Fantasy Flight Games

GM Guide: The Ultimate Sacrifice

Published 18 October 2017 | The Force Awakens Beginner Game

GM Guide: The Ultimate Sacrifice

Guest Writer Bryan Young on Tales of Desperate Heroics

"Saw Gerrera used to say, one fighter with a sharp stick and nothing left to lose can take the day. They have no idea we're coming. They have no reason to expect us. If we can make it to the ground, we'll take the next chance. And the next. On and on until we win… or the chances are spent."
–Jyn Erso

Like Star Wars™ fans around the world, we're eagerly looking forward to Episode VIII. At the same time, we're delighted simply to live in this new age of Star Wars riches. Constantly growing with new movies, television shows, novels, comics, and more, the Star Wars galaxy is larger and brighter than ever before.

It's also more diverse. Recent materials have focused on both a greater diversity of characters and styles. And while the Star Wars galaxy was always full of potential for stories of all shapes, sizes, tones, and themes, we're seeing more of them realized than ever before. From the expansion of the classic Star Wars saga presented by The Force Awakens, to the formation of the Rebellion in Star Wars Rebels, to the gritty war genre stylings of Rogue One, there's more here than ever before.

For those of us who enjoy bringing the Star Wars back to our tabletops via Star Wars roleplaying—whether through Age of Rebellion™, Edge of the Empire™, or Force and Destiny™—these stories and styles serve not only as entertainment, but as inspiration for our own adventures.

Today, guest writer Bryan Young follows that inspiration toward the pinnacle of heroism—designing adventures in which the player characters may be called to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Guest Writer Bryan Young on Game Mastering Desperate Heroics

One of the most striking things about Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was its message.

At its core, Rogue One was about a group of reluctant heroes who, at the end of the day, were willing to sacrifice their lives to create a better universe that they would never personally see. Watching stories of these ultimate sacrifices are emotional, even heart-rending. A doomed mission has a lot of weight to it, and it takes a special kind of character to embark on a mission you know you’ll likely never return from.

If your players are game, though, there is nothing more gratifying than playing a single session or limited series of sessions that are billed from the top as a mission that most likely no one will come back from. There are a number of steps you need to take to make sure your players are satisfied by this sort of sacrificial storytelling, but you and your group will be rewarded for it if you do it right.

Finding Inspiration

The first thing you need to think about is what the mission is.

Rogue One can offer plenty of inspiration for what the mission could be and how it can work, but you can also peel back a layer of Rogue One and see what sort of movies inspired it. World War II films. The Dirty Dozen. The Guns of Navarone. A Bridge Too Far. Even Saving Private Ryan has an air of futility to the mission you might be able to tap into.

All of these films have one thing in common: a team is gathered by the military and given a job they don’t necessarily want to do, but know that it would be good for the war effort. It’s really easy to come up with ideas like this that fit within a galaxy far, far away.

Getting Your Players on Board

The next thing you’ll need to do is talk to your group.

Some players get attached to their characters to the point where playing a sacrificial mission might not be appealing to them. Getting the buy-in of your players is really the most important thing you need. The point of any roleplaying game is to have fun, and if this isn’t the sort of fun they want, then you’d do better looking for a different kind of campaign. But if they are into the idea, you’ll need to decide if you’re playing a one-shot or a campaign with a finite amount of sessions. Then you’ll have to decide the mission objectives.

For the purposes of this exercise, let's say that the mission objective is to destroy a secret Imperial weapon on a planet that borders a vital space lane to the Rebellion’s cause. The Rebellion needs this space lane so they can use it for a vital rescue mission. The problem facing your characters is that they don’t know exactly where the weapon is hidden. They’ll need to infiltrate the planet, make contact with locals who can get them more information about the weapon, infiltrate the facility, and destroy the weapon so the Rebellion can pass through on their way to an important rescue mission. An important Rebel leader has been captured, and another team is leading that fight. If the mission fails, the rescue mission cannot occur. If that rescue mission doesn't succeed, the Rebellion might well be over.

The stakes are everything.

