Need some advice on my SW game's plot.

[ShadowDragon8685]

I'm having questions about the plot feasability and pacing of my Starwars RPG game, and I was hoping for your help. Here's my situation:

The game takes place in 23 ABY, and casts all the players in the roles of Jedi at Luke Skywalker's Jedi Praxeum. In fact, I threw my players an In Medias Res introduction starting with the Shadow Academy's attack on the Jedi Praxeum. However, things have gone off the rails.

Intead of letting the last Imperial Guardsman get tortured like a punk by Nolaa Tarkona, during the battle his men managed to steal an Artusian Crystal from the Academy's vaults, left over from the events of Jedi Outcast. He also stole the location of the Valley of the Jedi, and went there to unlock what he knew to be long-dormant Force Sensitivity. Basically, this man plans to rebuild the Empire: but he's already tried using a Paper Palpatine, and it didn't work, and got his three companions slain by one of the Dark Jedi they tried to manipulate.

So he's going to try a different approach: instead of a paper Palpatine, he's gotten a similarly-minded outlaw tech to make him a Vadersuit of power armor, and he's going to learn the ways of the Force and become a Sith like his dead bosses were. (His name, of course, is Darth Oster. )

During the course of the game, I wound up improvising the Zann Consortium back into play, with a burning desire to capture an amnesiac Lethan Twi'lek that had fallen into the player's care. She was an NPC at the time, though since then a player has taken up playing her. My players don't know it yet, but I have her backstory all figured out:

She was a Jedi Knight of the Old Republic, back during the days which were the setting of The Old Republic video game, which was when everything went to shit. She wound up being frozen in carbonite along with all of some Sith Lord's army, but he up and died before he could join them. Yes, that army, the one Zann winds up in control of at the end of Forces of Corruption. I've also decided that he did not, in fact, abandon Eclipse, but took it and hyperspaced to God-Knows-Where, then collected his Sith Army and his own Consortium forces to the same location; and, realizing how hot the heat was, simlpy froze himself and the rest of his people for 22 years or so, figuring that by then the heat would be off.

So far, all the players know is that Zann - or, to be more accurate, that ships bearing his markings - are in play. They have no idea yet about Vader's "return". Their troubles are more imediate:

23 ABY is the year Borsk Fey'lya was elected to be the Chief of State, and I'm playing him as a complete Lolbertarian douchebag. Not an American lolbertarian, BTW; the first thing on his budget chopping-block was the military, and the second was the official support the Republic had for the Jedi Order. They aren't outlaws, but they're no longer considered (officially) by the Republic to be the guardians of peace and justice; nor are they funded by them any longer.

Needless to say, with both a credible claimant to the title of Dark Lord of Sith and Tyber Zann at large, this is the worst time to be instituting military cuts. Anyway, the gameplan for the bad-guys is to amass, amass, amass.

Zann is going to do as he always does, amassing power through corruption, but I think that he, too, is going to have discovered a newfound Force Sensitivity thanks to Sliri. (The players have already proven that no bad guy, no matter how twinked, can stand up to them without the Force.) Combined with his ancient Sith Army which he'll be able to control and his own Consortium weapons of war, he's going to start pecking off border worlds whilst trying to finish Eclipse. This is going to be hampered by the fact that he burnt out the hyperdrive on it's last long-jump, and any hyperdrive for that ship will have to be custom-ordered. Of course, its superlaser is in working order.

Then there's Vader's return. What he's going to be doing is putting together the pieces of the old Force-User Conspiracies - Dessan's Reborn, Tavion's Cultists, and the Dark Jedi idea they were trying with the Shadow Academy. Basically, he's going to put together three "branches" of Jedi-classed force-using enemies for the battles; Dark Jedi (evenly focused between lightsaber combat and force use,) Sith Cultists (crap lightsaber users but powerful Force users,) and Lightsaber-wielding stormtroopers (evenly focused between lightsaber combat, force use, and martial pursuits.) And of course, he's going to pick out one exceptionally promising student to be his own apprentice, in true Sith style.

But if I'm giving Tyber Zann the Eclipse, that kind of makes Vader seem like less of a threat, even if he is starting to actually pull the Remnant together under the rule of a Sith again. So I had a thought; after he stages some raids on Republic installations (primarily to gather up more Artusian crystals and other useful supplies,) I was thinking of having him steal Lusankya.

Remember, the Republic is currently in a state of severe libertarian cutbacks mode. That money hog was first on Borsk Fey'lya's chopping block; I imagine that they would have mothballed the fleets instead of scrapping them. I was thinking it would be a good dramatic reveal of Vader's return, that they would get their hands on the logs from the mothball yard showing an entire Star Destroyer being used as a boarding craft; various camera cuts through the ship as stormtroopers and Imperial Navy personel board it, cutting through the skeleton-skeleton maintenance crew, and then they see Darth Fucking Vader walking down the boarding ramp, and (just to make it damn clear it's Vader, even though it isn't ) telekinetically choking someone to death.

This will give me a story with not one Big Bad Evil Guy but two, both of them unquestionably BBEGs, and one of whom is the archtypical BBEG, or whom at least puts up a credible appearance of being him. It also lets me draw stuff from all across Star Wars; Zann has the Consortium kit, so he's got the Fandalorian Crap nailed down pat, but he also has the Sith Army from the KotOR days, so I can pull in KotOR stuff like Sith Assassins weilding the Force and cortosis-weaved vibroblades, personal stealth generators and personal shield generators and stuff. And then there's the fake Vader, who can pull in all the Imperial era stuff and NJO-era dark side crisis stuff.

Of course, the Jedi will know it's a fake; Luke knows damn well his father's dead, and might even conjure up Hayden Christian's spirit just to make sure. But my intent is to make the players question just how sure Luke is by playing Oster as close to the real scare that was the Vader we all know from ESB and RotJ. I want them to hear the Imperial March, even without the benefit of an mp3 file.

How probable/improbable is this? With the New Republic waxing thanks to the maladministration of Borsk Fey'lya, the time seems ripe for a massive upswing in bad guys. Especially since Borsk can't be easily outsted since he's replaced most of the inner council (who can do the ousting; or block a new person's election) with Bothans loyal to him. He certainly wouldn't want to reveal what an incompetant fuck-up he was in losing the biggest ship in the Alliance fleet (especially if they make off with all the other Star Destroyers that were hanging around Lusankya as well.)

Now, it's not all tits-up. For one thing, I decided to change the timeline around: Admiral Ackbar only resigned recently (as in, post-game-start,) after Borsk hauled him up on charges of misallocation of military resources; after the Shadow Academy attacked, he sent the Lusankya and her fleet to Yavin to supercharge the Jedi's reconstruction because he could see which way the wind was blowing. While Borsk may have had the authority to order him charged, the military tribunal he could not stack, and the trial wound up being more like a litany of Ackbar's great deeds in the service of the Alliance and the Republic, which was followed by a prompt aquittal. Then he (and everyone involved) promptly resigned; that's when it gets hairy.

I also decided that the Mon Calamari people still technically owned all the MC80 star cruisers and MC30 frigates, which they had built for themselves and loaned to the Alliance to Restore the Republic, and allowed the New Republic to continue operating. In light of the Republic apparently deciding it no longer needed a military, they revoked that loan and called back all the MC80s and MC30s - the 90s they couldn't bring back, since those were actually sold, but the world of Mon Calamari is swimming in MC80 star cruisers.

Which leads me to where my players are now: The Mon Calamari people, following ancient unspecified alien traditions, have given Ackbar Home One, with the expectation that he would volunteer his ship and his services to the Mon Calamari defenses. But he's not going to; Ackbar's going through a late-life crisis (kind of like a mid-life crisis, only later,) and is trying to figure out what he should do with himself. Left alone, he'll wind up donating Home One back to the Mon Calamari people and buggering off to Force-knows-where and becoming a moderately influential existencialist poet, but that's not a desirable soloution. Since he's wrote to his old friends (Luke among them) explaining his feelings in light of the trial and keeping them abreast of where he is, a lot of people are understandably worried about the old Admiral of the Obvious. Especially Luke Skywalker, who senses that the ex-admiral's destiny has not played out yet, and that he still has an important role to play in the galaxy, but that if left alone he'll wind up abandoning it.

Enter the players. I figure Luke will be sending the current crop of PCs to Mon Calamari; since Ackba stated that his friends were always welcome in his home, he's decided to send some young Jedi to meet Ackbar, to "learn from him." In truth, he's hoping that the youngsters will inspired Ackbar to find his path again; behind-the-scenes, this is me trying to break the game out of the previously held "here's a mission, go do stuff until you've acomplished it" by giving them an open-ended mission and freedom to decide where to go and what to do. It's also given them a very large and impressive toy - Home One - to do their going in, but she's somewhat hampered by the fact that the crew is 25,000 astromech and other assorted droids, and that means that they can't exactly bring all her guns online or anything. At most, they could fire as many guns as they have PCs, which would involve leaving the bridge nearly unmanned. (I've also decided that the bridge finally got that control revamp so non-MonCals could use the systems, purely for the sake of playability.)

I'm not sure where the players are going to go with this. In truth, I'm a little worried that some of them may not know what the hell to go and do with such a high degree of autonomy, but I can handle that. The players are on the cusp of being named Jedi Knights, and they still haven't even touched upon one of the two BBEG's. (Well, one of the three, if you consider Borsk to be a third.) I want them to enjoy this adventure, but I also need to start doling out some of the main plot of what the bad guys are doing. Their newfound autonomy is a blessing in that it allows for long stretches of downtime during which the Bad Guys can be active, but it's also a bit of a curse in that I need to figure out how to dole out a carefully-parceled out measure of reveal to them. I want to hint at the fact that there's upheavals in the Remnant, and also that the Zann Consortium is back. I also need to figure out Ackbar's Destiny so I can make it relevant later on, but that's easily enough fudged by where the players convince him to fly Home One and what they see. IE, if they wind up tangling with pirates (and Zann), then Ackbar may decide that with the Repblic military in tatters, the Republic has need of Rogue Starships patrolling the spacelanes as a pirate hunter. He'd have no problem getting backing and crew for such a mission, and would no doubt even pull in Rogue Squadron to help. If they wind up going to Naboo (where they've already made themselves very welcome by their prior actions, and have made a close friend in the form of the aging again-Colonel Panaka), then Ackbar may decide to take the Royal Naboo Defense Forces up on an offer to bolster and advise their space defenses with Home One. If they wind up going on mercy missions, he might turn Home One into a hospital ship of mercy and use her to evacuate war-torn worlds, and if they wind up exploring history and what-not, he might refit her back to an explorer and take up the hopefully peaceful missions of exploration. That's not really an issue, since I can figure out how to make that important.

What is important is how plausable - and more importantly, interesting - this all is. I'm trying not to play anyone comlpetely out of type, but I'm not averse to changing minor dates and character facts for better story (IE, playing up Borsk as both an incompetant libertarian moron in addition to a Bothan-interests-serving racist,) and changing the time of Ackbar's resignation. Is this throwing too much at the players at once? I want them to feel more than a little overwhelmed once they realize the full extent of their enemies' resources and reach. I also need to figure out how fast to release the plot details. Too soon and it'll spoil the broth, too late and it'll look like they're badly hacked in. I need to find a way of hinting at what's up without revealing it entirely. For the Consortium, it's as simple as vicious criminal upswings that can be ultimately discovered to have been Zann-financied or operated, while letting them run into a terrorist-cell like dead end when they try to track back further, but I need to release drips and dribbles of the fake-Vader's activities by getting them close enough to what he's doing to get a very uneasy feeling (and hamming up the "Empire at it's height" stuff,) whilst not putting them remotely near the same room with him for a very, very long time. I was hoping that a lot of Star Wars loremasters could help me, and since I know my players read the Wizards forums (and I want to avoid the official Starwars forums,) I was hoping that you could help me.

