Hello All:

So, while I think it would be extremely easy to come up with campaign ideas for the types of Star Wars campaigns that take center stage in the movies and in past iterations of the RPG, I think Edge of the Empire sorta takes the "Wars" out of Star Wars. Yes, there's certainly fighting, but I think we can all agree that it is not the PRIMARY goal of the game to deal with the Rebellion, the Clone Wars, The Vong Invasion, the Sith Wars, the Old Republic Cold Wars and so on. That's not what you're meant to do.

It seems to me that this game wants you to play those poor sods you see face down in their Blue Milk during the Cantina Scene in A New Hope. The dredges and the dregs. The guys who live to scrape by - who become successful because they lower their expectations, or they make marks and take scores. Kinda like the movie "******" or it's equally clever (if packed with almost impenetrable Brit-Slang) predecessor "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels".

Trying to think up a campaign (or even singular adventures) for those guys is a bit harder than I thought. It takes a special group to actually WANT to play the hard knocked and hard done by.

So, I was thinking maybe we could give each other a hand. I did have one idea I thought might work, so lemme start:

This one doesn't have a working title yet, but it's set a little closer to Episode III than Episode IV. Shortly after Palpatine's takeover, the Imperial armed forces have established themselves and either absorbed or swept away much of the Old Republic's military. Though many still use old Clone Wars tech, that's rapidly changing. One young archaeologist - the progeny of an important Imperial Moff - can clearly see that under this New Order, s/he's gonna have a helluva time financing digs into old, forgotten places on the fringes of the Galaxy. Being young, she is also rather ambitious and decides that the best way to get sponsored (without having to go to the Corporate Sector, where sponsorship is directly tied to how much profit a find can garner) is to convince the Emperor himself that there are powerful treasures just beyond the reach of his Order - treasures that haven't been discovered yet, but lie waiting for those bold enough to claim them. Using his or her parental influence, she manages to wrangle an audience with the Emperor (in reality of course, the Emperor sets this all up for his own amusement and to see if s/he can make her case) and puts it bluntly to his Majesty "We need to recover these ancient artifacts, as an example of Imperial Might, as a means to power and most importantly - to keep these treasures out of the hands of our enemies." The Emperor is rather impressed by his or her zeal and gives he or she a commission in the Imperial Fleet as a Commander. He gives her a small (for the Imperial Navy) prototype ship and a complement of equipment and personnel. He gives her free reign to explore and produce results - much like Grand Admiral Thrawn but with a less combative mandate (and s/he doesn't have to worry about getting murdered by Vader unless s/he gets out of the galaxy as Thrawn did).

But, as an archaeologist, this rising Imperial darling had a teacher. One who kept in contact with him or her right up until s/he joined up with Palpatine. Now his or her Professor is appalled by what they realize will be a horrible thing for the galaxy. But what can the Prof do? The Prof has no political clout, no true influence. All the Prof has is information and a good chunk of an old family fortune. But the Prof alights on an idea. One of the Prof's older students - a promising archaeologist in their own right before a family tragedy put them on the skids (or maybe the Empire? Or something to do with the Clone Wars?). At the time, terrible words were exchanged between Prof and student causing a rift, but now, this former student may be the Galaxy's only hope to keep priceless treasures (some of which are very powerful) from the hands of the Empire. That student will have to do whatever it takes, find the treasures first, steal them, swindle them and ****** them. But that student is gonna need a ship….and some help from a motley bunch of unlikely and unorthodox treasure hunters….

So, yeah, that's my idea. I welcome thoughts about it and really urge you to put up your own! No idea is dumb! No adventure is too trivial! Stick-em up here and let us look at-em!

Iktotchi Jinz and the Raiders of the Lost Holocron. Iktotchi Jinz and the Temple of the Sith. Iktotchi Jinz and the Last Hyperspace War. Iktotchi Jinz and the Planet of the Lightsaber Crystals. Oh sure I see plenty of opportunity here.

mouthymerc said:

Hey now, it's better than your contribution. Or mine for that matter.

EngageEight said:

Not sure if you are taking a shot at me, but I was being serious. The titles are just my way of showing that. They could all be used for inspiration for adventures ( the Indiana movies, that is).

Sorry. I thought you were being sarcastic. My bad. :/

EngageEight said:

No problem.

The Indie movies would be good inspiration for something like this. Stormtroopers for Nazis. Emperor's Hands or Imperial Inquisitors for the opposing archaeologists. Or the way to introduce a lost tribe of Sith such as in the Iktotchi Jinz and the Temple of the Sith adventure. Or some other fringe group. Hutts could be the bad guys. All kinds of fun there.

mouthymerc said:

And when you consider that the Indiana Jones series was written (at least partially) by the same guy who wrote Star Wars it's not that far fetched.

As I further develop the campaign idea, I will put it up, but the Merc isn't far off from what I had in mind.

Definitely a great idea for a campaign!

Thanks EngageEight. What about you, do you have any ideas for a campaign?

