Taking the Easy Way Out - with the Force

So we have a slight kink in the schedule this year because someone decided to go and have ANOTHER baby, due in May and no, not at our house as four is quite enough.

Gven this, and given that I'm still working out how to run a West Marches game for D&D (shhhh - they don't know yet) I offered to run a mini-campaign of 8 to 10 sessions from Jan to May. Options I threw out were Deadlands, Star Wars, Supers, Warhammer, and a 40k RPG. Top 3 responses were Star Wars, Supers, and Deadlands, pretty much in that order.

Since I have done something like this before that was pretty well received I decided to go with Star Wars. I'm sure the new MMO has some people fired up about it and the release of the movies all over again should stoke it further. So interest is decent and because I've been playing around with Saga with the apprentices the system is not totally new to me which should help us get more done.

Then, having blindsided myself with a campaign out of nowhere (wasn't planning on this two weeks ago) and agreeing to start it in two weels or so I realized I needed a concept and I didn't have one. C'mon, I've been reading that huge Deathwatch book and every blog post about west marches, megadungeons, and sandbox games I can find! How the heck did I come up with Star Wars?

Anyway, I realized that given the momentum mentioned above, and that since it's not the first baby, the interruption might not be terminal to the campaign, so more than just a one-shot I needed it to have some future potential. KOTOR is a big deal right now with the new game and all but I'm not very familiar with it and I don't really want to compete with it directly. The Clone Wars could be a blast but I haven't tried to put anything together for those either. Rebellion Era is the place we've played the most but I want to do something a little different and I'm tired of unfreezing Jedi. So I'm copping out and using the published "Dawn of Defiance" campaign from WOTC.

Why?

One, it's "Rise of the Empire" which is fresh because there aren't any movies or AAA video games coming out about it. It has stormtoopers and star destroyers, but there are still renegade Jedi running around too, so I get the best of both worlds.  

Two, it's about the beginning of the Rebellion, so my players will feel like they're part of a major storyline and not just holding the bag for big doings over there by other characters.

Three, it's probably the major common ground set of adventures among Saga Edition players - quite a few people have run and played it, netting us that "shared experience" thing I ramble on about sometimes.

Four, it's made up of 10 separate adventures that will take the PC's from levels 1-20 if I want. The first one covers the first few levels and should be perfect for our Jan-May timeframe, and if we decide to keep going then I have plenty of material to work with. If not, we still have a complete adventure finished and a premise established for a future game down the road someday.

Five, it's published and ready to go and has some nice supporting material (especially since I'm running it a couple of years after everyone else), so I can focus on the mechanics and working in character details rather than plotlines.

I have at least one player excited. Since he played in my old game referenced above he's already thinking about making his new one that character's father - there's some "retroactive continuity" for you in a slightly different sense. I've read through the advanture and it looks good so here in a couple of weeks we should be firing it up and of course I will post up details here.