Not sure how often FFG answers but I thought I'd ask. I've always had trouble sifting through pre-made adventures to run them, often finding that I have to go back and dig through info which is hard to find.

That being said, I was VERY impressed with the adventure provided in the Beginner Box - not just for revealing the system as it was played, but simply how the adventure was structured. It was easy to read, the maps were printed nicely and easy to put on the table, etc.

I was very excited about the Pre-made FFG adventures... and then I got the GM screen. It came with a pre-made adventure, and as soon as I started going through it I realized that it was just like other pre-made adventures by other companies - hard to read through!

I don't know WHAT you did with the Beginner Box adventure to make it so easy for a GM to read through and use but I want to see THAT level of ease-of-use in FFG Edge of the Empire pre-made adventures.

Do you think that's possible? Thanks in advance!

I think part of what made the Beginner Box adventure easier to read through was how linear it was. There was a very clear progression from scene to scene without any real options for the players to take. It was a bit of a railroad. Now before anyone goes off on that, it was a great ride, and sometimes a railroad is awesome. At my table there was this sense of the bad guys being right on the PCs tails. Yeah they knew there was basically one route for them to run, but it didn't matter because it was fun.

The GM screen adventure is pretty different, without spoilering I think it is safe to say while it had a clear vibe (creepy) it was way more open ended. Instead of reading like a short story, it is more a toolbox to craft something for your players.

Anyway, thats just my two credits. I for one would like to see a mix of both types of adventure, sandbox and railroad.

On a similar note, as a GM that has a full time job and a busy life, I don't get a lot of time for adventure preparation, so anything in the adventure notes that can help absorb the information fast is really appreciated. I'd like to see key points highlighted for a scene, with more detail about that point close to it on the page.

Having a page full of solid text to take in is quite off-putting.

On a similar note, as a GM that has a full time job and a busy life, I don't get a lot of time for adventure preparation, so anything in the adventure notes that can help absorb the information fast is really appreciated. I'd like to see key points highlighted for a scene, with more detail about that point close to it on the page.

Having a page full of solid text to take in is quite off-putting.

EXACTLY!!!! Information absorption is the perfect word lol

RPG materials (rules, adventures, etc.) are very boring to read and I prefer that they summarize the important parts.

I haven't gm'd a session of the game but it would seem that you could play pretty free form. Have a few hooks and ideas for adventure paths. Keep a few adversary cards at hand. And roll with the dice. The character obligations make for a ready source of plot creation devices. Someone that has created their own adventure want to share what they did to prepare?

I know how you feel. I hate mucking through premades... that is why I usually skim them, read ideas they have... then throw them all out the window. Usually skimming and seeing the adventure they wrote sends me on a whole tangent that ties better into my campaign anyway.

As for the beginner box... I am running Long Arm first... as a follow up to an old Saga Adventure Rendezvous in Ord Mantrell. It is completely different other than some locations and encounters are different. Teemo is with the Black Sun in mine also. My players were already closely tied to Jabba and the Hutts from old system. I wanted a complete outside force for them to deal with so they could not go ask for help.

Have not even looked at the one in the Beginner Box yet. I am going to read Act 3 of Long arm and that at the same time... try to combine them into something bigger I think.

THe 4 SW:EOTE adventures I've run so far have all been excellent... Shadows wasn't even strictly linear, either.

None of them are overly tightly tied to the pregens, either.

Well, so far my running of Long Arm has been pretty awesome. Okay, we're occasionally all over the map (Bulldozer duel anyone?), but as a canned game goes - not too bad. Bits have gotten trimmed, info-dumps have been shuffled into the narrative to look less infodumpy, NPCs been dropped and things streamlined here and there - but it's been pretty solid.

I might have to give the other canned games a spin just for a change of pace.

I like to play through the pre-planned but make changes as we play if things don't make sense and to avoid rail-roads. I also work to tie adventures together for a better narrative.

It's a lot easier for me as someone else has already thought up the plot, I just need to add a few options to improve on it.

However, as I have years of adventures floating around I have enough flexibility to respond to any direction the players want to go, I also seed the players with possible adventure routes based on the fact that I can quickly dust off the appropriate pre-made with very little preparation time.

One other thing I noticed - in the pre-made adventure that came with the GM screen ALL the NPC stats/skills were listed so it was hard to decipher (at least to me). In the beginner set, all NPCs were shown with their dice pools for combat under their name, etc. VERY EASY to use when playing on the fly.

I don't understand why this wasn't brought over to the other pre-made adventure. In the future I'd like NPC's to have that - to actually see the number of green/proficiency dice actually under their descriptions is awesome and makes things easier.

