d6 Star Wars - What Is Too Dark of a Tone?

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jeff37923

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I posted this question elsewhere, but I wanted to see what y'all thought of it.

OK, so while overtime is being offered at work my d6 Star Wars game is on hiatus. So while thinking about directions to take the game once it restarts, I began musing about Star Wars as a genre since we are now in a post - Rogue One world. I've got a few veterans in the game and I was thinking about going very dark with the atrocities that the Empire is willing to commit. So how dark is too dark?

Just to give an idea of what I am thinking.....

The Empire would want to make examples of high population worlds in order to maintain peace through fear (the Tarkin Doctrine), because if a high population world with some interstellar political clout gets uppity and then is pounded by the Empire - what chance does any other world have to stand against the Empire? So I created a world which defied the Empire and showed the results.

Once the world's military had been neutralized and the orbital bombardment completed, the Empire began to systematically strip the world of all of its remaining resources. Imperial Leviathans were brought in to create more vehicles and equipment for the Imperial war machine from the detritus of the world's smashed technology, specialized processing ships would denude that world's biosphere of all its organic matter and create food with that raw material, the oceans of the world would be drained and contents strained for minerals and organics while the remaining distilled water is shipped off-world, and the population is used as slaves to keep these operations running.

World population members that resist are fed to the food processor while some non-producers are sold off as slaves. World population members who fit the Empire's preferred genetic profile are sent to be used as stormtrooper or soldier trainees, troop entertainment and/or as involuntary mothers for the Empire.

This last part is where I am wondering if it is too dark. I was thinking about the Joy Division of Nazi Germany since that is one of the more hideous things I think that human beings can do to other human beings. Naturally, the Empire would love that.

(The usual hang-ups I have about in character rape remain in effect, I won't have that at my game table. However, the aftermath of rape and subjugation would be shown in NPCs.)
 
Yeah, it's pretty dark, but the Nazis were just as fucked up (albeit at a smaller scale) and remain the #1 villains of pulp men's adventure, including the Republic serials that contributed to inspire Star Wars.

Knowing the extent of the Empire's crimes will just incense your PCs into raging, righteous revenge. Do it.
 
Hmm. Depends. I despise 4th wall genre emulation with the white hot fury of a thousand thousand suns, but...while the Empire is kinda/sorta Space Nazis, they are pulp serial Nazis, not real Nazis.

I think the Empire is more into overt, crushing shows of overwhelming strength to sow fear, rather than an extended campaign of punishment. I mean...Death Star.

They certainly are not above strip mining a planet to bare rock and genociding a populace...of aliens.

As far as going Full.Atrocity on humans, I doubt that would be a Policy from on high, unless it somehow was some form of extreme Sith experiment, trying to increase the Dark Side Force level of an entire populace through Hate, which is more likely in the Sith Empire era maybe, not Galactic Empire.

For humans, I'd think more of a soul-crushing 1984 type society, where the populace would see the benefit of compliance and the punishment of rebellion. Brainwashed Imperial Youth Cadres informing on grandparents, etc. Now, could a Governor decide to run his own Unit 731, and Soylent Green be a secret way to feed the people because he's actually mismanaging the planet, tweaking the industrial output to meet the Emperor's quotas while the planet slowly dies? Sure. Any bureaucracy can have stuff ignored or hidden if the trains run on time.

Hell, might be an interesting Imperial Intelligence campaign if the shit gets so Dark, the Emperor or Vader sense something and send the PCs to figure out just what the hell is going on over there.

Brothels, well, you got soldiers, you got brothels, no matter how disciplined. You land a company of T-800 Terminators on the ground, there will be Black Market in toasters. :grin: But again the Empire seems more like forced breeding programs and indoctrination to field a strong Stormtrooper recruit population then slave brothels.

Now Twileks, everybody buys and sells Twileks, even Twileks.
 
As a more general answer, whenever you're talking about tone within a licensed property you have to first answer the question as to what your players want out of the campaign.

Do they want to roleplay within the movie, book or comic, with an OOC eye towards the genre conventions in a 4th wall breaking manner?
Do they want to roleplay within the setting described by the movie, book or comic, keeping an IC eye to verisimilitude?

If the answer is the second, then Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, 007, Middle-Earth, you name it, can be very dark indeed.
If the answer is the first, then you go too far outside the lines described by the genre, people will complain about it not being "Star Wars" to them.
 
The Star Wars games I've played in always seemed to devolve into a fanboy wankfest... basically re-enacting the first movies amid lots of OOC 'discussions' of SW trivia... and Star Trek, and Firefly... and Stargate.
It always frustrated me a bit, and I tended to become 'disruptive' by trying to subvert their SW assumptions... creating Twi'lek space pimps and Mon Calamari assassins. I probably just should have quit and found myself a Dark Heresy group.

