As this other thread demonstrates, I have caught the bug and specifically as it comes to Force and Destiny I have a bit of a conundrum that I was hoping the community might help me with.

By and large, me and my proposed playgroup (still to actually get a campaign underway!) are way less interested in the spiritual side of Star Wars than the dirty, gritty side and as such, I have been more focused on the AoR/EotE expansions. So far I have gotten almost everything but with the exception of the core rulebook, I have zero FaD books. However, with the release of "Disciples of Harmony" I have felt the itch to grab it and that has gotten me wondering the following -

1. How much content is available in the FaD books that would be relevant to a campaign that will active eschew all elements of the Force, Jedi, the Sith, etc?

2. Is there much useful background data or lore that could be used in an AoR/EotE campaign?

3. Are the adventures so Force/mysticism-heavy that they would be difficult or pointless to try and convert?

4. Are there a significant number of ships & equipment in there that significantly add to the flavor of the game?

thanks in advance!

They are all heavy on the Force and mystical elements, but some books have a lot of useful non-force content. All the books (except perhaps the adventures) have some useful gear, vehicles, and starships.

Endless Vigil in a particular has a lot of great material on adventuring in urban environments and really integrating the specifics of a given city into your game. It also has podracing rules.

The other useful thing is probably the armor crafting rules in Keeping the Peace.

34 minutes ago, Dr Lucky said:

They are all heavy on the Force and mystical elements, but some books have a lot of useful non-force content. All the books (except perhaps the adventures) have some useful gear, vehicles, and starships.

Endless Vigil in a particular has a lot of great material on adventuring in urban environments and really integrating the specifics of a given city into your game. It also has podracing rules.

The other useful thing is probably the armor crafting rules in Keeping the Peace.

Engless Vigil is actually the one I am most inclined to get. Thanks for the input!

1. Depends on the campaign. The specializations are pretty locked in to their Force careers, but there's usually a fun wealth of data in chapters 2 and 3 of the career books to be useful. Keeping the Peace has armor crafting rules, Savage Spirits has beast taming and riding rules (copied from Stay on Target) and a few pages of animal stats, as well as a section on wilderness encounters, which is very nice; Endless Vigil offers the lovely contact network rules, and several sections on urban encounters, including tables covering different kinds of urban environments, and a section on investigations. I have yet to read Disciples of Harmony.
2. Again, it depends. Nexus of Power offers a slew of planet profiles, and most could be worked into any kind of AoR/EotE game. The later chapter on Force nexuses is probably useless, and the equipment chapter is pretty thin.
3. I'd say they lean toward mysticism. There's a lot on Chronicles of the Gatekeeper that could be used in other games, though. Two of the planets, Arbooine and Cato Neimoidia, could be adapted to any setting, and you could do some organ harvesting for encounter ideas.
4. For the most part, the equipment is pretty nice. F&D offers some pretty nice melee weapons (including the electrostaff, one of the best in the game) and attachments, but mostly reprints stuff found in the other two cores. It has a few unique ships, but that might not be worth it. KtP, SS, and EV all have very nice equipment chapters, though, with a pretty good spread of options and a pretty minimal number of repeats. As I said already, NoP, though, is pretty slim.

Species, too: the Core offers 6 unique choices (Cerean, Kel Dor, Mirialan, Nautolan, Togruta, and Zabrak), KtP has 2 (Iktotchi and Whiphid, with the Lannik reappearing in Lead by Example), SS has 2 (Anx and Quermian, with the Ithorians copied from AoR), EtP has 2 (Muun and Pantoran, with the Gand be copied from EoTE), NoP has 3 (Aleena, Bardottan, and Gungan, with Devaronian reappearing in No Disintegrations), and DoH has 3 (Arkanian, Cosian, and Pau'an). CotG also has 1 unique species, the Sathari.

2 minutes ago, MonkeyInSpace said:

Engless Vigil is actually the one I am most inclined to get. Thanks for the input!

Honestly, Endless Vigil may be my vote for best overall career book from all three lines (though I think Fly Casual and No Disintegrations are both in the running too). It's just got a ton of useful stuff.

I did forget to mention that they all have new species too, which is always nice. For Endless Vigil, that's Muun and Pantoran (plus they reprinted Gand from the EotE core).

