This is the Darkstryder box set (1996), the first part of West End Games’ biggest and most ambitious campaign for the D6 Star Wars RPG.

The basic plot: players are part of the crew of the FarStar, a Corellian Corvette tasked by the New Republic with bringing an Imperial war criminal to justice in the backwater Kathol sector. That war criminal was, until recently, the sector’s moff and has a formidable military force and some mysterious weapons at his disposal. Worse, the moff wiped most of the sector data, leaving the FarStar to effectively re-discover the local systems and planets. The ship, whose crew is made up of just as many rogues as it is professional officers, has to explore, scrounge for supplies and generally scrape by to complete their objectives.

Most of the box is dedicated to describing the FarStar and the richly detailed major characters among the crew. There are also six linked adventures that kick off the storyline.

Campaigns of this size weren’t something West End had a lot of experience designing (and, honestly, not a lot of other folks had figured out best practices at this point either). One of the the first missteps is not giving the GM an overview of the whole campaign – you only get enough info to get through what’s in the box. With crazy stuff at the end and no shortage of characters with slow burn dark secrets, this was a huge negative at the time (less so now that the whole campaign has been out for 20 years, but still).

Drawback #2: this was designed for troupe style play, with players running two pregenerated characters (one from the command team, one from the crew) and one custom character. The pre-gens come with scripted plot points, which some folks will hate because railroading. I played in a lightly scripted SW homebrew and thought it was amazing once we got over the slight constraint. Darkstryder has a heavier hand, so I dunno. Your mileage may vary.