The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers - Star Wars Campaign idea

By Marc1080, in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG

Hi everyone.

Long story short. I'm a veteran d&d gm who is known to build his own campaign.
However I'm new to the FFG Star Wars system. With my players we finished the beginners game Escape from Mos Shuuta.
Currently we are going trough the follow-up story of The Long arm of the Hutt.
Hopefully when the story is compleded will my players and I have a feel for the system.

I'm currently brainstorming about a couple of ideas one of the ideas I had was a Firefly kind of setting, somewhere between Episode III and IV.
We dicussed this already with my players and some had already some character ideas.

An other idea I have is a campaign build upon The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers (An space western cartoon from the 80s).
With the Sector Rangers does Star Wars have something similar.
Sector Rangers are mostly assigned to provide law enforcement services in the farthest stretches of space and usually traveled in pairs or groups of four.

The current idea for a setting: Early years of the New Republic.
After the fall of the Empire and the rise of the New Republic are the Sector Rangers, once a noble law enforcement community, rebuilding.
The players could new be members of Sector Rangers or be deputized by a senior Ranger.
The New Jedi Order also exist in it's early stages. The Sector Rangers (players) could support the New Jedi order in mission.
This allowes for my players to play as a Jedi as well, as I'm planning to allow all the 18 classes from the three books.

I'm currently looking into adapting Trouble Brewing into a campaign starter.
The R4 unit part of this adventure could well be an former Jedi R4 unit who who has some information which could lead to some Jedi-artifact or even lost temple.

To which degree I have to involve the Jedi will depend on the classes my players choose.
As mentioned I'm playing with some options. However I'm looking for some inspiration. Any ideas?

Exact same idea that came up in our group a few weeks ago. One player, a Firefly fan, suggested it. Even made his character based on... "My first idea is a young idealist (male, handsome, possibly human) - friendly, outgoing but with a bit of a wild side." As a group, we went with the Sector Ranger idea, too.

I would have a couple of suggestions.

1) Consider not allowing jedi (for this campaign). Once you go down the jedi path, it can tend to consume a campaign. How'd you get force powers? You a jedi? After the fall, do jedi just spring up everywhere? Are their darkside users out there? Sith? Is everyone taught by Luke? Leia? Etc.... It is just SO MANY questions and decisions to make to figure out how and why one or more characters can do what they can do. For us, it just means headaches in trying to have it all make sense.

If someone DOES choose to play a jedi (force-user), then to what extent do they expect it to play out? Is it just some guy/gal who pilots better than others for some uncertain reason? Or, are we talking full-blown guardian-consular-whatever? For our group, we have difficulty jiving the FaD careers and such with Luke, Leia, Vader, and what we saw on the movie screen. The partial-jedi group usually (again, with us) seems to have that character on a different path than the others. Everyone wants one thing...the jedi want to find some relic or learn a power.

OTOH, one cool idea is that Luke personally sought out a few people with "the gift" and sent them on missions as sector rangers (maybe in search of relics). That could work.

2) Have the Empire exist in remnants. In the void the Empire left, systems need law and order. But it's always cool to throw in some Empire here and there. Have you considered Thrawn in any way? Or at least some of his schemes. The rangers seek to re-establish law and order, yet an Imperial remnant also seeks to re-take the system.

In Legends, if I remember, Corsec (Corellian Security) has rangers that operated across sectors. I think that author was influenced by the Texas Rangers, especially the show with Chuck Norris.

11 hours ago, DurosSpacer said:

1) Consider not allowing jedi (for this campaign). Once you go down the jedi path, it can tend to consume a campaign. How'd you get force powers? You a jedi? After the fall, do jedi just spring up everywhere? Are their darkside users out there? Sith? Is everyone taught by Luke? Leia? Etc.... It is just SO MANY questions and decisions to make to figure out how and why one or more characters can do what they can do. For us, it just means headaches in trying to have it all make sense.

I'll respectfully disagree with this, as I don't think those tacit questions necessarily need answering. Luke had about 2 minutes of training with Obi-wan, and one great lesson about letting the Force guide you when he lobbed the bombs into the Death Star. But that was enough to learn a bit of Sense (which he already had), Enhance, and Move. After all, somebody figured it out thousands of years earlier, probably mostly on their own. Plus there's E8 and the kid with the broom at the end...whatever you may think about the movie as a whole, I think that part is truest to the SW universe: Force users are always popping up, and people are always learning on their own. Really, the only point of the Jedi is to teach clarity of vision, and that "with great power comes great responsibility". So you don't need to account for Jedi, or Luke, or anybody else to have a PC with Force powers.

Granted if the player wants to dive immediately into the flashy stuff it does kind of break with the general perception of how effective the Force can be in untrained hands, and I think the OP should feel well within his rights to put limits or prerequisites on how much and what can be learned. Enhance, the left side of Sense, and Move with a single Magnitude is plenty for FR1&2. Enhance on its own is flippin' amazing, all the better because it can fly under the radar of [insert whoever might be watching]. If the player just wants to throw lightning around, I'd tell them take a Heavy instead...

15 hours ago, DurosSpacer said:

1) Consider not allowing jedi (for this campaign). Once you go down the jedi path, it can tend to consume a campaign. How'd you get force powers? You a jedi? After the fall, do jedi just spring up everywhere? Are their darkside users out there? Sith? Is everyone taught by Luke? Leia? Etc.... It is just SO MANY questions and decisions to make to figure out how and why one or more characters can do what they can do. For us, it just means headaches in trying to have it all make sense.

If someone DOES choose to play a jedi (force-user), then to what extent do they expect it to play out? Is it just some guy/gal who pilots better than others for some uncertain reason? Or, are we talking full-blown guardian-consular-whatever? For our group, we have difficulty jiving the FaD careers and such with Luke, Leia, Vader, and what we saw on the movie screen. The partial-jedi group usually (again, with us) seems to have that character on a different path than the others. Everyone wants one thing...the jedi want to find some relic or learn a power

First of all they are all legitimate questions and questions we usually tackle during a session 0. I'm not planning to limit my players on which class they can choose.

When my players come up with the character concept I always ask for two things:
What is the character short term goal (usually the reason for starting adventuring)?
What is the character long term goal?
During the session 0 we get in to work on how a party can come together.
Think of it the adventure the Jewel of Yavin could easy work in to a story where the pressence of (even mutiple) Jedi make sense.
And yes a Force user doesn't have to be a trained Jedi. You could indeed have the guy/gal who pilots better than others for some uncertain reason (sentinel racer).

15 hours ago, DurosSpacer said:

2) Have the Empire exist in remnants. In the void the Empire left, systems need law and order. But it's always cool to throw in some Empire here and there. Have you considered Thrawn in any way? Or at least some of his schemes. The rangers seek to re-establish law and order, yet an Imperial remnant also seeks to re-take the system.

I'm definitely planning to have the Empire remnants out there. As stated I'm planning to let the campaign start in the early days of the New Republic.
Thrawn, maybe. This would put the campaing more into a military/strategig settling instead of a frontier lawman kind of game.
Let Thrawn be a pirate admiral or somthing. It's something I have to think about...

8 hours ago, Daeglan said:

Check out Antarian Rangers on wookiee

I know of the Antarian Rangers. One of my players was toying with this idea of have the Antarian Ranger as his background of our Firefly campaign.
Malcolm Reynolds not as a Browncoat, but a former Ranger and hunted down after order 66 by the Empire due to it's connection to the former Jedi-order.

Nothing wrong with the Antarian Rangers, but they are more (para)military force than frontier lawman's.

4 hours ago, Edgookin said:

In Legends, if I remember, Corsec  (Corellian Security) has rangers that operated across sectors. I think that author was influenced by the Texas Rangers, especially the show with Chuck Norris.

