Starting a Campaign

By Man in the Funny Hat, in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG

So, talked my group into giving EotE a whirl this weekend. Figured I'd just throw them into the little beginner game scenario and see where things go. My only worry is that I don't think they're gonna want to go with the premade characters, and even if they did, the group's gonna be a bit larger than that. There'll be at least 5 players, but maybe more and at least one, probably two will be super disappointed if they aren't a force-user of some stripe.

If it's 5 characters then I'm sure things will still play out okay, it'll mostly just be less of a chance of a PC actually getting killed. If it's more than that I figure I'll just have to throw in a couple extra Gammoreans, stormtroopers, or whatever the minion is at that moment. Obviously I'll have to deal with a bit of Force use as well. First session in any case is gonna be ALL of us - myself included - playing for the first time anyway so hiccups would be taken in stride as long as everyone has fun. Everyone at the table has plenty of experience at RPG's and I've been GM'ing games since RPG's first became a thing. Any general advice tho from when YOU first ran a EotE game?

If you go to the products page for each of the Star Wars FFG RPG lines (all lines are compatible also) and look for player resources you will find pregened players for each of the products and can print them from there. The only problem I see is if you don't have the beginner's box for Force and Destiny or any of the core rule books you won't have the rules to run any sort of force user.

The Edge beginner set doesn't have force users, but the core book from Edge will have the Force Sensitive Exile.

The Age beginner set is the same as Edge, but the core book has Force Sensitive Emergent.

The Force and Destiny beginner box will have the force rules for beginners and the core book will have more in depth rules for force users.

What books do you have? I am assuming you don't have any of the core rule books.

There are a lot of advice threads on running the beginner game over in that forum. As for your question re force users, ivthink youboffer up a couple of the pregens for Force and Destiny as stated above. I'd also consider purchasing the Force and Destiny beginner box and working one or two encounters from Mountaintop Rescue into escape from mos shuuta (the ones that teach how to use force powers).

So, talked my group into giving EotE a whirl this weekend. Figured I'd just throw them into the little beginner game scenario and see where things go. My only worry is that I don't think they're gonna want to go with the premade characters, and even if they did, the group's gonna be a bit larger than that. There'll be at least 5 players, but maybe more and at least one, probably two will be super disappointed if they aren't a force-user of some stripe.

If it's 5 characters then I'm sure things will still play out okay, it'll mostly just be less of a chance of a PC actually getting killed. If it's more than that I figure I'll just have to throw in a couple extra Gammoreans, stormtroopers, or whatever the minion is at that moment. Obviously I'll have to deal with a bit of Force use as well. First session in any case is gonna be ALL of us - myself included - playing for the first time anyway so hiccups would be taken in stride as long as everyone has fun. Everyone at the table has plenty of experience at RPG's and I've been GM'ing games since RPG's first became a thing. Any general advice tho from when YOU first ran a EotE game?

Don't constantly stop to check rules. Just make a ruling, jot down things you question and look them up later.

If you do allow the premades from other lines, I would shy away from the Force and Destiny premades that use lightsabers. Their not well balanced against the rest of the beginner characters.

Let them know that you think running a 'tutorial' game with premade characters would be a good idea for everyone. It gives everyone a chance to learn the rules, without risking a character that they worked hard to make and build. Nothing takes the wind out of a players sails faster than watching their character get scotched right off the bat. It also gives the players a chance to see what the various 'classes' can do. Sure, one person may have their heart set on being a faux Jedi, but he may change his mind when he sees what a bounty hunter can do.

My only worry is that I don't think they're gonna want to go with the premade characters, and even if they did, the group's gonna be a bit larger than that.

Tell them this "Look, this thing is deigned to hold your hand as you learn the system. Lets just go with the pregenerated characters for the moment, and if we like how things go we can build all new characters as we like and retcon them in instead of these guys."

probably two will be super disappointed if they aren't a force-user of some stripe.

Naw, dont do that. Baby steps, man. Learn the system, then get fancy.

Every time I've run the beginners game, it has been with player generated characters and it works very well with them. You really don't need the premades, but I would suggest you hold off on force powered characters. If you are going to use force-wielders go with the Exile or Emigrate if you have Age of Rebellion. I wouldn't use F&D characters.

If the players are making their own characters, you will need the core rule book. Don't give them any extra XP or cash after character creation, just stick to what they can get normally, rules as written (RAW). With 5 of them, they should be pretty powerful and have bases covered as far as skills needed.

