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.