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Yora
2020-08-05, 01:01 PM
There are several games out there made specifically for playing Star Wars: Various editions of Star Wars d6, various editions of Star Wars d20, and the three versions of Star Wars funky dice. And of course all kinds of generic systems that you can use for a Star Wars campaign as well. They all have their own ways of setting up the attributes of characters and making die rolls for actions, but in any case the ultimate aim is to have adventures and stories that evoke the feel an dynamics of the movies.

Most general advice for running games applies just as well to Star Wars as to anything else, but I also think that capturing the spirit of Star Wars requires using some different procedures and approaches for a campaign.

I have a cool unused idea for a Knights of the Old Republic campaign that I want to give another try. And there's two big things that are currently on my mind.

The first one is how you would approach making a campaign that deals with the Force in general and Sith Lords as antagonists in particular, that doesn't come down to hunting for some magical MacGuffin. It's an established standard for D&D campaigns, but it really doesn't feel like Star Wars to me. It's not in the movies or the books and comics I read in the 90s (not up to date on what came later), and I always thought it felt really lame when playing Jedi Academy. If you're playing Lando and Wedge type characters, fighting against a Darth Vader and defeating him to safe the galaxy just doesn't seem plausible.

Very much connected to that is the question of how you would get a party of widely different characters together to go on a great adventure. You could always start with the whole party being Jedi or Rebel Soldiers and being send on a mission. But would it be practically doable to also have a great campaign with a party that is more like Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewbacca, with perhaps the odd droid thrown in?
I guess you could always make an agreement with the players that the first session will be a more or less scripted thing where they are brought together by the Forces of Plot, but that doesn't really seem very elegant.

Sapphire Guard
2020-08-05, 02:12 PM
This podcast (https://www.redemptionpodcast.com/) does something like that, admittedly in CLone Wars era. Easy enough to have them be on the same ship when 'event that kicks off the story'happens.

Sith Lords do a lot of scheming. Thwart the scheme, not the person.

LibraryOgre
2020-08-05, 03:53 PM
Sith Lords do a lot of scheming. Thwart the scheme, not the person.


I agree with this; if you cannot face off against the Sith Lord, you have to thwart his plans, not him.

I'd also look at establishing an emotional tie to the antagonist, and maybe have your PCs help define those... some reason they don't want to just drop a starship on his last known location.

For the "How we got together", I am always a fan of "You are travelling with a caravan that gets attacked." So, everyone makes a character and you put them all on Space Bus, with a reason they are on Space Bus and going to Tattoodan or wherever you want things to happen. Then you have Force Associated With (but not actually part of) the Big Bad attack them. Driver of Space Bus is killed, and now it is up to the players, now in possession of Space Bus, to save themselves. In the course of doing so, they Bond, and learn about Big Bad, who is exerting pressure of Force Associated With.

A big question, some of which comes down to the system you choose, is going to be "What is the Force like", both mechanically and metaphysically. Are you ninja-jumping everywhere? Do you struggle to call a lightsaber from across the room? What can a beginning character do? What can a master do? What can a lightsaber do, for that matter?

Yora
2020-08-05, 04:42 PM
That's really useful advice already. (But don't take this as encouragement to not continue with more.)

My general idea is that the Sith Empress wants to learn the power that the ancient Dark Lord Marka Ragnos used to keep the other Sith lords from constantly backstab him and each other, so that she can finally go back to fighting the Old Republic without getting betrayed. She found some hints on Korriban but hit a dead end, but she hopes that perhaps the Jedi might have kept some records from the Great Hyperspace War that could be useful to her. So she has agents trying to get into remote Jedi archives like Dantooine and Alpheridies (and perhaps rediscovering the charred remain of Ossus after its star had been blown up in the Great Sith War).

To foil that plan, the heroes would have to find that information first and destroy it (or get it to a super secure location on Coruscant or something like that). That really helps giving that idea an objective and a victory condition.
And to get the heroes hooked, it probably will be pretty easy to come up with something about some sub-contracted agents failing at being secret, causing some disaster to the heroes and leaving a trail to their employers. Even if the heroes might not think that they are suited to preventing a new galactic war, they could still learn that some kind of heavy assault is planned to give agents an opportunity to break into an archive, which sounds like something more within the heroes' capabilities. And that can put them on the map as the major players are concerned.

I also have the idea that simultaneously a giant medical corporation is secretly developing a bioweapon for the Sith, and some Dark Side cultists are planning to take over an autonomous planet on the border between the Republic, the Empire, and Hutt Space. Also to help the Sith Empire to prepare for a new war against the Republic.
The idea here is to let the players have options between three different adventures (exploration search, corporate investigation, scoundrel conspiracy), which each can believably make no progress while the heroes are busy to be picked up later. But I am somewhat unsure if that might make things too complicated and confusing and lead to indecision instead.

Lagtime
2020-08-06, 04:36 PM
Star Wars is a tricky game to run. For most "Star Wars" is just the movies, and the movies are a special thing. The Star Wars movies present a Rule of Cool Fun Exciting Universe of Adventure That Makes No Sense.

The whole Battle of Yvan makes no sense: Why, oh why, oh why, did the Death Star come out of hyperspace "on the other side of the planet"? If they came out ANYWHERE else, the movie would be over in seconds. Why did the Death Star not just blow up Yvan 4? Why did the Death Star have no CAP? Why did the Death Star not have an Escort Task Force(real WW2 aircraft carriers did)?

And the Bonus Last Jedi: Why, oh why, oh why, did the First Order come out of hyperspace "over there" far away from the Rebel ship and not literally any other place closer? Why did they not just hyper jump closer instead of chase them in normal space? Why not send a couple other ships to jump around them and come at them from other angles to ;box them in'?

Of course the answer to all of the above is that they are movies that present a Rule of Cool Fun Exciting Universe of Adventure That Makes No Sense.

So, playing a Star Wars game, many players will want to play in such a universe. This can be very tricky for an RPG. With A.I., force fields and droids Star Wars should have perfect security.....but they don't. So when playing an RPG a player will expect that they can just 'make a joke' and walk right into the super maximum security base with ease. And when the GM has something reasonable like even a single guard droid they will flip out and feel like they are not playing "Star Wars" anymore.

So you either need to run the game in a Rule of Cool Fun Exciting Universe of Adventure That Makes No Sense way or otherwise just let the players "win".

Mechalich
2020-08-06, 07:17 PM
My general idea is that the Sith Empress wants to learn the power that the ancient Dark Lord Marka Ragnos used to keep the other Sith lords from constantly backstab him and each other, so that she can finally go back to fighting the Old Republic without getting betrayed. She found some hints on Korriban but hit a dead end, but she hopes that perhaps the Jedi might have kept some records from the Great Hyperspace War that could be useful to her. So she has agents trying to get into remote Jedi archives like Dantooine and Alpheridies (and perhaps rediscovering the charred remain of Ossus after its star had been blown up in the Great Sith War).

From this summary I can tell that this is a very AU scenario. AU Kotor-era scenarios are tricky because they require a lot of buy in by the players into the highly complex lore of the era without any real understanding of what's different from the (Legends) canon timeline. if you're going to do this you need to keep things as simple as possible so the players are not required to try and learn a heaping pile of AU history and lore to follow what's going on.


To foil that plan, the heroes would have to find that information first and destroy it (or get it to a super secure location on Coruscant or something like that). That really helps giving that idea an objective and a victory condition.

Your first post said you didn't want to just have things boil down to a chase after a McGuffin, but that's what 'find the information first' boils down to, since the information is essentially a McGuffin, whether it's a data file or, more likely in a Kotor scenario, a Holocron. In general 'secret info the villain wants' always becomes a McGuffin, it's very difficult to structure such a plot otherwise.



I also have the idea that simultaneously a giant medical corporation is secretly developing a bioweapon for the Sith, and some Dark Side cultists are planning to take over an autonomous planet on the border between the Republic, the Empire, and Hutt Space. Also to help the Sith Empire to prepare for a new war against the Republic.

The idea here is to let the players have options between three different adventures (exploration search, corporate investigation, scoundrel conspiracy), which each can believably make no progress while the heroes are busy to be picked up later. But I am somewhat unsure if that might make things too complicated and confusing and lead to indecision instead.

Asking the players to focus on three different and barely related subplots at the same time is unlikely to work. It also makes little sense in-universe, since why would you task a single team to handle three very different scenarios that require different skills? It makes much more sense to pitch the three ideas to your players and ask them which one they would prefer to do as a campaign and then develop subplots within the chosen overarching scenario. Making a bioweapon, for example, can easily be divided into: cutting off evil funding, preventing the villains from acquiring vital resources, and sabotaging laboratories and testing.

gijoemike
2020-08-06, 07:34 PM
You have big plans for an adventure. Don't tell the PC's any of that. Zilch. The Galactic Republic knows little of the plot if any at all.

Star wars starts in the action. A plan is laid out then it goes belly up, chaos ensues. Somehow victory is arrived at.

The plan: Start them off with a mission to set up a forward listening post on a distance uninhabited planet the GR needs to listen in on enemy communications. You could have a few Jedi/soldier to represent the GR, a tech monkey and droid or 2 to configure the equipment, a pilot and ship to get them there (a civilian contractor?). You could have 10 roles to fill. PCs and NPCs of the "crew." The mcguffin is still info. But they have all the parts to get it.

the Hiccup: Oh, but there are pirates/smugglers den. Do you deal with them peacefully/jedi mind tricks/ force them off?

Plan falls apart: Oh, 1 was a sith empire spy. They send out a distress signal. The whole plan goes belly up and now you are trying to escape/get info on who betrayed who. You have to escape and lay low now. You cannot just jump back to the GR. Instead you are now behind enemy lines with low fuel. Perhaps they learned something important and need a bit more investigation. The bare bones details of that initial plot hook, that s what they find.

play a bait and switch with the Mcguffin. They had no idea what they were going to get. They still get info in the end but in a shape they didn't see coming.

Mutazoia
2020-08-07, 12:36 AM
Star Wars is a tricky game to run. For most "Star Wars" is just the movies, and the movies are a special thing. The Star Wars movies present a Rule of Cool Fun Exciting Universe of Adventure That Makes No Sense.

The whole Battle of Yvan makes no sense: Why, oh why, oh why, did the Death Star come out of hyperspace "on the other side of the planet"? If they came out ANYWHERE else, the movie would be over in seconds. Why did the Death Star not just blow up Yvan 4? Why did the Death Star have no CAP? Why did the Death Star not have an Escort Task Force(real WW2 aircraft carriers did)?

They could power the hyperdrive or the planet-destroying laser, but not both at the same time. They needed time to charge the weapon, so popping out right in front of the Moon they would still have to sit around and wait for the guys on the bicycles to peddle hard enough to power up the pop gun. Yavin 4 itself was a gas giant...hard to say what effect the laser would have on a giant ball of condensed gas, but a good bet is diffraction/diffusion. Why no CAP? The Empire didn't think their giant planet-blowey-uppy-ball had a weak spot and was overconfident. Just look at what happened to the Bizmark and you'll understand. (The same applies to Escort Task Forces..they overestimated their strength and underestimated the intel that the rebels had.)


And the Bonus Last Jedi: Why, oh why, oh why, did the First Order come out of hyperspace "over there" far away from the Rebel ship and not literally any other place closer? Why did they not just hyper jump closer instead of chase them in normal space? Why not send a couple other ships to jump around them and come at them from other angles to ;box them in'?

Traveling through hyperspace isn't like dusting crops, boy. You can't just bounce around willy-nilly, you need to plot a course. Plotting a course to surround a moving target while essentially flying in blind and expecting your target to be where you guessed it would be, and the area you arrive in to be free of anything else (like your target ship) is nearly impossible. Also, hyperdrives don't work over short distances. This isn't Star Trek, where you can use the "Picard Maneuver" and micro warp.



So, playing a Star Wars game, many players will want to play in such a universe. This can be very tricky for an RPG. With A.I., force fields and droids Star Wars should have perfect security.....but they don't. So when playing an RPG a player will expect that they can just 'make a joke' and walk right into the super maximum security base with ease. And when the GM has something reasonable like even a single guard droid they will flip out and feel like they are not playing "Star Wars" anymore.

So you either need to run the game in a Rule of Cool Fun Exciting Universe of Adventure That Makes No Sense way or otherwise just let the players "win".

Um....no. Not even close. I don't even have the energy right now to point out everything what was wrong with that last bit. If anything you just said was true it would be true for every RPG in existence, and we should all just stop playing now and go learn calculus or something.

Yora
2020-08-07, 04:55 AM
Space Battles in Star Wars play out by the logic of World War 2 fighter planes and navies. The fact that they are in space and have computers doesn't matter. Fighters and star destroyers can not do what an advanced spaceship with futuristic automated computer control could do. They can do what a fighter plane and a battleship can do. Targeting computers are not able to automatically track targets and shot them. You still always need a person looking through the gun sights and pulling the trigger, with a high chance of missing.
It's unrealistic and silly, but that's what you sign up for when you watch, read, or play Star Wars.

What is critical to a Star Wars campaign is that the heroes don't stall. The action has to keep moving. Whether the heroes are winning or losing. What you really want to avoid are situations where the players try something, it doesn't work, and the heroes stand around having no idea what to do now. Failure is entirely acceptable. In The Empire Strikes Back, the heroes basically fail at everything they try. But failure does not result in the heroes getting stuck. Instead it always results in the heroes having to push forward even harder.
When players fail to open a huge blast door, don't let them stand there and scratch their heads. Make a patrol of stormtroopers arrive, forcing the players to either quickly sneak away and come up with a completely different approach, or pick a fight that will raise an even bigger alarm. If getting captured is a possibility, the GM should make plans in advance for what happens when they do. The cell they are taken to needs to have ways to get out, or alternatively they are taken directly to meet with one of the villains. And then given a way to escape.

I say the first rule for GMs is to always keep things moving. "If in doubt: Stormtroopers!"
There's nothing wrong with scenes that are not action, but even then the players should be thinking "Nice talking with you guys and taking a rest, but we really need to keep going soon."

Sapphire Guard
2020-08-07, 06:26 AM
Probably best to save the Stars Wars film discussions for Media section, because otherwise knowing GITP we will be here for a long time without being much help.

I don't know a thing about the Old Republic Era, but I was able to follow the plot explanation just fine.

Many Sith Lords warring with many Jedi, Adventuring party in the middle. Most players will expect to have to learn about the world anyway.

If they're working for the Republic, have whoever is supervising outline a choice of missions. If they're just a well meaning crew of people, what they do will depend on the character backstories, hard to give them a choice. Maybe they stumble across an enemy archive or communications hub
with breadcrumbs of all three missions?

Martin Greywolf
2020-08-07, 03:20 PM
Obvious advice is obvious: make sure you and your players are both on the same page. Some may want to play Han Solo smugglers, others heroic Jedi, others still space battles. All of these are tonally different and need some work to fit together properly. Also make sure you and your players want to play same kind of adventure - if you want to go "squad of soldiers and low-level jedi caught in a larger war" and they want "galaxy depends on you", you will both be frustrated.

Also, make sure you and your players are aware that Star Wars isn't sci fi, if you try to mix real world physics and orbits and energy requirements, you will very quickly get some... weird results. Your space battles could very quickly become about exploiting the fact that you have FTL comms and pressing smart munitions into use (strap those droids into suicide spaceships/torpedoes) and that is just not a very Star Wars thing to do.



