Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;960087As usual, Wookiepedia is your friend.

All that says is they massacred people. Not turn them into food!

Quote from: CRKrueger;960089The Empire better than the Nazis, well depends on how you define it I guess.  The Empire had zero issues with wiping out a planet with billions of people.  The scale of that atrocity is almost too big to grasp and writing it off as a valid or legitimate military target or acceptable collateral damage is an atrocity in and of itself.

That's just Dresden on a larger scale. The Nazis did things like attempt to genocide whole human races.

Edit: Re Alderaan, Obi-Wan says "millions of voices cried out in torment" - not billions. Billions sounds like a much later accretion.

Quote from: S'mon;960165All that says is they massacred people. Not turn them into food!

True.

My own 0.02credits is that the food is a glop with the consistency of a pudding and you do not tell the recipients of the kindly Emperor's largesse that while it is made with the processed organics of a world that human corpses are  a part of that organic material.

Quote from: AaronBrown99;960012Make sure the subjugated population isn't made up of Gungans.

Then the PCs would have to join the Empire to help, and that might get you in a morally ambiguous situation!

"Wait, why are fighting the Empire again?"

Quote from: Dumarest;960018But as someone said above, killing Gungans is a moral duty.

Actually, this does give me an idea for a side adventure situation.

Since Jar Jar Binks was the one whose senate motion allowed Palpetine to rise to Emperor, he holds a special place of recognition in the minds of many of the oppressed (who want him dead). So, acknowledging this, the Emperor has given Jar Jar Binks the title of Imperial Representative (a figurehead position) and sends him on various political junkets and fact finding missions to be a well publicized target for any crackpot wannabe Rebel to take a potshot at. There is a Badass Bodyguard with Jar Jar whose job is to eliminate any would-be assassins and extract information from them on any other Rebel activity.

Quote from: finarvyn;960008Well, the "fed to the food processor" thing is pretty nasty, but I think that in general the darker you make the Empire the more the characters will feel urgency in trying to resist the Empire. :-)

Right up until it breaks their suspension of belief.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;960054While I know that real life often defies our imagination on how terrible people can be to one another, this part trips my "So evil it's comical" switch. I'd probably have a hard time taking the campaign seriously after that.

Exactly. The instant something becomes too vaudevillian, mustache-twirling ridiculous for George Lucas's loving homage to pulp sci fi, you know you've gone overboard.

Would probably inspire some good Charlton Heston imitations at the table.

Quote from: jeff37923;960136See, this brings up the "why" I chose the route of stripping a world of all its resources instead of just destroying it. One of the impressions I get of the Empire is that it is a ruthlessly efficient bureaucratic and military machine. Destroying a planet demonstrates raw power, while systematically reducing a world's population and resources to serve the Empire's industrial and military might demonstrates chilling practicality.

Anyone that has played a 4x space sim knows this is the route to go.

Destroying a planet? Why in the world would you do that when you could subjugate it and use it? I'm with you on this, there would/should be a Pax Imperia where the Imperials have a set procedure for occupying a new system and grinding it to its knees. The gameplay is in knowing the weaknesses of those procedural actions (and of course you mapping them out for your own sake as a GM) and letting the players get creative either of their own means or via NPC help

I think the potentiality for "darkness" has puh-lenty of opportunities by outlining these procedures. But that also gives plenty of opportunities for heroism too! Industrial cannibalism - while dark... I normally run my games in the Old Republic - so some crazy shit like this could happen, on some world where the Moff is a little "off"....