I sprinkled some additions throughout the introductory adventure to set up future events. My players started off as passengers on a ship whose captain is killed during a pirate attack. Searching the ship afterwards, they discovered numerous fake IDs, disguises, and an encrypted data pad. So in addition to the adventure as written, they're trying to piece together who this captain actually was and what he was doing. It's something I can tease out for as long or as short as I want, and, since they've taken over his ship, can get them into all kinds of predicaments (they've already run afoul of the corrupt Imperial officer who had been taking a cut of the captain's earnings in exchange for looking the other way).

Corradus said:

Not really. The last one i was working on was for the old system; very sith oriented and might be really difficult to run using EotE.

I love the idea of a pulpy adventure campaign, but I agree that getting players to take on the fringe roles takes some convincing. I went back to my shelf of old WEG stuff and starting looking at ideas from the Scouts and Criminal Organizations Galaxy Guides.

I would like to run some bounty hunter adventures, and my group includes a droid player who could take on that role. I am working on how I can guide them towards taking on a job that some of the other characters would not necessarily choose on their own.

I was thinking about starting with a Maltese Falcon style treasure hunt that leads into the discovery that one of the gangsters who double-crossed my player crew has a price on his head high enough to tempt anyone living in the Outer Rim.

I don't have a lot of time to homebrew my campaigns, so I have done some cribbing from short adventure ideas in the old WEG materials. I conveniently have a copy of the Instant Adventures book. If anyone has that book, I am considering using Heavy Lifting as a follow up to the scenario in the back of the EotE book. The hook of the Heavy Lifting adventure is getting a Hutt gangster off the planet because he is on the run from a powerful rival. The payoff for success would be a hint about a treasure that could lead into my Maltese Falcon idea.

At any rate, I seem to have a stable group of five players, and I am looking forward to enjoying more fun times with the EotE rules.

EngageEight said:

I feel your pain. When I heard there was a new Star Wars paper and pencil RPG out, I immediately dreamed of restarting an old Saga campaign called Sons of Mandalore - where PC's took the roles of ARC Troopers and the campaign was partially set during the Clones Wars and partially after Episode III. Guess I have a year or so to wait for that one eh?

MetalJedi said:

Heh, yeah, I guess Heavy Lifting would be a good name for a campaign where you have to save a Hutt's big butt. I think it would make a great adventure!

I hear ya. In the meantime, speaking of pulp, there is a company called griffon publishing that has some excellent pulp scenario PDFs.

They are based around the 1930s, but i found it easy to modify the story material to Star Wars/saga. You might want to check them out.

For my, rather diverse and messed up group of deviants, these are my seeds/plots to work with from backgrounds and the like:

• The doctor in the group (a Mengele type, with conscience and hatred for old employer: ie imps) has heard about a secret project on Kashyyk, involving some "pals" from the old days. The character is not rebel material. The type of missions: sabotage, loot, acquire new tech, to sell or get an edge against (other?) pirates or smugglers. Two villains, an ISD captain and a army colonel - the latter being completely disturbed, the former only ambitious. So secret tech and science installations - this is as good as any treasure hunt, perhaps a bit more difficulty - although I'd say they are about equal, you only know you have to shoot stormies when going with this, safe old stormies, no monsters, odd-job aliens … or wait…

• Since I used the intro adventure, my players are in Sinasu's "care" - they did good and messed up the end for Cordol and Naoko. This means the turf war goes on. It means a hutt has it in for the group, and a bounty hunter lost rep and all his friends - to some upstarts with a rusty freighter (add bounty obligation anyone? ). They could either climb in the organisation - going from smugglers, to hired guns to pirates, perhaps even personal security. This means power, wealth and a lot of enemies. On this note I have two options for me, and perhaps my players, which is to use one of the background/obligations as something potentially positive (if they want power, [more or less] independence and hard work) - the one blackmailing the force sensitive assassin (yeah, I know, bad idea) is trying to re-establish the Exchange (which in my timeline has been dormant and all but non-existent for a LONG time) and could offer or be found out by the players - plot, drama, intrigue = fun. This could also be extended to the GenoHaradan guild, which I think the assassin and rodian gadgeteer would like - not that anyone in this gaming group has played KOTOR or any of those games.

• Exploration plots I would like. I want the players to search the unknown regions - but so far I have nothing, although a starmap and some old legends might help. A map won in a game of sabbac. This could be anything from Jones to the Da Vinci code inspired.

• You've always got the Minos Cluster (for those that have the Tramp Freighters books from WEG at least). Tons of fun, unless you've already played "it all". I'm just reading up on it myself, a corrupt and interesting sector. I just need the players to go there, at the moment they're braving Nar Shaddaa, even if Naoko and Cordol are after them.

I kept some logs for a Saga campaign that I ran here . While not planned, the players made it a very Edge of the Empire style campaign. The campaign morphed into the Rebellion-era but my logs stopped at that point so what is left could be of use to someone for EotE.

I'm a fan of old WW2 movies so you may note some influences there, especially in the adventure titles. I've looked to WW2 often for Star Wars ideas because of the obvious connections (Empire/Nazis vs Rebels/FrenchUnderground or Alliance/Allies).

