Star Wars RPG Story Framework: Opening Scene

I primarily put these tables together for my solitaire and cooperatively gamemastered roleplaying sessions but they are broadly useful for anyone trying to come up with a dramatic opening Star Wars scene. The inspiration for these tables comes primarily from thinking about the opening “In Media Res” scenes most Star Wars books, comics, movies, and televisions shows use to thrust the character into action.

Because I mostly play in either West End Games Star Wars or another roleplaying game that uses only regular six-sided dice, each of the random tables is keyed to something that can use them (rather than other polyhedrals.)

Determine Era & Opening Scene

It is important to pick an Era because this will frame the context for all of the conflict in your game. I picked the Eras from Disney’s current canon alignment to make life easier when looking things up on Wookiepedia but YMMV.

The purpose of the opening scene prompts are to setup the starting environment your character(s) will find themselves dropped into. Think about the prompts and try to imagine what the environment is like. Is it in-hospitable? overcrowded? under attack?

To begin, pick or roll on the following table to the set stage for your Star Wars solo adventure:

To determine the full objective of your opening scene, recall the Opening Scene: Objective result and roll again on this table:

Now determine which sub-area of your starting locale your scene will begin in:

Roll on this loosely named “Biomes” table to determine the dominant “terrain” feature:

If you roll up “planet adjacent” from the Space table you might pick or roll (d6) on one of 1-2) Barren, 3-4) Rural, or 5-6) Urban and then roll a d6 again to determine the exact nature of the nearby planet.

To complete our environment we will determine what our “In Media Res” state is:

While “in chase” or “in battle” paint a clear picture of the state of things “in transit” gives you a brief moment of the “calm before the storm.” Your character(s) is in hyperspace or an arrival approach of some sort. Perhaps they are giving one last speech before they brazenly attack or stealthily breach their next location. Maybe there is a violent storm that is preventing the characters from reaching their first destination.

Dice Rolling Methods: In Order or Upfront

One method to consider besides procedurally rolling on each table in order is to just roll 6 dice upfront and assign them to the results for each table that you like the most.

The “Big” Example:

To begin I decide to pick my Era, the “Age of Rebellion”, and roll a d6 die twice on the Opening Scene tables. Rolling a 1 and a 3 I have an Objective of “Find someone” and “Rural”. Now to determine who we are looking for with a d6 and we roll a 2. So we are looking for a “Family Member”. Next I roll another d6 scoring a 6 for a “Starport” Location and a 5 on another d6 for the “Plains” Biome. Rounding things out for the environment I’ll roll a d6 as a d3 (divide the result in half) and I get a (2/2 = 1) for “In transit”.

Thinking about all of these elements together reveal a story seed for me: A family member is in trouble with the Empire. They live on or have made their way to a rural praire planet’s major starport and need help getting out. I’d probably make a quick d6 table on-the-fly to determine the nature of the family relationship - something like 1) sibling 2) parent 3) spouse 4) grandparent 5) cousin 6) child. The key to a lot of random RPG generation is quick on-the-fly table such as these.

Characters and NPCs

If you need more detailed inspiration for the “someones” in your game then consider the following four tables:

Careers

Droids*

Droids are varied in the Star Wars universal but for some quick information here’s a simple d6 table you could use: 1) Assassin 2) Astromech 3) Labor 4) Medical 5) Protocol 6) Security

Species

The are too many species in Star Wars to reliably place into a d66 or even d666 style table. Instead I’ve taken someone’s online analysis of species occurrence data in the various media properties and used those percentages to seed this table:

Memorable Quotes

Perhaps you are looking for a snappy quote as inspiration for a character’s disposition or motivations:

West End Games Character Templates

Finally, I offer you this d666 table of the majority of character template names from the original Star Wars Roleplaying game from West End Games. While the game was “classless” many of the character templates (think of them as a pre-gens that could be further customized to your liking) provided some colorful inspiration as to which direction to take a character:

May the Force be with you friends of Star Wars roleplaying!