Hello everyone,

I am a long time Pen and Paper fanatic and first time Force and Destiny GM. Reading up on the utterly massive amounts of information about this game, I found myself running into difficulty considering how to really implement the Jedi studies or ancient knowledge to the players?

In order to make it an interesting and motivating thing for my players I want to make sure that the end game result of pursuing knowledge about the force is worth it but I don't know hot to implement it.

Say a whole party pursues an adventure seeking ancient knowledge about the Jedi Order and their records and some of the more book-smart types or potential Jedi want to study it to advance as a character, how do you express/explain/implement having access to that knowledge? For example the idea of taking on the identity of a Holocron is incredibly intimidating because of the amount of information I would then be responsible for.

My main problem is I really want to develop the intellectual side of being a Jedi instead of just the light-saber fighting but I could use some help in doing that.

Any advice would be helpful.

I guess the first starting point is ....... how much do you actually know about the Jedi and their traditions? Wookiepedia has a lot of info that you can consume on the matter. Also Jedi holocrons and texts don't need to be complete. They don't need to tell the whole story. So just find tidbits of information that the players will find interesting and give that to them. You can either do this by just telling them the information or acting it out via a holocron as you would any other type of NPC who was giving out information.

I really like the Jedi academy training manual from saga edition as a source for gamemastering Jedi campaigns. It's full of all sorts of info with helpful tips on role-playing it.

Also, don't forget that most holocrons are an imprint of a teacher's personality and that person's knowledge. It probably won't be 100% accurate

Perhaps the holocron is damaged, and the student has to mentally draw the information out of it (time meditating with it, maybe a Discipline check, too). That way you have control over what they learn and when.

Tales of the Jedi Companion for WEG, Jedi Academy training manual from Saga, The Jedi Path: A Manual for Students of the Force (legends manual thing not designed for RPGs as such) and Jedi vs Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force are all some quite useful resources for games like this and if you want to know more about the Jedi and other force traditions. Wookiepedia can provide a lot too of course.

As for in-game stuff: a holocron personae/gatekeeper doesn't need to know everything, nor is it necessarily designed to let the user know everything. So it will keep secrets as it were. Also, it may be a deceptive holocron, maybe not even a true Jedi holocron... Perhaps it was made by a Jedi during the time of his or her fall, but finished or completed or stopped being worked on before the Jedi became consumed by the dark side ... or after... who knows...?

Also, using libraries, old worlds, destroyed civilisations and the like to scrounge up knowledge is in itself quite fun and good adventuring.

Thank you all for the input, I will definitely look into some of those sources. And in regards to the benefits for maybe learning or studying this kind of information, do you offer your players some kind of bonus to their stats or skills? To what extent? Or do you just look at it in terms of how the core book refers to holocrons and skills?

I don't offer bonuses no. That is to say. Usually I provide a setback to two on knowledge checks by default due to the quality of data and sources they have available, and it also depends of course on what they're researching. A holocron would not provide setback dice for a number of topics - depending on the holocron - and perhaps even a boost die to certain types of information. I do this for archives - that is datatapes or datachips - too, at least I've made some house-rules for it. Rarely used, but the idea seemed sound at the time.

When the players have learned something, they now know (they should remember to write it down!). The result of this can be new stories, plots or solutions to ongoing stuff and perhaps it enables the players to do something new, like create a lightsaber or a piece of advanced armour, perhaps gaining a new force power. Basically I think knowledge should have in-game effects, not necessarily game mechanical effects, at least not straight away. One often leads to the other anyway.

I've had a thought perculating that might be pertinent. What if the Force felt the Jedi had lost their way. The Jedi allowing themselves to be drawn into the Clone Wars was just another symptom of their slide. Anakin was just the tool to bring balance by wiping the slate clean for both sides. The loss of so much Jedi and Sith Knowledge was also according to plan.

That being said the Force (Possibly the Living Force) chooses a different path, techniques, or method to restore the Jedi as Keepers of Peace and Justice. This could explain why only certain records are recoverable. Maybe by either meditation or other methods the players rebuild the order.

Almost like the impact Martin Luther had during the Christian Reformation.

That implies the Force as a will of it's own that it tries to express. I think the Force is just an aspect of nature. Also to say that the Force wiped out the Jedi and the Sith so the slate is clean would imply that balance is a subjected to the number of people using the Force which so far hasn't been the indication given by canon. The Force didn't seem out of balance due to anything the Jedi were doing, but to the growing influence of the dark side, which culminated in a galactic wide war.

You could go a lot of directions, depending on the nature of the "resource" the players have access to. It could be the Force itself (canon doesn't work this way, but there's no reason you can't do it if you like it), a library, one or more holocrons, etc. Chronicles of the Gatekeeper has an interesting mechanic where a character's knowledge (a custom Force talent) was deliberately split up across a holocron and three kyber crystals that needed to be recovered and installed in the holocron to access the later "tiers" of upgrades. You could do something similar with a damaged holocron that has to be repaired, or a library or tome that's incomplete, or Force visions that are delivered piecemeal.

If you want to include bonuses, you could treat it like the group resources in the book: certain skills become career skills like the holocron, or the cost of Force talents is slightly decreased on initial purchase like with a mentor, or some variant of one or both. It could be as simple as adding boost dice to specific checks or eliminating setback dice (possibly in the form of a custom talent, or like an equipment bonus) -- as a caveat, this one is probably more likely to offset balance a bit.

Also check the D6 Fragments from the Rim, there's some Jedi training odds and ends in the back.