The first one is how you would approach making a campaign that deals with the Force in general and Sith Lords as antagonists in particular, that doesn't come down to hunting for some magical MacGuffin. It's an established standard for D&D campaigns, but it really doesn't feel like Star Wars to me. It's not in the movies or the books and comics I read in the 90s (not up to date on what came later), and I always thought it felt really lame when playing Jedi Academy. If you're playing Lando and Wedge type characters, fighting against a Darth Vader and defeating him to safe the galaxy just doesn't seem plausible.

If you have time, give Kinghts of the Old Republic 2 a chance - it showcases what I'm going to suggest.

The key here is that Jedi and Sith are ultimately not two empires or opposing sides, but two philosophies - and not mutually exclusive ones either. Grey jedi are a thing. Sort of.

So, your best bet is to play that angle - look into Jedi and Sith creeds and think about how they would manifest in practice when dealing with issues, and don't play favorites. Sometimes, jedi way will fail horrifically, somteimes Sith will actually have a point. A campaign like this will need to be a bit more character-driven than your standard dungeon crawling fare, as I said at the start, make sure you and players are on the same page.



Very much connected to that is the question of how you would get a party of widely different characters together to go on a great adventure. You could always start with the whole party being Jedi or Rebel Soldiers and being send on a mission. But would it be practically doable to also have a great campaign with a party that is more like Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewbacca, with perhaps the odd droid thrown in?
I guess you could always make an agreement with the players that the first session will be a more or less scripted thing where they are brought together by the Forces of Plot, but that doesn't really seem very elegant.

I mean, it's a big galaxy, and only major faction that is xenophobic is the Empire, so you can't exactly have aliens in their squads, at least not the regular ones.

A bunch of people on a cruise liner IN SPACE, or a bunch of hapless passengers, maybe survivors of a colony, the possibilities are endless, really. From what we see in the prequel movies, humans and various aliens interact with each other without a problem most of the time, and all major factions are multi-species. Original trilogy is less so, real reason being the budget, in-universe reason being xenophobic Empire.

Yora
2020-08-07, 04:09 PM
I think you have to approach the Force like you would alignment. There are multiple different interpretations that have evolved over the decades and any of them can work as well as the others. As GM, you just have to pick one, make it clear to the players, and stick with it. That becomes particularly important when you use rules with Dark Side points.
Players should be able to tell themselves when they are starting to deal with the Dark Side before you bring up as GM that it could get them there. (But you still should ask the player to confirm before you lock in an action that will get the character Dark Side points).

(Unrelated: All the things that people praise about KotOR2 sound very unappealing to me. Just not my style of Star Wars.)

Mechalich
2020-08-07, 04:34 PM
I think you have to approach the Force like you would alignment. There are multiple different interpretations that have evolved over the decades and any of them can work as well as the others. As GM, you just have to pick one, make it clear to the players, and stick with it. That becomes particularly important when you use rules with Dark Side points.

The Force is best conceptualized as a system of natural law. In the Star Wars universe, the universe itself has moral principles, which are baked into the very base physics - the Force, after all, is a Force, and it's ultimate role is found alongside Gravity, Electromagnetism, and the Strong and Weak nuclear forces. When Obi-Wan says it 'binds the galaxy together' he's not being metaphorical, but literal.

But yes, as a GM, you decide precisely what the natural laws are and its most important to simply be consistent with them. For the most part there shouldn't be any need to be particularly restrictive, the good guys can be fairly questionable without falling to the dark side (and if they aren't Force sensitive they can be downright malicious) while the self-reinforcing nature of the interaction between living beings and the Force tends to mean that any dark side oriented villains are absolute monsters (if you actually play either Kotor game or TOR down an all dark side route you accumulate a litany of horrors to your name that is absolutely indisputable).



(Unrelated: All the things that people praise about KotOR2 sound very unappealing to me. Just not my style of Star Wars.)

Kotor 2 was very deliberately taking a variant and extreme view of the philosophy of the Force, one that doesn't match most other sources (the works of Mathew Stover perhaps, but his position is also considerably far from the norm) and was largely repudiated in later works. Basically, if you wish to reconcile that view with everything else, Kreia is simply full of it.


With regard to space battles, the best advice available for Star Wars tabletop is don't do space battles. All of the very best Star Wars games simply don't put the characters in cockpits outside of tiny mini-games. The needs of space combat simply don't match to the needs of a space fantasy adventure and the minute you put all the characters in ships it becomes a wargame (and generally not a very good wargame too). You can use space combat as a backdrop quite easily - many Star Wars adventures have the characters running through a ship or space station while a big space fight is going on in the background, and the film Rogue One does this particularly well during its climax at Scarif - but having the characters as pilots is a doomed enterprise.

Yora
2020-08-07, 05:57 PM
The Force is best conceptualized as a system of natural law. In the Star Wars universe, the universe itself has moral principles, which are baked into the very base physics - the Force, after all, is a Force, and it's ultimate role is found alongside Gravity, Electromagnetism, and the Strong and Weak nuclear forces. When Obi-Wan says it 'binds the galaxy together' he's not being metaphorical, but literal.

That's exactly what I mean. :smallbiggrin:
I think the Force is completely amoral, and that later writers who ran with that line of thought got the original concept wrong.

Like alignment discussions, trying to find the true interpretation is futile as there is no factual reality that could be discovered. And that makes it necessary for GMs to pick one interpretation by which they will judge what is possible and causes Dark Side points in their campaigns. (You can of course include the players into the deliberation before making the choice.) The important part is really that players have consistency in how such things happen in each campaign and can plan their actions accordingly.

I'm generally in agreement about space battles. While I think almost all systems allow you to play a character like Wedge Antilles, it's probably not a good idea unless every player plays a starfighter pilot. (And then the space battle rules are likely going to become the default combat rules. Having a starfighter RPG with space battles and barracks downtime could be fun.)

Let's take a look at spaceship action in the movies:
In the first one, we have Leia and Chewbacca in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon (maybe Chewie flying and Leia controlling shields), and Han and Luke each controlling a gun. Every character gets to participate in the fight in every round (not counting the droids right now). They are fighting against four tie fighters, a fight that probably shouldn't take more than 10 rounds in most systems. Perfectly fine encounter.
Then we have Luke by himself with 23 NPCs attacking the Death Star with infinite numbers of Tie Fighters. It's only Luke fighting, Leia watching on, and Han and Chewie not even in the scene. (Their own fault for splitting the party.) This is really not ideal for an RPG encounter. But how much fighting does Luke actually do? I think he might shot two Tie Fighters in total and he has one moment where he has one on his tail and one moment where R2 gets hit by Vader. And then he makes his shot at the exhaust shaft. (Han also shows up at the end to take one shot at a Tie Fighter.) If we really want to have this battle as an encounter, we really don't need to track health or roll dice for those other 23 NPCs. (Maybe roll once when Wedge gets the Tie Fighter that is on Luke's tail.)

In The Empire Strikes back, we have the ground battle against the Walkers. Maybe if the other players agree to play Dak, Wedge, and Wes Johnson (worst Star Wars name ever!) instead of their regular ones you could make this work. Make them take down two of the Walkers and call it a day. No need to roll to see what the rest of Rogue squadron is doing against the other four walkers. Two craft against two, with all four players making rolls? Why not?
Then we have the Millennium Falcon in the asteroid belt, again being chased by only 4 Tie Fighters. Yes, back in 79 it was a huge pain in the butt to do these effects shot and making it only four seriously limited the workload. But the scene only needed four Ties to tell the story of the encounter. Adding 20 more Tie Fighters crashing into asteroids or, one gunner blowing up six of them in four seconds while the Millennium Falcon makes a loop would not make the encounter any more interesting. Only more confusing and fuzzy. (Man, I hate JJ's work.) But it's not even the Tie Fighters this scene is about. It's about trying to fix the Hyperdrive and surviving the asteroids.
Oh, and at the end there's dodging Tie Fighters and a Star Destroyer while waiting for R2 to fix the Hyperdrive.

Then in Return of the Jedi we have Lando, Nien Nunb, and Wedge Antilles taking on the entire Imperial Fleet. About 90% of the whole battle consist of basically circling in a holding pattern while waiting for the shield to be deactivated, meanwhile taking shots at Tie Fighters that don't matter because there's an infinite number of them. This is exactly the kind of space battle that you really should not try to emulate in your campaign.
After the shield is down, the three fly inside the Death Star to blow up the reactor and than fly out again. Pursued by a small number (probably four) of Tie Fighters. I think this would actually be a fun encounter to play. Not exactly a battle, but more like a vehicle chase scene. You even get Lando failing a piloting roll and the Millenium Falcon loosing its sensors as a consequence.

Space Transports really are the perfect kind of spacecraft for a party of PCs. They allow every player to participate in the encounter. You can always have a third character manning a third gun to support the other two, even if those other two gunners end up getting all the kills because they have much better skills. And you could also always throw in some minor fire on board that one of the noncombatant has to extinguish before it causes further damage to the ship or crew.
And I'm with the movies that having four attackers is probably a really good base line for the vast majority of space combat encounters. Maybe increase it to six occasionally, but after that it probably gets boring. If you really want to have a huge battle, find a way to isolate one small segment of the fighting that falls within this scale. Once the players have won this little private skirmish, the overall outcome of the battle should become clear.
While the RPG books love their list of capital ships with their huge amounts of hit points and shields, and the large numbers of enormously powerful turbolasers, I don't really can't think of any situation where you want to use them. I can see how it could be fun to command a Calamari cruiser against two Carracks and a Nebulon-B frigate, but that's just not the kind of situation PCs ever find themselves in. Characters who command capital ships don't go on what is usually considered to be "adventures".

aglondier
2020-08-08, 01:12 AM
Having run many Star Wars games, across different eras, regions, and game systems...the one piece of advice I think most important is Scale. Decide on the scale of your campaign, and stick to it. The dark side will tempt you to escalate, don't. It will get silly very fast.

If they are commandos, or jedi knights, or smugglers, or princesses...find their level and run with it. There is plenty of galaxy for them to watch the Big Bad fight the Heroes, and maybe even help out a little, without getting themselves curbstomped.

Eh, whatever...need more sleep...

Yora
2020-08-08, 04:11 AM
Really a matter of opinion here, but I think when people want to play Star Wars adventures, they want to play something that is like the movies. Or at least the books, or the videogames. Of course you could play a bunch of regular people in the Star Wars galaxy, but would that feel like the Star Wars works that made you interested in the setting in the first place?

I think Star Wars campaigns should make the PCs to be heroes. They don't need to be Luke Skywalker, but they should at least be Kyle Katarrn.

If you really want to play a regular soldier or technician, there's no reason why you couldn't. But when you sit down to play a Star Wars campaign, does that really sound more exciting than playing big heroes?

Mechalich
2020-08-08, 04:38 AM
Really a matter of opinion here, but I think when people want to play Star Wars adventures, they want to play something that is like the movies. Or at least the books, or the videogames. Of course you could play a bunch of regular people in the Star Wars galaxy, but would that feel like the Star Wars works that made you interested in the setting in the first place?

I think Star Wars campaigns should make the PCs to be heroes. They don't need to be Luke Skywalker, but they should at least be Kyle Katarrn.

If you really want to play a regular soldier or technician, there's no reason why you couldn't. But when you sit down to play a Star Wars campaign, does that really sound more exciting than playing big heroes?

OT Star Wars is a deliberately generic fantasy epic that happens to be set in space. In that context, yes, the PCs essentially have to be large-scale heroes, because that's the operative mode of the work in question.

The Old Republic/KotoR Era is somewhat more questionable, because that time frame is significantly less generic. It's not built upon a synthesis of intended to be universal 'monomyth' thematic elements, but instead it's built out mostly of gradually accumulated and layered lore produced by various writers working within their personal soapbox of a pre-existing framework (ex. KotoR I resembles Mass Effect immensely because the same guy was heavily involved in writing both things). The massive timeline presentation which preceded the launch of TOR is a prime example of this - it's literally a synthesis of lore from earlier sources organized, re-emphasized, and occasionally retconned to fit the new game's specific context.

So scale, and in fact entire genre can vary. The Mandalorian, for example, is a western, not an epic (so far anyway) but its far more specific than the OT ever was because it draws upon a huge body of lore.

You can certainly have big epic storylines, but you don't have to. In TOR, for example, out of the eight class stories the principally epic ones are the Jedi Knight, the Jedi Consular, and the Sith Warrior. The Imperial Agent's storyline is much closer to a spy thriller, the Sith Inquisitor's storyline is about advancement in a shockingly cutthroat political organization (whose ultimate outcome actually serves to weaken the empire in its struggle with the Republic, at least temporarily), and the bounty hunter, commando, and smuggler stories all lean more into pulp action tropes than the epic mode.

Pulp action, in particular, is a common method of storytelling for Star Wars, and has a long pedigree. The Kotor comics story run (the one with Zane and Jarael), in particular, could easily be described as a pulp series, as could more recent productions like Dr. Aphra.

So it is important to determine whether you're running an epic (it need not be the epic, the Jedi Consular is still essential to insuring the defeat of the Sith Empire even though the Jedi Knight actually 'kills' him), or whether you're just romping around the galaxy pulp style.

aglondier
2020-08-08, 05:28 AM
Ran a campaign that led to an alternate timeline where Vader fathered an entire generation of powerful force users in secret, planning to use some of them to help him overthrow Palpatine. Leading to the discovery that both pc force sensitives were Skywalkers.

In another the team stumbled across a 'pleasure' planet that immediately dragged them into a series of rediculously over the top events that were subsequently broadcast across the sector as entertainment. Doing the deep booming voice of the Entertainment Director as he described what the players were doing next was a lot of fun, even when it had the players cringing...

It's your game.

Make it as mundane, epic, space fantasy, realistic, and/or fun as you like.

LibraryOgre
2020-08-08, 10:24 AM
Really a matter of opinion here, but I think when people want to play Star Wars adventures, they want to play something that is like the movies. Or at least the books, or the videogames. Of course you could play a bunch of regular people in the Star Wars galaxy, but would that feel like the Star Wars works that made you interested in the setting in the first place?


Of course, the question may become "Which movies"?

Sure, there's Luke and Leia and Rey and Finn, but there's also Han Solo and Lando Calrissian, or Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor. Sure, there's "Revan, Savior of the Galaxy", but there's also "Revan, Swoop Track Champion". You could be telling a story about Obi-wan Kenobi or Hondo Ohnaka... all Star Wars, all different.

Yora
2020-08-08, 11:29 AM
I don't consider Han and Lando to be regular people, though. They are still very extraordinary action heroes. They are both at the very top of the league in which they are playing, sparring with Vader and Jabba and getting away with it.

LibraryOgre
2020-08-08, 02:50 PM
I don't consider Han and Lando to be regular people, though. They are still very extraordinary action heroes. They are both at the very top of the league in which they are playing, sparring with Vader and Jabba and getting away with it.

I was leaning towards Solo, the movie, as the example of adventures that might happen with them.

Mechalich
2020-08-08, 07:25 PM
I was leaning towards Solo, the movie, as the example of adventures that might happen with them.

Solo is somewhat unusual though because Han spends pretty much the entirety of the movie in way over his head and it's only his gradually emerging Han Solo -ness that allows him to survive it's events at all (this is also true, though to a lesser extent, of Lando). Dryden Vos, the film's nominal villain is a big time player. He's head of Crimson Dawn which, at that point in the Disney Canon timeline, is a top ten galaxy-spanning crime syndicate, and reports directly to Maul, who is the #1 crime boss in the galaxy at that point in time (a spot Jabba usurps/retakes following Maul's death in Rebels) with control over several major syndicates at the same time. So while it's a heist film, it's still a high-end heist film, with the characters being the kind of people who, if you transported them to the Fast universe, could totally join Dom Toretto's familia.

