DMing Edge of the Empire with a player who has a 10 year lead in EU/background infos

[Spore]

Our group is treading a weird middleground. We are tired of fantasy RPGs (D&D and Pathfinder is too time intensive to prepare) and we already play post apocalyptic Degenesis and VtM.

I really want to DM a system, and I want it to be a scifi one. Star Wars is the obvious choice since most people are into that. But therein lies the problem. One of the players is DMing a play by email SW Empire game for over 15 years now. He knows the difference between two marginally different imperial flagships by ANY angle. He knows most relevant alien species, knows the intricate workings of the Empire. Gladly he cannot use his knowledge of the post Emperor Empire and all about Thrawn, but these characters are all but dead in the era the game is set in.

I don't want his knowledge to go to waste, but simultaneously I don't want to disenchant his suspense of disbelief. I am not sure if this is the right system but we all don't want the force to be a part in our game, and EotE is set on a freelancer/rebels/bounty hunter side if any.

What would you suggest? Is there a way?

[Yora]

As a Star Wars super-fan I would say to simply make it clear from the start that this is going to be a more casual Star Wars campaign that doesn't delve to deep into Expanded Universe lore. I think any reasonable player would be just fine with that. Making up completely new planets with their own new characters and various local issues is all fair game for the setting.
Star Wars is about swashbuckling adventures in space with robots and bounty hunters and most characters remain largely limited to their own stories. It's not like anything major is lost when the GM isn't a walking encyclopedia.

[Spore]

It is no loss but certainly a lot to gain. Like dealing salt to those *googles* Arcona who enjoy salt like a human would do meth or crack.

So would you advise to limit the players to some unknown planet in the Outer Rim, and their knowledge not beyond the planet (and a few alien creatures that go there to hide or trade with the locals). Because after the group gets a spaceship - and it will not be a SW game without a fricking spaceship - the galaxy opens up to them, and if they have enough fuel, they can easily just pop into Coruscant. And I would be a bad DM if I would deny them landing rights and detain them in a camp for illegal aliens (heh!).

I am also at a loss where to guide the story to. All LOVE adventure, most of them enjoy a bit of politics sprinkled onto it (if it goes full on politics, I think 2 of 4 are just lost).

[Hopeless]

Is he familiar with the Legacy era?

If so tell him Ania Solo wants his help with a surprise relative calling himself Kylo Ren and if he says it's not canon point out unless you're playing in the Legends of the galaxy it doesn't matter if the movies haven't mentioned Han & Leia had a daughter who isn't force sensitive but is younger than Ben and really angry her older brother has killed their dad...

By the way was Han a mentor to any of your PCs?

Might want to consider saying yes you know!

I'm sure Poe would appreciate the help!

[Yora]

I think Star Wars is a setting where it just isn't practical to have the players decide on a whim where they want to go and see what they might find. There's hundreds of already existing planets and even the sparsely populated ones have thousands of cities and billions of people. It really only makes sense to visit places to which the players have already been pointed by NPCs or clues.
Open World campaigns can be made somewhat believable in medieval fantasy settings but not in space. Star Wars is a setting that works best with prepared locations and encounters.

Which does help with researching for preparing adventures and campaigns. If you want to have an adventure take place on Onderon, you can learn all there is about that planet in half an hour and if there's something you find you want to include in your adventure then wookipedia can give you everything about that specific subject as well.

I would say a good setup for a Star Wars campaign is to start with some kind of big bad. An imperial governor, a crime boss, or a sith lord who is causing trouble for people and the players get dragged into it and have to somehow prevent the villain's plan. And this can easily span three to six planets. In Star Wars, it's generally best to think of planets as towns. With space travel and communication being so incredible easy and fast, distance doesn't matter. Whether two towns are on the same small island or on opposite sides of the galaxy makes no difference. People who work closely together don't have to be physically close together. Putting settlements on different planets instead on sharing the same world has the advantage of making each settlement be highly distinctive, and it also is an opportunity for space travel that everybody loves.
In Star Wars, going to another planet is no big deal. You should do it almost as casually as getting into a car to drive to the other side of the city. You can run a Star Wars adventure like a city adventure in which the city is the whole galaxy, with each space port taking the role of different boroughs. Having more than two or three locations on the same planet is boring by Star Wars standards. When the players learn about an NPC they should be talking to you can always feel free to put him into a space port on some other planet. I think the way most James Bond stories work are also a good example. Sometimes Bond stays in some exotic country or another for only 15 minutes to have a short talk with one person. It's much more interesting than having a phone call, and always an opportunity to be ambushed by an evil henchman.