Help me Stardestroyer.net. You're my only hope.

[evillejedi]

My honest advice from running a lot of SW games?

Turn down the epic level like 99%

Honestly, there are so many things you can do without even touching lore and still impact entire systems and sectors while making your characters actions important. This also allows you to make very unique flavors of locales, cultures, bureaucratic systems, NPCs etc. I always found next to impossible to involve anything that actually happened other than as background holonet news because of the weight of canon (or perceived canon). Using galaxy changing events only really works if you are willing to fanfiction the entirety of continuity from the second the players start (the first thing any group does is burn down the bar they start in, regardless of anything the GM actually wanted them to do)

In my games I would try to work in references to the era they were in. For example in the KOTOR era I ran a game where the players faced off against the mandalorians as soldiers and jedi, I maybe had them get an order that was signed by a named character or referenced events in the galaxy, but the battle was their own to influence and the gains and losses of various challenges impacted them directly through their actions. A dark empire campaign the highlight was going to balmora to pick up a shipment of SD-6 war droids and blundering into an imperial mutiny. The small touches keep them interested especially the ones that follow books, comics and games, but rewritting anything that is canon has to be agreed upon up front out of the game.

[Azron_Stoma]

Also including Tyber Zann in any flattering capacity is a bad sign, but that might just be because I hate the flippin' character with a passion.

Was it so hard just to make Black Sun a Playable Faction?

In one game I was in the GM made Zann a low ranking dock worker who the players were to kill on their way from one Black Sun NPC to the next as a "by the way" side quest, retconing the events of FOC as Zann's daydreaming and it had caused an on-the-job accident, so he was to be "Fired"

course it helped that everyone there hated Zann as much as I did.

[Havok]

Then there's Vader's return.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no NO.
Just no. Not ever.

[ShadowDragon8685]

My honest advice from running a lot of SW games?

Turn down the epic level like 99%

Turning down the epic is the exact antithesis of this game, and the players want epic. I want epic. Hell, I imported something of the Stunts system from Exalted; I give them mechanical rewards on doing crazy, off-the-wall shit like how Anakin leapt off a speeder and plummeted 300 feet onto that assassin's speeder.

Honestly, there are so many things you can do without even touching lore and still impact entire systems and sectors while making your characters actions important. This also allows you to make very unique flavors of locales, cultures, bureaucratic systems, NPCs etc. I always found next to impossible to involve anything that actually happened other than as background holonet news because of the weight of canon (or perceived canon). Using galaxy changing events only really works if you are willing to fanfiction the entirety of continuity from the second the players start (the first thing any group does is burn down the bar they start in, regardless of anything the GM actually wanted them to do)

It's not fanfiction if it's part of the game, it's retro continuity. And I have no problem RetConning things.

And they did blow up the bar they started in - well, the bad guys blew it up for them. But it's their bar, and now they're charged with rebuilding it and erecting a shield generator so the bad guys can't blow it up again.

I'm not afraid of changing canon going ahead. Hell, I've already changed it bringing up the rear. I just need to be careful that the rear-guard retcons aren't too drastic - like Ackbar retiring later, and Zann having stolen Eclipse and buggered off to parts unknown, instead of having abandoned it and buggering off to parts unknown.

In my games I would try to work in references to the era they were in. For example in the KOTOR era I ran a game where the players faced off against the mandalorians as soldiers and jedi, I maybe had them get an order that was signed by a named character or referenced events in the galaxy, but the battle was their own to influence and the gains and losses of various challenges impacted them directly through their actions. A dark empire campaign the highlight was going to balmora to pick up a shipment of SD-6 war droids and blundering into an imperial mutiny. The small touches keep them interested especially the ones that follow books, comics and games, but rewritting anything that is canon has to be agreed upon up front out of the game.

Well, their game basically started during the climactic end of the Shadow Academy attack from the Young Jedi Knights book, and ended with the Jedi Temple exploding and them evacuating the younglings from the bunker in the post-explosion mess. And as the game unfolds, there will be other galaxy-changing events going on: I haven't forgotten about Nolaa Tarkona and her Diversity Alliance. I wouldn't be surprised if my PCs go off to try and deal with them, too. ("You see those other guys out there on the landing field? Yeah, those other guys wearing robes? They work here too."[/Zed])

I mean, a small-focus game works, too, but I never intended this game to be small-focus, and the players don't want small-focus. Hell, they've already come into possession of a space station, a space "gas station" (basically an open-sided platform which retains heat and atmo and gravity and which has fuel refining equipment set up to automatically refine fuel from a gas giant,) and an old Republic Cruiser refitted as a pirate carrier, in addition to half a squadron of starfighters and a Dynamic-class freighter. (I'm going the opposite route of starving them for stuff by giving them more than they can figure out what the hell to go do with and not letting them sell any of it as it is all technically property of the Jedi Temple. So far they seem to actually be grooving the logistics challenges.)

Basically, I want them to feel like they could well be the stars of Star Wars: Episode VII, or at least their own video game.

Also including Tyber Zann in any flattering capacity is a bad sign, but that might just be because I hate the flippin' character with a passion.

I never played his campaign and I fucking hated his goddamned cheap-ass overpowered units playing an FoC galactic conquest as the Rebellion... Which really only made it all the more sweet when I took his last world and killed his last unit.

I'm not going to make his mass drivers fucking overpowered in the RPG, but I do intend for the players to hate his guts properly.

Was it so hard just to make Black Sun a Playable Faction?

No, but the Black Sun are gone by 23 ABY, whereas Zann could feasably show up with a Sith Army and an Eclipse- class Super Star Destroyer.

In one game I was in the GM made Zann a low ranking dock worker who the players were to kill on their way from one Black Sun NPC to the next as a "by the way" side quest, retconing the events of FOC as Zann's daydreaming and it had caused an on-the-job accident, so he was to be "Fired"

course it helped that everyone there hated Zann as much as I did.

Sweet, sweet schadenfreude?

Then there's Vader's return.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no NO.
Just no. Not ever.

It's not actually Vader. It is, however, someone who lived and worked around Vader for all the time Vader was Vader who is now impersonating Vader to use his fearsome reputation to rally the Imperial Remnant. After all, whilst they might bicker amongst themselves, not a one of them would dare say that Palpatine isn't their rightful Emperor, nor would they question Palpatine's right-hand man.

In the end, it wouldn't really matter if he were Vader or not. By his endgame, he'll control so much poer he could be open about being Emperor Oster and nobody would dare question it - 'cause he'd send his apprentice to choke the bitch who did.

[Thanas]

No, but the Black Sun are gone by 23 ABY.

Wrong.

[ShadowDragon8685]

No, but the Black Sun are gone by 23 ABY.

Wrong.

Only technically.

They've got a lot of plans in the fires, but they have no real power - as a criminal enterprise they're recovering (though they'll be wiped out in a year if they stay on schedule and something drastic doesn't happen,) but they certainly aren't going to bringing the old Sith Empire or Nightsisters of Dathomir to the table, nor a fully-fleshed-out space fleet and land-based army.

Plus, when I first introduced them, I needed a reason for my players to load up the unconcious Twi'lek (who would later be played by a player) and leave Tatooine in a hurry. They'd just killed a serial murderer, beaten up a local crime-lord and freed his slaves, and laid their hands on the Dynamic-class freighter (modified with a lot of neat stuff so that it can basically operate as a really friggin' big two-man fighter) and several starfighters.

So I had a Nebulon-B and an Interceptor IV with Zann's markings show up and threaten to bombard the world if they didn't give them the Twi'lek. They decided that if they made it known they had them, the frigates would have to give chase on their ships instead of bombarding the Republic naval military hospital they'd stashed her at, or going after the evacuation transport - so they led the frigates away. Was pretty cool, really, they all loved it.

[Sheridan]

While my lore is sadly lacking in the entire EU, there is one piece of advice that I can give about running epic-style RPGs (or, really any RPG). The story is dictated by the characters' choices.

Setting up background material that is different from established canon is fine. However, once the game starts, things should proceed from each PCs and NPCs motivation (modified by the dice, of course). For example, your description of what Ackbar wants to do post-PC-introduction seems like it should work--but only if you stay true to what Ackbar is likely to do in any given situation, based on what you know of his personality from already-established canon.

Another good example: regardless of the situation, Fey'lya is gonna work first for his own self-interest, second for the bothan people's interests, third for his political ideals, and only at the end towards anything else. This has been established fairly well through all of the EU stuff that I've read about him; if he suddenly started being charitable to folks whom he has no reason to expect any reciprocal boon from or who are not enemies of his enemies (for example), my bullshit detector would go off like an Orion drive.

So, determine (based on already-established canon) what the NPCs are likely to do given certain stimuli and work from there. Minor background details like what date Ackbar retired or whether Zann kept the Eclipse are nowhere near as important as an understanding of your NPCs psychology.

Mind you, Occam usually has things right, too. If you can come up with simple explanations for the changes that you make pre-game, it'll help with verisimilitude.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Turning down the epic is the exact antithesis of this game, and the players want epic. I want epic. Hell, I imported something of the Stunts system from Exalted; I give them mechanical rewards on doing crazy, off-the-wall shit like how Anakin leapt off a speeder and plummeted 300 feet onto that assassin's speeder.

That's impressive not epic. Figuring out how to deal with a Grand Master of the Jedi Order who can walk on lava and deflect capital grade weapons without harm is. Luke Skywalker is a living Deus Ex, the first thing you need to do in your campaign is figure out a way to sideline him.

It's not fanfiction if it's part of the game, it's retro continuity. And I have no problem RetConning things.

Are you employed by Lucasfilm? No? Then it's fanfiction.

I mean, a small-focus game works, too, but I never intended this game to be small-focus, and the players don't want small-focus. Hell, they've already come into possession of a space station, a space "gas station" (basically an open-sided platform which retains heat and atmo and gravity and which has fuel refining equipment set up to automatically refine fuel from a gas giant,) and an old Republic Cruiser refitted as a pirate carrier, in addition to half a squadron of starfighters and a Dynamic-class freighter. (I'm going the opposite route of starving them for stuff by giving them more than they can figure out what the hell to go do with and not letting them sell any of it as it is all technically property of the Jedi Temple. So far they seem to actually be grooving the logistics challenges.)

I don't see how influencing the histories of entire sectors of space can be small scale.

Basically, I want them to feel like they could well be the stars of Star Wars: Episode VII, or at least their own video game.

Okay, but it's still fanfiction and all the failings that go with it. If you're making an alt timeline Star Wars you need to set a divergence point and right now it looks like Tyber Zanns fucking off with Eclipse in tow is it, though this does not befit the personality of the Empire or the Emperor as I don't see how Zann would hold onto it if the Emperor wanted his ship back; this is why Zann abandoned it in the first place, he knew the Empire wouldn't let him keep it and eventually they're going to get it back.

No, but the Black Sun are gone by 23 ABY, whereas Zann could feasably show up with a Sith Army and an Eclipse- class Super Star Destroyer.

Zann could feasibly show up, but not with the Eclipse, no way no how. The Empire would've rather destroyed it than let him have it and Zann knew this.

In the end, it wouldn't really matter if he were Vader or not. By his endgame, he'll control so much poer he could be open about being Emperor Oster and nobody would dare question it - 'cause he'd send his apprentice to choke the bitch who did.

What are you talking about? Lots of Imperial Officers questioned Vader even before Palpatine's death.

[ShadowDragon8685]

While my lore is sadly lacking in the entire EU, there is one piece of advice that I can give about running epic-style RPGs (or, really any RPG). The story is dictated by the characters' choices.

