3. Can you come up with an adventure or two based around each of the five steps the player can be involved in?
That is the payoff from trying to figure this kind of thing out imo.
Step 1: A merchant ship arrives at port with a box of widgets.
Desert world where water from Bantha hide stills is collected by desert nomads. Farmer population restricted to oases.
Adventure: Trade mission to interest one of the oasis populations in a hi-tech
water still.
Depending on their skills the players could either be the trader mission itself, the security for a trader mission or some kind of crew/helpers. The oases could be pretty wild or have cultural mine fields or a local leader might have a mission to complete to raise their reaction high enough to agree.
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Step 2: The merchant ship makes another trip between the two worlds with another box or two of widgets. The original merchant buys both at an even healthier markup.
Adventure: The first still is set up some way from oasis forming basis for new farmer settlement - attacked by desert nomads. Adventure from that depends on player skills - could be repairs, could be security, could be diplomacy with local nomad tribe. First oasis takes shipment of stills - orders weapons.
Other options
a)rival merchant wants to buy the stills instead, could be an auction, could be players say no and whichever merchant loses could try dirty tricks e.g. using some nomads to try and steal the stills.
b) the same but rival oasis.
c) Traditionalist group sees all this as a threat to cultural or economic stability - sabotage and/or diplomacy.
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Step 3: Captain, seeing the potential for a profitable trade schedules a regular run between the worlds. Here, other goods are added to the ships hold and sold at the other end of the route.
Adventure: continuation of the above plus other free traders starting to muscle into this potentially lucrative new trade.
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Step 4: The demand for widgets outstrips the ability of the one ship to mange it. The manufacturer and the merchant set up their own trade agreement and find more consistent shipping
.
Adventure: as above but more general political/economic conflict within the oasis population and between them and the Jawas. Possible mercenary ticket. Once a "safe" demand has been built up by the free traders then larger corporate interests move in to squeeze them out.
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Step 5: Some time between step 2 and step 4 a local manufacturer discovered the ongoing widget trade and builds a local factory to make the widgets cheaper. The widget trade between the two worlds collapses.
Adventure: free traders turned pirate on the corporate ships.
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Running throughout all this is how would the oasis farmers pay for the stills?
Some kind of rare gem?
Where do they come from?
Nomads?
Where do the nomads get them from?
Which could lead into a whole different set of adventures finding out.
Or simply act as a lead in to a buried ancients site or ruins of an earlier civilization (ancient Jawa) that was trashed somehow by the desertification for some dungeon crawl with automatic weapons style action.
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edit: The players could be dropped into any stage of this cycle depending on where the desert world was.
