The role of PC Heroes in Star Wars

While I am working on my Hyperspace Opera setting, I am frequently getting out various Star Wars RPG books to look for ideas. And unsurprisingly, it’s always just a matter of time until I start to think “Man, I should run a d6 Star Wars campaign in the meantime.” It’s Star Wars! It’s amazing!

But then I grab something to take some notes and start looking for ideas what the campaign could be about, and where and when it would be set, and the whole thing begins to lose traction really rapidly. The main reference for what Star Wars is and what makes Star Wars cool are the adventures of Luke, Han, Leia, Chewbacca, and Lando. They quickly turn out to be major movers and shakers, destroying the two Death Stars, having several encounters with Darth Vader, and being directly responsible for facilitating the death of the Emperor. Their interactions with the setting and the major power players within it, and their perspective on the world as a whole are very different from what a group of freshly made PCs could ever experience.

But why does that have to be?

It is convention in RPGs that a party of new PCs consists of people with no significant accomplishments who are each just one out of a thousand or even a million of similar people with similar aspirations. They are bit players and peons, who through their deeds can slowly grow in strength and make connections to possibly one day become important actors in the fate of their worlds. And this works great for a great range of games, settings, and campaigns. But for a Star Wars game, this just doesn’t hook me. Playing rebel grunts ambushing imperial patrols to steal a crate of blasters, or irrelevant cargo pilots who have a rival crew trying to steal their cargo doesn’t really capture any of the things that make Star Wars amazing.

So instead of having a party of fresh new characters who first arrive on the scene at the start of the campaign and then look on the big picture from far below, why not have the players play PCs who are capital H Heroes? We have established that the Emperor and Vader killed all the Jedi except for two, but in that big galaxy, there could very well be a third who is also out fighting the Empire on his own in a complete different region. When we meet Han and Lando for the first time, they are not ordinary scoundrels. They both have reputation and influence that indicates they are pretty big shots in the circles they associate with. And Leia is an imperial senator and appears to be at least in the second tier of the leadership of the whole Rebel Alliance. Luke really is the very notable exception here, and that’s because he’s the main point of view character for the first movie. By the second movie, his role has already changed completely.

This idea is certainly not new, but it has never occured to me. PCs in a Star Wars campaign don’t have to be extras in the story of the Rebellion against the Empire. They absolutely can be protagonists in a story just as big as the one of Luke and Vader.

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