Most Star Wars protagonists are at least pulp heroes (Star Wars draws heavy inspiration from the pulp era, particularly Flash Gordon, so this is not surprising) and are distinctly larger than life even if they aren't the stars of an epic galaxy-spanning crux of history.

However, because the Star Wars galaxy, is a galaxy you can be engaging in some pretty big-time pulp heroics at a surprisingly small scale compared to the galaxy as a whole. Not for nothing has Star Wars run at least two episodes based directly on the 'train and save the village' plot of Seven Samurai (also a major inspiration), one in TCW and one in The Mandalorian. Consequently, in some ways setting scale is a matter of geography. Is your story about the fate of the whole galaxy? Or is it about a Sector, or a single star system, or a single planet, or even a single city. All are viable options for a campaign.

Yora
2020-08-18, 03:22 PM
I've decided that since I am planning on starting a Star Wars campaign with a completely new system that I've never run, I probably should start with something fairly compact and simple. I got a general idea already, but nothing really specific yet:

The campaign takes place in the months before The Empire Strikes Back, a good while after the dissolution of the Imperial Senate, the destruction of Alderaan, and the destruction of the Death Star, when the Rebellion is turning from small underground actions to full out civil war. I want to base it on the Expanded Universe how it was when I got into it during the 90s, like in Shadows of the Empire, Heir to the Empire, and the Jedi Knight games. Which I also think makes it most accessible for players who aren't super deeply into Star Wars in general. (I also don't really know anything about all the Clone Wars storylines, so I'll just be ignoring their existence.)

The idea that I have is that the campaign begins in some unremarkable sector in the Outer Rim in the region between Malastare, Sullust, Ryloth, Rodia, and Tatooine. (Which happens to be smack where Naboo is, but I want to keep it to the 90s EU.) The sector had previously off the radar of the Empire, but now that "the regional governors have direct control over their territories", the local Moff has great aspirations for it and himself. He removed the inefficient and corrupt local government official and replaced it with loyal Imperial officers.
That is making the locals very unhappy. In particular scoundrels who now get their ships stopped and search much more often and carefully, making their job much more dangerous. And the officials that used to not really care about what they doing and where happy to leave them alone for small bribes keep getting purged, and the buyers of smuggled goods getting arrested. The local population also gets quite angry as all kinds of Imperial taxes are now actually getting collected and unregistered weapons confiscated. The Moff also decided that several planets with valuable resources are now Imperial property (always have been), and the local human settlers have to pay outrages fees to get their land claims officially registered and recognized. Alien settlers just get relocated to nearby crappy desert planets.
This results in a sector where loyalty to the Empire is low, sympathy for the Rebellion quite high, and the Imperial forces still have not gained full control.

The heroes start as scoundrels with no love for the Empire, who have been under increasing pressure for the last year, and whose situation it becoming more precarious by the day. My idea is to begin with a number of close calls with the Empire, as other ships are getting seized just before the heroes want to dock to pick up contraband, their contacts are getting arrested, and they are in the wrong place at the wrong time when Imperial soldiers raid bars to arrest wanted criminals. Getting new jobs becomes more difficult, which makes accepting jobs for the Rebellion look more appealing. That's as far as I would want to push the players along. If they want to keep it at that or eventually join the Rebellion as full members should be left open to them.
Giving the time period and the context, I really like the idea that the moff is corrupt in his own way, hiding tax money from Coruscant, and setting the new government up to be loyal to him personally instead of the Empire. Which would be just the kind of situation that Mara Jade would be looking into. The heroes would not be able to tell who she is (though I wouldn't make much effort to keep players familiar with her from figuring it out), but could learn that the moff is being investigated by his superiors, and providing her with evidence could be one option to take him down.

With Star Wars being based on old movies, I think this situation would work great for an Italo-Western style: The railway is coming to the frontier, big companies are moving in and push around independent family farmers and store owners, the law is getting enforced more consistently, and the native population has already been displaced. Imperial propaganda makes it sound like they are bringing order and civilization, but for the frontier people there's nothing to cheer about it.
Tatooine is nearby, where Jabba is still the big criminal mastermind at this time. And not far away is Falleen, the homeworld of Prince Xixor, who also is still alive at this point and the leader of Black Sun, another major crime group. Talon Karrde has a base on Rishi, quite close to both Tatooine and Falleen. Wookieepedia tells me that Booster Terrik was released from Kessel shortly after the Battle of Hoth, but I think there's no harm in releasing him a year earlier, so I can have him in a campaign at the same time as Lando Calrissian is still running Cloud City. It's the Who-is-Who of early EU scoundrels.
I'd also like to do stuff on Malastare, Sullust, Sluis Van, and Bespin, which are all major or at least well known industrial centers. Organized crime and heavy industry very much lends itself to Noir, which is one of my favorite movie styles.
Given the time and the focus on scoundrels, I think Jedi could be left out of this entirely. It also means I don't have to bother with special rules about the Force while getting used to a new system. I also am not terribly interested in big military operations in RPGs myself, so I would have anything Rebellion focused have to deal with undercover spy work and sabotage instead of fleets and armies in major battles. (At this time the Rebels can't really openly conquer territory yet anyway.) Spy stuff is also super common in Noir in addition to organized crime, so that all goes together very well. Italo-Western and Noir. Sounds like a winning Star Wars formula to me.

Unfortunately I still don't have a solid idea for an actual story. As I see it, there's already five (or six) different factions with potential stakes in the area: The Imperial Moff, the Rebel Alliance, Jabba's Cartel, Black Sun, and the "good scoundrels" (and Mara Jade). With three crime groups involved, there would have to be something quite valuable about the sector. Making it the same thing that the Moff is trying to profit from would probably be a good move. I was thinking about having the heroes start out as independent, but I think it would also be fun to have them have a working relationship with either Talon Karrde or Booster Terrik. Not as their boss, but trusted business partner they trust to not stab them in the back. That way they could make more than cameo appearances, but would not have to be an additional party in whatever Jabba, Black Sun, and the Moff are fighting over.
I think the end goal of the campaign should be to have the Moff removed and replaced with someone who is corrupt in a way that is more favorable to smugglers and acceptable for the Rebels. And the path to get there should be through cloak and dagger shenanigans, not a big final battle. But I feel these are still all peripheral things. What's missing is a major central conflict around a specific focus.

Mechalich
2020-08-18, 05:59 PM
The idea that I have is that the campaign begins in some unremarkable sector in the Outer Rim in the region between Malastare, Sullust, Ryloth, Rodia, and Tatooine. (Which happens to be smack where Naboo is, but I want to keep it to the 90s EU.)

Looks like you might want the Dalchon Sector (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Dalchon_sector) as your base. That's the sector immediately between the Arkanis sector (which contains Tatooine) and the Gaulus sector (which contains Ryloth) on the Corellian Run. It doesn't have many notable worlds assigned to it, the most significant one might be Orvax IV, a noted center of the galactic slave trade (appears in the Dark Times comics).


I think the end goal of the campaign should be to have the Moff removed and replaced with someone who is corrupt in a way that is more favorable to smugglers and acceptable for the Rebels. And the path to get there should be through cloak and dagger shenanigans, not a big final battle. But I feel these are still all peripheral things. What's missing is a major central conflict around a specific focus.

Since I just mentioned Orvax IV, I'll toss out this idea: a Moff who tolerates Spice smuggling and takes his cut of those profits is generally superior from the Rebellion's perspective (and almost certainly that of the players) than a Moff who tolerates and takes his cut of the slave trade and orders all dissidents shackled and shipped off to bondage on Kessel or Zygerria. Slavery is technically illegal under Imperial law, which makes it the kind of thing Mara Jade (or some other Emperor's Hand, you don't have to use the galaxy's favorite redhead) could string a Moff up for getting too deep into. Likewise you could easily put Jabba - who supports spice smuggling because he controls the local spice triangle (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Spice_Triangle/Legends) worlds - up against Black Sun, who are more interested in the slave trade and its capability to support absurd construction projects backed by the wealthy nobles of the core and the Empire, which is also using slaves to build various massive superweapons (you could easily have a tie-in where you say that crippling the galactic slave trade sets back development of the Death Star II a few critical months).

Composer99
2020-08-18, 08:01 PM
Is there some resource there that the Empire has suddenly become very interested in? By that point there might be a big uptick in demand for unobtanium Khyber crystals. (*) For crime syndicates that have the wherewithal to swoop in, grab some, and launder it to sell to the Empire, there could be an incentive to get involved in the sector.

(*) Minor spoiler, just in case:
They're used to power the Death Star superlaser.

Pleh
2020-08-19, 09:21 AM
I've decided that since I am planning on starting a Star Wars campaign with a completely new system that I've never run, I probably should start with something fairly compact and simple.

*That's no snip, it's a space station.*

You have a funny idea of "compact and simple."

I really feel like this thread is hugely overthinking this, for the most part.

To me, Saga Edition did a great job using the core classes to identify the basic Star Wars experience in a thematic sense (I haven't played other systems to compare, but I haven't needed to).

It's star wars, so you have jedi nonsense going on.

It's intrinsically political, so you have nobles that represent government officials, crime bosses, and corporate officers.

It's a war, so you have soldiers.

The galaxy is largely unexplored, so you have fringe dwelling scouts mapping new lanes.

Crime is just as important as government, so you have scoundrels.

There you have it. Five critical elements every Star Wars game needs. Jedi voodoo stuff, political intrigue, tons of pulp action combat, increasingly bizarre alien cultures the further you get from the civilized amd regimented core, and a powerful, thriving criminal underworld always taking advantage of the chaos and keeping the good vs evil war from becoming a strictly two sided conflict.

As for starship combat, I have always run it that piloting a starship is as common a skill as driving a car. Every competent adult can do it, though they may have trouble with specialized equipment and capital ships still need a huge crew to operate them. You want a skilled pilot for doing things beyond traveling from A to B in a safe and reasonable manner and parking.

As for the combat rules, I like using modified chase encounter rules. Fits Star Wars pretty well.

Misereor
2020-08-20, 05:22 AM
The first one is how you would approach making a campaign that deals with the Force in general and Sith Lords as antagonists in particular, that doesn't come down to hunting for some magical MacGuffin. It's an established standard for D&D campaigns, but it really doesn't feel like Star Wars to me. It's not in the movies or the books and comics I read in the 90s (not up to date on what came later), and I always thought it felt really lame when playing Jedi Academy. If you're playing Lando and Wedge type characters, fighting against a Darth Vader and defeating him to safe the galaxy just doesn't seem plausible.

Very much connected to that is the question of how you would get a party of widely different characters together to go on a great adventure. You could always start with the whole party being Jedi or Rebel Soldiers and being send on a mission. But would it be practically doable to also have a great campaign with a party that is more like Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewbacca, with perhaps the odd droid thrown in?

I ran a prequel campaign a decade ago, based on the standard SW recipe:
- Slightly boring business as usual
- Something terrible happens
- Characters must rise as heroes to restore balance
- The story must contain a few moral conundrums, and at least one chance to fall to the dark side

Regarding your first question, the campaign was set at the beginning of the Mandalorian Crusade, a couple of years before the Knights of the Old Republic computer game (and featuring several minor NPCs). That allowed me to use the Mandalorians as very obvious and very cool bad guys, while keeping Revan, or at least his underlings, in my back pocket for a later reveal.

As for your second question, the campaign started on the planet Telos, which at that time was an agricultural and monastery world where failed Jedi apprentices were sent, in addition to being a major naval base (both planet and naval base were later destroyed by Darth Malak). By GM fiat, I declared the players failed apprentices in the same group, and incidentally setting them up for being hunted by both sides once they escape, at least in the begininng of the campaign.


The campaign basically ended up being a few into-adventures not directly related to the main plot, but foreshadowing it.
Then they fought the mandalorians for a few adventures.
Then in the begining of another adventure they were knocked out by a dark cloaked figure who told the present Mandalorians to "deal with them" (capture-escape adventure)
Finally discover that mysterious and very obviously non-Mandalorian bad guy (Revanite Sith) was using Mandies in his evil plans for entire sector, setting up remainder of campaign.

The group split up shortly after that, but I think the campaign had a solid premise. I was looking forward to tempting my players, using the imperfections of the Old Republic as bait, but unfortunately never made it that far.

Yora
2020-08-22, 02:46 PM
Question to everyone? How would you approach an all scoundrel campaign? No Jedi and Rebel soldiers. Just space cowboys whose activities range from questionably legal to all out criminal?

What would conflict look like and what kinds of antagonists would the heroes be dealing with? And what element from the original movies and the EU would you try to build on?

I think the go to reference would probably be the first third of Return of the Jedi. Jabba seems to be the archetype for scum and villainy in Star Wars.

LibraryOgre
2020-08-22, 04:00 PM
Question to everyone? How would you approach an all scoundrel campaign? No Jedi and Rebel soldiers. Just space cowboys whose activities range from questionably legal to all out criminal?

What would conflict look like and what kinds of antagonists would the heroes be dealing with? And what element from the original movies and the EU would you try to build on?

I think the go to reference would probably be the first third of Return of the Jedi. Jabba seems to be the archetype for scum and villainy in Star Wars.

Take my love,
Take my land,
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me

Antagonists would be a mix of other criminals and law enforcement... be they local customs agents or the ISB. I think mining Solo and the related EU properties would be good... The Hutts, the Black Suns, and similar groups. I'd make Bounty Hunters figure into it, perhaps even some of the old "Guild Bounty Hunter" stuff I noodled about on the 'Pit.

Lots of conflict would be about getting a job and keeping your crew running. Keeping one step ahead of the organized crime who wants to destroy you, use you, or absorb you (think Niska in Firefly), one step ahead of the law, and making sure that you're able to live with yourself.

Pleh
2020-08-22, 06:21 PM
Take my love,
Take my land,
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me

Antagonists would be a mix of other criminals and law enforcement... be they local customs agents or the ISB. I think mining Solo and the related EU properties would be good... The Hutts, the Black Suns, and similar groups. I'd make Bounty Hunters figure into it, perhaps even some of the old "Guild Bounty Hunter" stuff I noodled about on the 'Pit.

Lots of conflict would be about getting a job and keeping your crew running. Keeping one step ahead of the organized crime who wants to destroy you, use you, or absorb you (think Niska in Firefly), one step ahead of the law, and making sure that you're able to live with yourself.

This exactly. Every day becomes navigating the balance between rags and riches. Every job testing how far to the Dark Side will you go and what lines you refuse to cross. Every relationship is fraught with the danger of getting betrayed, either by handing you over to authorities, or getting you killed so they can take your stuff.

Firefly is a great balance point between goofy antics and thrilling heroics, but Solo is a great movie to pull from if you want to keep the tone lighthearted while exploring the same themes.

But I think most TTRPG players told they're gonna play a Star Wars Scoundrel adventure would actually want the biggest inspiration to be The Mandalorian.

Mechalich
2020-08-22, 07:46 PM
Question to everyone? How would you approach an all scoundrel campaign? No Jedi and Rebel soldiers. Just space cowboys whose activities range from questionably legal to all out criminal?

What would conflict look like and what kinds of antagonists would the heroes be dealing with? And what element from the original movies and the EU would you try to build on?

It really depends. Most scoundrel stories, in Star Wars and otherwise, involve the scoundrels becoming caught up in events that go beyond the limited scope of their current operations - which are usually 'make enough money to keep going and feed the vices' - and into a greater sphere where they are ultimately forced to make a choice between money and doing the 'right thing.' This is extremely prevalent in Star Wars and features heavily in the early Han Solo stories (both in the Legends EU and in the movie Solo), in a number of comics about scoundrel types (the Kotor comics run and the Legacy comics run in particular), and several books, including the eponymously titled Scoundrels. It's also pretty much the core story of The Mandalorian. It's also worth noting that if you have a scoundrel type character who does not choose to do the right thing when the chips are down the stories can get brutally dark. Examples in Star Wars include the Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy (Legends) and the Dr. Aphra comic line (Disney, but surprisingly really good anyway).

