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Drone posted:I've always really wanted to like the Hapans because their ships are cool as heck, but I can't really think Hapan society without picturing the planet Druidia from Spaceballs for some reason. It just feels totally out of place in Star Wars to me. I dunno, the fact they're apparently pretty from the outside but their nobility are utterly ruthless backstabbing bastards has loads of possibilities to me. Great for a party with face-type characters and shooters because being embarrassed is as deadly to them as assassins, and they will use both approaches as weapons themselves. Also they're one of the few (if not only) nations in the EU canon not even theoretically subject to the Empire, and in fact hostile enough for the occasional shooting incident in the EU as memory serves. That gives a great way to do Cold-War style scenarios, imagine the possibilities of smugglers or Imperial/Hapan intelligence agents on some planetary system set up like Berlin in that era. And Rebel games can deal with trying to recruit Hapan support (Leia had to have some sort of introduction to go to them later on, who's to say the PCs didn't build up those contacts?) while the Hapans probably try to manipulate the Rebels into undermining the Empire's ability to threaten Hapes while doing as little as possible themselves.
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Feb 8, 2015 17:04
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MadDogMike posted:I dunno, the fact they're apparently pretty from the outside but their nobility are utterly ruthless backstabbing bastards has loads of possibilities to me. Great for a party with face-type characters and shooters because being embarrassed is as deadly to them as assassins, and they will use both approaches as weapons themselves. Thyferra is also great for this, as is Alderaan, actually.
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Feb 8, 2015 18:23
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Endman posted:I rather like that there's this great mixed bag of settings in the Star Wars EU, it means you're not really forced towards telling a certain kind of story, you can pick and choose. And to be fair to the corporate sector, Coruscant's lower levels have a big cyberpunk vibe as well. Star Wars always was and is just a giant mix of random sci fi settings lifted from other works from the first film on. Gibson getting the treatment Herbert and Asimov got works perfectly. Hell the entire original point of Star Wars was to be a weird James Bond series of films where directors and writers could tell whatever type of story they wanted as a one shot film or whatever.
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Feb 8, 2015 18:35
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Drone posted:I've always really wanted to like the Hapans because their ships are cool as heck, but I can't really think Hapan society without picturing the planet Druidia from Spaceballs for some reason. It just feels totally out of place in Star Wars to me. Perfectly understandable, considering they're a goofy B-movie planet of Amazons from a goofy B-movie book. Anyways, Hapes (as I understand it):  Key feature of the Hapan cluster is that it's in the middle of a giant ionized nebula referred to as the Transitory Mists, which obscures navigation and makes mapping the sector really difficult. This in turn means that a poorly-aimed hyperspace jump has a great chance of running into something you didn't see, while traveling through on the sublight engines means you can run into stuff like ion storms which will fry your systems and leave you to drift until you suffocate/starve. But if you do know of good hyperspace routes through the nebula and can actually find star systems inside it then it makes for a pretty sweet set-up. This was the thought process behind the Lorell Raiders (originally based off of the planet Lorell, which is not part of the cluster) who set up shop there because it was not only a great place to hide, but reasonably close to several major trade lanes. They'd fly out of the mists for a few months, hit shipping lanes and then return to cluster with treasure and captives. They especially favored abducting beautiful women (because this is an uncomfortable B-movie theme that persists throughout the book), and would leave them back in the cluster to look after things while they went a'pirating. Some four thousand years ago the Republic finally gets fed up with their poo poo enough to send Jedi (including Old Republic superstar Arca Jeth) to stop them and pretty much nobody in the raider fleet winds up coming home. This is not as much of a set-back as it could have been since the women of Hapes were already basically running everything at home, so the women wind up rising up and seizing control. The people of Hapes somehow manage to survive losing the bulk of the able-bodies male population, set up a matriarchy, continue to explore the Hape cluster and about a thousand years later wind up closing their borders to the rest of the galaxy. Fast forward through three-thousand years of semi-isolated development and it's now the dawn of the New Republic. Leia goes into the Hapes cluster as part of a Republic attempt to open negotiations and get aid in stomping out some of the remaining Imperial Warlords like Zsinj. Later, the Hapans show up on