[Spore]

Sometimes Bond stays in some exotic country or another for only 15 minutes to have a short talk with one person. It's much more interesting than having a phone call, and always an opportunity to be ambushed by an evil henchman.

Plus, if I have understood the Empire in Star Wars correctly all important frequencies and connections are being surveilled. Just a small question: Is the Holonet still a thing? I know SW TOR played with the thought of a huge galaxy wide internet a bit. I feel this should be largely controlled by the Empire as well, with encrypted smaller sites and p2p communication being harder but possible.

[Blue Duke]

It's a thing but it's heavily Imperial monitored and controlled.

[Rakaydos]

The main difference fetween imperial holonet and modern internet is centralization. IRL the internet was decentralized by an unlikely alliance of anti athority peacenics and cold war defensive planners who didnt want a central point of failure/control.
instead, the imperial holonet is massive towers and relay sats, guarded by the military and watching evvery message sent.

[Ceiling_Squid]

The instantaneous galaxywide holonet may be Imperial-controlled, but local subspace networks can serve as regional "internets" in a pinch. Entire sectors can have their own subspace nets, but they do take longer to disseminate info, especially if it has to travel from one network to another. And it can be intercepted.

The most-secure messages are therefore carried by couriers! Plenty of plot hooks there, and it keeps something so dull as space-google or space-email from tarnishing the swashbuckling science-fantasy of Star Wars.

[Mutazoia]

It's a thing but it's heavily Imperial monitored and controlled.

The D6 version covered this, but this is basically it. This is why Vader could receive a holo call from the Emperor all the way out by Hoth, while the rebels needed to have things practically hand delivered. (Many Bothans died to bring us this information.)

As a big SW fan myself, I've always told the EU "know-it-alls" exactly where to stuff their "Knowledge". 90% of the EU is just crap that people (other than Lucas) have made up over the years, and a very small percentage of that stuff was ever acknowledged by Lucas or Lucas Arts. (Splinter in the Minds Eye, anybody?)

Just kindly let your "expert" know that the SW universe you are running may differ from the EU that he's an "expert" on, and to expect variations with out warning.

[Janwin]

Yup, that's precisely what I've done in the past when faced with an ultra-nerd who knows everything about a setting a game takes place in.

"Ok, cool, you know a lot. That's great! I'm glad! However, I'm going to point out right here and now that, while the campaign underlying timeline follows approximately the same arc as the original trilogy, it will not be precisely the same. There are a number of reasons for this: 1. I don't know as much as you do about the setting, and don't really care to, so simple way to not have you correct me every 3 minutes is "alternate timeline", 2. your actions would, naturally, affect the original timeline, and I have to be able to account for that--if I didn't work in some flexibility on reality, I couldn't. I ask that you put aside your out of game encyclopedic knowledge and adopt the knowledge that your character would have instead."

The timeline still worked out amusingly enough, with them getting little nibbles and tastes of the main story thread while conducting their own adventures, which made them really feel a part of the story. I never told them what happened when in the timeline for the original movie, but would tell them how long it took them to travel between planets and kept track of days on planet.

That's how they happened to be on Alderaan picking up fancy wine to trade when a new moon appeared in the sky... They ran the blockade, and got into hyperspace JUST BEFORE the Death Star fired. With two untrained force sensitives on board their freighter, at ground zero. Considering how much Obi Wan was affected by the feeling and he was still quite a ways out from Alderaan, one force sensitive spent a week in a coma (in space transit, so nothing was happening anyway), and the other was a gibbering mess the whole trip.