I'd make sure to add some extra minions to most encounters. Trex, the main boss at the end will likely need some extra guys.

Don't get super hung up on the rules, if you aren't sure about something just make a judgement call, and look it up later.

Encourage the players to think outside of the box, "how do you want to spend that 3 advantage, triumph, etc."

Also, it is very unlikely that any players will die, unless they are falling off a bridge or something. This system is not really a GM vs Player system, it is more collaborative. The only way for a player to die RAW is by a really high critical hit.

Edited by unicornpuncher

First session in any case is gonna be ALL of us - myself included - playing for the first time anyway so hiccups would be taken in stride as long as everyone has fun. Everyone at the table has plenty of experience at RPG's and I've been GM'ing games since RPG's first became a thing. Any general advice tho from when YOU first ran a EotE game?

The beginner game is a good idea. It's a bit hand-holdy, but you'll appreciate the sequence with which it reveals the rules. My group has been playing since the original D&D as well, so the biggest hurdle was the narrative axis on the dice because they were so used to binary success/fail. However, after the first couple of encounters, that was pretty easy to deal with. Provide the "spending Advantage and Triumph during combat" chart as a handout, and they'll be fine.

A minor hurdle was calculating the dice results, but that took about 20 minutes to settle in.

What was apparent by the time they got to Trex was how everybody was interested in each other's dice results. Since you can use your results to pass others benefits, everybody pays more attention.

On a different note: there are 4 pregens in the box, but 2 more are available on the support page for download. Three of my four players at the time decided to keep going with the pregens, they liked them that much.

Pretty much decided to give the players option of taking one of the pregens (printed out the two additional ones) or creating a character of their own as it's not all that complicated a process. After a couple sessions I'll let them decide if they want to keep going with what they have, start fresh with new PC's, or go back to D&D. Having a "spend advantage/triumph and reading-the-dice" handout will probably be a good idea. I bought F&D rulebook (but not the beginner set for it). I had already decided on keeping that in reserve as it was obvious trying to mix the two games at the start would be too much (for me AND them). Besides, if it all goes well I have an outline of a plan for a campaign to give things some direction and it would eventually include more force-users. Still reading the rules but I'm pretty confident of good results.

Edit: OP made their choice made and posted it.

Edited by StarWarsMom

Pretty much decided to give the players option of taking one of the pregens (printed out the two additional ones) or creating a character of their own as it's not all that complicated a process. After a couple sessions I'll let them decide if they want to keep going with what they have, start fresh with new PC's, or go back to D&D. Having a "spend advantage/triumph and reading-the-dice" handout will probably be a good idea. I bought F&D rulebook (but not the beginner set for it). I had already decided on keeping that in reserve as it was obvious trying to mix the two games at the start would be too much (for me AND them). Besides, if it all goes well I have an outline of a plan for a campaign to give things some direction and it would eventually include more force-users. Still reading the rules but I'm pretty confident of good results.

You'll have to let us know how it goes, and good luck!

So... Ran the game yesterday. _I_ had a good time (which is the most important thing :) ). I'm pretty confident that 3 of the 4 players enjoyed it. The last player... meh. She just wasn't as into it I think, though she was also somewhat preoccupied/distracted. DIdn't HATE it though and we're going to give it at least one more session now that we've worked out a few things - and there WERE a few things to work out.

As it turned out, everyone created a PC from scratch. Took more time that way, but I was ready for it. Or at least I THOUGHT I was. See, we ran into some trouble with the rulebook not being as clear as I think it ought to have been regarding skills. We all grokked right away that spending a good amount of xp on improving abilities was important as they would not be increased after character creation. The problem entered in with the free skill points for career choice and then specialization. I missed that entirely because it's very effectively buried in the text of the rulebook. Oh, it's THERE. I did, after all, stumble across my oversight when looking up something entirely unrelated about the droid assassin PC. At that point we stopped play for a while and got all the PC's straightened out with a rebate of sorts on skills giving them all some xp to redirect. It was a rather annoying and embarrassing hiccup. Better to have found it sooner than later but really was a step in character creation that wasn't made as apparent as _I_ think it ought to have been.

