Hello fellow GMs,

I plan on playing Beyond the Rim during our next session. After reading the adventure it feels a little weird, and as I am bad on writing my own adventures and using mostly prewritten ones I usually change those somewhat.

First of all the characters stumbled upon the emergency beacon from the Sa Nalaor a couple of sessions ago. The computer wiz could crack the thing by now and finds out that it is addressed at Reom's father. From there the players have to investigate the background stuff themselves. (Only Reom can get to the emergency message.)

What else did you change in this adventure?

Thanks for any help!

The only thing I changed was how the players got into the whole thing. They were going to the Wheel to have a chat with Reom at the behest of their Hutt patron. The Hutt had made an investment in Reom's business but hadn't 'checked in' with the Hutt for some time. When the players arrived, they discovered that Reom had the pod, but didn't have the manpower to follow up on the information it contained. He sold the players on the pod leading to the Sa Nalaor, and that it would contain treasures from the Seperatists that their Hutt patron would be interested in.

I had to change a lot because my NPC got really sketched out by the villagers, especially Harsol. They tried to sneak out of the village during the night, trying to convince Cratala (sp) to come with, and steal plans and whatever else they could find. They didn't want any of the other villagers with them, it was quite amusing how prejudiced they treated the "dirty separatists."

edit: NPC's

Oh, good old Beyond the Rim. This one has a lot of riffable material for players and GMs alike. This was the first big adventure my group did; and remarkably, I had to change very little. My players were the crew of a couple small tramp freighters and were already pretty adventure-minded. One of them wanted to get into business, and another was working to bring down an evil Rodian clan.

My advice would be to tie in player obligations and motivations as much as possible, and drop some threads to any future plots you may have planned. The beauty of Beyond the Rim as a whole is that it's not dependent on anything playing out in a specific way, from its smaller details to its outcome. (The only partial exception is the Blockade Bandit set-piece, which works best if the players decide to hold up their end of the bargain with IsoTech.) Put as much character into IsoTech staff as possible- I gave Shira a fair amount of screen-time and made her sort of a Watson to Reom's Holmes. Norta is a good character to make use of, also- my players grew quite fond of him. (I recommend giving him a crazy New Zealand accent.) Also, make sure to lower the difficulty of negotiating with Rel Harsol if your players have put effort into mounting an honest rescue. IsoTech's deal is not a bad one. Last, definitely give your players an opportunity to recover some of the treasure from the Sa Nalaor. It can cause immense logistical problems for them if they decide to do it right away, which is fun. It can also make for a fun side adventure if they come back for it later, especially since the Yiyar clan knows about it now.

So, one of the players was really interested in the sort of business IsoTech was doing, so the party as a whole got pretty involved with the company and still are as the campaign draws to a close. The other player's Rodian nemeses wer a stand-in for the Yiyar- they got a lot of screen time and became EVERYONE'S Nemeses. Rogue One put Kyle Katarn out of the job, so I dropped him in as an ISB deputy. He survived Cholganna and Raxus Prime and has since became the players' own Agent Kallus. I had plans to do Jewel of Yavin sometime later, so Arend Shen was introduced at The Wheel and gave the players a side mission to recover some Jedi artefacts from the Sa Nalaor- gave me a chance to use some of the hazards written up for the stern section. (Afterward, Shen has been a source of additional dungeon crawls any time we needed a change of pace or theme.) I also did an encounter with an abandoned salvager scout ship- it happened very early in the Cholganna portion of the adventure and was only meant to give a player a Y-Wing to sink some money into, but the players ran with the idea and started preparing to deal with another rival party or some additional unknown group- that was pretty fun.

That should at least give you some ideas. Have fun!

I adapted Beyond the Rim quite a bit to fit into the over-arching plot lines of my Edge of Empire campaign.

1) Since my PCs were already involved in growing a medical clinic *and* trying to find a cure for an Imperial virus, I expanded Cratala's backstory to intersect with the PCs interests. Their main motivation for going after the Sa Nalaor was thus to gain access to Cratala's medical notes and get her to help them work on a cure to the modern humans-only version of a virus she herself had created to specifically target clones back during the Clone Wars.

2) My PCs never even met Reom. They were on the Wheel for a different reason entirely when they found out he had the message pod and then broke into his shop to steal it before he'd managed to get it working enough to extract all the information it contained. Thus we had one session for this heist, and another session in which the PCs stole materials from a museum exhibit on the Clone Wars to get all the tech they needed to patch up this old timey message pod.

3) Since one of my PCs was raised by B1 battle droids aboard a Separatist vessel, her family provided some of the necessary background information. I didn't use the protocol droid from the book; one of the PC's B1 cousins had worked on Cratala's space station and had a crush on her. He insisted on coming along, hoping to see her again. Harsol and Cratala both recognize that droid, which made them willing to hear out the PCs, even though they hadn't been sent by IsoTech.

4) Instead of the Rodian clan from the book, my PCs were up against a Hutt-sponsored group that contained an old nemesis of theirs who used to be ISB. Reom had gone to the Hutts after the message pod was stolen, since they had enough resources to send groups to multiple planets in the area in which Reom believed the Sa Nalaor to be. The climax of the whole adventure came in the survivor encampment when Harsol posed his set of questions to both the PCs (there for personal reasons) and the Hutt group (there on behalf of IsoTech). For each question, I had both the PC and the NPC spokesperson give their response and roll an influence skill. I kept track of how well they were doing persuading Harsol, Cratala, and the crowd. I let them use advantages to learn about Harsol and Cratala's motivations (Genesys-style) to help them tailor their comments better. The questions were 1) How did you find the Sa Nalaor? 2) What is the current state of the Empire? 3) What personally brought you specifically here?

5) The Hutt contingent did not do well in the debate. Rather than have the ISB show up and attack, I had the Hutt contingent try to steal the data core from the encampment overnight while Harsol was deliberating.

6) The final act in the published module really felt tacked on to me. It made little sense to me that Reom would hire the PCs on the Wheel, but then tell them to deliver their findings to an Imperial-run world. Why not just meet back up at IsoTech? Even if I hadn't made any of the above changes, I wouldn't have run that third act. So Raxus Prime wasn't a part of our version at all. (However, I did use some of Act III's colorful junk world features when my players were in the Scraplands of Ord Mantell during Mask of the Pirate Queen. But that's another story....)