In early Forces brainstorming
sessions I explored likely affiliations and factions that might appear as well
as their accompanying Headquarters with which their personnel and ships could
report to. This was a fun exercise and
offered one of the first challenges for me from a creative and design aspect:
what should report to these HQs and what should they be named. Both of these were important to me and while
several ideas were easy to imagine, others proved more difficult. For example, naming the HQ mission for the
"Rebel Alliance" became complicated in light of their having had
several bases of operations in their universe (notably Yavin IV and Hoth).
Further exploration in ideas for affiliations and groups in
direct opposition to each other, such as the Galactic Empire and the Rebel
Alliance, resulted in a creative dilemma.
Should these affiliations be able to mix? Who would and who would not have cooperated? Initially, I used the Borg affiliation HQ -
Unicomplex, Root of the Hive Mind - as inspiration. The game text of "You cannot command
another Headquarters mission" gave me a brief solution to my desire to
restrict the mixing of affiliations.
However, I soon realized that this very restriction also extended to all
other affiliations in Second Edition.
This was disappointing. In
addition, the restrictive game text may have led to unintended design
consequences in the future, so I sought a new solution.
One solution I explored was the use of Coruscant as a
Headquarters for multiple groups - each version representing when a specific
group possessed it in their universe - and this helped me reduce the number of
restrictive HQ game text. Yet, I was
only partially pleased with this solution because some affiliations still felt
awkward. In particular, several of their
principle characters felt out of step with their reporting HQ. Mandalorians were especially cumbersome due
to many of their personnel intended to be Non-Aligned, yet possessing a faction
icon similar to that of the Maquis or Terok Nor in 2E.
When I finally settled on coalescing these many affiliations
into Dark Side and Light Side I quickly realized that my Headquarters issues
could be solved seamlessly: Coruscant made sense in both a game play
perspective (only one such named mission can be played by a player) and in a
story sense (many governments held the planet as their seat of power). I considered this a fortunate set of
circumstances in that the easiest element of building two new affiliations was
already complete. Through the use of Coruscant, Imperial Center
I am pleased to share that the following project benchmarks
have been met:
- An original "quadrant" icon (closely mirrors and functions just as existing 2E quadrants do)
- All
existing 2E templates - Dilemma, Event, Interrupt,
- Set 1's title (WITHHELD AT THIS TIME)
- Two card titles from Set 1 have now been spoiled
Although it has been very rewarding, much of my time has
been devoted to Photoshop use, so I am looking forward to reexamining actual
card design, selecting art and story, and then finally bringing these elements
together in the form of a fully realized set of cards.
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