As a new GM still digesting all the rule supplements and hosting a mostly elementary audience, I often struggle in drafting my own material outside of the published adventures. Meanwhile, I have been reading Marvel’s 2015 reiteration of Star Wars comics for inspiration, and I had an epiphany I wanted to share.

Has anyone considered using comics as the loose framework for an adventure, replacing the principal characters with your own PCs?

For example, examine issue number of one, Skywalker Strikes .

Quote

The Empire wants to use Jabba the Hutt as a weapons supplier and has arranged for an Imperial negotiator to meet with Jabba's emissary at Weapons Factory Alpha on the moon Cymoon 1, part of the Corellian Industrial Cluster. The emissary's ship was hijacked by the Rebels, however, and they intend to infiltrate the weapons factory—the largest in the galaxy—and destroy it to deliver another blow to the Imperial war machine.

•Build Imperial negotiator [Nemesis] and Stormtrooper [Minions]
•Build Jabba’s emissary [Rival] and Minions
•Hijack Emissary’s ship
•Utilize Corellian environment from Suns of Fortune

Quote

The hijacked ship arrives on Cymoon 1, where it is authorized to land at the weapons factory. Imperial Overseer Aggadeen, a squadron of stormtroopers, and a LOM-series protocol droid stand ready to greet the "emissary." When the ship lands, the emissary reveals himself to be Han Solo, still claiming to work for Jabba the Hutt. The Imperials confirm his identity and affiliation and bring him and his bodyguards—a disguised Skywalker and Princess Leia Organa—into the facility, along with R2-D2. In addition to the three Rebels in the facility, Chewbacca stands ready as a sniper, having arrived in the Millennium Falcon, which is being watched by C-3PO.

•Slice Imperial landing code
• LOM-series protocol droid [Rival or Nemesis]
•Face character replaces Han Solo

I could continue… but for the sake of time and length, I’ll just ask do you commonly adapt alternative media into the premise for adventures?

Any pitfalls to this methodology?

The PCs could be exposed to principal characters, Vader, Leia, Tarkin, Jabba, etc. Of course, the contact with the Big Names would have to be minimalized or carefully orchestrated.

I am running adventures for my son in TFA era, so the Poe Dameron comic is one of the very few contemporary resources at my disposal. We read the comic together, so I don't translate the plots directly into adventure modules as you've depicted; but I believe combing various media for inspiration or adaptation is common practice. Encounters featuring principal characters can be tricky, but recognizable characters from the canon can also add to the game, particularly with a younger audience in mind. Some comic book sequences may require absurdly lucky die-rolls for your players to emulate- be prepared with an out, or way to narrate through these, in order to carry the story forward.

I actually wrote about this very topic a couple of months ago: