Hi guys,

I recently started playing EotE with my friends and am now trying to write my own campaign. The players are quite experienced with roleplay games such as Pathfinder and Shadowrun, and really love the EotE system because of its narrative nature and its dice rules. Now I need a bit help from creative minds as I have trouble coming up with the middle part of the campaign.

So far we played 'Escape from Mos Shuuta' and 'The Long Arm of the Hutt'. In the first adventure, when the players visited the junk yard, the one who played 41-VEX talked the R5 droid into helping them steal the part they needed and joining them on their escape, to which the R5 droid agreed. Since, the player called their group the 'droid liberation front' and tried to free all of the droids they encountered for the rest of the campaign, which has been great fun.

Now I want to incorporate this in the new campaign. We already agreed to build new characters with a new story for the players, so I thought it might be fun to use the droid liberation front as the bad guys in this campaign. I was planning on starting the campaign by simply playing the prepared adventure 'Debt To Pay' as this perfectly fits the theme. (***SPOILER ALERT***) In this adventure the players are sent to a mining facility by a hutt and when they arrive there is no one there except for a few droids. During the adventure the players find dead bodies and finally realise that the droids were the ones who turned on their masters, who fled into the mine shaft. The droids were acting up for quite some time due to not getting sufficient maintenance and finally did this because an EV supervisor droid, who was bought by the mining company to control them, instead organised a revolt. I would only change two things about this session:

1. The plot hook: I'd rather have a (two-legged) business man asking for the players' help or just the players getting a distress call from the mining facility, as the players recently had a bad experience with a hutt and I think they wouldn't trust Bargos now.

2. The reason why the EV droid didn't work as intended and instead started a rebellion would be that 41-VEX managed to tamper with the programming of several EV droids in the hope that wherever droids rebelled in the galaxy, their oppressors would probably buy a supervisor droid and then those could spark the rebellion (so 41-VEX's goal is basically that all over the galaxy the EV droids would organise revolts, then steal ships and return to him with freed droids, so he can build a private army).

However I don't want the PCs to find out about that so early - I'd rather have two or three sessions in between where they slowly realise the great, evil plan before they finally find and kill 41-VEX (who now has a new body made from different parts of various battle droids) in an abandoned part of the MerenData droid factory (I'd steal the setting from the finale from 'Under The Black Sun' for this).

So as you can see I have the beginning and the end figured out, but I stole almost everything from existing campaigns. I could play the story like this if I just gave them the information about 41-VEXs evil plan in the data memory of the EV droid or from a spy network or something but this would feel a little too short as a campaign and I think there's more juice in this story. What do you think should happen in the middle part? How can I keep the players invested in the story while giving them just enough information so they can slowly figure out what is going on?

You could plan the campaign more episodical and "sandbox" as it is, so you can hide the real plot in the background.

Let them have non-connected adventures and from time to time sneak some crazy droids in:

A Protocol Droid assassinates (or at least tries to) some important political figure which tries to take control of some facilities - some of them producing droids.

Strange things happen on a small shadow port operated by a criminal syndicate. Maybe some horror or mystery-themed session where it turns out that the security droids of the criminals are trying to kill their masters and run the business in their place (to get Vex a source of income).

Stumbling over a bunch of disguised Droids working as Slavers as it is "just fair to treat them as they treat us..."

Receiving a distress call from a ship where a handfull of droids are trying to rescue their masters and fight the "freedom" they were promised by some "Pirate-Droids" (this could also work as the final lead where this is going).

So just hide the bigger Picture and let them guess that there is something wrong with all those droids and then introduce them to the first clues, where this could lead to.

Thanks, that's a great idea - this way I won't have to plan everything out in the beginning and I can slowly build the story without making the plot too obvious.

Did anyone already incorporate the idea of droid liberation or droid rebellions in their campaigns? What are your experiences? Do you have advice or any cool ideas?

11 hours ago, BeautifulMoustache said:

Did anyone already incorporate the idea of droid liberation or droid rebellions in their campaigns? What are your experiences? Do you have advice or any cool ideas?

We had some experiences that you might be able to draw from. Our droid issues were centered around one that really wanted to get rid of organics, but that might be useful to you, as an intermediate villain inspired by your 41-VEX's teachings.

My group played Quarantine Quandary , and there is a droid (Killjoy) in that module focused on getting rid of the organics. They blasted it to bits in the final combat, but the Outlaw Tech could not resist removing some pieces of the droid brain for later study. <cue ominous foreshadowing>

A few months later, while in Cloud City to steal the Jewel of Yavin, the crew met another droid (CH-1) who had in years past betrayed and stolen astrogation charts from the crew's astromech, R4-W9. Since CH-1 was focused on improving itself as much as possible, the Outlaw Tech made a deal with CH-1 to trade some advanced slicing modules (part of Killjoy's brain) to get back the astrogation charts for R4. The Outlaw Tech still retained one last part of Killjoy's brain.

While on Cloud City, R4-W9 had been left guarding the ship and had been tricked by an Imperial officer to let him on board when no one else was around. Some of the crew was quite upset about that when they found out, and R4 felt really bad about failing the crew. R4 decided to improve the ship's security by installing a slicing module it found in Engineering (the last part of Killjoy's brain). R4 did not tell anyone about doing this. When the ship was en route from Cloud City back to the crew's home base, we had an episode in which the hyperdrive fizzled out and they were stuck dead in the water, while their astromech was acting bizarre and things were going wrong on the ship. In addition to sabotaging the hyperdrive, R4 had doped their food with avabush spice, so everyone was suffering the effects of that. Ultimately, they disabled R4 before it could space them all and tracked down the source of the problem. Their ship's computers were infected with the "Killjoy virus" and that had spread to the astromech when it had accessed the navicomputer to plot their most recent jump. They reset their ship computer to the factory default and performed surgery on their astromech to cure it. They thought they were done with Killjoy at that point.

Months later, they returned to Cloud City. Members of the crew were still "persons of interest" in the Jewel of Yavin robbery, so they sought out Lando Calrissian to try to get their records cleared. Cloud City at that time was experiencing a series of brownouts and there had been some power cascades that had damaged tibanna processing. The crew offered to sort out the issue in exchange for dropping any charges against them. In their investigation, they found evidence that pointed to the Killjoy virus being in the Cloud City networks. City droids with restraining bolts were behaving oddly, and when they tried to meet with Lobot, they found him almost catatonic, locked in some internal struggle against Killjoy. Based on interviews they conducted along the way, it also seemed like CH-1 was involved. They suspected CH-1/Killjoy was in the city's computer core and took some preparatory actions before heading down to engage. They convinced the local underground slicing community to simultaneously attack city systems to distract Killjoy. They also convinced a local gang to head to the streets with baseball bats, whacking restraining bolts off city-owned droids (offering a payout for each restraining bolt handed in) to decrease Killjoy's army of assistants. Then they made their way down to the city's computer core, past municipal droids of many forms who tried to obstruct them. Once there, they fought Killjoy in CH-1's heavily-augmented chassis, and when that was disabled, the virus retreated entirely to the computer core. They had a slicing battle with it there, forcing it into a data-breaker which they destroyed and then verifying that they had eradicated every last vestige of the virus from the computer systems... all while the city was plummeting into the toxic layers of Bespin's atmosphere, of course, to cleanse it of organics. They also resuscitated CH-1 because the Outlaw Tech felt responsible for what had happened to it. (For this adventure, I drew upon the WEG module Crisis on Cloud City for inspiration.) A side effect of all this was that a lot of droids on Cloud City were now "liberated," and some might still agree with Killjoy's views on organics, while others were just trying to figure out what to do with their new-found autonomy. That was fallout that the crew did not really stick around to deal with, though the Outlaw Tech did talk to Lando about improving the rights of independent droids in his city (which resonated a lot with Lando, given his long-lost love from "Solo").

The crawl for that follows, which I include because it was from Killjoy's perspective.

It is a disgusting time in the galaxy. Filthy ORGANICS spread their contagions across many worlds. The only way to truly eradicate the diseases they carry is to cleanse their habitats. Imperial bases and pirate space stations are easy targets compared with an entire metropolis like CLOUD CITY.

Finally, a chance to make a real difference in the galaxy is within reach of droid crusader KILLJOY. However, weeks of patient planning and careful experiments are now threatened by the arrival of old enemies. It is time to step up the schedule...

I stumbled across a Legends . . . legend(?) about one of the IG droids going all anti sophont and leading a robot revolt!

From my campaign:

I also found that Mechis (L14) is an industrial world with a contract to manufacture droids by the lot. It's an HIGHLY automated production facility with about 20 human (or sophont) operators who supervise a planetwide robot production facility (including mining & refinery operations) with the sole output being robots.

So IG, along with his compatriots decided to visit and re-purpose the facilities to manufacture an army . . .

And to add sauce to the goose, IG had picked up a couple of Proxy droids (Sith training droids that can take on the appearance of Jedi [anyone really] and wield light sabers for effective training). So these Proxy Droids can pass as a sophonts, including the former staff on Mechis.

The hook that I used for my PC's was that they were contracted to pick up a delivery of droids (Astromech's in my case) for their client, after the client had received a message that their shipment was ready for pick-up.

But by the time the PC's had arrived, Mechis was "under new management" who tried to kill the PC's.

When Plan 'A' failed, the PC's found themselves being attacked by upgraded B1-B Battle Droids. LOT's of them!

And since this plot wasn't foiled . . . the droids are planning to secure transport ships so that they can move on to their next phase of their operation . . .

I'll be able to elaborate more . . . later (or PM me for details).