Before anyone complains that its "easy to figure out" this complaint goes out to most systems. D&D NPCs have a very "basic" way to showing their abilities. It's like their is a school for "how to smoosh all this info into a tiny spot where you have to figure things out" instead of making it user friendly.

The beginner set was laid out AWESOME, and I'd like to see the NPCs look like they do here Rhein in the GM pre-gen.

I know how you feel. I hate mucking through premades... that is why I usually skim them, read ideas they have... then throw them all out the window. Usually skimming and seeing the adventure they wrote sends me on a whole tangent that ties better into my campaign anyway.

As for the beginner box... I am running Long Arm first... as a follow up to an old Saga Adventure Rendezvous in Ord Mantrell. It is completely different other than some locations and encounters are different. Teemo is with the Black Sun in mine also. My players were already closely tied to Jabba and the Hutts from old system. I wanted a complete outside force for them to deal with so they could not go ask for help.

Have not even looked at the one in the Beginner Box yet. I am going to read Act 3 of Long arm and that at the same time... try to combine them into something bigger I think.

That's curious. Escape From Mos Shutta dumps right into Long Arm. I'm interested in what you are able to wrangle there.

One other thing I noticed - in the pre-made adventure that came with the GM screen ALL the NPC stats/skills were listed so it was hard to decipher (at least to me). In the beginner set, all NPCs were shown with their dice pools for combat under their name, etc. VERY EASY to use when playing on the fly.

I don't understand why this wasn't brought over to the other pre-made adventure. In the future I'd like NPC's to have that - to actually see the number of green/proficiency dice actually under their descriptions is awesome and makes things easier.

Before anyone complains that its "easy to figure out" this complaint goes out to most systems. D&D NPCs have a very "basic" way to showing their abilities. It's like their is a school for "how to smoosh all this info into a tiny spot where you have to figure things out" instead of making it user friendly.

The beginner set was laid out AWESOME, and I'd like to see the NPCs look like they do here Rhein in the GM pre-gen.

My guess is they want GMs to be more familiar with the rules so that knowledge of the core rulebook is required to run the adventures.

The adventure in the Beginner game is designed to be run by someone with no knowledge of the system at all, and they likely don't want people to be able to run the game without knowledge of the game's system.

Say a character has 4 agility and 3 ranks in Ranged Light.

Well if you look at the character description and it just says Agility 4 and Ranged - Light 3, you probably don't know how to put a dice pool together from just that. You have to know how upgrade proficiency dice.

I agree the adventures can be formatted better. I can easily look at agility 4 and ranged (light) 3 and know what the dice pool should be, but in the heat of the moment the yellow and green symbols are much easier to pick out of the stat block than searching for two numbers.

Well if you look at the character description and it just says Agility 4 and Ranged - Light 3, you probably don't know how to put a dice pool together from just that. You have to know how upgrade proficiency dice.

You constantly have to remember what ability goes with what skill. I'm sure some people have a rock solid memory, I am not one of those people. I'd rather see the ability dice/specialty dice symbols on the page instead of blaster - 3 and then in the top corner all 6 stats and have to figure out which one to use and then mash them together in my head.

I liked how Escape from Mos Shuuta was laid out, too. My group is a somewhat experienced D&D group (players ranging from extremely experience to fairly new), so I knew they could figure things out on their own, so I removed the parts that were so rail roady.

Instead of the bartender telling them everything they needed, he kicked the players out of the Cantina and they were left to figure things out on their own. The only thing they knew was that there was a ship belonged to Trex that they were going to steal.

By using some investigation/computer skills they were able to surmise for themselves that the ship was in need of repair and in lockdown. They even tried a couple different shops before trying the junk shop.

Funny thing, I've played this adventure twice with two different groups. When deciding which Hangar to go to, they chose Aurek because Besh was too close to Teemo's palace according to the map. I was pleased both groups managed to reach the same conclusion.

And I totally forgot the GM screen came with an adventure. Now to figure out where I put it. I hope I didn't throw it away....what's it called?

I'll go look for it later and let you know I gotta head out the door. What's funny is the 2 times I ran this adventure BOTH groups shot the shopkeeper and I had to make up a 1-2 hour sub-story lol

I'll go look for it later and let you know I gotta head out the door. What's funny is the 2 times I ran this adventure BOTH groups shot the shopkeeper and I had to make up a 1-2 hour sub-story lol

The adventure is called "Debts to Pay" but you won't see the name until you open the Game Master's Kit. It's in there.

