Looking to form a dev team for Star Wars Saga Edition Campaign set in Rebellion Era

Basically, I'm looking for interested people to help me develop the idea for a campaign I have in mind that will take players from level 1 to 20. I have it roughly sketched out, but I tend to write myself in circles when it comes to refining, and often run out of ideas for small, side-line adventures to contribute XP to get the players where they need to be. Looking for this to be a collaborative effort with everyone contributing ideas and seeing what we can come up with. The campaign I have in mind basically involves the Architects and the Force in a Star Gate sort of way (the whole ancient technology, lost species, forgotten worlds, exploring, etc). Essentially, the characters end up stumbling across extremely old artifacts, and each clue leads to another, revealing a bit about who the Architects were, and what happened to them, culminating in a climactic ending that preserves the galaxy and keeps the secret of the power of the Architects safe. In addition, they will be fighting against time as the Empire is interested in the same mystery for the purposes of exploiting it militarily and pursues the artifacts and the characters ruthlessly(sort of like Indiana Jones and the Nazis...hmm...). I was also working on some minor tweaks to the Saga Edition rules (such as changing Fool's Luck to be a +5 to the next skill check, rather than all skill checks until the end of the encounter). Just errata-type stuff to clarify and make it more balanced. This little group would use Google Docs to share ideas, and some of the stuff I have typed up already (all of my notes are hand-written and my maps are hand-drawn) posted on twowolves80.deviantart.com but these are more character sketches and breakdowns using the Saga Edition rules. If I get enough people interested, I will dump all my hand-written notes online in unedited form and let the group take a look and see what they think. I would love to convert it to the older 3rd Edition Star Wars rule-set (more detail!), but I'm not sure regression is possible as it is with converting older stuff to Saga Editon. I have a 3-inch binder full of this campaign setting I've been working on for several years, complete with characters, locations, backstories, new ship designs, maps, new corporations, and new a new race. Also, a new Star Wars font/language I call metroglyphic . I don't have anywhere near the whole thing uploaded to deviantart yet, but I'm working on it. Everyone would get full credit for their contributions (I'm not out to defraud or rip anyone off), and it's not likely to be published since the EU and Saga Edition has been rendered obsolete. Group times would be fluid and based on when everyone has time...basically, if you have spare time, open it up, add a few things and a note to let everyone know of the changes, and work at your convenience. I just think it would be cool to have a collaborative effort to make a really kickass campaign that we can then publish on roll20.net for everyone to use in the future for free. Anyone interested, feel free to post or shoot me a pm, even if it's to tell me it will never work, you damn fool! lol All feedback is welcome, so long as it's constructive. So if it will never work, tell me why so I can figure out how to make it work. :D

Spent two hours dicking around trying to find a blog site that MS Word was format-compatible with and couldn't do it. The closest I've come is to wordpress.com, but it does require you to have MS Word to open the doc, or something similar. The link is here . I'm using the $350 office suite I paid for to type the campaign up (if I paid that much, I'm going to use it, blast it all!) which is why it's in MS Word so I can insert text boxes and format it in a two column format like official Star Wars Saga Edition campaigns were done in. I apologize for the inconvenience. Would still like to collaborate...somehow...with a small group of people to help make a kickass campaign for all of us. We'll just use Google docs for the rough work, which I will then take and put in the MS Word doc I have and update the webpress site with the the new material as it's developed. As I said, I have the whole thing roughly sketched out, but I want as much input as possible from other people to help me develop this--help us develop it. Really hoping to find that group of world-builders that I know lurk on roll20.net. I can't be the only one. I will also be updating a pdf file on my deviantart website (the link is here ) with the same info for those of you who don't have MS Word, and those of you who want to see the maps, locations and NPCs that are in this campaign. Please help! I can't do this on my own!

Can't do it on your own? I'd say you're managing pretty well. I run a lot of SWSE (including one campaign that's 2 years in the running) but my heart isn't in publishing. Also here's a little help with a typo: "the heroes should view the Empire as both a thread and an enemy" I assume should be "threat" not "thread." What exactly are you needing help with? I could perhaps provide you with a test run of the adventure by sicking it on my players. But really if you just continue to do what you do you'll be well on your way. Good job so far it looks very professional and well made. Where most GMs give up is that it's just tedious work. PM me your Skype username we can talk some more about it.