In order to have a mission that keeps your players at the table, ready to sacrifice themselves for the cause, you’re going to need to raise the stakes as high as you can while still fitting your adventure within the Star Wars universe. If there’s no cost to the galaxy for the failure of your players, there’s no incentive for them to lay down the lives of their characters.

Pacing Your Adventure

Pacing is important.

In my example scenario, I’d recommend a three- to five-session arc. The first session would be the initial briefing and the insertion onto the planet and all the danger that that implies. The second and possibly third session would be making contact with the locals and the intrigue involved in actually finding the weapon. The next sessions would cover the actual infiltration and destruction of the weapon. The game ends as soon as it’s destroyed or all the characters are dead. If you’ve planned the session out well enough, those two things will happen simultaneously. They’ll have to give their lives to win. And they’ll be okay with that.

Getting everything to line up can be tricky, but the important thing is to plan the adventure so that the characters need to divide their attention between the mission and the enemies, especially when everything is coming to boil. There's nothing more classic to the sacrificial mission than the point where the party is forced to split and some characters willingly throw themselves in harm's way to buy time for the others.

Perhaps some of the characters might be able to survive. Getting away isn’t part of the session, though. That’s when the credits roll and your group does its post-mortem on the campaign. With the right amount of planning, it’ll be a campaign that will keep your players talking for a long time.

Like Jyn Erso, Cassian Andor, Bodhi Rook, Baze, Chirrut, and K-2SO, your players’ characters could go down in history as heroes of the Rebellion willing to lay down their lives in defense of the galaxy.

When he's not making life difficult for his friends' small band of Rebels, Bryan Young is a writer, podcaster, and gamer. He writes regularly for StarWars.com and Star Wars Insider, and hosts the Star Wars podcast Full of Sith. You can follow him on Twitter @Swankmotron.

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GM Guide: Making Characters Memorable

Published 12 September 2017 | The Force Awakens Beginner Game

GM Guide: Making Characters Memorable

Guest Writer Bryan Young on Bringing Your NPCs to Life

"They're my friends. I've got to help them."
–Luke Skywalker

Details bring characters and their stories to life. Characters without details are like skeletons. They may have some shape, but they're dead. They can't move. And you can't really tell one from the other. But once you flesh them out with details, they quickly become able to move you.

We recognize something fundamentally human in the young Tatooine farmboy who dreams of joining the Rebel Alliance to escape his planet's barren wastes and embark upon adventure amid the stars. We get a kick out of Han Solo not because he's a helpful smuggler and pilot, but because he projects a cocksure attitude and talks about how he completed the Kessel Run in under twelve parsecs, even though his modified freighter looks like a hunk of junk. And we respond to Darth Vader's presence with immediate fear and respect because a wealth of details suggest his terrible powers—his imposing stature, confident stride, masked helmet, deep voice, measured speech, and even the strange, wheezy sound of his suit's life support.

Physical details are important, but even more so are behavior quirks and the relationships these characters have with others. And just as these details helped us connect to the characters and conflicts of a galaxy far, far away, so can they enrich our games of Age of Rebellion™, Edge of the Empire™, and Force and Destiny™.

No matter what your characters are doing, your Star Wars™ roleplaying sessions are bound to prove more entertaining when they're set amid a galaxy full of three-dimensional characters with lives, challenges, and desires of their own.

So how do you fill your games with these Non-Player Characters (NPCs)? That's the question that guest writer Bryan Young explores in today's look at our Star Wars roleplaying games.

Guest Writer Bryan Young on Fleshing Out Your NPCs

When you’re looking to Game Master one of the pre-written adventures for any of the Star Wars roleplaying games, you'll find the cast of characters you'll get to play has already been taken care of for you. But when you’re running a game of your own design, all of those characters will have to come directly from your own head. So how do you invent the details that will bring them to life?

When I’m running a game, I like to come up with a few random details for each of my Non-Player Characters (NPCs) so I know exactly how to play them. The details I try to keep are simple and progress naturally as I think about how they interact with the players and the story.

Who Are They?