Coruscant with a good-sized armada and are apparently ready to talk. While avoiding the usual Star Wars problem where we take one example and use it as the benchmark for the entire system, we can infer a fair amount of things about Hapes from their appearances (which tend to be both attractive from millennia of selective breeding and often suffering from nightblindness after a similar amount of time from living in a dazzling nebula). The first is that they are technologically advanced and heavily militarized. Something like a bare minimum of seventy-five capital ships showed up to Coruscant, and while part of it was for display purposes that still doesn't change the fact that they've got serious military power (which is part of the reason why Leia tried to recruit them to begin with). At least twelve of those ships were Imperial Star Destroyers, captured from the various times the Empire stuck its nose into the sector because Hapans are great with ion technology. They've also got a large amount of gravity mines which function kind of like interdiction fields and prevent ships from jumping to hyperspace, helping them capture more ships and build their military even larger. They love guns so much that they cross-bred a capital ship with a lawn sprinkler just so they could fire more guns at someone. The Courtship of Princess Leia, Ch. 12 posted:Though the Imperial Star Destroyers were three times the size and more heavily armed than a Hapan Battle Dragon, the Imperials had designed their ships using old-fashioned stationary gun emplacements. After a blaster cannon or ion cannon fired, it took several milliseconds for the cannon's giant capacitors to recharge. The net effect was that the gun was stuck idle 80 percent of the time.  ftt ftt ftt ftt ftt ftt ftt ftt Even after they eventually join the New Republic, their navy is capable enough that they can basically field entire fleets on their own, and have the shipyard capacity to make even more in a fairly quick amount of time. They're not Fondor or Kuat, but they're certainly no slouch when their war machine gets going. Considering their navy spent most of its time shooting pirates, smugglers, and the occasional Imperial battlegroup it seems like it's a bit overkill, but Hapans just love their military. Other weird piece of combat technology they have is the Gun of Command, a literal mind-control weapon that seems to function by somehow making it difficult to distinguish between your own thoughts/urges and commands given by others, making its targets docile and pliant, opening them to anything from forced confessions to brainwashing into productive citizens to an actual source of ceremonial execution (shoot target with gun, hand target a real blaster and order them to finish the job). This brings us to the other major Hapan angle: intrigue.  This is Queen Mother Ta'a Chume (exactly how much of that is her name and how much of that is her title remains unclear, but the current guess is that "Chume" might be the title). Probably among the longest-ruling Queen Mothers in history and in power pretty much during the entire run of the Empire. Cunning, manipulative and incredibly ruthless, her two basic responses to any problem seem to be either to bring it under her thumb or have it destroyed. In her first appearance she ordered assassination attempts on at least five or six characters because they were doing things she didn't like, including unsuccessful attempts against Leia (drew the eye of her youngest son, too democratic, diplomatic, and Force-y)and Luke (interfered with her plans, Force user), and successful attempts against her eldest son (too weak)and her youngest son's lover (too pacifistic), and gunned for even more people in other books. Her youngest son had originally thought that some of these were the work of his aunts, which sort of shows just how the royal family works. Strong distrust for Force-users, though her mother Ni'Korish was even worse and has an anti-Jedi faction named after her. She may be a ruthless leader, but she's also a successful one. Despite the fact that Hapes is isolationist, that doesn't mean zero outside contact. Ta'a Chume's youngest son Isolder wound up as a privateer during the Rebellion, traveling the galaxy and serving on various ships while searching for the pirate who killed her older brother, and I have zero problems imagining other Hapan agents working outside the sector as a source of information and technology, especially since the Galaxy of Intrigue Saga Edition book mentions the Empire sending agents to foster unrest in the outer regions of the Hapan cluster in hopes of getting an information foothold so they can sniff inwards because Hapes has a ton of wealth in both material and technology. I pretty much see Hapes as being in a Cold War with the Empire. While the Empire could conquer them it would require an enormous investment of resources if they went through the front and matched up against the Hapan fleet in Hapan territory, and those resources are better spent dealing with the more immediate threat of the Rebellion, which just leaves them probing each other for resources and weaknesses because it's unlikely that Hapes will take any overt military action outside their own territory. This is a good set-up for a web of intrigue whjch you can start sprinkling with other threads from things like the underworld, Rebellion and/or the Republic.
