Adding some spice to my X-Wing miniatures game: 3 House Rules

Just before starting with the campaign, I decided to add some house rules that would add a lot of theme to the games in my club. I don't think they are suitable for use in tournaments, but if you are playing with buddies, they add a lot of detail and fun without too much effort.

At the moment, I have three extra rules:

A. CollisionsIf two ships overlap, follow the standard rules as explained in page 17 of the rulebook, then check whether there is a collision as follows:

1. Both ships roll as many defence dice as their Agility.
   - The player(s) controlling the ships may spend Evade or Focus action tokens for this check.
   - A player can decide to forgo this step (thematically this means that he is trying to ram the other ship).
2. If there is at least one Evade result, then there is no collision.
3. If there is no Evade result, there is a collision. Each ship then rolls as many Attack dice as their Hull value and applies the Damage and Critical Damage symbols to the other ship.
   - The damage roll cannot be modified, i.e. only unmodified Damage and Critical Damage symbols will actually cause damage.

Example

An undamaged X-Wing (Agility 2; Hull 3) is moved onto a damaged TIE Fighter (Agility 3; Hull 3; 1 point of damage) that has just taken a Barrel Roll action.

1. The standard overlapping rules are first used and the X-Wing is moved backward until its template touches the TIE’s.
2. The Rebel player decides to forgo his evasion manoeuver (he wants to ram the damaged TIE).
3. The Imperial player rolls 3 Defence dice and obtains 1 Focus and two blanks. As he has no Evade tokens, there is a collision.¹
4. In the collision, both players roll 3 Attack dice and assign damage to the other ship.

1 If the TIE had taken the Focus or Evade actions, he could have spent the corresponding token to prevent the collision.

B. Moving in formation as a WingA player can decide that some of his ships are moving in formation, following this procedure:

1. At the beginning of the planning phase, the player must announce that he will do a formation movement and must identify the Wing leader.
   - Ships cannot move in formation if there is any obstacle at range 2 or closer from any of the involved ships.
   - Any other ship in the Wing must be no farther than Range 1 from the Leader and must be facing the same side of the playing area.¹
   - Take note of the lowest pilot skill in the group, as this will determine the movement sequence of all the ships in the Wing.
2. The player then assigns a movement dial only to the Leader of the formation.²³
3. During the activation phase, the Wing will move as if all ships had the pilot skill of the lowest pilot in the Wing.
4. Move the Leader using the standard movement rules. ⁴
5. Then place the other ships of the Wing with the same facing as the Leader and no further than Range 1 from him.

During the Combat Phase, ships flying as a Wing attack using their individual pilot skill.

1 If a ship’s facing arc points toward more than one side, then the player can choose whichever side is more convenient to him for determining whether the ship can be part of the Wing.

2 As a reminder, you can place face-up dials near the other ships of the Wing if you want.

3 If the wing has different kind of ships, they must all be able to perform the same manoeuver.

4 Be sure to check the type of manoeuver (Green, Red or White) if the ships are of different types as each ship will be individually affected as if he had played the same manoeuver as the Leader’s.

C. Protect ActionAny ship can use the Protect action to escort another ship if it ends its movement at Range 1 from the ship to be protected.

Use an appropriate token to mark the action. A suitable option is to use the number tokens that come with the game to mark the two ships.

During the Combat Phase, the protecting ship must suffer the first un-cancelled damage¹ the protected ship would suffer from obstructed² attacks.

1 This means that, if the protected ship must suffer both normal and critical Damage, then one normal damage is suffered by the protecting ship, while the rest of the damage is taken by the protecting ship.

2 If the edge of the range ruler between the closest points of the attacking and the protected ships crosses the protecting ship, the attack is considered Obstructed (same rules as obstruction from obstacles found in page 20 of the rulebook).

The long process of creating your own X-Wing miniatures campaign

After the great fun I had playing the scenarios of the Erasmus campaign, I decided to create one of my own. The process is already quite advanced, but I want to record the steps I've followed in case they also inspire someone else to create their own campaigns or scenarios.

Inspirations

I started with the inspiration points given to me by Jim Chadwick's Erasmus campaign. I had been thinking for a long time on creating scenarios inspired by my memories of the great X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter computer games of old, and I now realized I could probably link several of my ideas to create a full campaign.

I had recently played the amazingly good Edge of Empire RPG from Fantasy Flight Games and had listened to the Thrawn Trilogy with Audible, so I decided those were also good places to mine interesting ideas.

My experience when designing RPG scenarios is that a good strategy is to have a general idea of the scenario, then create the skeleton of the scenario/campaign, then talk with friends about the ideas to see whether there are any weak points (these last two points being interchangeable).

First Idea for the Campaign. I wanted to explore two aspects of the game: using the new miniatures that were coming for the game (X-Wings and TIEs are great fun, but were starting to get repetitive), and exploring conflicts other than Rebellion-Empire. At the time I was reading the Edge of the Empire module "Beyond the Rim" and writing ideas about a heist adventure for some friends, so I decided my first campaign would deal with Pirates (great theme always).

With this in mind, I mentioned some of the ideas to my gaming buddy Beni and to other players, listened to their comments, adapted some and started putting the results on paper.


First thing was writing down the skeleton of the campaign. At the beginning I wanted to have 4 scenarios (I'm reconsidering this at the moment) and this is more or less what I had in mind:

Scenario 1: Unintended Repercussions

(assault of a band of pirates to a Transport or Shuttle; part of the cargo in the shuttles includes homing transponders that will be tracked by COMPNOR). Use of nebula areas... have to write extra rules.

 

Scenario 2: The Empire Strikes Back

The transponders have been followed by the Imperial Destroyer XX. The access to the system where the pirates have their hidden base is monitored by two sensor outposts that are protected with a minefield. 1 repair ship is caught docked to the satellite.

 

Scenario 3: Escape from Sarka

Escape through asteroid field

Pirates use a YT-100. Asteroids move at the beginning of each activation phase 1Straight in the direction of a 1d8 roll.

Scenario 4: Revenge is best served cold

The Pirates sabotage an important Imperial asset (possibility of 2 or 4 player game with big battle and extra rules for capital ships.