One of the tricky things about a scoundrel campaign is the issue of money. In most great scoundrel stories the crew occupies a sort of Schrondinger's financial space where they are somehow continually one failed mission away from having to sell their essential assets (usually a ship) and give up the life and also one big score away from being set for life (Cowboy Bebop, Firefly, and many other prominent 'space western' scoundrel tales lean into this trope hard). This can be rather difficult to manage in a tabletop setting without some pretty brutal interference in the PCs finances and a lot of high-handing GM actions to snatch the payday away at the last moment - traditional scoundrel serials are full of successful missions where somehow the crew goes home empty-handed anyway.


I think the go to reference would probably be the first third of Return of the Jedi. Jabba seems to be the archetype for scum and villainy in Star Wars.

While Jabba is a solid archetype for scum and villainy in Star Wars, the opening third of RotJ is not a good example of scoundrel campaigning, save perhaps as a final climax. It's an extended series of action set pieces in which Jabba's criminal empire, which is hundreds of years old, is collapsed by the actions of the Heroes of Yavin (and Lando). It's nothing like the slow grind of freighter captain or bounty hunter life.


Antagonists would be a mix of other criminals and law enforcement... be they local customs agents or the ISB.

The law, regrettably, is one of the more underdeveloped aspects of Star Wars, which is why scoundrel stories in Star Wars always seem to pit criminals against each other or against semi-legal institutions such as the Bounty Hunters Guild. While this fits with the source material, especially the Kurosawa films (and Star Wars did Seven Samurai in both TCW and the Mandalorian), it does have some issues. A useful antagonist with a law enforcement adjacent focus is a mercenary force hired as a security firm - the Regulators on Makeb in SWTOR are a good example, since they're essentially a fully equipped private army hired by the Hutts to keep people from messing with their stuff.

Yora
2020-08-23, 04:28 AM
I feel laws in most periods don't really matter much. The laws of the Empire are inherently unfair by design to work against whatever heroes you might be playing. Imperials can arrest you and confiscate your stuff for whatever reason seems convenient right now. There certainly is an Imperial law that covers that sotuation and make the heroes be treated poorly.
In the remote areas, laws are a farce. What goes as authorities are simply the biggest local gang of thugs, who can afford giving everyone a badge and a uniform. They don't enforce the law, they extort people for personal profit.

There are of course civilized planets not fully controlled by the imperial military, but those are individual unique cases that heroes aren't going to visit often anyway. In those cases part of such planets' unique character are laws that seem random and silly to outsiders.

In any case, specific rules of what is allowed or not don't really seem to serve much purpose in Star Wars to me.

Sapphire Guard
2020-08-23, 12:44 PM
The easy way is probably this.

Delivery job from Faction A, interference from faction B, delivery to faction C. How this goes will set up how your players view or are viewed by the factions involved. Some of them might give more employment, others might become hostile or put a bounty on them.

Misereor
2020-08-24, 05:23 AM
Question to everyone? How would you approach an all scoundrel campaign?

To be honest, I wouldn't.
Firefly was a scoundrel campaign, but the players were a diverse mix of scoundrels and non-scoundrels for a reason.

LibraryOgre
2020-08-24, 08:34 AM
To be honest, I wouldn't.
Firefly was a scoundrel campaign, but the players were a diverse mix of scoundrels and non-scoundrels for a reason.

Really, everyone WAS a scoundrel, to one extent or another, just for very different reasons.

Jayne was simply a bad person
Mal wanted to live outside the laws of the Alliance
Zoe was actively fighting the Alliance
Wash was content to live as a scavenger and smuggler
Simon and River were semi-normal people wanted by the Alliance
Book was an Alliance officer who left in a cloud of disgrace
Inara was "respectable" and a companion, but she was also quite willing to take part in crime (Trash) and help spring them from the authorities (The Train Job)
About the least scoundrely person is Kaylee, who just wanted to fix engines and get out in space.

And every pure scoundrel campaign can absorb one non-scoundrel.

Mechalich
2020-08-24, 07:59 PM
Scoundrel status depends heavily on context and relationship to the law. Specifically how strong the legal regime holds. The stronger and more restrictive the law is, the less one has to do to be classified as a person operating on the margins of the law or outright outside of it. To use the Firefly example, the crew of the Serenity drifted back and forth from completely legitimate traders in the outlying colony regions, to dubious freebooters further in, to outright thieves and robbers on Alliance planets.

Star Wars has a similar gradation. The law is generally very strong in the Core and Colonies (there are some exceptions, like Corellia), modest in the Inner Rim and Expansion Region, weak in the Mid Rim, and outright absent across much of the Outer Rim (or merely a front, Nar Shaddaa, for example, does have a police force, but it's just enforcers for the Hutts in a different uniform).

Many characters, transposed from one region to another, move back and forth from 'scoundrel' to 'not-scoundrel' accordingly, because their everyday activities vary in legality depending on where they are standing. Bounty hunting is a nice example. On some planets it's outright illegal - prior to the Clone Wars someone like Jango Fett could be arrested for just landing on a world like Chandrila or Alderaan, while out on Tatooine he becomes part of the quasi-legal regime that upholds a measure of public order.

It's worth noting that, during the Imperial Era, the law is about as strong as it's ever been during the history of the galaxy (partly because no one's ever really bothered to depict a Republic Golden Age), and much, much stronger than it was under the spectacularly corrupt and utterly toothless Republic during the decades immediately preceding the Clone Wars. Now, the Imperial regime is both illegitimate, massively corrupt in its own right, and absolutely morally bankrupt, but it is strong. Imperial ships can be found anywhere and Imperial captains generally have a fairly low tolerance for chicanery that doesn't directly benefit them. Life on the fringe becomes much more difficult from 19 BBY to 0 ABY, when the rise of the Rebellion takes a good bit of the pressure off.

aglondier
2020-08-24, 09:15 PM
Question to everyone? How would you approach an all scoundrel campaign? No Jedi and Rebel soldiers. Just space cowboys whose activities range from questionably legal to all out criminal?

What would conflict look like and what kinds of antagonists would the heroes be dealing with? And what element from the original movies and the EU would you try to build on?

I think the go to reference would probably be the first third of Return of the Jedi. Jabba seems to be the archetype for scum and villainy in Star Wars.

I would run an all-scoundrels campaign in the rebellion era as agents for the rebels. Much of the rebels equipment was stolen or salvaged imperial tech, someone had to acquire it. The shuttle Han and co. flew to Endor? Someone had to steal it. Go back to the movies and decide what the rebels needed for each major action, have the players acquire it, and then run a clip of the resulting section of the movies so they know what they contributed to the cause.

Misereor
2020-08-25, 05:00 AM
Really, everyone WAS a scoundrel, to one extent or another, just for very different reasons.

Jayne was simply a bad person
Mal wanted to live outside the laws of the Alliance
Zoe was actively fighting the Alliance
Wash was content to live as a scavenger and smuggler
Simon and River were semi-normal people wanted by the Alliance
Book was an Alliance officer who left in a cloud of disgrace
Inara was "respectable" and a companion, but she was also quite willing to take part in crime (Trash) and help spring them from the authorities (The Train Job)
About the least scoundrely person is Kaylee, who just wanted to fix engines and get out in space.

And every pure scoundrel campaign can absorb one non-scoundrel.

I tend to think of those as personality types, not classes.
Kinda like an Assassin campaign, where not everyone plays the Assassin class.

Yora
2020-08-25, 06:02 AM
Yes, as it should be. It's Star Wars, not Dungeons & Dragons.

Characters are people defined by personality, not by special abilities.

LibraryOgre
2020-08-25, 08:02 AM
I tend to think of those as personality types, not classes.
Kinda like an Assassin campaign, where not everyone plays the Assassin class.

Yes, but not every Star Wars game uses classes, and "scoundrel" is just a word. Since this is not edition specific, pointing out that everyone is some kind of scoundrel doesn't have anything to do with class, and everything to do with who they are.

Ad res, the strength and legitimacy of the law is entirely down to setting. For example, in a Rebellion-era campaign. no one but the Empire really questions Lando's legitimacy as the Baron-Administrator of Bespin (that we see). When Leia and Han arrive, they have air traffic control and, while they're a bit aggressive, both of them treat that as being fairly normal. But in the OT, we are otherwise never in places with legitimate authority... Tattooine is Hutt, the Death Star is a military compound (so, while they might be "legitimate", no one interacts with them from a position of civilian authority), and Yavin is the same. Hoth? Dagobah? Endor? None of those do they interact with authority as civilians, so we don't see any sign of legitimate, civil, legal authority.

Now, in the PT, we see more civil authority. On Naboo, it is contested (in TPM; not so in AoTC). On Coruscant, it is not. ST? No place we go really has a civil authority, except Canto Bight... and they don't really interact with them at all. So, you can write a place with strong and competent civil authorities... but, then, what is there for the players to do but be badguys?

Sapphire Guard
2020-08-25, 07:07 PM
How scoundrely they want to be is up to the players, not the GM.

Build your factions, let the players loose in the world, and let them pick a side. Know what each faction wants, which will influence how they treat the players. If they want to run spice, that'll bring them into conflict with rival dealers and such. If they want to hunt bounties for the Empire, that'll bring them into conflict with the bounties and their allies. And so on.

Yora
2020-08-26, 03:51 AM
Doing sandbox campaigns like this is certainly an option. But I think with Star Wars, many people would expect, for lack of a better term, a more cinematic adventure. Something where there's a clear villain and established victory conditions that have to be chased.
Rebels fighting the Empire could go on basically forever, and making a living as smugglers has no end point at all. Instead of working up to a conclusion, such campaigns generally go downward until people don't care to continue anymore.
The classic movies are about resolving the situation between Luke and Vader. The prequels are about the Emperor becoming the Emperor (though the protagonists think it's defeating the Separatist). And you get this with almost all Star Wars stories. The Heroes usually have a task forced on them that they have to deal with one way or another. Not having the option to fly off somewhere else and start something new is an aspect of Star Wars that I consider to be quite central.

Misereor
2020-08-26, 05:23 AM
Yes, but not every Star Wars game uses classes, and "scoundrel" is just a word. Since this is not edition specific, pointing out that everyone is some kind of scoundrel doesn't have anything to do with class, and everything to do with who they are.

Ad res, the strength and legitimacy of the law is entirely down to setting. For example, in a Rebellion-era campaign. no one but the Empire really questions Lando's legitimacy as the Baron-Administrator of Bespin (that we see). When Leia and Han arrive, they have air traffic control and, while they're a bit aggressive, both of them treat that as being fairly normal. But in the OT, we are otherwise never in places with legitimate authority... Tattooine is Hutt, the Death Star is a military compound (so, while they might be "legitimate", no one interacts with them from a position of civilian authority), and Yavin is the same. Hoth? Dagobah? Endor? None of those do they interact with authority as civilians, so we don't see any sign of legitimate, civil, legal authority.

Now, in the PT, we see more civil authority. On Naboo, it is contested (in TPM; not so in AoTC). On Coruscant, it is not. ST? No place we go really has a civil authority, except Canto Bight... and they don't really interact with them at all. So, you can write a place with strong and competent civil authorities... but, then, what is there for the players to do but be badguys?

Interesting...
Because how scoundrelly was Han really?
Besides having a backstory as a smuggler and meeting Luke in a bar, what was so scoundrelly about him? He might as well have been played by an eccentric down-on-his-luck spaceship-restoration afficcionado who sells rides on his completed projects. As far as storytelling goes, the scoundrel part seems to be mostly about flavor, and not essence. Of course that flavor makes all the difference in story telling,, and especially a role playing game, but as far as mechanics were concerned, it didn't really matter...

Reverse that contention, and you have my objection to a "pure" scoundrel campaign. People can be non-scoundrelly, whether by class or self-identification, and still play in a scoundrel campaign, but forcing everyone to roll up a scoundrel could quickly become boring. You need a little variety in your cast.

Yora
2020-08-26, 07:16 AM
I would say Han and Lando are the default reference frame for what the world scoundrel means in a Star Wars context.

LibraryOgre
2020-08-26, 11:36 AM
Interesting...
Because how scoundrelly was Han really?


The only reason we really use the word "scoundrel" in Star Wars is because that's what Leia called Han.

Misereor
2020-08-28, 07:11 AM
The only reason we really use the word "scoundrel" in Star Wars is because that's what Leia called Han.

But we all recognized the stereotype. :)

Yora
2020-08-29, 03:35 AM
Looking over to the villains, what's a good way to set up antagonists? What are decent threats for the players to deal with that aren't quite another Death Star?
Rebels at least have the long term goal of overthrowing the empire, and if your campaign is set later, New Republic soldiers are still pushing back the Imperial Remnant.
But without that commitment, I feel that usually the easiest solution would be to get on a ship and head for greener pastures. One way to get around that is to have a villain who would follow the heroes. Jabba has decided he wants to punish Han and pay a lot of money for getting him.That's a threat that follows you around anywhere. But it's not something you can use for every campaign.

LibraryOgre
2020-08-29, 10:55 AM
The Rebellion was always about taking out Palpatine... you had to remove him from power to have actually "won". But, with a scoundrel game, you may be looking at multiple villains, and multiple ways of "winning".

Let's say these are the big groups that have influence on the players:

A) Moff Ferkin, who leads the Imperials in this area.
B) Gonzo the Hutt, who is in charge of the Hutt crime syndicate, including a lot of smuggling
C) Scar, head of the Black Sun in the area, which tends to handle slavery and mercenaries

Now, the three of these have reached a degree of equilibrium... the Moff's customs people take some bribes from Gonzo and Scar, but bust them occasionally, and also sometimes bust someone else on their suggestion, breaking up their competition. Gonzo and Scar would like to move in on each other's territories, but it would be expensive to take out their competition (especially as both could get outside help), so they've kind of carved up the illegal activity between them, and occasionally use Moff Ferkin to screw over their opposition.

Then comes the nerf in the grenade shop, the player characters, looking to carve out their own fortune in this landscape. Upsetting the balance of power in any direction will break this fragile equilibrium, and depending on the agregate of who the PCs are, what they want might be very different. Someone might be Rebel-leaning, and want to damage the Imperials. Someone might be abolitionist and a freed slave, and want to damage the Black Sun operations (while avoiding Scar). Someone might be just out to make some money smuggling medicines, and that might be something that Gonzo is getting in the way of... and they can all wind up on the same ship, a Firefly-class transport, along with a merry cast of other misfits and near-scoundrels.

So, my method is to set up the current physical and political geography. Know what the landscape looks like BEFORE the party wrecks it, so you can figure out what the results of wrecking it are likely to be.

Florian
2020-08-29, 11:35 AM
Question to everyone? How would you approach an all scoundrel campaign?

Personally, I wouldn't (*).

Star Wars is quite good at pitching faction avatars against each other. We simplify a major conflict by focusing on some select basics. Like communist/fascists empires having a nearly endless supply of warriors, while their agile, liberal enemies/rebells sport highly trained and intelligent commando troops.

(*). Stuff like the Empire or First Order can't exist without a criminal underbelly. Now maybe you remember the original Solo trilogy, explaining his background. Quite cool, but more a session zero than an independent scenario.

Yora
2020-08-29, 12:39 PM
Ah, yes. My favorite piece of advice, now provided by several people: "Give up your aspiration."