Setting up background material that is different from established canon is fine. However, once the game starts, things should proceed from each PCs and NPCs motivation (modified by the dice, of course). For example, your description of what Ackbar wants to do post-PC-introduction seems like it should work--but only if you stay true to what Ackbar is likely to do in any given situation, based on what you know of his personality from already-established canon.

Well, when he thought he'd caused the deaths of a few hundred people (he hadn't; it was sabotage,) he grew extremely morose and fecked off to the middle of nowhere to live in solitude. Even Leia Organa-Solo and one of his nieces personally tracking him down wasn't enough to snap him out of it, though they did convince him to come along with them on the course of an adventure that did cheer him up.

That's what this is: Ackbar is falling back into that moroseness, feeling obsolete. He wrote to his friends, a long, rambling letter, entirely unlike him, and subconciously he wasa hoping for someone to either come or send someone who could help him out of his ennui. That's what Skywalker did: sent the players. They're currently plotting to convince him to go off to courscant to see some old friends and track down a slaver who slipped through their hands once before (narrated as the intro to two new PCs.) Since he'd like to see his old friends again and since he was once a slave, both aspects will appeal to him, resulting in him ordering Home One out of dock and flying to Courscant.

Another good example: regardless of the situation, Fey'lya is gonna work first for his own self-interest, second for the bothan people's interests, third for his political ideals, and only at the end towards anything else. This has been established fairly well through all of the EU stuff that I've read about him; if he suddenly started being charitable to folks whom he has no reason to expect any reciprocal boon from or who are not enemies of his enemies (for example), my bullshit detector would go off like an Orion drive.

Actually, I've wrote out Borsk Fey'lya's interests as a hierarchy. Here it is.

Borsk Fey'lya and his own interests -> Borsk Fey'lya's personal friends and friends' interets -> Bothuai -> Bothan Space -> Bothan interests-at-large -> Bothan Trading Partners' interests -> The New Republic's interests.

He's not going to be charitable towards the players. As I've wrote him, he's coming from a very libertarian point of view; he sees the Jedi as both an unnessessary waste of funds and an unregulated (and impossible-to-regulate) quasi-law-enforcement, quasi-military, entire-pain-in-his-neck agency which neither deserve nor need official backing or taxpayer's funds.

His beef with the Jedi isn't personal. He wouldn't go out of his way to harm them. He's just dead-set against lifting a whisker to aid them, and making it clear that the Jedi do not represent him in any way, shape, or form.

So, determine (based on already-established canon) what the NPCs are likely to do given certain stimuli and work from there. Minor background details like what date Ackbar retired or whether Zann kept the Eclipse are nowhere near as important as an understanding of your NPCs psychology.

Actually, entirely by accident, I got the date Ackbar retired correct. I was thinking of Wedge; Ackbar canonically retired when Leia stepped down, as he wanted no part in the politics and she had shielded him from them.

As for Zann, he's a greedy bastard, a power-hungry criminal warmonger. I don't think he's likely to have given up on Eclipse anyway, when he could have pulled a smash, grab, and run like hell with it.

Mind you, Occam usually has things right, too. If you can come up with simple explanations for the changes that you make pre-game, it'll help with verisimilitude.

It is pretty simple: Zann wanted to feck off with his new superweapon and wait until all the heat was down so he could make a comeback and take everything. Palpatine's motivations were vengeance and power; Zann's are possession. He wants to own everything, directly, or indirectly. During the Empire, Palpatine owned everything of value that wasn't in Rebel hands. The time was not right for Zann to strike. Now, the time is looking to be right.

That's impressive not epic. Figuring out how to deal with a Grand Master of the Jedi Order who can walk on lava and deflect capital grade weapons without harm is. Luke Skywalker is a living Deus Ex, the first thing you need to do in your campaign is figure out a way to sideline him.

Quite simple. There's so much going on that even with Luke actively aiding, there's simply more than he can handle alone. Skywalker is incapable of being in two places at once.

Are you employed by Lucasfilm? No? Then it's fanfiction.

I find your simplistic metric... Disturbing.

It is not fanfiction if it's not something I write out as a story. Now, the partially-started story I have featuring Jaden Korr getting into an entirely-ripped-off-from-Dead-Space adventure in a newfound sector of space which hid from the Galaxy at large for three hundred years and populated mainly by normal spacelane races as well as a Draenei ripoff? That is fanfiction.

But a game is not and cannot be fanfiction. It's not being written or read, it's being played. It's not a fanfic anymore than a Star Wars game found on Newgrounds is fanfiction - it's certainly not official, but it's not fanfiction on account of not being a story.

I don't see how influencing the histories of entire sectors of space can be small scale.

In a gigantic galaxy where you can travel from the capital of everything to the ass end of nowhere faster than one can travel from New York City to the ass end of Antartica, a "sector of space" influencing game in Star Wars is like a game of d20 Modern wherein the entire scope of influence centers around the United Kingdom and Ireland. It ain't tiny, but it ain't world-spanning, literally. It ain't even all of the EU - European Union, in this case.

Okay, but it's still fanfiction and all the failings that go with it. If you're making an alt timeline Star Wars you need to set a divergence point and right now it looks like Tyber Zanns fucking off with Eclipse in tow is it, though this does not befit the personality of the Empire or the Emperor as I don't see how Zann would hold onto it if the Emperor wanted his ship back; this is why Zann abandoned it in the first place, he knew the Empire wouldn't let him keep it and eventually they're going to get it back.

The Emperor was a bit too concerned with the pace of the Death Star II at the time to worry about getting his ship back personally, or even assigning Vader to the task. The Empire themselves certainly worried about it and searched, as did the Rebellion, but after seizing the Eclipse, IMG, the Zann Consortium started to pack up shop. Zann had just enough time left to pull his heist on Courscant and retrieve his carbonite army; this he packed aboard the Eclipse, and they jumped out for parts unknown. Like, way the hell unknown. No way to track him, and they brought enough Ysalamiri with them to block the Emperor's farseeing. After Endor, the Emperor was dead, the Rebels had bigger fish to fry, and everybody just assumed that somebody else dealt with Zann. The Rebels thought that the canonical explaination - that Zann had simply abandoned Eclipse - was the true one, since the Imperials had more hulks and one of those was renamed to Eclipse, and the Empire, for it's part, considered the fact that they had not recovered the real Eclipse to be a Code Red secret, and perpetrated the myth as much as possible, whilst simultainously hoping and believing that it had fallen into the wrong hands. In the end, even Palpatine himself believed this, as when he was reborn, there was a completed ship named Eclipse waiting for him; it never occured to him that nobody had recovered it, and nobody was going to get electrocuted for telling him the truth.

The real fate of Eclipse faded into the background, a secret, unknown. In the end, nobody knew the truth; those who did died with the destruction of Byss. Not even Darth Oster knows that it's really still out there.

Zann could feasibly show up, but not with the Eclipse, no way no how. The Empire would've rather destroyed it than let him have it and Zann knew this.

They can't destroy what they can't find. That's how the Rebel Alliance survived long enough to become the New Republic. Zann knew this, too. With his Ysalimiri, he hid the ship from the Force. By scuttling her Holonet and Hypertranscievers, he prevented any message from being sent (reinforced with jamming gear,) and by freezing his entire army in carbonite, he prevented anyone from caring that they'd be effectively skipping 20-some years of their lives. And by buggering off to goddamn nowhere, he prevented any normal sort of search from finding him.

In the end, it wouldn't really matter if he were Vader or not. By his endgame, he'll control so much power he could be open about being Emperor Oster and nobody would dare question it - 'cause he'd send his apprentice to choke the bitch who did.

What are you talking about? Lots of Imperial Officers questioned Vader even before Palpatine's death.

And Vader usually found their lack of faith disturbing, followed by the deck officers inevitably finding their emptying bowels and bladder disgusting.

Which is why nobody would question it. This guy isn't making the Force a secret, he's going to be openly controlling it. None of his Dark Jedi, Sith Cultists or FS Stormtroopers will give a damn that he's not actually Palpatine, and if anybody complains, they, and those forces loyal to him for being the best hope for the Empire to rise back to glory, will subsequently curbstomp anyone who disagrees.

Seriously, if some seven-foot-tall guy in black power armor, with a cape and a lightsaber and the ability to choke you with the force, to send a swarm of other guys to choke you with the force, or to have you blown out of the sky by a Super-Star Destroyer, says that he's the new Emperor, and most everybody is throwing in with him... Are you going to object? He's not that punk Zsinj or Thrawn, this guy is the real deal, he's a genuine, bona fide Dark Lord of Sith, and he's got all the power.

No, you're not going to object. Nor are most of the Imperial remnant. The ones who do object will be promptly made into object lessons of why you should not object.

[Sheridan]

Well, it seems that you've worked out most of the details. The only comment/suggestion that I have, based on the information that you've revealed, is to wonder what the average trooper under Zaan thinks about missing thirty frelling years of the universe.

If they were already loyal enough to let themselves be frozen (I dunno; I never read any of the stuff on Zann or the Eclipse), then no problem. If not, even with all of the "Vader" stalking horse stuff, there may be (probably quiet at first) dissention in the ranks.

As a matter of fact, that might be a good way to do the final reveal for your PCs as to "Vader's" true nature. One of 'em (or many of the followers) decides that he/she/it/them got the short end of the stick and wants to go public in some manner. Y'know, without resembling the admiral in Episode V. Just a thought.

[Ghost Rider]

So far it looks as if you have basically a Del Ray story with all the pitfalls. Adding in old ancient Sith/Republic shit just makes it worse. Let's examine what this is:

In the black corner at weighing in at 800 pounds is Mr Silverback! He has a mean Sith Lord right hook with his unknown army of loyal to the ends of existence with ties to the ancient Sith Empire/s! A devastating super Force weapon body blow! And a mobile super weapon footwork in tow! He doesn't need your rules of logic! He has a custom made Empire, just add water!

In the shining corner are our heroes! They are weighing in at a combined 100 pounds! But they have the pluck and name droppers of the galaxy! Mr Silverback better watch his bare ass!

Really, you're asking us to critque a Del Rey fanfic. It has all the same issues of wanting the galaxy in the grip of terror because...well the government is dumber then a sack of bricks. Really, if you want epic with a capital "E"? Don't make their mistakes. Making another end of the galaxy as we know it involves billions upon billions and Del Rey nor any of the writers got that correct. The SW galaxy is immensely huge, and having an army that threatens it? Sorry, the Vong were just more cash cows to attract the biowank crowd. You do not get that power unless you are the government or the men supplying the government. That is one of the few things Lucas got correct. This isn't as much epic as just bukkake splatter with name droppers from the movies and EU.

There are far better ways of giving epic without needing the novel EU route.

[ShadowDragon8685]

I think you guys are conflating Tyber Zann and Darth Oster. They're different people; this is going to be a three-way throw-down.

IMG, Darth Oster was the third Imperial Guard - the one who got away - after the Shadow Academy Crisis. Per canon, he goes on to get himself tortured by Nola Tarkona and deadified because he will not reveal to the schutta the location of the Emperor's plauge wearhouse. Per my game, he goes to the Valley of the Jedi, clutching an Artusian Crystal, and unlocks his own long-dormant Force Sensitivity, finds himself an Imperial-minded outlaw tech to make a Vader Suit, then in a very efficient manner sets about impersonating Darth Vader in order to rally the Imperial Remnant's more warmongering factions - the ones who never wanted peace with the New Republic but who got shut the hell up by the likes of Gilead Pellalon - as well as picking up the remnants of the Shadow Academy and past dark-sided crises, in order to forge a cadre of Sith-descended lightsaber-swinging bad guys to combat Jedi and keep rebellious captains in line.

Darth Oster is going to steal the Super-Star Destroyer Lusankya, which El Libertard had mothballed somewhere, eventually, once he's already started to gather serious support, but even before that he's going to be making good trade in capturing resources, primarily resources relating to old Force artifacts, in order to amp up his force-sensitive minions.

