Looking for peoples thoughts, comments, critiques and suggestions on the Edge of the Empire adventure, The Jewel of Yavin. Thinking about running it for our group and would like to hear from others who have.
Thanks in advance
The Jewel of Yavin... Thoughts?
I have yet to run it for my group, but its 'On Deck' for them. There is a bit of errata for it, so make sure you have that printed and handy.
Pretty much, this is going to be your groups chance to see what 'Oceans Eleven' is like in the Star Wars universe. Depending on your group, you may actually want to tell them that this module is going to be more of a thinking game, than a shooting one.
Played in it. Then after the adventure was done I had a look through the adventure path.
The betrayal near the end of the adventure seemed a little predictable to me, but maybe I've just read/written too many of my own stories.
It was actually a lot of fun, though as Lug mentioned light on the combat, though not necessarily light on action, the race can be pretty intense if run correctly.
Do consider that the characters might wind up with a couple hundred thousand in cold hard cash by the end of the adventure.
Here's my narrative on the adventure if you'd like to read.
Edited by Spatula Of Doom
"The Tale of the Theft of the Jewel of Yavin" is well worth a read!
Personally I thought it was a great piece of writing which was full of character... I actually own the adventure but have so far done nothing with it but this made me re-visit it & I'll be looking to adapt it for my next campaign!
I ran this for my group and we all had a great time with it. I adapted it here and there (especially timings) and obviously changed elements to reflect my players and their stories, but it ended up with a number of future points for the campaign.
The pilot ended up taking part in many more speeder races on different planets (with team), their base ended up being wiped out in an Imperial raid after the tech told the Imperial Agent all about them (and a little later when the team jedi was tagged by the Empire, they tracked the base o f operations), the gained a luxury ship which was used for infiltrating a luxury cruise liner and many other things.
While it is not perfect, with a bit of work it is a very good adventure and has lead to my players having Bespin as one of their regular haunts.
As already mentioned, if you have some very combat oriented characters (or a combat oriented party) you may want to point out that it may require more thinking and less shooting. It is difficult sometimes because you do get some players are who incapable of doing anything aside from murder-hoboing.
When we ran it, our GM had all the non-racing pcs run npc racers in the race with different motivations and tactics. We all got into it and genuinely wanted to win and almost ruined it for our party because we (the npcs) had some amazing dice luck compared to our racers. It was one of the most intense playsessions we've had and was great fun. The rest of the module was mediocre in my opinion. The limited timeline really puts pressure on when prepping for the heist and if dice rolls go poorly (Like they did for us) you end up under prepared and going in blind. Overall not my favourite module but it had it's moments
The race is a bit janky- one or two hits will down a Cloud Car and there's very little counterplay to it. There's no actual description for when you can consider people in arc/not in arc, so if you just assume the leaders can't shoot backwards you may end up with your players gunning their way to the front then dying. Be prepared to wing this bit.
13 hours ago, LugWrench said:I have yet to run it for my group, but its 'On Deck' for them. There is a bit of errata for it, so make sure you have that printed and handy.
Pretty much, this is going to be your groups chance to see what 'Oceans Eleven' is like in the Star Wars universe. Depending on your group, you may actually want to tell them that this module is going to be more of a thinking game, than a shooting one.
Any ideas where I might find the errata for this adventure?
1 hour ago, fist said:Any ideas where I might find the errata for this adventure?
The "E" word is a very hot button topic on these forums.
In short there is no Errata for this adventure.
I've run this adventure. It is fantastic. My players tell me its the best adventure we've ever done in our years of Star Wars gaming.
Thanks AceSolo, I'm glad you liked it.
I thought it was pretty awesome, but it helps when you've got a good creative GM.
We wound up sticking pretty close to the plot as laid out, but it didn't feel like it.
6 hours ago, Talkie Toaster said:The race is a bit janky- one or two hits will down a Cloud Car and there's very little counterplay to it. There's no actual description for when you can consider people in arc/not in arc, so if you just assume the leaders can't shoot backwards you may end up with your players gunning their way to the front then dying. Be prepared to wing this bit.
No worse than fighters with 6-10 HT duking it out with medium linked lasers and concussion missiles.
The GM played it that shooting at each other was Ok, but anyone who actually shot down another racer was disqualified. Plenty of people took shots, but only on undamaged opponents in hopes that later on a course hazzard would finish the job.
We actually wound up in the lead for a good portion of the race, and couldn't do much firing at stuff other than course hazzards.
Edited by Spatula Of Doom@LugWrench - what does the errata cover?
The only errata I could find was this here, which isn't much.
