Does anyone have a link to a thread/webpage/collection of the best adventures (FFG/D20/D6) for Rebels?
There's such a plethora of adventures out there, sorting the wheat from the chaff is a difficult task.
Thread/collection of the best Rebel adventures?
TL DR: No.
I found very early that I don't like "Canned Spam" RPG Modules. Sure they're useful tools for getting your feet wet if you're new to the hobby.
As an intermediate GM, you might skim through a Canned Spam module and farm it for ideas, but if you're comfortable in your craft, you're not grinding your players through a "Module." You need to be ready, if you use a canned spam story, to dismantle the rails and let the PC's fly free.
Now-a-days I might glance at a Canned Spam module as it gathers dust in a resale bin at the FLGS, but for the most part, I find them singularly uninspiring.
And now for anecdote time:
I was participating as a player in a John Carpenter Mars themed mini-campaign (thank goodness for the mini-part on that story) and the GM was running us hard and fast on the rails.
If you're not familiar with that type of campaign, the PC's are heroes from out of town, introduced to a bizarre strange 'Martian' environment with bizarre strange civilizations.
As PC's you get to do heroic things and make life gooder for poor oppressed peoples.
I'll admit that I kinda got into the story and I was enjoying the experience, but after we'd get done with a 'scene' I'd jump in and point out, "hey we just picked up this resource and this would be useful for us to do X then we could use Y from the previous scene and make life better for this group while we prepare to deal with . . ."
And EVERY SINGLE TIME the GM would say, "Oh, no. You can't do that! You need to hop back on the plot train and get dragged to the next scene." (Not an exact quote, but you get the gist).
Pretty quickly, we players stopped trying to figure out how to solve any of the issues and resorted to listening to the flavor text, nod our understanding, and grab our dice as we slugged it out in the next combat encounter.
So this goes on for a couple of weeks and we get to a "Dinner Party" encounter and we get to spend the night waiting for the next event.
Melodramatically, the GM leans in and asks, "So what do you guys do?"
"Sleep? It's night right? We have an appointment early next morning so yeah. Nothing here."
The guy acted all surprised. Oh, I thought you would sneak out and try to secretly meet with party I or consult with party J or . . .
Why?
Every time we had tried to inject ourselves into the story we were shut down. The Canned Spam module didn't permit us to really interact with the story.
And to some extent, this is true for all Canned Spam modules because they don't foster creativity. They kill it.
I've got more to say on this subject, but I've got an appointment.
More later.
Yup, some adventures are poorly written. Some are not. I'm looking for the ones that are not.
I've found several that have been fun for EotE, some that require more tweaks than others, and I'm looking for the same thing here.
Good luck then,
I think once HappyDaze stumbles across this thread he should have some pointers for you.
Anything that I could provide would be how to come up with original content that helps your group with examples on how to pull that kind of stuff off.
3 hours ago, Mark Caliber said:I think once HappyDaze stumbles across this thread he should have some pointers for you.
What was that?
8 hours ago, ddbrown30 said:Does anyone have a link to a thread/webpage/collection of the best adventures (FFG/D20/D6) for Rebels?
There's such a plethora of adventures out there, sorting the wheat from the chaff is a difficult task.
No thread that I know of, especially since what's considered "the best" is highly subjective. It can also boil down to the composition of your group; an adventure that's lauded for being a well-done social-heavy/low-combat adventure is going to tank hard if your group is comprised of a crack team of covert military commandos with the combined social acumen of a senile womp rat.
That said, the WEG adventures from their Classic Adventures series of d6 supplements are probably worth checking out, as they were the greatest hits of WEG's Star Wars tenure, and they are generally written for a party of PCs that are members of the Rebel Alliance (which was their default assumption for nearly all their adventures as well as for the game itself). I can't speak to how accurate that is, as I myself tend not to run canned modules (or at least not run them without a LOT of changes to the point it's more I'm using the module for inspiration than as the actual adventure).
I can't recommend either Onslaught at Arda I or Friends Like These . The former pretty railroad-y while the latter allows you a range of (limited) options... that all suck. Add in the obligatory mass combat scenarios with poor examples of both, and I found them rather unsatisfying. The adventure that comes with the AoR screen is also fairly bad as even a little foresight on the part of the PCs could derail the entire plot, so you either have to force the PCs to make dumb choices or heavily rewrite it.
Classic Adventures tends to have some of the best. I'd say Mission to Lianna is a good one that's not collected in the best of, being a solid infiltration mission. It needs some very minor changes to work with how one piece of technology is handled in works newer than it (which is everything since this was written before Dark Force Rising came out). Plus it can lead naturally to Riders of the Maelstrom with very minor adjustments
Mission to Lianna is to sabotage Imperial cloaking device research. Problem is Stygium cloaking devices already existed by the time of the Rebellion and Hibridium cloaking devices were successfully researched. There's a successful prototype in the story so it can't just changed to something else. This is easy to fix since stygium crystals are stupidly expensive: The research isn't on a cloaking device itself, but synthetic stygium crystals that would allow mass produced devices. You can add some references to Grand Admiral Martio Batch, who had been working on cloaking device research between 0 ABY and 3 ABY, being someone important to the project (but not on Lianna) since all his research by hibridium based cloaks was a failure.
The end of MtL is trying to get off Lianna with rather open options. RotM starts with the PCs evading Imperials and escaping onto the Kuari Princess. You can make this more natural by having one of their contacts give them tickets and suggest it. Just have them dropped off on Lianna since they'll never abandon their ship if they have one. edit: The default path of the Kuari Princess will need some changes to account for the much longer distance (the stops given are explicitly just window dressing) and tell the PCs they are to regroup at someplace, just change the location of the Maelstorm or ignore it and hope your players don't notice (Lianna is the only planet involved The Essential Atlas has on the map)
I particularly enjoyed the scope of Black Ice and the mood of Planet of the Mists, both of which are old d6 System adventures.
-Nate
I'm running "Dead in the Water" (The adventure that came with the AoR screen), and I think it's one of the best adventure modules I've seen in any system. Definitely not a railroad. Lots of options and avenues for the party to engage with, with a meaningful countdown that pushes them towards doing something. The adventure writer really took into account for a lot of outside-the-box solutions.
I really like DitW as well, but it does hitch on your players falling for the ruse of the sabotaged droids. But that one is easy to pull off if your players aren't typically the paranoid "how is the GM going to screw us over today" type.
On 7/12/2019 at 7:21 AM, Mark Caliber said:And EVERY SINGLE TIME the GM would say, "Oh, no. You can't do that! You need to hop back on the plot train and get dragged to the next scene."
That's just terrible GMing. When I ran a couple of the old WEG games - Tatooine Manhunt and Shantipole - for my group (who admittedly had already played them, but that was back in the 90's), they went flying all over the map. I thought it was kind of fun trying to adjust on the fly to what they were doing and still being able to connect the dots where they needed to go next. It was like herding cats while keeping the spinning plates on sticks from falling off. At the same time.
I would have made a **** of a Gong Show act.