This question has probably been asked before but...

I'm currently developing the next campaign for my group & we're moving from an Edge of the Empire style to working with the Rebellion (or Resistance, we're currently playing in the period about 2 to 3 years before A New Hope & the Rebellion as it stands isn't yet an entity)

I'm planning to run it as a sandbox style, using a lot of the ideas that Concise Locket had been talking about in his excellent thread, see below :

The campaign will be set in a small star cluster of my own design that's situated on the edge of the Mid Rim.

I was wondering how people are running their Rebel based games... Do you run it in a episodic style having objectives that can be completed in a few gaming sessions or do you go for the big picture approach where there's a definitive objective to complete along with the climatic encounter at the end?

I'm currently running F&D, but the group has made contact with a rebel cell. If they want to pursue that angle, I have a number of objectives they can work at. Most of them won't be military actions.

• First off, they need ships. The group they're working with has a lot of contacts with local planetary rebels, but they only have a handful of small freighters and such. This means that they can't organize a coordinated resistance, since they can't move enough personnel. Hopefully the PC's can recruit some of the region's less bloodthirsty pirates.
• They also need recognition from the growing, official Rebel Alliance. For that they need some real victories, and to show that they're team players. A couple of espionage and sabotage missions will help, and the information gathered will be traded with the Alliance.
• They need a military victory. To demonstrate that they can do more than just bushwhack, the cell will lead an attack to drive out the garrison and blockade of Utapau. This, of course, will be a multi-stage engagement. They'll need to get some folks to the surface, to agitate the population. Several strike teams will need to attack key Imperial bases, while whatever fleet they've scraped together will need to cause some damage to the blockading force. Of course, several PC's will be dealing with personal issues on the surface, so we're probably looking at a pretty good Season Finale episode. While they're celebrating their victory, the news will come in that Alderaan has been destroyed by an unknown weapon.

I am running an Age of Rebellion game set in that same time period - a few years BBY. I choose to focus on a single sector for the first story arc. The players were assigned missions at first, but now have transitioned into a more sandbox style with several story hooks that they can choose to pursue. The over-arching goal is to increase the capabilities of the resistance group they are a part of and destabilize the Empire's control of the sector.

So far they have:

• Escaped an Imperial Intelligence prison/interrogation ship (Nebulon-B frigate) while freeing other captives
• Raided an Imperial fuel depot on a remote planet (while fighting off solar flare-crazed plant creatures)
• Boarded and captured an Arquitens Cruiser that had been disabled by a Y-wing ion-bombing run
• Explored an abandoned asteroid mine that had been infested by mynocks and a young exogorth, rescuing a colony of Patitites that took over the cargo bay for a few sessions
• Infiltrated a pirate gang's base on a gas giant refining platform, discovered that the pirates were doing the Empire's dirtywork, freed several hundred enslaved Mirialans, and lead a Mass Combat against the pirates that successfully secured the refinery as a secret base for the resistance
• Thwarted sabotage of the refinery by commando droids, then boarded a huge gas mining ship on a collision course with the station and defeated several dwarf-spider droids there-in

Currently they are infiltrating an Imperial fighter base with the intention of breaking the blockade of the Hrasskis system, hoping to gain support and possibly troops from the freed population.

My goal is to up the stakes over the next few sessions as they win bigger and more audacious victories, then close this first arc of the campaign with a massive reprisal by the Empire - introducing the BBG with a barrage of turbo-laser fire and an overwhelming display of Imperial might.

I have done both in one campaign, I will do episodic for a while and then put them into a situation that is designed to span a bit. I used an ongoing big picture mission for the stuff that was longer than 1 session (Prepare a covert base for future rebellion presence on the planet). This was something that took a while to do because they had to really work on making sure that the bad guys they ran into didn't compromise their main mission, and they had to try and get the base operational.

For Episodic I made up a bunch of mission description cards and a detailed map of the sector to include systems that were unexplored/lost and also I drew in gravitic and other anomalies so that they actually have to plot their jumps through known hazards. Many of the missions are in those unexplored areas, but some are in established territory and along Hyperlanes. I have the players pick a mission OOC, but then they RP their leader getting the mission from command.

I know that this post is nowhere near being the first time this has been done, but...

this belongs on the Age of Rebellion forums.

17 minutes ago, Yaccarus said:

I know that this post is nowhere near being the first time this has been done, but...

this belongs on the Age of Rebellion forums.

That forum doesn't have a Game Masters section.

2 hours ago, Concise Locket said:

That forum doesn't have a Game Masters section.

Yeah I was wondering why that is

8 hours ago, Concise Locket said:

9 hours ago, Yaccarus said:

I know that this post is nowhere near being the first time this has been done, but...

this belongs on the Age of Rebellion forums.

That forum doesn't have a Game Masters section.

That makes things make a bit more sense.

#GiveAoRForumsAGMSection

Or just have an SWRPG forum group, with GMs, AOR, EOTE, FAD, Play by Post, and Misc subforums?

9 hours ago, Endersai said:

Or just have an SWRPG forum group, with GMs, AOR, EOTE, FAD, Play by Post, and Misc subforums?

This. Very much this. One General sub-forum and one Game Master sub-forum for all three lines would be good enough for me.

Has anyone asked Asmode/FFG to migrate the three groups together? It can't be that hard.

59 minutes ago, Concise Locket said:

This. Very much this. One General sub-forum and one Game Master sub-forum for all three lines would be good enough for me.

Another +1 for this proposal

I would caution against going "full sandbox" because most games can really benefit from some more structure. That's not to say it has to be a strictly linear "railroad" but don't discount having some well-laid event chains that guide the campaign and restrict the sandbox a bit. In an AoR game, with a chain of command, this is easy enough to do by giving general mission parameters while still letting the players decide the specifics on how they'll accomplish the missions.

On 9/25/2017 at 4:01 PM, Yaccarus said:

I know that this post is nowhere near being the first time this has been done, but...

this belongs on the Age of Rebellion forums.

I actually did put it in the Age of Rebellion forum as well... but I also value the input of other GMs which is why I posted here as well

I'd also back the one General forum & one for GMs... after all whether it's EotE, AoR or FaD it's all Star Wars ain't it!

20 hours ago, Endersai said:

Or just have an SWRPG forum group, with GMs, AOR, EOTE, FAD, Play by Post, and Misc subforums?

@FFGEvan shows up as a staff moderator...