So, this was something I had bouncing around my brain recently, that sounded neat to try, but given the nature of it, could prove tricky to actually GM. So I was curious if anyone has tried something similar to this, and what tricks they used to make it more manageable.

This idea came about from an Old Republic era campaign I ran with some friends. Basic premise was they were a Padawan (roughly Obi-Wan's skil level in Phantom Menace), and a young vagrant that had recently been picked up by the Padawan's master. Young and Force-Sensitive, but untrained. Not Chosen One or anything, just a kid they encountered that had Force powers. As they were traveling back to the Core systems, to take the girl back for training, their ship had a critical malfunction, and was forced to crash on a remote planet. The Master died in the crash, leaving the 2 PCs with trying to deal with what was going on, find a way to leave the planet, protect the handful of other survivors, and also deal with the native inhabitants. The final catch was they would end up helping to stop a Sith Ghost that had existed on the planet for centuries, freeing the native population from it's tyranny, and then eventually leaving the planet, roll credits.

Part Two: Would pick up during the Rebellion era, and they would be playing a pair of PCs that were about smuggling and other starship related stuff (their choice of PCs, just happened to work perfectly for what I wanted). They would end up taking on some passengers for extra credits, and one of those passengers would turn out to be a young woman, who recently learned she was pregnant, with a now dead Jedi's baby. He was living off the grid like Kanen Jarrus, but wasn't able to escape the hunting parties. She runs for her life, rightly afraid the Empire would seek her out due to the baby she was carrying. She would be having visitations by this Force Ghost, due to the link she shared with the child (who was Force-Sensitive), and he was basically trying to get her WAAAAY off the grid. So he told her to take passage on this specific ship (The PC's ship), and then hijack the hyperspace systems when she had a chance, and reprogram them to take the ship to an deep section of space.

The Twist: It would turn out to be the planet that the players had helped save from the Sith Ghost in the previous Old Republic campaign, and they would see the statues to their previous PCs at the head of the temple they constructed for their native Force users. The new PCs wouldn't have any idea of the connection, it would just be some random old ruins with big statues, not uncommon in Old Republic architecture. But the players, would get a fun little call back, and see how their actions had an impact.

So, yeah I kind of thought of doing something like that, but on a shorter time scale. Like, have a group of PCs, maybe in the Prequel Era, and have them just doing their usual thing, with some Big Bad to deal with. But have some random NPCs they interact with as a supporting cast. And if/when the PCs fail/die trying to reach their goal, of stopping the Big Bad, have them write up the NPC's that they interacted with as the new PCs, and fast forward the timeline several years. Like if one of them got busy with an NPC, perhaps they play the child, now living in the bad situation the parent was unable to resolve. Or if they had a beloved sidekick, like Short Round for Indiana Jones, who after seeing Indy die, decides to try and finish what he started, and you fast forward to him being an adult, with his own skill set.

I thought this could be fun to try out, and might help the players be more mindful of their impact when dealing with NPCs, which sadly tend to be disregarded as background dressing at best.

Thoughts from anyone who has tried this? What problems did you run into? How did you work around them? Or just random ideas on how to structure a campaign like this?

I am so sorry. I read through your post, but all I can think about is the Jaynestown episode of Firefly.

I did something similar with an old WEG campaign back in the day (before there was even a hint of the prequels), starting out in what would be the early Dark Times (using what sparse info there was), skipping to about mid-Rebellion Era (year or so past ANH) up to RotJ, then jumping ahead to what would later be the NJO era (though for our campaign the state of galactic affairs was generally better), and then a final jump to what became the final generation and pretty much wrapped up the conflicts with the ancient Sith and the last vestiges of Imperial warlords (we were pretty much making up our own canon by that point).

It worked out pretty well for us, with each arc lasting around 2 to 3 years in game time, which was plenty of time for the PCs to become plenty potent before jumping ahead about 20 years and picking up with the previous generation's kids. I made sure to include plenty of throwbacks and referenes to the deeds, both noble and otherwise, of the prior generations, along with the occasional "guest star mentor" appearance of some of the older PCs, including a particular cantankerous near-human (essentially a WH40K Squat) from the first generation who just kept getting increasingly surly and foul-mouthed as he got older, in addition to an astromech NPC that was handed down from mother to daughter throughout the entire thing.

And it certainly did provide a strong sense of legacy, with one particular family name becoming synonymous with brash heroics and truly horrific eye-rolling puns (remarks were made that by the fourth stretch, it was genetically impossible for members of that family to avoid speaking in sarcasm). But it did take player buy-in to accept that after a certain number of sessions (I used 25 as a general benchmark), the players are going to have to retire those characters and create brand new ones.

There's also the concern that some players may want to keep playing the same characters, just older and expect to be at the same level of ability as when the previous generation's arc ended, or perhaps be more experienced yet. Which can be a problem if several members of the group are indeed starting fresh as the kids of the previous batch of heroes. Of course, it depends on how much of a time skip you're planning between arcs; if the time skip is 50 years or so, then you shouldn't have too much issue as you can say "sorry, your prior character is literally too old to be adventuring at this point." After all, look how old and rusty Han was, and he was only 30 or so years out from his last major outing in RotJ.

42 minutes ago, Edgehawk said:

I am so sorry. I read through your post, but all I can think about is the Jaynestown episode of Firefly.

That's fine, the Rebellion Era portion was basically a reskin of the plot of the film Serenity, where River hijacks the ship and takes them to Miranda. In my story, replace River with Pregnant Girl, and Miranda with Old Republic Campaign world, and you've basically got the gist.

