Poll: Heavily Non-Canon Star Wars

[Longspeak]

Hi all,

I've been toying with an idea for a while, and a friend suggests I check to see if there's interest before I got too far down the rabbit hole.

I ran, for a few years, a Star Wars Game in which I changed the Canon just a bit. At the end of Episode VI, Luke Turned, Vader Took Over, and the Rebellion was Crushed. Set Twenty Years later, new heroes carried on the fight. That ran for a few years, and the PCs ultimately won after several adventures and much new history

The idea that's been in my head recently is a sequel to THAT.

In a galaxy rich with NPCs both new and familiar, with history both new and familiar, new Heroes would begin by helping to remake the Jedi as the Republic reemerges into a new era of peace. I expect some sandboxing, but also some goals of their own, some Imperial remnants and other fallout from the war and a few things new to the story.

I'm trying to see the the concept itself holds any interest before I even consider any further details, like a system I'd used, when and how we'd play. My son says people won't want to play a games with a heavily non-canon setting. He says "To them, it won't even be Star Wars. My friend says he's play... but he was in the original and knows its history.

This is mainly a yes/no, but there's a third option here for the inevitable 'other.'

 

[Willie the Duck]

An alternate universe where evil won, and some of the good guys ended up as bad guys? Does everyone happen to have goatees?

 

[MarkB]

If I'm going to join a Star Wars campaign, I'd prefer it to start out as the actual Star Wars, not someone's fan-fiction alt-history version with its own complex backstory.

I've nothing against then proceeding to go wildly off-canon, I'd just prefer it to be something we do together in the course of play.

 

[TwoSix]

Absolutely I'd play. I enjoy the aesthetics of Star Wars far more than I enjoy the "canonicity" of the movies. The best Star Wars stuff, for me, is the stuff outside of the movies, like the Old Republic stuff.

 

[Reynard]

One thing in my gaming bucket list is to run a Star Wars campaign under the premise that only ANH is canon and everything else is up for grabs. I would do it with some game system that encouraged everyone at the table to fill in the blanks and invent elements of the setting, not just the GM.

What exactly were the Clone Wars? Did Vader kill Luke's father? Why? Is the Force just a hokey old religion?

 

[Riley]

One thing in my gaming bucket list is to run a Star Wars campaign under the premise that only ANH is canon and everything else is up for grabs.

This. For fun, I’d add in the wahoo oddities of the first Star Wars comic books and maybe the early daily newspaper strip.

I’m not saying those are better stories, but I suspect it’d be a better RPG setting than the standard. Not nearly so constrained.

 

[Umbran]

The idea that's been in my head recently is a sequel to THAT.

So, I have played non-canon Star Wars in the past (in which the war with Darth Revan ended with neither Sith nor Jedi a going concern). But, unless I played in your previous game, sequel to alt history is uninteresting to me.

 

[amethal]

One thing in my gaming bucket list is to run a Star Wars campaign under the premise that only ANH is canon and everything else is up for grabs. I would do it with some game system that encouraged everyone at the table to fill in the blanks and invent elements of the setting, not just the GM.

What exactly were the Clone Wars? Did Vader kill Luke's father? Why? Is the Force just a hokey old religion?

I'm sure I've seen a thread about that somewhere. (Maybe you did too?)

There was some stuff on it that had never occurred to me, like Star Destroyers not carrying any tie fighters (since we never saw any launched in ANH other than from the Death Star).

 

[TwoSix]

One thing in my gaming bucket list is to run a Star Wars campaign under the premise that only ANH is canon and everything else is up for grabs. I would do it with some game system that encouraged everyone at the table to fill in the blanks and invent elements of the setting, not just the GM.

What exactly were the Clone Wars? Did Vader kill Luke's father? Why? Is the Force just a hokey old religion?

I love it.

Personal addition: Obi-Wan wasn't confused when he said "Your father is dead" to Luke. Anakin was killed at the end of the Clone Wars by Darth Vader. Plot twist: Darth Vader is a clone of Anakin created by Palpatine, who was entirely aware of Anakin's status as the Chosen One who would "bring balance to the Force."

Whether the real Anakin or the clone is Luke and Leia's father is an unknowable enigma.

It would be really fun to play Luke, Leia, Han, et al. and do a post-ANH alt-history of the rebellion.

 

[MGibster]

There's been so much expanded universe Star Wars stuff that I can't possibly keep up with it all. But I'm going to stick with the big events as they happened in the movies. I don't think I'll ever run a game set during the sequel trilogy so that's a non-issue for me. But if I set a game during the Rebellion era, the PCs aren't going to be the ones who blow up the Death Star, throw the Emperor down a shaft, or kill Boba Fett. They're going to be having their own adventures in the Star Wars universe.

A few years ago a new King Arthur movie came out directed by Guy Ritchie, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. I'm no expert on Arthurian legends, but I do know they've changed over the centuries. I'm sure there's some Welshman upset about the inclusion of that French upstart, but most of us are comfortable with Lancelot du Lac. More than that, we'd miss him if he wasn't there. What I'm trying to establish here is that I didn't expect Ritchie's version to perfectly adhere to past versions of Arthurian tales. It'd be impossible for him to do so because there's not just one version.

But in Legend of the Sword, Uther Pendragon kills Mordred at the beginning of the movie. Pretty radical departure, right? We haven't even gotten started. Uther's brother Vortigern stages a coup and becomes king while a young Arthur flees to London. You remember this part of the Arthurian legend, right? The part where Arthur lives with a bunch of prostitutes and becomes a crime boss in London?

I might have been able to enjoy the movie if it wasn't supposed to be King Arthur. As it was, the changes were so radical that I can only conclude they used the name Arthur because everyone recognizes it. The same thing goes for Star Wars. If someone radically alters the setting then what's even the point of playing Star Wars? I'd rather go play something else.