Example: Kelly's Heroes . PCs learn of a secret thinly guarded Imperial cache and hope to burglarize it. They form a rag tag band along the way, but discover that an AT-AT is guarding it upon arrival.

I'm designing Nar Shaadda using Bloodshadows sourcebooks for influence to create gritty adventures there. Also, I'm developing a campaign of gumshoe film noir adventures for Corellia.

Garrett

I've seen a couple of mentions of a "gritty" style of campaign. I wonder if EotE supports that kind of game. Seems to me that while combat can be (as I have read of the reports of others) surprisingly and suddenly lethal, I am not sure Film Noir or Grit is what the Devs had in mind. Do you think those kinds of campaigns would work given the game as is?

Corradus said:

So, any further developments here? Have you fleshed it out some or played any of this? Would love to hear about it.

I've been running essentially a Hutt Reality Holo series. The PCs are fitted with holo cams or hover droids to record their exploites. The PCs just have to recover 3 items of value every week, they are in a race with 2 other teams with diffrent objectives, that can overlap. First group back with all 3 items wins the big weekly prize. All you have to do is decide what "IT" is, and what problems need to be overcome to obtain it.

Its great to have the PCs play up to the cameras to make things more dramatic (and cinimatic) in hopes of better pay at the end. And after the Hutt Holo airs, the Imps, or disgrunteled parties can come calling to get their stuff back. Its been great fun and very easy to set up some random encounter to test various changes to rules etc, for this beta.

EngageEight said:

EngageEight said:

Slowly but surely I have begun to flesh things out. The Professor I spoke about is now a Cerean named Tion Harren who works out of the University of Alderaan (BTW, it's kinda funny, when I researched universities on Wookieepedia almost every single planet where they had them had only ONE. That was it. One University per planet. Hell, in the city I live in there are three!). The student that petitioned the Emperor is a Kuati named Sansa Tikkanen, youngest daughter of Moff Tikkanen, though the relationship is a little strained at times. I haven't decided precisely who the student is that Professor Harren approaches to counter Commander Tikkanen because I want that to be a playable character should the group wish (sometimes I get a group where a player steps up and takes the middle chair, sometimes I don't).

There will be two prominent NPC's in the group, I am thinking of a Hutt, an outcast who suffered some sort of debilitating disease as a child that basically keeps him from thriving physically, he is (as Hutts go) rather slim and (to their eyes) sickly looking. The disease is considered a curse from the gods and those who have it are often left to die of exposure by their clan. This Hutt is a survivor though, and has made extensive use of machines and so forth (he is a bit of a technical prodigy) to help himself. He has a Jawa friend and helper (as yet unnamed) who is going to provide a lot of the comic relief because this little bugger is a straight up lunatic. But he's loyal to the Hutt and the two very much love each other despite outward appearances.

I don't like the ship choices the Beta game gives PC's, so I am going to have a modified Consular Cruiser for them. I am not sure how precisely I will modify it, something fast and tough but beyond that I haven't decided - though it will be known as the Ruby Heart.

Commander Tikkanen commands the newly formed Imperial Archaeological Corps. She is given a prototype Light Cruiser that was in the shakedown stages at the end of the Clone Wars. (I wish I could put up a pic, but the picture loading icon doesn't seem to work) It was called the Spear Class and was originally designed to use one of the first gravity well generators to be mounted on a ship (eventually of course these generators would be mounted on an Interdictor Cruiser) but technical problems caused the whole design to be shelved. But, not wanting to waste any potential asset, the Emperor gave what was otherwise a perfectly working fast, light cruiser to Tikkanen. It was re-christened the ILC (Imperial Light Cruiser) Exploit.

The Exploit has a decent compliment of weapons and is well shielded but it's also pretty fast. However it's troop and small vehicle compliment isn't that high. A dozen or so TiE fighters, a couple of AT-ST's and that's about it. Most of its non-crew compliment are laborers - earth movers and stevedores and so forth. The ship does have some Imperial Army troops, a small compliment of Stormtroopers and an even smaller complement of Scouts (at the time the campaign opens I am actually going with an interim armor and bike design I found for the Imp-Scouts so they look cool but prototype). The key to the Corps though (apart from Tikkanen herself) are a group of experimental troops designed and trained specifically to be ideal archaeological diggers and investigators. Nick-named "Dig-Troopers", they use a specialized suit of armor that has a number of tools built into it (still working on that) but the real difference between these guys and anyone else is that they are given a special formula of a number of chemicals and a little spice mixed in. They breathe this stuff in constantly (and are hopelessly addicted to it) and it boosts their focus and senses, allowing them to see things/spot things few others could.

So, that's what I have so far. Thanks for asking. Prod me again from time to time and I will give you more

Thanks, really appreciate the update, Corradus!

EngageEight said:

You're most welcome. As I said, feel free to ask for an update any time

I kept some logs for a Saga campaign that I ran here . While not planned, the players made it a very Edge of the Empire style campaign. The campaign morphed into the Rebellion-era but my logs stopped at that point so what is left could be of use to someone for EotE.

This is fantastic stuff. I wish more groups catalogued their adventures like this. It's very interesting.