Darth Oster is convinced that the mistake the Emperor made was in trying to keep the Force as his personal secret. He also knows that it's infeasable to put the lid back on that particular pandora's box, so instead he's going to raise cadres of loyal Dark-Siders.



Tyber Zann, on the other hand, has a Sith Army which was frozen in carbonite some time during the time-set of the MMORPG The Old Republic - by my estimation, since there is no canon answer on where that army comes from. These are not Dark Lords of Sith, these are Sith armies from the KotOR time peroid. Many of them are force-sensitive assassins, many of them are just soldiers. These forces, largely, will not be lightsaber-wielders, but they have plenty of cortosis-weave-enhanced vibroweapons and other nasty lightsaber-user-fucker-upper weapons from that time peroid to make them a credible threat. In addition to these nasty bad guys capable of taking on Jedi and putting a hurt on them, he has his old Zann Consortium army and navy; battleships to rival Imperial-II class Star Destroyers in the form of the Agressor and Keldabe-class warships; he's up to his old shennanigans with using mass drivers and special weapons to bypass and otherwise fuck up shielding. He's quite happy to conduct false color operations using captured Alliance and Imperial vessels, and he has the Eclipse.

He also will be having a late-in-life force-sensitivity awakening, thanks to his personal Nightsister. This is simply a concession to the balance of the Star Wars RPG, and the way non-force-users simply stand no chance against force-users; it would be kind of lame if a big bad evil guy like Zann went down like a punk once confronted. He will develop his skills in the Lightsaber-weilding Jedi-descended tradition, if only to credibly control his Sith Army by trying to be Darth Zann (which will be to his mind a con,) but the mainly important part is that he has the force powers to prevent the players from simply shutting him down with Grip and whaling on him like they did the last three scummy villains without force powers I sent at them, including one who was fully twinked out with a reflex defense that they literally couldn't touch without a natural 20 (a 5% of the time automatic critical hit) and who was fully intended to put at least one of them in the trauma ward.

I also think it makes for better bad guys. Regardless, Zann is hungry for power, but his vice is greed. He wants to own it all, and destroy what he cannot own. To do this he'll need to make Eclipse mobile again (he scuttled her hyperdrive when he scuttled her hypertransmitters and holonet transceivers ,) and finish construction, but once he learns that someone else is attacking the weakened New Republic, he'll want to bide his time. He won't, however, entirely bide his time, since he believes that news of his return has already escaped, in the form of the Lethan Twi'lek. He doesn't know about her amnesia, all he knows is that when he last saw her, she'd made off with information about his operations, and presumably an intent to blow the lid wide open to the Republic, so he's gearing up for a contingency war like in the old days.

As for the average Zann trooper, most of them were mercenary squads. That's his big handicap right now, is that most of his rank-and-file boots-on-the-ground buggered off when he buggered off to parts unknown. His pirates, those manning his starships, were more loyal, and he promised those who wished to leave instead of staying on and being carbon-frozen they could leave. He let them leave, but he neglected to provide them with a starship, if you get what I mean. The rest wised up and got frozen. He still has the blueprints to produce the Destroyer Droids Mk. 2 that he used during the Galactic Civil War, and he'll probably try to fill out his rank-and-file again with a combination of battle droids, mercenaries, and his frozen Sith Army.


As for the reveal of "Vader" being not-Vader, I figure the PCs are going to handle that one for me, by investigating and then trying to prove to the Empire that he's not Vader. Of course, by the time they can actually convince anyone that he's not the genuine Moff-choking McCoy but an imposting Moff-Choking McBride, it'll be too late to matter. The warhawk faction of the Remnant will be behind him anyway, and the non-warhawk faction will be experiancing tragic, lightsaber-related shaving accidents courtesy of his Dark Jedi. The rank-and-file of the non-warhawk faction (like Pellalon's people) will be subjected to a Soviet-style "In the Empire, it requires more bravery to retreat than to advance" set-up, and will quickly conform to the situation at hand.

I want the players to go through some doubt on the matter; I'm planning on having them and Rosh Penin encounter him at some point, with the players slogging through the facility the hard way and Rosh encountering not-Vader. I'm going to build up by having them see a security footage showing Rosh fighting someone who's off-screen before the video feed cuts out, and they find Rosh all cut-up and on the brink of death, who manages to gasp out "Darth..." before he slips into a coma/becomes one with the Force. The actual reveal of "Vader" is going to be when he brazenly attacks a deep core world to loot ancient force treasures, most likely Onderon. Initially there will be confusion, rejection; the New Republic will, of course, denounce him as an imposter, and Luke Skywalker will say that he's definitely not his father, as he knows that Anakin Skywalker is dead (and consulted his spirit to prove it,) but I want even the players to start doubting that he's an imposter, by really hamming up the Vaderness. Like I said, I want them to hear the Imperial March.


@Ghost Rider: Again, you're conflating Zann and Darth Oster. Oster's not going to have any superweapons - not unless you count a Super-Star Destroyer as a superweapon. He's just going about the business of throning himself Emperor in an efficient, businesslike, ruthless Sith manner; he has, after all, learned from the two greatest Sith Lords of all time. As one of the Emperor's Guard, he was privvy to Palpatine and Vader's plans. He was one of the few to know about Starkiller, about the Emperor's Hands, about the Sith. He wants to restore the Empire he devoted all of his life to leading, and to that end he's going to be impersonating Darth Vader, with the genuine Force Sensitivity to back it up. He's going to drag up all of the non-superweapon projects; he reckons that Palps failed because he put all of his faith in superweapons, which is why he's not: he's dragging up the remnants of all the force-using plots that happened since the Empire (Desann's Reborn, Tavion's Sith Cultists, his own Shadow Academy project,) and the non-superweapon really-good-ideas that came out of the Empire, like the TIE Defender and the Dark Trooper Project.

He's not interested in the fear of this battlestation. He's interested in the fear of his goddamned stormtrooper corps, his motherfucking star destroyers, and the holy-shit-I-just-got-vivisected factor of making it an open secret that he's got cadres of lightsaber-swinging Dark Jedi running around doing his bidding.


Whereas Tyber Zann has a superweapon or two or three. Eclipse can't shatter a whole planet, but the ability to shatter a whole planet is overkill compared to the ability to shatter anything short of a Super-Star Destroyer in one shot, and even a Super-Star Destroyer in two shots. It can sterilize a planet, even a shielded one; even Courscant - with some time. His Fandalorian wankian mass drivers can go through ships' shields (though I will be allowing a shield upgrade to prevent this,) his ships tend to pack Stygium Crystal cloaking devices, and many of his smaller vessels still come equipped with spinally-mounted uberfucker weapons. To combat force- and lightsaber-weilding foes, he's got his Sith Army, and while most of them aren't Glowstick Warriors, they hail from the KotOR era when mundanes goddamned well knew how to kill Jedi, and they're not mundanes. He's a pirate, a smuggler, a criminal overlord, who's got the power of corruption on his side, a power against which even the Empire and the New Republic will find themselves hard-pressed to deal with, but he's got the means and the might to meet them head-on in a full-scale battle if nessessary.


Whereas the players have starfighters galore, lightsabers, a capital ship or two, an uncanny knack for making friends in all the right places, 800 lbs of pluck, and the Force on their side.

As for the galaxy being in the grips of terror... Well, yeah. Borsk Fey'lya is a dumb motherfucker. His decision to vastly cut back on the military will result in most or all of the New Republic's Imperial and Imperial-II class Star Destroyers and most of the older vessels being outright stolen, and the MC90 Cruisers being destroyed by the disdaining Imperial thieves of the Star Destroyers. He retained the New Class new designs, such as the Nebula-class and it's related ships, but they were never present in large numbers. The MC80 cruisers and MC30 frigates were preserved by the Mon Calamari people demanding them back subsequent to the trial of Ackbar. Once the true extent of his fuck-uppery becomes known, which will probably only happen when a Core World gets attacked (note to self: find a good reason to have a core world subjected to Base Delta Zero for added wham,) he'll be facing a swift vote of no-confidence and the installation of a warhawk faction from within the New Republic. This will be attempted to be blocked by the Inner Council, which will trigger an ethical and legal dilemna I'll cheerfully leave my players to sort out.

The New Republic will be at a major disadvantage still. They'll be very much weakened, and their enemies strengthened. One would think that in a straight-up fight, they'd lose, but the New Republic will have the most Hero Factor; in the end, it's going to come down to the PCs to swing the tide; with the balance so close in a three-way brawl, it's going to be up to them to pull it off.


As for Tyber Zann not having the power to hold the galaxy in his grip, his forces combine the versatility of the Rebel Alliance in being able to hide anywhere and strike without warning, and the sheer power of the Empire thanks to his damn dirty cheating special weapons. While the rest of the galaxy is focused in the galactic north, what with the Empire apparently resurgant, he's going to carve out a power base from Rim Worlds like Mandalore, and Hutt Space. His finances will be vast - after all, he did rip off the Emperor's personal storehouses - and will only get vaster, with his corrupting influence ultimately reaching into all corners of the Empire and the New Republic. Every petty crime, every overlooked act of slavery, every substitution of structural members' ultra-high-grade durasteel with a weaker piece of durasteel; these will be flowing into his pockets. The Hutt Cartels will be shattered, their influence usurped, the surviving Hutts will know Tyber Zann as their master, and for them it will be business as usual, simply with some upstart getting their tithes rather than their family superiors. In the shadows, in the dark, Zann will assemble vessels, will hire mercenaries, will construct droids. All the while, Stormtroopers and Jedi will be clashing, lightning-throwing Dark Jedi will be frying whole squads of New Republic soldiery, the New Republic will be trying desperately to rebuild while Darth Oster splits his attention between quelling the dissent internal to the Empire and preventing that rebuilding, and when the galaxy needs him the least, Tyber Zann's Zann Consortium will sweep out from the Rim Worlds, offering all those worlds that don't want the Empire and which the Republic cannot protect from the Empire thanks to the colossal blundering of Borsk Fey'lya a Third Option: paying him protection fees and kicking out both.

[Ritterin Sophia]

It's a noncannon work of a fiction for your enjoyment? It's fanfiction and bad fanfiction at that.

[Vehrec]

The problem with the fake Darth is the existence of Dark Side adepts trained by the Emperor and still in the service of the Empire, like Marrik Steele, Ace of Aces. These gentlebeings are not going to take this faker lying down, and there is a significant faction of the remnant who like peace and the opportunity to rebuild, thank you very much. Many of them have lightsabers and significant power structures of their own, and will not take kindly to this idiot muscling in. They will know that this is not the Son of the Suns, the terrible furry and power that was Vader. He can only fool the gullible, his 'dark side' corps is a joke, half trained at best, and the tooling for things like Dark Troopers was almost certainly broken up decades ago. Now, taking back the star destroyers, I honestly can say 'sure, go ahead, but that'll take crews he might not have. Time to man them, time to get reactors online, time to cut around hardlocks in the computers, time, time, time. I'd be very doubtful that its in any way a clean getaway.

Also, I must respectfully say 'no' to the Eclipse. Even if he keeps it and goes dark to hide, the Emperor wants his toy back. And he was a master of dark visions, so hiding from him is a trifle difficult. He could have snuck in once Zann was asleep, taken it back, and left him with a sticky-note attacked to his forehead with a few dozen HAHAs on it. So he might be mad, but the galaxy's a big place, still sprinkled with things he can use. Like maybe, if he can find them and feed the raw materials, the shipyards that built Malevolence. One of its sisters sported one of those big fuckoff axial weapons he liked, after all, and the original wasn't a bad destroyer killer at all. There are probably other options as well.