Florian
2020-08-29, 01:25 PM
Ah, yes. My favorite piece of advice, now provided by several people: "Give up your aspiration."

What did you expect?

The beauty of Star Wars is that it pars down a complex conflict into a direct confrontation of avatars.

Viewed as a RPG setting, we have one central conflict and everything is connected to it. To exaggerate a bit, in the New Order/Rebels era, you can't simply be Space Pirates with your own Nebulon-B, you are leaning to one side, therefore preying on the other side.

Star Wars without the central conflict is, well, not much more than Paizo Starfinder: Fantasy in Space.

Going further: Lando, Han and quite a few others are depicted as scoundrels that the Empire created by being what it is. Heck, watch Cowboy Bebop!

Star Wars without that central conflict? Not much left there. Might be an entirely different matter talking about Megatraveller.

LibraryOgre
2020-08-29, 02:33 PM
I disagree with Florian entirely. While some of the big stories will be about those cosmic clashed, they often form the backdrop of much smaller stories.

Take, for example, Solo. While the Empire is certainly involved in the story throughout, as is the nascent Rebellion, the struggle is actually much smaller... Han and Lando trying to get the money to keep Vos from killing them. The Empire is THERE, the Empire is occasionally part of the opposition, and Han ultimately sides with Enfys over Beckett, but those are not really central to the plot... they're part of the setting.

If you are setting a scoundrel game in the Rebellion era, the Empire and the Rebellion will be part of the backdrop, but they do not need to be a focus of it; plenty of folks will go about their lives without it having much impact on them. Scoundrels may run afoul of the law (i.e. the Empire), but their main competition will be other scoundrels. They may occasionally work for the Empire or the Rebellion... not because they agree with them, but because those entities are paying.

Star Wars may be GOOD for that, but there's no reason you have to have that. You can have a crew trying to keep their Turtle flying by hook, crook, and the occasional go-and-look, without needing to run with any of the big boys.

Florian
2020-08-29, 03:18 PM
I disagree with Florian entirely

I´m just being honest.

Star Wars is either the central conflict or an extremely bland space fantasy setting that could be done using Starfinder any day of the week.

LibraryOgre
2020-08-29, 03:31 PM
I´m just being honest.

Star Wars is either the central conflict or an extremely bland space fantasy setting that could be done using Starfinder any day of the week.

Perhaps, but if you're doing it in Starfinder, you're not doing it in Star Wars, and setting matters.

If you're doing it in Star Wars, you're doing it with Sullustans and Mon Cals. I get to play a Wookie or a Rodian or a Twi'lek. I can take a load of spice to Tattooine, get in a fight with a Gamorean, and then blast my way out of Mos Eisley spaceport. And I might be able to do those actions in Starfinder, but I wouldn't be doing them in Star Wars... and Star Wars has been a place I've lived in my head since the late 70s, whereas Starfinder is something I occasionally see mentioned on the message boards.

Your argument of "You might as well be doing it in Starfinder" doesn't carry weight when someone wants to be in Star Wars. I mean, you could be doing all of those Starfinder things in Star Wars... why are you bothering with Starfinder? You could be playing D&D, why bother with Savage Worlds?

Yora
2020-08-29, 03:35 PM
I just made an important realization about how Star Wars ticks.

I've been thinking of Star Wars as fantasy instead of science fiction for a long time, because of how it is all about wizard knights, swords, princesses, evil sorcerers, dark magic, and so on.
But I just now realized that Star Wars actually doesn't have any futuristic technology. All technology in Star Wars is really 1940s technology but reimagined in space.

Starfighters are fighter planes, except in space. Star Destroyers are battleships, except in space. Blasters are firearms and cannons, except they look like lasers, and lightsabers are swords, except they are lasers. Hover cars and speeder bikes are just cars and motorcycles, except that they float above the ground with no wheels. And the death star laser is just an atomic bomb.
The Expanded Universe later added the holonet, but it's a very 1990s internet which people basically go access in internet cafes and use it to send emails. Comlinks aren't cellphones but tiny radios.
I think the same principle is the reason why blue milk has always been a meme that never go away. It's not milk from a cow. It's space milk that comes from a space cow.

When it comes to dealing with technology in a Star Wars game (and really when creating any Star Wars content), I feel the reference frame should always be "was there something equivalent in 1945?"
And that goes for the civilized planets in the Core Worlds. Remote backwater planets can easily be like remote communities in Africa or Asia (or even Europe) 70 years ago. Electric light and running water might not be guaranteed, even when there's a spaceship docking back at the edge of the village. Remember how Luke's uncle shouted at him to come inside because he's going to turn down the generator for the night? Boy's got a hover car and space binoculars (and robot servants!) but they get their electricity from a generator that they turn off when they sleep.

Sapphire Guard
2020-08-29, 04:50 PM
If you want a definitive end point and don't want the crew to be able to up sticks, the easy way is to have your campaign's main villain have a personal grudge against the crew for some reason. So decide who your villain is, and then have the players do something that really annoys them.

They ruin a ceremony that was supposed to impress/intimidate the populace(if it's the Empire)
They break a protection racket by supplying aid to a planet that is blockaded.
They find a secret rich vein of spice and out its location to the villain's rivals.
They boost a really important shipment that is payment for a debt.

No matter where they run, the bounty hunters find them, or locals interfere with their operations. The only way out is to bring down your villain, so that becomes your campaign goal.

You said you can't use that for every campaign, but I thought you just wanted the one? If this becomes ongoing,

it's a good place to start. For future campaigns, your crew will have established contacts and useful NPCs that they will be less likely to leave behind.

What kind of game do you want to run, are your players the rats at the bottom of the pile or the kind of people that are going to bring down the Empire?

Mechalich
2020-08-29, 05:14 PM
But I just now realized that Star Wars actually doesn't have any futuristic technology. All technology in Star Wars is really 1940s technology but reimagined in space.

Star Wars does have some have some explicitly futuristic technologies though. The biggest one being, of course, the one that Lucasfilm trademarked: droids.

For example, Owen Lars owns a 'farm' on Tatooine (it's actually a small scale atmospheric harvesting plant, but whatever). There are three actual humans working there: Owen, Beru, and Luke. At the same time, there are something like two dozen droids. Luke calls himself a 'farmer' but his actual job is much more like 'droid maintenance technician.' This is analogous to a mid-sized ranch in the 'Old West.' Owen and Beru are the farmer and his wife, Luke's their child, but all of the farm hands and assistants are machine life. The lowest level of labor has been outright replaced.

This activity, the essential elimination of most forms of manual labor for organic sapient beings has profound impacts on how Star Wars society works. Impacts that, admittedly, no one has really grappled with in detail in the history of Star Wars, in large part because it is so complicated. In fact, in order to allow Star Wars to even exist as a universe the EU authors later drew in protections for organics in the primary storytelling space - armed conflict - by saying droids weren't as good at soldiering as organics for some reason (usually something about improvisation in chaotic environments). When the Prequels came out this became explicitly codified.

There are a number of other advanced technologies found in just the films too including:
Cloning
Bacta (more of a fantasy substance than a technology really)
Prosthetics with effectively perfect biofeedback
Force Fields (don't get used a lot but they're there)
Universal Translators (Threepio is annoying, but his primary ability is impressive)

That's just off the top of my head and without getting into the EU at all. Advanced technologies are there, but you're right that Star Wars is anachronistic in many ways. It's just that, in addition to certain technologies being designed so that war functions like one of the world wars, Star Wars is held back culturally. The Empire is the culture based on the most recent Earth equivalent and it draws primarily on a certain 1930s regime. Most of the other cultural inspiration is even earlier. The Clone Wars vintage Republic, for example, is very much aristocratic in the fashion of the late 19th century. Many of the characters in the halls of power on Coruscant would be perfectly at home on the set of Downton Abbey. And once you leave the Core and move to the Outer Rim, it's the Wild West or the chaotic end-of-the-Shogunate period in which most of Kurosawa's films are set. You could have any number of Western protagonists played by John Wayne walk down the streets of Mos Eisley and they wouldn't look out of place at all. And the converse is also true, see exhibit A: Nico Okarr (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Nico_Okarr).

Yora
2020-08-30, 04:52 AM
But I think you will agree that even though droids are an amazing technology, their existence apparently doesn't have any actual impact on society at all. You got these super advanced machines, but they still mostly do just the same things that a humanoid laborer would do. I would say droids also fall under "manual laborer, except shiny".

I admit, the prosthetics are amazing. But again, they are such perfect replications that they are indistinguishable from original limbs. They are a convenient way to have cool moments to chop off hands but then continue like nothing ever happened three scenes later.

Star destroyers with hyperspace engines and hover cars are hugely advanced technologies as well, no question about that. But my perception is that their existence doesn't seem to have any real impact on society, and their potential applications are almost never really considered.
Star Wars has the potential and technological capabilities to completely revolutionize how people live, but a major part of the Star Wars setting is that people don't do any of that. They still continue to go about their lives like people in the mid 20th century. Which is also the reason why there has really been no progress since 4,000 years earlier.
Which really isn't that revolutionary a thought. Even the Disney movies get that right.


You said you can't use that for every campaign, but I thought you just wanted the one? If this becomes ongoing,
What I meant is that I don't want to use that one. :smallwink:

Florian
2020-08-30, 09:04 AM
@Yora:

You are correct. Tech doesn't play any role here and you could well watch Star Wars/300/Rise of an Empire side by side and not care for the difference between short sword and sandals and stormtroopers with blaster, because there isn't one.

Max_Killjoy
2020-08-30, 10:28 AM
In some of the WEG d6 material, there were distinctions between the various Imperial agencies that were played up.

ISB was highly variable as a threat, often hobbled by being part of COMPNOR and thus being as interested in enforcement of Imperial orthodoxy and being saddled with political appointees and Imperial fundamentalists -- Alliance special ops referred to them as the Imperial Sunbathers and Birdwatchers.

Imperial Intelligence was a much more professional and consistent threat, but viewed with less trust by political hardliners because it had evolved from the intelligence apparatus of the Republic.

Imperial Customs was in a complex entanglement with the Navy and COMPNOR, and varied between honest agents, the thoroughly corrupt, and more Imperial hardliners.

Local/planetary law enforcement was all over the place, and still handled a lot of the "small stuff" (ie, anything not a threat to the Empire, such as traditional theft and murder...)

And so on.


Playing those agencies and priorities off against each other, distracting them with their rivalries and setting them up to pounce on each other (the corrupt customs officer becomes a distraction for the intelligence agent who has been hounding your trail) could add some depth to an underworld / scoundrels campaign.

Yora
2020-08-30, 11:47 AM
I was actually just reading up on this stuff. :smallbiggrin:

The Imperial Sourcebook from 1989 really went all out with massive organigrams of countless organizations and sub-sections that make up the Empire. But only a few seem to ever have been picked up by later writers.
Obviously the Imperial Navy and the Imperial Navy, as well as COMPNOR, the Imperial Security Bureau, and Imperial Intelligence. I think those are the only ones that are really acknowledged in the greater EU.

As I see it, COMPNOR is "the party", inspired by Blackshirts, SA, and Red Guards. They are also the people in charge of propaganda and political education. Cool idea and often mentioned, but I don't recall them actually making any appearances anywhere. Though plenty of references.

The ISB seems to be the official law enforcement service tasked with finding traitors and doing investigations in the loyalty of officers and officials. They are a branch within COMPNOR, but more law enforcement than a civilian or political organization.

Imperial Intelligence seems to be more like military intelligence, focused on providing information about hostile military forces. Which is kind of obsolete when you rule the whole galaxy. And I think the reason why they very rarely appear in any meaningful capacity. The only case that I am aware of is when Director Isard found herself to be the most powerful official left on Coruscant and assumed rulership over the core.

I think COMPNOR could be an interesting enemy faction for campaigns primarily set in the core worlds with a focus on instigating unrest against the Empire.
Imperial Intelligence would make sense as a threat in a Rebel Soldiers campaign.
For dodgy dealings with shady Imperial officers in the Outer Rim, or adventures about recruiting and organizing new Rebel forces, I think ISB would be the way to go. They really could be quite interesting, as they would be poking around for Rebel activity, which threatens even heroes who are not actually members of the Rebel Alliance, but could also be an asset to remove dangerous imperial officers if their loyalty isn't spotless.

Thinking about ISB agents as NPCs, how much of a stretch would it be to make Imperial Commandos (Storm Commandos, Shadow Scouts) units of the ISB? They are usually considered to be Stormtroopers, which makes them part of the military, and they do have their own combat uniforms (which are really cool (https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c2/15/6f/c2156f6b37c9663ce11cef0f96385f51.jpg)). But their missions generally fall more under the sphere of intelligence operations. I like the idea of Commando platoons being assigned to ISB officers when their missions requires some serious firepower. They could be used to raid Rebel compounds when a full Stormtrooper assault isn't desirably (like needing prisoners or rescuing hostages), but I could also see them working as bodyguards for ISB agents while out of uniform.

GloatingSwine
2020-08-30, 12:11 PM
Question to everyone? How would you approach an all scoundrel campaign? No Jedi and Rebel soldiers. Just space cowboys whose activities range from questionably legal to all out criminal?

What would conflict look like and what kinds of antagonists would the heroes be dealing with? And what element from the original movies and the EU would you try to build on?

I think the go to reference would probably be the first third of Return of the Jedi. Jabba seems to be the archetype for scum and villainy in Star Wars.

Star Wars has a rich variety of ways to be scoundrelly. There's criminal syndicates so powerful they are the de-facto government of star systems, hive city gangs, bandits attacking frontier villages, smugglers and bootleggers, disreputable hackers, slavers, and shady and ill-explored corporate types. (The Corporate Sector is so ill defined in the background you could pretty much just do Shadowrun in Star Wars drag and it'd still pretty much fit.)

So there's basically no wrong answer to how to do a scoundrel campaign, pick your poison. Same with the antagonists, could be the law (republic or empire), could be a bigger badder criminal, could be one of the galactic powers tying up a loose end.

What might be a good way to do it though would be to encourage the players to have a variety of those backgrounds so that no matter where the adventure takes them someone's always out of their social context and having to play the fish out of water character-wise (but still has appropriate things to do with their skills).

Yora
2020-08-30, 05:01 PM
Given how varied the planets in Star Wars are, I think that's almost automatically a given if the players each play a different archetype of character and the campaign goes to a number of different places.
You got people from highly civilized Core Worlds and from primitive planets in the Outer Rim. You have soldiers and civilians. Aristocrats, farmers, and street kids. People with government background and criminals. All of them have many different planets where they can shine and planets where they are very much out of place.
In addition you can also have old veterans and rookies, and even aliens and droids.

Even when you have characters from the same general niche, they still can have huge differences between them. Han and Lando are both "scoundrels" and best buddies, but you immediately see that they are at home in completely different circles. I think it's not specifically "background" that should be very different, but maybe more the focus on certain character aspects to be emphasized.
Two street kids who grew up to become smugglers could completely different when one of them emphasizes being a gruff gunslinger and the other a charming con man. You can even throw a timid starship mechanic in with that.
However, having a farm boy, a career politician, a smuggler, and a freed exotic slave as a group also can work out amazingly well. :smallamused:

I think the most important part is to encourage players to make their characters distinctive. Pick your preferred term, but get them to make their characters quirky. The last thing that a Star Wars hero should be is generic. I think in most games, many player are feeling cautious about not going overboard and keeping their characters serious and not too flamboyant. But with Star Wars the limit for that is considerably higher than for many other settings.
I definitely want to try in my next campaign to use the Apocalypse World method to keep asking players questions to make up new details about their characters. For example, if players want to ask around for someone who can help them with a problem, you can tell them "You hear that Lannik Tor currently has a shop in this town and he owes you a favor. Who is Lannik Tor and how do you know him?" Or you could tell them that they spot a wanted note for one of the heroes at a bounty hunter agency. Ask the player who is after him and why. And then use the information the players just made up on the spot later and make it into a big deal and something that give the characters a reputation. I've seen things of that type a few times over the years, and generally the players love it.

