After watching Rogue one, Last Jedi and Solo its made me appreciate how diverse and storied the characters in Imperial Assault are. It has struck me as kinda odd the way we never really see any main characters as aliens, besides well chewy but that iss a free pass at this point. Rebels did well with both Hera a Twilek and Zeb a lasat. It makes Star Wars feel like its in a galaxy far far way not here on earth. The core set has a twilek, wookie, bothan which is fantastic.

One of the big things I love is how each character story is captured with just 2 words that also acts like their class. "Haunted Exile , Brilliant Engineer " also just the visual design is clean and effective. Saska with her numerous data pads around her hip, goggles on her neck and busy fixing a blaster tells so much about about the character.

I know Star Wars is going through a messy time right now, but I do want to give credit to the FFG Story and development department for making characters I want to see in Star Wars.

For sure! I'm sure part of it is that, unlike the movies which would require a bunch of puppetry and/or CGI, adding a member of an alien species as a character in the game is as easy as coming up with a good idea and then adding some art. The rest is left up to the player's imagination, which often times ends up being more exciting than whatever the production team would have come up with otherwise. The little titles that you pointed out ("brilliant engineer", "valiant commander", etc.) only add to this, as it lets each player come up with a cool backstory in their head based that and the little thematic bits and pieces on their class cards, personal missions, etc.

I've heard a lot of people complain that they don't get to play as Luke, Han, Leia, etc., but I'm like you in that I like it better this way. It makes the Star Wars galaxy feel like it's bigger than one family. Also, I will go to my grave insisting that Biv Bodhrik is one of the coolest Star Wars characters out there

44 minutes ago, EpicBubbleSA said:

Rebels did well with both Hera a Twilek and Zeb a lasat.

Plus a Togruta Mentor.

Plus a Weequay Pirate.

Plus a Chiss Grand Admiral.

Plus a Devaronian Smuggler.

and so on...

Also, I don't think Star Wars is going through a messy time. The CGI-Shows are really good, the anthology movies provide some good stuff. I'd say Star Wars goes through a hyperbolic shrieking-chorus of narrow-minded pea-counters, who have been conditioned by a decade of popular negative and angry review-culture on the internet to solely focus on and obsess about the bad, seasoned with the bile of polarizing ideological thinking and an ever-growing 'us-against-them-mentality' advocated by a zoo of rhethorically competent intellectual leightweights and their weekly congregations.

I completely agree. I doubt this game would be as fun if we didn't have access to these newer characters. FFG really has truly made some interesting and diverse (at least in appearance) heroes to play with. By comparison many of the newer film characters look rather tame.

Creating backstories for each of them is actually a real pleasure of mine as you can see here:

Check em out if you have time. They may inspire you to create your own backstories or appreciate one of the characters in a new way you never thought of.

Great post!

Yeah, I love how the titles started kinda like almost Star Wars archetypes in the Core set:

Haunted Exile

Hardened Veteran

Fierce Warrior

Valiant Commander

The Smuggler

Bold Renegade

Branched out a bit with Twin Shadows:

Brilliant Engineer

Vengeful Guerilla (ironically before Saw Guererra gained mainstream recognition)

Adapted to more traditional tabletop roles with Return to Hoth

Cunning Operative

Deadly Marksman

Loyal Medic

Really dug deep with Bespin

Codename "Hawkbat"

Master of Intelligence

Went with a theme in Jabba's Realm

Daughter of Mandalore

Reckless Vigilante

Furious Bodyguard

Rejected the idea of theme in Heart of the Empires

Demolitions Expert

with "Jax

Rebel Quartermaster

And now have branched out into more sci-fi elements outside of what we know as just Star Wars

Cybernetic Brawler

"Wildfire"

It's really given the game a ton of flavor. I mean, the characters we know and love (stormtroopers, wookies, Maul) all help to do that too, but this also gives the game its own legs to stand on without relying totally on nostalgia, and you gotta respect that.

During one campaign, for instance, I used heroes from a previous (Imperial won) campaign as prisoners instead of tokens. My Rebels were actually pretty upset to see their former heroes locked up (and eventually executed). Amazing that these seemingly blank slates could illicit that emotional of a response.

18 hours ago, subtrendy2 said:

It's really given the game a ton of flavor. I mean, the characters we know and love (stormtroopers, wookies, Maul) all help to do that too, but this also gives the game its own legs to stand on without relying totally on nostalgia, and you gotta respect that.

Yeah, I broadly agree, between Rebels and Imperial Assault it shows that it's possible to make awesome Star Wars experiences without either desperately hanging off the coat-tails of the OT, or shoehorning in complete nonsense that doesn't make any sense - there's a middle ground where it works beautifully. The IA characters are easy to just "get"; way back in the beginning they wrote a couple of pages of fluff for a couple of the heroes (Gideon and one of the others, I think) and I wondered at the time why they didn't do that for all the heroes. But it's actually amazing how evocative they manage to get with just one picture, a model, a two-word class description, and maybe a few clues in the player prompts for their personal mission. Turns out pages and pages of fluff just aren't needed when your character design is that well thought out. My hero players get quite attached to their characters knowing only that they're a Twi'lek with a plasteel staff who's looking for her master's lightsaber, or a guy with big muscles and half a suit of looted Stormtrooper armour. It's very clever.

At risk of derailing things, it's why I'm so **** angry about the recent movies (even if that does make me part of a shrieking hysterical chorus ? ). This game, Rebels, and even the first half of TFA, show how much fun it's still possible for Star Wars to be, and that it's still possible to have genuinely interesting characters in the Star Wars setting. But the second half of TFA, along with the whole of Solo and TLJ (RO was tolerable), were just complete rubbish and there's no inherent inevitability about that, if only they weren't able to rely on shoveling any old crap and knowing a good number of people will lap it up.

[edit] Seriously? This forum censors the word "da-mn"? Unbelievable.

6 hours ago, Bitterman said:

At risk of derailing things...

Please, let's not open that particular can of space worms on this forum. Literally nothing good comes out of that

Opinions are all good and well (I for one count TLJ as the best SW film ever made), but we've all seen forum after forum crash and burn over the last 6 months and I would very much like for our great community to remain untouched by the drama.

Let's keep things IA-focused here

On 6/14/2018 at 7:58 AM, Fourtytwo said:

hyperbolic shrieking-chorus of narrow-minded pea-counters,

I had to google what a "pea-counter" is. Nothing. Did you just make that up?

54 minutes ago, Tvboy said:

I had to google what a "pea-counter" is. Nothing. Did you just make that up?

It's a "nitpicker".

Weird though, my Google adventures had to go pretty deep to find it too, even though it's a relatively common-ish phrase.

"Bean counter" is sort of a similar thing, I guess.

On 6/22/2018 at 3:00 PM, subtrendy2 said:

Bean  counter" is sort of a similar thing, I guess.    

Colloquially, Bean counters almost always refer to someone being nitpicky with Money, rather than things.