So for my PC's next session, they'll be visiting a quaint lakeside farming and fishing village. It's on a primitive planet with mostly medieval levels of technology (Weik). After a seemingly pleasant welcome, they'll suddenly find that the villagers have turned hostile on behalf of the dark-side user who runs the town. Due to various plot reasons, the PCs won't be able to leave the village without finding out its secret, but first they have to dodge the mob of villagers. This is going to lead them to the lake, where they can possibly commandeer a boat and avoid most of their pursuers by heading to deeper waters.

That's where things get tricky.

I'm going to need some ideas on how to stat two-person rowboats, one-person canoe-like craft, and larger fishing boats that can hold several people.

Not only that, but I need to figure out how speed will work for them. I have a general idea that Athletics will be involved in rowing each craft to the next speed level (obviously we're not talking true planetary scale for speed, but having different top speeds for different craft will still be useful). I'm thinking Athletics difficulty 1 to get the boat moving, 1 Purple 1 Red to increase to speed 2, and an additional Red for each speed beyond that. Despair would mean that an oar is dropped during the frantic rowing. Depending on the craft (and number of oars remaining), that could mean reduced maneuverability, lowered max speed, or possibly leaving them dead in the water. For the pursuing villagers, they'd be treated as a Minion group with Athletics as one of their skills. For my PCs, there would be one main rower while the others can opt to use the Aid Another action if they just want to get away instead of shooting it out.

Speaking of shooting it out, that leads me to my last set of questions. These are villagers who are literally coming after the PCs with torches and pitchforks. If they throw a torch into the PCs' wooden craft, what skill would they use to put out the fire? How much burn damage should something like that cause? And, as fledgling Force users, my PCs will be aware that these villagers are doing someone else's bidding, and their livelihood largely depends on these boats. Would sinking or using a flame projector on pursuing boats be worth Conflict? I could see it being justified as making the villagers abandon ship and return to shore, ending the fighting in the process. But I could definitely see it being overkill when the possibility of escaping through raw speed exists.

As always, any advice would be very much appreciated.

I'm guessing wither man-powered boats, or wind-powered ships, right?

Most of your smaller one- or two-person boats would probably be silhouette 2, with only a few points of hull. I would just waive system strain entirely on these. Any checks to use would probably be Athletics. Top speed be 1, or maybe stick entirely to personal movement scale, although you could maybe break the vehicle speed into fractions (1, 3/4, 1/2, 1/4 or 1, .75, .50, .25) and work out some kind of movement system for that. Handling is probably going to be in the negative.

The larger boats would probably be silhouette 3. If they're wind-powered, system strain could be used to represent stress on the more complex parts on those kinds of vessels, such as sails, pulleys, ropes, etc.. You could probably still use Piloting (Planetary), but other checks to do different things would be Athletics or Mechanics. Speed 1 or 2, and poor handling.

As for fire, just use the rules for hazardous environments. The rest of it looks okay. Self-defense usually waives most Conflict for harming others, as long as it's not excessive retaliation, and only you and your players should determine where you sit on that.

Tossing a torch into boat isn't going to do much if anything. Maybe on a Triumph it will burn for a round. It might be easier to use a personal scale HT on such "vehicles", just give them a pretty high Soak (8+)

Don't forget Resilience for keeping up the effort longer than X rounds, Survival or Knowledge (Education or Lore) for using a wind-powered boat, Coordination for tacking successfully.

Why not, since a lot are man powered, run it like a chase? Instead of worrying over speed, just have athletics checks to see how the pieces move in the encounter.

Use speed 1 or 2 for a sail boat to reflect how much faster they are. Destiny point to kill or cue the wind. Seems about right to me.

Also, to mix it up, for the man powered boats use athletics for the 'Piloting' check, and for the sail boats use knowledge (lore)

Astrogation can be used for navigation at night following the stars if you need a scene like that.

For row boats, just use personal scale? For sail boats, use vehicle scale speed 1? Possibly speed 2 for large sailing ships.