In a game I’m running, there’s a mechanic the players could deal with. Naturally, to make the mechanic feel more Star Wars, I made this mechanic a Rodian and gave her her own story. I did this because I believe it helps make the world feel more real when the NPCs have their own lives moving in the background of the game.

Her name was Leota. Her specialty was making modifications that the Empire might consider… illegal. Fake transponders. Illicit weapons. Extra shields. Even cloaking devices. So long as the price was right.

That was all the info I needed for the first session in which she appeared, but I had the idea that Leota owed debts to a number of people and might have bounty hunters coming after her at odd times. This was an idea I kept tucked in my back pocket in case I needed an idea for future sessions. At any point, if the characters came back to see her, this backstory could lead them into an interesting mystery.

Perhaps, they'd find bounty hunters hassling Leota when they showed up. Or maybe the bounty hunters would have abducted her.

Then I started to think about what her connection to the players might be. Did she trust them? Or did she think they were going to burn her, exposing her to Imperial attention? I opted for a mix of the two.

These bits gave me enough information to be able to interact with the players. You’ll still have to do plenty of ad-libbing when you’re talking in your NPC’s characters voice, but at least you’ll know where they’re coming from as a starting point.

Where Are They Headed?

These few rough points are all you really need to consider for each major NPC—name, appearance, role, motive, relationship with the PCs. And once you get used to bringing NPCs to this level of detail, making up new NPCs on the fly will be no problem.

Say there is a bounty hunter at the mechanic’s hideout. What’s he like? Is he a Zabrak with a vendetta? Or is he an Imperial loyalist working for the sector Moff. Maybe there’s a piece of one player character’s backstory that hooks into having a bounty on his or her head, too, doubling the trouble for the characters.

All it takes is a few questions and you’re ready to go:

What's the NPC's name?
What does this NPC look like?
How does this NPC typically operate?
What does this NPC want?
What does this NPC's presence in a scene mean for the PCs?

Given this list, I keep a list of names handy for whenever I have to come up with a new NPC. Nothing breaks the tension of the game more than when the Game Master has to stop and think up a name for the character the players are currently interacting with. I’ll write down ten or fifteen names and what species they’d belong to… just in case. This is one Game Master trick that always comes in handy.

Where Can Your NPCs Take You?

Hopefully, these tips about handling non-player characters will help you flesh out your game.

All it takes is asking questions and coming up with enough of a story for you, as the Game Master, to do some riffing. You just need to know enough about your NPCs to help your players visualize them and enjoy interactions that flow naturally.

Once you get that down, your games will be much more exciting and detailed, and your players will feel like you’ve dropped them in a Star Wars galaxy that is fully realized and in which every character they encounter has his or her own exciting story.

When he's not making life difficult for his friends' small band of Rebels, Bryan Young is a writer, podcaster, and gamer. He writes regularly for StarWars.com and Star Wars Insider, and hosts the Star Wars podcast Full of Sith. You can follow him on Twitter @Swankmotron.

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GM Guide: The Hero's Journey

Published 31 July 2017 | The Force Awakens Beginner Game

GM Guide: The Hero's Journey

Narrating Your Star Wars™ Roleplaying Games

"The belonging you seek is not behind you. It is ahead. I am no Jedi, but I know the Force."
–Maz Kanata

There's no more immersive experience of the Star Wars universe than that provided by any or all of the three different Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars™ roleplaying systems — Age of Rebellion™, Edge of the Empire™, and Force and Destiny™.

All three systems allow you and your friends to share thrilling adventures in the Star Wars universe, and all three utilize the same dice and core mechanics. Moreover, you can dive quickly into any of these game lines by starting with its Beginner Game. Regardless of the line, a Star Wars Roleplaying Beginner Game offers a unique and memorable take on the core Star Wars experience, allowing players and Game Masters to learn the game even as they play.

But where do you go from your Beginner Game? Perhaps you have a fantastic series of Star Wars adventures racing through your mind, and you want to share them with your friends. How can you use the game's narrative dice as part of your effort?

