#Age of rebellion duty free

Once we had that focus, everything clicked, and the last few sessions of the campaign were really engaging and fun. The core of the campaign became a cat-and-mouse relationship between and Imperial Navy Intelligence officer and the PCs. We discussed this after a few sessions and decided to cap the campaign with a grand finale. Without some sort of narrative frame, the comedy can fall a bit flat, and the story doesn’t gel. The comedic elements in roleplaying tend to be reactive, almost as though the GM is the straight man and the players are the comedians.

Our initial concept of three droids running amok was somewhat comedic by design, but we discovered that this was difficult to pull off in a sandbox setting. With a different group of players I might have been fine sticking to more typical commando team operations, spy missions, or fighter squadron exploits.

This requires a certain amount of flexibility on the part of the GM and players alike. Instead of NPCs giving the characters missions, they’d determine the missions, plan them, and carry them out on their own. So when I offered to run Age of Rebellion again, we took a different approach. The players told me they didn’t have enough agency, enough control over their characters’ actions. I ran them through The Perlimian Haul and Onslaught at Arda I, and everyone enjoyed the sessions, but something wasn’t quite right for our group. We hit upon this campaign concept after a brief initial run I set up several months ago, in which the characters were operating under a more traditional military leadership structure. IG–186, the Magna-Droid and former Separatist, was played by Manny. Emerson played TC–21, a protocol droid who believed any Stormtroopers he encountered were responsible for the death of his maker, whom he worshipped as a diety.

#Age of rebellion duty free

He wanted all droids to be free of human control. Matt played Knife, a cunning and manipulative R5 unit with a voice synthesizer. They were an unconventional bunch, to say the least. They were given wide lattitude, lots of autonomy, and a broad mandate to sabotage high-value Imperial facilities, assassinate particularly effective enemy military and political leaders, and disrupt important operations where possible. The campaign was built around a simple foundation - the player characters were a Rebel direct action cell created to hit the Empire hard where they least expect it. We enjoy games that cultivate deep immersion in the setting, we enjoy thrilling stories as much or more than the thrill of victory, and we’re easy marks for well-produced game books with evocative art. That’s primarily because we’ve been splitting our time between D&D 5 and Edge of the Empire, both of which have kept us fully engaged. Our tastes have changed a bit in the last couple of years, and we haven’t been exploring as many different games. I cut my teeth on D&D in the early 80s, and the rest of the group has been roleplaying since the 90s. So we came to Age of Rebellion biased in favor of FFG’s approach to Star Wars.Ĭollectively we’ve played a wide variety of games, from Apocalypse World to RuneQuest, over a long stretch of time. Earlier Matt ran an epic Edge of the Empire campaign that was hands-down my favorite campaign ever as a player (see my EotE actual play review).

I ran the game for three players: Emerson, Manny, and Matt. We just finished an eleven-session Age of Rebellion campaign. If you’ve ever wanted to take down an AT-AT, form up for a run at a Star Destroyer, or infiltrate an Imperial command post, Age of Rebellion may be the game for you. The visually stunning rulebook reinforces this, evoking the struggle between Empire and Rebellion. The game’s core mechanics give gamemasters and players the lattitude to introduce twists and turns rather than mere success or failure, and the overall feel of play is Star Wars through and through. Because this isn’t a traditional murder-hobos-in-search-of-power-and-treasure affair, this sort of campaign may require more than the usual up-front discussion between GM and players to be sure expectations are aligned. It is built for creating campaigns in which the players characters are heroes of the Rebellion. Like its predecessor Edge of the Empire, the Age of Rebellion Core Rulebook is a tremendously fun game. Star Wars: Age of Rebellion – The Actual Play Review