RPR Archive A lot of Clones and Saga Edition Questions

Hey Guys:

I find myself needing to plumb the depths of your knowlege and opinion on a matter I find kind of hard to research on my own.

Let me set the scene for you.

I'm a gamer who intends on using the new Star Wars Saga Edition to run a particular campaign I have wanted to see happen ever since AOTC - a campaign where the player characters are all Clones - Arc Troopers to be specific.

The idea is that the group has been sent off to some far flung world to help prosecute the War to its inevitable conclusion. They are sent without extensive support - basically them, their Laat/i and their pilots. While they are on assignment, Palpatine issues General Order 66, but for reasons I haven't entirely fleshed out yet the Player Characters don't receive that order. They are never directly 'told to turn'. By the time they come back from their mission (or on route) they come to realize things have changed - a lot - and the team's captain (an NPC - non-player character - to start, eventually I will hand team command over to a player) isn't comfortable with the changes. He resists and in doing so essentially casts his whole team adrift. I intend on making it possible for these ARCs to remove themselves from the GAR's military bureaucratic memory so that (at least in the beginning) it will look as though they went on a mission, never came back and are now dead (or something similar).

This of course will grant the Player Characters some obvious freedoms - and that is what the game will focus primarily on. This will be a game of questions. Questions such as:

- What would ARC troopers do with their freedom? Any clones for that matter?
- How many of the Player Characters would truly believe that they had done the right thing refusing Palpatine's Order?
- What would these guys' attitudes be towards Jedi?
- Would they join the Rebellion or the so-called 'Anti-Imperial Legion' I heard about?
- If they didn't decide to change the galaxy, what would they do with their time?
- How would they reconcile their bred purpose with the incredible complexity and nuance of the galaxy as a whole?
- How 'Mandalorian' would they become? How 'Mandalorian' would they remain?
- Would they try to 'fix' what had been altered in their genetic code - specifically the part that causes them to age faster?

All of these questions and more would hopefully be answered as the campaign progresses, and I am confident that the players I select will be top drawer and bring a great experience for me and for themselves into the game.

But as with any game, I as the Game Master must work out some particulars. I could (of course) always simply decide them for myself, but I would like to stay at least relatively close to canon - at least in areas that don't directly conflict with my vision of the campaign.

As such, I have a number of questions I am hoping you guys can help me wrassle with a bit. I will separate these questions into two categories, the first one I will call 'Universal Questions'. These will probe the canon itself, and it is where I need you the most my fellow worthies because they are questions I cannot seem to find answers to despite my not insignificant Wiki and Google-Fu. The second catgerory is much more specialized. These will be called 'Saga Questions', and are questions specifically about the new Star Wars Saga Rules, and specifically how I can adapt them to the campaign I want to run.

Okay, so, the Universal Questions:

1) Clone Iterations:

In AOTC, the Kaminoans tell Obi-Wan that a certain number of clones (20 000 I think?) are ready immediately, with more on the way. They also tell the jedi that if he wants more, it will take time to grow them:

- Does this mean that (at least the initial 'order') they are grown in successive batches rather than concurrent ones? ie: batch 1 is finished on day 1, batch 2 finished on day 14 or day 30, batch 3 finished in a similar period after that and so forth until the original 'order' is satisfied?
- Does anyone know if there ever was a subsequen

 

I hope LightWarden stops by, because he's your d20 RPG specialist...I can try and answer one or two of these queries, though:

As a general comment, the scenario you're talking about is partially played out in the opening third of Lucerno's novel "Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader", where a small group of ARC troopers does refuse Order 66. So you might get some direction from that.

On the universal questions:

1) Clone Iterations:
In AOTC, the Kaminoans tell Obi-Wan that a certain number of clones (20 000 I think?) are ready immediately, with more on the way. They also tell the jedi that if he wants more, it will take time to grow them:
- Does this mean that (at least the initial 'order') they are grown in successive batches rather than concurrent ones? ie: batch 1 is finished on day 1, batch 2 finished on day 14 or day 30, batch 3 finished in a similar period after that and so forth until the original 'order' is satisfied?

My impression was, that's exactly the way it works. The order was put in for an entire clone army, not simply for a couple of battalions. The Kaminoans spoke to Obi-Wan saying they were "on schedule", not that the entire army was ready right at that point. Obviously they couldn't put out an entire clone army at once -- not enough production lines, perhaps -- so some units were completed ahead of others, and only the completed portion of the cloned army accompanied Yoda to Geonosis.

- Does anyone know if there ever was a subsequent order or orders put in? and if so, would these clones have ever served in the Clone Wars considering they seemed to take about 10 years to get ready?

I don't think there were further orders put in. From memory the Kaminoans had replacement body parts and the like available for troopers, but as you say, the clones took a good 10 years to ready. I would imagine there were probably a decent number of reserves to deal with casualties, though.

- Would there have been more than one batch of ARC's created considering that Jango was no longer around to train them and Kal Skirata seemed to be more interested in the Commandos?

I don't know who Kal Skirata was, but I would've thought that no further batches of ARCs were contemplated or created since the ARCs would've been a unit of the clone army and thus only part of the original order.

- I have read the suggestion in the Saxton books (incredible cross sections) that after the death of Jango Fett, Clones were made (or plans were made to make Clones) using the genetic material of existing Clones. Do you think that ever happened?

As I understand the EU timeline the Kaminoan facilities remained operating after the Clone Wars were over. The sequence of events in "Star Wars Battlefront 2" is considered technically part of the canon, and suggests that eventually, some years later, the Kaminoans rebelled against the Empire leading to a clonetrooper vs. stormtrooper battle on the Kaminoan homeworld. I also understood that while clone participation in the stormtrooper regiments petered off over the years, it wasn't completely eliminated -- and there was at least one Royal Guard who was a clone template, based on Timothy Zahn's "Vision of the Future" book.

2) Roles/Specialties within the GAR:
In AOTC there seems to be little specialization among the Clones. That is to say there doesn't seem to be (at least on the screen) Clone Medics or Clone Demolitions specialists or Clone Snipers and so forth. They seem to come in one of a small number of varieties - you seem to have pilots, ARCs and infantry. Only later on in the Clone Wars cartoons and Episode III do we start to see these specialists appear - indeed by Epsiode III the GAR seems to have been fragmented almost into all sorts of specialist troopers and even specialist sub-armies within the GAR itself:

Interesting observation, but I think you have to remember in AOTC you don't see a fully-equipped clone army in action; you're seeing instead a cobbled-together force that Yoda's assembled as a rescue party