Today, guest writer Bryan Young draws upon his experience as a Star Wars roleplaying Game Master in order to help you make the dice your ally.

Guest Writer Bryan Young on Using the Power of the Dice

There are a lot of newer Star Wars gamers who opened up their Star Wars™ Roleplaying Beginner Games, ran the box's well-structured game, and are now looking to make their next game even better.

As you make your way on that journey from gaming Padawan to Master, having adventures of your own in the Star Wars universe, one of the most important things you can learn to improve your gaming experience is to focus on the stories you can tell using the dice.

The Star Wars Roleplaying Games from Fantasy Flight Games are unique from any other game I’ve played. With them, you can have wonderful things happen in tandem with otherwise unsuccessful rolls, but you can also have horrible things happen when you’ve clearly aced a task.

What happens when our heroes successfully convince a crime lord's henchmen to lead them to a secret weapons depot (success and Triumph)—only to find it more heavily guarded than they expected (Threat)?

This apparent contradiction lends itself to the sort of high-adventure storytelling of Star Wars movies, but can be a little difficult for players to get used to. The system asks a lot from the players, but it can create some of the most fun story moments you’ve ever had in a game.

What Stories Will Your Dice Tell?

If your group has players accustomed to other games, it might be difficult to get them to participate in telling stories with the dice, but once you do, you’re going to have a much more collaborative and fun game. Think about all the great moments in Star Wars movies where something good and bad happened at the same time and it helped tell a much more thrilling story.

A really great way to get your players accustomed to this is by offering all sorts of examples you’d find acceptable in play.

One of my favorite moments involved a starfighter battle in an asteroid field. One of my players was chasing a TIE fighter through the asteroids, dodging around back and forth, and rolled to shoot the TIE. Naturally, the difficulty of hitting the TIE fighter was really high, and my player missed the shot. But it still yielded a Triumph result. That’s when my player offered that the stray shot hit an asteroid and altered its trajectory… and that asteroid hit another—right into the TIE fighter!

There are many other ways to use your dice results. Fail that stealth roll but got a Triumph? Maybe the guard took a break to go to the refresher station so your stealthiness doesn’t matter. Or imagine that your players are rolling for their hyperspace navigation and score a bunch of Advantage, even as they fail what they want to do; maybe they manage to come out of hyperspace early, realizing that if they’d have done what they intended, they'd have fallen into a trap.

On the other side of the token, what if your player rolls a success along with a significant amount of Threat? Maybe she manages to blast the stormtrooper as which she's aiming at, and he’s knocked forward into the console he’s guarding, opening the blast door behind him.

Another of my favorite game moments happened when one of my players was shooting at a stormtrooper in the rafters. The player rolled enough Threat that the shot missed the trooper, but hit the rigging that kept a TIE fighter attached to the hangar ceiling. The TIE came crashing down, pinning the players in their position and made the rest of their job a lot more difficult.

These scenarios increase the tension of the situation, sure, and you, as the Game Master, will have to decide what’s appropriate. Some players might not be ready to add too much danger to their games, so you must also make sure they have the tools they need to have fun.

Know Your Role

With FFG's Star Wars Roleplaying Games and the narrative dice system, it’s not just the Game Master who adds to the twists in your story, but it’s important that it's clear the Game Master does have the ultimate say in what is permissible.

It’s also a lot more fun to use the dice to help turn the story on its ear than to use them to add simple bonuses. Being a Game Master who works with the players toward roleplaying of this sort ensures that your sessions are more about storytelling than being a slave to the numbers of the rules. And in my opinion, it creates a much more rewarding style of play.

Work with your players to get more creative in your use of the dice, and I guarantee you’ll have more fun gaming!

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A Call for Heroes

Published 13 September 2016 | The Force Awakens Beginner Game

A Call for Heroes

Continue Your Adventures Beyond The Force Awakens™ Beginner Game

"Through the ages, I've seen evil take many forms. The Sith. The Empire. Today, it is the First Order. Their shadow is spreading across the galaxy. We must face them. Fight them. All of us."
–Maz Kanata

Your struggles against the First Order begin with The Force Awakens™ Beginner Game, but they don't end with it.