Max_Killjoy
2020-08-30, 05:03 PM
I was actually just reading up on this stuff. :smallbiggrin:

The Imperial Sourcebook from 1989 really went all out with massive organigrams of countless organizations and sub-sections that make up the Empire. But only a few seem to ever have been picked up by later writers.
Obviously the Imperial Navy and the Imperial Navy, as well as COMPNOR, the Imperial Security Bureau, and Imperial Intelligence. I think those are the only ones that are really acknowledged in the greater EU.

As I see it, COMPNOR is "the party", inspired by Blackshirts, SA, and Red Guards. They are also the people in charge of propaganda and political education. Cool idea and often mentioned, but I don't recall them actually making any appearances anywhere. Though plenty of references.

The ISB seems to be the official law enforcement service tasked with finding traitors and doing investigations in the loyalty of officers and officials. They are a branch within COMPNOR, but more law enforcement than a civilian or political organization.

Imperial Intelligence seems to be more like military intelligence, focused on providing information about hostile military forces. Which is kind of obsolete when you rule the whole galaxy. And I think the reason why they very rarely appear in any meaningful capacity. The only case that I am aware of is when Director Isard found herself to be the most powerful official left on Coruscant and assumed rulership over the core.

I think COMPNOR could be an interesting enemy faction for campaigns primarily set in the core worlds with a focus on instigating unrest against the Empire.
Imperial Intelligence would make sense as a threat in a Rebel Soldiers campaign.

For dodgy dealings with shady Imperial officers in the Outer Rim, or adventures about recruiting and organizing new Rebel forces, I think ISB would be the way to go. They really could be quite interesting, as they would be poking around for Rebel activity, which threatens even heroes who are not actually members of the Rebel Alliance, but could also be an asset to remove dangerous imperial officers if their loyalty isn't spotless.

Thinking about ISB agents as NPCs, how much of a stretch would it be to make Imperial Commandos (Storm Commandos, Shadow Scouts) units of the ISB? They are usually considered to be Stormtroopers, which makes them part of the military, and they do have their own combat uniforms (which are really cool (https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c2/15/6f/c2156f6b37c9663ce11cef0f96385f51.jpg)). But their missions generally fall more under the sphere of intelligence operations. I like the idea of Commando platoons being assigned to ISB officers when their missions requires some serious firepower. They could be used to raid Rebel compounds when a full Stormtrooper assault isn't desirably (like needing prisoners or rescuing hostages), but I could also see them working as bodyguards for ISB agents while out of uniform.


My personal evidence-based head-cannon is that post-clone Stormtroopers all came up through COMPNOR, they're the "party faithful" troops that get all the best gear and the death's head iconography. While SW:Rebels and such tried to downplay the Imperial Army as a thing at all (official Disney cannon seems to be that there are just Stormtroopers and variants), I think the setting needs the Imperial Army and the Imperial Navy as regular soldiers, with Stormtrooper units dispatched both to act as "elite" troops, and to keep an eye on the regular military for disloyalty and unorthodoxy. Some units maintain an elite level, others are full of barely-competent zealots. Stormtroopers are the guys who will unfailingly charge down a boarding tube in the name of the Empire, the true believers in the New Order, who fit the political and physical ideals set forth. When someone says "you're a little short for a Stormtrooper", it's not such a ha-ha moment.

Also, if you can get your hands on Fragments From the Rim, it's one of my favorite WEG SW supplements.

(See pages 130 and 131 of the Imperial Sourcebook for some of where my thinking on Stormtroopers comes from.)

Mechalich
2020-08-30, 06:55 PM
While SW:Rebels and such tried to downplay the Imperial Army as a thing at all (official Disney cannon seems to be that there are just Stormtroopers and variants)

The Imperial Army does exist in the Disney canon, and in fact appears fairly extensively in Solo (and our titular scoundrel's Disney canon backstory has him serving in the Imperial Army rather than the fleet). Rebels doesn't feature army troopers, but then almost all of the ground battles in Rebels happen in strategically significant locations, most commonly Lothal, which is the sight of the TIE Defender factory in that series and therefore extremely important.

This actually matches fairly well with Legends canon, in that Imperial Army service, especially by the Rebellion Era, mostly consisted of garrison duty on backwater worlds and providing logistical and vehicle piloting support to stormtroopers during combat. Over time the Empire simply acquired enough stormtroopers to handle all of its important ground deployments and actual battles. This makes sense since ground combat is actually rather rare in Star Wars - you only need ground troops to take out a planetary shield or to acquire some strategically important McGuffin. Any other target can just be reduced to slag from orbit, up to and including whole planets if necessary via a Base Delta Zero. SWTOR is actually a good example of this, since every planet you land on has some special reason why you're actually bothering with ground combat and it's not just two fleets battering each other in high orbit.

A scoundrels campaign should therefore feature the Imperial Army much more heavily than a Rebellion oriented campaign, since any given team of scoundrels is likely to be working schemes against targets that are not considered strategically significant or are on otherwise unimportant worlds.

Max_Killjoy
2020-08-30, 07:08 PM
The Imperial Army does exist in the Disney canon, and in fact appears fairly extensively in Solo (and our titular scoundrel's Disney canon backstory has him serving in the Imperial Army rather than the fleet). Rebels doesn't feature army troopers, but then almost all of the ground battles in Rebels happen in strategically significant locations, most commonly Lothal, which is the sight of the TIE Defender factory in that series and therefore extremely important.

This actually matches fairly well with Legends canon, in that Imperial Army service, especially by the Rebellion Era, mostly consisted of garrison duty on backwater worlds and providing logistical and vehicle piloting support to stormtroopers during combat. Over time the Empire simply acquired enough stormtroopers to handle all of its important ground deployments and actual battles. This makes sense since ground combat is actually rather rare in Star Wars - you only need ground troops to take out a planetary shield or to acquire some strategically important McGuffin. Any other target can just be reduced to slag from orbit, up to and including whole planets if necessary via a Base Delta Zero. SWTOR is actually a good example of this, since every planet you land on has some special reason why you're actually bothering with ground combat and it's not just two fleets battering each other in high orbit.

A scoundrels campaign should therefore feature the Imperial Army much more heavily than a Rebellion oriented campaign, since any given team of scoundrels is likely to be working schemes against targets that are not considered strategically significant or are on otherwise unimportant worlds.

If the "new cannon" does include the Imperial Army, then I'm happy to be wrong -- I've had discussions elsewhere with people who insist that there's no such thing now, and the lack of its visibility in material I'd seen since the sale seemed to back them up, leaving me to argue that the IA is needed for the Stormtroopers to be what I think they should be.

Yora
2020-08-31, 03:52 AM
Yes, stormtroopers can't be elite soldiers when there are no regular soldiers.

Wookieepedia seems to treat the Stormtroopers as basically the Marine Corps of the Empire, not being part of the Army. But it's not really indicating the source for that idea.
Though it would match with Stormtroopers always showing up when Vader is hunting rebels, and being on the Death Stars.

I believe General Veers is meant to be wearing an Army uniform on Hoth, but being stationed on a Star Destroyer and commanding stormtroopers would make no sense for an Army general. General of the navy seems weird (though the Rebels have Generals commanding fighters like an air force), but General of marines would make more sense.
But that raises the question why naval troopers exist? The original purpose of Marines was to defend ships from boarders. (But then again, the US likes to use marines for regular ground operations as a second Army, which makes Army officers question the reason for their existence.)

Retroactively applying purpose and logic to things that were put on screen just because they looked cool is one of the weird questionable pleasures that Star Wars does unlike anything else. :smallbiggrin:

But I can see this arrangement make good sense:
Imperial Army soldiers as permanent occupation forces, and defensive garrisons on important planets.
Navy Troopers as security for Navy ships.
Stormtroopers as immediately available ground troops stationed as full batallions (or whatever) on Star Destroyers.

It won't match all depictions of stormtroopers of course. Videogames use stormtroopers exclusively for everything (and always have).
Going with this system would mean that smaller imperial ships like Carrack cruisers and Lancer frigates would only have naval troopers, as would smaller space stations. Customs checks by navy patrols would also be done by naval troopers.
And having the presence of stormtroopers indicating Star Destroyers in orbit would also be a fun little detail, I think.

Florian
2020-08-31, 05:21 AM
@Yora:

There's also an alternative approach possible.

The Empire could have a parallel structure in place. One half is everything that was created and maintained in the former Republic. Republic Army, Navy, Intelligence, Bureaucracy and such. The other half got installed to keep the Republic part firmly in line and under control.

Yora
2020-08-31, 05:29 AM
That too. Dictatorships are often inefficient like that, even more so than democracies already are. :smallbiggrin:

Got to make sure nobody is powerful enough to dethrone the leader.

Mechalich
2020-08-31, 06:46 AM
I believe General Veers is meant to be wearing an Army uniform on Hoth, but being stationed on a Star Destroyer and commanding stormtroopers would make no sense for an Army general.

General Veers is indeed wearing an army uniform on Hoth, and is an army general. He, and all the other AT-AT pilots are Imperial Army personnel, because the Stormtrooper Corps has only troopers, it doesn't control it's own logistics or vehicular support. That's something that the legends EU established based on how the um, historical regime the Empire most resembles worked with regard to this type of thing.


But I can see this arrangement make good sense:
Imperial Army soldiers as permanent occupation forces, and defensive garrisons on important planets.
Navy Troopers as security for Navy ships.
Stormtroopers as immediately available ground troops stationed as full batallions (or whatever) on Star Destroyers.

Army troopers are mostly garrisons on unimportant planets, because the overwhelming majority of the planets in the Empire are unimportant. The Empire has 1.75 million full member worlds, but representation on fully 69 million worlds overall (there are about one billion inhabited worlds in the Star Wars galaxy, many have no Imperial presence at all, like Bespin).


The Empire could have a parallel structure in place. One half is everything that was created and maintained in the former Republic. Republic Army, Navy, Intelligence, Bureaucracy and such. The other half got installed to keep the Republic part firmly in line and under control.

The Empire actually has, canonically, a parallel structure, both it's political and military. There's the centralized government that reflects the Republic with the Senate and its affiliated bureaucracies and departments such as Imperial Intelligence and the Imperial Navy and also COMPNOR, and there's a regional governance system that Palpatine actually started creating during the Clone Wars comprised of the Moffs and Grand Moffs who have direct control over their territories and report directly to Palpatine and his advisors (the guys in the funny hats). When Palpatine dissolved the Imperial Senate during ANH, this asserted the supremacy of the Moffs (of whom Tarkin was the most powerful so it was a huge boon for him) over the old bureaucratic system.

Military units were technically subordinate to the Moff of whatever region to which they were assigned, but they were also subject to the commands of the special officers: Darth Vader, the Grand Admirals, various quasi-Sith like Blackhole, Emperor's Hands, etc. who could direct them to do their bidding by virtue of reporting directly to Palpatine themselves. For example, essentially all imperial forces that appear in ESB belong to Death Squadron, Vader's personal fleet.

Max_Killjoy
2020-08-31, 03:18 PM
Yes, stormtroopers can't be elite soldiers when there are no regular soldiers.

Wookieepedia seems to treat the Stormtroopers as basically the Marine Corps of the Empire, not being part of the Army. But it's not really indicating the source for that idea.
Though it would match with Stormtroopers always showing up when Vader is hunting rebels, and being on the Death Stars.

I believe General Veers is meant to be wearing an Army uniform on Hoth, but being stationed on a Star Destroyer and commanding stormtroopers would make no sense for an Army general. General of the navy seems weird (though the Rebels have Generals commanding fighters like an air force), but General of marines would make more sense.
But that raises the question why naval troopers exist? The original purpose of Marines was to defend ships from boarders. (But then again, the US likes to use marines for regular ground operations as a second Army, which makes Army officers question the reason for their existence.)

Retroactively applying purpose and logic to things that were put on screen just because they looked cool is one of the weird questionable pleasures that Star Wars does unlike anything else. :smallbiggrin:

But I can see this arrangement make good sense:
Imperial Army soldiers as permanent occupation forces, and defensive garrisons on important planets.
Navy Troopers as security for Navy ships.
Stormtroopers as immediately available ground troops stationed as full batallions (or whatever) on Star Destroyers.

It won't match all depictions of stormtroopers of course. Videogames use stormtroopers exclusively for everything (and always have).
Going with this system would mean that smaller imperial ships like Carrack cruisers and Lancer frigates would only have naval troopers, as would smaller space stations. Customs checks by navy patrols would also be done by naval troopers.
And having the presence of stormtroopers indicating Star Destroyers in orbit would also be a fun little detail, I think.

To me, at least, Stormtroopers can't be... the parallel thing to a historical thing... that I see them being, without there being a not-Stormtrooper IA to serve as the "regular army".

Mechalich
2020-08-31, 09:15 PM
To me, at least, Stormtroopers can't be... the parallel thing to a historical thing... that I see them being, without there being a not-Stormtrooper IA to serve as the "regular army".

The Imperial Army definitely exists to serve that role, it's just that, due to the nature of the timeline, there's not a lot of focus on the period of time when that's actually happening.

By the time the Rebellion really gets going - which happens around 2 BBY in both versions of canon - the Empire isn't on anything resembling a war footing. The Empire suppressed most active dissent (Separatist holdouts, the Hutts, etc.) almost immediately after it was founded during the Reconquest of the Rim (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Reconquest_of_the_Rim) and subsequently expanded to it's largely stable borders fairly shortly thereafter. Thus Solo, which primarily takes places in 10 BBY and features the Imperial Army subjugating Mimban, represents the timeframe for some of the last major campaign initiatives by the Empire (not counting those waged by Grand Admiral Thrawn in the Unknown Regions). The timeframe holds true for both versions of canon as well.

In Legends canon the outward push of the Empire stops for two reasons. One, it becomes ever more expensive to control unrest with such massive but poorly managed holdings - 69 million garrisoned worlds but only 25,000 Star Destroyers leaves the fleet rather spread thin, even with 100+ other capital ships per Star Destroyer you still can only keep a ship in orbit over a fraction of the planets. Imperial military doctrine shifted towards trying just about anything to find a superweapon that would get around this issue. Two, Palpatine just sort of got bored with the idea of ruling the galaxy with an iron fist and decamped to Byss to play around with Sith Alchemy and schemes of immortality.

So if you're playing during the Rebellion Era (2 BBY to 4 ABY), most of the places where the Imperial Army is stationed, and not Stormtroopers, are stable worlds firmly in the Imperial Camp. This includes most (but not all, witness Alderaan, Chandrila, and Corellia as key exceptions) of the Core and Colonies, which, while the account for only a tiny portion of the galactic area, represent a majority of the total population. A world like Metellos (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Metellos/Legends), might well have an Imperial Army garrison hundreds of millions strong, but there simply isn't a lot of Rebel activity going on there.

Consequently the Rebellion, and major criminal groups like Black Sun or the Zann Consortium, tangle with Stormtroopers all the time because the Empire has the luxury of deploying stormtroopers to essentially any battlefield they actually care about. And, post-Endor, Stormtroopers remain a major component because they're the only ground troops loyal enough for the Imperial Remnant to trust them to actually fight the New Republic's forces. This is also why post-Endor warlords like Zsinj developed their own special units like the 'Raptors' for major engagements and rebel suppression, because they didn't trust the army garrisons to do it.

