Based in Austin, Texas, Ben Hickman and his friends are fast approaching the third year of their Star Wars Edge of the Empire RPG campaign. While most players would show their appreciation for the GM by paying for pizza, Hickman went just a little bit further - he spent four months building a 15 foot by four foot model of the Mandalorian capital city Sundari for the group to play out the showstopping culmination to the adventure's second arc.
Hickman's Edge of the Empire campaign started "months after the end of Episode 4: A New Hope", and the passage of time and events the party has triggered has "drastically altered canon". Akbar is dead after a failed mission, the Emperor has turned Luke to the dark side - all the good stuff that you can do in a tabletop RPG that even the best Star Wars board games and videogames can't touch.
The GM's plot for the second campaign arc involved the party finding a modified Bacta tank, which had successfully resuscitated a child long thought to be dead. The party used the tank to save a gravely injured NPC, before transferring it to the keeping of the Mandalorians. This, it turned out, was a bad idea.
The tank contained trace DNA from an ancient hive mind entity known as The Beginning. You can probably guess where things go from there - very, very badly for Mandalore, as the NPC emerged as a prophet of The Beginning, killing, corrupting, or drive off the inhabitants of the Mandalorian home world. This led the party into a quest to work out how to destroy The Beginning, and ultimately to the capital city Sundari to battle it head on.
Which brings us to Hickman's project, a miniature scale recreation of the capital city featuring "nine stand alone skyscrapers, many of which include multiple floors of playable interior, the Mandalorian Palace modeled directly from assets used in The Clone Wars animated show, and the Mandalorian throne room".
The fact that this was completed in just four months is a little mind-boggling. Hickman admits "the trickiest part of the build was just the sheer size of it", adding "there were many points in the build process where I started to feel burnt out, and felt in over my head". He says that persistence is the key to completing this kind of project: "some days I'd knock out eight hours of work, some days I'd only work on it for 30 minutes".
Almost all of the build is made from foam core, with 3D printed parts printed from STLs for some NPCs and the windows in the throne room. The metallic blue windows in the skyscrapers are made from blue wrapping paper, an ingenious and budget friendly trick. Hickman warns "it crinkles very easily so I had to be very careful while gluing and applying it to the buildings".
Hickman says he's "most proud of the throne room courtyard, the big open section with the Jedi vs Mandalorian mural", explaining "I can be sort of neurotic when it comes to details and I wanted it to look as close to the source material as I could make it". Some details had to be sacrificed for time, but he still loves "the designs on the floor, the ramps, and just the sheer scale and openness of it".
The party has played two sessions using the massive gameboard so far, and they sound like doozies. "The first was our assault on Sundari", Hickman explains, "We had to broker a temporary truce between the Empire and the Rebellion to assault The Beginning with everything the galaxy had… We even managed to find a deactivated CIS droid army to use as well".
The combined force successfully captured the city, but in session two they "went from invaders to defenders in the blink of an eye" as "Harsol, the host of The Beginning appeared in orbit over the planet with a MASSIVE fleet of corrupted imperial star destroyers and began an all out assault".
The party "managed to find the Bacta Tank hidden in one of the city buildings and destroy it once and for all", before returning to the throne room "for a final showdown with a monstrous version of Harsol, fully powered up by his connection to The Beginning". It was a close run battle, but the party successfully held the beast at bay while activating an ancient ritual to imprison the hive mind forever.
Hickman's character, a Mandalorian bounty hunter, was well rewarded for his part in saving his home world: "after having traveled the galaxy and risked everything to save it, our GM made my character King of Mandalore". After building the capital city with his own two hands, I think that Hickman has more than done his part to earn such a cool in-game reward as well!
If you're a big fan of Star Wars, have completed a similarly epic craft project for your RPG group, or have been part of an equally excellent campaign finale, the Wargamer team would love to hear about it - why not come and say hi in the official Wargamer Discord community?
If you want to spice up your Star Wars RPG games with some great scenery but don't quite have Hickman's talent for crafts, check out our mini guide to Star Wars Legion terrain.