Not only does The Force Awakens Beginner Game come with a learn-as-you-go adventure and character portfolios designed to help you jump feet-first into the action, it also contains information on advancing your heroes and an abridged version of the basic Star Wars® Roleplaying Game ruleset.

These allow you to continue your group's adventures pretty much anywhere in the galaxy, and you can add greater focus and depth by incorporating materials from any of the existing systems, Age of Rebellion™, Edge of the Empire™, or Force and Destiny™.

There is also another option—the free downloadable adventure A Call for Heroes (pdf, 10.4 MB).

Face Them. Fight Them.

Set after the events of Discovery on Jakku, A Call for Heroes offers you and your friends a chance to join the Resistance and take a stand against the First Order.

Toward the end of Discovery on Jakku, the heroes have likely made contact with the Resistance and joined the struggle against the First Order. At the very least, they now have good reasons to resent the rising power of this new state, even if they were not able to reach the Resistance. Now A Call for Heroes allows your group to follow up on the events of Discovery on Jakku and strike out against the newly revealed oppressors.

Like Discovery on Jakku, A Call for Heroes is designed to guide players along their continued experiences in the Star Wars Roleplaying Game. The Game Master will find useful sidebars that may help him or her adapt the adventure for groups that didn't necessarily follow the most "obvious" course through the Beginner Game. There are other tips, as well, for pacing sophisticated encounters. And you'll even find a number of suggestions for how you might continue your group's adventures beyond the scope of A Call for Heroes.

Additionally, the adventure offers you and your friends an opportunity to take advantage of the guidelines for character advancement that are included in The Force Awakens Beginner Game. Like Fira Bon, each of the pre-generated characters from the Beginner Game comes with an abridged version of the talent tree for his or her specialization.

Along with the rules the game introduces for skill training, these talent trees allow you to spend the experience points you gain from your adventures. And, of course, your Game Master will find valuable information about assigning experience points at the end of the Beginner Game's adventure, Discovery on Jakku.

Double Your Reward

There's more to The Force Awakens Beginner Game than its learn-as-you-go adventure. But that adventure, Discovery on Jakku, is clearly the most important component within the box.

Download A Call for Heroes (pdf, 10.4 MB)

It's what brings your characters together, it's what allows you to use your maps and dice, and it's what gives meaning to your Game Master's efforts, instructing him or her in the ways of the Force the whole way through.

By taking a minute now to download A Call for Heroes, you effectively double your reward from the Beginner Game. This free adventure is just as long, detailed, and thrilling as Discovery on Jakku. Download the adventure, and you gain twice as much opportunity to imagine yourself as a part of the Star Wars galaxy.

And if you haven't picked up your copy of The Force Awakens Beginner Game, it's not too late. The game is available at hobby retailers everywhere. Pick up your copy today!

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Who Will You Become?

Published 3 August 2016 | The Force Awakens Beginner Game

Who Will You Become?

A Look at Running The Force Awakens™ Beginner Game

"She's just beginning to test her powers. The longer it takes to find her, the more dangerous she becomes."
–Kylo Ren

Designed as an easy introduction to Star Wars roleplaying for fans of all levels of experience, The Force Awakens™ Beginner Game comes with four character portfolios and one learn-as-you-go adventure.

The Force Awakens Beginner Game also comes with all the dice you'll need, as well as a pair of maps and a number of tokens help you envision your characters' movements in relation to their environment and the other characters around them.

Of all these things, the character portfolios and learn-as-you-go adventure are the most important. They provide you all the information you need in order to imagine yourself as a character and enjoy a riveting Star Wars adventure; they are the elements that make the Beginner Game accessible to players of all skill levels.

In our last preview, we argued that the most important question you'll face as one of the game's heroes is "What will you do?" And we looked at how the information in your character's portfolio may offer you some guidance. Today, we ask a different question: Who will you become?

The Game Master

When you and your friends sit down to play The Force Awakens Beginner Game, you won't all become heroes. One of you will become something greater. One of you will become the Game Master.

