Star Wars Miniatures
Campaign Ideas

If you are lucky enough to have a larger group of players, the idea of running a campaign eventually will arise.

Many miniatures campaigns share a common fate. Often a moderator puts a lot of work into creating a campaign setting with maps, carefully balanced starting forces for all the players, and complex rules for determining resources and reinforcements based on victories and losses, then organizes all the players into a schedule of games to be played. Soon after starting the games some players will drop out due to scheduling problems and new players will want to join late. More players drop out as they lose a few games and are told they can't get the reinforcements they need to remain competitive. Eventually the whole thing implodes.

A better idea is to create a loosely organized campaign setting that provides a background story to explain the battles. It is more important to have a sense of who the different factions are and why they are fighting than it is to have detailed maps. A moderator can help players create stories about their battles, and the wins and losses can influence the progression of the stories without necessarily putting limits on the games played in the future. This kind of setting can encourage creativity in staging battles instead of trying to force players to play specific battles they might not want to play. Players dropping in and out will not cause a crisis, and no one will be forced out because they lost control of territory and resources. And favorite characters can always be brought back to life next week, with a full complement of troops to lead.

One way to combine a formal campaign structure with unstructured game playing is for the moderator to say that all of the battles played in a particular week will decide the fate of one city or planet. (Games Workshop sometimes does this with its games on a world-wide basis, staging promotional 'campaigns' announced in White Dwarf magazine.) The players can play any sized battles they want using any troops on any terrain, as long as one side is identified as pro-Rebel and one side as pro-Imperial. The total number of games won for each side will determine which side wins the greater strategic campaign objective.

Depending on the scale of the campaign setting players could be the leaders of different systems, planets, continents, or cities. Troops can be selected to represent the forces of the different home bases, so Rebel players could have fleet trooper uniforms with different color schemes, Hoth-style uniforms, Endor-style gear, or other colors of camo as appropriate for different areas.

My favorite idea is to have players take on the roles of ship captains, each commanding a force representing the crew and passengers of a particular ship. Have each one pick a ship type, name the ship and its captain, and flesh out the main officers as heroes. Battles could take place anywhere the characters or crew would be likely to go, especially in spaceports and on ship decks during boarding actions.

Some specific ideas for themes include:

• An Alderanean nobleman in a corvette full of fleet troopers and refugees, trying to hook up with Leia and any other survivors from that planet.
• A Rebel major with a stolen Imperial assault shuttle full of commandos, always trying to sneak in an out of secure areas for hit and run raids, stealing new Imperial recognition codes along the way with the help of some battered R2 units.
• A freighter full of escaped Wookiees (or other alien slaves) harassing Imperial forces wherever they can.
• A detachment of Imperial troops from a particular destroyer, trying to outperform the troops from rival destroyers in order to stay in the Emperor's and Vader's good graces.
• A rich merchant trying to make a living despite the disruptions caused by the Rebellion, with a well-trained group of bodyguards to escort her through the spaceports.
• Corporate security troops as described in the "Companion" or inspired by Lando's Bespin police force, protecting an expensive corporate owned ship and inspecting corporate facilities on various worlds.
• One of the few mid-sized navy vessels of a small independant system not loyal to the Rebels or the Empire, watching for incursions into their sovereign space, which happens to be strategically located for the placement of communications relays and hyperspace monitoring equipment.
• An alien patrol ship trying to keep Imperial slavers away from the homeworld.
• A smuggler ship with a mixed human and alien crew who try to evade any kind of authority.
• A ship full of pirates who try to capture everyone else's ships and equipment on the ground or in space.
• Mercenaries, of course. If someone likes to do conversions they could all be Gamorreans or some other race (conversions will be necessary to have a variety of weapon types).
• Bounty hunters, of course. These could be a Rodian hit squad if you have enough of the two different Rodian figures.
• If you don't mind a lot of force powers flying around you could have an underground cell of young Jedi in training or a coven of dark Jedi sneaking about the galaxy on secret missions.

These identities will turn into unit histories after a few battles, and will naturally lead to new scenario ideas all the time. This gives the games the feel of a campaign with ongoing stories without ever bogging down in a formal campaign structure. Players would still be free to try out different units as their ships took on passengers or hired new crew.

Back to my Star Wars Miniatures Scenarios page.