8 minutes ago, Dr Lucky said:

Honestly, Endless Vigil may be my vote for best overall career book from all three lines (though I think Fly Casual and No Disintegrations are both in the running too). It's just got a ton of useful stuff.

I did forget to mention that they all have new species too, which is always nice. For Endless Vigil, that's Muun and Pantoran (plus they reprinted Gand from the EotE core).

I can't get No Disintegrations anywhere but I do love Fly Casual. You sold me

Even the specs might be useful to you, as there's nothing in the RAW that prevents a non-Force user from taking one as a second spec. The drawback is that a non-Force user can't use the Force talents, even if they have to buy one here or there to get through to something they want further down the tree. Peacekeeper (Guardian), Hunter (Seeker), Investigator (Sentinel), and Racer (Sentinel) are fairly Force-light, though. In fact, Racer is fairly unique pilot spec that a character might want to focus on as a primary spec (even if they have to buy it second, as it'd be out of career for a non-Force user).

The new Disciples of Harmony has a big section I wrote on Mentors. If you are running an F&D campaign and the PCs have some kind of NPC mentor figure (be it a droid, force ghost, former Jedi, literally whatever), or even if the mentor is one PC to another (ala Kanan and Ezra), there is a lot of invaluable material there for running that story element as a sort overarching subplot to a campaign or as connective tissue between missions. It also makes selecting a mentor as a starting resource more appealing. The same book also has some amazing mind-expanding ways to look at knowledge skills that makes them infinitely more useful, and some help for GMs with running negotiations.

In general, the chapter 3 stuff in each book is going to have some great, generally useful stuff to any F&D campaign, even if the players aren't specifically interested in using a species, specialization, motivation, or emotional strength/weakness from chapter 1. Chapter 2 is just about more. More options for weapons, equipment, vehicles, and droids not just for the PCs to use as a shopping list, but for GMs to use for NPCs. I know when I think about what equipment to put in an F&D book, its as much about finding equipment that can be used to take down a Force user as it is about equipment Force users from that career would like to use. A bounty hunter that tracks Jedi could do well selecting a weapons load out almost entirely from F&D career books.

Monkey, at a certain worldwide auction site an australian seller has No Disintegrations for sale.

On 6/1/2017 at 4:49 PM, MonkeyInSpace said:

Engless Vigil is actually the one I am most inclined to get. Thanks for the input!

Endless vigil also has pantorans (one of the best species in the game), and the undicur jump speeder (it's in the starship chapter as standard equipment on a particular shuttle, it's the folding speeder bike from the episode(s) of the clone wars where Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Asoka, we're on mortis). I'd also highly recomendamos keeping the peace for the armor crafting rules and other gear.

On 2017-06-02 at 1:15 AM, KRKappel said:

The new Disciples of Harmony has a big section I wrote on Mentors.

That was you? Nicely done, I just got the book and it's my favourite part. Love the classifications and the tables, it's going to be very useful planning my new campaign.

On ‎6‎/‎2‎/‎2017 at 0:15 AM, KRKappel said:

The new Disciples of Harmony has a big section I wrote on Mentors.

I look forward to reading it - do you work for FFG or are you freelance, or how did that come about?

The Mentors section is great.

FFG really has dialed in the near need to all of the books. Very little is covered more than once, the adventure books do occasionally have useful stuff in them (Friends Like These has the Raider and Tie Phantom). There is a list online which references which stuff is in what book, but it's incomplete. A bit of tubez searching will net what book has what to a limited degree and picking from there makes the most sense.

On 6/9/2017 at 5:15 PM, MonkeyInSpace said:

I look forward to reading it - do you work for FFG or are you freelance, or how did that come about?

I'm a freelancer and have worked on a variety of books on the Star Wars line for FFG, something like 10 that have released. Back in like September of 2013 they had an open call for freelance writers, and I sent them a submission. Prior to that I ran a Star Wars fan site that did Star Wars fan comics and fan RPG material for D20 and Saga Edition at www.fandomcomics.com for like eight years with Ryan Brooks (who has also freelanced for FFG, we applied for the open call together).

I also hold a degree in fiction writing/creative writing from Columbia College Chicago, and some unique military experiences that influence a lot of my Star Wars work.