My advice is don't mess with the rules beyond errata unless you're instituting a SAM system. SAM (Skill attack modifier) is a means to bring skill checks that target defenses under control in the lower levels while keeping them relevant in the higher levels. You can find rules for it online. Your example, fool's luck, lends credence to this. Your solution is to make it a +5 to your next skill, but you failed to realize it costs a standard action to activate and a normal force point is a free action to activate and addes 3.5 average, 4.5 if you have strong in the force. That number, 3.5 isn't accurate once you start rolling more dice and taking the best, and it slowly climbs up to 5 without strong in the force. With strong in the force, you're looking at a 6-7 per force point. Strong in the force is a feat, whereas fool's luck is a talent. Talents are supposed to be stronger than feats. If I'm interested in boosting skills in your game, I'd just take strong in the force. In the games I've been involved in, I'm the only one who's considered taking fool's luck that I know of. Assuming you're using errata, it's rarely ever worth the talent unless you know the game has skill challenges. That standard action activation is what kills it. How many skills do you use in the average combat assuming you've already spent 1 of your standard actions? How difficult are the skills to accomplish? When you answer these questions, you'll understand that fool's luck is fine. Now, what isn't fine: Imperial Knight Armor Mastery talent. That talent gives you the equivalent of 2 talents at the time when you would want to have those 2 talents. This is terrible game design. Equilibrium + Channel Vitality to get free temporary force points. The other methods for getting temporary force points are all based in some way on luck, this one is not. However, it requires taking many force talents to qualify for force adept. Droids. In general, droids make better mundane characters than humanoids/organics. They also have the ability to upgrade themselves as well as swap out talents/feats. This means that they are the best crafters in the game. Luckily crafting isn't that important. One of my favorite characters is a droid with a co-processor who specializes in ambush talents. This lets you full attack flatfooted foes at huge bonuses. Threshold is a bad system if you let things stack. A bounty hunter, gunslinger, scoundrel who goes prone and aims is going to be oneshotting everyone after level 12. I'd suggest you don't let threshold reducing talents stack. The Jedi Heritage feat. That feat is pretty strong on a Twilek force user who chooses to only have 10-14 wisdom. Sorcerers of Rhand is obviously not meant to be a playable race and taken at face value is the strongest race...by alot. That's all I can think of right now. There's not much wrong with the system imho.

Renegade, the first adventure in the first episode of the Shadows of the Past is good. The second part, I kind of run out of ideas what to do for encounters for the characters without advancing them on the storyline too much or giving them too much XP. That balance is kind of a pain to achieve, and makes me respect professional campaign writers a lot more. lol As for publishing, I just meant here on Roll20, not actually publishing -publishing. I figure, it would be nice for the newer people to have an entire campaign freebie they can use, all set up and ready to go. Thanks for the catch on that word. lol It was supposed to be "threat," not "thread." D'oh! Soft, the fact that Fool's Luck is a standard action to activate is the only thing keeping it in check. I always used to get the players who would want to multi-class and pick up Jedi, or start as a Jedi and pick up Scoundrel, so I started making the Jedi class like the D&D monk class, where once you leave the monk class to pick up a different one, you can't level up the monk anymore. Same principle applied to Jedi, only, I would also say that one you select a class, you can't cross-class into Jedi. The only time I would allow players to pick up other classes and return to leveling up their Jedi class was once they picked up a prestige Force class because then, they would no longer be a padawan and would have some autonomy as a Jedi knight, story-wise. The reason I'm leery of Fool's Luck is because then you would have people say, oh, well, I'll activate Fool's Luck, +5 to Use the Force. Move Object. Oh, I rolled a 13. Well, my Use the Force check modifier is a +4, and I have a +5 from Fool's Luck, and I want to use another Force point--oh, I rolled a 3!--and I'll blow a destiny point on top of it! Guess I just took out that AT-AT with one Use the Force check, huh? The min-maxing potential for abuse is horrendous with the Saga Edition rules, and the errata only helped a little. That's why I also started saying that Move Object was based on an object's mass, not how strong you were in the Force. So, even though you might roll really high on a Use the Force check, if the object you're lifting is only a medium object, the most damage it will do is 2d6 points of damage, or 4d6 if you use a Force point. That removed the desire to min-max your Use the Force skill. I was also looking at implementing some kind of Force power progression, so that before you could even take Move Object (which required very fine control of the Force--Look at how Yoda was straining to lift the X-wing), you would have to take more basic, but less-controlled telekinetic powers like Force Thrust. Argh! It's such a pain, though. I don't know. I just think that would go a long way to addressing how overly powerful the Jedi/Force Users can get, but I also realize that part of it is finding players who are more interested in roleplaying than in min-maxing and hacking through the campaign as fast as possible. So, what about saying something like, a +5 competence bonus to a selected skill check until the end of the encounter? That way, a player is able to apply it smartly, to a skill that's going to get them out of hot water, and not just make them suddenly a Jack of All Trades until the end of the encounter. And so the mods don't yell that this thread is off topic...I came up with a type of Force-attuned weapon similar to the Ma'Tok, or Jaffa staff weapon in StarGate towards the end of the campaign to help balance out the power of the characters by that point, so that should be fun to play-test! lol