On the subject of force users vs non force users... the forceless can totally win, if they understand the principle of preparing ground. For instance, fleeing ahead of the jedi trainees to a hanger bay while hastily donning a flight suit might be considered an act of retreat. However, if once you get there, you lock the doors with them in the hanger and deactivate the atmosphere containment... well, that's a Jedi trap. So are ray-shield traps like the one from Revenge of the Sith. You might need a genius engineer to do it, but Hull 721 demonstrates the destructive use of inertial compensators as 'red jam' traps. Let an NPC wander into one and turn into a fine mist, and your players will freak. Use lots of fodder, to wear them down and fire from multiple directions. Deflecting one blaster bolt might be easy, but 20 when they've encircled you? Harder. Much harder. Of course, the most important part of any Jedi trap is to never actually use anything you really care about as bait and to make it so that simply by being there, they ensure you've won already. Killing them should be just a bonus.

[Ghost Rider]

You still have a mobile super weapon platform, it's a Del Rey novel and a low end one at that. May as well call this DarkSaber 2: Electric Boogaloo Sithari! It has the return of the GRIMDARK force wank, unknown forces to challenge the entire galaxy, an NR dumber then usual, and lastly...plucky heroes to show the older generation.

Jesus fuck dude, if you don't want advice that your scenario then don't ask. And before you go off the rails, asking advice does mean that you look at why are they critizing said parts, and prove to them why they are off base or not. It does not mean parroting your words again thinking they will make any difference if you move them into different configurations.

[Thanas]

So apparently, in his mind, it is easy to steal the Lusankya, despite it being the flagships of one of the five most important Alliance Fleets. Righto.

Also, the Emperor apparently never seriously wanted the Eclipse back and it is in perfect working condition despite it still needing a decade to be fitted out and was not really ready when the NR took Kuat.

Then of course the NR just lets ISDs and other warships get stolen, despite it taking the real empire several months of preparation to steal just a single one.

The plot does not make any sense. At all. Fey'la is not anti-military. He is against the MonCal because they are his political enemies. Nowhere did he ever downsize the military as you propose. And why would he?

[Simon_Jester]

I'd like to weigh in on this:

So he's going to try a different approach: instead of a paper Palpatine, he's gotten a similarly-minded outlaw tech to make him a Vadersuit of power armor, and he's going to learn the ways of the Force and become a Sith like his dead bosses were. (His name, of course, is Darth Oster. )

Will he be able to fake Vader convincingly, without Anakin Skywalker's raw power? Impersonating a Force user is NOT easy.

I've also decided that he did not, in fact, abandon Eclipse, but took it and hyperspaced to God-Knows-Where, then collected his Sith Army and his own Consortium forces to the same location; and, realizing how hot the heat was, simlpy froze himself and the rest of his people for 22 years or so, figuring that by then the heat would be off.

It would be quite difficult for Zann to find a hidey-hole deep enough to escape the Imperial search for the Eclipse. There's a precedent for a ship being lost in hyperspace so deeply that it cannot be found for decades, of course: the Katana Fleet. However, the Katana ships were relatively small and old, whereas Eclipse can raze worlds. And, of course, Palpatine wants it back because he's compensating for something...

So I think it might be smarter to do something like what Vehrec suggests: find Zann another supership, such as a Malevolence-class type from the Clone War era. Superships in and of themselves, even ones with a devastating spinal mount weapon like Eclipse or Malevolence are not implausible. The Eclipse, specifically... kind of is. To make matters more interesting, a Clone Wars-era dreadnought will have the infrastructure for a droid-heavy crew. Which reduces the trained manpower problem Zann faces, and creates problems for boarding Jedi if the defenders are clever and play games with the atmosphere and such.

23 ABY is the year Borsk Fey'lya was elected to be the Chief of State, and I'm playing him as a complete Lolbertarian douchebag. Not an American lolbertarian, BTW; the first thing on his budget chopping-block was the military, and the second was the official support the Republic had for the Jedi Order. They aren't outlaws, but they're no longer considered (officially) by the Republic to be the guardians of peace and justice; nor are they funded by them any longer.

How is this in character for Fey'lya? I am not as closely familiar with how he is portrayed as some others.

But my impression is that despite his (many, many) character defects, he is not a cartoon villain; he does not exist purely for the sake of sabotaging his own side's war effort. It's more plausible that he would disown the Jedi than that he would downsize the military.

I mean, the only thing I remember him doing was trying to take over the military by trying to supplant Ackbar in the Thrawn trilogy. He didn't try to dismantle it entirely. Why not just let him have a reasonably capable military, and make his opponents more capable to match? Let Zann have Outer Rim droid factories that are expanding exponentially (think von Neumann machines); let Fake Vader have a large number of Dark Side adepts. They're credible threats to the New Republic even without Fey'lya being more of a failure than usual.

Zann is going to do as he always does, amassing power through corruption, but I think that he, too, is going to have discovered a newfound Force Sensitivity thanks to Sliri. (The players have already proven that no bad guy, no matter how twinked, can stand up to them without the Force.)

If this is necessary from gameplay standpoint, fine. But a big suggestion:

Don't have Zann attack them directly in person. The challenge isn't killing him when you find him, it's getting close enough to him to do the job. You have to board his ship, fight your way past droids and environmental hazards (and droids can be as twinked as you jolly well please if you're using "CIS prototype designs" on a Malevolence-class dreadnought)

Then there's Vader's return. What he's going to be doing is putting together the pieces of the old Force-User Conspiracies - Dessan's Reborn, Tavion's Cultists, and the Dark Jedi idea they were trying with the Shadow Academy. Basically, he's going to put together three "branches" of Jedi-classed force-using enemies for the battles; Dark Jedi (evenly focused between lightsaber combat and force use,) Sith Cultists (crap lightsaber users but powerful Force users,) and Lightsaber-wielding stormtroopers (evenly focused between lightsaber combat, force use, and martial pursuits.) And of course, he's going to pick out one exceptionally promising student to be his own apprentice, in true Sith style.

Where is he getting all this from? Remember, he's not the real Vader; he doesn't have that kind of personal power, does he? How much dark side Force user support can he plausibly amass in a short period of time?

But if I'm giving Tyber Zann the Eclipse, that kind of makes Vader seem like less of a threat, even if he is starting to actually pull the Remnant together under the rule of a Sith again.

Oh, nonsense. "The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force." If everyone believes that this is Darth Vader reborn (except, obviously, Luke and the other guys who saw his funeral pyre on Endor)... He's Darth fricking Vader. He's a big threat no matter what happens, even if his fleet isn't very impressive.

Remember, the Republic is currently in a state of severe libertarian cutbacks mode. That money hog was first on Borsk Fey'lya's chopping block; I imagine that they would have mothballed the fleets instead of scrapping them.

Two problems:
1) Since when was Fey'lya a libertarian?
2) The military budget of a Star Wars economy is generally very small compared to their actual capability. We know this because they can afford to build huge things like Death Stars... even though their normal fleet is so much less massive than even one Death Star. So military budget cuts don't necessarily have much effect on the economy as a whole.

I was thinking it would be a good dramatic reveal of Vader's return, that they would get their hands on the logs from the mothball yard showing an entire Star Destroyer being used as a boarding craft; various camera cuts through the ship as stormtroopers and Imperial Navy personel board it, cutting through the skeleton-skeleton maintenance crew, and then they see Darth Fucking Vader walking down the boarding ramp, and (just to make it damn clear it's Vader, even though it isn't ) telekinetically choking someone to death.

That would be a good dramatic reveal for a Vader impersonator, yes. However, I recommend that you scale things down a bit. Have him steal, say, a heavy star destroyer-class ship that's currently in drydock for refit. Not something SSD-weight.

How probable/improbable is this?

Very improbable, to be blunt. It's not necessarily a bad plot, though, as long as you're true to the personality of various NPCs, as long as you make Fake Vader powerful and aggressive enough to be a convincing Darth Vader, and so on.

Remember that you're trying to please your own players in the campaign. If they don't have absolute encyclopedic knowledge of all the EU stuff, you may be able to get away with a bit more handwaving than you would otherwise. And that's fine as long as it's all in fun.

Which leads me to where my players are now: The Mon Calamari people, following ancient unspecified alien traditions, have given Ackbar Home One, with the expectation that he would volunteer his ship and his services to the Mon Calamari defenses. But he's not going to; Ackbar's going through a late-life crisis (kind of like a mid-life crisis, only later,) and is trying to figure out what he should do with himself. Left alone, he'll wind up donating Home One back to the Mon Calamari people and buggering off to Force-knows-where and becoming a moderately influential existencialist poet, but that's not a desirable soloution.

Why would he do that? What do we have as a basis to assume that? I mean, he could have some kind of mental breakdown or something, but... you sure? It sounds like "And Ackbar retired, a broken squid;" is that in character for the fellow?

I want them to enjoy this adventure, but I also need to start doling out some of the main plot of what the bad guys are doing. Their newfound autonomy is a blessing in that it allows for long stretches of downtime during which the Bad Guys can be active, but it's also a bit of a curse in that I need to figure out how to dole out a carefully-parceled out measure of reveal to them.

Hmm. The real trick is to make credible threat scenarios for a light cruiser (if ISDs are destroyers, Home One is arguably cruiser-strength). Have you read Eleventh Century Remnant's fics? They're pretty good at portraying fleet battles on that scale.

I want to hint at the fact that there's upheavals in the Remnant, and also that the Zann Consortium is back. I also need to figure out Ackbar's Destiny so I can make it relevant later on, but that's easily enough fudged by where the players convince him to fly Home One and what they see.

Ackbar's Destiny is, and has always been, heroic fleet command in which he detects traps and concentrates fire. Nothing more is required.

But yeah. Since you've decided to make him a warrior-poet type on the brink of retirement, he could do pretty much anything.

What is important is how plausable - and more importantly, interesting - this all is. I'm trying not to play anyone comlpetely out of type, but I'm not averse to changing minor dates and character facts for better story (IE, playing up Borsk as both an incompetant libertarian moron in addition to a Bothan-interests-serving racist,) and changing the time of Ackbar's resignation. Is this throwing too much at the players at once?

The problem is that when Fey'lya picks up that Idiot Ball he's effectively destroying the only organization that can really support the heroes. You don't HAVE to make it all up to the PCs, you know. It's OK to have competent fleets and armies supporting them.

So have Fey'lya come to his senses and remobilize the fleet, refit the ships, and so on. Fake Vader manages to steal some, and Zann has an exponentially growing number of droid warships of his own, but at least the New Republic is actually responding intelligently to a threat for once. Even so, they're still in danger of being overwhelmed, so the heroes still get to feel overwhelmed. Imagine they feel great because half a dozen rebel ISD-weight ships appear to support them... only to find their enemies throwing two dozen at them.

[Ghost Rider]

Ok, for a non snark answer.

Epic is dependant on scale of comparisons. Just because it is Star Wars does not mean every single galaxy wide event is *epic*. You have given an immense list of ingredients and desires but there is nothing there that means anything without how you and players execute it.

As it stands from your descriptions? It is not epic. It is another Sith Lord, who is apeing the One Sith of Legacy complete with a reputation that is not his, a crime lord who is a wanked out Xizor/Jabba with an over the top super weapon and circumstances, and a government so dumb that it is a bad parody of itself and last but not least...a team of super warriors as the protagonists.

Tell us if someone presented that set of circumstances would you think epic story or outlandish wankery?

[Simon_Jester]

Although it looks like the team of super-warriors aren't ShadowDragon's fault; he's stuck with them because the players turned out to be unexpectedly effective at optimizing their character builds. Now he needs opposition tough enough to climb into the ring with these monsters... which means going pretty far out on the wanked end of the spectrum.

Power escalation happens in RPGs sometimes.

