Star Wars - Relics of the Sith

This was my very first Star Wars campaign ever. Although I had GMed some one-shots for Star Wars before and in the meantime also gotten my first own rulebook I had always dreamed of running a cohesive adventure over multiple sessions with slow build-up and character progression, introducing the villains in a meaningful way and then pit them against the players in one large scale finale.

I had tried multiple times to run campaigns in other systems, like Earthdawn and The Dark Eye, but all efforts had been in vain, either because the player inconsistency was very high or because the group had arguments and split up. This time should be different – or so I thought.

It all started out well in a session zero when we sat together and made characters, as well as decided upon a basic tone of the campaign, just the way I had read in several articles about running campaigns. Instead of giving the players strict guidelines I let them play whatever they liked and brought some benefit to the group. Then I constructed the campaign around the characters. These should have been ideal circumstances for a well thought and planned out game with focus on my target audience.

We had a force-sensitive Twi’lek student of archaeology, a Nautolan Jedi-apprentice, a republic starfighter pilot, a brilliant engineer with a doctor’s degree in cybernetics and a mercenary specialized for bodyguard-duty. Almost everything the group needed skill-wise was present and so the group had seemed almost perfect.

Unfortunately, I did not foresee that one of the players had issues with some details of the adventures and then started a vote of distrust against me which brought up half the group against me. We had to take a longer break and the situation was quite tricky. The chance of successfully completing this campaign had become very slim, but after all the trouble I had gone through I was not ready to give up easily and I fought for it. Eventually, I was allowed to continue the campaign if I agreed to “fix” the issues that had been troubling the group.

These issues were essentially one NPC: the smuggler Trance Killian. Since nobody else wanted to play a character that owned and could pilot a ship large enough to fit in the whole crew I took the chance and introduced my own PC that had not been played before as an NPC so the group had a means of transportation. Trance was supposed to be a “typical” smuggler who owned a small freighter, but had had to take up some debts with a crime lord as part of the deal. Her background at the time was quite vague and was roughly based on background information about famous smuggler Platt O’Keefe from Brentaal IV that I had acquired from the official solo-adventure module “Imperial Double-Cross”.

She had the exact skill-set to complement the group (space transports, astrogation, streetwise, bargain), but one of the players felt deprived by an equally skilled NPC (or GMPC), even though she brought benefits to the group in some scenes. Things escalated when I had the guts to actually write down a few character points for her participation in the adventure, and half the group then refused to continue playing.

To save the campaign I sacrificed Trance Killian right during the opening scene of the next adventure, had her taken in by bounty hunters and brought back to her creditor for “payment”. Now she was safely out of the way and could no longer “steal” any character moments or “compete” with PCs and their skills through “undeserved” character points. Although I had specified that the crime lord would not kill her, but keep her as a pleasure slave instead, I had pretty much made my peace with her. So it really caught me by surprise that the majority of the group voted that I should run a rescue adventure after the campaign finale, where they would go after the crime lord and save Trance from his clutches.

That way this campaign had – despite some trouble in between – a happy ending and in turn made the background for Trance Killian a great deal more interesting, when I adopted her as a player character afterwards.