Hey guys,

Before I ask for your help, I wanna give you a little context to how I landed at wanting to run this campaign.

First facet: After playing/GM'ing for a couple years now, I've never actually seen characters with top-tier talents unlocked and I've barely seen high-level skills. I want to see that so I decided to run a Knight-Level campaign, give PC's a chance to really throw down high level talent trees against suitably powered foes.

Second facet: Gritty Star Wars Art Gallery on Imgur . I love this gallery for a million reasons (SO much inspiration, especially the wounded Stormtrooper in the smoke) but read the captions and see where my inspiration comes from. I've thought for a long time about the Imperial side of the galaxy, and especially in this Game of Thrones-esque era of storytelling, it's far more interesting to me to see the gray in characters and stories than to just hear "mwahaha, we're evil kings" and "we are the hero come to save the world yay!" That just bores me now. Great villains don't think they're villains, right? SO:

*****I want to play a campaign where the PC's are in command of a Star Destroyer that shows the benevolent side of the Empire*****

It's all a matter of perspective, right?

Third facet: Modular. Personally I like doing long storylines better than modular/episodic sessions, but given how many people I know who want to have characters, I can't accommodate all of them, so I think the best way to maintain some form of continuity is to basically handle it like any sci-fi show like TNG or BSG: not every episode has to have all the characters.

Fourth facet: Capital ship battles. PC's Star Destroyer v. a Mon-Cal cruiser. Need I say more?

Okay, all that in mind, I'm coming up with plenty of my own episodes (with inspiration from the shows I already mentioned), but I'd love to get resources, character/scenario input, episode ideas, or even whole modules if anyone's willing to share. For help narrowing it down, here's some parameters I've thought of:

• Campaign shows another side of the Empire. They protect colonists, try to route out the terrorist/seditionist rebels who are known to kill civilians in their quest to "bring down" the Empire.
• PC's would start as career Empire, contracted Empire, or even potential Rebel sympathizer/traitor.
• They could choose any position they want aboard the ISD except for the Captain and attending First Officer
• The Force would be available if desired
• PC's ISD is given special dispensation from the Empire to include multiple species and a wide variety of internal arrays for, say, a scientist or biologist PC, maybe a trade-negotiating Politico? Not limiting to human-only either.
• Knight Level PC's means they should be dealing with challenges suitable to something an ISD would be called upon to handle.

Episode/Mission ideas

(With occasional exceptions, each mission should be contained enough to be a single session)

• Traitor: PC's must discover a Rebel traitor aboard their ship
• Find and deal with a pirate fleet hassling trade routes
• Escort colonists to a new world, deal with s**t on the way
• Hunt down a Rebel terror cell that slaughtered Imperial civilians in a search for weapons
• Deal with xenophobia within their ranks
• Science missions, Star Trek style
• and so on

So yeah, that's where I've started. Im planning to map out essential parts of the ship for home base, possibly get a few Armada models, and go from there! But any suggestions, input, rules, mission ideas, concepts to tackle, even full modular campaigns if you're willing to share would be hugely appreciated! Thanks guys!

PS, I apologize if I'm slow responding back to stuff, got a lot on my plate these days and working hard to carve time out to do this.

Knight Level is merely a small step toward epic heroes. Honestly if you want to fast track character progression (and the Players of the group have experience in this system) then I would give out 300xp at least. Your much better to start bigger then have a slower XP earn rate than start small and have to accelerate later.

The 9000 credit thing is s bit of a problem too, but in the opposite way. When crafting gets involved you can end up with some frightening gear in the PC's hands after only 9k... but that's fun some times.

Good call on the no Captain/First Officer. We started a play by post here in the AoR forum and basically the Captain (my character) was involved in every scene, but everyone else had no reason to be. You certainly need to build some solid connections between characters at the beginning and have real reasons to work together... the old "we met in the local tavern 5 minutes ago, now we are saving the world together" simply doesn't cut it.

Knight Level is merely a small step toward epic heroes. Honestly if you want to fast track character progression (and the Players of the group have experience in this system) then I would give out 300xp at least. Your much better to start bigger then have a slower XP earn rate than start small and have to accelerate later.

The 9000 credit thing is s bit of a problem too, but in the opposite way. When crafting gets involved you can end up with some frightening gear in the PC's hands after only 9k... but that's fun some times.

Good call on the no Captain/First Officer. We started a play by post here in the AoR forum and basically the Captain (my character) was involved in every scene, but everyone else had no reason to be. You certainly need to build some solid connections between characters at the beginning and have real reasons to work together... the old "we met in the local tavern 5 minutes ago, now we are saving the world together" simply doesn't cut it.

I actually didn't think of bumping it all the way up to epic level, but you're probably right. 150 just isn't enough to get characters to where I want them to be.

And on the credits I could see it going both ways, but ultimately I figure it'd be hard to justify the command crew of a Star Destroyer not being able to get the gear they want, you know? The top-of-the-line resources about a ship like that just sort of negates them getting only crap gear. I'll have to see what feels right though, maybe gauge exactly how crazy they'd get with 9K.

And yeah thanks I thought so too. I figured it'd be better for the PC's to be like the crew of TNG: they've served together for a long time, been through a lot together, and while their decisions and opinions can seriously affect or change what the ship is doing, they don't get final say (particularly: a single PC doesn't get final say for being the Captain).

If you've got a crew in command of an ISD, are they realllllly going to be doing much? Being on the thing is 'front line'. To do this properly IMO you have one PC as Captain of the ship (Admiral in rank?), you have another who's the commander of ground forces, space forces, maybe a spec ops unit, science division, medical, etc. I'll offer more RP especially for those who don't have a direct combat role to play. EG My medic for my next session will be THE character to be, he has to save a city. The rest of us will just be there for his backup.

In my game I just handed my party a black ops Corvette, what my intent is that each member will take on a specific role for handling the ship. I've got two suitable pilots, a suitable medic, engineer, spec ops/gunnery, one of the pilots is a survival expert, and the remaining PC could take over a more standard ground force.