Lit Fantasy Flight Games and the Star Wars TCG

Words cannot describe my excitement, as Rebellion is my favorite board game of all time. New heroes, new units, new cards, and it seems like it will introduce new strategies as well. "Third Quarter of 2017" can't come fast enough!

 

Still at work, but would definitely be interested in seeing that kind of discussion and fleshing out some of your's and Ender's previous points. I love history, political theory, and policy.

 

I've played Rebellion four times so far (twice as the Rebels and twice as the Empire - in fact I've just gotten back from the fourth game an hour ago) and I love it. Every game ended really close (like either side could have won and it was basically down to a few things in the last turn that decided things) and was very fun. Yesterday I was wondering if they would make an expansion for this and now I see this news, this is awesome!

 

I love how detached and distracted she looks there. Like she is trying to remember where she last put something or wondering about how a bug found its way to the bridge of a star destroyer.

Also that the Tie fighter missed the B-Wing and hit the Star Destroyer. That is coming out of someone's pay.

Good, goooooooood.

(I kind of have a Jello based character in my game too - the local imperial governor is a Coruscanti generational who likes to remind everyone how much he hates his backwater posting and how much better everything is in the Core. Cause my game is set in a spot so backwater it makes Tatooine look like a center of wealth and culture.)

Oh yes.

Which reminds me - I didn't realize how much your views have influenced me until I realized I was surprised to find out that the Italian monarchy actually supported Musolini and the fascists.

 

I'm surprised GrandAdmiralJello was not more excited about:



https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2017/5/5/disturbances-in-the-force/

Or this:



https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2017/5/5/heart-of-the-empire/

 

So...Pomab from Icewind Dale? All high and mighty about how he's the Pasha's cousin, and probably flies into a rage if somebody wonders what someone with his connections is doing all the way out here?

 

I don't remember that character, but yeah that is pretty close. Just a bit more sullen than raging in response.

 

Truth be told, I am still going back and forth between several possibilities*, but the long and short of it was that he offended the wrong person and got "promoted" from a cushy job on Coruscant to the most remote outpost they could find.

* Speaking of which, since you have great knowledge of the elite and their standards of behavior, I would appreciate any ideas you might have on how one might, without committing an actual crime or meaning to offend, greatly anger one's social superior in a social situation - particularly if they were trying to impress or flatter said superior but screwed up in a way that backfired completely.
But some basic ideas I am flip-flopping between now:
-While doing some friendly ribbing (I vaguely recall that the British elite developed a tradition of jovial insults as duels became more socially unacceptable, but please correct me if I am wrong) he accidentally said some things that hit too close to home.
-Had a little too much drink at a party and made some lewd comments towards a host or other guest(s)
-His marriage to the daughter of someone of high military and social rank has gone decidedly sour and so his father in law went from a patron to an enemy.
-His black sheep (black nerf?) nephew ended up killing the son of a powerful generational officer in a drunken duel, and the whole family ended in a bad spot
-Broke a very old and valuable vase, from the founding of the republic itself! (Hmm...I suppose a proper Jello would commit ritual suicide for such a thing, but then again this character is only based on you in the loosest sense.)

...Wow. I have to hand it to you, you have some impressively high standards when it comes to nobility and royalty.

 

Jay- my heritage is Italian, primarily Piedmontese (some Toscano too). Northern Italians are the best.

--Adm. Nick

 

I so cannot wait for this. Rebellion is one of my favorite board games of all time and I thought how perfect Rogue One would fit in with it.

I'm hoping they do a Rebels expansion too including the major players like Ahsoka, Rex, Thrawn, the Grand Inquisitor.

 

Ok that Heart of the Empire set looks great. I will definitely get that one.

This guy is interesting too:



So with 5 endurance he can deploy this J4X-7 droid comfortably, and he has plenty of strain in there to move etc. Solid stats, esp with tech, but I feel like 10HP means you'll not want this melee guy in too many fights (assuming Jax has no healing/shielding powers like adding a white dice or second black to the defence pool). He can heal well but since IA is very time critical you may not want to spend a turn just clearing damage.



Ko-Tun by comparison looks like an update to Saska Teft from Twin Shadows. Saska, if you didn't play, could spend strain (the heartbeat looking graphic next to the 1 under "Arms Distribution") to give out gear tokens in support of others. Ko-Tun uses strain (she has 4, as it is derived from your endurance score) to hand out power tokens that can surge/cancel surges, add damage, etc.

Yep. I'm in.

 

But this is essentially how all dynasties everywhere got started.

 

All good suggestions, thanks for that.

I am growing particularly fond of the idea of being collateral damage of a power play, but I also kind of want the reason for his banishment to be as petty as possible.

Hmmm....good point.

True.

Really? Huh, hadn't considered that....

Thanks.

Heh. As to be expected.

And yeah, thinking about it, that is at least a massive lawsuit, best to just drop the idea (and not drop the vase)

I'll defer to your expertise on that.

