Hi there, I’m Deuterium Ice. I like telling a story, but I don’t like telling all of it. I like to come up with a few of my own plot twists, but I also like it when those plot twists have gone sideways on me. This is what has brought me to Game Mastering.
Luckily, 21 years ago I was given West End Games Star Wars 2nd Edition by my mother and I’ve had pencil and paper in hand ever since. I’ve grown a gaming group around me everywhere I go, from gaming in the hallway at ‘lunch’ in high school to starting a gaming group as I learned how to repair avionics. I’ve started to branch out into board games when it was proven to me that they aren’t all Monopoly or Risk.
I love Star Wars and vacuumed up the EU as much as I could. Since I love the universe so much and there was this role playing game that was parent approved I started up a campaign with my friends (the only other option was Rifts) and off to being wookiees on the edge of the Empire it was.
The styles of story I like are the tales that go down in the shadows while the big flashy protagonist draws all the attention. I find there to be as much, if not more, personal drama in the forming and pushing of morals than in a ‘will he blow up the McGuffin in time’ story.
I want to expand my circle of gaming; this has led me to the fabled halls of the internet and online gaming. I have had an idea for a living sector for a while. A place where the characters are more involved in it than a ‘you pick up a load from Asy Lya’Trey and take it to Bothi Spaceport while Creenk here tries to stop you’ kind of thing.
Through the Mad Adventurers Society and potelbat I’ve found some tools to try this out, such as Obsidian Portal and Roll20, and I think that the integration will become epic. These are my tales of Hope and Frustration as I learn how to translate being an okay GM into being a good online GM that brings player’s imaginations to the fore.
The Campaign
Since this is going to be fairly out of the box for me I’m going to use a system I understand well, Star Wars from FFG, for this adventure. I have a small, somewhat thought out, sector of space mapped as well as some of the more prevalent unique organizations.
Edge-of-the-Empire-Corerulebook_FFG_2013
This will be a living sector where the player character actions will have an effect. If they bring down a crime lord then there will be a whoosh of dangerous people trying to fill the void. A struggling band of adventurers will be helping those around them, hoping their assistance doesn’t cause more harm than good. I want to the players to feel their actions have a consequence.
The campaign, as I envision it, will be a Rebellion based look at entering a new sector that has none of the established supports that the Rebellion can normally rely upon while having a fairly massive set of goals.
I’m looking to this from the perspective of TV seasons.. Each campaign will have several adventures to it that allows for decent action, reversals and heroics, but it all will be leading to a big ending that only partially wraps up the major plots. This should allow for players dropping in and out if life gets in the way as well.
The Setting
I’ll delve into the setting in more detail later, but for now, the idea is that a sector on the edge of the unknown regions is opened for settlement a scant three millennia ago. It caught the attention of the rebellion when a mobile, and hidden, construction facility was credibly reported in the sector. Not knowing where in the sector it is, and having a special ops team fail horribly some years ago before the Alliance was formed, the Rebellion is sending in more materiel to the sector as well as some heavy hitters.
There is enough going on in the sector what with the secretive Sullustan Brotherhood, the duplicitous Bantha Express, and the bold Free Corellia Militia. Several classic style planets may be slightly familiar to Sci-Fi geeks; for example, I liked the idea behind Noveria from Mass Effect. Once I’ve filled in some more details I’ll share a link to the Obsidian Portal campaign and advertise for players.
More to Come
I’m going to be posting my experiences with Roll20, finding art and creating maps I can use, planning from a rough outline (such as Cpt. Futures ideas), trying to construct a ‘big scene’, and any other learning experiences I have. I will be looking at all of these things as I move towards getting the campaign off the ground.
Throughout, I will try to make some of my mental leaps easier to understand, such as how I went about transforming one of the planets that, on paper, was a simple agricultural planet into a desert planet with a survivor colony of Twi’leks in a deep rift valley.
Plotting and planning a full campaign is hard work and must be an adaptive process, this will be a look at the weirdness that goes through my head and how I go from hoping to have fun to having a great group of players that have fun with me.