I've run it once, and it is a lot of fun, with a lot of ways to get to the end. It is best run with a flexible and creative GM, as there are plenty of ways for players to take off with their ideas. One of my pcs had an assassin droid who could fold up to hide inside an astromech chassis. He decided to take the NPC pilots out while they were at their hangars the evening before prepping for the race. He shot the two pilots with a disintegrator and took them down to 1 HP. I wasn't too experienced a GM at the time, but I had two replacement pilots show up and just used the stats for the original NPCs.
All in all, it has a few weak spots when reading it over in its entirety, but the PCs will probably never know as they will be too caught up in the story as it unfolds. The only thing I would alter, is the beginning. Very weak intro, IMO, but if you can alter it so that your PCs will bite its a very intense adventure.
My thoughts? It could be really fun for the players if I was a better GM. So I'm saving it for the end, when I've got more experience. Planning to make it a kind of tie-up for the game, as all the PCs will probably be pretty advanced. For now, I've been mining NPCs out of it and sticking them in here and there. The PCs have already met Kaltho the Hutt in person and facilitated a business deal. His obligation rolled right away, so we're probably doing "Rubbing Slimy Elbows" next week. In one of the upcoming missions, the PCs will have a chance to meet and work with Lando Calrissian. Arend Shen has also been giving one of the PCs miscellaneous jobs- I've added a "Shady Collector of Jedi Ephemera" clause to his character, and have plans to introduce the idea of the Jewel of Yavin earlier, so they spend some time getting invested in finding it well before they actually do the heist.
Since it's not been mentioned yet, someone said a while back that if you're struggling to give the other PCs something to do during the cloud car race, let them each pick one of the NPC racers and roll for them.
Good luck and please let us know how it goes.
For the most part our group had fun during this adventure. There was a few things that had us running in the dark for the most part of the heist though. (Not sure if this is part of adventure or if it was out GM adding it) The time constraint when scouting museum and finding information about the bidders made us split up and even though it was only average difficulty checks we rolled very poorly so we knew very little about what and who we where getting into it with. But this is a problem with all published adventures, they all reward mostly only advantages in the tables and not so much successes. In many of those tables a 10 success 0 advantage will give less information then a 1 success and 1 advantage.
Being short on cash we couldn't really buy information or improve our cloud car either (+ our GM failed to mention the special +1 handling attachment provided in adventure)
So while the auction went without much excitement due to lack of knowledge to make them bid as long as possible, the rolls to hack and transfer the money was very lucky so we got away with that despite not having done much to Lobot.
The race:
We had a basic pool 2Y3G and no piloting talents against 3Y1G + 1 blue + 1-2 black due to modifications and sabotage + their piloting talents and higher top speed. This turned out incredibly even, but without sabotage we would have been far behind. Our GM decided the gunnery seat was for shooting only, so no co-piloting or mechanics to reduce strain/damage, this coupled with shooting down opponent equals disqualification made him only shoot twice in race, once he missed an opponent (just as well tbh) and once to scare the creatures on 2nd to last leg. So didn't see much action as gunner and rolled for one of the opponents just as the others.
One thing we noticed was missing the piloting check had a very small penalty only 1 black next roll, which doesn't really match up with the flavor text "missing a buoy makes you fall to far behind, even if it happens on first leg, to catch up later"
On 5/10/2017 at 3:12 PM, Icosiel said:I've run this adventure. It is fantastic. My players tell me its the best adventure we've ever done in our years of Star Wars gaming.
Out of interest, what did they like the most about how you ran it? What did you do to make it shine?
If you really read the book and properly present the setting, Jewel of Yavin is a very open, sandbox-y adventure. My players tell me they felt like they weren't railroaded at all, and that Bespin felt open full of interesting things. They could go anywhere they wanted, and I had lots of details about every person and place they encountered. They said they really felt like they were immersed in it because there no set structure of events, mostly. Granted, this took a lot of rereading and commitment on my part, but it paid off.
I'm currently about half way through and my players are loving it so far. I was kinda apprehensive about spending so much time on planning and preparation, thought it might be a little dull, but it's playing pretty nicely. Just about to get to the meat of it (the actual auction and heist), I might post about it here once we get done in a few days, give my proper review of it when it's all done.
My players have taken it a little off the rails in one way though; the force sensitive in the party managed to figure out Elaiza is a Jedi through some convenient triumph results, and so now they're actually working together with her to steal the gem, which means the big climactic confrontation won't happen. Also means they'll have to break up the gem so she can use part of it for her saber, but that was already sort of the plan; aforementioned force sensitive wants some for his own sabers, and the more practically minded party members figure it'll be easier to fence the gem without getting traced back if they break it into pieces. Less profit, but smarter.
Edited by Tom CruiseI'm going to run this one down the road for my players. Even though we are doing a full on Age of Rebellion campaign I think it will work well with some tweaking. I plan on changing out one of the interested parties to the Imperials which will be a motivator for the Rebellion to take interest and send the PC's.