So we set up our kitchen sink FFG Star Wars (FFGSW?) game last night. Three players. I’m stoked!
Everyone was cool with my house rulings: no alien species stats, no computer skill, no fucking slicers. But boy is it interesting, when you really start digging into Teh Roolz, how deeply insinuated all the crypto-cyberpunk shit is in the EU-inspired material. It is harder to de-EU-ize the game than I anticipated.
We ended up with an assassin, a smuggler pilot (both from Edge of the Empire), and a shadow (from Force & Destiny). I’m glad we have one space wizard (well…space wizard ninja), but I was a little surprised about no interest in those Rebel nerds. Interesting! Actually not that interesting, and it all comes back to those awful Duty rules: since the whole party aggregates their Duty to earn Contributions, either everyone needs to be all-in or not at all. I considered offering the Recruit specialization for free to anyone who wanted to take it, but they started going down this badass operator pathway. Maybe they’ll get recruited later!
Now I’m thinking thoughts about what a badass operator crew looks like in the Star Wars universe, in a way that doesn’t just default to cyberpunk. Kind of unexplored territory! Makes me appreciate how easy it is to fall into comfortable tropes, how hard it is to extrapolate from first principles.
They all work for Black Sun, which is this vague corporate superMafia group I need to read up more on. Everyone has motivations, everyone has Obligations (I let the Shadow take on an Obligation so she could get more XPs) to Black Sun, but for now only the Force user has morality happening. It stood out to me as especially weird that morality only “matters,” insofar as there are mechanisms at all, to the Force sensitive character. I do wish there was a broader application; it would make the Force feel more embedded in the world, rather than just, you know, mana. Special wizard stuff.
The pilot is actually a pro-Empire patriot! My mind is kind of blown at the prospect of someone having genuine sympathy for the Empire, but she’s a rule-of-law gal from a wealthy family that’s doing quite well under the Empire. But those bad apples at Black Sun are threatening the family with blackmail to keep the pilot working. Neat twist, very stressful.
Hmhm. The assassin is a self-made murderer from the streets, in so very deep debt to Black Sun that it’ll be a thousand generations — or a few well-paid scores — before she can buy her way out from under. Pretty straightforward story but I think it’ll be nice. Relucant killer.
The Shadow has been hidden from the Empire’s Force-hunters by Black Sun, so she owes them for that favor by being a Force-using mobster. Also a cool angle. There are other/different background questions for Force users than scoundrels, once again setting them apart from the crowd.
First session is next week!
Do you mean no slicers ?
Yes. Hackers. None of those.
The lack of an Internet in the SW verse makes Imperial patriots make much more sense. Transmissions in the films only seem to work short range, and are prone to interception. Therefore data has to be transferred by courier, which might take hours, on a planetary scale, or days to weeks on an interplanetary scale.
Your reputation for honesty as a courier means everything, because who’s to say that message hasn’t been tampered with? Or that you haven’t played it for someone else?
We know as a fact that the Empire has great propaganda: the Jedi go from guarding peace and justice for thousands of generations to myth in twenty years. In a no-internet universe, the only people who know about Imperial atrocity are the ones planning and conducting atrocity. Leaks can only happen, if they happen at all, given the Emperor’s capacity for prophecy, on a local scale, from one Imperial Deep Throat (Sarlacc Throat?) at a time. Even getting the story planet-wide is going to be a challenge. It’s one of the many ways that the first Death Star was a turning point for the Rebels: destroying Alderaan was something the Empire couldn’t keep secret, and clearly Tarkin didn’t even want to. Even then, given the short window between that and the destruction of the Death Star, it’s possible that the Emperor could have cracked down on the story, leaving everyone to just wonder what had happened. The smart move would have been to quickly spread the story that the Rebellion blew it up somehow, to turn public opinion against them.
Yes to all this. It’s really important part of My Star Wars to get back to this old fashioned sense of society.
No aliens?
Mischa Krilov no species stats. Millions of aliens. Place is crawling with them.
The EU is strong in this one…meaning, I appreciate and support your dislike of EU inspired…stuff(?), and it sounds like you have an interesting set-up; however, the characters made for your group sound much more EU than Star Wars film inspired.
But EotE drips with the EU, so I’m not so sure how you could avoid it. I’m looking forward to seeing how you handle Obligations and Morality in the Beakley Expanded Universe (BEU)
Oh yeah, agreed about the character career choices. I’m thinking about it! Might end up more Tarantino than Kasdan. Or at least more Farscape than Star Wars.
This seems really cool, but it doesn’t feel like SW to me at all, which is less an issue with your group and more with my issues with RPG’ing in the SW universe.
I’m looking forward to seeing how the disparate rulebooks mesh in play.
Interesting, Paul Beakley! Curious what comes of it! We went a completely different way in our Star Warsish campaigns!
Mark Delsing not sure what the “it” refers to! My de-EUing of the game? The career choices?
I mean in a way I can appreciate how anything other than playing Luke, Leia and Han would feel off. And yeah, definitely a matter of personal taste where I’m okay with someone playing a professional killer but not okay with the Holonet.
But playing in the Star Wars universe itself got a whole lot easier for me when I pulled way way back from the particulars of the movie plot. I mean, I can play Carolina Death Crawl just fine, even if the players don’t play Rhett or Scarlett.
We had our first Star Wars session last night. It will be interesting to read about yours in parallel.
Paul Beakley It = scoundrels and a psi-ninja working for a megacorp. That sounds like some other SF game to me.
For me, you need to have jedi-vs-sith and a rebellion for it to be SW. Scoundrels, too, but I see so many games that focus mostly on scoundrels that I feel like you’re just playing Traveller/Firefly at that point.
I guess I have a specific, narrow vision.
No no, Black Sun is a bunch of gangsters. Just well organized and polished. Agreed that an all-scoundrel game is just Firefly set against the backdrop of the Empire/Rebellion civil war.
Yeah man, I hear you re the Jedi-Sith thing. I back my focus up just a smidge and settle on the underlying morality of the Force as a component of reality itself. Hence my disappointment that the morality rules that apply to Force users don’t (yet!) apply to just everyone everywhere. Still thinking on that one.
It’s also why I’m glad there’s a Force user at all in my game. She’s also a pragmatist! Self taught, Force powers are just a useful edge in her line of work, doesn’t even know anything about the gravity the Dark Side applies to you. So I’m semi-satisfied with the setup because, hopefully, at least one of the trio will get to address this. Because a moral Force is very much a part of what I think of as being starwarsy.
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I am running a AW hack for SW, and we have avoided recreating the movies, but not digging in to the EU.
When I ran Edge, the Wookiee was actually pro-Empire. The whole crew wanted nothing at all to do with the Rebellion. Despised em.