Yora
2020-09-02, 03:54 AM
Asking from the perspective of the d6 system, but I think it applies to all Star Wars games in general.

Do you think it's worth the effort to bother with money in a Star Wars campaign? All equipment that characters need 95% of the time is a blaster, which is very cheap, and a ship, which is very expensive.

The vast majority of expanses that characters would encounter are food and docking fees, and that's not something worth tracking in a Star Wars game.
In a campaign of bounty hunters or smugglers doing their day job from one day to another, there's a purpose to seeing how much money they make and spend. It's part of what those stories would be about.
But I think in most cases, the players would want to make a single big purchase that they can not afford, and so they have to go on a small adventure to get the money, which then just happens to be the right amount that they need.

Do you have any experiences either way?

AvatarVecna
2020-09-02, 04:56 AM
Before I say anything else, I'll say that it's strange seeing anybody say "if you take the good vs evil space magic conflict out, what's even left to do in Star Wars". Like...you do know that Star Wars is this galaxy-spanning setting with a thousand worlds and a million stories and a trillion characters all moving around at the same time, right? Are you, in fact, aware that there exist stories in our real world that don't actually require magic in order to be interesting? And that telling stories like that set in the Star Wars universe does not, in fact, ruin the story by virtue of those stories not originally having magic space samurai?

Like legit, you could make a "Star Wars" game that's a heist movie, or a slasher horror movie, or an urban fantasy movie, or a war movie, or a spy movie, or a buddy cop movie, or a gangster movie, or a Shadowrun movie. The guns are laser guns, any magic is now The Force, and there's droids and spaceships sometimes, but like...it's not so different a setting that you can't tell other stories in it.


Asking from the perspective of the d6 system, but I think it applies to all Star Wars games in general.

Do you think it's worth the effort to bother with money in a Star Wars campaign? All equipment that characters need 95% of the time is a blaster, which is very cheap, and a ship, which is very expensive.

The vast majority of expanses that characters would encounter are food and docking fees, and that's not something worth tracking in a Star Wars game.
In a campaign of bounty hunters or smugglers doing their day job from one day to another, there's a purpose to seeing how much money they make and spend. It's part of what those stories would be about.
But I think in most cases, the players would want to make a single big purchase that they can not afford, and so they have to go on a small adventure to get the money, which then just happens to be the right amount that they need.

Do you have any experiences either way?

I've recently been building for a Saga game, and I'll add a middle tier between them we'll call "droids" because that's primarily what fills the tier. Droids, and particularly expensive pieces of personal equipment, have niche uses which they are perfect for and will save tons of time and money, but you can do without them if you really have to, and they are a bit too expensive to just always say "I'll buy another [droid]" if you lose the other one. Droids are items that are highly useful and kinda difficult to obtain, but losing them doesn't ruin the story, and if it's important enough to the PCs, they can acquire another one without the acquisition being a whole mission in and of itself.

But the actual amount of credits is...not necessarily important. The character I'm playing in that game started with 130k compared to a more normal 5k for a starting character, and specializes heavily in upgrading gear. I've got another +1/+2 to a bunch of things compared to a stock character of my level, but I still couldn't afford a ship, and my guns aren't that much better. The big difference is that I was able to afford some good droids.

I'll also say that, for a previous IRL game set in the Firefly universe using the Cortex system, I made a ship administrator who would handle the business side of keeping the ship running. The game didn't last as long as I'd have liked, but that system had the fuel efficiency of ships, the cost of fuel, and the worth of goods clearly marked, and the DM presented options for what kind of cargo we could try to transport/how far we were taking it/what our pay would be. This ended up being a way for all the PCs to talk through the various options and figure out what this or that means. This pay is way too much for the common-as-dirt cargo we're transporting, are we being set up to get shot on delivery or is their secret valuable cargo hidden in there that we're smuggling? This passenger agreement is pretty standard, but between the timeframe and our fuel situation we're gonna have to fly through reaver space to deliver it - buuuuut there's hazard pay if that happens. That approach could easily give your Star Wars adventure an accounting mini-game, especially if there's a handful of obvious traps and one sensible mission that pays what they need. But the upside is, it puts the direction the adventure takes in the players hands, making it a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure where they have to way the risks and rewards and talk it over and that makes the resulting adventure feel more real. There's advantages to skipping that accounting minigame and saying "this is our cargo this week, we're taking it here, here's the risks, here's the rewards, no there wasn't a better option".

EDIT: Also, if anybody's gonna give you solid advice on running a long-term Star Wars game revolving around criminal enterprises, it'd maybe be a site-regular who's been doing that since March of 2015? Thundercracker has been running The Gathering Storm for more than 5 years now, and that's a crime-organization-focused kinda game, taking advantage of how sandboxy star wars can be.

Florian
2020-09-02, 05:24 AM
@Yora:

Yeah, money is not that interesting. But: You need money to keep on flying, you need to fly to earn money. Look up the old Darkstryder campaign for an interesting take on the approach. You have a Nebulon-B and full crew, but no support beyond that, so you have to work quite hard to keep that thing flying, the crew in fighting shape and such until you reach the end of your mission.

@AvatarVecna:

It entirely depends on what you understand Star Wars to "be all about". I think there two main stances: Either it is regular SF with some mystical crap thrown in to keep it interesting, or it´s about a core struggle about how things should be that comes along with some SF trappings to keep things interesting.

LibraryOgre
2020-09-02, 07:39 AM
I generally don't think money is worth dealing with in Star Wars. If you really want it, you might look at d6 Space (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/20447/D6-Space?affiliate_id=315505) and the Wealth stat... more abstract, easier to track.

Mechalich
2020-09-02, 04:49 PM
I think the value of tracking money in Star Wars depends on two things: character goals and the level of future tech you're willing to embrace.

The character goals part is simple. If any of the characters have 'get rich' on their list of character goals then you need to track wealth in some way, because having income exceed expenses is now a major story theme. This is usually more important in a scoundrel-type game, where characters wander the galaxy continually in search of the next big score (and often enough petty cash to splurge on high-class meals as opposed to ration bars), than in a game where characters fight for some ideologically based faction.

The tech stuff is more a matter of whether or not you wish to embrace characters modifying equipment, buying special guns, tinkering with starships, purchasing droids, and the like. A lot of published Star Wars RPG systems allow for this, but it's not something you have to do. Still it tends to make more sense for scoundrels - who are liable to constantly be tinkering with their gear, seeking out black-market upgrades, and potentially switching equipment based on local legality, than some group of soldiers, who just make do with whatever standard issue happens to be.

GloatingSwine
2020-09-02, 05:56 PM
Money in games is only interesting when you don’t have it.

When you don’t have money you have to decide what your character is willing to do to get it. And that means action.

When you do have money all you’re going to do with it is turn it into something more interesting than money.

So it’s fine to leave it pretty abstract as long as you have something that lets players know what they can’t afford and so need to work for.

hifidelity2
2020-09-03, 02:57 AM
For the game I run I "charge" fixed amount / game month. This covers running of the ship and a basic standard of living for the party

They need money for
- Fixing battle damage (to them or the ship)
- upgrading the ship
- a more opulent lifestyle

Yora
2020-09-03, 08:58 AM
Actually surprised by the overwhelming support for not counting credits. I didn't expect that being a popular approach.

I think one approach that sounds quite workable is to simply say that minor expenses can be paid with pocket change, while major expenses are automatically "you don't have it" and the players first have to find a source of money that can cover the fee or purchase. Whatever difference remains at the end doesn't go into any account and is simply forgotten about.

Though as an amendment to that, I think it could be useful to keep a record of what major spoils the players cashed in for credits, and remove items accordingly when they later make some big purchase.
Say the players fought a swoop gang and decide to keep four swoops for themselves, sell the remaining three, and also sell the old landspeeder they used to drive around in, as they no longer need it. Their account would now say "5 swoops and 1 cheap landspeeder traded in". Later the players decide that they need to buy a hover truck and the GM decides that the money they got for the landspeeder and three swoops will cover for the truck, and their account now changes to "2 swoops traded in".

Basically the players barter goods for goods, but they don't have to haul all the stuff around physically until they find something that they want to trade it in for. Trade it in for "credit" with the galactic merchant community. :smallwink:

Max_Killjoy
2020-09-03, 09:15 AM
Actually surprised by the overwhelming support for not counting credits. I didn't expect that being a popular approach.

I think one approach that sounds quite workable is to simply say that minor expenses can be paid with pocket change, while major expenses are automatically "you don't have it" and the players first have to find a source of money that can cover the fee or purchase. Whatever difference remains at the end doesn't go into any account and is simply forgotten about.

Though as an amendment to that, I think it could be useful to keep a record of what major spoils the players cashed in for credits, and remove items accordingly when they later make some big purchase.
Say the players fought a swoop gang and decide to keep four swoops for themselves, sell the remaining three, and also sell the old landspeeder they used to drive around in, as they no longer need it. Their account would now say "5 swoops and 1 cheap landspeeder traded in". Later the players decide that they need to buy a hover truck and the GM decides that the money they got for the landspeeder and three swoops will cover for the truck, and their account now changes to "2 swoops traded in".

Basically the players barter goods for goods, but they don't have to haul all the stuff around physically until they find something that they want to trade it in for. Trade it in for "credit" with the galactic merchant community. :smallwink:


Perhaps keep track of big credits, but not the small stuff? So it's important that they've got 100,000 credits, but not important that they had to spend 100 credits?

Corsair14
2020-09-03, 09:16 AM
My current campaign which has been running since Corona started began with the party taking part in the R1 Scariff assault to get them used to the system and shake off the cobwebs(I and one of the players played our last campaign back 1992-2001) and it was essentially a them park ride until the first chapter was over. I time jumped a year and they lost their old ship, owed a Hutt Cartel what sounded like a huge amount of credits and were marooned on an Imperial backwater trading station. I had a McGuffin that was a trap set by the Inquisition and the campaign went from there. They were overly worried about the money situation and I played into it since it was funny to me and had them make encounters with Hutt representatives wanting the money paid back. This was the only real use for money as ship costs were fairly light, they got paid well for doing things, and they haven't quite figured out that just like in real life once you have money, its quite meaningless. I finally have gotten them involved with the Rebellion(who doesn't pay well, but pays enough), we have a weapons dealer character who grabs every spare and fallen gun, weapon and armor piece he can so I am pushing the rebellion aspect more than the struggling to make ends meet. The fallen jedi is about to have another encounter with the Inquisition and have him set off on a path to be the good guy(he has gotten up to 5 dark side points but I don't play that completely in line with the book either). Thinking of having them discover the plan or be sent to discover the plans of another Mcguffin after this.

The hardest part is having one player with a well thought out character and the other characters being shallow stereotypes. Makes it really hard to keep them all involved.

Yora
2020-09-03, 09:53 AM
Perhaps keep track of big credits, but not the small stuff? So it's important that they've got 100,000 credits, but not important that they had to spend 100 credits?

Like having separate currencies of "trival credits" and "serious credits"? I think that could work quite well. Simply as a way to quantify what types of equipment are equivalent to others.

Looking at the prices for gear in the the d6 system, 1,000 credits would seem like a good cutoff point. Almost all blasters, tools, and basic combat suits fall within that price range, while droids and vehciles are all above that.

Anything below that can be gained from stores for free, but also can't be looted for profit. I think that should get a good balance that meets the needs of a typical Star Wars story.

Florian
2020-09-03, 06:03 PM
Just some idle thoughts:

I´m not much of a gamer, but I did enjoy both of the SW:KotoR games, as well as Jade Empire.

Reason being, that class and talent choices defined the character. Gold/Money/Credits is a means to get equipment and equipment is only there to enhance what is already there and fun for you.

When I was younger and systems like WEG:SW or Shadowrun were new, we swiftly realized that options, therefore power, was available for coin on the market, not for EXP and steady advancement.

In short, acquiring system mastery made the game less fun for us. In a sense, that changed with Mechwarrior and Earthdawn. The former using Battletech rules, so your mech will be ground down to pieces and you will have to work with what you can get your hands on as replacement, the later being the first RPG I know that dealt with classes and class choices being the thing, outside options being only there to enhance what was already chosen.

Pleh
2020-09-03, 09:49 PM
Scoundrel Star Wars:

Most important thing is having some level of autonomy. Give them a ship, preferably analogous to the Millenium Falcon or Serenity.

This does not need to happen quickly; earning your ship can be half the fun. But you do want most of the campaign to be *using* the ship. You don't want winning the ship to be the endgame capstone loot and the story ends.

However it gets acquired, make sure the acquisition has drawbacks. It's not going to be brand new, never previously owned, and totally registered in the party's name. If it's nice, the PCs probably stole it. If they own it legitimately, it's probably a junker they are fixing up as they go. If they don't own it and haven't stolen it, they are probably working for some crime boss or corporate stooge and the ship is granted while they are employed by the owner. Maybe they begin the campaign traveling with their ship's original owner, who is rather destined for retirement soon after the adventure begins, handing the ship off to their crew.

The most interesting thing about these drawbacks is that it means that no matter the ship's origins as a party member, its involvement in their adventures is simultaneously a blessing and a curse.

Past this, you want a firm idea of the PC character goals. Scoundrels are probably best run in a sandbox, or psuedo sandbox, where they can think outside the box and adapt unconventional strategies to their problems. Star Wars is a big box, so you do want to add some structure and linearity for the sake of getting them started, but this is where the best thing to do is get player feedback.

Have your players write backstories and request them to outline a few backstory friends and foes for their characters to be connected with. These can be, but don't need to be interwoven as primary plot characters. More than likely, these characters will be tangential to the plot, but they may connect in exactly the right way to connect the protagonist scoundrels to their campaign antagonist(s).

Max_Killjoy
2020-09-03, 10:35 PM
Brainstorming... first sesseion IF your players are amenable to this sort of thing...

1) Figure out with each player why their character would be in the brig on a large orbital spaceport... anything from bar fight to picked up on an Imperial warrant to thrown under the bus so his smuggler "buddies" could make their getaway when they got caught to... whatever.

2) Let them figure out with these strangers how they're going to get out of their cells and stage an escape... if things start to drag maybe pirates launch a raid on the facility and all hell breaks loose. Maybe there's an unlikable NPC they leave behind who can become a recurring enemy or foil. OR, if the soon-to-be crew is missing some necessary skill for running the ship or whatever, or you want to plant a future contact in their awareness, have an NPC who can escape with them.

3) Let them fight, flee, or finagle their way to the hangers, where they come across several ships they could steal, and give them a few minutes to argue over which ship... have stats and quirks ready for all of them. Again, chance to make enemies and friends right away, from the mortified station security chief, to the owner of the ship they take, to whoever.

4) Space chase as they try to evade pursuit while plotting a hyperspace jump in an unfamiliar ship. Maybe the character with repair or shipjacking skills has to disable an interlock or remote that the "previous owner" installed, while the sharpshooter gets to apply his eagle eye to the ship's defensive turret, and so on.

Max_Killjoy
2020-09-04, 11:12 PM
Wow, my ideas were so bad they killed the thread.

GloatingSwine
2020-09-07, 03:06 AM
Brainstorming... first sesseion IF your players are amenable to this sort of thing...

1) Figure out with each player why their character would be in the brig on a large orbital spaceport... anything from bar fight to picked up on an Imperial warrant to thrown under the bus so his smuggler "buddies" could make their getaway when they got caught to... whatever.


Six scoundrels, one lineup, no coincidences.