I did print up a couple cheat sheets and laminated them (since I have a laminator which is awesome for just that kind of thing). By the end of the evening they were starting to all work together reading each others rolls, and working out how to spend their advantage points. mostly by passing boost dice on to the other PC's. Next session should move somewhat smoother and faster because they'll have a better idea going in how the dice mechanics work. The one player did still squawk a few times about wanting to use a new set of her own traditional dice she'd bought so I can tell she's gonna be a bit of a tougher sell going forward. Hopefully, I can get some things happening to bring her smuggler character into the limelight a bit. With the initial concentration upon combat in the adventure (being intended to get players familiar with the mechanics) her unoptimized-for-battle PC was outshone by the bounty hunter assassin droid, the hired gun marauder/force exile, and even the colonist doctor, who became the go-to computer hacker and mechanic because of his high intellect and had plenty to do that he was at least effective at even if it wasn't what he'd initially anticipated.

They went through the adventure very out-of-order (but I have much experience handling THAT) and with a very shoot-it-first, then shoot-it-more approach, again thanks mostly to the marauder and assassin droid PC's. I tried pretty hard to... suggest... more creative thinking but those two had their hearts set on fighting their way through things. That's something I will also have to handle. Either THEIR bloodlust will need to be toned down (these are NOT subtle players, they are each very happy with their PC's abilities and will drag the game in their PC's direction by sheer momentum if not actively kept in check and even pushed to at least ALLOW for alternatives), or else MY ideas (and perhaps the other two players as well) for an extended campaign will need to shift to suit their PC's attitudes.

Couple questions came up about medicine/healing related stuff. One of them is regarding the repeated use of the medicine skill itself. It's only usable once a week when helping to recover from CRITICAL wounds, but can it otherwise simply be used repeatedly until a PC is fully healed? The other that kinda went along with that was how many uses is a 400cr medpac supposed to have? Or is it just intended to be a "bottomless" standard piece of gear that a doctor needs for doing medicine - like a mechanics toolkit?

It wasn't a grand slam debut but it went reasonably well and with any luck/skill will get better.

It's one Medicine check per encounter, so essentially until initiative is rolled again. You roll initiative, get in a fight, finish, and then heal/recover Strain. No more Medicine checks until the next encounter. There is rest and Bacta tanks for downtimes in between. For criticals it's one check, per critical, per week. So if a PC has 3 criticals you can check for all 3 once a week. In regards to uses of a Medpac entirely your call. If you just do a sort of standard upkeep charge in credits for your PCs just assume Doc gets more stuff for their kit in the charge.

Edited by 2P51

So... Ran the game yesterday. _I_ had a good time (which is the most important thing :) ). I'm pretty confident that 3 of the 4 players enjoyed it. The last player... meh. She just wasn't as into it I think, though she was also somewhat preoccupied/distracted. DIdn't HATE it though and we're going to give it at least one more session now that we've worked out a few things - and there WERE a few things to work out.

As it turned out, everyone created a PC from scratch. Took more time that way, but I was ready for it. Or at least I THOUGHT I was. See, we ran into some trouble with the rulebook not being as clear as I think it ought to have been regarding skills. We all grokked right away that spending a good amount of xp on improving abilities was important as they would not be increased after character creation. The problem entered in with the free skill points for career choice and then specialization. I missed that entirely because it's very effectively buried in the text of the rulebook. Oh, it's THERE. I did, after all, stumble across my oversight when looking up something entirely unrelated about the droid assassin PC. At that point we stopped play for a while and got all the PC's straightened out with a rebate of sorts on skills giving them all some xp to redirect. It was a rather annoying and embarrassing hiccup. Better to have found it sooner than later but really was a step in character creation that wasn't made as apparent as _I_ think it ought to have been.

I did print up a couple cheat sheets and laminated them (since I have a laminator which is awesome for just that kind of thing). By the end of the evening they were starting to all work together reading each others rolls, and working out how to spend their advantage points. mostly by passing boost dice on to the other PC's. Next session should move somewhat smoother and faster because they'll have a better idea going in how the dice mechanics work. The one player did still squawk a few times about wanting to use a new set of her own traditional dice she'd bought so I can tell she's gonna be a bit of a tougher sell going forward. Hopefully, I can get some things happening to bring her smuggler character into the limelight a bit. With the initial concentration upon combat in the adventure (being intended to get players familiar with the mechanics) her unoptimized-for-battle PC was outshone by the bounty hunter assassin droid, the hired gun marauder/force exile, and even the colonist doctor, who became the go-to computer hacker and mechanic because of his high intellect and had plenty to do that he was at least effective at even if it wasn't what he'd initially anticipated.