Having done typesetting in the past, I can guess why they chose to do stat blocks like they did in Debts to Pay; the ones in Escape/Long Arm take up a lot of space (and thus bump the page count up). Condensing stat blocks lets them fit more content into the adventure.

I think there's a thread somewhere about this, so sorry if I'm derailing the topic, but how could you fit the pre-mades together?

We did Escape from Mos Shutta last week, Long Arm of the Hutt last night (we're still in the middle, probably finish it in a couple weeks).

By my count, there are a couple pre-mades left. Debts to pay, and the one that came with the Core Rulebook (I don't have the Black Sun free RPG one yet).

After Long Arm, is there a neat way to tie in the other two?

I think there's a thread somewhere about this, so sorry if I'm derailing the topic, but how could you fit the pre-mades together?

We did Escape from Mos Shutta last week, Long Arm of the Hutt last night (we're still in the middle, probably finish it in a couple weeks).

By my count, there are a couple pre-mades left. Debts to pay, and the one that came with the Core Rulebook (I don't have the Black Sun free RPG one yet).

After Long Arm, is there a neat way to tie in the other two?

My group is doing Shutta/Long Arm with the pregens to learn mechanics and see some of the careers in action. They'll then be rolling their own characters. I'm going to try to find a way to make Shadows of a Black Sun, Trouble Brewing, and Debts to Pay work together and then hopefully launch into Beyond the Rim. If I can't find a good flow I'm not above "screen wiping" and doing episodic adventures rather than trying to tie the whole thing into one big epic tale. I learned running Shadowrun that short, bursts of narrative are just as fun, and occasionally not as cumbersome to tie together.

I think there's a thread somewhere about this, so sorry if I'm derailing the topic, but how could you fit the pre-mades together?

We did Escape from Mos Shutta last week, Long Arm of the Hutt last night (we're still in the middle, probably finish it in a couple weeks).

By my count, there are a couple pre-mades left. Debts to pay, and the one that came with the Core Rulebook (I don't have the Black Sun free RPG one yet).

After Long Arm, is there a neat way to tie in the other two?

My group is doing Shutta/Long Arm with the pregens to learn mechanics and see some of the careers in action. They'll then be rolling their own characters. I'm going to try to find a way to make Shadows of a Black Sun, Trouble Brewing, and Debts to Pay work together and then hopefully launch into Beyond the Rim. If I can't find a good flow I'm not above "screen wiping" and doing episodic adventures rather than trying to tie the whole thing into one big epic tale. I learned running Shadowrun that short, bursts of narrative are just as fun, and occasionally not as cumbersome to tie together.

I'm not against screen wiping either. But last night, we ran into a little bit of a narrative hiccup. Admittedly, it may have been my fault as the GM for not articulating the story well enough, but the group felt a little apethetic to the plight of the Twi'leks in Long Arm of the Hutt.

They were questioning as to why get involved, especially since Rhyl mining isn't quite legal (from what we understood, maybe we're wrong). So fighting some "cause" because a people are getting oppressed from doing something illegal didn't quite get their moral engine running. Nor did they have much drive to strike back at Teemo.

Basically I had to impress on them that they will keep getting hunted (as proven by the bounty hunter fight in the lylek cave) until Teemo is dealt with, and that the Twi'leks will help them if the heroes help the twi'leks. They're going along with it for story's sake, but they're not really feeling it. In fact, they were SERIOUSLY considering turning around and turning Bura Ban over to Teemo, but decided that was too dangerous. They really weren't very interesting in Bura Ban's troubles. I would have had to do some serious improvisation to get them not to do that if they had their heart set on it.

So, my fear of a screen wipe is that if they're just dropped into a new adventure, it's up to me (which is my job, I know, but it's harder) to come up with a good motivator, and it might be easier if it's tied into what they did previously so they have a deeper connection with it.

Rook, that is a problem with every pre-fab adventure in every system I've played. The character hooks are weak. The only reason the adventure stays on track is because the players meta-game reason that they are supposed to do this action because thats what the adventure calls for.

It's extremely easy to overlook large portions of the shutta/hutt adventure. Even character hints are worded weirdly.

Spoilers ahead obviously.

