After playing through Debts to Pay, which introduces a militant Droid Rights group, my EotE players have latched pretty heavily onto that idea. They’re trying to get to the bottom of this rogue droid conspiracy. It’s a little more than I had planned for, but I’m kinda glad, as I wasn’t really sure what direction to take things for a while. I like the idea of a droid liberation front, with several subfactions advocating different approaches. Some would want to Kill All The Humans, while most want a more equitable integration into Galactic society. At some point I’m hoping to move the game into the Age of Rebellion, so if the group plays their cards right, they might be able to bring an army of droids into the fold of the Rebel Alliance. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I would like to run them through Beyond the Rim, and have been trying to think of how to incorporate this Droid Rights group. The finale on Raxus Prime brings to mind The Force Unleashed video game, and the mad Jedi, Kazdan Paratus. While I considered keeping him alive as an NPC, I think instead the droids he left behind could have seen him as some sort of messiah. Though he’s only been dead for a couple years, they may see him as a bridge between organic and mechanical beings, and seek to emulate his teachings. This leaves us with a bizarre droid cult on a junk world, which worships a dead, insane Force-user. They’re led by a droid technician who seeks to elevate droids to the next level of sentience. To this end, he’s look at several paths. One of these would be cybernetics, blurring the lines between man and machine at a more fundamental level than simple limb or organ replacement. Perhaps the Yiyar clan is unwittingly in the pocket of this droid cult, receiving messages and payment through holocommunications and couriers. They (like everyone) are after the cyber-doc stranded on Cholganna, but this leaves open a possibility for diplomatic solutions. I don’t want this droid tech to necessarily be a villain, but he’s definitely creepy, and a lot of his allies are militantly pro-droid.

After writing this wall of text, I realize that sometimes I write these things just to get my thoughts in order, and I don't even have much of a question at the end. But, seeing as I'm already here, and a click of the Submit button will send feedback my way, does anyone have any thoughts or twists or complications I should consider?

*click*

*Spoilers for Beyond the Rim*

In BTR, one of the main NPCs the players are trying to find is a cyber tech specialist, Cratal I believe is her name. It could be that some of her work left over from the Clone Wars is linked to this militant droids rights movement that is popping up across the galaxy. It would be a nice tie-in to get the players motivated to go looking for the lost separatist ship at the start of the campaign.

What if Cratal is actually a cyborg specifically a Droid based Cyborg who assumed their current identity to avoid being scrapped or worse given the Emperor's interest in her research!

So a little secret that forwards your idea in a way no-one would suspect imagine she "saved" crew members who like her are droids but believe they're not!

Would that help?

Some spoilers may follow.

Alternatively, start with the reason why the crew is going after the Sa Nalaor in the first place. The ship's droid crew was rumored to have gone crazy and turned against its masters at the end of the war, making off with a ship full of treasures and/or weapons. Reom knows the PCs are interested in stories like this, which is why he brings it to their attention, but everyone else wants in on the treasure and/or weapons, including Reom.

That would change the context of the Retreat on Cholganna from a pocket of survivors to a deliberate settlement established between the droids and the organic survivors who agreed to treat the droids as equals rather than slaves. They might still want to escape and resettle on a planet that's less dangerous. However, there could also be a growing tension between the survivors: Cratala genuinely empathizes with the droids and wants to see them be free, while Captain Harsol represents a sizable chunk of the organic survivors who feel like they were forced to live here at the end of a gun.

If you keep the stories about treasure, then the Yiyar clan's motivation remains intact. The Empire's might change once they get wind of the society that's been built here, as they're not likely to allow it to continue. This could reshape the final act of the adventure, with the PCs helping the survivors escape to find a new home. It could happen from Raxus Prime or from another world, depending.

Turn the Yirar clan into Ganks and go with your idea above... problem solved.

*Please forgive the following. I was an English major*

One of the themes in Star Wars generally is Man vs Machine. The perfect example of this is Darth Vader: 'He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil.' And once people do turn toward the mechanical, that machinery is often a symbolic parallel to being controlled or enslaved. Take Luke's hand - when its cut off he is emasculated of his power in the form of his lightsaber, and loses his ability to apply his will to the world around him, much as Vader does when he's all burned up and stuff. He has to dehumanize part of himself (literally, in this case) in order to regain that ability. Then in the final battle against the emperor and vader, you see that scene where he looks down at the mechanics in his fake hand and is horrified that he is becoming just like Vader - and then purposely surrenders his power, turning off his lightsaber, and putting himself at Vader's mercy in the process. The force, after all, is organic, mystical, not bound by the rules of the universe (at least in the original. In my head canon, midicholorians don't exist ;P).