 

Thanks again for the suggestions?

As for the second part - truthfully...I am not sure. I get carried away with world building and NPCs of backstories sometimes, even when it doesn't matter much to the main story...and in this case it is something of a sandbox with the imperials taking something of a backseat*, so I am not sure if they will ever even meet him.

Though I see his backstory affecting his personality and motives in these ways:
-He desperately wants to get transferred back to Coruscant, and so is eager to get his hands on anything that might regain his favor in the imperial court - which, since the player characters are scavengers, might make him a valued customer or dangerous enemy. Or both.
-But he has also been stuck out here long enough that he is starting to resign himself to being a big fish in a small pond from his point of view, and so tries to recreate as much of the comforts and culture of the core as he can here, with a particular interest in antiques
--Related to that end, he is trying to get his cousin the position of senator for the sector that he is in.

I will definitely think about it more though, thanks for the advice.

*Basically, the Empire's garrison in the star cluster where the story is set are few in number, equipped, and incredibly corrupt, with some stormtroopers even hiring themselves out as mercenaries for the many local criminal factions. At least at first....if the story goes on long enough, I think I will have the imperial presence increasingly ramp up in the background.


-PS: Jello: reading your comments on civic nobility, I can't help but feel you would love the Tang dynasty aristocracy.

 

I like the new character introduced. The one with the Wolverine-esque claws and the BB-8 lookalike companion.

 

The droid is on treaded wheels, though. So unlike a BB series in that regard.

 

I ran my first session of my AOR campaign yesterday. It went really well - practice with this game, and tips from Order 66, will make GM'ing so much easier.

The previous GM wasn't as big a SW fan, so at times his game could be generic space fantasy that was not tied to the universe. I went the opposite. The players, set up as an infiltration unit called Nomad Squadron*, were briefed by Mon Mothma and General Madine. I can point to them both in ROTJ and they then instantly are able to connect to the world. I also threw in Hondo, because Hondo.

Whilst there was a fist fight, there were no shots fired. It was nice to get them away from that.

One thing I'd recommend is, as GM, pre-select the careers and specialisations of the players. Tailor it to them. I did this now, because my players had either been too d20, played a character concept they liked but wasn't instinctive to them (the brash smuggler played by someone who doesn't understand guile), or thought FFG's system was a classical RPG and built a tanky combat monster.

To recap, I have;

Human Commander Tactician
Human Spy Infiltrator
Bothan Diplomat Agitator
Wookie Engineer Saboteur
Duros Ace Pilot

Given the party is 60% non-human, and only a few have read EU/nu-canon, I played up the Imperials Are Racist Bastards angle and it really hit home with them. You don't usually get too much for being an elf or dwarf in D&D, but being a second tier citizen in fascist occupied space really got them engaged. The plot about a bioengineered virus that sterilises a number of alien races will, I think, be more than just a mission objective for them.

 

Er, your asterisk doesn't seem to lead to anything.

 

Crap.

* So one of my players, who has this strange point of pride of not having seen all the films (I know. I know), comes to me and says "I want my character to do a lot of tagging Imperial stuff with iconography. And I want him to come up with the group's logo or symbol."

I laughed and said "look up Sabine Wren".

It's a great idea and I love and encourage it, but it was great how he was basically completely describing Sabine without knowing it.

 

In anticipation of running tomorrow, I went ahead and made my first character - both as practice to help the others flesh theirs out (only one player has completed their PC) but also because we're doing round robin DMing and I'll be playing after my adventure is over. So I threw together this: "Darkknell" Basso, a Duros Explorer Archaeologist, based on the image for the Archaeologist career. Much of the design followed from that idea - Motivation (Discovery - Knowledge), Background (Academic), Obligation (Sponsorship).

Some notes on the character design process for SW:
The game almost dares you to min-max by making it difficult to adjust your base stats outside of character creation. I resisted the siren call, and tried to spread out evenly between that, skills and traits.
Having said that, I couldn't resist stacking as many of the free skills as possible.
Encumbrance makes a surprising return in character design - I had to make sure to buy encumbrance-enhancing items to balance out some of the heavier equipment.
For the EotE characters, it's almost a given that you have to take the additional Obligation to get better equipment funds - 500 credits just doesn't cut it.
The Droid character creation process in sadly lacking - having just a generic "Droid" race does a disservice to the vast variety of variants that should be available. I assume that they'll eventually do a droid book? Especially with the class splatbooks finally tapped out for EotE.
Obligation and Motivation are features that I'll probably export to other game systems - an excellent way of personalizing long-term campaigns.

I'll probably have him meet up with the party as a helpful NPC during the adventure - I'm planning on running the first published adventure module, Beyond The Rim, which seems like a good introduction to GMing the game.

 

It doesn't dare you to min max, not really.But it is worth spending XP on your attributes, yes, because 1 green 1 yellow is worth less than 3 green base.

Characters should deemphasise the build phase though. It's not d20, so they shouldn't look for incremental advantages.