I am just reading through the published adventures for Edge of The Empire.. and got to wondering.
For those who have run them.. what were the best bits and the worst bits you found by your experience?

And if you made changes, what were they?

In Jewel of Yavin , ditch the race. The race is supposedly only there to get you into the gala. After the gala, you have to have a good slicer to pull off the next phase of mission, so just have this slicer get you on the guest list of the gala. Sneaking into the gala by drawing all the attention to yourself is a bad idea in a heist.

Beyond the Rim had two very nice parts, or at least, parts that gave the players fits. The first was when they encountered a nexu for the first time, and the thing **** near killed the droid PC (lucky dice rolls). The second was when they encountered a nexu cybernetically enhanced with metallic/electrified claws. "Its got WHAT?!", followed by a rather colorful string of muttered curses.

Friends Like These has a fairly awful ending. As written, no matter what you do, you probably hold the line and drive off the Imperials. The first problem is that the mass combat is a railroad. You can't really win until the end, and all the losses in the world up until then won't really make you lose in the end. Basically, it's a lot of rolling dice just to roll more dice. The second problem is that the Imperials get away at the end, and that really means all you did was delay losing until the Imperials come back with a real invasion force. I suggest rewriting the adventure as just needing to buy time for an evacuation to load up everything necessary and the Rebels will be gone after the first attack is driven off.

I really liked Beyond the Rim . We played it pretty much as written in the first half and then we went somewhat off script towards the second. We used all three locations (the Wheel, Cholganna and Raxus Prime). I did change the Deep Dark to a Gozanti Cruiser and allowed for the fact that they carried drop ships and a couple TIEs as needed. I actually really liked the Cyber Nexu encounter in the wreckage, I tried to play this a bit like something from an Aliens movie and it was super fun.

On Cholganna, we went pretty off script with the survivors but that was always pretty flexible in the book. Also the subsequent encounter with the ISB and the Deep Dark was pretty off-script. I was using the ISB secret agent subplot with one of the PCs which added some fun twists and turns around this point in the campaign. They also decided to take over the Deep Dark, so there's that. My thought is that once you meet the survivors, plan to be flexible for a while.

On Raxus, I rearranged the final encounter/battle a bit with the "jawa's". I said that the "Jawa's" had brought a bunch of salvaged droids (consistent with the Yiyars assets), that ended up being retooled for battle. One of these was a huge forklift droid with a saw for a hand hand and some serious fighting skills (imagine the forklift suit in Aliens 2). I also looked for an opportunity to light the polluted lake on fire mostly for dramatic effect.

After the fact, we got a lot of use from Reom (as an arms and tech dealer) and his sister Shira. It turns out she used her connections with the company to support the Rebel Alliance. This was a great connection to our next chapter Onslaught at Arda .

I only borrowed certain beats from Onslaught at Arda . I had the PCs meet the Rebels at Arda base which I used as a jump off point for some home-brew missions. Then I used the 'spy' investigation at Arda (instead of at the next base). They had discovered there was a spy during one of the home-brew missions. Then I went straight to the mass combat encounter at Arda (more or less as written). Then we went our own direction. Basically, I just took what I liked the most and left the rest. I'm sure it would have been fun to run OaA as written but I had a huge meta-plot in mind:)

I guess overall, what I'm getting at is that I really like the books, but for me they are just guides. They give some great characters, encounter ideas etc. but sometimes the best sessions happen when we've gone a bit off the rails.

My team just recently got done running Mask of the Pirate Queen and we overall really enjoyed it. My quick note would be to simply control your PC's time management because I let mine spend a little too much time in the market and they lucked out and were able to pick up a few thermal detonators that made the final boss fight for the second act a breeze. My other tip concerning it would be to be a bit more lenient on the actual ending.

*SPOILERS BELOW*

At the end, the Pirate Queen herself is in their grasp and takes a strong poison to kill herself before being handed over to the Consortium. My team si really reliant on armor and being able to tank damage, so they don't have a medic, meaning no one had the ranks in Medicine to save her, so I had to pull a little bit of fudge to keep the tension going, right down to making them do athletics checks to see how far they could get in a short time while carrying the dying Queen. It made for a really climactic ending, but just be wary of your team's abilities and if they don't have a medic, give them more opportunities to "make do" but keep them on the edge of their seat since they don't actually know if they're gonna make it.

The rest of the story is pretty good, although it does have the bad habit of saying "You only THOUGHT you killed the queen!" and then duping the party at least twice. This can be a strong element for making the group come to actually hate the Veiled Sorority, like mine did, but it can also be very frustrating, just like mine got. Just know how much your team is willing to take and then adjust the rewards or encounters accordingly. Overall I give it a recommendation.

On 10/21/2018 at 6:13 AM, Goose666 said:

And if you made changes, what were they?

Everything. The published adventures are great idea-mines for your own adventures, and often provide good insight into how some of the mechanics are supposed to work, or how to adapt them to new situations. But otherwise...the only one I've really run close to "as-is" is Beyond the Rim, and only Act 2, and even that got completely revised.

Read them, absorb them, and then do something else. Besides ditching the straight-jacket, it's way more satisfying in the end.

Thanks Folks.. I have a few on the shelf to read through and wondered if they were worth the investment of time over reading other things..
Sounds like everyone has tweaked them a little at least, but are as whafrog says, are good idea mines! Cheers.

My group really enjoyed Beyond the Rim. We stuck pretty close to the book until about half-way through act 2.

*SPOILERS BELOW*

My PCs did a bunch of investigating at the Retreat and befriended Cratala and, oddly enough, the Yiyar crew. Harsol kind of went off the deep end and fled with some metals into the forest when the Imperials showed up. My PCs (Shireen and Gand) rallied the survivors and evacuated the settlement while they held the Imperials off. Shireen grabbed Cratala and stole the working ship Harsol got from a previous scavenger group. They lead the Deep Dark away and tried to lose them in the forest. That didn't work too well, but they convinced Yav to assist them and he crashed his ship into the Deep Dark, taking both out of the air. Too Low died, but Yav survived and joined the PCs for the time being. Meanwhile, the Imperials fled back into the forest to regroup, now marooned themselves.

Everyone regrouped at the engine section of the ship by the waterfall and Shireen contacted her sister to send a ship to get the survivors off-world. Gand's obligation caught up with him when the bounty hunter who had been blackmailing him for years arrived, wanting the location of the treasure. They brought her to the ship along with her new Hutt allies (who only joined up with her to get back at Shireen's powerful sister because proxy wars are fun).

They take her back to the main ship section where they find a crazed Harsol activating all the B-1s he could. Things didn't go well and the blackmailing bounty hunter died in a shoot out with Gand while Harsol was knocked out and taken by Yav who figured the bounty on an Imperial fugitive would be the best he could get out of this failed mission. Everyone left for Raxus Prime with Cratala and her droid.

Now this is where things went really off the rails as a rival archeologist kidnapped Shireen with the intent to ransom her to Shireen's sister for some exclusive excavation rights. The final bit of this campaign ended with Shireen escaping her binders and fist fighting her captor on a speeding skiff while Gand tried to catch up. Everyone had a great time as things just got worse and the skiffs sped through the garbage canyons and a recycling droid's furnace.

So clearly I went off the book for the player's personal stories, which I think made the adventure that much more memorable. I'm saving that last bit with the Imperial attack on Reom and his Raxus Prime facility to kick off a new story arc. I just couldn't take away from that epic skiff chase.

Overall, I've enjoyed the story modules. There's a lot of room to add new bits or change things. I really liked thinking about how the NPCs would react to my PCs and how that would change the story.