Own this MF'er... Eh, Millenium Falcon MF'er I mean...
I’ve been jonesing to run a SW game lately. Really, really bad. It isn’t going to happen… at home my players want to keep playing Dragon Age, and I’m running an online 4e game for some nice folks who seem to be enjoying it. Regardless, I’ve been thinking of what I would run if I had a game, and the other day I came up with a concept that would be kind of neat… check it out. So it’s set before the original SW, perhaps a few years after the time Episode 3 ends more or less… enough time for Tarkin’s Death Star project to be in full swing. (Remember that we see the Death Star at the end of Ep. 3)
The premise of the campaign is that one of the players is one of the many people who owned the Millennium Falcon at some point, a ship that would one day become one of the most famous ships in the galaxy… Remember when Han bragged about how well the ship ran the Kessel Run? Well, he never said that *he* did it, only the ship. So who did? The pc’s!
The campaign would tell the tale of how this group of PC’s would come to eventually lose the ship… And Vader’s obsession with the ship? Well, turns out that we’ll learn why that is. By the time of Empire Strikes Back, he’s pretty pissed to be running into it again… I’m imagining the end of the campaign to be a strike on one of Vader’s pet projects… could be a prototype ship… a complex of some sort… anything… something he’s working on to get Palpatine’s attention. It seems Tarkin’s Death Star is getting too much attention from the old man and jealous Vader is jealous. Also, Vader became a bit of a gimp in Palpatine’s eyes after the whole lava thing and he’s looking for redemption…
So the players would destroy Vader’s project X and in the campaign epilogue lose the Falcon somehow… sacrificed it, got captured, whatever…. the point is that the ship changes hands at the end of the campaign. Her tale with these heroes is told and over.
Does it go to Lando? Who knows… it goes to somebody. Do the PC’s die at the end, sacrificing themselves in a heroic act of bravery? Maybe, who knows…
You have smuggling… early rebellion vs. empire stuff… Vader…. space dogfights…. Kessel Runs… what’s not to love? Oh, and leave your “expanded universe is canon” stuff at home. I don’t read that stuff and wouldn’t care if I contradicted half of it.
🙂
www. Newbie DM .com 
Ted
November 28, 2011
DO WANT! Seriously, this is a fantastic hook into the greater SW universe. Count me in!
Joe
November 28, 2011
No expanded universe and no mention of Jedi sounds like this will be a great game.
pdunwin
November 28, 2011
Sounds good. I do recommend the Lando books by L. Neil Smith, though. They give some details on what Lando might have done with the Falcon before losing it to Han.
Jonathan
November 29, 2011
… I’d play that. ^_^
wartang
November 29, 2011
Me too^^^^
newbiedm
November 29, 2011
Yeah, I really like the idea the more I think about it. It can work as a nice way to ground the pc’s into established SW lore without really breaking too much the story seen in the films.
We assume the Falcon had many owners before Han, and (from a certain point of view) you can make the whole Vader thing fit.
I imagine the lower levels of the campaign as a run of the mill smuggling based campaign (and all the baggage that brings… Crime Lords, bounty hunters, illegal cargoes) and an eventual meeting with a fledgling rebellion.
From there, in the mid levels we’d see the Kessel Run part of the campaign, and a transition to smugglers working for the folks creating the rebellion (which is in an infancy).
At the tail end of the campaign, the Vader stuff comes into play… A new imperial weapon or ship is revealed. The insurgents have a chance to strike and show that one day they can be a force to be reckoned with. Vader looks bad in the Emperor’s eyes, Tarkin moves to the forefront, and the Millenium Falcon had a huge part in all that.
In the end, the heroes past comes back to bite them in the ass. An old rival, crime lord, or loan shark comes back to collect a debt that they can’t pay…. They thought they could escape this past, but fate had other plans…
I think I need to sketch this out further… On the side, I’m working on a SW conversion of AGE which would be really neat to try this on. 🙂
Luke Monroe
November 29, 2011
The Kessel Run sticks out in my mind. The entire encounter could be a race of sorts, with the PC’s having to beat someone there. This brings the 12 parsec distance into play without being too heavy handed.
JLC
November 30, 2011
I like where your old skool head’s at. One niggling killjoy thought tho: wouldn’t the players know in the backs of their minds that since the Falcon can’t be “killed off” (assuming you want carryover continuity into SW4 – 6), they won’t be in that much danger? Naturally the characters *themselves* could still be properly threatened, but say….in a tense chase thru an asteroid field…wouldn’t the players “know” that the ship itself can’t receive more than a few dents?
Joe (@get2joe)
November 30, 2011
The Falcon was caputred by Tractor beams in a New Hope and in Empire Stikes Back is broken most of the time. Also they could lose the falcon in gambling or have it stolen.
newbiedm
November 30, 2011
The facon could be damaged beyond repair (that they could afford to do anyway) forcing them to be careful.
But ghood points.