They went through the adventure very out-of-order (but I have much experience handling THAT) and with a very shoot-it-first, then shoot-it-more approach, again thanks mostly to the marauder and assassin droid PC's. I tried pretty hard to... suggest... more creative thinking but those two had their hearts set on fighting their way through things. That's something I will also have to handle. Either THEIR bloodlust will need to be toned down (these are NOT subtle players, they are each very happy with their PC's abilities and will drag the game in their PC's direction by sheer momentum if not actively kept in check and even pushed to at least ALLOW for alternatives), or else MY ideas (and perhaps the other two players as well) for an extended campaign will need to shift to suit their PC's attitudes.

Couple questions came up about medicine/healing related stuff. One of them is regarding the repeated use of the medicine skill itself. It's only usable once a week when helping to recover from CRITICAL wounds, but can it otherwise simply be used repeatedly until a PC is fully healed? The other that kinda went along with that was how many uses is a 400cr medpac supposed to have? Or is it just intended to be a "bottomless" standard piece of gear that a doctor needs for doing medicine - like a mechanics toolkit?

It wasn't a grand slam debut but it went reasonably well and with any luck/skill will get better.

That's awesome, sounds like a solid success! Yeah, not getting the free skill ranks with your career/specialization would be a big deal, but it sounds like you guys fixed it pretty early, so no worries there.

I will say the two players who are using lethal force for everything might need to be calmed down a bit. You might need to talk to them and tell them that you are going to give them plenty of things to shoot at and kill, but you aren't going to let them just blast everything and turn every encounter into a combat encounter. The other players need time to shine as well, and just from a narrative standpoint I'd want some diversity to resolving conflicts.

As for your smuggler player, they tend to be more focused on Cunning and Agility based skills, so throw some of those at the group. Streetwise checks, piloting checks, and/or make her a bigger focus in the story. Have her character be attached directly to a plot device or something of that nature. Draw her in with story hooks if nothing else. And if she wants to roll her own dice let her, if they are traditional dice she will have to use the conversion chart in the core rule book.

Medicine checks to recover wounds/strain are allowed once per encounter. So They either use medicine sometime during the encounter or after it, but they can't use it again on the same person until after another encounter has started.

That's where stimpacks and Force Heal come in to play. You can use those any number of times, but the amount healed is reduced each time you use one or the other. If you use force heal, then the next stimpack on that person recovers 1 fewer wound, etc.

Since there's not really a set rule on how many times players can attempt Force Heal power checks outside of combat, you may want to implement some measures to keep them from abusing it. Maybe a strain if they decide to attempt another roll after a failure instead of flipping destiny to use dark pips.

Edited by Vulf

UPDATE:

Finally ran our second session tonight taking on the first act of Long Arm of the Hutt. Figured I'd post it in the thread I started 2.5 weeks ago rather than start another.

Spoiler Alert! (for those who, like me, might only just now be getting round to the game.)

When we last left Jirayia the force exile, Pasha the smuggler, AK-47 the assassin droid, and Scones the rodian engineer/doctor, they had just escaped Mos Shuuta on Tatooine and set course for Ryloth.

As GM I was a bit slow getting myself up to speed, but I decided I really didn't want to start with the PC's in another dogfight, so that went by the wayside. Players were also a bit slow to start in and I kind of led them towards dealing with their captive aboard the Krayt Fang. They discussed briefly actually trying to collect the bounty that Trex had but then realized it was Teemo paying it so that would be ridiculous. With nothing else to do with him THEN they decided to let him go free. These PC's are decidedly not squeaky clean good guys. They only stopped shy of actually trying to sell the wookie pelts. Had they not already been rotting they'd have likely kept them to sell later to the right buyer.

Anyway, landed on Ryloth, bought some stimpacks (and repair patches for the droid), but nothing else really. They then met with Bura B'an's (BB) other shadowy compatriots and let themselves finally get thrown the next obvious adventure hook - to help out the little mining colony. Interesting that they never asked for pay or compensation at that point, despite previous noises about needing CASH LOOT, but instead were sufficiently motivated by the description of the "developers" depredations.

Headed out from town in the speeder with BB guiding them to the colony. The prompt to slow down to navigate the terrain was happily and sensibly chosen, but then hearing the description of the rising cliffs and the terrain in the approach to the cave: To a man they all said, "TRAP!" They spotted the Gand, stopped the speeder out of range and approached to cover. Firefight ensued of course. First shot by the assassin droid was a triumph so I allowed him to use it to just collapse a big pile of rock onto the Gand and knocked him out for the duration of the fight. The "jedi" charged up to melee, of course, since that IS his thing..., and the rest just started concentrating all fire on one of the remaining opponents. After 3 or 4 rounds the "jedi" took out his opponent, the other went down under the heavy fusillade, and the last survivor hoofed it off into the cave. The "jedi" wanted to chase him down but pushing the encounter further at that point would have been much too anti-climactic. I declared him to have effectively escaped. They coerced all the information they could out of the Gand, such as some general concept of the efforts of the "developers" and what was in the cave. They were not even interested at that point in exploring the cave an inch, much less meeting the critter inside, so they opted to execute the prisoner on general principles and then go on to the mining camp.

