Quick Question about stranding characters on a planet

[death_jester]

Part of a campaign I'm thinking of running is going to be to stand a group of players on a planet for several game sessions. They are going to have to make friends with the locals and assume some leadership roles in order to get out of the situation they are in.

The planet is going to be an old Sith slave world where they bred with the locals but later abandoned due to other concerns. The technology level will be very low, think about stone age, so that they do not have the tools to build the players ships and not convenient outlet for their weapons either. The players are going to get dumped off in a rescue pod so no readily available ships to get them off the planet.

My question is has anyone had any experience with running players that cannot run around the galaxy? Does it kill the flavor of Star Wars if they cannot leave the location? What kinds of consideration should I be thinking about for the game, mechanics wise, I have the story and plot sort of ready but any suggestions are good?

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Peace
Jester
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Happiness is a warm blaster.

[Ankhanu]

You won't want to leave them there TOO long. While space travel isn't an absolutely necessary aspect of Star Wars, technology is... pretty much as much so as the Force (which can play a fairly background role in a story, it doesn't actually need to be used outright).

One thing to remember; one planet does not mean one setting. You can run an entire campaign on a single planet and use a multitude of different settings and situations. You're only limiting yourself by your own imagination... and cutting out space settings. You could have ancient ruins, deep forests, jungles, deserts, plains, mountains, etc etc etc depending on where you are planetside, how far your players end up traveling and how you design this planet.

That said, it would be good to reintroduce elements of the greater Galaxy at some later point in the story; perhaps some sort of scouting vessel arrives, or left behind ancient Sith technology (ie. starship) they can manage to salvage and limp back to known space. It may even help the characters (and players) not take galactic tech and the conveniences they offer for granted (which I find many players do).

It's doable, but will require some solid planning on your part. Good luck.
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[Grimace]

While space travel isn't an absolute necessity of Star Wars, as was mentioned, you don't want to keep them stranded on the planet for too long. One thing you can do that will continue to help with the Star Wars flavor, even with them stuck on a stone age planet, is to give them some of the Star Wars technology to use while on the stone age planet. So while the natives are using slings, spears, maybe bow and arrows, and axes, the PCs would have their blasters and medpacs and glowrods and other fancy Star Wars technology. Sure they don't have a ship, but they should be able to at least have some gear. Even an escape pod would have some emergency survival gear aboard it to help augment what the PCs might have been carrying at the time they needed to use the escape pod.

It could be one of those situations where they start out realizing they're stuck for a bit. Find the natives. Maybe a fight or two to start out until they may be able to communicate with the natives and realize that they're not an enemy, they're just uneducated and scared. Even if the PCs don't become friends with the natives, you could have them stumble across some ruins that might indicate that there once used to be Sith on this planet, many hundreds or thousands of years ago. Throw some more clues and things at them, or (if they become friends with the natives) have the natives show them a "fear" place....a place where the natives don't go because anyone who goes there never comes back. If you can make it tantalizing enough, say their portable scanner is picking up a very faint energy reading from the "fear" place or the see some metal where the stone age people claim to never go. So they investigate, fight their way through either some wild creatures that have taken up home there or still-operating automated defense systems (or even droids), and find a long lost, long forgotten Sith structure that contains a dusty, long neglected but still operational Sith starship. They have to figure out how to get the ship out, as over the years a forest has grown over the launch bay doors and such, but it'll give them something to shoot for.

Eventually you let them get it out, maybe with help of the natives, maybe not...up to you and their decisions, they manage to barely get it powered up, and *shooom!* they're off the planet in a thousand year old craft.

Of course you can throw other plot complications at them depending on what they do. Maybe if they make friends with the natives, just as they're getting ready to leave a ship picks up the emergency distress beacon and comes to check it out. It's a pirate ship, or Imperials, or basically someone that's certainly NOT going to be friendly to the natives. So the PCs then have to decide whether just to take their chance and leave on the Sith ship, or to stay and help the natives to defeat the pirates. Then you could have the Star Wars technology of the PCs, maybe with some ancient Sith weapons thrown in (found in the Sith building), and the stone age technology of the natives, going against the Star Wars technology and meanness of the pirates.

Lots of oppotunity for a lot of different things to do. You could keep them on the planet for longer if they really seem to get into the game and you keep the challenges interesting and fresh, and not have everything figured out by simply shooting their way out of things. Maybe some of the challenges can only be beaten by using some form of stone age technology. If they seem bored pretty quickly because of lack of moving around, then you can speed things up either with the Sith artifacts (ship) being found or some sort of ship arrive to investigate the distress signal from the escape pod. The ship will, of course, have to NOT be friendly, so you can have some blaster fights, throw in some stone age spears and slings to help out (or hinder, depending) and let the PCs try to take the new ship for their own.

Hope this helps with some ideas.

[death_jester]

[DarthMortis]

[death_jester]

[Esoomian]

[DarthMortis]