So none of the OP's ideas sound too dark to me... as a game... but as Star Wars... meh, I think I'd feel obliged keep a lot of the more grisly stuff off camera and referred to only with euphamisms... 'The Jews went East'. That would seem more in keeping with the old serials I'm familiar with and less likely to piss off the Players.
 
You've already heard my views on this, but they've been reinforced since then.

Having recently watched Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and come to the conclusion that those two films made me feel more like Star Wars 4-6 than the last two Star Wars films did, I want to reiterate: I'd suggest only skimming over gritty darkness, it isn't Star Wars. Especially Rogue One's gritty darkness.

Simlasa said:
That would seem more in keeping with the old serials I'm familiar with and less likely to piss off the Players.

Right.

When Alderaan gets blown up, we get one brief moment of poorly acted despair/frustration from Carrie Fischer, then it's right back to pulpy-fun derring do that stays focused on the characters, not the human condition.

Indiana Jones and The Pianist theoretically take place in the same world and period, but I have a hard time imagining players, no matter how jaded, showing up specifically for tabletop Indy yet being OK with protracted meditations on the Warsaw ghetto between their mine cart chases.
 
I don't think its about how dark you go with ideas, its about what you "show" in the game...

For example, remember this part of the first film?
TortDroid-shnikt1.png

Its obvious Leia was tortured, probably in a pretty nasty way. But we don't see it, we don't even hear her screaming behind a closed door. In the same way, the genocide of Alderan was shown from the PoV of the Deathstar bridge, not the people on the planet.
 
I agree that in most cases the darkness in Star Wars happens behind the curtain.

"Many bothans died to get us this information", and that's all we need to know.
 
You've already heard my views on this, but they've been reinforced since then.

Having recently watched Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and come to the conclusion that those two films made me feel more like Star Wars 4-6 than the last two Star Wars films did, I want to reiterate: I'd suggest only skimming over gritty darkness, it isn't Star Wars. Especially Rogue One's gritty darkness.
Right.

When Alderaan gets blown up, we get one brief moment of poorly acted despair/frustration from Carrie Fischer, then it's right back to pulpy-fun derring do that stays focused on the characters, not the human condition.

I thought The Force Awakens was fun and light Star Wars fare. I knew what I was getting in Rogue One. It was a suicide mission, therefore it was not light, though the action scenes were fantastic and all that. I certainly thought it was Star Wars though. After watching multiple seasons of Clone Wars, which is canon, I was prepared for Star Wars to go off into all kinds of directions. You could see them experimenting a little bit.
 
I think we all agree that the vile darkness should happen behind the curtain to avoid graphic depictions (which doesn't fit the genre), so any hints at how bad the vile darkness is will be demonstrated by the behaviors of NPCs or just raw data that is found (like a report detailing how many successful births happened with the breeding program or how many workers died on a given day and how much nutrient paste was made from them).

I'd like to bring up the "why" I chose the route of stripping a world of all its resources instead of just destroying it. One of the impressions I get of the Empire is that it is a ruthlessly efficient bureaucratic and military machine. Destroying a planet demonstrates raw power, while systematically reducing a world's population and resources to serve the Empire's industrial and military might demonstrates chilling practicality. Both are effective at producing fear in neighboring systems in accordance with the Tarkin Doctrine, but each has a different feeling of scope - and ruthlessness regarding the world's value to the Empire.
 
So we see that most of the people posting here, when considering the licensed property of Star Wars are in the first camp I described above. They're not "playing Star Wars" with an eye towards in-setting verisimilitude, they're "playing Star Wars" with an eye towards the sense of genre, as defined by the movies (or in some cases, only certain movies).

Now is Palpatine capable of ordering such a thing? Of course he is. Is it the Empire's modus operandi? Again, for aliens, sure no problem, for humans, it might be a tad much, but destroying this planet by grinding it's people and resources into materiel and troops is certainly possible for the Empire.

Jeff, your first task is finding out from your players what "playing Star Wars" means to them and if they are up for a verisimilitude-based as opposed to genre-based campaign.
 
Jeff, your first task is finding out from your players what "playing Star Wars" means to them and if they are up for a verisimilitude-based as opposed to genre-based campaign.
I'd like to think that I already have a good idea since the group has been together for a while, but it definitely would not hurt to ask for their input on this. Thanks for the suggestion.
 
I think that it's fair to portray the Empire as gruesomely evil. Remember how in A New Hope they murdered all those cute Jawas? And burned Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru alive? They were effin' awful. Which is why I didn't feel a huge tonal shift with Rogue One, unlike the rest of the internet.
 
Rogue One didn't have any "But I was going to go to Tosche Station to pick up some power convertors!!"
 
