In the Game Master section of the FFG SW core rule books, there is advice on canon and picking and choosing inspiration from Legends/Expanded Universe lore. This is common advice for any RPG that's based on a licensed media property; look at the original media property and get inspired by it!

The problem I've found is that it leads to incredibly derivative games. I want to use the setting - the people, places, and things that make up Star Wars - but I don't want to run a game where thinly veiled stand-ins for existing characters have adventures that are thinly-veiled homages to existing Star Wars films or shows.

In order to push myself to run better games, I've developed a hierarchy of acceptable sources of inspiration from worst to best. Think of it as a "reverse canon."

1. The films and the TV shows.

These are the heart of the franchise. If your players are rescuing a princess, defending a rebel base from an AT-AT attack (I'm looking at you "Onslaught at Ardra I"!), or blowing up a mega-weapon, your players will rightfully give you the side-eye.

2. The video games, novels, and the comic books.

Unless all of your players are die-hard SW fans who have consumed every piece of Star Wars media ever published, you should be able to slide some plot ideas from the Legends/EU media empire into your home game. Just avoid using smart mouthed assassin droids who call people "meatbag," admirals who base their strategies on the art of their enemies, and and ginger or light-whip yielding Force Sensitive Imperial assassins. However, if you can make Jaxxon the Space Rabbit, Sorrow the Crying Mountain, or Triclops cool, you're doing it right.

3. West End Games and Wizards of the Coast adventure modules.

Wizards didn't publish a lot of prewritten adventures but the mini-adventures they put out for their D20 SW line included quite a few interesting plot seeds. West End Games's adventures were standard adventure module length and, while they focused primarily on Rebel v. Empire conflicts, most of them were also "space action" tales that were generic enough that they could be easily re-skinned. They're also 25+ years old. My wife never played them and my other players are millennials so I was able to modify old WEG adventures and drop them into our campaign without anyone noticing. I also blended two or three together by cherry-picking plots and sequences.

4. Other RPG system adventure modules.

I've written adventure modules for other companies. They had to be generic enough to cover the various combinations of careers/classes that PCs may choose during character generation. That is a difficult goal to hit but if you hit it and do it well, you'll find that those pre-written adventure plots can be easily ported over to other games. I cribbed several Shadowrun modules from the early-to-mid-1990s as, when I first started playing EotE, I realized it was simply Shadowrun meets Star Wars. So rather than having my PCs chase after a computer chip containing schematics for a new bio-cyberdeck that was stolen by a corporate scientist, my PCs chased after a Rakata memory crystal containing the location of an ancient ship crash-site that was stolen by a rogue archaeologist. The plot beats were the same, all that changed were names and locations. And it's not like there's a big difference between a megacorporate tycoon and a Hutt crime lord.

5. Movies

Now we're hitting the point where we really need to put our creative thinking caps on. George Lucas wanted to do Flash Gordon films but when he couldn't get the rights, he made Star Wars instead, ripping of Kurosawa, spaghetti Westerns, and World War 2 movies. The Clone Wars did some fairly successful homages to Aliens and Godzilla. And Kurosawa (again) via Yojimbo.

If you're doing a Force & Destiny campaign, samurai movies and pulp adventure films should be your go-to source for plot ideas. For EotE, Sergio Leone films and the classic gangster flicks of the 1930s - 1970s are great. "World War 2" is an entire film genre and R-rated and angst-ridden flicks like The Thin Red Line or Fury, while awesome, might not be the best source of inspiration. The quasi-propaganda films of 1940s/1950s Hollywood and the U-boat film sub-genre are good places to start. Games tend to work best if the plots are straightforward and the plots of those films are very straightforward.

6. Non-Fiction

The historical accuracy of period films is always questionable but if you're a fan of the local library and want to find some obscure stories that haven't been turned into movies, there are always books with that kind of lore. I recently read an article about a Native American who had earned his war chief status in World War 2 by killing an enemy, getting into a fist fight with an enemy and letting him live, and by stealing the enemy's horse. That is pretty awesome and would make for a great NPC or PC motivation.

Any thoughts?

Of late I've been getting annoyed at people wanting to rewrite the OT.

I can understand the Prequels but given how large the Star Wars Universe is I find it irritating they all want to be Luke or the new Darth Vader when it feels so unnecessary?

For example Rogue One, who hasn't started their game by acquiring the Death Star plans?

At one point in my former group we obtained them three times and even introduced the exhaust vent problem!