I'm planning to use Star Wars Legends material for my campaing ideas. And given the ranks I see the influence of the Texas Rangers.
Unfortunately lore wise this doesn't work very well.
Acoording to the lore is CorSec only a planetary law enforcement agency. Think of it as a City PD instead of well, the Texas Rangers or State Troopers.
Second lore problem was CorSec replaced by the public safety Service during the time of the New Republic.

Of course what is determine "lore" in a tabletop RPG is always up to the GM

Edited by Marc1080

Not sure if you found out about the Sector Rangers from my work in the Clone Wars books, or if you knew about them from the prior EU or wookieepedia. But...

1.) If you want to find out how the Sector Rangers fit into the Old Republic government, check out Rise of the Separatists, where they get mentioned in the context of the Republic.

2.) https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sector_Ranger There is a fair amount of legends info there that can still help you out, along with some character names you can use for NPCs.

3.) If you're looking for campaign concepts, a rogue Sector Ranger that the party now has to hunt down is always a cool start. Maybe that sector ranger has good reason for doing what he's doing. Maybe he's deep undercover. Maybe hte people running the sector rangers are the truly corrupt ones, maybe this one ranger just went bad, and wants to form a crime syndicate that will plague the PCs for the whole campaign. I think the important elements for a successful Sector Rangers campaign are to have investigations across multiple planets and varied environments, shoot outs, and maybe even a few courtroom drama scenes thrown in sparingly. Thematically, the campaign is exploring what justice looks like in the galaxy far, far away, so you want to show it from a lot of different angles, and show where it's working and where it's not, and see what your PCs do!

Enjoy the campaign!

1 hour ago, KRKappel said:

Not sure if you found out about the Sector Rangers from my work in the Clone Wars books, or if you knew about them from the prior EU or wookieepedia. But...

1.) If you want to find out how the Sector Rangers fit into the Old Republic government, check out Rise of the Separatists, where they get mentioned in the context of the Republic.

2.) https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sector_Ranger There is a fair amount of legends info there that can still help you out, along with some character names you can use for NPCs.

3.) If you're looking for campaign concepts, a rogue Sector Ranger that the party now has to hunt down is always a cool start. Maybe that sector ranger has good reason for doing what he's doing. Maybe he's deep undercover. Maybe hte people running the sector rangers are the truly corrupt ones, maybe this one ranger just went bad, and wants to form a crime syndicate that will plague the PCs for the whole campaign. I think the important elements for a successful Sector Rangers campaign are to have investigations across multiple planets and varied environments, shoot outs, and maybe even a few courtroom drama scenes thrown in sparingly. Thematically, the campaign is exploring what justice looks like in the galaxy far, far away, so you want to show it from a lot of different angles, and show where it's working and where it's not, and see what your PCs do!

Enjoy the campaign!

I grew up with the Star Wars EU now Legends material, so I'm planning to get inspiration from this for my campaign.
And yes I know Wookieepedia, but the Sector Rangers are also discussed in the EotE CRB. I don't have Rise of the Separatists yet.

A successful campaign need indeed have investigation across multiple planets and environments, shoot outs and courtroom drama's.... Let the Diplomat Advocate work for it's money.
According to Legends material are the Sector Rangers partially reorganized into the NRSF (New Republic Security Force).
Members of the NRSF were part frontier law enforcement officer, part counter-intelligence operatives and hunting down Imperial spies and terrorists.
This could work very well in "exploring what justice looks like in the galaxy far, far away".

I like your idea of the rogue Sector Ranger...
This rogue Sector Ranger could be from the Imperial era. The players could be members of the newly created NRSF.
If some of my players want to play as a Jedi I could have a former Inquisitor as well...

Edit:
I just checked the canon material as well on the subject of the NRSB (New Republic Security Bureau).
The NRSB made use of bounty hunters to capture Imperial fugitives and solicit the services of freelance investigative slicers...

Edited by Marc1080