I think that is best to look for setting verisimilitude rather than emulating a concrete story or feeling. On this, I like Call of Cthulhu's take. It's not a game of playing lovecraftian adventures. It's an horror game in the Worlds of HPL. Subtle, but important.
 
I think that is best to look for setting verisimilitude rather than emulating a concrete story or feeling. On this, I like Call of Cthulhu's take. It's not a game of playing lovecraftian adventures. It's an horror game in the Worlds of HPL. Subtle, but important.

And honestly, there's as Much Derleth, Block, and Chambers in there as there is Lovecraft.
 
So we see that most of the people posting here, when considering the licensed property of Star Wars are in the first camp I described above. They're not "playing Star Wars" with an eye towards in-setting verisimilitude, they're "playing Star Wars" with an eye towards the sense of genre, as defined by the movies (or in some cases, only certain movies).

I don't think the two are always mutually exclusive. Verisimilitude relies on the setting being "real": players can make any choices they like, the consequences are logical and realistic, the subcreation of the setting is consistent. But none of that affects tone. And tone can be set within a game without violating any of the previous conceits. Consider this:

Player: "I raise my blaster and fire at the Stormtroopers wildly"
(rolls dice)
GM: " You catch one stormtrooper square on and he falls back. His companions duck to the sides of the corridor for cover."

VS

Player: "I raise my blaster and fire at the Stormtroopers wildly"
(rolls dice)
GM: " Your shot hits one stormtrooper square in the face, and his helmet isn't enough to protect him from the blast, as the glass around his eyes explodes outward in a mist of blood. His body convulses horribly, before collapsing."


On a more general note, something like the Droids cartoon, while not exactly high quality, could be easily mined for ideas as to the wider universe outside of what is depicted in the films, and the "normal" lives of people in a galaxy far, far, away.
 
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And honestly, there's as Much Derleth, Block, and Chambers in there as there is Lovecraft.
Exactly. And I think is for the best. I don't want to play Lovecraft tales, I want to play in his worlds, meet his characters and have a system that simulates the way his world works.

I don't think the two are always mutually exclusive. Verisimilitude relies on the setting being "real": players can make any choices they like, the consequences are logical and realistic, the subcreation of the setting is consistent. But none of that affects tone. And tone can be set within a game without violating any of the previous conceits. Consider this:

Player: "I raise my blaster and fire at the Stormtroopers wildly"
(rolls dice)
GM: " You catch one stormtrooper square on and he falls back. His companions duck to the sides of the corridor for cover."

VS

Player: "I raise my blaster and fire at the Stormtroopers wildly"
(rolls dice)
GM: " Your shot hits one stormtrooper square in the face, and his helmet isn't enough to protect him from the blast, as the glass around his eyes explodes outword in a mist of blood. His body convulses horribly, before collapsing."



I fully agree. D&D can be a family friendly game or a Game of Thrones mature show just by dialing description and NPCs behavior.
 
And honestly, there's as Much Derleth, Block, and Chambers in there as there is Lovecraft.
I think that's a good point for what I want out of a Star Wars-ish game as well. I'd like to feel free to pull from a variety of sources.
The Guardians of the Galaxy movies have, by far, been my favorite Star Wars-ish movies of late.
I'd like to avoid tie fighters, x-wings, AT-STs, and Death Stars as requirements for letting Players be secure in knowing they're in that setting... similar to how I avoid name-dropping all the Mythos entities in CoC games.
I want the themes and feel of Star Wars, NOT the IP merchandise.
 
Yes! The Droids cartoon had lots of great ideas in it, actually. Re-watching them with my kids has given me tons of ideas for a Star Wars campaign.
 
Spaniard's in the house! How's it going Imperator? I figure Gus looked you up?
 
Spaniard's in the house! How's it going Imperator? I figure Gus looked you up?
Certainly, and I jumped at the chance :smile: Was looking to use messageboards again, and well, RPG.net is still what it was, and therpgsite seems to have become more politized since election. I liked most people here, so here I am.
 
Certainly, and I jumped at the chance :smile: Was looking to use messageboards again, and well, RPG.net is still what it was, and therpgsite seems to have become more politized since election. I liked most people here, so here I am.

Good to have you around.
 
I haven't been able to get the entire old group back together, so I do not know yet. I may just have to try it with a new group.
 
The Star Wars games I've played in always seemed to devolve into a fanboy wankfest... basically re-enacting the first movies amid lots of OOC 'discussions' of SW trivia... and Star Trek, and Firefly... and Stargate.

I tend to shy away from a lot of licensed properties for that reason, you get a bunch of fans together and, well, they act like fans. That's not a bad thing in most circumstances, but it doesn't exactly lend itself to an immersive game experience.
 
I actually think something like Rogue One or some of the events in The Clone Wars (especially something like season seven) are about as dark as you should get.
 
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