So what if we started a game off where you're playing your version of Jyn, Cassian and K-S2O explaining they were caught inside the Archive when Tarkin missed blowing it up and they start the game trying to escape Scarif undetected with a copy of the Death Star plans whilst Vader pursues the Rebel flagship, Tarkin moved the Death Star back to where he can finish getting it operational and the storm troopers sent down to Scarif are unaware any of the rebels are still alive.

In this game YOU'RE the only rebels left who can transmit the plans to the Tantive IV on the bad side unless you're insane you'll want a safe way to avoid Vader's attention but good news he's more likely to go after the Tantive IV than you!

Fancy your chances?

Let's play!!

Video games.

Numbers 4, 5 and 6 are the keys for me. Crime dramas with a focus on what bad guys get into, anthropological National Geographic stories, Shadowrun hooks. Sundry gritty science fiction from the late 70s and early 80s — itself inspired by Star Wars before separate Willow-y and EU-Jedi-Elfquest sensibilities took over — is great. Moebius' less fantastical artwork takes you to the right place, too.

I've also written single-paragraph descriptions for 30-odd sector star systems in the style of the Mass Effect codex, giving each location a visual and narrative hook that are often drawn from real-life geography. This has paid off well, as systems I've written about and walked away from suddenly fit the adventure perfectly.

Moebius is definitely a good source (such as The Black Incal).

I draw from sci-fi/space opera literature having nothing go do with Star Wars, old and new issues of Heavy Metal magazine, and long-established sci-fi RPGs like Traveler or settings such as 40k. Heck, I even ran a three-session scenario inspired by the Space Invaders and Gork video games.

For me personally, when I'm trying to come up with ideas for the books, a lot of my inspiration comes from one place, the Essential Atlas by Dan Wallace and Jason Fry. It could just be a part of my military background, but knowing what is geographically nearby allows me to start associating likely trading partners, common species on a planet, and what major outside influences (though that planet might have groups deeply for or against that influence) are in play there. Learning and thinking about these connections often rapidly generates a story in the form of "What if...." once I get going.

Because this is all happening organically as I make these connections in a certain area of space, it helps me avoid too much cliche or retreading of the movies.

1. The films and the TV shows.

These are the heart of the franchise. If your players are rescuing a princess, defending a rebel base from an AT-AT attack (I'm looking at you "Onslaught at Ardra I"!), or blowing up a mega-weapon, your players will rightfully give you the side-eye.

However, enormous superweapons with a flaw that a starfighter can target are fair game.

For the most part, I create adventures within the original trilogy, but separate from any major plot points. But I like to bring the players close to it once in a while, and my inspiration comes from one off lines in the films. Recently, I researched "the bounty hunter we ran into on Ord Mantel" and had the players intervene in the event. I took some liberties, since it was actually written (for the comics, I think).

In a d20 "Rise of the Empire" era adventure, I latched onto a line from Sio Bibble (Governor of Theed) who said, "after four trials in the Supreme Court, Nute Gunray is still Viceroy of the Trade Federation") and wrote an adventure where the PCs were responsible for busting one of Gunray's schemes resulting in one of those court appearances.

As Copperbell points out, Rogue One is an example of this type of adventure. "Several transmissions were beamed to this ship..."

Space adventure tv shows can supply a lot of plots that easily fit into the Star War galaxy. I'm not that familiar with it, but as far as I know Farscape gets very close in tone. Firefly is obvious. Babylon 5 might warrant a look too. And Star Trek: Enterprise is probably the ST incarnation that's easiest to mine for SW.

I agree that WW2 movies are one the best places for inspiration with AoR games. A few lesser known ones I think are a great fit are Winter In Wartime and Black Book.

The EotE adventure I ran at my local con last year was a direct adaptation of Escape From New York. My players were all under 30, and none of them had ever seen it.

The EotE adventure I ran at my local con last year was a direct adaptation of Escape From New York. My players were all under 30, and none of them had ever seen it.

Knowing your game group or running a game group that doesn't have the same pop culture touch points as you definitely helps.

So they say -- they being researchers into creativity -- that it's new experiences that fuel the mind for creative use. You all have presented an excellent set of information so far, but I wanted to throw out just one technique I use that I find invaluable: take a semi-related image from my favorite image source, then describe in "in-game" terms what is going on. My current favorite haunt for these images is http://fscape.tumblr.com/ , but of course there are artwork threads in the general forum that have boatloads to inspire.

So the tl;dr I'm getting at here is that getting outside one's typical comfort zone for influence might just be the best thing one can do to spur creativity in the game. It doesn't have to be something you do on the internet, heck you can go sit at a winery and watch people (a favorite pastime) and imagine a StarWarsy scene in its place. As long as it's a new experience, scientific data suggests one's brain unlocks itself to new ideas when faced with new situations.