[ShadowDragon8685]

The problem with the fake Darth is the existence of Dark Side adepts trained by the Emperor and still in the service of the Empire, like Marrik Steele, Ace of Aces. These gentlebeings are not going to take this faker lying down, and there is a significant faction of the remnant who like peace and the opportunity to rebuild, thank you very much. Many of them have lightsabers and significant power structures of their own, and will not take kindly to this idiot muscling in. They will know that this is not the Son of the Suns, the terrible furry and power that was Vader. He can only fool the gullible, his 'dark side' corps is a joke, half trained at best, and the tooling for things like Dark Troopers was almost certainly broken up decades ago. Now, taking back the star destroyers, I honestly can say 'sure, go ahead, but that'll take crews he might not have. Time to man them, time to get reactors online, time to cut around hardlocks in the computers, time, time, time. I'd be very doubtful that its in any way a clean getaway.

Oster is going to have to deal with people like Marrik Steele and so forth, true. This is going to be part of his "consolidating power" bid, but it is known that the Shadow Academy thing had at least some backers in the Remnant. If they thought there was the chance of the Emperor being born that was small enough that they still funnelled money to it, having "Darth Vader" show up having seized control of a Star Destroyer in true Vader fashion will make them more inclined to support him, covertly absolutely, and overtly to some extent; more as he picks up steam.

And make no mistake; Oster is powerful. He may not have the Skywalker legacy, but he will be powerful in the Force. Powerful enough to credibly ruin anybody's day; powerful enough to choke a bitch dead, or to go on a lightsaber duel and win.

Could he beat Luke in a one-on-one? No. But short of Luke Skywalker, Kyle Katarn, or Jaden Korr, there will be few living people who are unquestionably his betters in lightsaber combat or the force. His Destiny is to re-forge the Empire as Emperor, and he will be judiciously using Destiny Points to that effect.

His Dark Jedi will not be the half-trained jokes that got thoroughly trounces at the Shadow Academy. Last time he was a fool and trusted a fool to train them; this time no longer. He has recovered Vader's own notes for training apprentices, and in following the notes, not only has he taken the steps on the road of the Sith, but he will be able to efficiently train others. Make no mistake; they will be dangerous, and with every victory within the Empire, their influence, experiance, and power will grow. Vader absolutely will have had copies of the Dark Trooper project plans; he may not have the tooling set up, which is why getting an assembly line up and running will be quite important as a mission goal.

Also, I must respectfully say 'no' to the Eclipse. Even if he keeps it and goes dark to hide, the Emperor wants his toy back. And he was a master of dark visions, so hiding from him is a trifle difficult. He could have snuck in once Zann was asleep, taken it back, and left him with a sticky-note attacked to his forehead with a few dozen HAHAs on it. So he might be mad, but the galaxy's a big place, still sprinkled with things he can use. Like maybe, if he can find them and feed the raw materials, the shipyards that built Malevolence. One of its sisters sported one of those big fuckoff axial weapons he liked, after all, and the original wasn't a bad destroyer killer at all. There are probably other options as well.

The Emperor was too busy to get his toy back - he had the small matter of the rebel fleet to deal with at Endor, and once that was done with, he planned to track down the Eclipse. Only that kind of went south in a bad way, and by the time he was ressurected, there was a completed Eclipse-class dreadnought already ready for him, with Eclipse painted on the bow. He never questioned it being his ship, and nobody ever wised him up.

Anyway, Malevolence is neither big nor bad enough. His standard Agressor-class Destroyers are bigger and have twin fuckoff cannons. I think I've adequately explained how he has Eclipse, unfinished, but in a usable if fragile state. It's really not that much of a stretch; Emperor dead, Alliance believes that the Empire has it, Empire trying to prevent anyone from knowing they don't have it while hurriedly building another... It's easy to lose track of those things, and Eclipse is both really, really fearsome, and has the benefit of having unquestionably been under Zann's control. As well, the Emperor couldn't have farscryed it if he'd filled the thing with Ysalamiri, after all.

On the subject of force users vs non force users... the forceless can totally win, if they understand the principle of preparing ground. For instance, fleeing ahead of the jedi trainees to a hanger bay while hastily donning a flight suit might be considered an act of retreat. However, if once you get there, you lock the doors with them in the hanger and deactivate the atmosphere containment... well, that's a Jedi trap. So are ray-shield traps like the one from Revenge of the Sith. You might need a genius engineer to do it, but Hull 721 demonstrates the destructive use of inertial compensators as 'red jam' traps. Let an NPC wander into one and turn into a fine mist, and your players will freak. Use lots of fodder, to wear them down and fire from multiple directions. Deflecting one blaster bolt might be easy, but 20 when they've encircled you? Harder. Much harder. Of course, the most important part of any Jedi trap is to never actually use anything you really care about as bait and to make it so that simply by being there, they ensure you've won already. Killing them should be just a bonus.

The Force is way too overpowered for that to be a simple task, especially under SWSE rules. Plus, those sorts of traps tend to be hideously unfair to the players; realistic, yes, but it should never come down to an arbitrary "spot the trap or die," which is what these traps do - or rather, "spot the trap or lose a Destiny Point saving yourself from it." It just feels horribly, horribly cheap, and even worse to the players caught in them. Trust me, I've been a player caught in arbitrary traps often enough to know.

You still have a mobile super weapon platform, it's a Del Rey novel and a low end one at that. May as well call this DarkSaber 2: Electric Boogaloo Sithari! It has the return of the GRIMDARK force wank, unknown forces to challenge the entire galaxy, an NR dumber then usual, and lastly...plucky heroes to show the older generation.

And what's wrong with superweapons? They're staples of Star Wars, and as superweapons go, Eclipse is fucking tame compared to Tarkin or the Death Stars or Darksaber or the Sun Crusher.

Jesus fuck dude, if you don't want advice that your scenario then don't ask. And before you go off the rails, asking advice does mean that you look at why are they critizing said parts, and prove to them why they are off base or not. It does not mean parroting your words again thinking they will make any difference if you move them into different configurations.

Criticising events which are already in motion or actors and key plot points which have already been bought and paid for avails neither you or me one iota.

So apparently, in his mind, it is easy to steal the Lusankya, despite it being the flagships of one of the five most important Alliance Fleets. Righto.

Given that it will have been mothballed with a bare skeleton crew and a mere one X-Wing squadron to protect itself and the starship mothball yard it was stuck in, yes. The place was preferring security through obscurity, but that's going to fail, obviously. Lusankya's no longer a flagship of anything; Borsk mothballed it.

Also, the Emperor apparently never seriously wanted the Eclipse back and it is in perfect working condition despite it still needing a decade to be fitted out and was not really ready when the NR took Kuat.

He wasn't alive at the time to worry about getting her back, and she is neither in perfect working condition nor complete. That's one of Zann's key goals; finishing the Eclipse, and unscuttling the parts of her that he scuttled twenty years ago.

Then of course the NR just lets ISDs and other warships get stolen, despite it taking the real empire several months of preparation to steal just a single one.

(a) they didn't have the Force on their side at that time, and (b) they didn't have the beneficience of the New Republic having stored them in mucking great mothball yards way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere.

The plot does not make any sense. At all. Fey'la is not anti-military. He is against the MonCal because they are his political enemies. Nowhere did he ever downsize the military as you propose. And why would he?

Because they're an expensive boondoggle. He views everything pre-New Class as a logistical headache, sucking up excess resources in exchange for subpar performance. He is, as I said, pursuing an aggressively libertarian agenda, which involved cutting out the Mon Cal vessels, the Star Destroyers, and drastically cutting back on military expenditure in favor of reducing taxes and tarrifs to make him very, very popular, and using diplomacy instead of military might to mollify the Empire.

So he's going to try a different approach: instead of a paper Palpatine, he's gotten a similarly-minded outlaw tech to make him a Vadersuit of power armor, and he's going to learn the ways of the Force and become a Sith like his dead bosses were. (His name, of course, is Darth Oster. )

Will he be able to fake Vader convincingly, without Anakin Skywalker's raw power? Impersonating a Force user is NOT easy.

He will be. He's going to be quite powerful in the Force, powerful enough to give a great many of the Galaxy's Jedi and Sith a long, hard run for their credits. He's not impersonating a Force-user, he is a Force-user.

It would be quite difficult for Zann to find a hidey-hole deep enough to escape the Imperial search for the Eclipse. There's a precedent for a ship being lost in hyperspace so deeply that it cannot be found for decades, of course: the Katana Fleet. However, the Katana ships were relatively small and old, whereas Eclipse can raze worlds. And, of course, Palpatine wants it back because he's compensating for something...

If you're cutting off all outside contact like Zann is, it's really a matter of picking some area away from all gravitational eddies that could remotely affect you in the time-span you plan to be out of things, in the space between the stars and away from the trade lanes, and just going dark. Nobody who could search for him with the Force would get a chance to do so, and finding someone who intends to be not found badly enough to go into cryo-freeze in the asshole of nowhere with mundane methods is more or less impossible.

So I think it might be smarter to do something like what Vehrec suggests: find Zann another supership, such as a Malevolence-class type from the Clone War era. Superships in and of themselves, even ones with a devastating spinal mount weapon like Eclipse or Malevolence are not implausible. The Eclipse, specifically... kind of is. To make matters more interesting, a Clone Wars-era dreadnought will have the infrastructure for a droid-heavy crew. Which reduces the trained manpower problem Zann faces, and creates problems for boarding Jedi if the defenders are clever and play games with the atmosphere and such.

The rest of the Eclipse-class is gone with the destruction of Byss, and Zann needs a big fuckoff weapon powerful enough to oneshot any capital warship that comes calling up to and including Lusankya (on a good damage roll, anyway.) Malevolance, while cool as all hell, simply lacks the size and power he needs. It's sufficient to wax a Star Destroyer or three, but it's not a serious contender in the realm of Super-Star Destroyers.

How is this in character for Fey'lya? I am not as closely familiar with how he is portrayed as some others.

He's no fan of the Jedi, he's a big fan of criminals (he arranged for sixteen lunatics to be released from Kessel and inserted to Courscant as a diversion,) and a big fan of himself and his own interests, he's not a big fan of Ackbar or the old heroes, and not being a military man, has no particular love of the ways and means of the Rebel Alliance.

But my impression is that despite his (many, many) character defects, he is not a cartoon villain; he does not exist purely for the sake of sabotaging his own side's war effort. It's more plausible that he would disown the Jedi than that he would downsize the military.

I'm not running him as a cartoon villain, I am running him as a corrupt politician pursuing his own interests, his race's interests, and his pollitical ideals, all of which happen to be ruinous to the New Republic's military defenses. This isn't exactly unprecedented.

I mean, the only thing I remember him doing was trying to take over the military by trying to supplant Ackbar in the Thrawn trilogy. He didn't try to dismantle it entirely. Why not just let him have a reasonably capable military, and make his opponents more capable to match? Let Zann have Outer Rim droid factories that are expanding exponentially (think von Neumann machines); let Fake Vader have a large number of Dark Side adepts. They're credible threats to the New Republic even without Fey'lya being more of a failure than usual.

At that time, the Imperial Remnant was still officially interested in reconquering the New Republic. Now they have a peace accord, and he's uninterested in maintaining a gigantic wartime fleet when a smaller peacetime fleet composed of only the newest, best, most efficient designs will do to maintain order. In his mind, if the poodoo meets the ion engine, he can always call the old ships and servicemembers back to active duty. It hasn't occured to him that a daring enemy could stage a massive series of simultainous raids to seize the mothballed ships for themselves and escape into hyperspace, because to pull that kind of thing off, you have to be Rogue Squadron or a Jedi.

Zann is going to do as he always does, amassing power through corruption, but I think that he, too, is going to have discovered a newfound Force Sensitivity thanks to Sliri. (The players have already proven that no bad guy, no matter how twinked, can stand up to them without the Force.)

