What If...?

One of the great problems with the Star Wars RPG (all versions) is that the most interesting time frame to play in is around the time of the "Holy Trilogy", but that during that time frame events are dominated by certain powerful, named heroes. (Incidentally, Dragonlance has always had exactly the same problem, although that's less of an issue these days.)

There are several ways to get around this issue: set the game far in the past, set the game far in the future, set the game in some distant corner of the galaxy... (There's also a lot of play in "Dark Times" campaigns, set between the prequels and the real films, of course.)

But one of the most fun is the "what if..." campaign - change some aspect of the known story, and derive from there. The most extreme example I've used is, of course, my "Mirror Universe" game, which stood pretty much everything on it's head. Another "what if..." campaign I've considered would take place after the Battle of Endor, but would posit a very different outcome - Vader and the Emperor are dead, but Luke turned to the Dark Side in doing so, and is now emperor himself. Han died on Endor, Admiral Ackbar is dead, and the remnants of the Rebellion are now led by a heartbroken Leia...

But this morning I found myself pondering another "What if..." campaign: What if Luke and Leia had never been born? What if, at the end of "Revenge of the Sith", Vader had simply killed Padme outright, so that her children didn't survive? (Or, alternately... what if she had survived, but her children had not? Hmm...)

Under this model, there's no "new hope" for the Jedi, and so there's no motive for Obi-Wan and Yoda to go into hiding. Instead, they would be forced to come up with a sane plan for defeating the Emperor and restoring peace and justice to the galaxy.

(Because there are words to describe the plan of hiding Luke with Anakin's only living family, under the assumed name "Skywalker" for twenty years, before having a dead man send him to a near-dead mentor to be half-trained, and there to challenge Vader, and the same Emperor who has just defeated Yoda himself, secure in the knowledge that in order to defeat them he will have to call on the Dark Side... and doom everything. "Sane" is not one of those words.)

There are a handful of key differences between this and a standard "Dark Times" campaign. The most obvious is that all the trappings of the Rebellion Era are now in place: TIE fighters, the Imperial-class Star Destroyers, the relative lack of droids and non-humans... and the Death Star. Meanwhile, the Rebellion is fully-established, and so gives PCs a likely source of allies that doesn't exist in the Dark Times. Better still, one has to assume that Obi-Wan and Yoda would have established some sort of Jedi Academy-in-Exile, gathering up as many of the scattered Jedi as they could find, training a new generation of knights, and so creating scope for Jedi PCs in the setting without any great difficulty.

The campaign opens just after the Rebellion, striking from its hidden fortress, has won its first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the conflict, the secret plans for the Empire's new superweapon were stolen, and passed to the PCs by a dying courier. And now the PCs are onboard the Tantive IV under Captain Antillies, desperately fleeing Imperial pursuit...

Go!