twowolves80 said: Soft, the fact that Fool's Luck is a standard action to activate is the only thing keeping it in check. I always used to get the players who would want to multi-class and pick up Jedi, or start as a Jedi and pick up Scoundrel, so I started making the Jedi class like the D&D monk class, where once you leave the monk class to pick up a different one, you can't level up the monk anymore. Same principle applied to Jedi, only, I would also say that one you select a class, you can't cross-class into Jedi. The errata makes it explicitly not stack with skill focus. If you're going to be rolling a skill, you're always better off with the skill focus and spending a force point instead of using fool's luck. Fool's luck is reserved for skill challenges where you'd have to make multiple skill checks of different kinds in a given encounter. Before, when it offered a luck bonus, it was worth it on a force wizard only. A saber Jedi was better off taking other things. Then again, the problem with force wizard is 100% in the domain of skill attacks being broken. It's the same with the noble or consular using persuasion as an attack. twowolves80 said: So, what about saying something like, a +5 competence bonus to a selected skill check until the end of the encounter? That way, a player is able to apply it smartly, to a skill that's going to get them out of hot water, and not just make them suddenly a Jack of All Trades until the end of the encounter. Selected at the time you activate the talent and it will be pretty similar to how other players would use it. However, it would fall off a cliff in a skill challenge encounter with that rule in place. You're missing the point of what it's supposed to do, which is make you extremely likely to succeed at skills at the cost of a force point. Compare to Manifest Guardian Spirit, which gives you a +2 to utf, +1 to attack, and +2 to will and has a rider talent that further increases it. It only costs a swift to activate as well. So it gives you an effect that fool's luck would give you for 1 fp and a standard as well as all the rest (don't forget fool's luck increases attacks/defenses). No, an actual fix to the talent if you must fix it would be: +2 luck bonus to skills, +1 to attack, or +1 to defenses for the encounter and costs a swift action to activate. That way it would stack with skill focus, like it should and follow the rules for other talents. Look at the errata for acrobatic strike for my reasoning. If you use SAM, that +2 would only be a +1 to actual skill attacks btw. twowolves80 said: I came up with a type of Force-attuned weapon similar to the Ma'Tok, or Jaffa staff weapon in StarGate towards the end of the campaign to help balance out the power of the characters by that point, so that should be fun to play-test! lol The Jedi used force imbued katanas before moving on to forceblades. The Sith moved on to sithswords and developed lightsabers, which the Jedi stole. I'm in an empire game with funky hybrid rules and the gm is heavily pushing us to use sithswords instead of lightsabers. I'm trying to talk him into letting me have a force imbued katana instead. Unfortunately, as you know, the force imbued rules in saga stink.

So...competence bonuses don't stack with Skill Focus? Well, that certainly changes things. I have the errata, but I never noticed that before. lol Kind of nullifies my concerns. I still sense potential for abuse in the Force powers themselves, especially Move Object, but...I'll have to put together a complete list of Force Powers available in Saga Edition before I can do that, which means combing though a lot of books... Yeah, the Force Imbued rules are garbage. The staff-weapon I came up with is this...(I suppose I can reveal it now as a hook, maybe...? lol) Khetaryet(1) Large Exotic Weapon Damage: Special Stun Damage: Special Weight: 2.5 Kg Type: Energy Availability: Military/Rare Cost: 7,500 (1) Inaccurate Weapon: This weapon cannot fire at targets at long range. The khetaryet is a staff approximately two meters long, made of a lightweight but extremely strong metal, with the upper end widening into a teardrop-shaped pod. Inside the pod is a Force crystal that allows its wielder to make a DC 15 Use the Force check to channel Force energy into a focused ball of destructive energy, similar to ball lightning. The khetaryet's damage is a base of 2d6, and for every five points by which the wielder's Use the Force check beats the DC 15, the khetaryet does an additional die of damage. The wielder can choose to do either stun or normal damage, both of which do the same amount. Additionally, the wielder can spend a Force point as a move action to deal an addtional 2d6 points of damage. The wielder must have the Force Sensitivity feat to use a khetaryet . A DC 10 Use the Force check as a swift action will cause the Force crystal to instead shed a soft white light with the same light radius as that of a torch. I actually lifted the name for this type of weapon from ancient Egyptian, and it means "staff of fire," or something like that. Of course, a Force user picking one of these up is not going to know how to activate it or use it if they've never learned, either. What kind of check should that be? How to make the players struggle to figure out how to use one of these?

twowolves80 said: So...competence bonuses don't stack with Skill Focus? Well, that certainly changes things. I have the errata, but I never noticed that before. lol Kind of nullifies my concerns. I still sense potential for abuse in the Force powers themselves, especially Move Object, but...I'll have to put together a complete list of Force Powers available in Saga Edition before I can do that, which means combing though a lot of books... Try here: <a href="http://thesagacontinues.createaforum.com/general-d" rel="nofollow">http://thesagacontinues.createaforum.com/general-d</a>... The Saga Index 4.0 is complete and easy to look through if you have excel. As for move object, that would be a skill attack. I've already told you how to fix skill attacks, use SAM SAM is basically splitting attack skills into 2 values based on the roll. The first value is determined normally and determines the effect. The second value determines if the attack hits and Uses this formula: Character Level + Relevant Stat Mod + Misc. Skill focus would give a +2 instead of a +5. If you're not trained in the skill you'd get a -5. Anything that gives a +2 normally, such as manifest guardian spirit would instead give a +1 here. This has 2 effects. First, it makes the force and persuasion less deadly at low levels. Secondly, the force and persuasion taper off after level 15 in a normal game. Here they would not. You can keep unstoppable force and other defensive boosters as is under the SAM system. Move object really isn't a problem, it's force grip that is a problem. Fixing force grip is as simple as making it a darkside power and enforcing darkside rules.