Referee's Screen: Star Wars Edge of the Empire II, part 4

Part IV: A New Hope

Let's continue our unboxing coverage of Star Wars: Edge of the Empire with some thoughts on campaign creation for the new game. There is a significant amount of game design in campaign creation, and the process can make of break the game. Let's look at some traditional pitfalls of Star Wars campaigns first, continue on to theming, and then layout a framework for building a new campaign.

Where Star Wars Games Go Wrong

I have played in a number of Star Wars games, and I have seen a number of areas where Star Wars as a game can fall apart. Usually these are story and campaign reasons, and a lot of them are common to sci-fi games in general. Let's look at the top three that I have seen and discuss them:

Theme Creep: Readers of SBRPG may recognize this one. A game centered around criminals on the edge of space shifts into a Sith versus Jedi war, alien invasion, son of Darth Vader plot, or some other 'do not want' nonsense. The reason that attracted the players to the game in the first place has been sidelined for the new 'big bad plot' and the players are showing up to just see what happens next to their characters. When the players are not driving the story and the GM is, expect things to break apart in a couple games.

The Great War: I have been in a couple Star Wars games that lost focus, and just turned into a big wargame. The Empire versus Rebellion fight gradually escalated, and the next mission had to become bigger and better than the last - with the stakes even higher. It's only a matter of time before super star destroyers and the latest and greatest superweapon (Sun Crusher, Death Star III.V, Plot Smasher, etc) shows up at this point. Players start racking up TIE fighter kills in the hundreds, the players form STAR Team 6, and the intimate feel of the game is lost.

Supervillain Escalation: This is a common one in Jedi and Sith games, and it happens all the time in superhero RPGs. The big bad is defeated, and the power level goes up for the next battle. Pretty soon, both sides raise their power levels, and the game then becomes about who can throw the biggest attack and most dice around. We saw this in our d6 System superhero game, "Well no, I got 18 dice of attack! The big-bad has 24 dice of defense! Pah-shissshhhh, let the dice tsunami roll!" The game degenerates into a power-versus-power battle, and pretty soon, the big-bad is threatening other planes of existence.

What to Do Padawan?

A good bit of general advice to avoid the above is to keep the game focused on characters, not conflicts. Nobody cares about "The Empire hates the Rebels" in an adventure where the PCs are supposed to be interacting with NPCs face-to-face. The galactic conflict should be in the background, with personal conflicts between characters taking center stage.

Let's look at this closer. If a colony manager is short of water because a local trading cartel is jacking up the price with the help of a local Imperial governor, then things start to become interesting. The 'Rebel vs. Imperial' conflict is still in there, but it is a subtext, and the smaller more personal conflict between characters is driving the plot. It is up to the PCs to interact with those characters, and resolve the situation however they want to.

Never let an ideology be the reason for the adventure! It makes as much sense as M calling James Bond into her office and this exchange taking place:

M: "James, your mission this time is the Cold War. Good luck 007."

James Bond: "WTF? omg lol"

Peeling Back the Onion

Ideologies, conflicts, wars, cartels, trade embargoes, and other large ideas should be backdrops and affect characters in the world - giving them motivation to do specific acts. It is better even yet to have these large ideas being the reason 'something else happened' and a character is involved. The more layers you can write into your adventures the better. Let's layer one out and see if we can craft a beautiful situation:

1. The Empire hates the Rebels, so...
2. The Empire supports a local Hutt boss, who...
3. Runs the local Water Cartel, that is...
4. Run by an Imperial Governor, who is...
5. Raising prices on a colony world, that is...
1. Bonus points for going deeper than this!
6. Causing a shortage of minerals from the asteroid mines, which is...
7. Causing pirates to raid ore ships, which...
8. Caused one ship to disappear, that is...
9. The reason the daughter of the captain contacted the PCs, who wants them to...
10. Find her father.

Wow. The more layers you add, the more fun you can have. Now that we have this, we can fill out each layer with NPCs the players can interact with, factions who have interests going one way or the other, and locations for all of this fun stuff. You should also keep most of the middle layers secret, and let the PCs discover them for themselves! This gives them the satisfaction of unraveling the mystery themselves, and this 'peeling back the onion' is an important part of letting the players have the satisfaction of solving a problem.

Most of the problem will be finding out the who and what, and shadowy forces will be hunting them and trying to stop them at every turn. You typically start out with generic baddies, like Imperials and monsters; and then as the bad guys figure out someone is on to them, the cartel thugs and adventure-specific bad guys start showing up. The opposition that appears is driven by the PCs actions, events in the galaxy, and what happens next.

Remember, the conflicts are driven by the NPCs, the Water Cartel should never order an attack 'because it is'; the NPC leader of the faction should order the attack in response to a specific incident by one of the groups (or PCs). If you played SBRPG and recognize Factions and Faction Reactions at work here, give yourself bonus points. It is the same system, and it works very well in Star Wars: Edge. You can incorporate "ripples" from the events that happen in the galaxy, and have the factions react to them as well, and all of a sudden you have a cool sandbox model for running your game.

In Closing

Keeping your games focused on situations and a layered adventure model keeps your game on track, and keeps you from having to make it up as you go along. You can't sustain winging adventures from week to week, and that typically causes one of the three failure conditions to happen for your campaign. Layer your situations, keep things secret, and have NPCs drive the conflicts between factions. Doing these three things will help you manage a successful game, and keep the players involved in your galaxy.