Soldier – Heavy – Untold Devastation
The Empire marches to war with massive machines of death, designed not only to crush their foes but also any hopes of victory they might represent. The Rebel Alliance, for its part, is short on such materiel. While its starfighters and capital ships are able to directly contend with those of the Empire, the Rebel Alliance must fight most of its ground battles with infantry, only supported by entrenchments and light airspeeders. Many of its operations rely entirely on infantry. To this end, it must have troopers whose expertise and equipment allows them to take down even the most heavily armored targets. Heavies are the Soldiers best suited to carrying and operating these crucial big guns.
UNTOLD DEVASTATION
A Heavy has Gunnery, Perception, Ranged (Heavy), and Resilience as additional career skills. If this is a character’s starting specialization, he may choose two of these skills and gain one free rank in each, without spending starting experience. Resilience gives a Heavy the capacity to march considerable distances carrying a heavy blaster or missile tube, while Perception lets a Heavy find the gaps in the armor of enemy vehicles and fortifications to target once the battle begins. Gunnery and Ranged (Heavy) have more obvious applications and make the Heavy one of the best Soldier specializations for shredding enemy formations and vehicles from afar. A Heavy should ideally have a solid starting Brawn characteristic so that the character can effectively wield cumbersome weapons.
Heavies tend to prefer direct solutions to their problems. After all, enough ordnance can reduce most any challenge to a smoldering crater, regardless of what it was before. Still, Heavies who fight on the battlefields of the Galactic Civil War must often be cunning and knowledgeable too. While a Heavy working as a mercenary among smugglers or pirates is often the largest combatant on the field, a Heavy on the front lines is no match for a behemoth like an Imperial AT-AT in a straight-up fight. Defeating a massive walker requires not only the firepower to pierce is armored hull, but also the knowledge of its blind spots and the cleverness to exploit them. A veteran Heavy has almost assuredly gotten good at engaging and even beating vehicles and other craft that most ground troops would dismiss as invincible. Heavies are also extremely effective against infantry, and a single Heavy with a large gun and a good position can easily turn the tide of a battle.
Within a group of Player Characters in Age of Rebellion, a Heavy is likely to be one of the strongest, toughest, and most lethal at range. Given the specialization’s destructive abilities, a Heavy is usually more at home on the battlefield than out spreading the word of the Rebellion or at clandestine meetings to rally supporters. Still, a Heavy can be a real asset to any party on and off the battlefield. The ability to both see and enact direct solutions is useful in nearly any context, and the Heavy’s skills and talents support this theme only slightly less fervently than the specializations’s capacity for wreaking vast and terrible destruction with gigantic firearms.