10 minutes ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

I did something similar with an old WEG campaign back in the day (before there was even a hint of the prequels), starting out in what would be the early Dark Times (using what sparse info there was), skipping to about mid-Rebellion Era (year or so past ANH) up to RotJ, then jumping ahead to what would later be the NJO era (though for our campaign the state of galactic affairs was generally better), and then a final jump to what became the final generation and pretty much wrapped up the conflicts with the ancient Sith and the last vestiges of Imperial warlords (we were pretty much making up our own canon by that point).

It worked out pretty well for us, with each arc lasting around 2 to 3 years in game time, which was plenty of time for the PCs to become plenty potent before jumping ahead about 20 years and picking up with the previous generation's kids. I made sure to include plenty of throwbacks and referenes to the deeds, both noble and otherwise, of the prior generations, along with the occasional "guest star mentor" appearance of some of the older PCs, including a particular cantankerous near-human (essentially a WH40K Squat) from the first generation who just kept getting increasingly surly and foul-mouthed as he got older, in addition to an astromech NPC that was handed down from mother to daughter throughout the entire thing.

And it certainly did provide a strong sense of legacy, with one particular family name becoming synonymous with brash heroics and truly horrific eye-rolling puns (remarks were made that by the fourth stretch, it was genetically impossible for members of that family to avoid speaking in sarcasm). But it did take player buy-in to accept that after a certain number of sessions (I used 25 as a general benchmark), the players are going to have to retire those characters and create brand new ones.

There's also the concern that some players may want to keep playing the same characters, just older and expect to be at the same level of ability as when the previous generation's arc ended, or perhaps be more experienced yet. Which can be a problem if several members of the group are indeed starting fresh as the kids of the previous batch of heroes. Of course, it depends on how much of a time skip you're planning between arcs; if the time skip is 50 years or so, then you shouldn't have too much issue as you can say "sorry, your prior character is literally too old to be adventuring at this point." After all, look how old and rusty Han was, and he was only 30 or so years out from his last major outing in RotJ.

Yeah, I was thinking one way to help prevent players wanting to just play older versions of their previous characters, would be to have the setting be far more lethal. I know FFG designed the game to be very forgiving when it comes to a character actually dying, and given how hard it is for some Star Wars characters to stay dead, there is some precedent for it. And in general I fully approve of this design concept. But I think it might be fun to make things just a tad bit more lethal than intended, so you can have situations where the heroes don't necessarily "win". And the next generation of PC's has to deal with growing up in the Bad Ending scenario, so to speak.

I've kind of done something similar -

Ages and ages ago, back when D6 ruled the heavens and Tatooine Manhunt was brand new, we did a bog standard Rebels vs Empire game. As this was my first real go-round with an RPG , there was no real structure or story arc and the game just kind of fell apart without a real ending. We just stopped.

A year or so later, after a bunch of Champions (and some fresh blood at the table), we determined that we really liked those characters and wouldn't it be cool if we did something with them. So we took the old characters, put their era back about 20 years or so (long before we had a notion about E1-3, so we kept the Clone Wars vague) and played offspring or somehow related to the characters (I played the daughter of the Han Solo knock off from the original team). Then we punted slightly down the road with another batch of descendants (I played the granddaughter of the Solo knockoff, with some alien handwavium to age her up slightly).

And then, I went off to collage. I wound up playing the game for an all new set of players, and I took my slightly aged up granddaughter with this fourth generation. By the time all was said and done, we were 10 or so years post the three Thrawn books.

None of the characters have ever shown up in any of the games since then, but we have had cameos from the Solo Knockoff's home planet and a couple of other vague "Oh yeah, I remember that!" namechecks.

On 4/25/2019 at 1:59 PM, KungFuFerret said:

Thoughts from anyone who has tried this? What problems did you run into? How did you work around them? Or just random ideas on how to structure a campaign like this?

I would say you can pull off something like this but it requires less planning ahead.

Rather than predetermining what happens with the callback to the prior campaign, wait until you've finished the first campaign and carry on into the next to throw in your little bites of nostalgia.

The campaign I just wrapped up was with the intent to pick up in the same setting years later, either with the same group or with new characters but with the idea that the players themselves didn't have much of the setting lore to learn outside of what they already knew and a few updates due to the time skip. For various reasons, I ended up ending the campaign and will not be running Star Wars for the foreseeable future but I reserve my right to run it again at a later date.

I originally forsaw it as the group is Padawans, they go out and save the galaxy with the Jedi Order, and we pick up later on when they are Knights and the threats are a little different, non-Sith but still formidable, then maybe pick up when they are Council members and their actions were more about leading the Order and making the hard calls that the Council used to when they were in training. Each arc would be a little different with how it played out and the responsibilities of the characters. However if they lost vs the Sith in the first campaign then we could pick up with new characters trying to stop the tyranny of a new Sith Empire or they would maybe even play characters that were part of the Sith Empire faction, depending on what the group thought was fun.

The game ended with the group surviving but splitting up to pursue their own various goals. If I were to start the group up with a timeskip, the callbacks would depend on whether they played the same characters or not and wouldn't be things I necessarily directed them towards by way of planning ahead but would be things based on their previous game decisions and characters they met. So they might go back to that one planet that was originally at war with various factions and find out that one side dominated the war because they tipped the balance when they were strictly told not to by their business partner at the time. One side would view them as heroes and the remains of the other faction would see them as a great evil that nearly wiped their people out. If they were different characters though maybe they would end up just hearing in passing about what happened.