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Feb 8, 2015 19:44
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Q3 for F&D. So probably Gencon. That screen  http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=5359
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Feb 9, 2015 23:35
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I expected it would be out at gencon but I'm still excited to hear it none the less.
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Feb 9, 2015 23:37
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That book. That is one sexy hardcover.
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Feb 10, 2015 00:16
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I'm going to find it difficult not to adopt a Yoda voice for all of my GMing with that screen.
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Feb 10, 2015 01:26
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You don't normally in EotE GMing?
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Feb 10, 2015 01:42
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Tatum Girlparts posted:You don't normally in EotE GMing? I don't have this avatar for nothing. Witness the difficulty of this fully upgraded and setback-filled skill check!
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Feb 10, 2015 01:44
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Looking to run the Beyond the Rim adventure for my group soon, what I've read seems good so far. Anything about this particular module I should be wary of/look for?
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Feb 10, 2015 02:23
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FFG artwork is so goddamn good. I feel I need to mention that every time i see their stuff.
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Feb 10, 2015 02:27
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kingcom posted:FFG artwork is so goddamn good. I feel I need to mention that every time i see their stuff. Seconded. The artists they get are top notch, and I'll yet again register my happiness at an absence of fanboy cheesecake anywhere in their Star Wars line.
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Feb 10, 2015 02:30
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kingcom posted:FFG artwork is so goddamn good. I feel I need to mention that every time i see their stuff. I agree. But then I remember....  
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Feb 10, 2015 02:31
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kingcom posted:FFG artwork is so goddamn good. I feel I need to mention that every time i see their stuff. Yes, yes it is.  One of the advantages of having a dozen different products based on the license, they can likely recycle any given art piece in at least 2-3 different games, meaning they can pump extra money into each piece. There is one piece of art in the EotE core book, page 148 in the Equipment section, that features a Trando hiding a Thermal detonator behind his back while squaring off against 3 dudes. The center dude is a rough-and-tumble looking Kel Dor scoundrel and basically instantly made me say "Ok, I wanna play that guy." Plo Koon was always the best Jedi anyways, so why not Smuggler Plo Koon. 
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Feb 10, 2015 02:33
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jivjov posted:Seconded. The artists they get are top notch, and I'll yet again register my happiness at an absence of fanboy cheesecake anywhere in their Star Wars line. I convinced someone to give the game a try just by linking her this image: 
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Feb 10, 2015 02:37
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Eponymous posted:Looking to run the Beyond the Rim adventure for my group soon, what I've read seems good so far. Anything about this particular module I should be wary of/look for? There's an area of the Sa Nalaor that's mentioned but not described. The critters are definitely deadly (my group went on to rename their ship Arboreal Octopus), as are the scout troopers, so be gentle with new characters. My group actually stole the Deep Dark, only to lose it in the third act. I was caught totally flat-footed when my group asked whether there were any children. I didn't want another complication, so I said no, and apparently that triggered all sorts of suspicion alarms for them.
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Feb 10, 2015 02:39
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kingcom posted:I convinced someone to give the game a try just by linking her this image: And have you noticed that something like half the cover art for the supplements is of (fully clothed) female characters? That's such a rarity in the trad games world.
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Feb 10, 2015 02:56
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Is there a strong mechanical difference between various types of Motivations? For example, a colonist took Ambition - Greed because she wants to build a casino. She's a colonist, and I was paging through the Colonist source book and I see there's Creation - Business. Is there any reason I should ask her to change motivations? Is there any "difference" between the two that would matter? The narrative behind it stays the same, so I'm wondering if there's anything else that I'm not seeing while reading the GM section.