But basically, they had try outs, and I worked hard, and then I got a little lucky besides. I've been fortunate enough to keep getting asked back to do more work. I've had the chance to work with a lot of big names in this industry, and a ton of up and comers. Plus, you know, when I'm on a job I get to sit around and write about Star Wars all day and claim I'm working.

If you're curious what I've worked on specifically.....

Suns of Fortune (From Centerpoint Station to the end of the chapter, plus the Five Brothers smuggling run Modular Encounter)
Far Horizons (New obligations/backgrounds/motivations/spec flavor, Homestead Rules, sample Colonist campaign and adventure seeds)
Age of Rebellion GM Kit (Dead in the Water Adventure, Squad and Squadron rules off a mechanic in Dan Lovat Clark)
Stay on Target (species, spec flavor duties, motivations, backgrounds, basically all of chapter 1, I think, except the trees themselves, which get built in house)
Force and Destiny Core Rulebook (the intro, Chapter 10: The Galaxy, with the exception of Wiek, which is a Sam Stewart creation)
Strongholds of Resistance (Kinyen, Chandrila, Mon Cala, Sullust, Ord Gimmel, and The Independence with Ryan Brooks)
Nexus of Power (Empress Teta, Ossus, Tython Vergences, Vergence Creation Rules, Modular Encounters: Exploring the Acablas Ruins, Witch's Wrath, Vault of Justice)
Friends Like These (Co-wrote entirely with Ryan Brooks and Tim Flanders)
Forged in Battle (Soldier Backgrounds, Duties, Motivations, New Gear and Equipment pgs 52-55)
Disciples of Harmony (Consular Motivations, Mentors)

Of course, the books are something of a team effort. Any book I'm on, its pretty common for me to talk with all of my co-writers (sometimes to the point of pestering) and trade ideas and talk through some of the challenges in our respective sections, and of course whichever editor/dev they put on the book in house has a strong influence on shaping whatever the final product is.

Dead in the Water was committed by you? That is imho a real stain in this overwise really nice list. Though I have yet to read Friends Like These and heard that it has similar issues.
Makes me wonder if you in retrospective still would have writing Dead in the Water in a way which relies heavily on the players screwing up first?

Sorry you didn't care for some aspects of Dead in the Water. Of all the RPG writing I have done to date, adventure module (or modular encounter) crafting remains the most difficult. On some jobs, I wish I could keep the manuscript and keep polishing and tweaking and run my own playtests and peer readers for months until I'm sure it's as perfect as possible, but deadlines and non-disclosure rules rarely allow for that sort of thing. So while after every job, there are naturally things I would have gone back and changed in retrospect, this has a tendency to occur with modules the most.

That said, I am proud of the work I have done on the line thus far, and I'd like to think I learn something and get a little better with each product.

With Dead in the Water, my understanding was that it was the programming of the droids that was altered, and that it wasn't some physical module that turned them into Manchurian agents.

Given this is Imperial Intelligence (who in Legends were far more competent than the ISB), it stands to reason that unless the PCs are going to scour every bit of coding in the droid's programming, then there's not really any way for them to notice that even one of the droids have that extra bit of programming, much less all of them. Given that they're fugitives by default, they probably also don't have a lot of time to hang around, to say nothing of the seller (even though she's an Imp undercover agent) probably wanting to conclude the transaction as quickly as possible; the PCs don't really have time to thoroughly check the hooves and teeth of the herd of horses they're picking up for the Alliance.

Plus there's the fact that (again in Legends) both Imperial Intelligence and Alliance Intelligence had each been running covert droid spy ops for quite some time with a pretty decent rate of success for infiltration. ImpIntel even had a specially-built series of 3P0-style protocol droid fakes that unless you knew exactly what to look for and where to look could pass for the real thing with nothing in the droid's core programming to indicate it was a spy. Seeing as how Dead in the Water looks to have been written with fairly inexperienced PCs in mind (probably no more than 50 earned XP at most), it'd make sense that the PCs simply wouldn't have the means or ability to detect that the droids they're taking delivery off had some unexpected extras in their programming.

OK, I bite, still please don't forget your spoiler tags for dead in the water