If this is necessary from gameplay standpoint, fine. But a big suggestion:

Don't have Zann attack them directly in person. The challenge isn't killing him when you find him, it's getting close enough to him to do the job. You have to board his ship, fight your way past droids and environmental hazards (and droids can be as twinked as you jolly well please if you're using "CIS prototype designs" on a Malevolence-class dreadnought)

I think it's quite nessessary. Stories where the players kill the bad guy easily always feel anticlimactic, like the climax of the fight happened in the second-to-last act. This was demonstrated recently when my players had to fend off wave after wave of oncoming battle droids whilst covering some refugees' retreat; it was an intense battle. When they finally faced down the BBEG, even though he was level 7, and they were level 6, and he was quite ruthlessly optimized, and there were only three of them, they simply shut him down without him being able to get off more than one attack which barely scratched a player due to bad damage rolling on my part (seriously, he was rolling the same dice that you'd get from a vibroaxe, and wound up doing shitbiscuit damage like you'd get from a regular dagger) with Force Grip and force-blasted him to death. Those kinds of shennanigan just beg for the bad guy to whip out the power that lets them reflect someone's force power on themselves.

Where is he getting all this from? Remember, he's not the real Vader; he doesn't have that kind of personal power, does he? How much dark side Force user support can he plausibly amass in a short period of time?

He wouldn't beat the real Darth Vader in a fight, but he's so good that only the likes of the Jedi Masters of the NJO would realize it in a stand-up battle with him. He's also got the remains of one darksided plot to pull together as a starting point.

Oh, nonsense. "The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force." If everyone believes that this is Darth Vader reborn (except, obviously, Luke and the other guys who saw his funeral pyre on Endor)... He's Darth fricking Vader. He's a big threat no matter what happens, even if his fleet isn't very impressive.

The thing is... Vader lied. While it's true that the Sith Lords of old were capable of ripping stars apart or eating the souls of everyone on a planet, doing such things were not routine. In the SWSE rules, that kind of shennanigan required the invoking Force-User to spend a Destiny Point to acomplish it, and it was certainly never a common feat, even discounting the game mechanics.

Was the Force superior? Absolutely, but the ability to destroy a planet again and again, at the pull of a switch, is not insignificant, even compared to the power of the Force.

Still, if he's rocking Lusankya and calling it Executor II, he'd be pretty damn scary, even if Lusankya wouldn't be capable of one-on-one tackling Eclipse.

Two problems:
1) Since when was Fey'lya a libertarian?
2) The military budget of a Star Wars economy is generally very small compared to their actual capability. We know this because they can afford to build huge things like Death Stars... even though their normal fleet is so much less massive than even one Death Star. So military budget cuts don't necessarily have much effect on the economy as a whole.

1: Seems as good an explaination for his behavior as any. It explains how he got elected (promising massive tax cuts and fewer government interferances,) it gives him a course to pursue that, not coincdentally, sabotages the New Republic's military defenses at a critical moment.
2: The Empire bled the taxpayers heavily to fund bullshit shennanigans like the Death Stars and other dreadnoughts, and the only reason they were able to do so was because of the fact that they held everything in an iron grip. The Imperial Revenue Service was a thing of terror. The New Republic doesn't have nearly the budget of the old Empire.

That would be a good dramatic reveal for a Vader impersonator, yes. However, I recommend that you scale things down a bit. Have him steal, say, a heavy star destroyer-class ship that's currently in drydock for refit. Not something SSD-weight.

I don't think stealing an SSD which has been mothballed is really all that out of the question. Plus, I want to play with the bad guys having firepower in the Super weights.

Very improbable, to be blunt. It's not necessarily a bad plot, though, as long as you're true to the personality of various NPCs, as long as you make Fake Vader powerful and aggressive enough to be a convincing Darth Vader, and so on.

Well, I have taken some liberties with the fates and motivations of some actors, but I think they're not mind-bogglingly bad. They're explicable, from their points of view they make sense, and Darth Oster will be powerful and agressive enough to be convincing.

Remember that you're trying to please your own players in the campaign. If they don't have absolute encyclopedic knowledge of all the EU stuff, you may be able to get away with a bit more handwaving than you would otherwise. And that's fine as long as it's all in fun.

Well, they like it so far. They're learning to dislike Borsk Fey'lya with an intensity that rivals Rogue Squadron's pilots, and they're liking the recent plot with Ackbar.

Which leads me to where my players are now: The Mon Calamari people, following ancient unspecified alien traditions, have given Ackbar Home One, with the expectation that he would volunteer his ship and his services to the Mon Calamari defenses. But he's not going to; Ackbar's going through a late-life crisis (kind of like a mid-life crisis, only later,) and is trying to figure out what he should do with himself. Left alone, he'll wind up donating Home One back to the Mon Calamari people and buggering off to Force-knows-where and becoming a moderately influential existencialist poet, but that's not a desirable soloution.

Why would he do that? What do we have as a basis to assume that? I mean, he could have some kind of mental breakdown or something, but... you sure? It sounds like "And Ackbar retired, a broken squid;" is that in character for the fellow?

As I've cited previously, when he feels guilty or useless, Ackbar is given to retreating to solitude. Being put on trial by someone he hated didn't do him any favors, even if the judgement was an astounding aquittal, and he feels he would ill-serve the Mon Calamari people by entering the fields of politics (Which he hates and considers himself to have no skill in,) and he feels that he's too old and useless to be of use defending the world when there's many younger Mon Cals he considers more than stellarly qualified to do the job.

I want them to enjoy this adventure, but I also need to start doling out some of the main plot of what the bad guys are doing. Their newfound autonomy is a blessing in that it allows for long stretches of downtime during which the Bad Guys can be active, but it's also a bit of a curse in that I need to figure out how to dole out a carefully-parceled out measure of reveal to them.

Hmm. The real trick is to make credible threat scenarios for a light cruiser (if ISDs are destroyers, Home One is arguably cruiser-strength). Have you read Eleventh Century Remnant's fics? They're pretty good at portraying fleet battles on that scale.

Home One's a heavy cruiser, but she currently has a crew consisting mainly of R-series astromech droids. While they're more than competant to keep the ship in good repair and fly her about, they can't fire the turbolasers at all, and they're untrained with the ion cannons and tractor beams. The players could personally man the guns, it's true, but she's nowhere near full fighting trim. Primarily, Home One is a cool flying base for them to play around with for the time being, a mobile base with all the trimmings. If they come up with a good reason for her to be fully-crewed, I won't object, of course; I welcome such innovations.

Ackbar's Destiny is, and has always been, heroic fleet command in which he detects traps and concentrates fire. Nothing more is required.

Hehehe. Well, it's not nessessarily that simple. Depending on the players' actions, where they take the old fish, what they do with him, he could wind up doing anything, from deep-space exploration to medical/mercy missions to pirate/slaver hunting.

But yeah, he'll be detecting traps and concentrating firen o matter what happens.

But yeah. Since you've decided to make him a warrior-poet type on the brink of retirement, he could do pretty much anything.

It's not out-of-character for him. He's tried to bugger off to nowhere before.

The problem is that when Fey'lya picks up that Idiot Ball he's effectively destroying the only organization that can really support the heroes. You don't HAVE to make it all up to the PCs, you know. It's OK to have competent fleets and armies supporting them.

Oh, totally. During the last adventure, the PCs had a number of Alderaanian crew of a starship which they rescued and a gungan ex-pirate who only wanted to go home working for them, and they let the NPCs storm a pirate-held GR-75 transport and seize it. The players are absolutely likely to have competant support. It's just that they're going to have to build it for themselves, which might well mean arranging Borsk Fey'lya's abrupt exit from power.

So have Fey'lya come to his senses and remobilize the fleet, refit the ships, and so on. Fake Vader manages to steal some, and Zann has an exponentially growing number of droid warships of his own, but at least the New Republic is actually responding intelligently to a threat for once. Even so, they're still in danger of being overwhelmed, so the heroes still get to feel overwhelmed. Imagine they feel great because half a dozen rebel ISD-weight ships appear to support them... only to find their enemies throwing two dozen at them.

By the time he can act, it will be too late. Most of the ships will be gone. They'll have enough to secure the Core Worlds left ino the form of the New Class project, but not enough to go rampaging without leaving core worlds exposed. Pollitically, Fey'lya would know that's suicide.

Things will be Bad. Very, very Bad, though not nessessarily hopelessly lost.

Ok, for a non snark answer.

Epic is dependant on scale of comparisons. Just because it is Star Wars does not mean every single galaxy wide event is *epic*. You have given an immense list of ingredients and desires but there is nothing there that means anything without how you and players execute it.

As it stands from your descriptions? It is not epic. It is another Sith Lord, who is apeing the One Sith of Legacy complete with a reputation that is not his, a crime lord who is a wanked out Xizor/Jabba with an over the top super weapon and circumstances, and a government so dumb that it is a bad parody of itself and last but not least...a team of super warriors as the protagonists.

Tell us if someone presented that set of circumstances would you think epic story or outlandish wankery?

Um, yes. I play Exalted. I love Exalted. You've pretty much described the setting of Exalted there.

Although it looks like the team of super-warriors aren't ShadowDragon's fault; he's stuck with them because the players turned out to be unexpectedly effective at optimizing their character builds. Now he needs opposition tough enough to climb into the ring with these monsters... which means going pretty far out on the wanked end of the spectrum.

Power escalation happens in RPGs sometimes.

In fairness, I encouraged the power level of the PCs by giving them very favorable character generation terms. I did this so I can throw more and more bad guys at them. By my way of mind, it's easy enough to balance out by adding more and more bad guys and up-rating them.

[Srelex]

Anyway, Malevolence is neither big nor bad enough. His standard Agressor-class Destroyers are bigger and have twin fuckoff cannons.

I take issue with this--it's hard to tell given gameplay mechanics and whatnot, but I always thought that Aggressors were supposed to be about ISD-scale, whereas the Mal is about eight kilometers long or so at the least, and it has the WTFioncannon of doom that should be more effective than the guns on the Ags.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Anyway, Malevolence is neither big nor bad enough. His standard Agressor-class Destroyers are bigger and have twin fuckoff cannons.

I take issue with this--it's hard to tell given gameplay mechanics and whatnot, but I always thought that Aggressors were supposed to be about ISD-scale, whereas the Mal is about eight kilometers long or so at the least, and it has the WTFioncannon of doom that should be more effective than the guns on the Ags.

Sure, one-on-one the Malevolance would take an Agressor down hard, but with or without it's fuckoff axial gun, it's not powerful enough to stand up to a whole star-fleet or the Super-Star Destroyer Lusankya. Plus, I'd need to figure out where and how Zann laid his hands on it, whereas it's relatively easy to go from "had it and tossed t away" to "had it and fucked off with it."

That, and I don't have stats for Malevolance, whereas I do have stats for the Eclipse, which are easy enough to extrapolate into stats for the unfinished Eclipse.

[Ghost Rider]

So let's make this simple so we don't have to read another four thousand word retell of your intial statement.

How does all this exist in the shadows long enough that the powers to be....do not notice a vast military build up, an immense procurement of force users, and the theft of high end military weaponry?

If you answer: Because I wrote it so. That's useless. You are set in your ways and this entire exercise is just for you to show us what you and your gaming group spanks off to. Otherwise, you either need to flesh this out over several sessions or it's just "And then Luke II became a Jedi Knight, slayed Emperor Anakin Palpatine Skywalker Solo who was possessed by Darth Omnus". Your opponents are all geared to some high end with no real hint that they are nothing more then shoehorned in there by using reputations you simply inserted.

For plot? You've presented : Plucky heroes, retard government, uber Sith Lord #8908797812, Crime Lord that outdoes Kuat and Sienar and the CSA combined, and last but not least....name dropping helpers. Combine with a story that is nothing short of conquering the known galaxy.

