With game days and other events coming up in the next few months, it's time for me to wrangle a few Star Wars convention adventures together. Rather, it's time for me to start pulling things together in order to hopefully avoid the last-minute rush putting characters or other items together. This and other upcoming posts will include a variety of thoughts about how I assemble, adapt, and hopefully improve on previous events. They'll include some combination of convention adventure design thoughts, how the game looks and works at the table, and how I often prepare my own gamemaster notes. Some posts will be longer than others, depending on how much time I've been able to spend in a particular week.
I want to have three go-to adventures I have ready to run most any time with minimal additional preparation. I need one for each core book, Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion, and Force and Destiny. I already have them in mind, and they are in different states of readiness to start with. Ultimately, I'll need the adventure itself, pregenerated characters with some amount of backstory, possibly handouts for use at the table, and decide what maps, tokens, and or miniatures would be fun to include. I'll try to avoid spoilers, since hopefully some readers will eventually get to play the adventures.
The Age of Rebellion adventure is the easiest and the most developed. I'm going to use my Rebellion Day adventure Rescue at Glare Peak. However, I want to be able to use it with 4, 5, or 6 players, which means adding a couple of extra characters to the pregenerated ones already included in the adventure. I've previously done this on the fly without issue. However, since the existing characters have backstories tied directly into the adventure, I want to create similar hooks for the extra characters without altering the adventure plot.
The Force and Destiny (Beta) adventure is the next most ready to go. I ran an adventure called The Secret Guardians at KC Game Fair last November. It was hastily assembled before the con. I liked the way much of it played out, but want to clean up some encounters, expand others, and improve the player character connections to the story. I also want to expand the roleplaying opportunities, and I need to develop proper background stories for the pregenerated characters. Come to think of it, I need to create new pregenerated characters, since the ones I used were extra copies from the FFG GenCon adventure. They worked okay, but I would like to highlight other Force powers and talents so they are more useful in the adventure.
The Edge of the Empire adventure basically doesn't exist yet. This might sound strange as it is the book that has been out the longest, but my previous con adventures tended to test out certain ideas for upcoming products, unbeknownst to my players. Not rules testing, but encounter concepts. For example, some of the fancy flying required in the latter stages of Beyond the Rim were camouflaged by putting the player characters into a race through an early version of the terrain. I needed to know if the difficulties I set were for appropriate for the encounter. Since that would be recognizable to some players (hopefully), its time to move on to other things. I think I'll return to my Saga Edition era method of con adventure creation. Those adventures highlighted the most recently released products I worked on. I may salvage or upgrade some previously created pregenerated characters.
So, its a start...
I want to have three go-to adventures I have ready to run most any time with minimal additional preparation. I need one for each core book, Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion, and Force and Destiny. I already have them in mind, and they are in different states of readiness to start with. Ultimately, I'll need the adventure itself, pregenerated characters with some amount of backstory, possibly handouts for use at the table, and decide what maps, tokens, and or miniatures would be fun to include. I'll try to avoid spoilers, since hopefully some readers will eventually get to play the adventures.
The Age of Rebellion adventure is the easiest and the most developed. I'm going to use my Rebellion Day adventure Rescue at Glare Peak. However, I want to be able to use it with 4, 5, or 6 players, which means adding a couple of extra characters to the pregenerated ones already included in the adventure. I've previously done this on the fly without issue. However, since the existing characters have backstories tied directly into the adventure, I want to create similar hooks for the extra characters without altering the adventure plot.
The Force and Destiny (Beta) adventure is the next most ready to go. I ran an adventure called The Secret Guardians at KC Game Fair last November. It was hastily assembled before the con. I liked the way much of it played out, but want to clean up some encounters, expand others, and improve the player character connections to the story. I also want to expand the roleplaying opportunities, and I need to develop proper background stories for the pregenerated characters. Come to think of it, I need to create new pregenerated characters, since the ones I used were extra copies from the FFG GenCon adventure. They worked okay, but I would like to highlight other Force powers and talents so they are more useful in the adventure.
The Edge of the Empire adventure basically doesn't exist yet. This might sound strange as it is the book that has been out the longest, but my previous con adventures tended to test out certain ideas for upcoming products, unbeknownst to my players. Not rules testing, but encounter concepts. For example, some of the fancy flying required in the latter stages of Beyond the Rim were camouflaged by putting the player characters into a race through an early version of the terrain. I needed to know if the difficulties I set were for appropriate for the encounter. Since that would be recognizable to some players (hopefully), its time to move on to other things. I think I'll return to my Saga Edition era method of con adventure creation. Those adventures highlighted the most recently released products I worked on. I may salvage or upgrade some previously created pregenerated characters.
So, its a start...