“When you ask for trouble, you should not be surprised when it finds you.”     –Plo Koon

In September, we announced the upcoming release of Suns of Fortune, an Edge of the Empire™ sourcebook for the Corellian Sector that introduces many of the fantastic characters, starships, weapons, and local hotspots that you might find in and around the birthplace of such notable space jockeys as Han Solo and Wedge Antilles.

Moreover, even as it provides players a host of new options and presents Game Masters with the details they need to flesh out their Core World adventures, Suns of Fortune introduces a new set of resources that Game Masters (GMs) can use and players can enjoy: modular encounters.

What Is a Modular Encounter?

There are adventures, and there are campaigns. Frequently, a GM runs one or two adventures in succession, and if everyone is having a great time and wants to keep going, the adventures develop into a campaign. Other times, a GM may begin with plans for a full campaign, and each adventure plays into a long story arc that may run for months.

Some GMs rely on adventures written for the setting, while others craft their own stories; these are often strongly influenced by the characters’ backgrounds, Obligations, and decisions throughout the course of their adventures.

Modular encounters are meant to supplement the work that the GM does to build adventures or campaigns, serving as “set pieces” that the GM can draw upon to spice up an adventure with new forms of challenges, local flavor, vibrant adversaries, or dramatic scenarios. They are the kinds of scenes and challenges that can crop up almost at any time. They can fill in some downtime during the ongoing tale of a campaign, or they can be triggered by specific choices the players make, giving the GM an effective response to an unplanned turn of events.

Suns of Fortune introduces nine modular encounters, ranging in length and scope. All of them are set within specific regions of the Correllian Sector, but with a little work, the GM can easily modify them to fit in nearly any campaign.

For more information about these handy new GM resources, we turn to lead developer Sam Stewart.

Sam Stewart on Modular Encounters

The whole idea of modular encounters originated from the experiences that the Star Wars roleplaying game’s design team has shared as Game Masters. Like most people who have run a game, we have at points taken published adventures and gleefully pulled them apart. We pull out some encounters, shuffle them around, and build entirely new adventures around them to fit our own groups and play styles.

So when we were designing Suns of Fortune, we had an idea: What if, instead of putting a single adventure into the book, we put in nine miniature adventures? We could create a bunch of individual encounters, each designed to run an hour or two, and all designed to fit neatly into an ongoing adventure. Instead of forcing the GM to figure out how to remove an encounter from the context of a wider adventure, we’d do the work beforehand.

The decision to create modular encounters also let us touch upon a wide range of the different elements and events one can find in the Corellian Sector. Whereas a single adventure would focus on one element to the detriment of the rest, the introduction of modular encounters allowed us to write about smuggling goods across the Corellian system, then skip to the other side of the Sector and present an exciting encounter with corporate agents and an angry ronto on Nubia.

Taming the Dragon is a great example of our modular encounters. In it, the PCs have a chance at earning a few extra credits by participating in an illicit, underground swoop race. Of course, the only way swoop racing could be more Corellian is if you were to hold your race in a swamp full of razor sharp crystals!

Like all modular encounters, Taming the Dragon contains a short lead-in that offers a few different ways the PCs could become involved, then jumps straight into the race itself! The encounter ends when the race does, providing the GM with some guidance for distributing potential rewards, as well as suggesting some future complications with the gang leader the PCs raced against. The whole event can wrap in an hour’s worth of play, or the GM can flesh it out into a longer, more involved adventure and turn one-time adversaries into recurring NPCs. All the tools are there; it’s up to the GM to decide how they get used.

  Click on the above thumbnail to download Taming the Dragon (pdf, 1.9 MB) and preview the modular encounters from Suns of Fortune!

More Adventures. More Worlds. More Action.

Whether the modular encounters of Suns of Fortune find their way into your campaign as fleshed-out set pieces or as the seeds of adventures that merit greater expansion, they offer a wide range of exciting new challenges and experiences.

Combined with the detailed information about the different worlds and key locations in the Corellian Sector, the nine modular encounters in Suns of Fortune not only add new turns and twists for your Edge of the Empire campaign, they help you establish it firmly in locations full of life and local flavor.

Add these modular encounters to your campaign, bring the Core Worlds of the Corellian Sector to life, and expand your player options with a host of new starships, weapons, and playable races. Pre-order your copy of Suns of Fortune from your local retailer today!