What Do I Know?

In the Age of Rebellion adventure Onslaught on Arda I, a new mechanic is introduced to the Star Wars Fantasy Flight game system.  It’s a simple mechanic, but it’s basically an event based timer that lets you track the progression of time without getting into the minutia of how much time various actions might take.

Essentially, there is a track with a certain number.  Once each of those numbers have been ticked off, an event happens.  As this is used in the adventure, what this means is that each time a character goes to one of the scenes, a number ticks off the timer, limiting how many of these scenes that a character can take part in before an event happens.

This got me to thinking about hyperspace travel.  How fast ships move in Star Wars are problematic.  We know exactly how far apart planets are  (at least in the Legends version of the universe), but not how fast the ships are.  We’ve gotten various ship speeds from various RPGs over the years, but these don’t always match up.

In the movies and the television series, ships move at the speed of plot, and it never seems to take more than a day for people to get even from one end of the galaxy to another.  The only thing that seems to matter is the relative speed of ships with different hyperdrive ratings.

Putting the new rules together with the “speed of plot” concept, I thought, what would happen if you came up with a chart for “travel events,” events that happen after a ship has been traveling for a longer period of time.

My thought is that you might have an Event Track of 100.  Each time the ship jumps to hyperspace, the Event Track ticks off a number equal to the hyperdrive rating.  Once the group hits 100, roll on the Travel Event Chart.

These results do make more sense for a game where the group is more “on their own” and without a support structure. For example, this chart is set up more for Edge of the Empire or some flavors of Force and Destiny rather than Age of Rebellion  (Age of Rebellion travel events might revolve more around military movements and forces arrayed against the Rebels involved).

Keep in mind, this is a first pass.  There may be some fine tuning that makes it work better in a campaign, and the chart may be fleshed out better.  For now, I would love to hear back from anyone that might want to try these out in their games.