and I know a guy that can overhaul your hyperdrive...maybe give it a little extra kick, too." That may not seem like much of a payment, but given what you (as the GM) may have the players pay for engine overhauls...

I think the Alliance has money, but its not in 'liquid' forms of stacks of credits. Its in the form of weapons, bacta, MRE's, a spare compression coil for the engine, stuff that the players can USE and NEED, rather than what would be fun to spend.

That works for typical EotE and AoR small groups of a handful of people. Unfortunately, it doesn't work when trying to maintain a multimillion credit capital ship with a crew of a thousand.

Reread the Letter of Marque on FOP pg 6 and note the details.

The Rebellion has the option to buy cargoes, but they are not required to. Additionally, it allows the "Owner" to sell the cargo on his own, but he must report all profits and split them 50/50 with the Alliance. Furthermore, the Alliance isn't required to buy those cargoes in credits, it can also trade, or provide services.

That's Vedijs angle. The Alliance can't buy cargo outright most of the time, he knows this. But others can, and that's where most of the income in expected to come from. Hutts, traders, and the usual fences. What the Alliance CAN do is provide motivated people that are slightly less likely to turn mutiny. So when they capture an Imperial corvette, they don't have to go hire a bunch of thugs from some backwater to crew it. They can establish a command staff and cadre to crew it and go to the alliance to fill out the rest, which works for everyone since these new crewers will be paid from prize profits instead of Alliance funds.

Now going further, there's some neat fixes for someone these problems if you just think it through. Lets say your players bag that second Neb B. They show up and are all "oh.. hey Alliance, it's beat up, but we'll sell it to you!" and alliance can be all "Awesome, but we can't afford to buy it, much less fix it up... We can provide a place to stash it though, that way you can keep it and use it for spare parts when the Far Orbit gets shot up!" Boom, two problems solved. 1) the second Neb-B is out of the picture without making the Alliance look like they have money, and 2) The players get a discount on repairs, and don't need to track down special parts when fixing those nasty crits.

That's the thing about Privateers. They are pirates first and foremost. They still do pirate things, the pirate way most of the time. They just have permission from a government to do it, giving them more options, and (assuming their side won) the ability to actually walk away scott free once it's all over. The Privateer gets to retire a war hero. The Pirate is a criminal till the end.

That's the thing about Privateers. They are pirates first and foremost. They still do pirate things, the pirate way most of the time. They just have permission from a government to do it, giving them more options, and (assuming their side won) the ability to actually walk away scott free once it's all over. The Privateer gets to retire a war hero. The Pirate is a criminal till the end.

I literally cannot like this post enough:

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That's the thing about Privateers. They are pirates first and foremost. They still do pirate things, the pirate way most of the time.

Unless the privateer has an Alliance Observer aboard, who's a field-grade officer, to make sure that they're behaving like an actual Alliance vessel would with respect to accepting surrenders, treatment of prisoners ... and reporting of all of the loot seized. The ship may be crewed by scum, but they have to behave like Rebels, else their letter of marque gets revoked. The Empire may not make a distinction between pirates and rebels, but there is most assuredly a huge difference between the two.

That's the thing about Privateers. They are pirates first and foremost. They still do pirate things, the pirate way most of the time.

Unless the privateer has an Alliance Observer aboard, who's a field-grade officer, to make sure that they're behaving like an actual Alliance vessel would with respect to accepting surrenders, treatment of prisoners ... and reporting of all of the loot seized. The ship may be crewed by scum, but they have to behave like Rebels, else their letter of marque gets revoked. The Empire may not make a distinction between pirates and rebels, but there is most assuredly a huge difference between the two.

That really doesn't change much though. Aside from the fact that it's only one guy, and accidents do happen... Most pirates accept surrenders. It's easier, safer, and encourages future prizes to surrender as well. Likewise taking slaves, seriously mistreating prisoners, and so on isn't beneficial in the long run. If a potential prize knows you don't take prisoners, do take slaves, and torture captives all that does is give them reason to fight back harder and longer. If they know you just want the rich stuff and will be on your way... hey, let corporate cash in the insurance, I'm not paid enough to die defending their stock prices.

