These appendices are the result of my being conned into GMing a Renegade Legion Legionnaire campaign geared towards Imperial Senate-level political intrigue. In my research and preparations, I came across a distressing truism: the game I had enjoyed for decades for its rich background lacked more substance than flat soda. Don’t get me wrong! I still love the setting, but the more I looked into the details, the less sense they made together.
I know, it’s hard to believe, but let me illustrate with one particularly egregious example; the Garrison Legion:
Canon states that the TOG Army is composed of over eight million legions, the majority of which are Garrison legions deployed as standard TOG doctrine of one Garrison Legion per million inhabitants of a world. Every. Million. It does not say that it is in a particular region of space or that it’s per million slaves; the context makes it clear that TOG has one GL per million inhabitants in every world. Period. Then they come up with (in canon) that TOG has “quadrillions of inhabitants on billions of worlds”, which is problematic in that this would leave about a million or so inhabitants per world and that the Milky Way galaxy would have significantly more than 1% of ALL of its stars with at least one habitable world, which is a HUGE number of viable systems considering that the books themselves tell us that TOG’s organization cannot have more than an absolute maximum of 1,500,000 worlds (40-50 worlds per province x 12-30 provinces x 1,000 [or 1,009] prefectures = 1.5 million) AND over half of the worlds with published numbers have populations greater than one billion.
It simply does not hold up to the slightest scrutiny; and this is only one example. Sometimes the very authors seem to not know what another author has written.
So in order to address this issue, as well as a gazillion others and make the setting as coherent and realistic as possible, I started looking at the published materials and read between the lines, keeping in mind the flavor of the setting as well as its development history, which gives a lot of clues in and of itself. Some of the conclusions I have come to may seem shocking (an average of ~1,300 garrison legions per world, for example), but such changes are supported within canon by analyzing the numbers (compulsory military service for every male citizen, for example, being enough to actually support and maintain a garrison legion per every million inhabitants, with plenty to spare) and enrich the setting by making it more realistic and believable.
So I made the outline of the campaign and delved into research; adding appendices to the base work detailing the research, tests, presumptions, assumptions and conclusions. By the time they reached thirteen, they significantly surpassed the original campaign notes by a significant margin, so I decided to reorganize them as a supplement to hand out to my players. One suggested streamlining them into a netbook and you hold the results in your hands (or screen… you know what I’m talking about).
I realize that these suggested changes are not for everyone, but I hope that you will look at the data and see the way in which things make so much more sense with them than without them.
Oh, yes… and the obligatory disclaimer:
I’m doing this for fun and playability, not for profit; no copyright infringement is intended. Renegade Legion and all its trademarks and copyrights are the property of its (their) respective owner(s). Any artwork is the property of its respective author(s). Star Wars and everything related to it is the property of Lucasfilm (and related entities) and no infringement is intended.
Disclaimer II: The Renegade Legion universe, by its very nature, is a setting dealing with mature themes such as war, slavery, racism, inequality and discrimination, as well as politics, religion and corruption. Reader discretion is advised AND I’ll add that while discussing many of these themes in a positive or negative light, I personally do not necessarily agree with any particular point of view.