What you've described, themensch, is what I do to down-shift my brain into creative mode and kick the process into gear. For me, however, I need to look at what other writers do to create the framework of a situation or a plot so that I can translate that into writing that will work for a game.

Completely blank pages terrify me. But if I have even the faintest skeleton of a framework to hang ideas on, I'm much more productive as I'm not constantly worrying about the foundation being solid while I hook up the plumbing and wiring.

That's just me.

What you've described, themensch, is what I do to down-shift my brain into creative mode and kick the process into gear. For me, however, I need to look at what other writers do to create the framework of a situation or a plot so that I can translate that into writing that will work for a game.

Completely blank pages terrify me. But if I have even the faintest skeleton of a framework to hang ideas on, I'm much more productive as I'm not constantly worrying about the foundation being solid while I hook up the plumbing and wiring.

That's just me.

You know, I think that blank page syndrome gets me too - have you tried mind-mapping? I have found that useful to overcome this, but admittedly I am a hack as a writer.

I try to put my work into a useful format, and while I like to utilize frameworks others have used, I generally get a wild hair to make my own so I get lost and stuck in procedural definitions. Really it's just bikeshedding when I could just say I need a who, a what, a when, a where, a why, and a how. Since I aspire to run a sandbox with lots of improv, too many details is a hindrance but not enough can be the same. I often end up with a bunch of bullet points but they're never the same, and while that drives the organizational part of my mind wild, maybe it's not worth the effort to normalize.

When I'm not creative but I feel like I should be prepping, I try to organize my notes and oftentimes that in itself will spark something. Seems like the real challenge for me, though, has been being able to record my thoughts when inspiration hits and wouldn't you know it, finding that solution is maddening in and of itself.

I'm honestly not familiar with mind-mapping.

I always have a little notebook with me or nearby so I can jot ideas down before they fall out of my head for good. If you have a smart phone, they typically come with audio recorders.

I'm honestly not familiar with mind-mapping.

I always have a little notebook with me or nearby so I can jot ideas down before they fall out of my head for good. If you have a smart phone, they typically come with audio recorders.

I got turned on to mind-mappping specifically for RPG brainstorming but by golly, it turns out to be a pretty handy tool outside that.

I do have a smartphone with an audio recorder, but oftentimes audio is inappropriate for my situation and typing thing in on that little keyboard is a joke with my manly thumbs. I've tried carrying around a notebook, yadda yadda, and I guess I'm just destined to never be satisfied, heh.

I do have a smartphone with an audio recorder, but oftentimes audio is inappropriate for my situation and typing thing in on that little keyboard is a joke with my manly thumbs. I've tried carrying around a notebook, yadda yadda, and I guess I'm just destined to never be satisfied, heh.

Write things down on post-it notes and move them around. Seriously.

I do have a smartphone with an audio recorder, but oftentimes audio is inappropriate for my situation and typing thing in on that little keyboard is a joke with my manly thumbs. I've tried carrying around a notebook, yadda yadda, and I guess I'm just destined to never be satisfied, heh.

Write things down on post-it notes and move them around. Seriously.

I've tried, post-its do NOT stay affixed to my tractor! However, my desk is littered with them (found some graph paper ones even!) and they are one of the very few exceptions to my paperless quest. I'm a special little snowflake, what can I say?

I've tried, post-its do NOT stay affixed to my tractor!

Okay, so use duct tape (or even Duck Tape™) to keep them on your tractor!

However, my desk is littered with them (found some graph paper ones even!) and they are one of the very few exceptions to my paperless quest. I'm a special little snowflake, what can I say?

I’ve known plenty of places that do all their Agile/Kanban/Scrum planning with post-it notes. They do work! Well, most of the time….

I've tried, post-its do NOT stay affixed to my tractor!

Okay, so use duct tape (or even Duck Tape™) to keep them on your tractor!

However, my desk is littered with them (found some graph paper ones even!) and they are one of the very few exceptions to my paperless quest. I'm a special little snowflake, what can I say?

I’ve known plenty of places that do all their Agile/Kanban/Scrum planning with post-it notes. They do work! Well, most of the time….

I did work at a place that used post-its for exactly that. It was a great idea until a small gust of wind knocked all the cards down. Me, I do it in trello!

I have reasonably good recall for good ideas, and I think that by not writing them down but instead trying to remember them affords me the opportunity to fine tune them for ultimate coolness. It's kinda like how chili is better the second day, ya know?