Wookiepiedia is fun

I like the storytelling and interaction parts, but its a tough juggle when everyone has a slightly different interest or approach or maturity level. But you get that sort of mix with a bunch of adults, so its all part of being the GM. I need to make sure to include more time with miniatures and boards/maps instead of being purely verbal, and a little bit of action or suspense each game helps keep everyone's interest level high. Not familiar with Universalis, Spence, but maybe I should be.

We play once or twice a week in the evenings for one or two hours at a time. We played a little last night, pure verbal, primarily filling in background information and interacting with each other and with some NPCs.

They met a young security officer (Panaka) who is one of the Senator's guards, and some other canon characters like Senator Kim's young son Rohnar (my kids don't browse the wookieepedia often, but they're thrilled when I name-drop movie characters into the game). They discovered some backstory regarding Senator Kim and Prefect Palpatine. The girls wanted some scoop on Palpatine, their host, so they did some detective work (Use Computer, Gather Information, and some Knowledge rolls) and made some phenominal rolls. Not enough to get any DC30 scoop, but enough to get a few DC25 nuggets. Turns out Palpatine rose to prominence on Kim's staff, rising from "bureaucrat" to "political aide-de-camp", when the nobody Kim championed some high-profile legislation regulating the corporate banking industry and directly affecting the InterGalactic Banking Clan (Muuns). Senator Kim made his mark as a Reformer over the objections of the Banking Clan, and Palpatine has since directed two re-election campaigns to landslide victories. Alas, their detective work was not done in secret, so we'll see how that plays out. So far they haven't scooped anything sensitive or illegal, and Palpatine is a master at covering his tracks.