# Thoughts on Rewriting: The Acolyte tags: #thoughts ![[The Acolyte (series).png]] I've been wrestling with doing something which is clearly a terrible idea. There is no doubt this would be ill considered nor is there any question that nothing good could come of it. I just want to preface things by saying that I am well aware of it. I've felt the terrible itch to rewrite **[The Acolyte](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI9PNU6AzjT7bCmEO3RaJEF_5qM04KX__&si=EPZxiXQhOS4aGJo6)** as a pseudo-generic TTRPG **[[Star Wars]]** campaign, fixing all the shitty characterization, restructuring the narrative to actually make sense, rebuilding the bones so that it truly supports the idea that the players/audience should be engaged the whole time, and actually having some kind of a mystery. You know, all the things that Disney couldn't be bothered to do the first time. I would probably use **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]** as my mechanical core of choice to illustrate things but you could use anything you were happy with once the basic ideas were down, including **[[Star Wars|Star Wars (WEG 1987)]]**. The reason that I *know* this is a terrible idea is that the source material is literally so bad that anyone who thinks that it's good is going to be a slobbering fanboy and think anything I do with it is abominable. There is literally no way to win here. And yet… I have always said that the best media to use as inspiration for RPGs is bad media, because everyone looks at good media and thinks *"well, I can't do any better than that,"* but they will look at terrible media and say *"I can't do any worse than that!"* **The Acolyte** definitely fits into the latter pile. This is pointedly a thing that I should not do. *But if I did…* One of the things that I would define during set up is that the Jedi of the High Republic era are at the height of their powers, both personally and politically, and as such becoming a Jedi Master means that they develop a particular specialty, something that they are better at than most of their compatriots. The ways of the Force are many and varied, and the gifts that come to each of us may differ. How would I model that? And why? Let's talk about the second one first: one of the worst things about **The Acolyte** is that the Jedi, theoretically the protagonists that we are supposed to care about and be interested in, are almost utterly featureless in terms of differentiation. We get bare-bones personalities which is bad enough, but they don't seem to have any sort of consistent expression of their manifestations of the Force. Anybody can do *anything* just as well as anybody else. In what should be a criminal procedural, which is what this show really wants to be, why is that a problem? Because you can't take away anything from the group if everybody can do everything and does. If you can't take anything away from the group or cause any important or difficult decisions about how to allocate the personal resources, you can't have any of that as part of the story. For example, one of the consistent failures of the narrative is that early on the Jedi trivially brain-rape people in order to get information. They do it casually. And yet when it would be useful later on not only do they not even have trouble with it they don't attempt it.^[Except when they do it casually *to Mae* to prove she doesn't know anything - which we already knew as the audience.] That is horrible writing. So instead, maybe Yord is the brain-rape specialist.[^yord] He's very good at it. He can do it casually to most people; a wave of the fingers, a little bit of a smile, and they will spill their guts no matter what. We'll establish that, both narratively and mechanically, and simultaneously say that while all the Jedi can do it it's considerably harder for them so if Yord isn't around it just doesn't happen outside of great duress. Now we *immediately* have a reason that you can have a situation where directly reading someone's mind would be incredibly useful but may have to be delayed or simply can't happen because Yord isn't around. You can have situations where the rest of the team needs to get Yord close or in a good position or wear down the mental resistance by distraction of a target. Suddenly we have a good reason for bad things to happen and the protagonists to want to overcome it. Good things fall out. So how would I model this? In **Starforged** terms, I would make Force User an asset whose primary effect would be to allow narrating the use of the Force directly into the fiction to allow using its effects narratively. That alone is pretty intensely powerful. I'd probably start by ripping off the Invoke ritual from **[[Ironsworn]]** to represent their ability to meditate and build up energy to use for effects. This has the pleasant advantage of giving a really good excuse for those *Endure Stress* outcomes as the Jedi receives a disquieting vision of something somewhere going horribly wrong. Perfect! Despite the obvious way to represent particular fields of expertise being to simply take an asset and say that it represents your personal connection to the Force, I would lift something else from **Ironsworn** that I really like: Relics. Force User would come with an inherent Relic ability, whatever your personal focus is, and it would function exactly like Relics from **Ironsworn: Delve**. It could be tremendously impressive and effective – or it could go horribly wrong. Maybe you have other assets which go along with your particular focus – or you have assets which are in direct opposition because sometimes the Force is perverse in the gifts that it offers. Perhaps most Jedi leave training having taken Blademaster but you never had an affinity for the lightsaber; instead the Force would prefer you to simply enhance your physical abilities directly and you ended up with Brawler instead.[^sol] Now we have a reason for if the *"special team"* of Jedi protagonists to be running around. They're investigators. They're troubleshooters. They each have something that they bring to the table in order to find out what's going on. - *You get unconfirmed reports that there is some kind of Force sensitive cult on some backwater world in the Outer Rim that was supposed to be abandoned decades ago?* Send in the troubleshooter team. - *The murder in public of a Jedi Master out on the Rim by someone who isn't supposed to exist?* Send in the troubleshooter team. - *Find a planet that's supposed to be completely dead and you need some guys to park there for a couple of months doing chemical and biological assays?* Okay, this probably doesn't need the troubleshooter team, it needs a scientific research team – but if they suddenly disappeared with the only trace being a cryptic message about witches… Send in the troubleshooter team! Already we are light years ahead of Lesbian Headlamp and what passes for creative writing in **The Acolyte**. That would just be the start. I really *don't want* to write this. I don't want to feel compelled to do it. But it keeps scratching at the back of my brain, begging to be set up, structuring little bits of mechanical goodness that would explain things better and more effectively while giving players the opportunity to get in there and change the outcomes. Meaningfully. Sometimes it sucks to be a writer. [^yord]: [Yord was. supposedly, one of Lesbian Headlamp's **Star Wars** TTRPG characters.](https://x.com/StarWarsExplain/status/1812948827391029292) As much as I'm tempted to point out that Leslye Headland has a pretty clear history of being close to actual rapists, I won't mention it. That has no influence here. Shit, I said it out loud. That's fine; nobody reads the footnotes anyway. [^sol]: Wouldn't this be a really nice hook for Sol, explaining why he's so good at climbing walls and going straight cold kung-fu on peoples' asses? Because that's his Force gift. And when he's not around, wouldn't it be good for the rest of the team to wish he was to make something easier? If only.