Hello fellow GMs,

i am currently ending my first EotE campaign. I had a chat with my players and we definitely want to start a new one, F&D this time. So all in all they want to play a campaign placed in the old republic timeline, right after the treaty of Coruscant "accepted" by the Repulbic.

From my perspective i would like that approach, but a couple of question came to my mind and maybe you can help me with this:

1. How to work with emotional strength and weakness. Simply turn it around? as anger would be strength for a dark side user, mercy would be more of a weakness from the perspective of other Sith.

2. How should i keep a proper tension in the group, as a Sith you will betray "friends" to rise in power. you will kill opponents which could became a risk to your selfish plans. I guess its a hard balance to have a kind of tension in the group that could lead to PC kill each other. My approach is to give them higher goals which only can be achieved if they work together. That would be the most though one guess.

3. Does anybody have details about Starships from the Old Republic? Stats and stuff?

4. As my campaign is currently pushing the players to discus a lot about decisions (moral aspects, consequences) i like to push the group into situations where they have issues with finding a solution which is "acceptable" for every PC, like accepting an Empire contract or obtain something which leads to get them into moral dilemma.

Looking forward to your thougts and answers and additional tipps on the topic as well!

Cheers

Chris

Easiest thing would be to impart upon them the desire to usurp a Sith lord and take/earn a Darth title for one or all of them. Check out either Lead by Example or Friends Like These for mass combat rules and you could do some interesting stuff where your party has to recruit enough people to eventually take on the Dark Council or a handful of Sith lords.

Uncanny the timing of this thread as my son starts us on a Sith Old Republic era adventure/campaign this weekend.

Personally, if you are going to do a bad guy campaign I really think you should just have one Sith PC. The rest can be bounty hunters, or imperial agents(spy), or some other type of criminal (smuggler/hired guy, inc). This way you can keep the PC infighting and betrayal out of it, unless you really want that to occur.

5 hours ago, unicornpuncher said:

Personally, if you are going to do a bad guy campaign I really think you should just have one Sith PC. The rest can be bounty hunters, or imperial agents(spy), or some other type of criminal (smuggler/hired guy, inc). This way you can keep the PC infighting and betrayal out of it, unless you really want that to occur.

I tend to agree with this. Unless you really want to be playing Song of Ice and Fire stuff having conflicting Sith interests will probably sidetrack or derail adventures with alarming frequency. If the other PC's aren't Sith, though, there will be more reason for them to have a stake in the outcome of the game.

One thing to remember is that these are not Bane-era Sith. While taking things by force and betrayals are hardly out of the question, it's not hard-coded into their society yet. It's possible for an apprentice and master to have a good mutual relationship right up to the point that the master dies peacefully of old age. They wouldn't be able to have a thriving society otherwise.

In addition, the top 'office' in the Empire has been occupied by the same guy for the last 1500 years. A lot of Sith have realized they can't compete and this set their sights for the next best thing: being on the Dark Council. If your players set it up so that each one hungers after a different Council position, it could easily support a campaign where none of them are looking or interested in betraying each other; reliable allies are hard to come by after all.

The thing is, society in the Sith Empire is falling apart, slowly but surely. With all the betrayal and underhandedness, evident in even the non-Sith branches of office, the system is collapsing from the inside. In the intervening years between the signing of the Treaty of Coruscant and the start of the war, there is more than enough infighting and conflict among the Sith themselves to cause plenty of trouble. They sort of luck out with Corellia (the first time at least) but soon things take a turn for the worse, especially when Darth Malgus declares himself the next Emperor. Talk about something that would erode the Empire's power! There is going to be betrayal and there is going to be deception, and a 'mentor' is going to try and kill a player/some players/the party/the galaxy no matter how well they served eventually because it is just part of the nature of the Sith - they're the baddies after all.

I like unicornpuncher's idea for a 'one Sith with friends' party as it keeps the potential party-on-party conflict to an expected degree rather than something that is bound to occur at one point or another. Were one player willing to play an underling or apprentice of another character who is committed to following along, that could also work (the idea of PC sith as siblings is a neat concept as well!) While it's not out of the question for Sith to unite against a common threat, it isn't something made to last.

As far as ships and the like go, it's simple enough to reflavor things as appropriate - the book lists 'Blaster Carbine' not 'E-11' for a reason! The D5-Mantis is analogous to a Firespray-31 in a lot of ways, and an XS Freighter is more or less a YT-1300 (or -2400, pick your poison) LibrairaNPC has a thread where he talks about freighters, and I believe there are stats for an XS in there to look at! No official stats for Old Republic-era ships however.

For flavor as well Blaster weapons tend to be bulkier since the technology is less refined. So folding stocks are less of a thing. And warships I would give a silhouette no greater than 7. Harrower-class Dreadnought were 800 m according to wookieepedia.

thank you all for your input. there is indeed a lot of good stuff mentioned.

On 8.3.2017 at 0:40 AM, unicornpuncher said:

Personally, if you are going to do a bad guy campaign I really think you should just have one Sith PC. The rest can be bounty hunters, or imperial agents(spy), or some other type of criminal (smuggler/hired guy, inc). This way you can keep the PC infighting and betrayal out of it, unless you really want that to occur.

That is good. We will have the session zero in a couple of days and this will be a suggestion for the campaign from my side.

In the end i fear they all want to be force users, which is fine, but then i have to find out how i am able to make them work together. but the first number of good ideas are already here

1 hour ago, musicninja98 said:

For flavor as well Blaster weapons tend to be bulkier since the technology is less refined. So folding stocks are less of a thing. And warships I would give a silhouette no greater than 7. Harrower-class Dreadnought were 800 m according to wookieepedia.

Indeed! weapons look bigger, and ships are not ISD size for sure. My PCs do not like space fights at all, they are more in Story then in fighting but a nice spacerace / fight is simply part of Star Wars

Alright- so we played my Son's "Sith" one-shot Saturday afternoon/night. It was a lot of fun actually. We accepted our first assignment and immediately following the first contact one of the Sith slew a Sith trooper (ie player on player violence). it was pretty comical but both players agreed that was what would have happened in the particular circumstances. Luckily my son had a few extra characters lying around for us to use. The word of caution here is that Sith on Sith violence can absolutely occur and all players should be willing to accept that without any ill will. A few hours later another player showed up and he played a Masssasi who was a slave NPC before the player showed up. Unfortunately for him, the group had agreed that he would be used as a sacrifice for a Sith ritual the party had unlocked in a long lost temple. The player had been at the table for approximately 20 minutes when he realized- his time was up!!! Again, fortunately we had extra player characters to replace him with. The party had a moral dilemma in slaying him as his "master" was opposed to the idea because he did give him his word he would not come to any harm.

I played a Taung who was tasked with protecting the Sith group he was with. I was a "Hired Gun". We took place in Darth Malgus's assault on Alderran. We fought through 2 pretty epic battles against Jedi Consulars and other Knights.

Ultimately I enjoyed it and I believe all the other players did as well. I do agree with one of the previous posts that perhaps one or two players should be actual Sith. We had 8 players at the table so we could work with 3 Sith. Id like to continue the campaign but I don't believe that's in the immediate future.