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Feb 10, 2015 06:41
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FISHMANPET posted:Is there a strong mechanical difference between various types of Motivations? The motivations are there for you to help tell your characters personal story and help the player and the GM communicate with each other on what aspect of the star wars universe they want to explore. Mechanically they are just a vehicle for that.
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Feb 10, 2015 06:48
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That's kind of what I figured, but I just wanted to double check. So then the only point of the tables and types of motivations is if a player wants to randomly choose one?
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Feb 10, 2015 06:54
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Pretty much. A little random suggestion never hurts when feeling uncertain about character aspects.
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Feb 10, 2015 08:45
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That's an interesting one and I kind of wish one of my players had chosen it. It opens a number of cool options for adventure hooks down the line, like someone knocking over the casino and the players have to hunt them down, or some organization muscles their way in and takes over and the party has to pull an Ocean's Eleven-like heist to get it back. As was suggested before, there are plenty of casino+crime movies that could serve as inspiration for a hook.
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Feb 10, 2015 17:15
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It's gonna be weird because her Obligation is a gambling addiction. So a protocol droid with a gambling problem wants to run a huge casino. Actually this is a weird party, it's literally Hans Solo, Chewbaca, young boy Anakin, HK-47, and the droid with a gambling problem. E: Also, I think I have like, a moral obligation to run something like this at some point: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Badda-Bing,_Badda-Bang_%28episode%29 E2: This one would be pretty good too: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Magnificent_Ferengi_%28episode%29 FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Feb 11, 2015 |
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Feb 11, 2015 00:19
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Fly Casual has been changed to shipping now, 2/20 in store date.
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Feb 11, 2015 14:51
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Yessss. My FLGS is going to hold a copy for me, I can't wait. I hope we get some more cool light freighters; I'm a total sucker for not-Falcons. I wonder what the non-career books for AoR will be. I doubt they'd be sector related like EotE, but I can't think of what else they might cover. Organizations or military arms? Rebel Navy, Specforce, etc?
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Feb 11, 2015 15:18
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alg posted:Fly Casual has been changed to shipping now, 2/20 in store date. This seems ridiculously close to Lords of Nal Hutta...am I forgetting an occurrence of two books coming out so close together, or is this pretty unusual?
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Feb 11, 2015 15:22
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It's pretty close. I think it may have something to do with the west coast port issues that nerds are screaming their heads off about. Hoping for a VCX-100 light freighter (Ghost) myself
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Feb 11, 2015 15:31
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That would be great. I really like the design of the Ghost, even the Kenner toy butt-shuttle. I'm guessing it would be a slower, beefier YT-1300 statwise. Order 66 (and I'm pretty sure our own goon CroatianAlzheimers?) statted it out on an episode, but I think that was before the show came out and they underestimated its size.
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Feb 11, 2015 16:39
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I doubt the VCX-100 is any slower stock than the YT-1300 is. Its certainly a bit bigger, so it'd be tougher in that regard. I wouldn't be surprised if it carried only as much, or even less, than a YT-1300. The cargo hold on the Ghost seems surprisingly small (though I guess it does have the ability to haul around external cargo canisters). Nevermind ship encumbrance seems like a confusingly useless stat. I wonder if the Phantom shuttle is a stock thing (though possibly unarmed) or if that was a customization of Hera's. Maybe that slot in the back is for customizable modules (Mini-shuttle, extra crew/passenger quarters, extra cargo, etc). I'll be pleasantly surprised if it shows up in Fly Casual, but I wonder if they'll be allowed to use something so new. I suspect its more likely we'll get some more WEG-era tramp freighters. We know we're getting the YT-2000, so maybe we'll get some other ships from games, like the Nova Courier from Star Wars Galaxies? That said, I'd love to see a larger variety of non-corellian tramp freighters. CEC may be the best in that market, but there are other manufacturers out there. Galaga Galaxian fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Feb 11, 2015 |
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Feb 11, 2015 16:46
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For those of us who's FLGS suck: Lords of Nal Hutta Fly Casual Pre-Order
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Feb 11, 2015 18:58
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Mustache Ride posted:For those of us who's FLGS suck: Just a heads up that Fly Casual preorder is not fulfilled by Amazon, and the shipping costs push the discounted book back up over MSRP.