Reporting and sharing is also not that big a deal really. Yeah, that's 50% of your profits out the door, but in exchange you get more safe port options, limited material support, and (the best part) improved intelligence. A normal pirate needs all the same things, and they'll probably lose around 50% of their profits getting it anyway. A mole inside Xizor Transport Systems isn't cheap when he's merely corrupt. It's more affordable when he's doing it for political reasons.

And if they bag a cargo that the Alliance CAN pay for? It's payday. That's the point of that line on the letter, to provide incentive for the privateer to go after materiel important to the Alliance. Swiping a load of turbolaser capacitors isn't easy, but unlike that load of gooberfish you had to unload on Nar'Shadda, you don't have to turn over 50% to the alliance.

A privateer ship doesn't have to behave like rebels, not in the slightest. They can drink, and swear, and get into trouble. They can slap around a prisoner if he looks like trouble as a message to the rest. They can wear any kind of clothes they want, grow out their beards, leave the ships thermostat at 24C. They can resolve crew disputes with a knife fight next time they are dirtside, and pack up and leave when they've got their share. A privateer vessel is a business, plain and simple, and an illegal one at that. As long as the profits are coming in and the buyers are happy, nobody's gonna ask too many questions about how the work got done.

Getting back to the original post.... How can the cash-strapped alliance pay privateers?

I had posted that the Alliance operates mostly on a barter system...trading goods for services, and such. It struck me that that Alliance might be able to scrape up some cash, from time to time, and would pay a privateer in a mix of money and goods. "Not a bad haul, Smitty. Tell you what...I'll pay 5,000 credits, and have the boys in engineering slap on a spare ECM unit that we...ah...borrowed from the Imperials."
But the question still stands, 'How does the Alliance come up with cold, hard cash?'. One way could involve an Alliance sympathizer who owns a shipping company. On the surface he (she, it, they) run a legitimate business. But add on a few layers of bureaucracy...enough to lose a few hundred credits per month...and that cash can be funneled towards the Alliance. It may not seem like much, but run that scam with three or four or a dozen sympathizers, and now the Alliance has a slow but steady trickle of funds.

Getting back to the original post.... How can the cash-strapped alliance pay privateers?

I had posted that the Alliance operates mostly on a barter system...trading goods for services, and such. It struck me that that Alliance might be able to scrape up some cash, from time to time, and would pay a privateer in a mix of money and goods. "Not a bad haul, Smitty. Tell you what...I'll pay 5,000 credits, and have the boys in engineering slap on a spare ECM unit that we...ah...borrowed from the Imperials."

But the question still stands, 'How does the Alliance come up with cold, hard cash?'. One way could involve an Alliance sympathizer who owns a shipping company. On the surface he (she, it, they) run a legitimate business. But add on a few layers of bureaucracy...enough to lose a few hundred credits per month...and that cash can be funneled towards the Alliance. It may not seem like much, but run that scam with three or four or a dozen sympathizers, and now the Alliance has a slow but steady trickle of funds.

I find bank robbery works too...

Bank robbery might work, but that attracts a lot of attention. Some of it Imperial attention. While the odd small heist here and there might go unnoticed, knocking off a megabank, or highjacking a high profile convoy will get someones attention. Somehow, I can't see the Alliance knocking over 7-11's on Hutta to finance revolution....

Bank robbery might work, but that attracts a lot of attention. Some of it Imperial attention. While the odd small heist here and there might go unnoticed, knocking off a megabank, or highjacking a high profile convoy will get someones attention. Somehow, I can't see the Alliance knocking over 7-11's on Hutta to finance revolution....

In that case we're talking "white collar" crimes: embezzling, skimming, and laundering the credits. Heck, the Empire does it often enough on their own for the various black projects.

As for being cash strapped, there's an addendum as well: even in the one example of the 20% cut for the equipment for the battalion, the GM could have it where the PC just make a mark on themselves. All that money is going to attract a lot of attention if they aren't careful and it would be a royal pain in the rear if they get on a planet with that 700 grand in credits on for it to get seized in Civil Forfeiture (yeah, real life corruption is a pain),

I'd also add that they could "donate it" or have it be on credit or favors. PCs never know when the next time their in an Imperial Detention center or a prisoner transport and the Rebels decide to break them out. That's something that make an adventure all by itself.