After the initial meet&greet at Tent City and hearing more details of the "developers" it was immediately declared they needed to go scout wherever it was the chief developer was operating from, so the little "drunk & disorderly" encounter got skipped. They scoped out the base and immediately began making plans of how to clear it out. Much discussion of possible tactics and ploys, but they couldn't decide on a grand scheme of what it was they really wanted to do and how to go about it. They really wanted better intelligence but only one of them was actually any good at a stealth approach (the assassin droid - a bit ironic as the player is the biggest advocate of shooting everything.) Eventually, I suggest that the droid make the initial approach to the compound and then wave the others in after ensuring they would be unobserved.

I invented the layout of the whole place off the top of my head from just the vague description of parking bay, apartment building and cantina. I can do that. I've had years of experience doing that. But GOSH, wouldn't a map have been a good idea if it was INTENDED to be the location of a significant firefight? _I_ didn't have any issue with it, but this IS supposed to still be an extension of the beginner rules adventure. At least warning the potential utter newbie GM that they were about to be called upon to invent a lot of stuff on the fly would have been expected, but a simple, general layout of the place SHOULD have been provided even if there weren't any details for any of it. In any case, I let the PC's scout in through the parking bay and into the apartment building by something like a back door. They had asked if there was a comm tower so I decided there was one at the end of the apartment building. Mostly they were on the hunt here for a good weapons cache to be able to arm the whole mining camp, but I decided none was to be found. Strangely, they never felt they had TIME to go back to the "big city" to get more weapons or gear even though I had BB suggest it.

What they did find was only a completely oblivious "guard" at the reception desk in the apartment lobby facing away from them. In a hallway behind him was the comms room, which they then hacked computers for details of operations here, sent a false message back to Tatooine about "we're all fine here now, how are you?" (only with a successful check), and then wired things to redirect comms to the mining camp to cut the place off from all outside communication (except whatever miscommunication they would then want to perpetrate if needed). That was fairly clever of them I thought so I let them do it. They had talked about scouting inside the cantina while planning but completely left that out of their operations at this point. They then withdrew and put their final plan into motion.

That plan was to have everyone they could arm from the camp set up close to the compound with two of the PC's, set two of the five construction machines to blow up (using a destiny point to ensure that it happened for at least one of them) and take out the whole apartment building in the blast (that was their INTENT anyway, and I had already decided it wasn't going to go down quite that way as I wanted to keep plenty of opponents for the miners to deal with when it came to that). The other two PC's along with one not-as-brave-as-they'd-have-preferred miner went back to the lylek cave! Their plan was to lure the lylek out, jump back into the speeder and kite it out to the developers compound.

This part of the plan was actually appallingly sketchy and they didn't have ANY details for it ironed out. Mostly they were intending that the monster would just create confusion at the compound, take out at least some of the opposition, and then whichever of the two sides survived that little soiree the PC's and miners would clean up. Now I hadn't actually looked up the stats intended to be used for the thing. If I had, I might have gone about handling the next part VERY differently, but too much RELENTLESS real-world work for the last couple weeks meant NO prep time for the game. I let them kite the critter out of the cave but then had the miner waiting in the speeder panic at the mere sight of it and take off. At that point they used a destiny point to get him to stop/turn around and not leave them to get eaten.

When the crew at the compound gets word that the "diversion" is x-distance away they go to work on the construction machines. They use a destiny point on one to ensure it blows, as planned, and the other they figured they'd have time for at least two attempts to make it happen without needing to use yet another destiny point. They failed both rolls on that, however, and decided to cut bait and hoof it back out to their rally point. Well then I looked at the beginner rulebook and the stats they said the thing had. Have mercy.