Who or what is the Game Master? In short, the Game Master—or "GM"—is the player responsible for weaving together the whole imaginary realm in which the heroes interact. You're not the bad guys. You're not working against the players. If anything, you're more like the Force, binding the galaxy together.

Hero players each control a single character—their heroes. The GM controls all the characters in a story that aren't player characters. The GM also creates the worlds and environments in which the heroes find themselves. And he or she gives life to each beat of the game's ongoing narrative, investing each moment with meaningful stakes, and arbitrating whether or not the heroes' actions may successfully alter the course of events in their favor.

It may sound like a daunting role, but the Game Master's contributions are absolutely central to your roleplaying experience. And The Force Awakens Beginner Game makes it possible for anyone to step into this role and succeed with ease. Here, you'll find that the key is the learn-as-you-go-adventure, Discovery on Jakku.

Discovery on Jakku is contained within an Adventure Book that's part adventure and part rulebook. But you won't have flip back and forth from one to the other. Instead, the adventure is written and organized so that you can find the rules sitting along the first instances to which they become pertinent. More than this, it's written so that you'll start at a relatively simple level of complexity and work your way more deeply into the rules and the different possibilities they introduce.

By the time that the heroes are ready to start looking beyond their immediate safety and toward exploring more far-reaching plans, you'll have come across enough of the rules and story, as GM, to be able to incorporate your friends' designs. And, as with all the best roleplaying games, the possibilities are staggering.

First, after Discovery on Jakku begins with a narrowly focused sequence of action, it turns and widens, becoming a suddenly more expansive and open-ended adventure with real potential for the heroes' decisions to make an impact on the fate of the galaxy.
Second, The Force Awakens Beginner Game allows you to carry your adventures even beyond the scope of Discovery on Jakku. A slim rulebook of forty-eight pages summarizes enough of the core Star Wars roleplaying rules to allow you and your friends to take your characters into new adventures of your own design. You'll also find a beautiful starmap to help you do just that.

The Dark Side and the Light

In Star Wars, there is a balance in the Force. In Star Wars roleplaying, there must be a balance between the contributions of the hero players and the Game Master. When you sit down for your first adventures with The Force Awakens Beginner Game, who will you become?

Look to start your adventures with The Force Awakens Beginner Game tomorrow! We'll have copies of the game at our booth in Gen Con Indy, and even if you're not able to join us at Gen Con, you can pick up your copy at your favorite local retailer. The game will be available at retailers throughout the U.S. Availability in other regions may vary.

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What Will You Do?

Published 26 July 2016 | The Force Awakens Beginner Game

What Will You Do?

A Look at Roleplaying with The Force Awakens™ Beginner Game

When you're given the chance to fight the spead of evil, will you take it? Or will you flee? What will you do?

That's the question that's at the heart of any roleplaying game: "What will you do?"

It's the question at the heart of The Force Awakens™ Beginner Game. It's the question that can drive the veteran of a hundreds Star Wars battles to achieve new heights, and if you're a complete roleplaying novice, it's a question that can sweep you away from the sands of Jakku and onto an adventure that may change the course of the galaxy!

Life as a Restless Pilot

When you sit down to play The Force Awakens Beginner Game, you become one of four characters from the Star Wars universe. You might become an alien like Durm Borno the Abednedo Colonist. Or you might remain human, like Fira Bon the Soldier, Tiras Or'un the Explorer, or Mhar'li the Ace pilot. Whichever character you become, you will find all the information you need to assume that character's identity in his or her character portfolio.

For now, we'll imagine that you assume the role of the human Ace, Mhar'li. Like each of the other characters, Mhar'li is defined by an eight-page character portfolio that offers insight into her personality through a bit of backstory and that uses an assortment of numbers and charts to describe her specific skills and talents. Both the backstory and the charts are important, albeit for different reasons.

