Hi! I'm Zoot, and I need you! If you're a GM! And you like Star Wars SAGA Edition! And you're willing to run a game with only two players! On Discord! Via instant messaging, because we're just not super comfortable with voice chat!

If you're still reading, you have my enormous appreciation.



My best friend and I started playing a game of SAGA Edition on RPoL some years ago that, sadly, had a bad case of the "disappearing GM" plague. Since then, we've talked off and on about maybe looking for someone else who's interested in the premise of the game to play it with us in our preferred gaming medium (Discord, as mentioned above). The reason we prefer Discord over RPoL is that it gives everyone the same flexibility to post when they can throughout the day, but also makes it easy to sit down and knock out a combat or make a lot of progress when we have overlapping free time. By keeping it strictly to messaging instead of voice, we always have a written history of everything we've said and done in the game to refer back to.

The original game premise as the GM explained it to us was for our characters, living on a little Outer Rim world, to have finally had enough of the Empire, ultimately leaving the planet in a bid to gather a force under our command (rebels, pirate armada, droid army, etc.) to return and push the Empire away, and expand from there into full-fledged war against the Empire almost like the Army of Light or Sith Brotherhood from Legends.

Now, the above is just what the original game was. Neither of us really needs exactly that to happen, we just want to play our characters and their stories out at long last.



**THE FLUFF**

The characters are these (subject to change depending on the kind of game you want to run):

My character is Kyra, an Alderaanian padawan who left the Jedi Order and joined the Jedi Service Corps when the costs of the war began to weigh too heavily, and then went into hiding on a quiet agri-world when the Empire formed. She has since bought some land and built it up into a small vineyard, eking out a quiet life under the nose of the Empire. Kyra has long hidden her Force abilities to stay below the radar, hoping to protect herself and the one person dear to her.

Mechanically, I planned Kyra to be as close to a prequel-era, cinematic Jedi as I could get. She's agile, focuses on defense, and uses the Force to enhance and protect herself.



My friend's character, Xanthe, is Kyra's 'niece' (no actual blood relation; Xanthe's parents helped Kyra during the purge and she became Xanthe's guardian when they later died). Xanthe is a developing Force-User in her own right who has come into possession of a dark side (possibly Sith) holocron that encourages her ambition and which she uses to secretly develop her abilities. Unbeknownst to Kyra, Xanthe is mixed up in the local criminal element, using her natural magnetism and Force abilities to take over a local gang and protection racket in the nearest city.

Mechanically, Xanthe is a Force Wizard and Noble. She leans on the Force for combat and has a breadth of skills, especially for social situations.

Obviously, not everyone is comfortable having a character in a game who is clearly flirting with and falling to the Dark Side. Xanthe's player says that he's happy to discuss changes if the idea won't fly.



If you're okay with having a Dark Side character in the game, however, our hope was to seriously play out how their moralities would interact and conflict over time, and how their relationship would evolve as a result. We enter the game knowing that at least one possible ending scenario would be a duel of the fates between Kyra and Xanthe to decide how the climax of the story resolves.



Storywise, I think we're both hoping for a classic Star Wars feeling. Underdog heroes rising above the odds to conquer a much greater foe, learning and developing as they go along. That will probably mean joining the Rebellion, but who knows! It's your world, we're just living in it.



**Disney Canon vs Legends Canon vs Alternate History?**

We're flexible on the historic details, and content to leave what is and isn't canon mostly in the GM's hands. If you want to run a game where Luke Skywalker will never join the Alliance and they get us instead, that's fine. If you want Kanan Jarrus and Starkiller to both exist in the same galaxy, that's fine. If you want the history to play out as expected while our adventure happens elsewhere and involving no canon characters, that's great, too! As long as it's recognizably Star Wars and we aren't being totally overshadowed by the big names, I think we'll be happy.



**THE CRUNCH**

For the original game, Kyra and Xanthe started at level 5 and were built using gestalt rules, one permanent class and one variable class (Kyra, for example, was a combination of Jedi 5 and Scout 2/Soldier 3). However, not everybody likes gestalt, so please just say so if you don't want to use that system. It is, by far, the most negotiable thing about this whole game request. We'll drop it like a hot potato!

The lowest level we are willing to start at is 3, and I would personally prefer that we start at 4 or 5 (or higher, if you want us to). In our experience, character concepts don't start expressing themselves until level 3, most of them don't take off until level 7, and starting from scratch just flat-out isn't fun anymore. Also, since there are only two of us and we'd prefer to keep it that way, it can be a challenge to get anything done if we start at levels 1 or 2.

We have a number of optional rules and house rules that we *like* to use, either because they make the game more fun or make a 2-player group work better, but all of them are at your discretion. For convenience, here is the list of our suggestions and why we like them:

1. No XP. The party levels up when the GM decides they should. (This has just always been a thing at our table. It means we can go long stretches of time without fighting without worrying about it, and there's no scenario where we level up at an inconvenient time for the story because we killed an extra stormtrooper.)
2. Having maximum Dark Side points doesn't make the character an NPC. (This goes hand-in-hand with the Dark Side character concept above; if Xanthe is at risk of being turned into an NPC, the whole idea of writing her fall to the dark is kind of moot. If you don't want a Dark-Sider in the game at all, this one obviously isn't an issue.)
3. Daily Force Points instead of per-level Force Points, the optional rule from the Jedi Academy Training Manual. (If we have a small number of Force Points every in-game day, we're much more likely to use them the way the system expects us to instead of hanging onto them for emergencies or to wipe out a boss.)
4. Merging Block and Deflect into one talent, Block/Deflect. (There are a ton of good talents, especially for Force-using characters, and a lot of them have long prerequisite lists. This is one extra talent available to make our characters more interesting.)
5. Merging Climb, Jump, and Swim into one Strength-based skill, called Athletics. Any class which has at least two of those skills on its Class Skill list receives Athletics as a Class Skill. (The way skills work in SAGA, having to spend separate picks on three very specific physical tasks feels like a holdover from D&D that wasn't thought through very well. Merging them into one skill makes life easier for everyone.)
6. Receiving a feat at every odd level instead of every third level. We call this Pathfinder Feat Progression. (This one is really specific to being a small group. Like talents, there are a lot of interesting feats in SAGA and a lot of them require several prerequisites. Having only two people, our characters have to cover a few more bases than normal to stay competitive with the world around them.)

And that's pretty much it! If you have house rules you like to use around your table, we're glad to talk them through and find out if they're a good fit for us.

Anyone interested in GMing these characters and having us play in your world, please send me an rmail!