It was invincible, invulnerable, untouchable. Not a single weapon found in the game up to this point could so much as scratch it. A freakin soak of 12 when best anyone could do for damage was 9? 40 damage threshold, 20 damage with its brawl. At that point it was too late to change directions, so nothing else to do as GM but ride it all with a smile to the inevitable conclusion. The sequence of events then was that the first construction vehicle blew. The second did not blow but definitely caught fire. The one that blew took out part of the apartment building including the lobby. Most of the bad guys, however, were obviously in the cantina as was intended by the adventure. They all come out to see what the freak is goin' on. Then the speeder roars by the crowd and the lylek in its wake stops to consider all the little food creatures that now turn to shoot at it. Again, NOTHING can touch it. Not even close. It'd take a dozen thermal detonators to take one out. It is a walking TPK/deus ex machina. I describe the first baddie getting shishkebobbed from head down through his torso and out through his foot and then getting eaten like he was a tic-tac. Every bad guy remaining fires but the rolls don't even matter. It is The End.

From their hiding place the PC's and miners see the bad guys flee into the desert with "grignak" skewering them and leaving only a blood pool at the point of impact to show they were ever there. They do not wait to even watch what happens and any thought of "picking off survivors" vanishes. They realize they have unleashed DEATH on a stick and all they can do is get far, FAR away. When they return - with GREAT caution - to the scene there isn't a body to even be found. The apartment building is burned out. Three construction vehicles are salvaged for sale/use by the miners. The cantina, otherwise intact, is sacked. The PC's also pick up a beat up old gonk droid I spiced the place up with.

End Act I of Long Arm of the Hutt.

And then they laughed for the next 45 minutes about unleashing the lylek on the enemy like that. It never should have worked - but it ended up being too perfect an idea not to.

So, the time my GM ran us through this same encounter, we didn’t spot the Gand or the bushwackers until it was too late. They were using Stun damage against us, and that was being excessively effective.

That is, until my Wookiee one-shotted the Gand in single combat, at which point they decided to switch to killing damage — and my Wookiee had only one point of Strain left.

Once they were doing killing damage, we were able to quickly mop them up. Then we started to explore the cave. IIRC, Trex was with the bushwackers, and he was the one to run into the cave. When we saw him get shishkabobbed, the rest of us quietly turned around and left. We came back to that cave at a much later time when we were much more heavily armed, but we left the Lylek alone for the moment.

We did help Bura’Ban and the mining camp, without much consideration for payment. But our idea was to ride a mining vehicle into the door of the fortress wall around the camp, making sure it was heavily loaded with explosives. Our Toydarian was elected to be the one to drive the thing, because he could fly when it came time to bail out. Only, he flubbed his roll, and so he was very nearly incinerated by the explosion.

My Wookiee was happy to leap into the breech and start killing people in hand-to-hand combat, but what the GM hadn’t prepared for was the fact that our Smuggler/Pilot decided the best weapon to bring to the fight was his ship — a YT-2400. The ship made very short work of all visible targets on the ground, and toasted most of the cantina, too.

That didn’t leave too many for us to clean up.

Quite some time later, once we had a lot more XP under our belt, we were being paid to deliver some cargo containers to another Hutt, and we discovered that the cargo containers in question were actually filled with slaves. So, we busted the slaves out and went looking for “alternative” cargoes that we could deliver instead. And we thought back to the Lylek.

So, we went back to the cave, and came up with our own plan for drawing the mother Lylek out, and then capturing one of her babies to put in the cargo container. We were going this route because the mama Lylek was much too big to put in a cargo container, but the babies would have been fine.

My Wookiee was fine being the “bait” to draw out the mama, and actually did a good bit of damage to her. Then she made the mistake of following my Wookiee all the way out of the cave, and once again the smuggler/pilot had decided to bring his ship to the fight. There wasn’t even a green stain left where the mama Lylek had been. And we were able to go in and go after the baby Lyleks.

One thing about Lyleks and Rancor-class targets — even with a Soak of 12, you can still hit them and hurt them with personal scale weapons. You just have to have enough Successes to add to your base damage to exceed their Soak. It helps if you’re using weapons with Pierce or Breach, because then some or all of their Soak is bypassed by the attack.

And if you’re trying to capture them alive, then you want to use Active Stun weapons like the SSB-1 Static Pistol or the Stokhli Spray Stick, which completely bypass any Soak. Both of these weapons do 8 points of damage directly to the Strain Threshold of the target, and if you’re using them in Two Weapon Combat, you can do a minimum of 16 points of Strain damage by yourself in a single round.

And 16 points of Strain in a single round is almost enough to take out a Lylek or Rancor.

For more information on the SSB-1 Static Pistol and the Stokhli Spray Stick, see the table at http://swrpg.viluppo.net/equipment/weapons/