My players couldn't figure out why they were helping the Twi'leks either. They are trying to save their own butts and there's no real reason (other than just being good guys) that they'd help. Why do they need to drive the guy to the other camp? No mention of concern for his help or why their own people can't do it. What's Ota's motivation? The books did a poor job describing the hives or the cantina. They went into massive details about the members of a band, what type of fake music they are playing and what type of made up instruments they are playing, but for what reason? Ota asks for info afterwords that he doesn't ask for before the party. The messages on the computer are worded in an odd way that actually created a red hearring for the players (it seems to reference Sivor as a droid due to poor grammer). The info about battledroids can pretty much be completely overlooked. The books seem to indicate that everyone should be wearing their empire/rebel affiliation on their sleeves. This really blows my mind as this should be some of the most guarded info on the fringes.

But that's all par for the course when it comes to pre-fabs. Your players are going to ask for details not provided. Provided details are just going to confuse players. Players will meta-game why they should do something or figure out that they missed something. Thankfully the adventure allows for some of that, and a couple quick GM descisions can fix up some of those issues.

It's hard to GM those when players go off the rails too. If they ask a question you don't know off hand and isn't readily available, you hate to wing it because you may say something that you later find out is just dead wrong.

I gotta give my players credit though. Towards the end of the adventure, I told them that we wouldn't be continuing with these characters (we used the pre-gens) so they got to Tat, then just rode the ship back to Geon. They hatched this great plan and decided a frontal assault would be a bad idea. The ship they had was hot, and they were going to get a 50k reward that could buy a new ship....so they flew the ship into Teemo's palace directly into the Hutt's throne. Got everything lined up, made the piloting roll, jumped in the escape pods and boom....Teemo's palace was leveled. I thought that was a great solution to the problem.

My players couldn't figure out why they were helping the Twi'leks either. They are trying to save their own butts and there's no real reason (other than just being good guys) that they'd help.

I played it up two ways: The first was that one hand washes the other. Both parties had trouble with Teemo - if they could work together and remove this source of irritation, the better off everyone would be. They have the connections, the players have the resources - everyone comes together in a big old chocolate and peanut butter collision and is happy!

The second was The A-Team angle. Here's this settlement of defenseless villagers being exploited and run off their land. Who better to Help the Helpless than our heroes? They even improbably McGuyvered up construction equipment into a siege weapon!

(I suspect I'll be going to the A-Team Well quite a bit with this campaign. )

Rook, that is a problem with every pre-fab adventure in every system I've played. The character hooks are weak. The only reason the adventure stays on track is because the players meta-game reason that they are supposed to do this action because thats what the adventure calls for.

It's extremely easy to overlook large portions of the shutta/hutt adventure. Even character hints are worded weirdly.

Spoilers ahead obviously.

My players couldn't figure out why they were helping the Twi'leks either. They are trying to save their own butts and there's no real reason (other than just being good guys) that they'd help. Why do they need to drive the guy to the other camp? No mention of concern for his help or why their own people can't do it. What's Ota's motivation? The books did a poor job describing the hives or the cantina. They went into massive details about the members of a band, what type of fake music they are playing and what type of made up instruments they are playing, but for what reason? Ota asks for info afterwords that he doesn't ask for before the party. The messages on the computer are worded in an odd way that actually created a red hearring for the players (it seems to reference Sivor as a droid due to poor grammer). The info about battledroids can pretty much be completely overlooked. The books seem to indicate that everyone should be wearing their empire/rebel affiliation on their sleeves. This really blows my mind as this should be some of the most guarded info on the fringes.

But that's all par for the course when it comes to pre-fabs. Your players are going to ask for details not provided. Provided details are just going to confuse players. Players will meta-game why they should do something or figure out that they missed something. Thankfully the adventure allows for some of that, and a couple quick GM descisions can fix up some of those issues.

It's hard to GM those when players go off the rails too. If they ask a question you don't know off hand and isn't readily available, you hate to wing it because you may say something that you later find out is just dead wrong.

I gotta give my players credit though. Towards the end of the adventure, I told them that we wouldn't be continuing with these characters (we used the pre-gens) so they got to Tat, then just rode the ship back to Geon. They hatched this great plan and decided a frontal assault would be a bad idea. The ship they had was hot, and they were going to get a 50k reward that could buy a new ship....so they flew the ship into Teemo's palace directly into the Hutt's throne. Got everything lined up, made the piloting roll, jumped in the escape pods and boom....Teemo's palace was leveled. I thought that was a great solution to the problem.

Good, it's not just me then lol. Same with my group is that they just wanted to save themselves. They didn't care what Bura Ban had to say, they considered handing him over to Teemo, and when they got to Ryloth all they wanted to do is sell their loot. Not that they were apathetic players, but that there wasnt a strong enough case as presented by me and the adventure for them to even get involved.

They realize, however, there's an adventure at play so they went with it for gameplay's sake.