When you play The Force Awakens The Beginner Game, your goal is to enjoy an immersive and collaborative storytelling experience within the Star Wars universe. Along with the other heroes, you arrive to Jakku in the middle of a dramatic situation rife with possibility, and your choices may have far-reaching consequences. Your character background helps you understand who Mhar'li is, why she's in the adventure, and why she's joined up with a band of nomads outside a salvage site on Jakku.

While Mhar'li's backstory specificially avoids confining your actions throughout the course of the adventure, it gives you enough information so that you can take the actions you think Mhar'li might take… even if they're different from what you might do in her place.

Some of the things you'll want to do as Mhar'li may come with a risk of failure. For example, you might want to scavenge a crashed ship for the specific part you need to repair your ship's engine. There's no guarantee that you'll succeed—especially if the situation is further complicated by the threat of laser fire!

Whenever you want to pursue a course of action that might fail, your Game Master will ask you to make a skill check. To do this, you'll assemble a pool of dice determined by the difficulty of the task as well as your character's ranks in the appropriate skill, plus the associated characteristic. If you roll more than , you succeed.

Naturally, since Mhar'li's character portfolio identifies all her skills and characteristics, you can identify which of her skills—and, therefore, her potential courses of action—are more likely to lead to positive results. As Mhar'li, you're great while piloting, and you're great with blasters. But you're only mediocre with ship repairs. So when you get caught in the middle of a shoot-out, you might decided to abandon your scavenger hunt in favor of returning fire.

Time to Act

…You run through the airlock and slam it shut. There’s no lock, so it won’t hold the Strus Clan back for long.

The hallway just beyond the entrance is cluttered with crates and piles of junk. The light panels flicker fitfully, leaving deep pools of shadow in the alcoves on either side of the door. Some of the crates are large enough that, if pushed onto their side, they could serve as a solid barricade. Parts of the hallway are narrow enough that one resolute hero could make a stand there to stop intruders from advancing deeper into the ship.

At the far end of the hallway, Misha Vontoba orders a group of nomads to take cover or flee deeper into the ship, her clear voice ringing through the halls. Some of the nomads ignore her, cowering in corners and wailing. If you can’t hold off the Strus Clan’s gangsters, these people are done for. You have just enough time to do one thing to prepare for the attack. What do you do?

Allied with nomadic scavengers. Thrust into conflict with vicious gangsters. Stranded on the sands of Jakku. This isn't a time for modesty. This is a time to summon your courage and do what your favorite heroes from the Star Wars movies would do. This is time to act!

What will you do when The Force Awakens Beginner Game arrives at your local retailer? Will you rise to the occasion and help those in need? Will you be a hero? Who will you become?

The Force Awakens Beginner Game is scheduled to arrive at retailers early next month. Be sure to pre-order your copy today!

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The Force Is Calling to You

Published 4 May 2016 | The Force Awakens Beginner Game

The Force Is Calling to You

Enjoy New Adventures in the Star Wars™ Galaxy with The Force Awakens™ Beginner Game

"The Force, it's calling to you. Just let it in."
–Maz Kanata

Take your first steps into a galaxy full of adventure with The Force Awakens™ Beginner Game!

Coming in the third quarter of 2016, The Force Awakens Beginner Game allows you to enjoy the action and energy of Star Wars: The Force Awakens through the lens of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game.

Note: Unlike our other Beginner Games, The Force Awakens Beginner Game will not be followed by a new Star Wars RPG game line. Instead, it draws upon the core mechanics shared by Star Wars®: Age of Rebellion™, Star Wars®: Edge of the Empire™, and Star Wars®: Force and Destiny™. Players interested in continuing their Star Wars adventures can do so through any of these fully compatible systems.

You and your friends will travel to Jakku, the remote desert planet above which was waged one of the last great battles of the Galactic Civil War. In that battle, the Empire suffered a horrific defeat, and scores of its warships plummeted into Jakku's arid sands. Shortly afterward, the remnants of the Empire and the nascent New Republic signed their peace treaty, and civilization quickly forgot about Jakku. In the following decades of peace, the planet became a haven for junk scavengers, criminal elements, and those trying to stay hidden from the rest of the galaxy.