They're there because someone wanted them all together for a job. If you're doing anything on the shady side of the law a heist is a good way to start because it explains why you have a group of different characters with conveniently diverse skills all in one place. It also gives the players an inbuilt reason to stick together for the first adventure.

Yora
2020-09-09, 03:18 PM
I completed my five months D&D campaign and now work seriously on preparing a first Star Wars d6 adventure. Not having run or played the system before, I think I want to run two or three one shots first before starting with a full scale campaign. (And perhaps check out some players who I might or might not invite for the full campaign.)

What do you think would be a good approach to short one-off adventures for a single session or two in Star Wars? I think meeting in a cantina and having the characters get to know each other for a while isn't really an option. It probably should be a wild adventure with plenty of action that is very easy to grasp without much exposition. But any neat ideas for a scenario?

AvatarVecna
2020-09-09, 03:22 PM
I completed my five months D&D campaign and now work seriously on preparing a first Star Wars d6 adventure. Not having run or played the system before, I think I want to run two or three one shots first before starting with a full scale campaign. (And perhaps check out some players who I might or might not invite for the full campaign.)

What do you think would be a good approach to short one-off adventures for a single session or two in Star Wars? I think meeting in a cantina and having the characters get to know each other for a while isn't really an option. It probably should be a wild adventure with plenty of action that is very easy to grasp without much exposition. But any neat ideas for a scenario?

Is this request about an all-scoundrel kinda set-up, or just general ideas for quick missions that give you some experience with the system?

Yora
2020-09-09, 03:26 PM
Just general Star Wars anything one-shot. (Though I think Rebellion period is most accessible for that purpose.)

AvatarVecna
2020-09-09, 03:36 PM
Just general Star Wars anything one-shot. (Though I think Rebellion period is most accessible for that purpose.)

My advice for one-shots in general would be to test out particular iconic bits of "Star Wars" to get a feel for them in isolation. That is to say...

1) Space Mission where you get a feel for the vehicle/dogfighting mechanics. This the one-shot where you find out if you're going to have fun running space battles or if it's going to be a slow grindy neutral-game until one of you gets a lucky hit that ends the whole fight. Finding this out in a game you care less about is a good way to make space battles more or less of a focus in the real game.

2) Force Battle where jedi and sith duke it out with each other. Probably with some goal beyond "murder the other" to keep things interesting, like Jedi have to give [important politician] time to escape so they can't let the Sith get away from them, or something. If force mechanics are unwieldy in practice, you can make a no-force-users party, and play up force abilities being rare and special and mystical and scary when they show up.

3) Running battle against a mob. This is our plucky heroes surviving a battle against a large number of stock enemy soldiers while trying to get to safety, classic Star Wars action. If the players can just stand out in the open and gun down a squad of storm troopers, that's a problem. If the players can't so much as peek out from behind a wall without getting disintegrated by pinpoint accuracy, that's also a problem.

4) Heist. This is a good general set-up that gives you a chance to play around with mechanics for social interaction, stealth, and potentially computers.

Pleh
2020-09-09, 04:31 PM
What do you think would be a good approach to short one-off adventures for a single session or two in Star Wars? I think meeting in a cantina and having the characters get to know each other for a while isn't really an option. It probably should be a wild adventure with plenty of action that is very easy to grasp without much exposition. But any neat ideas for a scenario?

Seriously.

Firefly is your answer.

You are a group of mercenaries for hire, sometimes working legit jobs, other times less so, whatever pays the bills. Your primary goal is to keep the ship flying and keep food on the table while earning maybe just enough to save towards a comfy retirement and get out of this paycheck to paycheck life in a galaxy that is rigged against you.

Great for episodic one-shot adventures where each week you're dealing with a different job, different employer, and different set of complications that keep things interesting and not too profitable to end the campaign early.

LibraryOgre
2020-09-09, 10:19 PM
I completed my five months D&D campaign and now work seriously on preparing a first Star Wars d6 adventure. Not having run or played the system before, I think I want to run two or three one shots first before starting with a full scale campaign. (And perhaps check out some players who I might or might not invite for the full campaign.)

What do you think would be a good approach to short one-off adventures for a single session or two in Star Wars? I think meeting in a cantina and having the characters get to know each other for a while isn't really an option. It probably should be a wild adventure with plenty of action that is very easy to grasp without much exposition. But any neat ideas for a scenario?

On a cruise liner that is boarded by pirates. Something has gone wrong, and the pirates aren't doing the usual "take the money and run"... they're talking hostages, they've shot someone... and the players are still free, in a small room, playing cards.

Misereor
2020-09-10, 07:12 AM
On a cruise liner that is boarded by pirates. Something has gone wrong, and the pirates aren't doing the usual "take the money and run"... they're talking hostages, they've shot someone... and the players are still free, in a small room, playing cards.

...and the players are still free, in a small room, playing cards> on the Holonet, arguing fiercely and not noticing what is going on around them.

Yora
2020-09-10, 02:21 PM
You are a group of mercenaries for hire, sometimes working legit jobs, other times less so, whatever pays the bills. Your primary goal is to keep the ship flying and keep food on the table while earning maybe just enough to save towards a comfy retirement and get out of this paycheck to paycheck life in a galaxy that is rigged against you.

Great for episodic one-shot adventures where each week you're dealing with a different job, different employer, and different set of complications that keep things interesting and not too profitable to end the campaign early.

Yeah, I think everything that is basically an In And Out Job would be very well suited. It gives the players a clear goal of "I want you to do this" and also clearly fences in the area in which the adventure takes place. And you get a resolution when the goal is accomplished or the players accept that they have failed and retreat.

Stealing a couple of starfighters for the Rebellion out of a hangar and then fighting through hostile fighters guarding the location could be neat. Gets you some sneaking, exploration, gunfights, and space battles in a neat small package.
I also always thought that stealing the Death Star plans would make an excellent introduction to Star Wars RPGs for completely new players. Though I could see that being expanded into a mini-campaign as well.

Yora
2020-09-11, 04:29 PM
So I got a specific idea for a one shot that I started working on. Maybe someone got some ideas how to add to this:

In the early years of the Rebellion, a junkyard worker on Malastare has leaked to the rebels that they got a big load of recently decommissioned Y-Wings from a planetary security force. The cost to refurbish them for sale to another poor planetary government wouldn't be economical, and the Empire is putting a stop on starfighters being sold to civilians without a license. So they were sold to a junkyard that has a government contract to remove all the weapons and transponders and then get cannibalized for spare engine parts. But most of them are still in flying condition and wouldn't be that difficult to get them combat ready.

In preparation to steal them, Rebel agents have bought some large bodywork panels from the junkyard and announced that they would come with a big Action VI bulk freighter to pick them up. They call the junkyard twice over the day that they will be late and then show up only 10 minutes before the place closes for the night. And then there will be an unforseen situation where the panels don't actually fit through the cargo door and they'll have to unbolt part of the freighter's hull to get it trough. Also the pilot speaks only bad Basic. (A situation that could be taken straight from real life, as anyone knows whose workplace gets truck deliveries. :smallamused:)

While the last two or three workers that remain on the site and want the customers to hurry up so they can lock up and go home, the PCs take care of the security and pick out the Y-Wings that will be loaded up. When that's done, the freighter crew will take care of the junkyard workers and get the ship over to where the Y-Wings are parked. Then they quickly get loaded up, the PCs hop on the freighter, and they all make their escape to the Rebel base.

In theory.

However, there will be problems with disabling the burglary alarms and the security guards won't be following their usual patrol round.
And while the PCs are checking out the Y-Wings, they get spotted by someone who was working late in the office, who will try to explain to them that the Y-Wings can not be sold before the weapons and electronics have been removed.
Also the freighter will not come flying from the bodywork heaps to the Y-Wing storage right away when the PCs send the signal to start with the loading. And then the heavy anti-grav sled they brought to move the Y-Wings into the cargo hold breaks down with only two fighters loaded yet. (But of course the junkyard has its own ones. Somewhere.)

Of course, the Imperial Army will get an alarm about a break in at a facility dealing with military hardware and arrive at the junkyard halfway through the loading process, forcing the freighter to take of early, to get chased by TIE fighters before it jumps to hyperspace.

With so many complications that should all be very easy to implement, the adventure should easily adjustable for length as the need arises. If it starts getting too long or things begin to drag, any of the complications could simply be skipped.

What I would really like to set up is something that keeps the players from jumping into the freighter before it has to take off, forcing them to get out in another way. And somehow make it seem like it's the players' own idea to jump into two of the Y-Wings they just powered up. It would be really cool if they do, but I don't want to give the impression that I decided for the players that they will now have a starfighter segment. Or that the freighter takes off without them before they even have a chance to get on board.
All the other complications are something for the players to react to, and regardless of how they chose to deal with those, it won't actually interrupt the mission unless they get themselves killed. All outcomes that I can imagine would come down to "someone will probably arrive in the next 10 to 15 minutes to stop us, when we're hopefully already gone". Completely switching gears and pushing the PCs to the next encounter through a cutscene doesn't seem right.
I think when in doubt, I'd just let the players get on the half loaded freighter and man some of the hidden gun turrets to shot at some TIEs before jumping to hyperspace. That would be a complete adequate ending to that adventure. But stacking the odds so that they see the freighter take off without them while there are Y-Wings with running engines on the field would be really cool. Any ideas to subtly nudge towards such an outcome?

Dr paradox
2020-09-12, 02:35 AM
But stacking the odds so that they see the freighter take off without them while there are Y-Wings with running engines on the field would be really cool. Any ideas to subtly nudge towards such an outcome?

Possibly add some kind of heavy security cannon that works reliably against larger ships, but can't lock on to fighters? It could be a part of the junkyard infrastructure, or on an imperial ship that jumps in to raise the stakes. I'd favor the former option, because you could establish it as a danger early on while it's powered down. If you mention it twice, that should be a good reason for them to think fast and jump in the Y wings, AND a good reason for the freighter to jump out of there pronto. Characterize the freighter as a sitting duck that could really use a distraction to keep from being blown out of the sky.

I'd make the cannon be part of a repurposed derelict, so it's harder to get to and not directly part of the security system they're shutting down.

Pleh
2020-09-14, 09:04 PM
Also the pilot speaks only bad Basic.

Add an irritating C3PO style protocol droid just to emphasize the problem by contributing an unnecessary middle man with way too much sass and uncooperative drama.


However, there will be problems with disabling the burglary alarms and the security guards won't be following their usual patrol round.

If I were a player here, I would be somewhat convinced we had been betrayed just off this alone, and I'd be trying to warn my friends to be ready to run if the Empire shows up.


And while the PCs are checking out the Y-Wings, they get spotted by someone who was working late in the office, who will try to explain to them that the Y-Wings can not be sold before the weapons and electronics have been removed.
Also the freighter will not come flying from the bodywork heaps to the Y-Wing storage right away when the PCs send the signal to start with the loading. And then the heavy anti-grav sled they brought to move the Y-Wings into the cargo hold breaks down with only two fighters loaded yet. (But of course the junkyard has its own ones. Somewhere.)

This may be a few too many complications when things are already smelling fishy. I would think towing a set of starfighters onto a freighter more or less manually will be slow enough without the freighter being additionally late. I'd say the freighter is on time, with a sled breakdown being enough of a complication. Imply the defunct grav-sled belongs to the pilot who tries to make excuses in some other language while the protocol droid tries to translate frantically, wasting yet more time. The players should probably get the hint that arguing about it is a waste of time and start exploring alternatives.

Remember, if a few things go wrong, that's normal. If every possible things go wrong, that's probably a trap going off.


Of course, the Imperial Army will get an alarm about a break in at a facility dealing with military hardware and arrive at the junkyard halfway through the loading process, forcing the freighter to take of early, to get chased by TIE fighters before it jumps to hyperspace.

This is just about perfect, but I would avoid railroading by planning for the possibility the players say, "screw the y wings, we gotta get ourselves out or it's all for nothing" and abandon the fighters to jump on the freighter.

Note that between junkyard security having new routes, the updated alarms, and the imperial tipoff, it's almost stupid to think someone didn't blow the whistle on this operation. You should have a plan for who it was, or if it was somehow a really unlucky coincidence, have a story for how it happened.

Best way to make sure they don't get on the freighter in time is to have the empire show up while they are trying to get the junkyard's anti-grav sleds. They can drop the sleds and race back, but the freighter pilot didn't wait for them. Now the fighters are their only option.

Maybe they split the party and some of them stayed with the freighter. Fair play, they can join the freighter and/or try to force the pilot to wait for their friends. You gotta let them have this if they go to this much effort to control the situation. Maybe the pilot tries to double cross them and take off even with a gun to his head (death better than imperial prison for rebel affiliation) and they have to fight to prevent the freighter from leaving. Or these scoundrels may feel no loyalty to their party members and force the pilot to leave them behind. Who knows? This is where the players need to have autonomous agency to mess up the plot.


Any ideas to subtly nudge towards such an outcome?

Have an NPC talk up how much good is still in the fighters while they're trying to load them. "Hate to see such a fine machine stripped for parts to dust crops on the outer rim. You should see the hyperdrive they've got loaded on these guys. Empire doesn't make fighters like that anymore. Everything's built to be expendable now: fast, mass production so you replace and never repair. Just strip mine another planet and you've got another fleet."

What they maybe didn't mention was that the hyperdrive hasn't been primed in years and might take a couple minutes to warm up before it can jump to hyperspace...

You make it so they want to fly these things before they have a need for it, then the empire is just a proper excuse.

Next, you want to carefully time it so they aren't near the freighter when it takes off without them. Best bet is to remind them each antigrav sled can only haul 1 y wing at a time and emphasize how long it will take to move the y wings with a single sled. Now they need probably 3 or 4 sleds to get the job done faster, so each player grabs a sled, meaning no one can stay behind with the freighter, not to mention it will be easier to get the sleds past security if they all work together.

Finding and acquiring the sleds should feel like a win, like things are finally starting to go their way. They don't get the warning that the empire is here until they are already driving the sleds back to the freighter. Suddenly, their quiet and stealthy sled heist turns into a full tilt sled race where they have to blast through junkyard security on their sleds while the pilot warns them he can't wait any longer.

Of course, assuming they make it to the loading bay, they see the freighter leaving without them, a protocol droid translating profuse apologies as they fly out of comms range.

Yora
2020-09-16, 03:17 PM
Another great idea someone gave me is to make the hazardous spill highly flamable, for additional drama. :smallamused:

Also, things become much more managable if the fighters are stored in a closed hangar instead of outside on an open field. It makes it more plausible that the scrapyard is allowed to process military hardware and provides simple protection against someone snatching them away with a freighter by means of a simple roof.

Yora
2020-09-21, 10:17 AM
While I was on vacation, I was reading the Gamemaster Handbook for Star Wars 2nd edition on the plane to Portugal and back. It's not a big book and not a particularly long read, but I found it to be really quite fantastic (http://spriggans-den.com/2020/09/21/star-wars-gamemaster-handbook-a-book-that-teaches-gamemastering/). Absolutely worth hunting down for new and moderately experienced GMs, for any game really.

hifidelity2
2020-09-22, 09:28 AM
While I was on vacation, I was reading the Gamemaster Handbook for Star Wars 2nd edition on the plane to Portugal and back. It's not a big book and not a particularly long read, but I found it to be really quite fantastic (http://spriggans-den.com/2020/09/21/star-wars-gamemaster-handbook-a-book-that-teaches-gamemastering/). Absolutely worth hunting down for new and moderately experienced GMs, for any game really.

I have seen the book but never read it so will do so as any help is useful (and as running a D6 SW game at the moment I am sure will get something out of it)