Your actions would have to be multiple confrontations that will either be vast fleet battles given the armies and vehicles you are pointing out to us.

Your Climax is either a final confrontation with the SUPER SUPER SUPER STAR DREADNOUGHT WANK! with an obligatory Lightsaber spank fest. Maybe the villains flee ala Cobra or die.

Your falling action is the galaxy either being fucking dumber then usual or make your group the galaxy's greatest since Luke.

Your finale is...RETURN OF THE SITH or they died, what else to do on this fine Saturday evening.

Even with your telling us of building and structuring, it still sounds nothing more then a bad Del Ray novel. And you are still telling us that it's not, because you're telling us.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, they like it so far. They're learning to dislike Borsk Fey'lya with an intensity that rivals Rogue Squadron's pilots, and they're liking the recent plot with Ackbar.

OK, fun dominates. But remember, you ASKED us to help you make your plot make sense; don't be surprised and defensive if you get complaints that it doesn't make as much sense as you thought it did.

Oster is going to have to deal with people like Marrik Steele and so forth, true. This is going to be part of his "consolidating power" bid, but it is known that the Shadow Academy thing had at least some backers in the Remnant. If they thought there was the chance of the Emperor being born that was small enough that they still funnelled money to it, having "Darth Vader" show up having seized control of a Star Destroyer in true Vader fashion will make them more inclined to support him, covertly absolutely, and overtly to some extent; more as he picks up steam.

If he's powerful enough to convincingly impersonate Darth Vader, then this objection basically vanishes. But that is damned powerful.

The Emperor was too busy to get his toy back - he had the small matter of the rebel fleet to deal with at Endor, and once that was done with, he planned to track down the Eclipse.

!?

So, in other words, the reasoning that Zann canonically applied was just plain wrong? Oh...kay... I mean really, why not just use another big evil battleship? Do you have some specific motive for making it the Eclipse? Does there even NEED to be a big evil battleship, as opposed to a larger fleet of more normal ships?

Anyway, Malevolence is neither big nor bad enough. His standard Agressor-class Destroyers are bigger and have twin fuckoff cannons.

OK, this is simply not true. Looking at the game, Aggressors are built to the same scale as ordinary star destroyers. Malevolence was more like the size of the Executor- or the Eclipse. In addition, the Malevolence had one hell of a "fuckoff cannon" in its own right, capable of one-shotting a Venator.

So I think you've got your sense of exactly what Zann had on hand and how it compared to the rest of the galaxy badly miscalibrated.

I think I've adequately explained how he has Eclipse, unfinished, but in a usable if fragile state. It's really not that much of a stretch; Emperor dead, Alliance believes that the Empire has it, Empire trying to prevent anyone from knowing they don't have it while hurriedly building another... It's easy to lose track of those things, and Eclipse is both really, really fearsome, and has the benefit of having unquestionably been under Zann's control. As well, the Emperor couldn't have farscryed it if he'd filled the thing with Ysalamiri, after all.

SD, what I'm not clear on:

Are you looking for an excuse to give Zann the Eclipse, when canonically he decided to abandon the ship because of the heat it was drawing him? Or are you looking for a logical plot? Pick one and stick with it; don't just keep insisting that it "has to be this way!" when people are raising problems with the idea?

Also... Zann? Ysalamiri? When and where did he get those? It's not as if everyone in the galaxy knew about them.

The Force is way too overpowered for that to be a simple task, especially under SWSE rules. Plus, those sorts of traps tend to be hideously unfair to the players; realistic, yes, but it should never come down to an arbitrary "spot the trap or die," which is what these traps do - or rather, "spot the trap or lose a Destiny Point saving yourself from it." It just feels horribly, horribly cheap, and even worse to the players caught in them. Trust me, I've been a player caught in arbitrary traps often enough to know.

I suggest that the trick is to make options for bypassing the trap (without spending Destiny Points) available, but make them difficult and taxing. They can go through the hangar bay (which is obviously rigged to blow the atmosphere out into space), or they can crawl through the maintenance tunnels with berserk flamethrower-bots harassing them or something.

Given that it will have been mothballed with a bare skeleton crew and a mere one X-Wing squadron to protect itself and the starship mothball yard it was stuck in, yes. The place was preferring security through obscurity, but that's going to fail, obviously. Lusankya's no longer a flagship of anything; Borsk mothballed it.

Why would they do that?

Don't be married to your existing ideas if they don't make sense, at least not if you want them to make sense? You may have a rationale that you cooked up for how it happens because the result of it happening would be Just. So. Cool! But that doesn't make the rationale into a good reason.

Why would the New Republic cripple itself so thoroughly? Why would Fey'lya suddenly catch a case of stupidity worse than anything he'd ever had before?

Because they're an expensive boondoggle. He views everything pre-New Class as a logistical headache, sucking up excess resources in exchange for subpar performance. He is, as I said, pursuing an aggressively libertarian agenda, which involved cutting out the Mon Cal vessels, the Star Destroyers, and drastically cutting back on military expenditure in favor of reducing taxes and tarrifs to make him very, very popular, and using diplomacy instead of military might to mollify the Empire.

Is this in character for him? Is this in line with his normal policies?

If you're cutting off all outside contact like Zann is, it's really a matter of picking some area away from all gravitational eddies that could remotely affect you in the time-span you plan to be out of things, in the space between the stars and away from the trade lanes, and just going dark. Nobody who could search for him with the Force would get a chance to do so, and finding someone who intends to be not found badly enough to go into cryo-freeze in the asshole of nowhere with mundane methods is more or less impossible.

Again, the precedent exists: the Katana Fleet. But it's questionable whether Zann would decide to do that rather than simply abandon the ship, especially if it involves cryogenically freezing himself for decades. Remember, that's exactly what he did decide in the main timeline.

The rest of the Eclipse-class is gone with the destruction of Byss, and Zann needs a big fuckoff weapon powerful enough to oneshot any capital warship that comes calling up to and including Lusankya (on a good damage roll, anyway.) Malevolance, while cool as all hell, simply lacks the size and power he needs. It's sufficient to wax a Star Destroyer or three, but it's not a serious contender in the realm of Super-Star Destroyers.

I'm not sure I agree.

Also, if you really want, you can surely create a fictional type. Imagine Malevolence with a low-power superlaser, something in the dreadnought-killer class, instead of its superheavy ion cannon? I mean, if some random private citizen could fit a superlaser to an Imperator-II, couldn't Zann manage the same?

The idea of Zann making his own supership makes a great deal more sense than Zann managing to pirate one of the few existing ones out from under the nose of the Empire and keep it hidden for decades.

He's no fan of the Jedi, he's a big fan of criminals (he arranged for sixteen lunatics to be released from Kessel and inserted to Courscant as a diversion,) and a big fan of himself and his own interests, he's not a big fan of Ackbar or the old heroes, and not being a military man, has no particular love of the ways and means of the Rebel Alliance.

How does this add up to him downsizing the military, which he never did during his twenty years in political office?

I mean, I get him being corrupt, I get him fighting wars of intrigue against genuine heroes within the New Republic (like Ackbar). I get him being ambitious. That's all in character. But for him to suddenly turn into a libertarian stereotype? I mean, does libertarianism as we know it even exist in Star Wars?

Why not just have the military not be downsized, but have Fey'lya mismanage the war? Or crank up the power of the opposition so that even when Fey'lya makes the right tactical calls, he's still outgunned?

You've already got two really great villains. Why add a third, much lamer one on your PCs' own side?

I think it's quite nessessary. Stories where the players kill the bad guy easily always feel anticlimactic, like the climax of the fight happened in the second-to-last act.

I'm not sure you understood me. The point is that you can make Zann a dangerous enemy without having the PCs come face to face with him and demolish him with their Force powers. His minions are dangerous, his battledroids are dangerous (because you can reasonably make battledroids superhuman in strength and firepower), and so on.

It's the minions that are the threat, not Zann himself. If they ever even interact with Zann, it's over a commlink in another star system; he doesn't want to get near this bunch of Jedi super-commandos.

Oh, nonsense. "The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force." If everyone believes that this is Darth Vader reborn (except, obviously, Luke and the other guys who saw his funeral pyre on Endor)... He's Darth fricking Vader. He's a big threat no matter what happens, even if his fleet isn't very impressive.

The thing is... Vader lied. While it's true that the Sith Lords of old were capable of ripping stars apart or eating the souls of everyone on a planet, doing such things were not routine...

Let me put it this way.

Force users have an uncanny knack for achieving extremely difficult feats (like destroying the Death Star, or taking over the galaxy). That goes double for extremely powerful Force users, who do difficult feats all the time and make it look easy. Just as your PCs tend to overpower their opposition easily, NPC Force users who are active in the galaxy should be doing the same thing.

So a Dark Jedi with Vader-level powers is a great threat because he can accomplish things that would not normally be possible. Even if he can't physically blow up a planet, he can do other things that have as much impact in a galactic war as blowing up a planet would.

I mean, think about what Luke accomplished when he killed the Death Star using the Force. Strategically, that was at least as important as the destruction of Alderaan, because it saved the Rebellion from immediate defeat, and because it removed (for years) the Empire's ability to destroy planets. Thus, while in a sense Vader lied (because the Sith cannot physically destroy planets), in another sense he did not (because they can do other things that are roughly as significant).

Darth Vader does not need to be able to destroy planets to be a menace. He certainly didn't in the movie; was Vader any less impressive in Episode V when he didn't have planet-destroying weapons than in Episode IV when he did?

1: Seems as good an explaination for his behavior as any. It explains how he got elected (promising massive tax cuts and fewer government interferances,) it gives him a course to pursue that, not coincdentally, sabotages the New Republic's military defenses at a critical moment.

But it seems like you made this up to justify using him to sabotage the NR military. Why not just strip that out of the character and make him a perfectly normal politician? It isn't even necessary for him to sabotage the military in order for Fake Vader to steal the Lusankya; the ship could simply be down for routine refitting and maintenance.

You're adding plot elements that don't need to be there, and that weaken the character of the NPCs you're relying on to drive the plot.

As I've cited previously, when he feels guilty or useless, Ackbar is given to retreating to solitude.

I was not aware of this aspect of his character, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Could you explain?

Home One's a heavy cruiser, but she currently has a crew consisting mainly of R-series astromech droids. While they're more than competant to keep the ship in good repair and fly her about, they can't fire the turbolasers at all, and they're untrained with the ion cannons and tractor beams. The players could personally man the guns, it's true, but she's nowhere near full fighting trim. Primarily, Home One is a cool flying base for them to play around with for the time being, a mobile base with all the trimmings. If they come up with a good reason for her to be fully-crewed, I won't object, of course; I welcome such innovations.

Well, I suggest reading Eleventh Century Remnant's stuff anyway, because it's well in line with the quality of EU stuff that is itself worth reading- though I have low standards, so take that with a grain of salt.

If you want to write capital ship battles, I think that ECR's stuff becomes required reading, much as you shouldn't be allowed to write Star Wars dogfights without reading the Rogue Squadron series.

The players are absolutely likely to have competant support. It's just that they're going to have to build it for themselves, which might well mean arranging Borsk Fey'lya's abrupt exit from power.

Why?

I mean, you can write GREAT adventures where the PCs think they're screwed, they're outgunned, they're scrambling to save what they can and find a way to survive... and then the NPCs they'd dismissed as useless idiots have a change of heart and come storming in to back them up. Well, you can if you do it right.

By the time he can act, it will be too late. Most of the ships will be gone. They'll have enough to secure the Core Worlds left ino the form of the New Class project, but not enough to go rampaging without leaving core worlds exposed. Pollitically, Fey'lya would know that's suicide.

Things will be Bad. Very, very Bad, though not nessessarily hopelessly lost.

What I don't understand:

Why do you keep talking about the way this Will Be? It sounds as if you aren't really interested in advice...