What this comes to, basically, is that there is no connection between what men create and the divine - Droids cannot feel the force, for example. Once one becomes artificial, unnatural, one loses one's connection to the divine, and becomes evil.

Given that powerful metaphor, the idea of a droid seeking to gain the power that mortals withhold from them has a lot symbolic weight. Some droids, I imagine, would be very puritanical - it is the 'humanity' of humans that makes them the enemy after all, that makes them unable to empathize on a meaningful level with droids, that makes them think of droids as less than human and not deserving of things like freedom and self-determination. An interesting historical parallel might be found in the revolution of Haiti. When the French were driven from the island, Dessalines, the first leader of the new state, took a french flag and tore out the white strip in the middle, saying that he was taking the white out of Haiti. The slaves of Haiti separated themselves symbolically from the evils of their colonial masters. Some droids would do the same.

Others, though, would, I imagine, want to take their enemies strengths into themselves, and that is where you would get cyborgs (or, what is the backwards of cyborgs? Droids with human parts instead of humans with droid parts? ). And the thing that (in the SW universe) separates sentient droid from mortal seems to be something along the lines of a soul - a connection between the individual and the divine, in the form of a web of energy - the force. And everything else that happens with a soul (the force is as dangerous as it is helpful after all).

This raises some really interesting questions that would be interesting in any campaign - could a droid, then, learn to use the force? How would their relationship to the force differ (would they experience the light side of the force, with its conceit of being a connection to organic life, differently than a human?)? Can a droid do other things we associate with a soul - could they fall in love? Be altruistic? Artistic? Would they have increased empathy? How would this affect their relationship to mortals? How would they appear to mortal force users? Would they introduce a 'disturbance' in the force, where the web of lie would sort of 'snarl' on their peculiar signal? Would force powers work in the same way on them?

The parallel that would seem most interesting to me would be Frankenstein's monster (except in this case, the monster creates itself). The monster, when it interacts with humans, gives them a sense of creeping uneasiness, of 'wrongness' that can be unsettling to people. Droids would perhaps have the same effect.

In terms of Beyond the Rim in particular, then, it opens up the question of what, exactly, the cybernetic research that the separatists were doing consisted of. Consider, for example, that the separatist armies relied on droids who, at least when I watched the movies, suffered some weaknesses due to their lack of humanity - they were uncreative and lacked the tenacity and emotion of a truly human soldier (and they just seemed to have no ability to fire a blaster, but I digress). Wouldn't separatists, then, be interested in grafting the flesh of mortal beings into droids? Think of the applications:

1) A droid can have real human emotions that could be filtered and controlled - feelings like real loyalty and love for their fellow soldiers, or hatred of an opposing cause

2) An assassin or intelligence droid could be encased in harvested human flesh, to make them hard to distinguish from a normal human, while still retaining the advantages of being a droid

3) A droid could be built that would latch onto human forms and highjack them into disconnecting from the human brain and connecting to the droid brain instead.

4) A droid could self repair from the corpses of enemy soldiers (ewww)

So this could be what they find when they find the lost ship and the colony. In fact, it would be cool if, for example, instead of those cyborg animals you can end up fighting, you instead have animal bodies under the control of sentient droid brains that can intercommunicate, analyze information intelligently, and simply leap to a new body if their mortal flesh is damaged.

And then all of this can again ask the same questions you get with Vader or Luke's hand - what does it mean to be human? Is it objectively better than being sentient but not living? What is it that makes a human more than an unloving thing? And when does technological creation turn over into divine creation - the creation of new living things and of sentient souls to occupy them?

Plus, a Jedi-droid with bits of organic flesh bonded into its mechanical body would just be cool.

Maybe the opposite of “cyborg” (CYB-ernetic ORG-anism) might be “organetic” (an ORG-anicized cyber-NETIC entity)? Or perhaps “bionetic” (BIO-logical cyber-NETIC entity)?

I would also observe that R2-D2 and C-3PO are examples of droids that can have emotions, and can act altruistically, artistically, and with empathy. Perhaps not exactly like humans, but then this is a big Galaxy and lots of alien species don’t act exactly the same way as humans, either.

