Star Wars - Underworld Legacy

The whole story about why there were two parallel follow-up campaigns after “Dark Aftermath” are described in the intro to the Shadow Invasion campaign.

For this campaign two things were important for me: First, I wanted to sort of reward my most loyal players by creating a story for them individually. Second, it was important for me, due to some emotional deep hits (*), to get my feet back on the ground and enjoy the campaign not only as a GM, but also as a “player” with a GMPC.

In contrast to the Dark Trooper campaign where it wasn’t important which hero with what backstory and whatever connection to the campaign would take part in an adventure session, this was meant as the total opposite: A small campaign, focusing on 1-2 characters and very personal. It was set up for 5 episodes, but since one of the loyal players was absent during the session of episode 5 I squeezed in another episode so I had all the important players present for the finale, making the campaign last 6 main episodes total.

In addition I attempted a new approach for the underlying concept. Since time at the table during a typical RPG-Saturday was limited, and playing longer personal storylines that were only relevant to one or two players tended to be boring for the others I tried to outsource them as much as possible so I could play them separately with only the player(s) involved. To make things worse one of my most loyal players had a 2 hour drive to get here, so it would have been unfair, having him drive 4 hours total for a mere 2 hours of playing.

So I began to play these intermezzo-sessions with the 1-2 players involved on TeamSpeak. That eliminated the dependency from locations and driving time and instead could fully invest in character development and individual side plots without annoying anyone else. For years before I had refused to play or GM adventure sessions online, and I still think that larger groups with 4 or more people are problematic and you can quickly lose your overview. But for duet- or trio-sessions it was very nice and has helped a lot to give characters more background, motivation and story than it would have been possible during only 6 normal sessions at the table.

For the main story of Underworld Legacy I took the existing background of character Mia De’Ore and – with the consent of the player – expanded it by several scopes, weaving a story arc that reached back 15 years into the past and brought Mia and her family much closer to her recent past and present. Bit by bit a giant conspiracy was unveiled until at the end all pieces fell into place.

(*) In addition to some personal problems at that time this fell exactly into the aftermath of the death of Chester Bennington from Linkin Park, which had also hit me very hard.