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Feb 11, 2015 19:28
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Lords of Nal Hutta came out, what, Thursday? By Saturday, the FFG Game Center was down to like three copies. I think people would devour an Imperial sourcebook, and it would work for all three Star Wars RPGs.
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Feb 11, 2015 19:31
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homullus posted:Lords of Nal Hutta came out, what, Thursday? By Saturday, the FFG Game Center was down to like three copies. They would but I get the feeling it will never happen because Disney controls the IP and Star Wars is really, really being pushed hard as the feel-good kid-friendly IP of the millennium, and playing as Stormtroopers would sorta undermine that company policy. That said, you can play as the Empire in the board games, so here's hoping. Maybe I should pitch my ISB campaign idea to FFG witht he details ironed out so they can turn it into a campaign or something...
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Feb 11, 2015 20:09
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Fuzz posted:They would but I get the feeling it will never happen because Disney controls the IP and Star Wars is really, really being pushed hard as the feel-good kid-friendly IP of the millennium, and playing as Stormtroopers would sorta undermine that
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Feb 11, 2015 20:18
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Fuzz posted:They would but I get the feeling it will never happen because Disney controls the IP and Star Wars is really, really being pushed hard as the feel-good kid-friendly IP of the millennium, and playing as Stormtroopers would sorta undermine that company policy. The existing RPGs already feature organized crime, slavery, and drug addiction. An Imperial sourcebook wouldn't need to fully support players-as-Imperials (it would be a resource for any FFG Star Was game), and to whatever extent it did, the players wouldn't be stormtroopers, anyway -- they'd be Imperial operatives and contractors. The best storylines in The Old Republic MMO are the light-side Imperial ones, and I think there would be some great work to be done with Empire vs. Black Sun, rogue Sith, pirates, Hutts, and the like.
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Feb 11, 2015 20:23
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Fuzz posted:They would but I get the feeling it will never happen because Disney controls the IP and Star Wars is really, really being pushed hard as the feel-good kid-friendly IP of the millennium, and playing as Stormtroopers would sorta undermine that company policy. It's the EU, and the EU Empire is a hell of a lot more shades of grey than the monolithic British Space Nazis of the film franchise. You could easily do an Imperial sourcebook as an Imperial Armoury book with rules for Imperial weapons/armour/vehicles and some details about the Imperial chain of command/politics/etc. for use with AoR (since spy stuff and nicking Imperial gear is a big part of the Rebellion in the EU), which I figure is probably how they'll do it, or you could do a supplement for playing Imperial defectors or the Remnant (in order of likeliness) that focuses on how not everyone in the Imperial military was Wilhuff Tarkin.
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Feb 11, 2015 20:23
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Make the book give the option for the PCs to be Imperial Sector Rangers. A good amount of free-reign in their duties, limited support (and needing significant, justifiable reasoning to call in the big guns), undercover potential, and at the end of the day the players can, if they want to be, some definition of "Good Guy" (stopping crime lords, harmful drug dealers, slavers (still mostly illegal in the Empire) etc).
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Feb 11, 2015 20:27
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Would it be totally reasonable to put something like a functional speederbike or landspeeder into a YT-1300? There's generally a cargo lift in the back, so as long as it's big enough to fit the speeder it should be fine, right? The YT-1300 isn't too tall but it should be able to fit vehicles that aren't too tall.
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Feb 12, 2015 00:42
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Seems doable to me. You could even fit a swoop/speeder bike up the boarding ramp if you were careful with it. You could always get one of those compact, fold-up speeder bikes that have shown up a few times in The Clone Wars and Rebels.
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Feb 12, 2015 01:13
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