These are all good ideas, though i think largely delving a little more gruesome than I'm planning. At least for most of the droids. There should be at least one small rogue faction that seems to think "reverse cybernetics" is the way to go, at the expense of living beings. Oh! "Cybernecrotics!" There's a name for the books!

But I digress. I'm thinking more Pinocchio, less Frankenstein. The philosophers of this droid group are trying to figure out what would step them up from sentient to alive. I remember listening to a rep from Hewlett Packard in 1998 talk about their work in using bacteria and such to "grow" circuit boards. Perhaps they found records of Cratala working on a similar process, growing partially organic cybernetics that grafted more easily to the recipient. They want to explore that path. To that end, they've hired the Yiyar clan, who is basically a buch of schmucks they've been paying off for a while. They're not entirely pleased with the Yiyar, as the thugs are violent, have zero sense of subtlety, and tend to end up in a lot of scrapes with the law. But they don't ask questions, and take a lot of payment in hardware and cybernetics. I think a mix of Rodians and Ganks would be the way to go.

This would allow most of the adventure to be run as written, but I intend to mess with the finale on Raxus Prime. Gotta work in a chance for an audience with a droid leader, deep in the Uncanny Valley, which should be creepy, but not nightmarish. The droids want Cratala's expertise, and are willing to pay for it, such as they can. Depending how the earlier adventure goes, the Yiyar may just decide to screw up the whole deal, because that's kinda their thing.

Amazingly good post Keshalyi. I really like that analysis. I think you can work into that theory also general Grievous, seen as a stepping stone: a cyborg with much more machine parts than biological organs left, but that still keeps his biological brain, and thinks like a sentient being. Maybe that's what the the separatists wanted to do, create a Grievous-like droid. Oh and myabe some of Cratala's research has been used to "repair" Darth Vader and one of the reasons the Emperor wants her is to silence her because she could be threat.

Plus, a Jedi-droid with bits of organic flesh bonded into its mechanical body would just be cool.

Cool or utter body horror. One or the other, really.

Lareg - I agree. The separatist movement in general is an interesting window into the idea of sentience, life, etc.

See if you can find the old storybook and record set "Droid World." It had a cyborg who lead a bunch of war droids.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_Further_Adventures:_Droid_World

Here is how I've tied in BtR with our campaign:

I've been running BtR right after completing the starting adventures followed by Under the Black Sun.

My PCs ended up capturing the Nikto nemesis from Under the Black Sun alive and getting hold of his speeder with two crates attached to it. One of the crates contained spice the Nikto stole from the Hutts (altered to fit the group's oblgiation), but the other crate had a hi-tech lock on it that could not be opened niether by force or slicing. The crate had “IsoTech” label on it.

The players were considering if they want to return the Nikto to Hutts first or investigate the mysterious crate first. Just when they were about to leave Coruscant and they were hailed for boarding by an ISB ship with no chances of getting away… The PCs decided to hide the myserious crate, but have left the Nikto and the spice in plain sight.

The agents appeared to be some sort of special division within ISB (like SS hunting for rare treasures/occult artifacts in Indiana Jones movies) and were tracking the Nikto’s speeder which was in PCs ship’s bay. They were mostly interested in what they found out from the Nikto and what they took from him rather than in any other petty crimes like hutt-slaying or spice trafficking or absence of bounty hunter licenses. The PCs gave up the Nikto, his speeder and the spice but managed not to break under interrogation and kept the mystery crate. ISB released the PCs (with clear intention on following them).

With an underworld check the PCs pinpointed IsoTech at the Wheel and headed there to investigate further. They met Reom there who opened the crate to find an astromech droid (altered this from BtR a bit) which once belonged to Reom's father and was part of Sa Naloar crew with Captain Harsol. Reom hired the PCs to investigate.

The rest of the adventure has been played more or less by the book (which is great!), except that the Imperial troops were more of a black ops ISB team rather than just a random squadrons of troopers. This added some more tension and complexity and also kept the PCs off the official Imperial wanted lists.

Moreover, ISB had the Nikto to help them trace down/capture the PCs promising to release him if all goes well. So on Raxus Prime the PCs had an epic showdown against ISB troops headed by their Nikto nemesis and another new ISB agent nemesis. PCs managed to wound and capture the Nikto again and wounded the agent leaving her a remarkable scar, so their rivalry became really personal

I have sucesfully reintroduced that ISB nemesis after a couple of other campaigns. and I also plant to use IsoTech again at some point as potential employer or freinds in trouble when the time comes.