It is on this forsaken planet—the same planet that saw the fateful introductions of Rey, BB-8, and Finn—that your adventures begin.

You Are the Heroes

Whether you are new to roleplaying games or a veteran gamer looking to enjoy adventures set amid the conflicts between the Resistance and the First Order, The Force Awakens Beginner Game carries you as deeply into the themes and excitement of the Star Wars universe as you can go. You and your friends become the heroes of the story. You must use your wits to outmaneuver your rivals, and when that's not possible, you must draw your blasters and fight for your lives!

The beauty of roleplaying games lie in their ability to wrap you in a story that you help push forward through your character's decisions and actions. In the adventure that comes with The Force Awakens Beginner Game, you and your friends will determine the fate of valuable secrets lost during the Battle of Jakku. When a band of nomads searching the wastes of Jakku came across a wrecked New Republic corvette, they accessed the remains of its central computer and found evidence of something extremely valuable hidden in a secret vault somewhere within the ship.

However, because the rumors of this secret spread quickly across the desert wastes, they have attracted the attention of the vicious Strus Clan who intend to claim the wreck and its secrets for themselves. Now, as they threaten violence against the nomads, you will determine the fate of a decades-old secret formerly coveted by both the New Republic and the Galactic Empire…

Discover Your Story as You Play

As with all the best roleplaying games, The Force Awakens Beginner Game allows you to weave your story on more than one level. Even as your characters are fighting for their lives and rounding the next twist in their action-packed adventure, you and your friends are developing their personalities and determining whether or not your characters will be able to meet their personal goals.

The Force Awakens Beginner Game launches you into this character-focused side of roleplaying by allowing you to choose from any one of four different heroes. Whether you play as the veteran soldier, the ace pilot, the desert explorer, or the peace-loving Abednedo colonist, you step into the shoes of a fully realized person, complete with a unique history and skill set.

You'll find your character's history and motivations described on the back of your four-page character portfolio. Each has been carefully developed to ensure you have enough information to get a sense of that character's unique approach to the adventure, but to leave you enough room to portray the character's actions and growth according to your own tastes.

The Easiest Game to Master

There is, however, a dark truth to The Force Awakens Beginner Game. It is that when your group sits down to play, not all of you will become heroes. One of you will assume the role of Game Master, and as Game Master, you will be the invisible hand behind all the galaxy's evils. Nonetheless, you will not be evil, yourself. Instead, as Game Master, your role is more akin to that of the Force, the power that flows through all things—dark and light alike.

The Game Master is the most important player in any roleplaying session, responsible for presenting the world that the hero characters inhabit. As the story moves forward, it is the Game Master's responsibility to have villains, allies, and bystanders react to the heroes' actions. It is your duty to help the other players understand the different actions they may take and to interpret the results of their efforts. And The Force Awakens Beginner Game makes it easy for anyone to step into the Game Master's role.

Designed to be a "learn as you go" experience for both players and Game Masters, The Force Awakens Beginner Game provides a complete adventure, along with helpful tips for running the characters through its different scenes. You'll find all the applicable rules neatly summarized next to the situations in which they'll first come into play. Even with zero previous roleplaying experience, you'll be able to weave together a thrilling and flawless Star Wars adventure for you and your friends to enjoy.

These Are Your First Steps

Loved The Force Awakens? The Force Awakens Beginner Game is your chance to take your next steps into the Star Wars universe and live through a brand-new Star Wars adventure!

Even though the Beginner Game is a standalone introduction to Star Wars roleplaying, it is possible for your characters to continue their adventures elsewhere in the galaxy. In fact, there are so many ways to enjoy the Star Wars galaxy, that Fantasy Flight Games has created three separate systems, all of which are fully compatible with The Force Awakens Beginner Game and with each other, but that each pursue a different experience within the Star Wars universe. You can learn more about these systems and how they related to The Force Awakens Beginner Game by visiting our The Force Awakens Beginner Game website.

The Force Awakens Beginner Game is scheduled to arrive to retailers in the third quarter of 2016!

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